In the last chapter, we deviated from the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment in the chapter of Phenomenology of Perception entitled “The Body as an Object and Mechanistic Physiology” by noting that the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s denial of any human bodily movement that would be wholly independent of personal or existential meaning lies in the fact that it derives from his claim that human existence as a whole, inclusive of its natural organismic dimension, falls within the overall movement of human history: “the organism and its monotonous dialectics are . . . not extraneous to history as though inassimilable to it” (PhP 104, emphasis added). And I suggested that in making this claim, Merleau-Ponty had certain ideas from Lukács in mind. We can now consider these ideas directly, and then return to the initial discussion.
Lukács on Totality
The main idea in question was made in the context of the opening essay in History and Class Consciousness, entitled “What is Orthodox Marxism?” The central thesis for which Lukács argued in this essay was that what is essentially distinctive about Marxism properly understood—and Marxism properly (as opposed to typically) understood is what he meant by orthodox Marxism—has to do fundamentally with its method as opposed to any substantive claims or doctrinal tenets. “Orthodox Marxism,” he wrote, “does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. Rather, concerning Marxism, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method” (HCC 13/1). And for Lukács, what properly defines the method of Marxism is that it is based on and accords methodological primacy to a dialectical conception of “concrete totality” [konkrete Totalität] as “the true category of reality” [die eigentliche Wirklichkeitskategorie] (HCC 23/10). This method takes as its point of departure Marx’s claim, made in The Poverty of Philosophy but reiterated elsewhere, that “the production relations of every society form a whole” (Marx 1976, 166; cf. HCC 22/9), and it reasons on this basis that it is only by construing all seemingly discrete facts of social life as moments of historical becoming, and integrating them dialectically into a totality, that “knowledge of the facts can become knowledge of reality” (HCC 21/8).
Such is the first aspect of the main idea in question. But there is more to it. For as Lukács also claimed, “only the dialectical conception of totality is able to comprehend reality as a social process” [Wirklichkeit als gesellschaftliches Geschehen] (HCC 27/13). A crucial aspect of Lukács’ account of Marxist method concerns the scope of its concept of totality as encompassing human sociohistorical reality but excluding nature. Lukács made this point primarily as a critique of Friedrich Engels’ efforts (in his popular 1878 work Anti-Dühring)1 to articulate a dialectical account of nature which, following the model of Hegelian monism, would provide a materialist metaphysical grounding for Marxism’s dialectical understanding of human history. As Lukács put it:
This limitation of the method to sociohistorical reality is very important. The misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account of dialectics are based mainly on the fact that Engels, following Hegel’s mistaken lead, extended the dialectical method to the knowledge of nature as well. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics – interaction of subject and object, unity of theory and practice, historical change in the reality underlying the categories as the basis of their change in thought, etc. – are absent from our knowledge of nature. (HCC 17 n1/24 n6, translation modified)
Without getting into an overly extended discussion of Lukács, we should note that what is at issue here is the assimilability of nature to Marxist historical analysis. In Lukács’ view, the dominant theoretical tendency during the period of the Second International (roughly from the 1880s until World War I), strongly informed by Engels’ philosophical contributions, sought to “naturalize” (or at least had the effect of “naturalizing”) Marxism’s account of human history by embedding it within an account of the objective dialectical laws of nature. The main problem with this tendency is that it occludes “the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process,” with the result that the theory would amount to just another metaphysical interpretation of the world, whereas “for the dialectical method,” in accordance with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, “the central problem is to change reality” (HCC 15f/3). In opposition to that prevailing tendency, then, Lukács, deeply informed by the neo-Kantian distinction between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften, affirmed the need to maintain a methodological duality vis-à-vis the natural and the sociohistorical.
This claim is elaborated in some of the other essays that comprise History and Class Consciousness, but not uniformly and consistently. For, at some points, Lukács claimed that the standard methods of natural science were all well and good within their proper domain, and that problems arise only when they are misapplied to human society and history (HCC 23/10), thus suggesting an ontological dualism. At other times, though, he implied that the standard methods of natural science are themselves actually skewed ideologically and are consequently unable to yield scientific truth even with regard to nature (HCC 226f/207). The precise status of Lukács’ methodological separation of history from nature is thus not altogether clear. In fact, in a well-known remark, Lukács even seemed to go so far as to reduce the natural to the sociohistorical:
Nature is a social category [eine gesellschaftliche Kategorie]. That is, whatever is held to be natural [was . . . als Natur gilt] at any given stage of social development, its relation to man and the form in which his confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with it occurs, and thus what nature means in terms of form, content, range and objectivity, this is always socially conditioned. (HCC 240/234, translation modified)
This claim is certainly open to different interpretations, including those that would claim that it betrays, beyond ontological dualism, an underlying idealism. But in fairness to Lukács, he rejected both ontological dualism and any sort of idealism with regard to nature or our knowledge of it. His basic intention was simply to deny “that there is a socially unmediated, i.e., an immediate relationship of humans to nature in the present stage of social development” (TD 106), and to affirm conversely that our “metabolic interchange with nature”—which Lukács glossed regularly as an uninterrupted “exchange of matter between society and nature”—“[is] mediated socially” (TD 96), such that “[o]ur consciousness of nature, in other words, our knowledge of nature, is determined by our social being” (TD 100).
Lukács’ considered view in History and Class Consciousness can thus be understood, first, as a claim to the effect that while nature undoubtedly does really exist in its own right, and that it may function according to objective dialectical laws, both of these claims are fully consistent with there being qualitatively distinct dialectical laws operating in the sociohistorical world, and with these laws being implicated in human knowledge of nature.
