Abstract

Ancient philosophy models non-living processes in terms of living beings; modern science and philosophy reverses this priority by conceiving the living as evolving from the non-living. Recent work in science and philosophy questions that reversal, by emphasizing how living beings are self-organizing, active agencies. But in the contemporary context we would need a new concept of nature to follow through on this reversal, to fit self-organizing organisms with nature as a whole.
A study of the themes of structure, expression and sense across Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy opens a way toward this new concept. Points from Bergson and Hegel lead to a concept of expression as a movement that creates new possibility. Results from immunology and evolutionary cellular biology let us detect such a movement of sense in nature. This gives a model for thinking of nature as a whole as an expressive, living movement—for thinking of the law of the non-living as the visible outgrowth of an invisible expressive movement of the universe.