Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

This is a book about the connection between humanism and political violence. I believe the author rightly argues that humanism can champion liberty and freedom of speech but it can also lead to authoritarianism and in the extreme, terrorism. The author argues against sacrificing individual liberties for collective "progress" (Amen, brother!) This long essay was written in response to the show trials that took place under Stalin in 1936-1938; specifically that of Bukharin. Also as response to show more Koestler's Darkness at Noon. I did not think that I would like or agree with anything by this author, as he is a noted French, liberal philosopher, but we do have a couple of compatible thoughts. Who knew?;) 140 pages show less

If only all philosophers had a text like this; MMP introduces himself and his thought very well in this series of lectures. I knew almost nothing about him going in, and now I feel ready to think through his harder works. Very readable!

The introduction was excellent, as well, despite the unpromising "summary of each lecture" format. Baldwin is sympathetic, but he also isn't afraid to point out MMP's failures, whether of factual understanding (his grasp of physics doesn't seem to have been show more particularly good) or reasoning (you can't analyze painting, music and literature in the same terms).

As for the thought itself, MMP seems to me to be a left-wing Heidegger variation. He is critical of 'science', which means something like analytical thought materialism, and insists that human experience can only be properly explained if we give attention to 'perceptual' life (hence the title). Perception turns out to be very broad: looking at tables, yes, but also intersubjectivity, stimmung, and so on. He's usually reasonable--making a plea to include 'perception' in our understanding of human experience, rather than insisting that *all* human experience is non-cognitive. But sometimes he seems to lean too far in that direction, suggesting that "naive" experience is opposed to intellectual experience altogether, rather than insisting, rightly, that all experience is both intellectual and bodily. In Kantian cant, he is content to admit the existence and necessity of regulative ideas; he just doesn't think we should fool ourselves into thinking that those ideas are anything other than regulative, nor that they are sufficient for understanding.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see him applying all this to a specific time period: he is writing, he says, about a particularly modern way of understanding. But here we run up against philosophy's usual issue: on the one hand, MMP wants to laud the emergence of a new way of understanding (roughly, a more holistic and less 'classical' way) in modernity. On the other hand, he can't help himself, and insists that "modern consciousness has not discovered a modern truth but rather a truth of all time which is simply more visible--supremely acute--in today's world." So... if it's a truth of all time, why was it so unacknowledged until now? If we can come to understand this consciousness differently, why can't the consciousness itself be liable to change?

He also gets a bit carried away in a very French philosophical way (classical painting kills the "trembling life" of the world; Chinese (sic) rock gardens express "a preference for death"; art is always the attempt to create a self-sufficient object), but certainly isn't the worst offender in this regard.

Anyway, I look forward to learning more about MMP; anyone who can be this clear and interesting in such a restricted format can surely be interesting in more professional texts. And I do suspect that he'll tell me what I want to hear, things like this:

"To look at human beings from the outside is what makes the mind self-critical and keeps it sane. But the aim should not be to suggest that all is absurd, as Voltaire did. It is much more a question of implying, as Kafka does, that human life is always under threat and of using humour to prepare the ground for those rare and precious moments at which human beings come to recognise, to find, one another."

Reason, he tells us, is waiting for us; we'll never inherit it, but nor will we give up on it. Has anyone compared MMP with Adorno? That would be fruitful, I think. show less

A Dialectic without Dreams, January 13, 2005

Merleau-Ponty is generally read for his work in phenomenology, not his work on dialectics. This is both a pity and a mistake. While he certainly does deserve to be remembered as the third great phenomenologist of the past century, after Husserl & Heidegger, his being forgotten as a dialectical thinker is almost inexplicable.

I say almost inexplicable because, I fear, the reason he is ignored as a dialectical thinker is because he advocated, and show more superbly demonstrated, a dialectic without myths, utopia or dreams. In the great chapter (2) on Lukacs he says, "[t]he dialectic is this continued intuition, a consistent reading of actual history, the re-establishment of the tormented relations, of the interminable exchanges, between subject and object. There is only one knowledge, which is the knowledge of our world in a state of becoming, and this becoming embraces knowledge itself." He speaks of interminable exchanges, implies the permanence of tormented relations, affirms that knowledge always becomes. This is a dialectic scraped clean of the utopianism of the Marxist classless society, contemptuous of some miraculous Kojevean 'End of History', sans any vain 'Hegelian' promise of some never-never land in which Science will precisely equal Wisdom.