Self-evidently nature and its laws existed before society (that is to say before humans). Self-evidently the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of development of nature before society, if it did not already objectively exist. From that, however, follows neither that social development could produce no new, equally objective forms of movement, dialectical moments, nor that the dialectical moments in the development of nature would be knowable without the mediation of these new social dialectical forms. (TD 102)
And it is crucial for Lukács to approach these issues—the epistemic status of nature and the dialectical character of society—within the dynamic perspective of “the present as becoming” [die Gegenwart als Werden] (HCC 223/204).
The dialectical conception of knowledge as a process does not only include the possibility that in the course of history we get to know new contents, new objects, that we have not known until now. It also means that new contents can emerge, which can be understood only with the aid of principles of knowledge that are just as newly available. (TD 102f)
This relates to Lukács’ bold claim that “it is true that reality [Wirklichkeit] is the criterion for the correctness [Richtigkeit] of thought. But reality is not, it becomes—and not without the assistance of thought.” (HCC 223/204). So while maintaining that all knowledge is conditioned by the historical development of society and its “metabolic interchange” with nature, he can nonetheless deny dualism and idealism by affirming an ontological discontinuity between nature and society and a corresponding epistemic distinction.
The knowledge [of nature] achieved at any one time is relative only in as far as it can be modified, indeed can be proven false, through a higher development of the economic structure of society (and a corresponding expansion, greater intensity, etc., of the exchange of matter between society and nature). However – in as far as it pertains to the objective reality of social being and the nature mediated through this – it is objective truth, absolute truth, which only changes its position, its theoretical explanation, etc., because of the knowledge that “overcomes” it, and which is more comprehensive and more correct. (TD 105)
In sum, Lukács did not reject the idea that nature is dialectical. But given the active involvement of human subjectivity in the historical development of society, that is, the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, he did want to insist that nature was not dialectical in the same way as human history, and that as a consequence, differentiated methodological approaches were required.
Now, it may seem that there is nothing particularly remarkable about these ideas. In a certain sense, this appearance is true, inasmuch as Lukács took himself (and we can take him in this way too) as aiming to recover methodological ideas that were already tacit or operative in Marx’s own work, but which were in need of explicit reaffirmation and clarification in the face of the sort of objectively deterministic revisionism that, in his view, regrettably held sway within Marxist theory at the time. And indeed, it can be difficult to appreciate fully the sense and force of Lukács’ claims outside of the theoretical and political context in which he made them, and without regard to their underlying rationale, which was (Zinoviev et al. notwithstanding) in effect to provide a theoretical understanding and philosophical justification for the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia—that is, reconcile Marx and Lenin philosophically. For the Revolution of October 1917 was, as Antonio Gramsci had put it at the time, “a revolution against Capital” (Grasmci 1990, 34–7), in that it defied those who prognosticated on the basis of the objective laws of historical development as found, at least supposedly, in Marx’s mature works (recall that the philosophical works of the young Marx had not yet been published). In order to integrate the Russian experience into a Marxist understanding of history, then, it was necessary to thematize the subjective (in addition to the objective) conditions of revolutionary change, and to this end, to conceptualize and articulate the irreducibly active and efficacious role that human consciousness—and, in particular, proletarian class consciousness as consciousness of the historical totality—can play in the historical process. This focus on the subjective conditions of revolution was in no way meant to accord them priority over the objective conditions, the primacy of which Lukács repeatedly affirmed in line with the materialism of classical Marxism. But whereas the latter tended to underrate consciousness by construing it in epiphenomenal terms, Lukács insisted on construing consciousness as involving an irreducible materiality of its own that can be decisive in certain objective historical circumstances.
The foregoing remarks convey the fundamental sense of what Lukács undertook in History and Class Consciousness, and it is a view that shares important philosophical affinities with Merleau-Ponty. Consider the notion of totality. Jay’s broad claims that “Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, indeed his entire outlook on the world, was deeply holistic from the beginning” (1984, 361), and more specifically, that “the concept of totality was at the center of his concerns” in the postwar period (1984, 367), are certainly accurate. As discussed above, the Gestalt-theoretic account of nature that Merleau-Ponty developed in The Structure of Behavior is consistent with a materialist approach that reserves a relative autonomy for consciousness, and which emphasizes the interaction of subject and object and the role of this interaction in creating new conditions of existence. All of this is shared with Lukács—indeed, Merleau-Ponty tended to blur any conceptual distinction between “structure” and “totality” (SNS 223/126)—and what is undertaken in Phenomenology of Perception is positioned within this framework.2 (Recall that Fink had shown totality to be the key methodological issue facing phenomenology.) In this way, then, Merleau-Ponty was very much on the same page as Lukács in terms of trying to update Marxism with “a new conception of consciousness” that would be appropriate to this dialectical-holistic perspective (SNS 143/82).3
Given this perspective, however, along with his phenomenological tendencies and with the benefit of hindsight with regard to Lukács, Merleau-Ponty examined this problem more closely. For in claiming that “it is in lived perception that the dialectical synthesis of the subject and object takes place” (Low 1987, 174, italics added), he approached consciousness—and a fortiori proletarian class consciousness—as a matter of perceptual consciousness in its distinction from and relation to intellectual or reflective consciousness. This can be seen as the main way in which he tried to update and redeem the Lukácsian framework. More on that shortly.
