SOURCE: Walsh, Robert D. “An Organism of Words: Ruminations on the Philosophical-Poetics of Merleau-Ponty.” Kinesis 14, no. 1 (fall 1984): 13-41.

In the following essay, originally presented to the Eastern Pennsylvania Philosophical Association in 1983, Walsh emphasizes the role of the Nietzschian idea of rumination in Merleau-Ponty's theory of phenomenology.

I. Introduction: Rumination and Rapprochement

The title of this paper is a phrase found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.¹ It is used there to indicate the originary element of authentic language. It also suggests, however, a way of entering into the philosophical writing in which it is found: Merleau-Ponty's body of work is itself an “organism of words.” This biolinguistic expression is consonant with another one found in the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche—which brings us to the subtitle.

Commenting on his Zarathustra in the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche says that “no one should claim to understand it who has not...