So then why dialectic, or, more precisely, why use the dialectical method if it offers no goal? Immediately after the sentences quoted above M-P says, "[b]ut it is knowledge that teaches us this." The dialectic, as M-P understands it, gives us, better - can give us, an understanding of history, and our present, but as to the future it promises exactly nothing. How could it promise more? If becoming, and the unknown, press on us forever, every totalization is always in danger of being threatened by some unanticipated contingency that changes this totalization into some unpredicted, and above all, unpredictable (until it occurs) Other.

By way of contrast let me now mention that for Hegel, finally, one could say that Dialectic remained a retrospective method and not a predictive science - at least until the precise end of the dialectical process. "The Owl of Minerva takes flight only at night." But, for Hegel, I think it is correct to say that when Subject and Object become One, Forever, we will be able to say that the all-knowing owl is always flying because the Absolute (Spirit) is always dark. We now perhaps better understand the content of the Hegelian characterization of (and objection to) the early position of Schelling - as a 'night in which all cows are black' - this position wasn't wrong; it was merely premature. Thus at the extreme end of Hegelian theory, one is always in danger of seeing it toppling over into the Kojevean 'End of History' position, which M-P in the epilogue characterizes as an idealization of death.

M-P holds, in this book, that this is not the position of Marx and Lukacs. "In Marx spirit becomes a thing, while things become saturated with spirit. History's course is a becoming of meanings transformed into forces or institutions. This is why there is an inertia of history in Marx and also an appeal to human invention in order to complete the dialectic. Marx cannot therefore transfer to, and lay to the account of, matter the same rationality which Hegel ascribes to spirit." Hegel is pleased to be taken to mean that Spirit is an active helpful partner of humanity in dialectic; a materialist dialectic can make no such claims of matter. What Merleau-Ponty, btw, is here denying, for those who have ears, is that there can be an end to any genuine material dialectic. ...Matter itself is permanently, in every human sense, an irrational factor. In other words, being and reason can never be one. Whatever Rationality in things we find - we find it there because we put it there. "Marxism cannot hide the Welt-geist in matter." Dialectic in which a dialectical partner is permanently non-rational becomes a science of circumstances. Thus M-P maintains that for Lukacs (and, I think, himself) that only revolutionary creativity can `guarantee' "a coherent and homogenous system."

...But no system is permanent. "A dialectical conception demands only that, between capitalism, where it exists, and its antecedents, be one of an integrated society to a less integrated one." By more integrated M-P means a more `socialized' society, societies in which, since there is more common ground, "destinies can be compared." It is ultimately here in social interaction that, for M-P, dialectical knowledge arises. But, as indicated earlier, nothing is guaranteed. "The principle of the logic of history is not that all problems posed are solved in advance, that the solution precedes the problem, or that there would be no question if the answer did not pre-exist somewhere, as if history were built on exact ideas. One should rather formulate it negatively: there is no event which does not bring further precision to the permanent problem of knowing what man and his society are..." One is here tempted to say that M-P here answers two of the questions we asked at the beginning of the review. Why resort to the method of dialectic? - It brings (or exposes a) further precision to our knowledge of the problem of man. Why no certain Telos, no end to history, no grand finale that finds Science and Wisdom in permanent embrace? - The "problem of knowing what man and his society are" is permanent.

For M-P the problems of society reside only in human history; neither spirit nor matter will save us. "The sense of history is then threatened at every step with going astray and constantly needs to be reinterpreted." "There is less a sense of history than an elimination of non-sense." Oh, and this indeed would be the 'reason' M-P, the dialectical thought of M-P, was forgotten. A dialectic, shorn of fairy tale, certainty or reward, would attract none of our scholarly saints, or even our Leninist `realists.' Over the last two centuries there have been only three reasons, often entwined, to turn to dialectic; the pursuit of Knowledge, the pursuit of utopia/revolution, or the pursuit of some always obscure inner `intuition' or joy. ...Apparently, given the way M-P is ignored by Hegelian and Marxist dialecticians, the only pursuit that was decisive was the last.

