To reiterate the point with which the previous chapter concluded, it seems safe to say that virtually all readers of Phenomenology of Perception today would be confused, shocked, or even scandalized were the book actually to conclude as follows, with the final line re-embedded in its original context:
Quand le corps se défait, l’essentiel se montre. L’homme n’est qu’un nœud de relations. Les relations comptent seules pour l’homme.
Le corps, vieux cheval, on l’abandonne. (PG 171)
One’s essence appears when the body comes undone. Man is but a knot of relations, relations alone matter to man.
The body is an old crock that gets left behind.
For the central thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, in its philosophical rehabilitation of corporeality as the locus of human existence, is powerfully opposed to the antipathetic disdain of embodiment that Saint Exupéry expressed unambiguously in these lines. Or at least that is how Phenomenology of Perception is overwhelmingly understood. Yet, it is on a note of such “high-altitude” disincarnation that it ends. That Saint Exupéry is given the final word—and that that is the word he gets—is, to say the least, quite puzzling. Why then does the book conclude in this way? Why is the final morsel of this otherwise delectable phenomenological feast so unpalatably bitter? For anyone with a modicum of familiarity with Pilote de guerre, the ending of Phenomenology of Perception is plainly inconsistent with the thrust of the work. Is it then merely, say, some sort of throwaway remark, the inconsistency of which is of no philosophical consequence? Or is there a deeper level at which some kind of consistency or coherence may be discerned? This is what we need to ascertain. For as long as the ending of Phenomenology of Perception remains unexplained, a serious and disconcerting philosophical question mark is left hanging over the work as a whole, as well as over standard interpretations of it.
Further remarks on the Exupérian ending
In fact, the more one probes this ending, the more one uncovers numerous unexpected and disquieting anomalies that add further emphasis to this question mark. These details can be boiled down to the following three observations.
First, according to his own account, Saint Exupéry was daydreaming or hallucinating during the death-defying episode in question. This may be fictionalized in this particular case, but he was, as a matter of fact, notorious for his absentmindedness while flying. Indeed, the whole of Pilote de guerre is written in an oneiric tone as established by its very opening line: “Sans doute je rêve” [“I must be dreaming”] (PG 9), and the text drifts regularly between dream and reality—in particular, between immediate actuality and the quasimythic irreality of Saint Exupéry’s recollection of his childhood (see Ton-That 2000). The question at hand is thus not just why Phenomenology of Perception ends by deferring to a paradigmatic case of la pensée de survol. It is, moreover, the question as to why this philosophical work dealing with perception would conclude with a moment, not simply of nonperception, but one that would seem to lack reliable epistemic warrant of any kind.
Second, the episode from which the final lines of Phenomenology of Perception were drawn did not stem simply and directly from Saint Exupéry’s own close encounter with death. Rather, it involved the recollection of the real death of his younger brother, François, as a result of heart failure caused by rheumatic fever nearly a quarter-century earlier, when Saint Exupéry’s own life was under no threat whatsoever (PG 170f.).1 It was his brother’s words—“I can’t help it, it’s my body” [Je ne peux pas m’en empêcher. C’est mon corps]—and the pressing need he felt, shortly before dying, to bequeath to Antoine his modest worldly goods, in order to ensure a kind of vicarious survival of that which gave his life meaning, that first implanted in Saint Exupéry, albeit tacitly, the fundamental insight of Man concerning the priority of relations over the alien, contingent character of the body. This was later reinforced by Saint Exupéry’s experience in Aéropostale, in particular by Guillaumet’s walking ordeal in the Andes—an example that Saint Exupéry himself (along with his mechanic, André Prévot) emulated some years later in 1935 after crashing in the Libyan desert and having to walk for several days with minimal provisions before finally being rescued (an episode he described at length in Terre des hommes). Here, he claimed our striving toward others in this remarkable way as a “universal truth,” and in the text, he gave Prévot the key line: “If I were alone in the world, I’d lie down right here” [Si j’étais seul au monde . . . je me coucherais] (TH 166).
Thus, even if we grant that for Saint Exupéry such thoughts were not fully driven home until his perilous flight over Arras in 1940, the ideas expressed in the lines drawn from Pilote de guerre at the end of Phenomenology of Perception do not exactly have the “heroic” pedigree that is implied by Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of them.
Third, that fact may actually be felicitous, however. For whatever may have been the situation in 1944 (when he fatally disappeared), according to Merleau-Ponty’s own express stipulation concerning heroism—namely, that “the man who is still able to speak does not know what he is talking about” (SNS 258/146)—Saint Exupéry could not possibly have been a “hero” over Arras in 1940. For it is not the case that he “entered history and melded with it” [s’est joint et confondu à l’histoire] at that moment (SNS 258/146), and he was certainly still able to speak—he was even able to write a book about his experience! There is obviously a paradox in any appeal to heroes, if it is effectively stipulated that they are dead. Merleau-Ponty was perhaps more circumspect at the end of the Preface to Humanism and Terror, written in 1947, where he said that he was writing “for friends whose names we would gladly inscribe here, were it permissible to make witnesses of the dead” [s’il était permis de prendre des morts pour témoins] (HT xlii/xlvi, emphasis added).
Taken along with the problematic nature of the passage itself, these anomalous details might seem to add up to a devastating objection to any construal of Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to heroism as being philosophically significant in its own right. This would recommend reading the ending of Phenomenology of Perception as nothing more than a throwaway remark of some sort that may be freely glossed—or even disregarded altogether—without actually impacting the philosophical content of the work as a whole. And indeed, this is what we find in most scholarship devoted to Merleau-Ponty. As was pointed out in the Introduction, the passage in question is seldom addressed at all by commentators on Phenomenology of Perception, and whenever it is addressed, it is—without exception—either dismissed as extraneous rhetorical ornamentation, or else taken as a reiteration of something that Merleau-Ponty himself had, actually or effectively, already said.
Such readings might be understood in different ways, but none is plausible. It is worthwhile tarrying over this briefly. As noted earlier, for example, it is fundamentally unsound to offer an explanation of the ending of Phenomenology of Perception in terms of the sociopolitical context of the immediate postwar period (see Introduction, Note 4). To be sure, Saint Exupéry was being celebrated and eulogized in very positive terms at that time as a symbol of the Resistance and the defeat of fascism in France. And Merleau-Ponty’s book—completed in August or September 1944, shortly after Saint Exupéry’s death and in the immediate aftermath of liberation (cf. Noble 2011, 73ff)—was indelibly marked by these allegiances as well. But while Saint Exupéry may have been among the most famous heroes of the war, he was certainly not the only one. And he was by no means the most progressively-minded nor philosophically inspired person to die for France. Over and above implying that qua author, Merleau-Ponty was something of a conformist, then, a suggestion that seems disconfirmed on virtually every other page of the book, to attribute the ending of Phenomenology of Perception to the sociopolitical context is merely to rationalize it without offering any insight as to why the book ends on a “heroic” note at all, and why it was Saint Exupéry in particular to whom Merleau-Ponty turned.
Much the same could be said of claims to the effect that the ending of Phenomenology of Perception “betrays the displacement of [Merleau-Ponty’s] philosophical concerns, and his impassioned interest in the political events of the day” (Saint Aubert 2004, 115). For aside from the most general level of allegiances that scarcely excluded anyone in France at the time, it is simply not the case that Saint Exupéry was in any way whatsoever reflective of Merleau-Ponty’s political views—his political writings at the time never refer to him. And given the discussion above (Chapter 1), there are clearly very good reasons for this. So the main problems facing the contextual approach recur here. In general, it seems safe to say that with regard to understanding why Phenomenology of Perception ends with those lines from Pilote de guerre, any approach that focuses on who authored those lines while discounting or overlooking their textual content will always only amount at most to a rationalization rather than a genuine explanation. For the question at hand is not a matter of figuring out what conceivable sense at all there could possibly be in recognizing Saint Exupéry as a hero, but rather of ascertaining why Merleau-Ponty ended his book with a deference to a hero in the first place, and then why he chose this one, Saint Exupéry, for this purpose. Moreover, once the textual incongruity of the passage itself is also factored into the problem, then it becomes perfectly clear that these sorts of approach are woefully deficient.
Matters are no better, however, and probably worse, if we do focus on the textual content of the lines from Pilote de guerre. For given what we have seen, lest we willfully turn a blind eye to Saint Exupéry’s book, we would have to say either that Merleau-Ponty did not notice the acute incongruity, a suggestion that seems unimaginably unlikely, or else that he made the choice despite that incongruity, and that he crafted the excerpt with some kind of deceitful or manipulative intent. But it is scarcely possible seriously to imagine him thinking that his ellipses would have fooled any sophisticated reader at the time. It is very likely that such readers would have been familiar with Pilote de guerre, and in any case, the bulk of the passage is enigmatic in a way that invites the reader to consult the original.2 It is thus not insignificant that the textual incongruity of the cited passage was not called out by contemporary readers of Merleau-Ponty’s book. But this can be accounted for satisfactorily by recognizing that those readers were preoccupied with trying to come to terms with the other 500-plus pages of groundbreaking philosophical investigation, combined with the fact that, at the time, a reference to Saint Exupéry was nothing particularly noteworthy (see above, Chapter 1, note 2). In that interpretive context, the ending could easily have been regarded as merely a rhetorical flourish or stylistic device. In other words, it could have been safely and innocently presumed that in textual terms, what the hero expresses at the end of Phenomenology of Perception, even if it clearly lacked philosophical rigor, was consistent with the basic claims of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. It is just that 65 years ago, readers were still in the process of figuring out what exactly those claims were.
Many readers today make the same presumption, that is, that the “heroic” ideas at the end of Phenomenology of Perception are a reflection, however enigmatic, of Merleau-Ponty’s own thought. But given the current development of Merleau-Ponty scholarship, this can no longer be considered innocent. Knowing what we now know about Phenomenology of Perception and the basic claims of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, or at least given what we think we know about them, and given what we know about Saint Exupéry and Pilote de guerre, it quite simply will not do to deny that there is a major problem of interpretation here. As far as making out the end of Phenomenology of Perception to be merely a rhetorical device of some sort, then, this seems once again to engage in bad faith rationalization. For if Merleau-Ponty’s interest was merely rhetorical, then why would he draw from a source so bizarrely at odds with his own position? Why would he risk such perverse misunderstanding for no compelling philosophical reason? This choice could only be seen as an alarming compositional blunder, inasmuch as it would obstruct seriously the uptake of the philosophical content of the book. Although Merleau-Ponty’s ability to communicate clearly and effectively may have left some room for improvement, to suppose that at the very culmination of this major text, he committed such an outright authorial faux pas would raise difficult new questions while answering none. Such a claim would thus appear to be nothing more than a desperate attempt to avoid facing a very difficult hermeneutical problem.
