“Strange kinship”

Merleau-Ponty about the relation´s of the human and the animal

Abstract

Reacting to Henri Bergson and Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of the «vital order» of nonhuman animal life in The Structure of Behavior establishes an ontological continuity between humans and nonhuman animals, yet it also treats the human and vital orders as different in kind due to their hierarchically arranged structures. In Merleau-Ponty’s later work, however, the ‘Umwelt’ of the nonhuman animal is a guiding clue to the constitutively phenomenal character of Being. On this basis, Merleau-Ponty affirms a nonhierarchical «intertwining» of‘’ the human and animal comparable to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of «becoming-animal.»