ABSTRACT
Nature is one of the most important concepts in the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher who, it could be argued, devoted his entire philosophical career to developing a better understanding of humanity's relationship to the natural world. From the environmental perspective, one of the most interesting aspects of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is the centrality of relations. What Merleau-Ponty offers is an ecological philosophy in the sense that he attempts to understand the nature of the surrounding world, living beings, and human society in terms of the types and qualities of relations that exist. Nature consists in a set of relations provisionally organized into systems that achieve contingent and mutable stabilities over a period of time as a result of the relative stability of the bodies that inhabit a given place at a given time. Thus, nature is a continually evolving form, and, following Alfred North Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty calls nature "the memory of the world".