In short, all of these ways in which the ending of Phenomenology of Perception may be discounted or disregarded are implausible. The common thread between them lies in regarding the ending as an extraneous element tacked onto an otherwise complete work, and rationalizing it or explaining it away on that basis. Refusing to consider the ending as an integral and irreducible part of what Merleau-Ponty was doing, they fail to provide any insight into it, and instead, simply tend to raise further questions and multiply problems.
At any rate, given the manifest textual incongruity of the lines drawn from Pilote de guerre, none of these stratagems is sufficiently plausible to justify refraining from investigating the possibility that those lines are, in fact, a necessary part of the phenomenological project undertaken in Phenomenology of Perception. Such is what I wish to do in this book. For while the textual content of those lines is inconsistent with the thrust of the work—I believe the passage is, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, a moment of non-sense—I would submit that there is nevertheless a deeper level at which it makes sense. Indeed, what I shall argue for in this book is that there is a deeper level at which the ending literally makes sense—that is, at which it contributes to producing or generating sense—and that this is how it should be accounted for. The fact that Phenomenology of Perception ends with those Exupérian thoughts has primarily to do, I will contend, not with what they say, but rather with what they do: as a subliminal experience of meaningful death, the invocation of heroism is intended to establish intuitionally that the limits of what is humanly knowable coincide with the scope of existential phenomenology as conceived by Merleau-Ponty. In this way, the heroic ending is implicated performatively in the “realization” of the philosophical content of the work as a whole. Its significance is thus methodological, pertaining to Merleau-Ponty’s main claims regarding what, following Husserl and Fink, he called the “phenomenology of phenomenology”—claims which were, as we shall see, bound up inextricably with Merleau-Ponty’s simultaneous and concomitant attempt to come to terms with what he viewed as the central methodological problem facing Marxism. In a remarkable way, then, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “heroism” was the single stone with which, so to speak, he tried to kill two methodological birds at once.
So much by way of an anticipatory glimpse of what I shall argue for in this book, a view that will be more fully elaborated, naturally enough, in the Conclusion. It might just be added at this point, though, that even if what I will claim about the ending of Phenomenology of Perception is true, it would by no means follow immediately that it is philosophically unproblematic and defensible. Rather, it may emerge that it signals—and this in an unexpectedly conspicuous way—a fundamental methodological weakness in Merleau-Ponty’s project of existential phenomenology, a weakness that could have important implications in terms of the epistemic status of the claims that Merleau-Ponty made in the context of this project. But regardless of how that further question plays out (it is beyond the scope of the present work), it is imperative for those interested in Merleau-Ponty’s work to come to terms in the first place with the problem of Exupérian heroism.
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This chapter will get this investigation underway by first considering a pair of earlier references to Saint Exupéry in Phenomenology of Perception. This will serve to further bolster the claim that the concluding reference to Saint Exupéry is not inconsequential by showing that there is, in fact, philosophically substantive content in Merleau-Ponty’s interest in him. More importantly, though, my analysis of these earlier references—which will begin presently and resume in the latter part of Chapter 3—will also set the stage for the investigation of heroism by foregrounding the historical and political horizons of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment. In particular, I will be claiming that these references to Saint Exupéry help to reveal a very important connection between Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the postwar period and the Hegelian Marxism of György (Georg) Lukács. This claim may surprise many readers. But while the role of Lukács’ work is largely unexplored in Merleau-Ponty scholarship, it is, I believe, of the first importance. Thus, after initiating an analysis of the early references to Saint Exupéry, the bulk of this chapter will be devoted to elaborating contextual considerations that serve to strengthen the plausibility of according a central significance to Lukácsian Marxism in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. These considerations will pertain to the reception of Lukács’ work in France, and to the “origins” or “sources” of Merleau-Ponty’s attachment to Marxism. Concerning the latter especially, this sort of contextual work is unavoidably circumstantial and thus fraught with some risk. But it is very important inasmuch as it may be able to shed light on the underlying architectonic, so to speak, of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. Specifically, and what is important for my purposes, it can lend credence to the claim that Marxism has a certain theoretical priority over phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s postwar project.
Many of the details of this discussion will recur later, but this general point provides the backdrop for the discussion in Chapter 3. There, my argument will rest upon certain philosophical connections that are demonstrable on the basis of textual evidence. In particular, in dealing with the earlier references to Saint Exupéry in Phenomenology of Perception, we will be brought to consider Lukács’ claims regarding the methodological priority of the category of “totality” and the social mediation of nature in modern society, and how these are taken up by Merleau-Ponty in Gestalt-theoretic terms as the claim that human history forms an existential totality. It will consequently emerge that the holistic approach to embodiment and human être-au-monde that is central to Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology is to be understood as situated methodologically within the horizons of the meaning of human history as a whole. In other words, for Merleau-Ponty, history has phenomenological priority over embodiment. As we shall see, recognition of this priority is extremely important in terms of understanding Merleau-Ponty’s project in the postwar period, including its appeal to Saint Exupéry and the heroism that he is taken to personify. But it is also a point that is generally not recognized—and often even unknowingly contradicted—in the literature.
Earlier references to Saint Exupéry (Part 1)
Readers of Phenomenology of Perception will recall that in a pair of linked footnotes found within the first chapter of Part I, “The Body as an Object and Mechanistic Physiology,” Merleau-Ponty had already appealed to the same section (Chapter XXI) of Pilote de guerre to which he appealed at the very end of the book. And in this case, it was for a phenomenological illustration of a point that he was making about the structure of human embodiment, to wit, the possibility of a person’s “human” situation fully incorporating her “biological” situation in moments of danger, that is, for her body to “enter into action unreservedly” [se joigne sans réserve à l’action]. The first reference reads as follows:
Ainsi Saint Exupéry, au-dessus d’Arras, entouré de feu, ne sent plus comme distinct de lui-même ce corps qui tout à l’heure se dérobait: « C’est comme si ma vie m’était à chaque seconde donnée, comme si ma vie me devenait à chaque seconde plus sensible. Je vis. Je suis vivant. Je suis encore vivant. Je suis toujours vivant. Je ne suis plus qu’une source de vie. » (PhP 99 n1, citing PG 174)3
Thus, Saint-Exupéry, over Arras, surrounded by [enemy] fire, no longer feels as something distinct from himself this body which, just moments before, was recoiling: “It is as if my life were given to me every second, as if with every second my life were becoming more palpable. I live. I am living. I am still living. I am always living. I am nothing but a source of life.”
But Merleau-Ponty immediately added that this possibility is strictly momentary, occurring only in limit cases. Thus, the second reference—which consists in a citation that is actually drawn from a slightly earlier passage in Pilote de guerre—reads as follows:
Mais certes au cours de ma vie, lorsque rien d’urgent ne me gouverne, lorsque ma signification n’est pas en jeu, je ne vois point de problèmes plus graves que ceux de mon corps. (PhP 100 n1, citing PG 169)4
To be sure, though, in the course of my life, when not directed by anything urgent, when my meaning is not at stake, I see no problems more serious than those of my body.
Granting the appropriateness of these references to Saint Exupéry for Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of embodiment—even granting for the sake of argument that, concerning embodied action, “what Saint-Exupéry is saying is the same as what Merleau-Ponty says” (C. Smith 1980, 269, emphasis added)—it is not clear why Merleau-Ponty would return at the very end of the book to a one-sided disambiguation of the point. That is, whereas in the discussion in Part I, the body’s unqualified participation in action is minimized and exceptionalized on account of corporeal exigencies, the heroic ending of Phenomenology of Perception pertains to that unqualified participation taken in isolation. Of course, it might seem on the contrary to be perfectly clear why Merleau-Ponty would do this—the deference to Saint Exupéry qua hero at the end implies that he was dead, and death ensures unfailingly that the problems of one’s body are indeed nullified. As I have argued, however, it is not clear why such a deference is needed at all. More particularly, though, it is also not clear why Merleau-Ponty made this point about embodiment in the first place, nor why it is something that becomes relevant again at the very end of the book. Why is it that at this preliminary stage of his phenomenological account of embodiment, where it would occur to no one to rationalize it as a piece of philosophically empty rhetoric or political homage,5 Merleau-Ponty endorsed the implied distancing or even rupture between embodiment and life? It is, after all, to those moments at which the body is least bodily, or at least at which it is least mine, that the following statements apply: “I live. I am living. I am still living. I am always living. I am nothing but a source of life.” It would be specious and arbitrary to dismiss this as insignificant simply on the basis of having similarly dismissed the ending of Phenomenology of Perception. Rather, we need first to understand these initial references, and then, on that basis, come to terms with the reference to Saint Exupéry with which Merleau-Ponty’s book concludes.
In order to understand these earlier references to Saint Exupéry, it is necessary to reconstruct more fully the immediate context of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion. The central notion under consideration here was that of the “habitual body,” understood in conjunction with the idea of repression, which was a crucial conceptual element in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the ambiguity of embodiment. And as we shall see, coming to terms with this will—somewhat surprisingly perhaps—involve us in an excursus on the work of Lukács, which will in turn motivate considerations on how Merleau-Ponty came to embrace Marxism philosophically in the first place. On this basis, which we will be in a better position to understand Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to embodiment.
