Elements of an Incarnational Marxism
We have seen that, for Merleau-Ponty, the heroic action of Saint Exupéry referred to at the end of Phenomenology of Perception is a matter of total repression of his “actual” body, and that precisely for this reason, it discloses an operative intentionality toward universal life which, residing in the anonymity of the habituated organism, is a structure of historical apriority in the contemporary world. This was a key part of Merleau-Ponty’s response to Fink as it enabled him to obviate the need for what the latter had termed “secondary enworlding,” which was central to his proposal for a “constructive” phenomenology (see Preface). This will be further elaborated in the Conclusion.
To that end, however, we need first to relate the climax of Phenomenology of Perception to Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism in more detail. We have already seen how, in general, Merleau-Ponty’s thought, at least since The Structure of Behavior, was situated within a philosophical framework consistent with Marxism, and that in the postwar period, he specifically tried to take up and redeem Lukács’ account of “orthodox Marxism.” It is ultimately in terms of this redemption that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of heroism needs to be located and understood—this is intertwined with his reinterpretation of phenomenology, but in methodological terms priority goes to the political dimension.
In order to address further the philosophical role and significance of Exupérian heroism in Merleau-Ponty’s project, then, this chapter will explore certain themes in his thought, some of which have tended to receive short shrift in the literature, but all of which turn out to be quite relevant to the question at hand, inasmuch as they have to do with Merleau-Ponty’s elaboration of what I earlier called an “incarnational Marxism,” which provides the basic sense of his attempted redemption of Lukács. I will first consider the themes of sacrifice and death in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and then discuss how Merleau-Ponty understood his existential phenomenology as a project of political hermeneutics. I then consider this with respect to Merleau-Ponty’s effort to rethink the Marxist category of the proletariat qua “universal class,” and the idea of its world-historical revolutionary role, in existential terms. In particular, I examine Merleau-Ponty’s account of the tacit cogito as the basic phenomenon of class consciousness. Finally, I draw these ideas together in terms of what Merleau-Ponty called “human productivity” and the conception of rationality that results from all of this. Although there are, to be sure, many points in this thematic survey that invite deeper analysis, it shall nonetheless emerge clearly that the cumulative import of these considerations pertains to Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to reinterpret Marxism in a way that would be both militant and philosophically coherent. This reinterpretation has to do primarily with the philosophy of history, and it hinges on a certain conception of “heroism” that will be considered in more detail in Chapter 5.
Merleau-Ponty on sacrifice and death
Although the themes of sacrifice and death are not treated at length by Merleau-Ponty, and scarcely at all in the literature devoted to his work, in the context of his appeal to Exupérian heroism, they turn out to be quite significant. For Merleau-Ponty’s views concerning sacrifice are strongly contrary to those stated by Saint Exupéry, and these are connected to an attitude vis-à-vis death that bears directly upon the political dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology.
Sacrifice
There are two texts prior to Phenomenology of Perception that need to be considered with respect to the theme of sacrifice. As we shall see, despite certain important differences, in each case, Merleau-Ponty makes a philosophical argument against the cogency of the notion of sacrifice, and this in a way that gestures toward his later construal of Marxism in incarnational terms.
First, there is Merleau-Ponty’s review of Max Scheler’s Ressentiment [1912], written a decade before Phenomenology of Perception.1 Here, Merleau-Ponty expressed, in Christian terms, a defense of ascetic self-denial that was not altogether dissimilar from Exupérian heroism. Siding with Scheler’s defense of Christianity—at least in its “true” form—against the Nietzschean accusation that its aspiration toward the “Kingdom of God” is based on a resentful “devaluation of the earth,” Merleau-Ponty argued that the sacrifice of “natural movement” is not opposed to life, but rather signifies merely a certain “spontaneous indifference” to its own biological circumstances. Such spontaneity occurs immediately in non-human life: “in its naïve force, the life of plants and animals does not obsess over its vital welfare.” With regard to humanity, then, what Christianity seeks, according to Merleau-Ponty, is to impart “a confidence and a spontaneity” that would be “supernatural” [surnaturelles], and “what [it] proscribes is precisely, and in the strongest sense of the word, a ‘vital debility’ [« débilité vitale »]” (CR 14/88, citing Scheler). Here, rather than as a system of self-preservation, Merleau-Ponty regarded life as a kind of self-overcoming, as “an expansion or a prodigality,” indifference to the particular details of which can indeed have a “vital value” (CR 13/87f).
But this is equivocal—for “the assurance of the Christian is only analogous to the vital confidence of natural beings” (CR 16/89, emphasis added). It is thus not philosophically clear how Christianity can “back both horses” and simultaneously lay evaluative claim to both natural and supernatural life (CR 16/89). Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion was that the separation of these can only be maintained on the problematic basis of unfounded philosophical prejudice—in Nietzsche’s case, “biological monism.” If, however, quoting Scheler, “ ‘a logic of the heart reveals, beyond vital needs, an objective structure of spiritual and religious value, [then] Christianity can no longer be accused of depreciating terrestrial life through the sole fact that it aspires to something else: transcendence can no longer be the sublimation of a vital weakening’ [la sublimation d’un affaiblissement vital]” (CR 23f/93f, emphasis added).
