With the 1995 publication of the notes to Merleau-Ponty's three lecture courses on the subject of nature, scholars of the philosopher have been given a treasure trove of material with which to make sense of the “ontological turn” in his late thinking and to reconstruct the possible trajectory and potentially radical implications of what, by the necessity of accident, became his final work. These notes, assembled under the collective title Nature, bring together materials from the lecture courses of 1956-7, 1957-8, and 1959-60, respectively titled “The Concept of Nature,” “The Concept of Nature: Animality, the Human Body, Passage to Culture,” and “The Concept of Nature: The Human Body.”

The importance of these lecture notes goes well beyond their contribution of a wealth of material relevant to Merleau-Ponty's final project, fragments of which are presented in The Visible and the Invisible. Indeed, the broad claim I want to make in this chapter is that Merleau-Ponty’s confrontation with the biological sciences of his day, not unlike his earlier engagement with Gestalt theory, psychology, and physiology (in both The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception), furnished him with the means necessary tomake a crucial philosophical breakthrough: just as his early turn to science allowed him, through a kind of immanent analysis, to discover the incarnate experience of the body as the necessary implication of its scientific objectification, so, too, did his later engagement lead immanently to the discovery of a properly philosophical concept of embodied life necessarily situated beneath the division between consciousness and body, thought and extension, memory and matter.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most original and important philosophers of the past century. Yet in many ways the full scope of his contribution is becoming clear only now, more than forty years after his death. His impact on philosophy, psychology, and criticism has been enormous, although his intellectual reputation was initially somewhat overshadowed - first by the greater notoriety of his friend Jean-Paul Sartre and then by structuralism and poststructuralism in the latter half of the century. As a result, in part due to his premature death, Merleau-Ponty's presence in contemporary intellectual life has remained strangely elusive. His influence has cut across disciplinary boundaries, yet it has tended to move beneath the surface of mainstream scholarly and popular intellectual discourse.

As a result, perhaps understandably, academic and nonacademic readers alike have been slow to appreciate the real depth and significance of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, which cannot be neatly pigeonholed in familiar conceptual or historical categories. He was a phenomenologist above all, yet he differed in fundamental ways from the three other major phenomenologists, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. Unlike these philosophers, Merleau-Ponty availed himself of empirical data and theoretical insights drawn fromthe biological and social sciences, although he was not a psychologist, a linguist, or an anthropologist. He could fairly be called an existentialist, although that label has come to seem less and less informative in hindsight, embracing as it did such a disparate array of literary and intellectual figures.