Embodiment and historicity
The point that Merleau-Ponty illustrated by way of reference to Saint Exupéry had to do with the distinction that he drew between what he termed “the habitual body” [le corps habituel] and “the ‘actual’ body” [le corps actuel] as two distinct “layers” [couches] of our embodied being (PhP 97). In brief, the habitual body is understood in terms of the persistence through “sedimentation” of the general form of past experiences, and thus as a kind of impersonal existence, while the “actual” body is understood in terms of spontaneous personal existence in the living present. He used this distinction—especially the concept of the habitual body—to formulate a framework for understanding cases of phantom limb syndrome and anosognosia without reducing them to either psychological or physiological factors. But as Merleau-Ponty emphasized, having a sedimented dimension of embodiment is not in itself pathological, but rather an essential feature of human existence in general. For it is in virtue of having a habitual body that a certain distance can be taken from the immediacy of one’s “environing-world” [milieu, Umwelt], and it is only in virtue of this distance that, unlike animals, humans can gain awareness of a “world” [monde, Welt] properly speaking as the “common ground [raison commune] of all environing-worlds” (PhP 103), and then, on this basis, attain a critical distance from one’s own immediate setting: “it is by renouncing a part of his spontaneity, and by engaging in the world through stable organs and pre-established circuits, that man can acquire the mental and practical space that will in principle liberate him from his environing-world and enable him to see it” (PhP 103). Somewhat paradoxically, then, the sort of “integration” that specifically characterizes human existence in contradistinction to animal life occurs precisely through a movement that begins by decentring and deactualizing that existence.
This movement is that of historicity, the active historical nature of human existence. For Merleau-Ponty, the distinction between the habitual and the “actual” body is essentially a temporal distinction, that is, between pastness and presence, and it is within the terms of this distinction that the dynamic of historicity emerges. The integration of human existence or être-au-monde thus occurs fundamentally through historical action that is ultimately based in a dialectic of embodiment, and which is oriented toward equilibrium understood in Gestalt-theoretic terms. This is a distinctive feature of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, and it is the reason why, for him, as we shall see, discussions of embodiment or corporeality at the level of individuals can lead with otherwise startling suddenness to discussions of history at the macroscopic level. This historical dialectic of embodiment is meant to provide a unified conception of human existence that would bridge the traditional divide between body and mind, or immanence and transcendence, thereby surpassing any one-sided attempt to understand human existence in either objective physiological or subjective psychological terms alone. For Merleau-Ponty, “man taken concretely is not a psyche joined to an organism, but this back-and-forth movement of existence [va-et-vient de l’existence] that sometimes allows itself corporeal being, while at other times it goes into personal acts” (PhP 104). And these poles of existence are not just connected but are interwoven—they s’entrelacent, as Merleau-Ponty put it—and they are thus deeply implicated mutually. Between the psychological and the physiological there are, Merleau-Ponty claimed, “relations of exchange” [rapports d’échange], such that “there is not a single movement in a living body that is completely accidental with regard to psychic intentions, nor a single psychic act that has not found at least its germ or its general outline [son germe ou son dessin général] in physiological dispositions” (PhP 104).
This general claim is, to say the least, quite audacious. It provides a good expression of the basic sense of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the irreducible ambiguity of human être-au-monde, and it is corroborated, at least partly, in and through the descriptive accounts of corporeality that are elaborated in the subsequent chapters of Part I. Yet, a moment of frank reflection would suffice to make it clear that description alone, however extensive and richly elaborated it may be, could never suffice to prove the full scope of the claim in any strict sense. It is thus worth noting what is at stake in it for Merleau-Ponty. On the one hand, there is the denial of any “free-floating” mental activity, that is, mental activity that would be autonomous of its corporeal situation. And on the other hand, there is the converse denial of any bodily movement that would be fully devoid of or detached from any psychological meaning. As discussed above in the Preface, the first denial is important for Merleau-Ponty inasmuch as he wanted to be able to claim his phenomenological descriptions as genuine philosophical contributions, and this requires establishing that they cannot be surpassed by a higher-level intellection capable of disambiguating them. Or, in other words, he needs to claim that philosophy itself is not a free-floating or disembodied mental activity. And as noted above, this is the task that Merleau-Ponty takes up explicitly in Part III of Phenomenology of Perception. The second denial is related closely to this first one, and can even be seen as providing its fundamental source of support. The denial that there is any human bodily movement or gesture that would be wholly independent of personal or existential meaning is important for Merleau-Ponty because of its relation to the claim that human existence as a whole, hence inclusive of its natural organismic dimension, falls within the movement of human history: “the organism and its monotonous dialectics are . . . not extraneous to history as though inassimilable to it” (PhP 104, emphasis added).
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Here, we need to take a step back. A big step, in fact. For it seems likely that in making this last point, Merleau-Ponty had György (Georg) Lukács in mind, specifically certain points that Lukács made in his 1923 book, History and Class Consciousness. Before getting into that directly (in the first part of Chapter 3), though, it may be helpful to lay out some contextual considerations concerning Lukács, as well as the “origins” of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical attachment to Marxism.
Considerations on Lukács
A collection of essays written and revised between 1919 and 1923, History and Class Consciousness, is widely and duly regarded as being by far the most theoretically sophisticated contribution to the philosophical discourse of Marxism in the early part of the twentieth century, and as having inaugurated the philosophical tradition of “Western” Marxism (Arato and Breines 1979, 190–209; cf. Anderson 1976)—a label [le marxisme « occidental »] that Merleau-Ponty himself coined in Adventures of the Dialectic to designate theoretical developments which, emerging in western European contexts after 1917, were at variance with Marxist theory as officially promulgated by the USSR. As is well known, this work, Adventures of the Dialectic, was a trenchant examination of existing tendencies within Marxist philosophy that Merleau-Ponty wrote a decade or so after Phenomenology of Perception, and it includes an important chapter on Lukács (AD 43–80/30–58). History and Class Consciousness is thus often addressed (though rarely in any detail) in discussions of Adventures of the Dialectic. But it is seldom referred to in commentaries on Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work, including Phenomenology of Perception, even those that do pay some attention to the political views he held at the time. As I will be arguing for a view of Lukács that would make History and Class Consciousness out to be an especially important source for Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, a source on par with Husserl (cf. Miller 1979, 205f), it would be helpful, before getting into any substantive issues, first to make some comments pertaining to the reception of Lukács’ text in France in order to contextualize what I take to be its general but undue neglect within Merleau-Ponty scholarship. These comments will lend some support to my argument, although this support will be limited and indirect. Before returning to Lukács and his connection with Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment (Chapter 3), then, it will also be helpful to elaborate some sociobiographical conjectures concerning the advent of Merleau-Ponty’s attachment to Marxism. These remarks will lend further indirect support to my claims, but they will also do so in a way that casts instructive light on Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought in general.
History and Class Consciousness in France
As noted, Lukács, and History and Class Consciousness in particular, are seldom referred to in commentaries on Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. There seem to be four main reasons for this.
The first and most direct reason is quite simply that Merleau-Ponty himself hardly seemed to talk about Lukács at the time—his only explicit written reference to him was in an article first published in 1946 (SNS 223/126). Prima facie, this suggests a strong presumption against the claim that History and Class Consciousness was a point of reference at all—let alone an especially important source—for Merleau-Ponty. To be sure, there is the countervailing fact that it was not in Merleau-Ponty’s style always to devote explicit discussions to even his most important sources. But still, the absence of any published discussion is suspicious.6
The second and broadest reason is that History and Class Consciousness was not widely discussed at all in the 1930s and 1940s. This is due primarily to the fact that shortly after its publication, Lukács, along with some other communist intellectuals, were harshly denounced by Grigory Zinoviev and others at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in June 1924.7 This denunciation did not involve any sort of detailed philosophical critique, and it is highly unlikely that Zinoviev actually read History and Class Consciousness. Rather, fed by a series of critical reviews suggesting that Lukács’ book amounted to a denial of objective scientific status of dialectical materialism and hence the assertion of some form of subjective idealism with ultraleftist implications, and fed as well as by a growing mood of anti-intellectualism, especially with regard to new philosophical approaches to questions concerning revolution, Zinoviev’s critique reflected the fact that the reception of Lukács’ book collided directly with the USSR’s need to consolidate and reinforce its ideological hegemony within the international Communist movement (see Arato and Breines 1979, 176–82, 186–9). Thus, despite some early positive accounts (Arato and Breines 1979, 182–6), this brusque official dismissal by and large held sway, and Lukács himself effectively capitulated, disavowing the work in order to accommodate himself, at least outwardly, to the new emerging Stalinist orthodoxy.8
History and Class Consciousness was thus absent from subsequent political and philosophical discussions occurring under the auspices of official Communism. So while it continued to breathe and have what Hans Mayer called an extensive “underground impact” (Mayer 1949, 219, cited in Arato and Breines 1979, 203) within certain circles of intellectual subculture in central Europe—and in Germany especially (Arato and Breines 1979, 200–9), where it was an important resource for much of the “critical theory” that emerged from the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt (Feenberg 1981)—it was firmly marginalized elsewhere until much later.
The third and fourth reasons follow from the second: History and Class Consciousness was not a point of reference for the political and philosophical debates that occurred within French Marxism during the interwar period, nor in the immediate postwar context. With regard to the former, for example, the work of the Philosophies group—“the first notable circle of French Marxist philosophers” (Jay 1984, 277) in the 1920s and 1930s, including Pierre Morhange, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Friedmann, Paul Nizan, Georges Politzer, and Norbert Guterman—was carried out without any apparent familiarity with Lukács (Burkhard 2000, 72). And this was the case despite sharing some common philosophical ground with Lukács.9 Something similar may be true of others as well. The seeming exception that serves to corroborate the political and philosophical invisibility of Lukács in interwar France would lie in the fact that one of the earliest references to History and Class Consciousness by a French writer was in Raymond Aron’s 1935 book on contemporary German sociology (Aron 1981, 64f).
As for the immediate postwar period, Lukács was largely absent here too. It is widely recognized that it was the work of Lucien Goldmann, who had studied with Lukács, that served as the main conduit whereby Lukács’ thought was introduced into the French intellectual context (Axelos 1960; Furter 1961; Poster 1975, 47f; Gutting 2001, 235 n17), and that it was on this basis that History and Class Consciousness became “a most important influence on the direction of French Marxism after the Liberation” (Poster 1975, 44)—although until the publication of a French translation in 1960, even that was described as “a considerable underground influence” (Axelos 1960, 5, emphasis added). Yet this work by Goldmann dates from later in the 1940s (Goldmann 1948), after the immediate postwar period that concerns us here.