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The second text to consider with regard to the theme of sacrifice is The Structure of Behavior, which, as noted earlier, Merleau-Ponty completed in 1938. Here, he no longer upheld a Christian perspective, and his thinking was disencumbered of certain unwarranted claims—in particular, the existence of “an objective structure of spiritual and religious value” and the metaphysical assurance that that would afford. Merleau-Ponty now linked such assurance with critical philosophy’s misguided dream of achieving complete individual integration—the absolute self-consciousness of the pure subject whose history “is subordinated to its eternity” (SC 222/206), and for whom death would be rendered meaningless (SC 220/204). It is ultimately the impossibility of precisely this consummate individuation that Merleau-Ponty sought to demonstrate in The Structure of Behavior. He maintained instead that genuine lucidity can only come from facing up to our finite historical situation, not by projecting our preferred idealizations onto it. There is no absolute: “the contingency of the lived perpetually threatens the eternal significations in which it is believed to be completely expressed” (SC 240/223). Death therefore has a meaning that is crucial to the meaningfulness of life. Merleau-Ponty thus insisted on the need “to assure oneself that the experience of eternity is not the unconsciousness of death” (SC 240/223). This is no less important than the distinction, which he upheld more firmly than before, between “the love of life” [l’amour de la vie] and biological self-preservation (SC 240/224). In fact, following Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty held that human self-preservation is a “phenomenon of disease,” that it is just a pathologically limited manner of self-actualization (SC 190n1/245n97; cf. Goldstein 1934, 162; 1995, 337). The real essence of human life is to project itself beyond situations—not just biological, but also humanly created ones (SC 189/175). It is fundamentally an orientation to the possible (SC 190/176). “The healthy man proposes to live, to attain certain objects in the world or beyond [au delà] the world, and not to preserve himself.” This is not to set healthiness in opposition to self-preservation. It is merely to assert that the norms of healthiness are existential and thus ultimately independent of biological existence. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty noted, some suicides can be understood as manifesting the primacy of existential over biological norms by showing that “man is capable of situating his proper being, not in biological existence, but at the level of properly human relations” (SC 190 n1/246 n97, emphasis added). It is noteworthy in this regard that Merleau-Ponty drew close links between acts of suicide and acts of revolution: “both presuppose the capacity of rejecting the given milieu and of searching for equilibrium beyond any milieu” (SC 190/175, 245 n97).
Although the conclusion of The Structure of Behavior can be summed up in terms of the pithy methodological desideratum, expressed in the final paragraph, “to define transcendental philosophy anew in such a way as to integrate with it the very phenomenon of the real” (SC 241/224), what this portends is, in certain ways, more clearly revealed in the claim made in the penultimate paragraph to the effect that, given the fulfillment of that desideratum, “the sacrifice of life will be philosophically impossible; it will be a question only of ‘staking’ [« mettre en jeu »] one’s life, which is a deeper way of living” [une manière plus profonde de vivre] (SC 240/224, emphasis added). The philosophical impossibility of sacrifice announced here would not render indefensible the self-denial of which Merleau-Ponty had earlier defended the vital possibility. Nor does it necessarily render revolutionary martyrdom indefensible. It just rules out understanding it as self-sacrifice on the grounds that there is no overarching, authoritative framework within which a sacrificial gesture involving one’s biological being could be meaningfully made. It is the metaphysical impossibility of giving or exchanging one’s life for some future state of affairs. For there is no eternal Absolute that could serve as the guarantor—the clearinghouse, as it were—of any such economy. This by no means rules out the possibility of giving one’s life, nor of holding false beliefs concerning the possibility of doing so sacrificially.2 But it does aim to render philosophically indefensible any attempt to disburden oneself of responsibility for one’s life (and ultimately death), or to misunderstand the life (and/or death) of another, by trying to derive its meaning from the future. Meaning is immanent in the present. If life is, in fact, a matter of venturesome self-actualization in the absence of eternal truths, then recognition of the metaphysical impossibility of sacrificing it should encourage that non-biological “love of life” that can push the bounds of personal, communal, and historical integration. As we shall see, it was along these lines that Merleau-Ponty sought to interpret Saint Exupéry’s glorification of self-sacrifice in immanent (and thus incarnational) terms.
The metaphysical impossibility of sacrifice claimed by Merleau-Ponty in The Structure of Behavior also has a specific philosophical significance, to wit, the methodological claim that transcendental insight concerning the a priori conditions of lived experience cannot be obtained from a standpoint that would be situated outside of or beyond human life, but can only be achieved from within. It must be the case, then, that transcendental philosophy is a function of human existence—this is in effect what Merleau-Ponty meant in saying that it would have to be “integrated with the very phenomenon of the real.” But given the contingency and finitude of “the real,” transcendental philosophy cannot be underwritten by any sort of metaphysical guarantee. Lest it illicitly take for granted what it seeks to achieve, transcendental philosophy cannot avoid hazarding commitment to some normative standpoint concerning the meaningfulness of reality, such that it too, like any act of genuine transcendence, will be a matter of “staking one’s life.”
