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Considering Merleau-Ponty's treatment of Whitehead's Concept of Nature, the paper regards the affinity between these two authors, in their characterisation of the deficiencies of classical ontology and in their invention of concepts for a new approach to nature and ontology. Merleau-Ponty sees the task of philosophy of nature as the articulation of the two dimensions of Cartesianism, immaterial and material, in a single configuration, whose privileged site will be the 'body proper', as the insertion of matter into consciousness and consciousness into matter. Whitehead conceives this task as bringing together the idea of nature as a totality which is unaffected by our perceptual capture of it and the notion of perception as constitutive of nature. The conclusion evaluates the current stakes and political resonances of a philosophy of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]