Taking these considerations into account, the picture that emerges is one of Merleau-Ponty as a pioneer with regard to the reception of Lukács in France. Jay’s comment to the effect that Merleau-Ponty was “one of the first French thinkers to appreciate the significance of History and Class Consciousness” (1984, 367) is thus certainly true (cf. Schmidt 1985, 201 n196; Hughes 1968, 192), and in terms of those who took up this work positively (unlike, say, Aron), it may even be the case that he was the first to do so. But even if there were others—and there is absolutely no reason to exclude this possibility—the following conditional is clearly true: if Merleau-Ponty did draw upon History and Class Consciousness in working out his existential phenomenology, then his encounter and engagement with this text necessarily occurred prior to the formation of any significant context of political or philosophical discussion of Lukács’ work in France (see Axelos 1960; Furter 1961). This point is relevant to the argument that I shall make about Lukács being an important point of reference for Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, inasmuch as it would offer an explanation of sorts for the lack of explicit published discussion concerning Lukács on the part of Merleau-Ponty, and of other forms of contextual evidence that would support my claim—the relevant context simply did not exist yet, nor was it Merleau-Ponty’s intention to try to create one.10 The lack of such discussion in the immediate postwar period and earlier should thus not be taken as evidence of a lack of interest or familiarity. This does not, of course, contribute directly to showing that Lukács was an important source for Merleau-Ponty. But it does challenge some of the assumptions that support its denial.
Here, we should just add that by the mid-1950s, when Merleau-Ponty wrote and published Adventures of the Dialectic, such a context did indeed exist. The fact that, by far, Merleau-Ponty’s most extended published discussion of Lukács was made on the pages of this critique of existing tendencies within Marxist philosophy thus has the consequence of closely associating Lukács with what is generally taken to be Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of Marxism. Such a one-sided view is, I think, quite misleading, but it is perhaps also partly because of it that History and Class Consciousness is not recognized—even when the self-critical dimension of Adventures of the Dialectic itself is recognized—as having been a crucial inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s own Marxist politics in the immediate postwar period. That is, such a view has the effect of distorting the fact, if it is one, that Merleau-Ponty’s earlier Marxism had drawn upon what was by all accounts the most theoretically sophisticated and innovative precursor of Marxist philosophy, as opposed to merely applying an existential sugarcoating to official Communist doctrine, say, or else flirting with a voguish but theoretically flimsy and eclectic radicalism. Recognition of this would make it more difficult to justify any offhand dismissal of Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism as merely a short-lived misapplication of phenomenological ideas, or else (or perhaps also) as a matter of being swept up in the politics of the immediate postwar period in France.
This brings up the fundamental point, which concerns the relation between Marxism and phenomenology within Merleau-Ponty’s thought. There is a common assumption among readers of Merleau-Ponty to the effect that his attachment to Marxism is to be understood as theoretically secondary to his commitment to phenomenology, as being derivative from or extraneously tacked onto it. It is only in virtue of such a view that many readers are able to subtract Merleau-Ponty’s early Marxism out of their view of his work as a whole as an inessential—and, for most, regrettable—deviation (see above, Preface). The superficial plausibility of this subtractive move, however, would be upset if it could be shown that History and Class Consciousness was an important source for Merleau-Ponty’s earlier postwar outlook. For Lukács was by no means au courant at the time, even if Marxism more generally was in vogue, and in terms of philosophical rigor and sophistication, Lukács’ work is arguably on the same level of that of Husserl. This could lend indirect support to a view that sees Marxism and phenomenology as standing on a roughly equal footing in Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, such that rather than a blithe dismissal, what would be required to subtract the former would be a more worked-out argument to the effect that within Merleau-Ponty’s work, Marxism and phenomenology were “implicitly in conflict on a number of points” (Miller 1979, 205ff), that is, that their combination represents an incoherent and hence unworkable theoretical amalgam. Or, in other words, that Merleau-Ponty dabbled temporarily in Marxism against his better (read: phenomenological) judgment, that in doing so, he “betray[ed] his own best instincts” (Jay 1984, 371).
This claim is, I believe, fundamentally mistaken, and it is principally against it that my present argument is directed. For I want to claim that Merleau-Ponty did indeed draw upon Lukács’ work, and I want to do this by identifying substantive points of connection on the basis of what textual evidence there is. But my interest is not primarily in claiming that Lukács was a source for Merleau-Ponty’s political views, that is, his reinterpretation of Marxism. Given the low regard in which the latter is currently held by most Merleau-Ponty scholars, such a result would be of limited interest. Rather, I am primarily interested in claiming that Lukács was a philosophical source for Merleau-Ponty, that is, that as a Marxist philosopher, he was a source for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, that is, his reinterpretation of Husserl. Beyond simply denying the theoretical secondariness of Marxism within Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought by affirming that its status is comparable to that of phenomenology proper, I want to claim that these traditions are essentially interwoven in Merleau-Ponty’s project of existential phenomenology and that in at least some respects, including methodologically, priority goes to certain ideas drawn from his view of Marxism. Contrary to the suggestion of a theoretical inconsistency, then, I submit that it is only on the basis of certain ideas drawn from Lukácsian Marxism that Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology itself actually achieves methodological coherence—that with regard to how the project of phenomenology could, contra Fink, be rendered viable on an existential and corporeal basis, basing it on certain Marxist ideas drawn from Lukács was Merleau-Ponty’s “better judgment” at the time, that he was drawing on his “best instincts” in doing so.
Conjectures on the origins of Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism
This goes against the grain of most current views of Merleau-Ponty’s work. It may be helpful, then, to consider the “origins” of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, and how he first came to embrace the different traditions that are woven together therein. For the claims that I will be making would receive further indirect reinforcement if it could be shown that Merleau-Ponty developed a serious interest in Marxism, and in Lukács in particular, before making a decisive turn to phenomenology.11 For this would make it plausible to suggest that his uptake of phenomenology occurred within the terms of a preexisting Marxist orientation. As with anything else concerning the earlier and largely undocumented part of Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual life, however, such a suggestion would be very difficult to substantiate conclusively.12 In particular, there would seem to be no way to identify when Merleau-Ponty first took up History and Class Consciousness, nor would it seem possible, even in principle, to pinpoint in any precise way when his “definitive” uptake of phenomenology occurred.
If, however, it is accepted that The Structure of Behavior predates that uptake—a claim that seems fairly uncontentious, and if we leave Lukács aside for now and just focus on Marxism in general, then it would suffice to show that that text, completed in 1938, reflects relevant Marxist commitments to a suitable degree.
Such a proposal may seem like a nonstarter, though, given that The Structure of Behavior does not mention Marx, and does not have any readily apparent political aspect at all. But the question is: does it have a Marxist philosophical aspect? Given its evident Hegelian character, such a claim may not be such a stretch. Consider, for example, Cooper’s argument (1975) to the effect that The Structure of Behavior bears very strongly the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel (cf. Cooper 1976).13 This conclusion is, I think, ultimately and quite seriously mistaken.14 But it does emphasize the existential-Hegelian character of the book, and also raises the possibility of a Marxist inflection of that character, given that Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology did involve elements of a certain kind of Marxism (and Kojève may even have been familiar with Lukács’ work). Thus, in pointing out that Merleau-Ponty started studying Marx “seriously” around 1934 or 1935, and that he was among a group organized by Marcel Moré to discuss Auguste Cornu’s 1934 work Karl Marx, l’homme et l’œuvre, Geraets implicitly connected this to Kojève (1971, 25ff).
But there is something implausible about this connection. For even if Merleau-Ponty later stated that Kojève’s lectures “created a deep impression” on him (1956, 436; cited in Rabil 1967, 77), and although there are some points of philosophical common ground,15 it would be very hard to overlook how Merleau-Ponty disagreed utterly with Kojève on certain fundamental issues of substance, for example, whether history is a closed or open totality, something to be known absolutely or to be lived venturesomely. For contrary to Kojève’s retrospective contemplation of history as a completed process, history for Merleau-Ponty was something to be engaged in and made:
we are not spectators of a completed history, we are actors in an open history, our praxis maintains what is not to be known but rather to be done as an irreducible ingredient of the world, and that is why the world is not just to be contemplated but also transformed. What is for us unimaginable [irreprésentable] is a consciousness without a future and a history with an end. As long as there are men, therefore, the future will be open, and there will only be methodical conjectures but no absolute knowledge. (HT 99/92, translation modified)
This militantly engaged perspective contrasts sharply with Kojève, but it is certainly on the same wavelength as Lukács in History and Class Consciousness in terms of subordinating historical knowledge to historical praxis: “It is true that reality [Wirklichkeit] is the criterion for the correctness of thought. But reality is not, it becomes. . . . Only he who is called upon and willing to bring about the future [nur wer die Zukunft herbeizuführen berufen und gewillt ist] can see the concrete truth of the present” (HCC 223/204, translation modified). And for both Merleau-Ponty and Lukács, although for different reasons, there are thematic affinities with the young Marx’s critique of Hegel from a revolutionary perspective.
But the view in question here from Merleau-Ponty stems from the postwar period—can something along these lines be found already in The Structure of Behavior, a text that was completed shortly after Merleau-Ponty’s attendance at Kojève’s lectures? In an underappreciated work, Douglas Low (1987) analyzed Merleau-Ponty’s first book in a way that supplies an affirmative answer to this question. Specifically, his argument concerned methodology, and his central claim was that The Structure of Behavior exhibits an existential-dialectical method that is in significant conformity with the approach taken by Marx. What is key here is less the claim that Marx, whose dialectical credentials are beyond dispute, was a sort of proto-existentialist than the claim that Merleau-Ponty, circa 1938, was “a thoroughgoing dialectician” (Low 1987, 175). Low argued for this view on the basis of a close reading of The Structure of Behavior, a reading that serves to foreground three key features of Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt-theoretic notion of structure: the interconnectedness of all things, the interpenetration of subject and object, and the overall framework of a nonreductive hierarchy of mutually influencing forms of integration—the physical order, the order of life and that of consciousness (Low 1987, 162–75). Through comparison with representative texts from Marx, Low then claimed that “Marx’s methodological approach parallels Merleau-Ponty’s on a point-by-point basis” (Low 1987, 192), such that in methodological terms, there is a “striking similarity” between them (Low 1987, 191; cf. 175, 195).