Merleau-Ponty thereby claimed that, from the perspective of transcendental philosophy, engagement is not simply something commendable or even imperative in a distinct ethical sense, but rather that it is epistemically necessary. This was closely in line with the personalist views of Landsberg:
At the same time as being a necessity of moral life, engagement for a historical cause that incarnates certain values is an indispensable means of knowledge itself. This kind of engagement alone makes a profound knowledge possible, . . . knowledge of the historicity that we live, . . . a genuine comprehension of history that happens solely in the act of solidarizing and identifying with a cause. (Landsberg 1937, 187)
For Landsberg as for Merleau-Ponty, just as engagement calls for a transcendental-philosophical justification, transcendental philosophy implies a stance of engagement. But whereas Landsberg drew a distinction between my experience of historical inherence and the choice or decision I make to align with one “cause” over others, Merleau-Ponty, aiming to work out the standpoint of philosophy and philosophical truth itself, inclined to Marxism in part as a way of providing a more univocal view of history that would integrate what Landsberg held distinct. Always averse to any sort of potentially arbitrary or irrational decisionism, Merleau-Ponty thus deviated from Landsberg’s conception of engagement in that for him, it was not premised on the idea of realizing something in the future (Landsberg 1937, 1980)—an orientation that leaves open the possibility of sacrifice. Rather, working within the limits of immanence as described above, Merleau-Ponty’s basic claim here is that the project of transcendental philosophy itself ultimately just is a kind of engagement.
Death
In “L’existentialisme chez Hegel” (SNS 109–121/63–70), a short but dense discussion that was ostensibly a critical review of a lecture given by Jean Hyppolite on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,3 Merleau-Ponty articulated a view concerning death that is of considerable significance for understanding his existential phenomenology.
In his lecture, Hyppolite had more or less concurred with the Kierkegaardian critique of Hegelianism in general as an abstract systematization of the world that excludes or suppresses existence. With respect to Phenomenology of Spirit, however, Hyppolite claimed that although it did ultimately subordinate individual existence to abstract universality, Hegel had actually dealt therein with real human existence, “the full scope of human experience” (Hyppolite 1971, 94). He described Hegel’s account of the emergence of self-consciousness through the acquisition of an internalized awareness of the negativity of personal death as the irruption of a new modality of distinctly human being—namely, existence. “The taking consciousness of life is thus something other than life pure and simple, and human existence, like the knowledge of life, is a new way of being which we can well call existence” (Hyppolite 1971, 95).
Merleau-Ponty was by and large in agreement with Hyppolite, except in one important respect. Whereas Hyppolite limited the protoexistentialism of Hegel to certain parts of Phenomenology of Spirit, on the grounds that Hegel’s account of “absolute knowledge” ultimately sewed up the dialectical movement of existence in such a way that the meaning of history would subsume that of individual death (thus legitimating sacrifice), Merleau-Ponty sought to separate the whole of Phenomenology of Spirit from Hegel’s later “orthodox” idealism as his contribution to existential philosophy. That is, Merleau-Ponty offered a qualified defense of Hegelian absolute knowledge circa 1807 against the sort of Kierkegaardian critique of its systematization circa 1827—that is, when Hegel had written his Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right—that Hyppolite allowed.
Thus, not unlike Hyppolite, Merleau-Ponty argued that Hegel’s thought is existentialist “in the sense that it views man not as being from the start a consciousness in full possession of its own clear thoughts, but as a life which is given to itself [donnée à elle-même] and which tries to understand itself.” But he adds, “all of Phenomenology of Spirit describes man’s efforts to recover [ressaisir] himself” (SNS 113/65, emphasis added). Merleau-Ponty thus interpreted “absolute knowledge” as “the final stage of the evolution of spirit as phenomenon [l’esprit-phénomène] wherein consciousness at last becomes equal to its spontaneous life and regains its self-possession.” Crucially, he suggested that this was not so much a philosophy as “a way of living [une manière de vivre].” Or, as he also put it, it was a “militant” philosophy (SNS 112/64; cf. 237/134). Concerning the theological trichotomy between “the Church triumphant,” “the Church suffering,” and “the Church militant” (see Chapter 2, note 22), Merleau-Ponty explicitly attributed the first view to the “orthodox” Hegel, and the third to the reading of Hegel that he himself was defending as his own view. It would seem that he implicitly meant to associate Hyppolite’s position—presumably along with many other formulations of existentialism—with some sense of purgatorial suffering.
In contrast to both the undue pessimism of the purgatorial view and the undue optimism of the triumphant view, Merleau-Ponty construed the movement of human existence in “militant” terms as contingently directed toward a “genuine reconciliation between men” (SNS 112/65). He argued that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit offered a richer—because thoroughly intersubjective—view of human existence than that found in it by Hyppolite, and he thought that this was precisely in virtue of the link between absolute knowledge and death that Hyppolite found objectionable. Merleau-Ponty thus defended the “deathliness” of Hegelian absolute knowledge as a key facet of a living understanding of intersubjectivity. In his view, Hegel’s main philosophical achievement as far as existentialism was concerned was to unmask the role played by the consciousness of death in realizing rationality and achieving mutual understanding.
The key point for Merleau-Ponty is that “consciousness of life is, in a radical sense, consciousness of death” (SNS 115/66). That is, the awareness we have of life is ultimately rooted in our awareness of death, which enjoys a certain priority. The gist of the argument that stands behind this claim is that consciousness, as a kind of nothingness [néant] or negation of being, represents a “rupture” with life, where the latter is understood as an anonymous preconscious force that spontaneously expends itself in its action, and which is in itself devoid of self-awareness. And this rupture with life shares some of the essential features of death. This holds even if, in accordance with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre, consciousness is understood nondichotomously as only obtaining in a “hollow” [creux] as opposed to a “hole” [trou] in being.4 “Life is only thinkable as presented to a consciousness of life which denies it” (SNS 116/67).