Concerning that framework, though, what is most important is that Merleau-Ponty posited a methodological distinction between history and nature that followed Lukács’ account. For he agreed with Lukács that, pace Engels, it would be idealistic to claim a direct connection between the dialecticity of the human historical world and any sort of dialectics in nature, maintaining to the contrary that inasmuch as “nature is nature, that is, exterior to us and to itself, then we can find in it neither the relations nor the quality that are necessary to sustain a dialectic” (SNS 224/126). In this way, he concurred with Lukács’ dismissal of nature as not amenable to philosophical analysis except as socially mediated. “If [nature] is dialectical, then it is a matter of that nature that is perceived by man and which is inseparable from the human action that Marx talks about in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology. ‘This activity, this perceptible and continuous action and work, this production are . . . the foundation of the entire perceptible world such as it currently exists’” (SNS 224/126, citing L’idéologie allemande, in Marx 1927–37, vol. 6 [1937], 163). In effect, this is the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Marxism is “a philosophy of history” (SNS 130/231, italics added; cf. HT 165/153)—that is, it is a philosophy of the historically unfolding human world in its dialectical distinction from nature as such.4
Light can be cast on this by considering Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a “logic of history,” by which he meant the following: (a) that history is an integral whole, “a single drama” in which all events, however contingent, have a human significance; and (b) that the phases of this drama do not follow an arbitrary order, “but move toward a completion and conclusion” (SNS 212/121; cf. NI 15 [3]). In other words, that history is intelligible and has a direction—that “there is in the instant and in their succession a totality moving toward a privileged state which gives the meaning of the whole” (HT 166/153). Combined with the idea that the “privileged state” in question represents a genuine “reconciliation of man with man” in fully universal terms (HT 139/129f), this is, for Merleau-Ponty, the essential content of Marxism.
This conception of history corresponds to the need on the part of phenomenology to be able to come to terms with the outermost horizons of intentional experience. As discussed in the Preface, the most important methodological problem facing phenomenology stems from the fact that if all intentional experience is horizonal, in that objects of experience are necessarily conditioned by the backgrounds against which they appear, then the claims of phenomenology to achieve critical philosophical insight are fundamentally jeopardized by the possibility of a vicious regress. Fink, as we saw, offered a bold solution in the form of a “meontic philosophy of absolute spirit.” Although this approach would redeem the philosophical pretensions of phenomenology in the strongest sense, it deviates sharply from some of the project’s guiding ideas, and in these respects, it also tends to be highly dubious from an existential point of view. Merleau-Ponty’s solution was rather different. The idea here was to show that the domain of phenomenology coincided with the human historical world as a well-defined totality, but also therefore to show that the horizons of this totality could be experienced as such—that there could in fact be certain experiences—specifically, self-experiences—characterized by an indistinction between object and its external horizons. For such an absolute experience of the concrete totality of history as such would be a necessary condition of the philosophical viability of an essentially incomplete (because situated) phenomenological reduction.
But how would this experience be possible? How could “totality” be anything more than empty rhetorical or polemical gesture? How would it be able to do real philosophical work? As Karl Jaspers asked in a critique of the notion of totality and the use to which it was put, especially by Marxists like Lukács: “In general, is man capable of grasping, knowing, wanting, or planning the whole? Is totality an object of thought and a goal of action for man? In my view, this is impossible” (EE 250). According to Jaspers, although this view was and is widely held, this impossibility would stem from the fact that, living in the world, we can only relate to “partial elements and aspects” which, as discussed above, are always conditioned by certain horizons. And Jaspers insisted that these horizons always retreat when approached, that there is always a more encompassing horizon. In principle, then, “no totality can ever be achieved” (EE 251)—“one never knows the whole because one is [always] in the whole” (EE 199).
This may certainly be true at the level of reflective or intellectual consciousness—Merleau-Ponty would agree that we do not have this kind of relation to totality. There is some ambiguity, however, as to Lukács’ view of the matter. On the one hand, a key theoretical construct in History and Class Consciousness was the idea of “imputed” [zugerechnet] class consciousness, which applied primarily to Lukács’ concern with the possibility of the proletariat attaining true knowledge of society as a totality.
Relating consciousness to the whole of society discloses the thoughts, feelings, etc. that people in a determinate life-situation would have, were they completely capable of grasping that situation and the interests arising from it, both in relation to immediate action as well to the construction of society as a whole in accordance with those interests. (HCC 62/50, translation modified)
In other words, Lukács’ notion of “imputed consciousness” is a counterfactual matter of the “thoughts and feelings” that would befit a certain objective situation, and as such it relies heavily on the Weberian idea of “objective possibility.” To be sure, at least typically, there is a significant distance between the class consciousness imputed to the proletariat—which amounts to “a correct knowledge of the historical process”—and the actual or empirical consciousness of any individual proletarian. But given the unique social position of the proletariat, bridging this gap is a real possibility. “By ‘imputed’ class consciousness,” Lukács wrote, “I mean the consciousness that corresponds to the objective economic position of the proletariat at any one time, and that can be attained by the proletariat” (TD 66).