We need not, for present purposes, rehearse the exegetical details of Low’s claim. I should just like to say that his take on The Structure of Behavior is generally sound and, moreover, quite valuable in terms of understanding Merleau-Ponty. But it does have some limitations that are worth mentioning.
For instance, we should note that although Merleau-Ponty does not explore this explicitly in The Structure of Behavior, for which reason Low does not touch on it either, the dialectical methodological perspective under consideration here would lend itself readily to considerations of social and historical transformation. For, as Merleau-Ponty saw it, with a direct allusion to Hegel’s philosophy of history, each “order” represents “the institution of a new dialectic” in such a way that “higher behavior retains the subordinated dialectics in the present depths of its existence, from that of the physical system and its topographical conditions to that of the organism and its ‘milieu’” (SC 224/207f). Thus in the same way that animal life is conditioned by but irreducible to mere physical existence, the structure of human life likewise sublates the vital order of animal life dialectically—both human existence and animal life alike involve “a retaking and ‘new structuration’ [« nouvelle structuration »]” of the preceding level (SC 199/184), while in both cases, “all integration presuppose[es] the normal functioning of subordinated formations, which always demand their own due [réclament toujours leur propre bien]” (SC 227/210). This implies a point about historicity which, as such, can be taken as having significant political ramifications: “What defines man is not the capacity to create a second nature – economic, social, cultural – beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity of going beyond created structures in order to create others” (SC 189/175).16
More importantly, though, Low’s discussion of The Structure of Behavior tends to overlook what is actually most interesting. For in presenting Merleau-Ponty as attempting to avoid both materialist reductionism or critical idealism by claiming that “[d]ialectical structure does not occur only in nature or only in consciousness,” but rather that “[i]t requires a synthesis of both, [a] synthesis which takes places in perception or lived, active experience” (Low 1987, 192), Low does not consider how this result presented Merleau-Ponty with a major new problem, to wit, how to understand perceptual consciousness, as well as its relation to intellectual consciousness. For in affirming that “the dialectic is found in the synthesis of the in-itself and the for-itself,” and that this synthesis occurs in “lived perception” (Low 1987, 174), Merleau-Ponty may have definitively nullified the threat of materialist reduction. But he thereby admittedly came very close to some kind of idealism. This is the reason why The Structure of Behavior is in a certain way inconclusive, culminating as it does with a call to “to define transcendental philosophy anew” (SC 241/224). Low thus seems to read The Structure of Behavior partly through the lens of Phenomenology of Perception, in the sense that this problematic aspect of his understanding of “structure” is not seen as being particularly problematic at all.
Furthermore, though, Low does exactly the same thing with Marx, only in this case, the situation is slightly more complicated. For in claiming that Marx grounded his understanding of dialectic in “lived, active experience” and that he performed “the same synthesis between the in-itself and the for-itself that we find Merleau-Ponty performing” (Low 1987, 195), Low goes well beyond the textual evidence from Marx that he presents in his discussion. It is not that the point is incorrect. But here, too, the texts are clearly being read retrospectively, except that in this case, the relevant lens is not a subsequent text from Marx himself. What is it, then? Low himself tells us in an overview statement concerning his analysis of Marx: “with the help of Lukács, we will point up the dialectical character of Marx’s method” (Low 1987, 161, italics added). And indeed, Low’s account of the dialectical character of Marx’s method, although relatively brief, relies heavily on points made in History and Class Consciousness (Low 1987, 189ff).
There is thus a plausible case to be made to the effect that The Structure of Behavior does indeed betray a philosophical orientation to Marxism, which would—on the assumption that that text does likewise—precede Merleau-Ponty’s definitive turn to phenomenology. More specifically, given what we have just seen, it may even be plausibly suggested that this orientation is one that bears its affinities less with Marx himself directly than with Lukács, in particular, with regard to the pivotal point concerning the mediation of dialecticity in general by consciousness, that is, by the dialectical relation between subject and object. To be clear, this would not necessarily imply any sort of direct influence. There may well have been some, but I am not going to make an argument to that effect—pointing out the plausibility of the connection suffices for my purposes here.
But I also want to highlight a pair of important related points. First, Merleau-Ponty was clearly not fully content with the position elaborated in The Structure of Behavior, and he felt the need to develop it further in terms of a more worked-out account of perceptual consciousness—something he did, of course, in Phenomenology of Perception. If what I claimed above is true, then this suggests that the latter work stems as much (or more) from a desire to supply a corrective to Lukácsian Marxism as from simply advancing phenomenology for its own sake or for any other reason. Second, though, this working out, which certainly pertains to his definitive uptake of phenomenology, remained consistent with the overall dialectical framework presented in The Structure of Behavior. Given these points, it could be maintained with a high degree of plausibility that the underlying rationale behind Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology was to shore up a Lukácsian-Marxist philosophical framework with regard to its account of consciousness. I will return to this below.
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Some readers may remain skeptical, and so we might still wonder about the origins of the Marxist perspective which, following Low, I have claimed exists in The Structure of Behavior. After all, it may remain somewhat implausible to claim that the material dealt with in that text would just by itself prompt a Marxist orientation—although there were certainly contributions being made to the field of psychology in France from theorists with distinctively Marxist outlooks (e.g. Politzer 1928).17 Having claimed that Kojève cannot be considered a major positive influence on Merleau-Ponty in this regard, how might we make sense of the latter’s having adopted a dialectical framework consistent with Marxism by 1938?
Usually when Merleau-Ponty’s earlier intellectual development is considered, a prominent role is assigned to his Catholic religious outlook. This is entirely appropriate. However, it is also usually assumed that a sharp break separates his religious faith from his Marxism, that is, that they are basically incompatible, such that the demise of the former is a necessary condition of the advent of the latter. To be sure, there is a certain conceptual incompatibility. But concerning how Merleau-Ponty came to Marxism, the assumption in question is seriously misleading, and as such contributes to rendering falsely implausible the suggestion that Merleau-Ponty’s attachment to Marxism dates from the mid-1930s, prior to his definitive uptake of phenomenology. For as a matter of fact, the context within which Merleau-Ponty initially developed a serious philosophical interest in Marxism was precisely a religious one—the Catholic “discovery” of the young Marx in the period of the Popular Front (1934–38). Approaching this within the broader context of intellectual engagement in interwar France, (a theme to which I shall return in the Conclusion), we will see how this interest on the part of Merleau-Ponty came to transform the Christian conception of “incarnation” and thus ultimately to eclipse his erstwhile religious faith from within. These considerations will complete the conjectural excursus on the backstory, so to speak, of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar Marxism. This will lead us back in the next chapter to consider Lukács directly, which will then return us to the discussion with which the present chapter began, namely, the initial analysis of embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty made the first references to Saint Exupéry.
Merleau-Ponty and engagement
Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual development during the 1930s unfolded in a social context in which increasing economic and political crises, along with the lessons of the Dreyfus Affair,18 made political abstention or complacency among French intellectuals, especially among Merleau-Ponty’s generation, increasingly disrespectable. To be sure, in 1927, Julien Benda had written his notorious diatribe against the “treason” [trahison] committed by intellectuals [clercs] who involve themselves directly in partisan politics, rather than remaining independently committed to the values of truth, freedom, and justice considered in timeless universal terms. While not per se opposed to intellectuals publicly taking positions on political issues (he himself had been a “Dreyfusard”), Benda was concerned about the trend he perceived in the decades following the Dreyfus Affair in which intellectuals came to mistakenly “praise attachment to the particular and denounce the feeling of the universal” (Benda 1927, 97). For this resulted in the subordination of intellectual work to “political passions”—for example, those of nation, race, or class—and in Benda’s view, this amounted to a betrayal on the part of intellectuals of their historical responsibility to give voice to universal values from a position of detached autonomy. (It is far from clear whether Benda himself truly lived up to this ideal, however, as the presentation of his argument was chequered by what would appear to be a rabid anti-Germanism.)
Although Benda’s book provoked quite a stir, it did nothing whatsoever to alter the trend of which it was ostensibly so critical. On the contrary, in the following decade, the urgency with which intellectuals in France were faced with the question of political commitment intensified greatly—Benda himself even came to revise his considered view in a way that allowed, and even required, a certain measure of leftist partisanship (Benda 1937, 164). Specifically, during the Popular Front period and thereafter, French intellectuals were confronted with the question of engagement, which may be defined in this way: “the political or social action of an intellectual who has realized that abstention is a ruse, a commitment to the status quo, and who makes a conscious and willful choice to enter the arena, never abandoning his or her critical judgement” (Schalk 1979, 25). It is safe to say that Merleau-Ponty accepted this responsibility during the 1930s and it led, by way of his own involvement in Resistance-related activities during the war, to the existential Marxism that he espoused in the immediate postwar period.
But in considering this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s biography, it is very important to keep in mind that the development of his political thinking was connected inseparably to his early religious outlook. A believing Catholic until at least 1936,19 he had been, as he later put it, “led ‘to the Left’ [« à gauche »] by the demands of his faith” (SNS 172).20 Initially oriented toward social Catholicism and Christian democracy, from early on, his position was within earshot, so to speak, of Marxism.21 It may therefore prove useful to approach Merleau-Ponty as having been, in a certain sense, pulled between the politics of two other men, both also trained as philosophers, but who, unlike Merleau-Ponty, had renounced their academic vocation: Paul Nizan and Emmanuel Mounier. It is worth considering briefly that and how it was from his position as a philosopher who chose to remain intégré—that is, within the system—that Merleau-Ponty worked out an independent position that transcended the tension between politics and religion.
Merleau-Ponty knew of Nizan from the École normale supérieure (ENS), although they were not particularly close (like Sartre, Nizan was a couple of years older). Like Merleau-Ponty, Nizan was once an observant Catholic. But he foreswore that early and joined the Parti communiste français (PCF) in 1928 (see Cohen-Solal 1980, 64–9; Scriven 1988, 10–25). He became a very dedicated and prolific member for over a decade, until dramatically quitting in 1939, following news of the Nazi-Soviet pact, which he considered a bitter betrayal. He was killed at Dunkirk in May 1940.