This rupture cannot be completely like death, though. At least not normally. It is important to recognize that there are two senses of “life” here that Merleau-Ponty does not distinguish explicitly: on the one hand, there is the sense of life as an anonymous, spontaneous force subsisting below the level of consciousness. This sense has universal import, and I shall refer to it as life-as-such. It was with this that Merleau-Ponty was principally concerned—in particular, this is the object of what he calls “the love of life.” On the other hand, there is the sense of life that refers to the particular manifestations of life-as-such—I will refer to these simply as lives. Lives are founded on and thus imply life-as-such, but the converse does not hold: life-as-such does not imply any particular lives.
To construe consciousness-of-life as ultimately rooted in consciousness-of-death is thus to say three things: first, that the proper object of consciousness-of-life is life-as-such; second, that as a universal awareness, this consciousness involves a virtually complete death-like rupture with particular lives, including one’s own; and third, that this rupture is self-conscious, and hence consciousness of something essentially like death, because, following Hegel, the experience of death stands at the very origin of self-consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty thus effectively rendered death and life-as-such epistemically indistinguishable. Although there is a certain truth in the idea that death individualizes, it is evident that Merleau-Ponty was here distancing himself drastically from Heidegger’s notion of Sein-zum-Tod (cf. Landsberg 1936, 41f). For Merleau-Ponty, what alone is thinkable is on the contrary that death communalizes. When we seek to think the totality of our existence in terms of death, as Heidegger, for example, asks us to do, what we are really doing is thinking it in terms of life taken universally. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “my consciousness of myself as death and nothingness is deceitful [menteuse] and contains an affirmation of my being and my life” (SNS 118/68). He turned to Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus et Cinéas for a forthright statement concerning the alternative to Heidegger supposedly offered by French existentialism: “Death does not exist for me while I am alive” (SNS 121/70, citing Beauvoir 1947, 61). For Merleau-Ponty, this is supposed to mean that (normal) human existence is situated within the universality of life-as-such, and that it is consequently directed toward self-realization within historical horizons that transcend the life of the individual.
Such is the view that Merleau-Ponty wanted to defend against the deceitfulness shared by purgatorial and triumphant views of existence. Accordingly, he claimed that there are, broadly speaking, two ways of thinking about death (SNS 116f/67). The first way, which Merleau-Ponty rejected, resentfully sees death as just an incomprehensible and impenetrable end to existence. This view is thus “pathetic and complacent,” and this is because it is deceived. Blind to the vital significance of death, it is blind to the vital significance of its own life. The underlying problem with this way of approaching death is that it is not self-consciously historical.
In contrast, the second way of thinking about death, which Merleau-Ponty accepts, is self-consciously historical. Specifically, it is militant. This means—and here Merleau-Ponty was contrasting himself to other readings of Hegel, notably that of Hyppolite, but Sartre’s as well—that it recognizes both the abstractness of the universality of life, and that this abstractness is the reason for the above deception. “The abstract universal which starts out opposed to life must be made concrete.” This approach—characterized by Merleau-Ponty as “dry and resolute” —thus “takes up [assume] death and turns it into a more acute awareness of life.” It “interiorizes” or “transmutes”—that is, sublimates—death into (particular) lives. In this way, consciousness of death “goes beyond itself.” The negativity of death is deployed in such a way as to promote the concrete realization of the underlying universality of human coexistence, the incarnation of life-as-such.
The point of this is most clearly seen in Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the only experience which brings me close to an authentic awareness of death is the experience of contact with another” (SNS 117/68). Here, Merleau-Ponty offers his interpretation of the struggle of consciousnesses as originally described by Hegel. Contrary to the views of Kojève and Sartre, for example, the idea is that scrutiny of the encounter and the ensuing conflict reveals that there must be an underlying common ground. “We cannot be aware of the conflict unless we are aware of our reciprocal relationship and our common humanity. We do not deny each other except by mutual recognition of our consciousness” (SNS 118/68; cf. PhP 408). The experience of objectification, of the death-like stripping away of all particularity, lays bare that “my consciousness of an other as an enemy comprises an affirmation of him as an equal,” that is, as an equal participant in life-as-such. Just as I find consciousness-of-life in consciousness-of-death, so too do “I find myself in the other.” Otherness is thinkable only on the basis of this sameness—recognition of which further revivifies my deathly self-awareness. “If I am negation, then by following the implication of this universal negation to its ultimate conclusion, I will see its self-denial and its transformation into coexistence” (SNS 118/68, italics added).
Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, death is integral, not simply to historical life, but to historical progress. At root, this is because history is made through transcendence, the creative capacity of human existence to detach from the repetitiveness of life, to step beyond ourselves, beyond our lives, such as to alter the conditions of life—I shall further discuss this below in terms of “human productivity.” Although necessarily underwritten by life-as-such, transcendence is a matter of the negativity of death, as understood by Merleau-Ponty. Death is a vital part of life-as-such, for it is precisely through it that life-as-such gains self-consciousness. The experience of vulnerability and dependence—whether in the face of death or in the face of the other—decenters my life, dislocates it temporally, drawing me out of myself in a way that elicits productive involvement. The power that is revealed in such an experience is one that “makes us wait with our own being somewhat in abeyance and in this way is a creative power which is not of ourselves but which invites and makes possible our own creative response” (Pax 1982, 198).
