Unity in Nature

Before talking about Hopkins I wish to briefly return to Merleau-Ponty's concept of reversibility, which offers an approach to understanding humanity's being with nature and, by extension, God. Galen A. Johnson argues that Merleau-Ponty ‘was committed until the end to the primacy of bodily perception as the starting point for ontology”. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously in 1964. In this work, particularly in the chapter, ‘The Intertwining – the Chiasm’, Merleau-Ponty informs us that perception encompasses not simply touching and seeing, but also seeing as touching. Perception is essentially contact between the self and the other. As Jones puts it, perception is contact with differentiation, and contact is possible because of reversibility. In the words of Merleau-Ponty, ‘there is a reversibility of the seeing and the visible… [T]he visible takes hold of the look which has unveiled it and which forms a part of it’. In other words, the things I see also see me:

Reversibility is possible because we are located within the world we perceive and inhabit. In short, ‘my body sees only because it is a part of the visible in which it opens forth’.