How Contemporary Author Robin Wall Kimmerer Communicates with Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

Since the Enlightenment, the promotion of empirical reasoning as the ideal path to knowledge has pervaded the sciences. In response to authors like Rene Descartes, who believed that true knowledge could be obtained through reason alone, authors like Francis Bacon and David Hume contended that conclusions drawn from sensory experience through inductive reasoning provide a more comprehensive picture of human knowledge. These ideas gave rise to the modern scientific method, accelerating scientific progress to an unprecedented rate in the time since. However, while principles like induction and statistical inference have provided a solid foundation for obtaining knowledge, 20th-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty worries that overreliance on these principles in the pursuit of knowledge has blinded people to what he calls “the primacy of perception.” Merleau-Ponty argues that pure perception and embodied experience can just as validly provide knowledge as empirical reasoning. Rather than extracting knowledge from the world through experimentation, he says, knowledge from perception is obtained through a more revelatory process. While it may seem like Merleau-Ponty’s ideas failed to breach the popular conception of science, contemporary author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer posits a remarkably similar perspective in her novel Braiding Sweetgrass, wherein she explains her personal philosophy on science and viewing the natural world as a teacher rather than a puzzle. Exploring the works of these two authors, one “modern” and one “postmodern,” can offer insight into a scientific approach that, as both authors emphasize, incorporates an element of embodied perception without replacing empiricism and induction.