Such a temporal dislocation is central to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the interiorization of death by the Hegelian slave [Knecht]. Recall that in the story told by Hegel, what defines a slave is that he chooses life over death. What Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in his interpretation is that the life chosen is life-as-such. The slave “consents to live only for others,” according to Merleau-Ponty, “but it is still he who wants to maintain his life at this price” (SNS 119/68f, emphasis added). The point in putting it this way is to insist that there is—or at least there was in the past—vital meaning and value even in servitude. To be sure, slavish living is unjust. But there is always something that exceeds it, and it is this that accounts for the “love of life” that puts the slave in contact with the “vital foundations” [assises vitales] of humanity, giving the slave “the most exact awareness of the human situation” (SNS 118f/68f). Familiarity with life-as-such is slavery’s hidden strength. This is why it is the slave who makes history and why humanist egalitarianism will ultimately prevail: “it is he who will finally have the only possible mastery—not at the expense of others, but at the expense of nature” (SNS 119/69).
This is another way of expressing the historical process as the negation of the negation of abstract individuality that culminates in universal reconciliation. The lives of history’s slaves attest to the following general point, which is the most important lesson that Merleau-Ponty draws from his reading of Hegel: “Death is the negation of all particular given being, and consciousness of death is synonymous with consciousness of the universal. . . . To be aware of death and to think or reason amount to the same thing, since one thinks only by taking leave of the particularities of life [en quittant les particularités de la vie] and thus by conceiving death” (SNS 115ff/67).
For Merleau-Ponty, this is tied to the realization of philosophy, inasmuch as it is a matter of bringing rationality into being—overcoming, that is, the mutual separation of particular consciousnesses in such a way that “perspectives meet up, perceptions confirm each other, [and] a meaning emerges” (PhP xv). In other words, overcoming what we might call the structural non-sense or even madness of a world of alienation by “taking leave” of its particularities, and instead bringing forth the underlying commonality and making that concrete. To realize philosophy is thus to redeem what Merleau-Ponty called “the promise of humanity” [la promesse d’humanité] through a process that grapples with death. “Learning the truth about death and struggle is the long maturation process by which history overcomes its contradictions and fulfils the promise of humanity—present in the consciousness of death and in the struggle with the other—in the living relationship among men” (SNS 119/69). And this is why, at the end of his discussion of Hegel and death, Merleau-Ponty suggested that existentialism might be most completely defined
by the idea of a universality which men affirm or imply by the mere fact of their being and at the very moment of their opposition to each other, in the idea of a reason immanent in madness [déraison], of a freedom which becomes what it is by giving itself bonds [liens], and to which the least perception, the slightest movement of the heart, the smallest action, bear incontestable witness [sont les témoignages incontestables]. (SNS 121/70)
Key here is that understanding human existence in terms of these paradoxical views of universality, reason, and freedom, and in a way that implies the literal ubiquitousness of corroborating experiential evidence, is possible only in virtue of the idea of a militant intersubjective sublimation of death—as is encountered, for instance, at the very end of Phenomenology of Perception.
Thinking the political
Inasmuch as the foregoing view of death bears upon the realization of authentic intersubjectivity, it has consequences for the sort of engagement of which Merleau-Ponty intended his existential phenomenology to be a part. And as we shall see, it is ultimately in connection with his effort to rethink the Marxist understanding of revolution—against tendencies that would approach it, at least in effect, as some sort of mortal adventure—that the relevance of his view of heroism comes to light.
In “La Guerre a eu lieu,” published in 1945, Merleau-Ponty argued that French philosophy, traditionally practiced from the isolated standpoint of the Cartesian “meditating ego” (a perspective that Merleau-Ponty tended to assimilate as much to Kantianism as to Cartesianism) (cf. SNS 257/145; cf. 180, 298/103, 168; NI 2 [23]), had received from the experience of the war an incontrovertible “wake-up call,” so to speak, such that its principal task now was to come to terms with what had been “unthinkable” [impensable] from the traditional perspective—viz., politics (SNS 255/145). “Politics,” he wrote, “is impossible from the perspective of consciousness” (SNS 256/145). This is because it has no grasp of the objective consequences of actions, nor of the concrete interconnectivity of the human world. As Merleau-Ponty put it, the abstract subjectivism of “this solitary Cartesian” means that “he does not see his shadow behind him projected onto history as onto a wall, that meaning, that shape which his actions assume on the outside, that Objective Spirit which is him” (SNS 257/146).5
The result of this was that in the interwar period, French philosophers (among others) tended to inhabit an idealized political reality, upholding universal humanistic values with an attitude of naïve pacifism. Phenomena that were inconsistent with this universalism—in particular, those based on ascriptions of nationality and “race”—were effectively dismissed as irrational and ultimately illusory. This is why, according to Merleau-Ponty, the real significance and portent of epochal events in the development of European fascism in the 1930s—such as the Anschluß, Guernica, and Kristallnacht—were lost on so many French intellectuals (cf. NI 22 [2], 27 [8], 32 [13]). And this was not a blameless ignorance. “No one’s hands are clean” (SNS 259/147), he thought, because freedom is always ultimately complicit with worldly power.