As noted above, as part of the Philosophies group, Nizan was involved in publishing some of Marx’s early manuscripts in France. He was also a novelist (see Leiner 1970; Scriven 1988; Ishaghpour 1990), and a work from 1932 in particular, Les chiens de garde, a scathing critique of the academic philosophical establishment (especially Léon Brunschvicg) and a clarion call to philosophical activism (see Schalk 1973; cf. Maublanc 1935), posed for academic philosophers like Merleau-Ponty a compelling imperative to come to terms with the implicit political consequences of his chosen profession. This work was in part a direct retort to Benda (1927), and it attempted to put a very different spin on the idea of the “treason” of the intellectuals, in that for Nizan, this would be committed when one tried to remain au-dessus de la mêlée by abstaining from progressive political commitment. Nizan thus represented something for Merleau-Ponty, the importance of which was greatly out of proportion to their actual personal relationship. For the two had similar bourgeois backgrounds, and so, the fact that Nizan himself openly committed a kind of “treason” in the sense of turning against his class and engaging himself uncompromisingly in the project of revolutionary working class politics was something by which Merleau-Ponty was philosophically but also personally fascinated. Not that he followed suit, of course. But the fact that Merleau-Ponty devoted a considerable portion of the Preface to Signs (Signs 32–47/23–35) to commenting critically on the Preface that Sartre had written for the republication of Nizan’s 1931 novel Aden Arabie (Nizan 1960), along with the fact that he also responded to the critique to which those comments were subjected by Olivier Todd, Nizan’s son-in-law (Todd 1961; Merleau-Ponty 1961), testifies to the deep and enduring significance of Nizan as a figure of political commitment in Merleau-Ponty’s thought.
In contrast stood the left-wing Catholic personalism of Emmanuel Mounier. In 1932, Mounier founded the journal Esprit (the first issue appeared in October) which, as “a meeting ground for Catholic and non-Catholic ‘revolutionary’ intellectuals” (Curtis 1991, 166), contributed in an unsurpassed way to the conceptual formation of the term engagement, in particular by conferring upon it a nonconformist, anti-party connotation. Although both Nizan and Mounier spoke of radical commitment in opposition to the prevailing order, Mounier sought a third way, that is, to “take sides without being a party man” (Schalk 1979, 20). The difference was expressed in the distinction articulated by Paul-Louis Landsberg—whom Ricoeur once described as the most influential philosophical figure in the prewar development of Esprit (cited in Hellman 1981, 286f n44) —between engagement and what he called embrigadement, which denoted party-style activism (Landsberg 1937, 182). The personalist perspective of Esprit, in presenting a radicalized collective sense of témoignage—that is, bearing witness (for Christ), which originally implied individual acts of martyrdom—as the proper realization of engagement, was thus able to convey, at least for a few years, a viable nonconformist critique of established liberal democracy and of French (and European) bourgeois society in general (see Rauch 1971, 98–149).
Merleau-Ponty was interested in Esprit from the time of its first appearance, while he was teaching in Beauvais (Le Baut 2009, 136), and he accepted its orientation, although perhaps without ever finding it fully satisfactory (see above, note 20). But given his Catholic background, he certainly must have been closer to it than to any PCF activists like Nizan. The fresh contrast which personalism presented to the Christian establishment in France—and to the political scene in general—must not be underestimated. Hellman described it as “exhilarating” for those in a situation like that of Merleau-Ponty: “No longer need one feel oneself part of a rearguard for the retreating Christian Middle Ages; one was now in the vanguard of the second Renaissance.” Importantly, especially for Merleau-Ponty, this meant that affiliation by no means entailed a “conversion” to Mounier’s own views: “Even if one found some of Mounier’s rhetoric unrealistic it was stimulating to work with some of France’s brightest intellectuals at elaborating something new” (Hellman 1981, 86).
Merleau-Ponty most likely became more involved in the movement around Esprit during his research sojourn in Paris in 1933–34. In late 1933, “Esprit restated its determination to have an autonomous philosophical base,” and by early 1934, “Mounier organized study groups with Landsberg . . . to define ‘the personalist-communitarian philosophy of our movement’” (Hellman 1981, 80–1). In May 1934, when many “newcomers to Esprit” were divided into research groups on various political and scientific issues, the “philosophers group” was divided into subgroups to “ ‘define means of spiritual efficacity’, to study Marx [as was noted above] with the aid of Marcel Moré, and to study ‘our metaphysics of the Person and the Community’ ” (Hellmann 1981, 81), that is, Scheler’s notions of Gesamtperson and Lebensgemeinschaft. Although Merleau-Ponty taught in Chartres in 1934–35, where he was correspondent for Esprit and tried to establish a local “Amis d’Esprit” group, upon his return to Paris, he certainly participated in the groups organized around Moré (cf. Geraets 1971, 25), and he may have been connected to the “metaphysics” group as well. And in subsequent years, he also directed Esprit’s research group on psychology.
It is crucial to note—although Geraets did not emphasize this—that the role played by Marcel Moré in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s early interest in Marx occurred within the context of his primarily religious affiliation with Esprit. It was initially in connection with Moré and articles that he wrote for Esprit (Moré 1934; 1936)—including a detailed exposition of Cornu’s groundbreaking 1934 book on the young Marx (Moré 1935), a book which “occupied a central place in the reappraisal of Marxist philosophy which was beginning to emerge in the middle 1930s” (Kelly 1982, 29)—that Catholic intellectuals began to “discover” Marx (cf. Boivin 1936). It is crucial to emphasize that the personalist context with which Merleau-Ponty was closely affiliated was the original epicenter of this newfound Catholic concern with Marxism (Curtis 1991). This was the beginning of the Popular Front period, which among other things was marked by a strategic openness on the part of the PCF toward Catholics, including by 1936 the explicit policy of “la main tendue.” Most believing Catholics rejected such overtures, perceiving Marxism—which was officially condemned in Pius XI’s encyclicals Quadragesimo Anno (15 May 1931) and especially Divini Redemptoris (19 March 1937)—as “une doctrine diabolique” (Moré 1934, 470). And these Catholics tended to see the Popular Front itself as merely a Communist ploy. But given its success, and given the increasingly dynamic and influential presence of Communist ideas in French cultural and intellectual life (Curtis 2000, 78; cf. Kelly 1982, 47), a simple refusal would have been inadequate. Rather, what many Catholic intellectuals came to see as necessary to retain the hearts and minds of Catholic workers was a two-pronged reply, one that would show (i) that at the level of theoretical principles official Communist doctrine was a consistent and coherent system of atheistic materialism, for which reason it was, contrary to its own claims, fundamentally antihumanist, and as such fundamentally at odds with the worldview of Catholicism;—but also (ii) that Marxism, as a body of thought based on the work of Marx, could be given a very different philosophical interpretation, one that would portray it as having some profound affinities with Catholic thought.
In line with the papal view, this approach was anti-Communist. But it was pitched as a “positive anti-Communism” (Curtis 2000, 75f). This is what Mounier referred to as the “constructive critique of communism” that formed part of the mission of Esprit from its inception (Mounier 1937, 307), and which aimed “to take up Marxist analyses in order to separate the great work of lasting value from the one-sided philosophical biases” (Esprit 1935, 5). In other words, this was a polemically charged Catholic revision of Marxism that endorsed the most compelling aspects of its critique of capitalism and liberal democracy, but also contended that these claims could be maintained most securely and effectively by integrating them into a broadened Catholic perspective. And this was the sense of Moré’s view that “accepting Marxism as a completed doctrine was just as untenable as rejecting it entirely” (Moré 1935, 19).
Both aspects of this two-pronged critique necessitated a greatly expanded and deepened knowledge of Marxism. Beginning with Esprit, it was thus the case that the level of discussion concerning Marxism within and across various Catholic milieux in France quickly rose considerably (Curtis 1991), and “an extensive literature of articles, pamphlets, and even books” on Communism was produced (Rémond 1960, 67).
Concerning the first point, the resulting discourse primarily took shape as a critique of anthropocentric humanism as the terms in which the PCF was then presenting its Marxism. The idea from the Catholic side was that such a view was inexorably shaped by Marxism’s uncompromising commitment to materialism, and that as a result, it effectively nullified any serious concern with spirituality, thereby leading to a gravely impoverished conception of human life. Many Marxists tried to portray their theory as sensitive to the range and diversity of human experience, including spiritual richness. In his philosophical selections for the Morceaux choisis volume (Marx 1934), Nizan had included relevant passages from Marx’s early work on alienation. And Lefebvre’s work explicitly presented Marxism as devoted to the realization of the “total man” [l’homme total] through the overcoming of all forms of alienation (Lefebvre 1949, 147). But from the perspective of Catholic efforts to conceptualize a complete humanism—what Jacques Martitain called un humanisme intégral (1936), or what Gaston Fessard called un humanisme réel (1937, 128)—unconstrained by any materialist commitments, the humanism on offer from Marxism could not but appear to be shallow and crude. These efforts thus aimed to highlight a contradiction or inconsistency with the basic materialist presuppositions of Marxism (Maritain 1936, 97). The sort of complete humanistic view that Marxism ostensibly wanted to uphold—along with the “faith in man” that its revolutionary perspective implied (cf. Vignaux 1935; Daniélou 1938)—could only be conceived and maintained consistently and coherently within a Catholic Christian framework—duly updated, of course, through specific theoretical contributions from Marxism and other forms of modern thought.
Hence the second prong of the critique. Here, it was a matter of Catholic intellectuals trying “to assimilate elements of Marxism and to challenge Moscow’s and the PCF’s interpretation of the doctrine” (Curtis 1991, 166). Based heavily on the newly published 1844 Manuscripts and Theses on Feuerbach (along with Cornu’s work), the idea behind these efforts of revision was that Marx himself was, in fact, quite far from being the hardcore materialist as depicted in official doctrine, and that Marxism in general could be rethought accordingly. It was thus the case that despite some efforts on the side of the PCF, especially among those in the Philosophies group, discussion of the early philosophical work of Marx was overwhelmingly carried out in the milieux of the Catholic left as part of a strategy designed to pit Marx against received Marxism by assigning theoretical priority to the early work. This was intended to portray the received understanding of the doctrine as a one-sided deviation, and thereby to effect a “surpassing” [dépassment] of it in the name of a more authentic—because more complete—revolutionary humanism. Recognition of this fact is crucial for understanding the intellectual development of Merleau-Ponty.