Lukács thus affirmed that while the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat may have “no psychological reality” [keine psychologische Wirklichkeit] (HC, 88, cf. 86/75, cf. 73), it is no mere fiction. It takes some concrete form prior to its explicit realization. Thus, on the other hand, Lukács also approached proletarian class consciousness in terms of its latent or implicit existence, claiming that “the relation to totality does not need to become fully explicit, the full extent of its content does not need to be consciously integrated into the motives and objects of action. What ultimately matters is the intention towards totality [die Intention auf Totalität]” (HCC 217/198, italics added), or equivalently, what Lukács called the “intention toward what is right” [Intention auf das Richtige] (HCC 84/72), that is in some sense immanent within the life of the proletariat. Owing to the special (but not unique) relation that it has to the social standpoint of the proletariat, the category of totality operates and has effects prior to contributing to any specific cognitive achievements, and Lukács claimed that it does so by ensuring that even actions that seem to concern only particular objects nevertheless derive their objective sense from a practical, transformative intention with regard to society as a historical totality (HCC 192/175). The “intention towards totality” is thus in effect also the “intention towards the realization of the dialectical tendencies of [historical] development” [Intention auf die Verwirklichung der dialektischen Tendenzen der Entwicklung] (HCC 196/179). In short, in the case of the proletariat, the “intention towards totality” is involved in the overcoming of immediacy “regardless of whether it is already conscious or remains initially unconscious” (HCC 190/174), and proletarian class consciousness can be understood as “the sense [Sinn] . . . of the historical situation [Lage] of the class” (HCC 86/73, italics altered).
How this “sense” becomes conscious is, of course, the key question. But it is not answered simply by positing imputed class consciousness in an unconscious form—for example, in terms of the feelings and tendencies of “correct instincts” [richtige Instinkten] (HCC 88/75). This just repackages the problem as to how the proletariat as a class existing in-itself becomes a class existing for-itself. Although in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács had much to say about this problem in terms of political organization, the philosophical basis of the advent of the self-consciousness with which he was concerned remained unclear.
While in general terms Merleau-Ponty followed Lukács’ conception of totality, the main innovation that he introduced was to reconceive the latent intentionalities posited by Lukács—in particular, the “intention toward totality”—in prereflective terms. This is, at least to some extent, implicit in Lukács. But it is not worked out. Merleau-Ponty’s contribution was thus to rethink explicitly the relationship between consciousness and the historical totality that was implied in Lukács’ account on the basis of perceptual consciousness. Rather than simply claim with Lukács that “Marxist thought only raises to a higher level of thought the totality that we are forced to live with in daily life, whether we like it or not, and whether we are aware of it or not” (EE 252), Merleau-Ponty sought to show that history as a totality is something of which we are (or at least can be) aware at the prereflective level of lived perception—in other words, that historical totality is a lived percept. As he put it to Jaspers by way of defending the Lukácsian conception of totality against the worries alluded to above:
a certain postulate of the rationality of history is something that we cannot avoid, for it belongs to [se confond avec] the necessities of our life. Anyone, from the moment he takes a political position, has a certain conception of the whole of historical life, and even if he does not formulate it in words, he nonetheless expresses it in action. (EE 253)
In other words, humans, at least in certain historical conjunctures, have an operative-intentional relation to the totality of history as the outermost horizons of experience. This is the “perception of history” (HT 105/98), or of its logic, that Merleau-Ponty saw as lying at the core of Marxism. I shall have more to say about this later. For now, we just need to note that this perception—which lies at the basis of the “operative knowledge” [connaissance opérante] of which Marxism supplies the “general formula” [la formule générale] (HT 100/94)—is primordial in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in that all other perceptual experience is situated horizonally within it and has its epistemic status conditioned accordingly.
For this reason, Merleau-Ponty saw this “perception of history” as the basis for phenomenological truth. For it is the rationality and sense [sens] at the level of history as a whole that underwrites the rationality and sense that may be perceived at any subordinate level. As he put it, “where history has no structure and no dominant trends it is no longer possible to say anything, since there are no periods nor lasting constellations, and a thesis is only valid for a moment” (HT 156/144f). Whereas on the contrary, “the simple fact that someone perceives an historical situation as invested with a meaning that he believes to be true introduces a phenomenon of truth” (HT 102/95f)—that is, a presumptive rationality emerges in the course of historical development that “testifies to our rootedness in the truth” (HT 103/96). And this presumption is inescapable. Echoing the comments he made to Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty claimed that “the contingency of history is only a shadow at the margins of a view of the future from which we can no more abstain than we can from breathing” (HT 102/96). Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, the very experience of historical contingency is itself sufficient evidence of the historical logic outlined above, that is, of a “common history.” In other words, the consciousness of historical contingency invalidates itself (cf. HT 206/188)—“we are condemned, whether we like it or not, to the philosophy of history” (SNS 297/167f).
It is thus the case for Merleau-Ponty that human être-au-monde is indistinguishable from “being-in-the-truth” [« être-à-la-vérité »] (PhP 452)—that is, that “we are in the truth” (PhP xi), that “we are true through and through” (PhP 520)—just in virtue of what we might call his existential-communist philosophy of history. But the latter is also a necessary condition. As Merleau-Ponty put it in a well-known passage:
Marxism is not just any hypothesis that might be replaced tomorrow by some other. It is the simple statement of those conditions without which there would be neither any humanism, in the sense of a mutual relation between men, nor any rationality in history. In this sense Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. (HT 165/153)
The sense of this rather audacious claim is that “any philosophy of history will postulate something like what is called historical materialism,” inasmuch as any philosophical position that takes history seriously as the locus of human existence could not fail to see it as a Gestalt totality that maintains the identity of subjective and objective factors, while still remaining oriented to truth in a universal sense.
Embodiment and repression
Although Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to perception may correct for the problem of consciousness with regard to the Lukácsian notion of totality, there is another issue that must be addressed: if, following Lukács, Merleau-Ponty sees history as a totality to which nature as such is inassimilable, then what is to be said about human embodiment? The problem is not that the notion of concrete totality must be all-inclusive—Merleau-Ponty is in effect dealing with the human order in its dialectical distinction from the vital and physical orders as outlined in The Structure of Behavior. But if human beings are natural creatures as well as historical beings, then any sort of methodological duality would, so to speak, slice right through us.