For Merleau-Ponty, what the defeat of France in 1940 and the war as a whole taught was, above all else, history (SNS 265/150).6 It was primarily in this way that his examen de conscience and its critique of Cartesian rationalism avoided both conclusions of a traditional religious nature, as well as the irrational conclusions to which certain other, superficially similar analyses were led—for example, the reactionary perspective of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle: “France was destroyed by the rationalism to which its spirit had been reduced. Today, rationalism is dead. We can only rejoice in this collapse of rationalism” (1941, 171). For Merleau-Ponty did not reject the old values. The problem did not lie in those as such, but rather in the fact that they were not concrete. The lesson was that “values remain nominal and indeed have no value without an economic and political infrastructure that brings them into existence. . . . It is a question not of giving up our values of 1939, but of realizing them [les accomplir]” (SNS 268/152, emphasis added). To this end, philosophy needed to reorient itself so as to render human coexistence, in all its contingency and complexity, thinkable as a historically dynamic confluence of subjectivity and objectivity, of freedom and necessity. It needed to reorient itself to the living present. That is, it needed to form its ideas “in contact with the present” in order to be able to “accomodate all truths and to take a stand in reality” (SNS 273/154, emphasis added). The solution rested on a certain conception of totality—as discussed above, what was crucial in Merleau-Ponty’s view was to grasp “the total intention” of society, “the Idea in the Hegelian sense” in which “everything signifies everything” (PhP xiii; SNS 268/152). As Merleau-Ponty put it—wrapping up “La Guerre a eu lieu” with a direct statement of the sort of gloss conventionally applied (or rather misapplied) by commentators to Saint Exupéry’s words at the end of Phenomenology of Perception—“there is nothing outside this unique fulguration of existence” (SNS 269/152, italics added).7
It is interesting to note that Merleau-Ponty recognized that the totalistic character of his political outlook had certain superficial affinities with fascist thought.8 This is evident from a short document entitled “La Résistance: la France et le monde de demain, par un philosophe” [“The Resistance: France and the World of Tomorrow, by a philosopher”].9 Following discussions with Sartre and Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Merleau-Ponty drafted this document toward the end of 1941.10 In it, he offered a fairly pessimistic description of the French Resistance at the time as suffering a profound spiritual crisis. Aside from its communist and conservative members, “the majority of patriots have an ideology that is confused, hesitant, purely negative, or else concerned solely with individual morality” (in Sartre 1970, 110), a situation that manifested itself in “a kind of laziness and fatalism” (cited in Michel 1962, 421). In this work, Merleau-Ponty attempted to account for this crisis in philosophical terms. He linked the infirmities of the French to their “analytical spirit,” and contrasted this with the “synthetic thinking” that elsewhere gave rise to totalitarianism, in particular National Socialism. Merleau-Ponty cautiously commended this kind of thinking, “for it alone permits one to give an account of the diversity and the interaction of situations, whether particular or collective” (in Sartre 1970, 110). That is, it enables one to cease treating individuals in isolation, and instead, as organic parts of the whole. Merleau-Ponty thus thought that to be successful, the defeat of fascist totalitarianism would also have to assimilate something of it. Aspects of totalitarian ideology could be used in support of a genuine democracy. To some extent, according to Merleau-Ponty, the war had actually occasioned a spontaneous turn toward a more collectivistic outlook, but this was in deep conflict with the old individualistic ideals. This was the underlying reason for the hesitation: a straightforward communist solution was just as untenable as a simple return to status quo ante. The only solution could be a socialism that takes as its goal to overcome liberalism by concretizing its ideals. This is what Merleau-Ponty recommended as a viable strategy for securing French unity.
Were a government in exile to take stock of the difficult situation in which we are struggling, and to choose for its slogan the realization of concrete freedom through the collectivization of the means of production, it would bring together around itself the majority of the French. It would give to the Resistance a positive faith; a France provided with such a message would regain a politics and a dignity; it would make a new place for itself in the world. (in Sartre 1970, 100f)
Although nuanced in important ways in light of the outcome of the war, this essentially remained Merleau-Ponty’s position circa 1945. The key idea concerns the material conditions of liberal values. It is from this standpoint that he issued his critique of the impassive idealism and apolitical neutrality of prewar thinking. Although it is unclear to what extent he meant it to apply to himself as well, this critique clearly had a special pertinence to the particular social sector to which he himself had belonged, to wit, progressively-minded but largely contemplative intellectuals, especially normaliens. There were exceptions to this, of course: Nizan is a case in point—there is no sense whatsoever in which Communist activists like him were guilty of the leisurely philosophical illusions later censured by Merleau-Ponty.