The key to these attempts to surpass Marxism, in particular in the case of the personalist revision presented by Moré, lay in the Marxist problematic of alienation, or more specifically, what he called Marx’s “method of alienation” (Moré 1935, 755, italics added), which is a “genuine method of knowledge” [une véritable méthode de connaissance] in virtue of stemming directly from revolutionary activity oriented toward the overcoming of human alienation (Moré 1935, 29). It was this method that enabled Marx “to cast unexpected light on the worst and most cruel drama of the modern world, that of the worker alienating his human substance in commodities,” and Moré claimed that essentially the same approach could enable Christians “to understand all the humiliating and degrading aspects of the forms of labour in capitalist society” (Moré 1935, 756). The philosophical grounds for this method lay in the dialectical account of the relation between humans and nature that Marx sketched out in his early work. In Moré’s gloss, this led to the following result:
the identity of the I and the not-I, which is the crowning achievement of idealist philosophy, is replaced by a kind of synthesis between man and nature that obtains in practical activity. . . . There is no opposition between subject and object, between man and nature, but interpenetration: man is a product of nature just as nature is a product of man. (Moré 1935, 29, 53)
Moré endorsed this view, but he also claimed that it could support a broader approach than Marx actually developed. Specifically, he considered Marx’s method to be “strangely deficient” in that it “considers man only from the angle of economic facts, refusing to see the fulgurations that illuminate his angelic and animal sides” (Moré 1935, 19). Related to this, he thought that Marx focused almost exclusively on “social man” to the exclusion of the “unique” individual and his relation to God (Moré 1935, 30). For Moré, it was primarily to redress such accidental shortcomings that Marxism had to be “completed, assimilated, and expanded” (Moré 1934, 568).
But Moré could consider this possible only because he discerned a more significant common ground. In line with Maritain’s affirmation that Marx’s problematic of alienation was “shaped by Judeo-Christian values” (Maritain 1936, 55 n3), Moré claimed that there is an important analogy between the Pauline view of the postlapsarian world and Marxism’s dialectical understanding of history (Moré 1934, 464). In this way, Moré’s critical understanding of Marxism read it into a broader theological discourse of “incarnation” (Curtis 1991, 168), in the sense of a militant orientation toward the worldly realization of spiritual values.22 Such a discourse was in the ascendant in the interwar period. Seeking to “justify an attitude of incarnation among Christians in the modern world through an appeal to the Incarnation of Christ,” this discourse was geared toward creating the social institutions of a nouvelle chrétienté (Besret 1964, 38–50)—a new Christian civilization which, in giving expression to the “totalistic” nature of faith (Congar 1935, 218), would be “the incarnation of a true [i.e., total] humanism” (Curtis 2000, 85). For people like Moré, then, “it was as a Christian ‘heresy’ that Marxism needed to be ‘saved’ from its own distortions. . . . It was a mode of thought which echoed imperfectly the incarnational themes which were central to the ideal of a nouvelle chrétienté” (Curtis 2000, 90; cf. 84). These “incarnational themes” were variously expressed, but they came to be articulated theologically in terms of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ (e.g. Mersch 1936), that is, the originally Pauline conception of the unity of the Church and its members as one with the mystical body of Christ, that is, the body of Christ supernaturally construed in terms of the Christian community and its vocation as an organized and living whole. “All in all, the unity of the Church . . . is that of a very special reality composed of men united by a supernatural life proceeding from God and from Christ” (Congar 1937, 108).
Along these lines, perhaps the most striking—and most philosophically informed—contribution to the Catholic revision of Marxism came from Fessard, who posed the argument against the interpretation of Marxism as an atheistic and anthropocentric humanism in terms of a certain equivocation in Marx’s conception of communism—whether it is to be understood teleologically as an end of history, the final overcoming of all alienation, or else as (merely) an open-ended movement of historical progress (cf. Marx 1934, 227f). Based on this equivocation, Fessard presented the Marxists with the following dilemma: either Marxism is atheistic and anthropocentric, in which case it is not oriented to “a real and true Transcendence” [une Transcendance réelle et vértitable] (Fessard 1937, 123; cf. 114). But in that case, it can only yield an account of historical progress that necessarily fails to overcome alienation fully (Fessard 1937, 119ff), and its humanistic pretensions are thus effectively voided by its foreclosing upon the existential and spiritual aspirations of humanity. In Fessard’s view, these aspirations imply an ideal historical resolution, which in turn implies, beyond material immanence, an affirmation of real transcendence.
And Fessard thought that the considered view of the young Marx was in agreement: “despite its provocative appearances of atheism, Marx’s humanism was secretly but truly open to the Infinite” (Fessard 1937, 118). For Fessard, then, “a Marxist capable of penetrating to the spiritual core of his doctrine as revealed in the young Marx would have to admit that his faith in Man . . . was close to the Christian’s faith in God” (Curtis 1991, 77). On the other side of the dilemma, then, if Marxism does support a genuine humanism, if it is in fact “a ‘total’ philosophy” [une philosophie « totale »] (Fessard 1937, 124), then this could only be because, even if unbeknownst to itself, it retains a theocentric perspective. In other words, Marxism can draw revolutionary consequences from its critique of alienation only inasmuch as it affirms positively an ideal state of disalienation as a transcendent end of history. And according to Fessard, this affirmation can—indeed, can only—be seen as tantamount to the incarnational views alluded to above: “all the principles of the ‘real humanism’ for which Marx is currently celebrated have always belonged to the Christian consciousness that understands and lives its faith in the Mystical Body of Christ” (Fessard 1937, 128). This is the “profound truth” of Marxism that alone can give proper sense to its dialectical account of history by helping to reveal Marx himself as “an unconscious theorist and an unwitting builder of the Mystical Body of Christ” (Fessard 1937, 189).23
Just in terms of the general historical context, it is probable that Merleau-Ponty was familiar with Fessard’s argument. But there was a more specific connection, in that both were regular attendees at Kojève’s seminar on Hegel. In fact, it is entirely conceivable that Fessard—who was no less knowledgeable than Kojève about Hegel, and who attended largely in order to challenge Kojève’s anthropocentric interpretation—interested Merleau-Ponty as much as, if not more than, Kojève himself. Not that Merleau-Ponty agreed with either. The key to this disagreement had to do with the idea of an end of history, an idea that both Kojève and Fessard endorsed, even while they disagreed between themselves as to whether it could be attained in the temporal world (Kojève) or else only in some transcendent sense (Fessard). As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty rejected that idea in no uncertain terms. But he also rejected the dilemma posed by Fessard. It was ultimately not without merit, however, for it did show very clearly that recognition of a profound affinity between Marxism and Christianity—which Merleau-Ponty accepted—was incompatible with a transcendent religious or theocentric interpretation, thereby strongly affirming that the philosophical task at hand was to show how a “total” humanism could be grounded satisfactorily in this-worldly immanence and in conjunction with a conception of historical progress as a kind of teleology without a telos. Despite itself, then, Fessard’s argument served to confirm that no less than the attempt on the part of Marxism to found humanism on a strictly materialist basis, Christianity has its own self-defeating contradiction between incarnation and transcendence. Although it may acknowledge divine Incarnation in the human world, it also retains belief in a divine omnipotence residing outside of that world. As a result, “God is not completely with us. Behind the incarnate Spirit there remains that infinite gaze that strips us of all secrets, but also of our freedom, our desire, and our future, reducing us to visible objects” (SNS 314/177). Hence, “when it is true to the Incarnation Christianity can be revolutionary. But the religion of the Father is conservative” (SNS 315/177), in that its primary orientation to divine transcendence ultimately leaves it indifferent to this world. This is what accounts for the tendency toward political quiescence that had bothered Merleau-Ponty from the start. What Fessard inadvertently clarified, then, was that commitment to absolute transcendence is incompatible with engagement, and that transcendence must be reconceived accordingly, for example, in terms of historically situated humanity. As Merleau-Ponty later put it, “whatever is sound in my belief in the absolute is nothing but my experience of an agreement with myself and others” (SNS 166/95; HT 204f/187). To adapt a statement quoted above from Curtis (1991, 177), what Fessard’s argument would have helped someone like Merleau-Ponty to see was that “a Christian capable of penetrating to the political core of his doctrine would have to admit that his faith in God . . . was close to – or even essentially no different from – the Marxist’s faith in Man.” It would follow that “Christians should live out the marriage of the Spirit and human history that started with the Incarnation” (SNS 314/177)—something done best, Merleau-Ponty thought, from a Marxist perspective.
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Views like those of Moré and Fessard were not in line with Mounier’s own perspective, which, less inclined to separate theory from practice, tended to draw a much sharper line between Marxism and Christianity—for example, in his claim that “Marxism is basically a negation of the spiritual as an autonomous, primary, and creative reality” (Mounier 1938, 52). More on that shortly. But let us first say a few more words about Moré’s idea of “saving” Marxism by “completing, assimilating, and expanding” it, and how this relates to Merleau-Ponty.
In line with most revisionism of that time, Moré was mainly concerned about rethinking the relation between the economic “base” or “infrastructure” of capitalist society and its ideological “superstructure.” The received Marxist idea concerning this relation founded the latter simplistically on the former, thus seeming to imply an objectionable materialist reductionism, one that would be especially anathema to anyone with serious spiritual concerns. This needed to be rethought, and Moré called for sustained theoretical work to be devoted to this problem on the basis of the latest developments in theory and science (Moré 1936, 566ff). This is the sort of research that was promoted more generally under the auspices of Esprit. What is significant for our purposes has to do with Merleau-Ponty’s own role with regard to psychological research. To be sure, the research that went into The Structure of Behavior was not instigated or commissioned by Esprit. But there is no good reason to imagine that Merleau-Ponty’s academic work during these years prior to 1938 would have been unaffected by his involvement in the personalist milieu. In fact, there are very good reasons to believe that the opposite is true. This would mean that we can regard the dialectical framework developed in The Structure of Behavior as an attempt to “complete, assimilate, and expand” the indications concerning the relation between humanity and nature that were sketched out in Marx’s early philosophical work, and which, by and large, were positively endorsed by Moré and others at the time. What is of significance here is that in working this out in a philosophically rigorous way, and because in doing so, he was also “following out the Incarnation in all its consequences” (cf. SNS 313/176), Merleau-Ponty arrived at a position which, although it certainly effected a dépassement of the philosophical perspective of official Marxism, by no means pointed in the direction that Moré or Mounier or Fessard would have desired. For the claims laid out in that text did not at all affirm the basic presuppositions of Catholicism—for example, no less than any good PCF activist, Merleau-Ponty’s work squarely denied that the spiritual is an “autonomous” or “primary” reality. But it did not do so by implying any sort of materialist reduction, for it accorded consciousness an irreducible role with a kind of relative autonomy. The dialectical framework presented in The Structure of Behavior thus outlined, as least in part, the philosophical basis of a revisioned Marxism which, though secular, laid out a potential common ground for materialism and spiritualism that supported a reciprocally informed conception of engagement. As noted above, this work did not represent a finished and final position. But it would be to phenomenology, not Catholic theology, that Merleau-Ponty ultimately turned in order to complete his own rethinking of Marxism, even though Catholic concerns were what originally brought him to consider it seriously. But the incarnational themes remained central.