This has only been a brief commentary on a small slice, a handful of pages, of this superb book, that, I hope, will make others interested enough to read it. The discussions of Weber, Lukacs, Trotsky and Sartre are all excellent. M-P is a political philosopher who deserves to be read along with the great and important political philosophers of the 20th century: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. Ignore any of them and increase your ignorance. show less

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Humanism and Terror" was intended, in 1946, to be an answer from the intellectuals still associated with the 'official' Communists to Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon". Merleau-Ponty summarizes the book, addresses the challenge Koestler poses, and attempts to judge the USSR by the standards of "Marxist humanism" as he sees it. Nevertheless, the book is a very mixed bag.

The interesting thing about this book is that the preface, in which Merleau-Ponty does not show more address Koestler directly but instead deals with the trouble of Communism during the Stalinist period, the attempts to weigh means and ends, the desire for honesty vs the desire for pragmatism, the failure of people to face the dilemmas of history and the lack of seriousness on the part of liberal critics in this, and so on, is the most interesting part. This is all excellently written and clearly set out in unmistakable terms, at least for a Parisian philosopher.

The part of the book which discusses Koestler's thesis, however, is really poor. Merleau-Ponty ascribes to Koestler himself the views that Rubashov and his inquisitors share, namely a sort of Hegelian-mechanistic interpretation of History as the infallible guide of politics, and the risks and destructiveness this implies - but as is clear from an elementary reading of Koestler's book, he himself does not share this view at all, and precisely wrote the book to attack this viewpoint. It is really odd that someone with the philosophical and literary training of Merleau-Ponty does not see this.

In the subsequent discussion of Koestler's problematic itself, namely whether one can support communism but not communist policy, whether one can be a communist outside the Party, whether there can be such a thing as a democratic socialism, whether economic development is a prerequisite of such democratic socialism or not and what sacrifices are valid to achieve it, etc., Merleau-Ponty does not make this error as much. Yet here he makes a different error: especially in the discussion of the Moscow Trials, which take up the middle part of the book, he completely and uncritically adopts the Stalinist line. He believes every word in the 'confessions' of the accused to be actually intended and seriously meant by them (not writing a word about the torture applied before the Trials began), and he also uncritically adopts the Stalinist line that the suppression of all opposition was necessary to defend the USSR against foreign aggression. On the other hand, he clearly does not believe the actual charges themselves, for which there was blatantly no evidence whatever, as he freely admits. For Merleau-Ponty, the question is then reduced to why people like Bukharin and Trotsky would argue for the Party that 'had to' destroy them. An interesting dilemma, but an irrelevant one, since it is by no means necessary to adopt this assumption in the first place. Koestler's book is clearly superior to Merleau-Ponty's in this, since it makes no such assumption.

The last part of the book is the author's attempt to reconstitute the meaning of Marxism and its philosophy of history. Here, he does criticize the USSR quite strongly (for someone with sympathy for socialism in 1946), and his discussion of the merits and demerits of Trotsky's commentaries on this problem is quite good, if meanderingly written. There is still a lot of vague chatter about the dialectic and the proletariat in an abstract philosophical way, but it leads to several quite good points nonetheless, and advocates taking up a position that supports the Revolution of 1917 as well as communism in general, but without being uncritical towards the USSR or any specific form of Communist Parties and the like, and not binding oneself to having to defend it against better reason. He also engages the philosophical analysis undertaken by Koestler in "The Yogi and the Commissar", and undertakes some effective and well-considered critiques of Koestler's metaphysical views in it, while admitting Koestler's own critiques as useful and valid, as it should be.

Here Merleau-Ponty concludes with the famous statement: "Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is _the_ philosophy of history, and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there remain only dreams and adventures."
That, at least, is and remains true. show less