Nevertheless, they may have been guilty of other theoretical errors, and Merleau-Ponty’s analysis did have something to say about Marxism as well. For at least in its official forms, Marxist theory was at a deeper level surprisingly similar to the detached Cartesianism that it claimed to repudiate in practice. For it, too, ultimately made politics—and the war in particular, which it saw as ultimately only an internecine conflict between capitalist factions—into a matter of mere appearance, in this case, of the class struggle: “what remained real beneath that appearance was the common fate of proletariats of all nations and the profound solidarity of all forms of capitalism through the internal contradictions of the regime” (SNS 261/148). So whereas the naïve Cartesian humanist thought that there were only “men” and thus could not understand anti-Semitism, for example, because there is no such thing as a “Jew,” the Marxist thought that there were only “classes”—“no proletarian in uniform can feel anything but proletarian” (SNS 262/148)—and thus reduced anti-Semitism to a moronic “capitalistic episode,” a social contradiction that was in truth but a node on the path to a classless society. But Merleau-Ponty insisted that historical truth cannot be understood to lie behind the phenomena of events. “There are not two histories, one true and the other empirical; there is only one, in which everything that happens plays a part, if only one knows how to interpret it” (SNS 263/149, emphasis added).
Merleau-Ponty believed that existentialism, understood as a holistic, phenomenological Marxism, offered the hermeneutical framework that progressive
left-wing politics in general required. It was primarily for this reason that Merleau-Ponty was, as Whiteside aptly put it, an “indefatigable proponent” of existentialism in the postwar period (Whiteside 1988, 36, italics added). That is, he actively strove to promote his project as a political-philosophical common ground, especially for Marxism and social Catholicism. In his own work, and in his representations of the work of others,11 Merleau-Ponty aimed to portray his existentialism as an approach uniquely suited to theorize political phenomena adequately, that is, to render them “thinkable” in all their concrete complexity, and to do so in an ideologically (but not normatively) neutral way.
The proletariat question
The themes of sacrifice, death, and politics come together in the problem that lay at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s political thinking, to wit, the status of the proletariat qua universal class of history. Merleau-Ponty wanted to save the latter notion, that is, universal class, from Hegel but also from Marx by approaching it otherwise than by way of the contrast between its being-in-itself and being-for-itself—a dualistic approach that was still present even in Lukács’ work. In particular, his aim was to conceptualize class anew in terms of intercorporeal coexistence, rather than in terms of objective economic structure, in order to be able to approach the political problem of proletarian class consciousness in terms of “the social,” that is, that “dimension of existence . . . with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us prior to any objectification” (PhP 415).
Following Marx, Merleau-Ponty regarded Hegel’s account of history and the liberation it realizes as incomplete, inasmuch as it merely ushered in a higher stage of exploitation, one in which “slaves” are so dehumanized, so de-particularized, as to be effectively reduced to life-as-such. Merleau-Ponty thus took up Marx’s account of the proletariat as the class whose historical task is to do away with servitude once and for all. Although he had some misgivings, Merleau-Ponty recognized as the core of Marxism a theory of the proletariat as the latent existence of universal concrete intersubjectivity. “In the name of the proletariat, Marx describes a situation such that those in it, and they alone, have the full experience of the freedom and universality which Marx considered the defining characteristics of man” (HT 122/113). In other words, “the proletariat as Marx conceived it embodied simultaneously the experience of individuality and universality” (HT 155/144). Proletarians thus embody the truth of the species, and Merleau-Ponty makes this out to be a matter of their lived experience. “The very exercise of life” in their objective situation leads them “to the point of detachment and freedom at which it is possible to be conscious of dependency” (HT 123f/115), that is, the interpersonal dependency to which rational idealism is blind. Hence the “inseparability of objective necessity and the spontaneous movement of the masses” (HT 17/15). As the “moving force” [moteur] of history, workers have “instincts” for it (HT 121/113), such that their collective praxis transforms the world “as a spontaneous development in their own lives” (HT 39/36). For the proletarian, “individuality or self-consciousness and consciousness are absolutely identical” (HT 124/115). In short, the working class is universality incarnate:
the condition of the proletarian is such that he can detach himself from particularities not just in thought and through a process of abstraction, but in reality and through the very movement of his life. He alone is the universality that he thinks, he alone realizes the self-consciousness that philosophers have sketched out in reflection. (HT 124f/116)
All of this is very much in line with Lukács’ understanding of the proletariat as the “subject-object of history.” But whereas Lukács had emphasized more directly the political consequences of this conception, Merleau-Ponty was primarily concerned with using it to show that the philosophical standpoint that he wished to endorse was possible—or rather, that it was “possible” precisely because it was already actual (cf. PhP xv). Although nowadays, few philosophers take the idea of the proletariat very seriously, what is significant, as we shall see, is that this idea is implicated directly at the very heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work (which is taken very seriously).
But given Merleau-Ponty’s view of death, the classical conception of the proletariat did raise a serious problem. For unlike the Hegelian “slave,” who chooses a life of subservience, the revolutionary task of the proletariat is to reject servitude altogether. An honorable idea, to be sure. But this task is, by definition, to be performed from the standpoint of absolute knowledge. And what the task involves is precisely overcoming that standpoint—overcoming, that is, the manière de vivre definitive of the proletariat. This is meant to imply what Lukács called its “self-abolition” [Selbstaufhebung] qua exploited class (HCC 82, 84/70, 71; cf. AD 65/47, where Merleau-Ponty cites HCC 93/80). But since that way of living, thus conceived, includes all living particularity, the revolutionary moment would thus imply, as Merleau-Ponty’s then-close colleague Trân Dúc Tháo later put it, “an ultimate form of sacrifice” (1951, 318; cf. 1949, 321f, 327).
