171 Ted Toadvine ANTHROPOCENE TIME AND THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1959 course on the “Possibility of Philosophy Today” is distinctive in two respects: First, it is the text where Merleau- Ponty comes closest to anticipating an “environmentalist” perspective in the contemporary sense. 1 Second, it is also the only text where he explicitly broaches the possibility of the annihilation of the world. In the course’s opening discussion, Merleau-Ponty links two crises of reason, the first concerning human relationships, and the second concerning nature. Of course, Merleau- Ponty regularly discusses nature as a philosophical problem in his later writings, but the treatment here is distinctive for its invocation of the atomic bomb and the specter of nuclear destruction. As he describes it, our everyday world surfs atop a volcano of explosive energies that both condition and threaten it, forces of nature that are absolutely alien to and undermine any cohesive sense of our daily lives by insistently reminding us: “our world could not be” (1996, 42; 2022, 11). Following this insight, Merleau-Ponty immediately critiques the Promethianism of modern physics and its forgetfulness of the sedimented institutions that complicate its pretension to reveal nature “in itself.” On the one hand, these alien elemental forces are presented as the ultimate truth of nature, as a kind of ultra-naturalism, while on the other hand they are only revealed through the applications of advanced technology in contemporary physics, so that they are equally a product of ultra-artificialism. Merleau-Ponty does not directly address the fantasy of nuclear destruction here, although he will say some pages later, in his commentary on Husserl, that “The true philosophical attitude is not the hypothesis of the Nichtigkeit [annihilation] of the world but astonishment before the world” (1996, 78; 2022, 33). 2 The specter of atomic destruction, as a crisis of our relationship with nature, is also an invitation to rediscover nature beyond the antinomy of pure object and artifact. Since this course concludes with an extensive examination of Heidegger, it is striking how Merleau-Ponty’s presentation here parallels the themes of Heidegger’s “Gelassenheit” (1959/1966a) – text published in 1959 but not explicitly mentioned by Merleau-Ponty. 3 Heidegger also takes atomic energy as his central example of modern technology, and he also emphasizes the historical and technical presuppositions that allow modern physics to take the world as a manipulable object. More importantly, he sees the true danger of the atomic age not in the possibility that bombs will destroy us all – which Merleau-Ponty also refrains from saying explicitly – but in the technological