These considerations clarify how it was that Merleau-Ponty’s increasing association with Mounier and Esprit was simultaneous with a widening philosophical and political divergence. Recall that for Merleau-Ponty, as for so many others, “Esprit was simply the most lively vehicle for Christian thought in France” (Hellman 1981, 99), that is, his commitment to the organization per se was not particularly deep. Thus, even if he was far from embracing them, Merleau-Ponty was surely open to the several (quite harsh) critiques to which Esprit was subjected by its Marxist critics in the initial 1932–34 period (e.g. Nizan 1933a, 1933b; cf. Hellman 1981, 71–4), that is, during the formative years of its own critique of established Christian democracy. And when, in 1934, the perspective of the organization began to succumb to the tendency, against which Mounier had warned from the beginning, to construe engagement in an overly individualistic way that deemphasized its basis in collectively shared values (Schalk 1979, 20f), the difficulties faced by the effort to negotiate a “third way” between quiescent témoignage and uncritical embrigadement no doubt contributed to Merleau-Ponty’s own heightening political consciousness. In the very effort to firm up the philosophical basis of Esprit beginning around 1934, a project to which he was surely drawn, Merleau-Ponty was thus out of sync with Mounier. For the motives of the latter ultimately lay in clearly dissociating the organization from Marxism, in order to stave off papal condemnation, rather than articulating a philosophically rigorous conception of engagement (cf. Hellman 1981, 78f). In other words, as the theoretical basis of Esprit matured, its radical edge dulled, such that while Mounier and the organization were growing more distant from Marxism, Merleau-Ponty was moving closer to it.
In this regard, it is noteworthy that Nizan was “an unusually sensitive critic of Catholicism,” a Marxist who reproached it less as simply reactionary than as subject to an inherent dilemma whereby its politics would ultimately be torn between Catholicism and fascism (Hellman 1981, 73)—precisely the main axis of Merleau-Ponty’s own disillusion. Beginning in 1934, under the auspices of the PCF’s Popular Front strategy, Nizan publicly toned down his earlier critique of Esprit and was put “in charge of implementing a friendly approach toward the Catholics” (Cohen-Solal 1987, 111). More specifically, “Nizan was entrusted with the task of liaising with fellow-travelling intellectuals,” a role which later included “the very specific task of entering into contact with the Catholic community within the framework of the PCF’s ‘outstretched hand’ policy” (Scriven 1988, 83). No specific information is available as to how this affected Merleau-Ponty. However, given it as a contextual factor, and the fact that Merleau-Ponty was increasingly exposed to and had good relations with other Marxist activists, both in the PCF (e.g. François Cuzin) as well as in the Fourth International (e.g. David Rousset), it is safe to say that during the period of the Popular Front, his sympathy for the style of engagement and the “spiritual revolution” of Esprit began to be questioned by his deepening philosophical interest in political issues about which Mounier et al. tended to be reticent (Rauch 1972, 80ff; cf. Hellman 1981, 87).
Communist overtures to Catholics intensified in the run-up to the historic national election on 3 May 1936, but only fringe elements responded agreeably. Nevertheless, this was apparently enough to raise fears within Esprit that it would be censured by the nuncio, and once again, this motivated a sharper self-distinction from the nonbelieving left (Hellman 1981, 111f). But following the Popular Front victory, “there was a certain disparity between Mounier’s public and his private reactions” (Hellman 1981, 112). Publicly, he warmly greeted the regime of Léon Blum, but privately, he was wholly committed to his own personalist movement. At the end of June, for example, a “well-publicized” debate concerning Christianity and communism, in which Mounier faced Nizan and André Malraux, presented an amicable discussion of common ground (Hellman 1981, 113f). Yet in his report for the same month to Cardinal Verdier, Mounier privately claimed that his was “almost alone among the . . . movements of the young to oppose communism on the metaphysical plane at the same time as competing with it . . . on the plane of technical research.” And later that summer, Mounier composed a new Personalist Manifesto (Mounier 1938), which “articulated the basic doctrine of the personalist movement” as an alternative to capitalism and communism, and did so in more strongly anti-Marxist terms than had ever been previously used, suggesting that “nothing could be done with Marxists unless they abandoned several basic tenets of their ideology.” Needless to say, “[t]he Personalist Manifesto’s Third Way did little to encourage co-operation with Blum’s coalition, or with Marxism” (Hellman 1981, 116). Although there is no precise record, given his leftward development, it is reasonable to suppose that Merleau-Ponty felt alienated from these developments.
There is no question that Mounier recognized the importance of Marxism, and that he drew from it. In that same report to Verdier, Mounier stated that the goal was to “realize in the name of God and Christ the truth that the Communists are realizing in the name of an atheistic collectivity” (Rauch 1972, 180). Yet, although Esprit is often thought of as having had a sympathy, unusual among Catholics, for the Popular Front, “in fact this whole episode illustrated Esprit’s unwavering determination to create a ‘new politics’ on its own” (Hellman 1981, 117).
It was not for that, though, that Merleau-Ponty aligned himself with Esprit. Even as he was evolving along a different trajectory, Merleau-Ponty remained associated with Esprit because it offered a space of optimism and latitude for coming to nonconformist terms with the meaning of engagement, that is, a way in which one could s’engage in a collective project without having a Party line to toe as in the case, for example, of Nizan. In late 1936, however, Mounier became “determined to form a more broadly based, and more disciplined, movement.” Membership requirements were made more stringent, activities became more regimented, and agreement with the tenets of the Manifesto became necessary—Mounier saw this time as “the end of our youthful years” (Hellman 1981, 126f). The Esprit congress held in the late-summer of 1937 at Jouy-en-Josas may have marked the last straw for Merleau-Ponty. At Jouy, the organization became tighter, less democratic, and “disciplinary standards” for its constituent groups were instituted. It is noteworthy that he was still at this point a co-director of the Esprit research group on psychology, since this was the main vector of his divergent intellectual trajectory. But he did not wish to be seen as collaborating with the organization (Geraets 1971, 26 n111). Some of same reasons that had turned him away from the Communist left now occasioned his exit from the personalist milieu. “Transformation of [Esprit] from a free and open laboratory of ideas into an organ of a disciplined, ideologically coherent movement soon brought the dissent of several important young intellectuals” (Hellman 1981, 129), and it would seem safe to conjecture that this included Merleau-Ponty.
At some point not long after this congress, Merleau-Ponty broke off contact with Mounier (Geraets 1971, 26; but cf. Le Baut 2009, 136ff), and it was “probably during the months that followed” that Merleau-Ponty “definitively renounced his religious beliefs” (Geraets 1971, 26). The latter point is hard to verify one way or the other. But in any case, consider the recollection of Jean Lacroix:
Without a doubt it was in returning from Jouy-en-Josas . . . that I had the most intimate conversation with [Merleau-Ponty], the kind that happens between youths who just met and reveal themselves to each other less in what they are as in what they are tending to be. He told me about his doubts, his investigations. A sort of atheistic humanism was already coming through in his remarks, and one sensed that for him phenomenology was going to become the whole of philosophy.24
The final line of this statement presents a mixed message. As a recollection from a quarter-century later, it confidently reads back into the encounter in question what obviously became the case (i.e., Merleau-Ponty’s turn to phenomenology). But it is clearly implied that that had not happened yet, while what was already present in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking was what Lacroix called an “atheistic humanism”—this was “already coming through,” while phenomenology was what “was going to become the whole of philosophy.” And in this context, “atheistic humanism” would refer unambiguously to Marxism—in some sort of revisioned way, of course, but to Marxism nonetheless.
Recapitulation
Let me briefly recapitulate. I began by considering the references to Saint Exupéry that appear in Merleau-Ponty’s initial discussion of embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception—and to those I shall return. But I noted that in that discussion Merleau-Ponty made a significant point about the organism in history—although its significance may not be apparent quite yet. In order to disclose that significance, it is necessary to consider the work of Lukács—and it is to this that we shall turn next. But because the main claim that I want to make is that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception is to be understood within a methodological framework inspired by Lukácsian Marxism, and especially because this claim is quite unusual and may initially strike many readers as highly implausible, I offered (a) some contextual considerations that would account for the virtual absence of any explicit discussion of Lukács in Merleau-Ponty’s work from the time, and (b) some extended sociobiographical conjectures that would locate the “origins” of Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism in the Catholic discovery of Marx during the period of the Popular Front in France, set within the larger context of intellectual engagement. The point of these considerations is to set the stage for what now follows, by showing, contrary to standard assumptions, that it is at least eminently plausible that Merleau-Ponty’s adoption of a recognizably Marxist philosophical outlook has temporal priority over his embrace of phenomenology—a fact, if it is one, that would lend considerable support, albeit indirect, to the claim that certain ideas based in what I shall call an “incarnational Marxism” also have a logical priority over the phenomenological approach to embodiment that is central to Phenomenology of Perception. In other words, the foregoing considerations express in historical terms an analogous claim about the relative priority for Merleau-Ponty of Marxism and phenomenology. None of this can be demonstrated with absolute certainty, and the larger claims that I shall make do not strictly depend on this account being true. But the next chapter, and the remainder of the book, will benefit significantly from having it as a backdrop.