It is because he claims that in lived perception, we experience history as such as a unity, and because he takes the fact of our naturalness to rule out methodological duality, that Merleau-Ponty affirms that “the organism and its monotonous dialectics are . . . not extraneous to history as though inassimilable to it” (PhP 104). The significance of this claim lies initially in the fact that, as we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty, nature in general is extraneous and inassimilable to history. But there is something exceptional in the case of human embodiment understood in natural organismic—or biological or physiological—terms. Merleau-Ponty’s accounting for this is based upon his notion of the habitual body in contradistinction to the “actual” body. Recall that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is an “inner necessity” for human existence “to provide itself with a habitual body” (PhP 103). For owing precisely to its impersonal (or prepersonal) character, the habitual body is an essential dimension of the historicity that enables a human being to transcend the immediate actuality of her environing world. It is only in virtue of having an impersonal corporeal anchorage that one can develop a genuinely personal existence in the world. A key point, however, is that this anchorage, and hence the historical assimilability of the organism, is achieved through the repression of the “actual” body. Repression [refoulement], which translates Freud’s term Verdrängung, is thus a key concept in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the habitual body. But there are some ambiguities that need to be sorted out.
To begin with, the main idea concerning Merleau-Ponty’s view of repression in this context has to do, as just mentioned, with the repression, from the side of personal existence, of the “actual” body. In this sense, the “actual” body has a kind of “first-person existence”—a kind of corporeal Jemeinigkeit—and what transpires in its repression is its impersonalization, something that could be described equally as its deactualization. But this seems to represent the intertwining of two different processes that may be disentangled analytically.
First, it seems that in Merleau-Ponty’s view, the habitual body effectively subsumes or incorporates within itself the “actual” body itself qua biological organism. The latter does have a certain independent being—it has, as we know, its own dialectic. But in the course of a human life in this or that historical context, the organism and its dialectical tendencies are sublimated and transfigured to such an extent that they typically comprise a virtually indistinct aspect of the habitual body as the impersonal dimension of human existence or être-au-monde—we might just call this the “habituated organism.” The key idea behind this view was expressed most boldly in Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “man is an historical idea, not a natural species” (PhP 199).
This sublimation of the organism and its vital dialectic could be seen as a matter of what Merleau-Ponty—citing the work of Schilder (1923), as well as of Menninger-Lerchenthal (1934) and Lhermitte (1939)—referred to at one point as “organic repression” [« refoulement organique »] (PhP 92). The general thought behind this (originally Freudian) notion is that in addition to psychological mechanisms of repression pertaining to the level of representation, there also exist biological mechanisms pertaining to the level of bodily affect. Something along these lines is key to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the specific pathologies that characterize cases of phantom limb syndrome and anosognosia. But still, Merleau-Ponty did not seem to place too much stock in this distinction between different modalities of repression. Repression is, he claimed, “a universal phenomenon,” and “all repression is the passage from first-person existence to a sort of pedantic abstraction [scolastique] of this existence”—in this way, he described it as “the advent of the impersonal” (PhP 99, italics added).
Rather than in terms of “organic repression,” then, we can get a better handle on the sublimation of the organism in terms of this idea of “the advent of the impersonal.” What is supposed to occur in this sublimation is the absorption or transposition of the vital dialectical tendencies and exigencies of the biological organism as such into the historically specific operative intentionalities and affects of the subject “engaged in a certain physical and interhuman world” (PhP 97). There is a “natural movement” that becomes an interwoven part of the impersonal worldly inherence of individuals. If we construe biological embodiment in “first-person” terms of some kind, then it is in this sense that its sublimation can be seen as part of “the advent of the impersonal.” Here it is important to keep in mind that “the impersonal” does not denote a general negation of “the personal,” but rather a specific kind of anonymity that is the presupposed counterpart to “the personal” in the context of être-au-monde.
Second, the habitual body is also—and perhaps principally—the product of the repression of actual embodied experience. Although still perhaps within the ambit of “organic repression,” this aspect tracks more closely the more common understanding of repression as a psychopathological condition, according to which, in Merleau-Ponty’s gloss, “the subject commits to a certain path . . ., encounters on this path a barrier and, having the strength neither to surmount the obstacle nor to abandon the undertaking, he remains trapped in this attempt and endlessly uses his strength repeating it in his mind” (PhP 98). What is to be especially noted about this view of repression is that it is concerned directly with temporality and historicity: “the subject always remains open to the same impossible future, if not in his explicit thoughts, then at least in his actual [effectif] being. One present among all presents thus acquires an exceptional value, displacing the others and divesting them of their value as authentic presents. . . . Impersonal time continues to flow, but personal time is knotted up [noué]” (PhP 98).5
Viewed as “the advent of the impersonal” from this angle, the habitual body is the repository of the general form or structure of past experience. It is primarily in this way that, as a universal phenomenon, repression “clarifies our condition as incarnate beings by connecting it to the temporal structure of être au monde” (PhP 99). As noted above, though, an impersonal habitual body is an essential aspect of human existence. Thus, even if it is in some sense always a “pedantic abstraction,” the repression involved in the formation of the habitual body is not necessarily pathological at all. On the contrary, it is, at least to a certain degree, a positively healthy mechanism that is indispensable for human self-realization—historicity requires repression. It becomes pathological only when it goes too far and becomes existentially preponderant, when the balance is skewed in the sense that what should provide anchorage for personal existence actually smothers it and arrests its development.
As a product of this dual form of repression—the sedimentation of the general form of experience, infused with and animated by sublimated biological tendencies, the habituated organism—which, in the discussion in question, Merleau-Ponty often refers to as “the physiological” or even simply as “the organism”—has an intentional orientation just as the personal or “psychical” dimension of existence does. This orientation is typically not the same at the two levels, and in terms of intentionality, the former has a prereflective character while the latter is reflective. Each thus has its own history or temporal rhythm that, in typical cases, does not overlap entirely with the other—Merleau-Ponty describes that of the habituated organism as “banal and cyclical,” that is, “monotonous,” while that of the psychical “may be open and singular” (PhP 103). But what is important is that the banality of the habituated organism is a source of meaning in history. Indeed, it is a very important source of historical meaning. For this is the concrete locus of historical apriority. It is in virtue of literally embodying certain generic or stereotypical dispositions that “the subject of history does not create his role completely,” but rather tends to act in certain predelineated ways (PhP 103). And in a characteristic move, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion, which had been concerned with cases of phantom limb syndrome and anosognosia, makes sudden reference to Louis XVI and Nicholas II as subjects of history constrained a priori by the roles they embodied—strictly speaking, they are “repressed” in essentially the same way, in that their behavior likewise stemmed from their habituated organism understood as an “inborn complex” [complexe inné]. In this light, Merleau-Ponty affirms that “history is neither a perpetual novelty nor a perpetual repetition, but a single [unique] movement which creates stable forms and breaks them” (PhP 104). This is an elaboration of the fundamental perception of history, on account of which, as noted above, Merleau-Ponty is able to include the organism in history—as he put it immediately following this last point, “the organism and its monotonous dialectics are therefore not extraneous to history as though inassimilable to it” (PhP 104, italics added).
It is thus the univocal logic that Merleau-Ponty claimed is characteristic of human history perceived as a meaningful dialectical totality, in connection with the claim that the organismic and personal dimensions of human existence do not generate two distinct histories, that enables him to include the organism within the historical totality, and specifically as pertaining to the dimension of its apriority.
Two further consequences follow from this. First, it follows that human existence at the individual level, which unfolds within the Gestalt totality of history, is likewise to be considered an existential totality and to be approached holistically. As indicated earlier, the existential unity of human être-au-monde cannot be affirmed legitimately at the level of individual existence itself, and Merleau-Ponty’s justification for it turns on the transcendental necessity of unity at a higher level. Analogously to how one first comes to see one’s environing world as such from the higher standpoint of the world, individual human embodied existence can be glimpsed as a totality only from the perspective of the larger encompassing totality of human history. Second, it is on this basis alone that Merleau-Ponty could affirm the otherwise unprovable claim (noted earlier) 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 in physiological dispositions” (PhP 104). That is, it is only as a deduction from his transcendental claim that human être-au-monde is an existential totality—which itself is a deduction from his transcendental claims about history—that he can posit a quasi-isomorphism of this sort—the most important aspect of which is the implication that every bodily movement or gesture bears some connection to higher-order intentionalities, that any such movement or gesture has historical significance because it is enacted inescapably on the basis of the currently operative a priori structures of history.
■
The main consequence of the transcendental claims in question here is that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to embodiment must be situated within both the methodological as well as the normative horizons of the historical totality as he perceived it. Before bringing this to bear upon the discussion of Saint Exupéry, it may be helpful to emphasize clearly that, contrary to standard interpretations, Merleau-Ponty’s approach to and account of history is not based upon an attempt, as Taylor Carman (for one) recently expressed it, “to extend some of the basic insights of his phenomenology [of perception] into the political sphere” (Carman 2008, 24; cf. Roland Caillois 1947; Miller 1979, 207f; Whiteside 1988, 155). Merleau-Ponty would fully agree that there is no legitimate Gestalt-theoretic basis for any such analogical move from body to world. But he would vigorously disagree with the claim that this is because “[t]here is no totalizing perspective for an entire society as there is for a single perceptual subject” (Carman 2008, 163). On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty, it is only at the level of the historical world that we can begin with totality—and indeed, as he put it to Jaspers, this “belongs to the necessities of our life.” It thus follows that the order of logical priority is precisely the reverse from what is typically assumed. That is, methodologically speaking, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology begins with a holistic view of the world in its historical becoming—what he once called “the Idea in the Hegelian sense” (PhP xiii)—which is then extended down to the level of perceptual experience. As noted, it is only because he is already working on the basis of the perceptual givenness of history as a totality that Merleau-Ponty can approach the phenomena of our embodied existence in holistic terms. This is a transcendental claim that derives from the deeper intuition regarding history. Absent the encompassing unity of its external historical horizon, there is simply no legitimate phenomenological justification for adopting a totalizing perspective on the perceptual subject. This is particularly crucial with regard to all the results that Merleau-Ponty draws from considerations of pathological phenomena—in particular, his important discussions of the case of “patient Schn.” would have no definite philosophical import whatsoever without his philosophy of history. Approaching être-au-monde holistically may, of course, ultimately prove to be phenomenologically valid. But such validity would derive its epistemic status from the place of the phenomena within the horizons of the historical world as an open-ended process of becoming. It is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, including his approach to embodiment, cannot be properly understood in abstraction from his philosophy of history and the normative commitments underpinning it.
Earlier references to Saint Exupéry (Part 2)
Such is the context for Merleau-Ponty’s initial references to Saint Exupéry. How does the foregoing discussion bear upon them?
Let us first recall the passage in question, which reads as follows, with the footnoted references inserted and italicized:
Just as we speak of a repression [refoulement] in the restricted sense when I maintain through time one of the momentary worlds through which I have passed and which I make into the form of my entire life, – in the same way we can say that my organism, as a pre-personal adherence to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence, plays, beneath the level of my personal life, the role of an inborn complex [complexe inné]. It is not like an inert thing, [for] it too delineates [ébauche] the movement of existence. It can even happen in cases of danger that my human situation effaces [efface] my biological one, that my body enters into action unreservedly [que mon corps se joigne sans réserve à l’action].
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 these moments can be no more than moments,
“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.”
and most of the time personal existence represses the organism without being able to disregard it nor to give itself up, – that is, without being able to reduce the organism to itself nor to reduce itself to the organism.
Merleau-Ponty’s basic claims here seem to run like this: personal existence represses “actual” corporeality and embodied experience, thereby generating the habituated organism as an “inborn complex.” Biological tendencies are sublimated and personal experience is sedimented in an anonymized and generalized form, with the result that human corporeal existence has a dual temporal structure and a corresponding intentional duality—for the organism does have an existential impetus of its own, something that is made visible in those limit cases, like that of Saint Exupéry, when “my body enters into action unreservedly.” For Merleau-Ponty, repression along these lines is normal, but also normally incomplete, such that normal human corporeal existence is characterized by historical movement aimed at achieving an equilibrium at as high a level of integration as possible.
Normal existence would thus be delimited by two different limit cases: at one extreme, the reduction of the habituated organism to personal existence (bodily disregard), and at the other extreme, the reduction of personal existence to the habituated organism (self-renunciation). One of these limit cases is illustrated in the reference to Saint Exupéry—but which is it?
On the one hand, the idea of “effacing” my “biological situation” might suggest that what is involved is primarily a matter of bodily disregard—or more specifically, a matter of the complete instrumentalization of my body for the purposes of an action determined by my personal existence. In other words, it might seem that the illustration from Saint Exupéry is meant to describe how, in extreme situations of mortal danger, I can use my body in the service of my personal existential choices in ways that are both radically inhabitual as well as contrary to the vital tendencies of the organism as such. This would imply that what is going on with Saint Exupéry, at least in Merleau-Ponty’s view, is a temporary moment of the complete repression—or perhaps more accurately, the complete suppression [Unterdrückung] (cf. Ayouch 2008, 341)—of the habituated organism. This would be a moment of complete bodily disregard that would correspond to a moment of the complete (and likewise temporary) un-repression of personal existence—an exceptional moment in which individual spontaneity triumphs over the exigencies of biology and the inauthenticity of habitual anonymity.
Although it may be initially tempting to adopt such a view, it is, I believe, mistaken. For on the other hand, and quite to the contrary, it would be much more plausible to claim that Merleau-Ponty’s point was to illustrate the complete—though again, temporary—repression of “actual” corporeality as a way of bringing the habituated organism to phenomenological givenness and thereby showing that it has its own existential dynamic. For as he said, it is not inert, as “it too delineates the movement of existence”—and my “body entering into action unreservedly” was clearly meant to illustrate this. The action in question thus stems from the habituated organism—that is, the body that “enters into action unreservedly” is the habituated organism. The “effacement of my biological situation” thus refers to the complete repression of my “actual” body. It is, after all, to my “human” situation, not my “personal” one, that Merleau-Ponty attributes this “effacement”—and surely, he did not mean to imply that biological exigencies could be wholly suspended, even temporarily. It is in complete repression that one coincides with one’s embodiment in the way Merleau-Ponty describes of Saint Exupéry—and the embodiment with which one coincides is the habituated organism. Contrary to the first view, the emphasis is clearly meant to be on the autonomous activity, not the passive instrumentalization, of the habituated organism. Entirely consistent with Saint Exupéry’s view of the matter, it would seem that for Merleau-Ponty, existential abandon (the term is felicitous) in the face of mortal danger is a personally selfless act—or we should perhaps say that mortal danger exists only in the perception of an individual, while existential abandon in the face of it stems from the “anonymous and general” level of existence. It is a matter, to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, of the dialectics of the habituated organism “demanding their own due” and directing the agency of my—or rather, this—body accordingly. And if so, then this would imply that the illustration from Saint Exupéry is primarily a matter of complete personal self-renunciation, the momentary reduction of “actual” corporeality and first-personal existence to the habituated organism—a moment of consummate repression whereby one comes to coincide temporarily with one’s “inborn complex.”
The second citation from Saint Exupéry might seem to offer better support for the view that I am rejecting, since it seems to imply that what characterizes the exceptional moment is the absence of the sort of bodily issues that typically predominate, suggesting that it is outside of those moments that the body exists in its own right, rather than, as I have claimed, that it is precisely in such moments that the body, as the habituated organism, manifests itself most clearly on its own terms.
Yet this contrasting view clearly equivocates with regard to the body in its “actual” and habitual dimensions. More importantly, such a reading of the second citation does not fit particularly well with Merleau-Ponty’s main point, namely, that the “actual” body is normally (albeit incompletely) repressed. The exceptional moment that he described with the help of Saint Exupéry is supposed to illuminate this repression by showing what it leads to, namely, the anonymous habituated organism and its selfless tendency toward universal life. That, for Merleau-Ponty, is the organism on its own terms, not what the contrary reading of the second citation would suggest, to wit, that the organism per se is to be discerned in a bunch of bodily “problems”—it is highly implausible that that would be Merleau-Ponty’s view here. That may well describe the typical experience of the organism, but that is because it situates it within human existence as a whole, which is to say, it situates the organism in its tension-filled relation with personal existence—that alone is the context in which the organism can be construed as raising problems, but that is clearly not where it exists on its own terms. In other words, although the second citation from Saint Exupéry might seem to describe the organism when it has returned to itself, at least for Merleau-Ponty in the discussion in question, it actually describes the organism in its typical state of significant but not total repression, as in his claim that “most of the time personal existence represses the organism without being able to disregard it,” that is, it still raises problems vis-à-vis personal existence. But when it is wholly and problemlessly engaged in action, that can only be because all contrary personal or individual motives have been repressed.
In sum, although Merleau-Ponty’s discussion contains numerous terminological ambiguities that will prevent any reading of it from being absolutely watertight, the soundest analysis of it shows that Merleau-Ponty meant for the references to Saint Exupéry to disclose the operative intentionality of the habituated organism on its own terms by glimpsing its activity in a moment of the total repression of “actual” corporeality and embodied experience. To be sure, in existential terms, this complete repression or de-actualization is abnormal, even pathological. But there is nothing at all unusual in Merleau-Ponty using pathological cases to arrive at phenomenological insights. It is just that the fact that this case is pathological, and is being dealt with as such, is not as obvious as it may be in other cases.
Consequences
What does all of this mean, then, given that the episode in question—Saint Exupéry’s perilous flight over Arras—is the same as that which is invoked at the very end of Phenomenology of Perception? In other words, what is implied by the fact that, for Merleau-Ponty, “heroism” is a pathological matter of complete self-repression?
I shall develop this further in subsequent chapters. But what we have seen in this chapter strongly confirms the earlier claim that, taken literally, the invocation of Exupérian heroism at the end of Phenomenology of Perception represents a moment of radical disincarnation. And it also coheres strongly with Saint Exupéry’s own account as far as rejecting any construal of the action in question in terms of individual agency. Merleau-Ponty is not interested in heroism per se, however, but in the fact that it is phenomenologically disclosive of something of the utmost importance for his view, namely, the latent existence within habituated organismicity, at least in the current historical context, of an operative intentionality toward universal life, and the fact that this intentionality represents the historical apriority governing all action in that context. In other words, with regard to heroism, it is the evidence afforded by actions that are effected in a pathological state of total repression, yet which nonetheless remain generative of historical sense and significance, that enabled Merleau-Ponty to claim that the logic of history forming the core of his understanding of Marxism was more than just some dogmatic partisan assumption.
In particular, this conception of heroism is what enabled Merleau-Ponty to say, in line with classical Marxism, that the historical movement toward a postcapitalist society is already immanent and underway (HT 135f/126), but that as a consequence—and here he deviated from classical Marxism on account of his conceiving the social in corporeal terms—revolutionary change is not to be pursued through historical action aimed at effecting a radical structural break with the present, but rather, through forms of action that are geared toward the concrete realization of the latent universal content of existing structures. In other words, it supports what we might call an “incarnational Marxism,” in the sense that the fundamental structures of universal reconciliation are already embodied collectively and impersonally, and that the revolutionary task is therefore not to impose radically new social structures, but to realize those already tacitly embodied at the level of the habituated organism more fully at the level of “actual” embodied existence. As shall be discussed further in Chapters 4 and 5, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of heroism, especially inasmuch as it involves total repression, was intended as part of an effort to rethink the Marxist category of the proletariat in existential terms. The central idea is that the lack of an existentially “healthy” equilibrium between “actual” and habitual corporeality—and hence the lack of freedom—within individual human existence is effectively identical with the lack of “harmony between the individual [in general] and history,” which Merleau-Ponty regarded as an existential “postulate of human existence” in the sense of being a necessary condition of the realization of humanity.6 Inasmuch as the latter can be viewed in terms of freedom construed socially, it follows that for Merleau-Ponty, there is a mutually implicatory relation between the realization of humanity and freedom at the individual level.
And broadly speaking, it is this political perspective that enabled Merleau-Ponty to complete and thus save phenomenology methodologically, that is, from the speculative construction of Fink. What is needed is a concrete apprehension of the outermost horizons of experience, and Merleau-Ponty supplied this with a prereflective existential interpretation of Lukács’ idea of an “intention toward totality”—which, as he noted in reply to Jaspers, arises “the moment [one] takes a political position” (EE 252, italics added). This is fundamentally why, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology—and a fortiori his phenomenology of embodiment—is “profoundly and intrinsically political” (Coole 2007, 123). It is not from any philosophically arbitrary desire that it be so, any desire to “politicize” philosophy, or from any kind of extraneous connection at all. Rather, it stems from the fact that what phenomenology requires intrinsically to achieve methodological closure can only come from the practical realm of political engagement. This solution is, of course, not unique—different political perspectives on history can be adopted, and these would frame different interpretations of phenomenology. For his part, Merleau-Ponty believed that in existential and normative terms, the most defensible historical perspective was one broadly in line with classical Marxism—and as we have seen, this has significant implications for the methodological structure of his phenomenology, which in turn has ramifications with regard to his basic approach to embodiment. And this is how heroism fits in. By bringing to phenomenological givenness the latent tendency toward universal life in the contemporary world understood as a historical period of generalized repression and unfreedom, heroic action—or rather, the third-person experience of it—forms a connection between embodied inherence in that world and the concomitant possibilities of philosophy and revolutionary politics. I shall explore this in more detail in the next two chapters. What will be important to bear in mind, though, is that in providing indispensable experiential evidence that contributes crucially to justifying this overall perspective, and precisely because it does so, for Merleau-Ponty heroism itself necessarily remains external to the philosophical and political projects in question, in the sense that its involvement occurs indirectly through its dialectical sublimation.