As we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty, this was metaphysically indefensible. He thus thought that the formulations of classical Marxism concerning the proletariat had to be rethought. But this was not because the objective composition of the proletariat—that is, its being-in-itself—had changed since Marx’s time through some degree of bourgeoisification of the working class and proletarianization of the petit bourgeoisie, such that the “intellectual needs” of the “objectively revolutionary class” could no longer be satisfied by Marxism in its orthodox form. Such was Trân’s view (Trân 1946, 173; 1949, 328f). But while there may have been some truth to this, it did not challenge the sacrificial view of revolutionary change. Trân expressed this in the following illuminating way: “if, in accordance with Heidegger’s magnificent line, ‘Dasein [la réalité humaine] chooses its heroes’ [das Dasein wählt sich seinen Helden], its choice is the act of a real [effective] freedom only if it bears precisely upon the destiny prefigured in its objective situation, if its project is not just any project, but the very project of its own dereliction” (Trân 1946, 173, citing SZ 385; cf. Trân 1949, 320).
For Merleau-Ponty, the basic problem with Marxist theory as it stood at the time was that it was fundamentally morbid. This is not because it thematized death, but rather because it did so in the wrong way. Although Merleau-Ponty thought that Marx had correctly denied the possibility of thinking the future (HT 136f; EP 41/50f), this denial was effectively lost on Marxism such as it actually existed. Its overly futural orientation was thus a kind of “triumphant” thinking that invoked an “experience of eternity” that led to a certain “unconsciousness of death” in the present (cf. SC 240/223). Its call for revolution thus worked at cross-purposes, inasmuch as the life of the new humanity for which it militated could not be brought into vital connection with the lives of those who would comprise the collective agency of its realization. There was a profound split between end and means (and hence between theory and practice) in that the communist ideal implied an impossible hiatus from life’s “vital foundations.” The problem for Merleau-Ponty was how to tell the Marxist story of humanity “smashing the given structures of society and acceding through praxis to [what Marx, in the third volume of Capital, called] ‘the reign of freedom’ ” (SNS 226/128), and to do so in terms of living experience, but without invoking any philosophically indefensible sacrificial imperative. In a nutshell, this is the idea of an incarnational Marxism—that the structures of human universality that represent the ideals of communism already exist in latent form, and that revolution is thus not a matter of inventing them, but of realizing them—a process that can be described as “working out the consequences of the Incarnation” through forms of praxis that are ultimately based not upon autonomous decisions and detachment but passive prepersonal inherence and the historical necessity of those structures themselves. As Merleau-Ponty put it, being a Marxist in this way “is indeed to reach the universal, but without ceasing to be what we are” (SNS 265/150).
In line with the thrust of “Western Marxism,” as well as with the Catholic interest in Marx in France in the 1930s, Merleau-Ponty held that the classical formulations of Marxism were due for a theoretical overhaul in the light of twentieth-century conditions. The point of this overhaul would be to express the fact that with respect to the realization of universal proletarian class consciousness, “ideological” issues are no less politically real than economic issues. Merleau-Ponty rejected the idea—and claimed that most Marxists did likewise—of any simplistic materialist construal of consciousness in epiphenomenal terms (SNS 135/78). Marxist analysis is credible only when it does not “suppress the subjective factors of history in favour of objective ones, but rather tie[s] them together” (SNS 263/149). No account of class consciousness as the coming to awareness of an intersubjective situation can do away with individual consciousness, which is to say, Marxism cannot avoid giving an account of the cogito. “Every man, even a Marxist, is obliged to agree with Descartes that if we know some external reality, then it is only on condition of grasping within ourselves this process of knowing, that no in-itself would be accessible to us if it were not at the same time for-us, and that the meaning we find in it ultimately depends on our assent” (SNS 138/79).
Clearly, though, agreement with this claim—which, in any case, may go well beyond what can be legitimately attributed to Descartes—is consistent with divergent interpretations of the cogito. In particular, it is consistent with the rejection of the traditional Cartesian interpretation. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, this interpretation is “false” because it one-sidedly emphasizes the autonomy of consciousness; “it removes itself and shatters our inherence in the world” (SNS 235/133). It sets up the cogito as a merely contemplative escape, and thus remains a conceptual expression of “that phase of history where man’s essence and existence are still separated” (SNS 136/78). What was required is “a new conception of consciousness,” one that would “found both its autonomy and its dependence” (SNS 143/82, emphasis added). To attain this would require surpassing the Cartesian cogito in a way metonymical to the dialectical realization of philosophy as a whole through the destruction of its separateness. “The only way to do away with [the Cartesian cogito] is to realize it, that is, to show that it is eminently contained in interpersonal relations” (SNS 235f/133, emphasis added).
Merleau-Ponty thought that Marxism, in its discovery of “social existence as the most ‘interior’ dimension of our life” (SNS 142f/82), implicitly contained an account of the cogito that satisfied this desideratum, that is, an account of “the process of knowing” that situates it squarely in the context of intersubjective relations. But it had yet to furnish this with a sound theoretical formulation. This is, I would argue, the principal theoretical task that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the cogito (PhP 423–68) in terms of the “tacit cogito,” or the “true [véritable] cogito,” was designed to fulfill. The point was to specify the site of contact between thought and being that would be the conditio sine qua non of human existence and coexistence.
A complete review of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the cogito is unnecessary here, and would take the present analysis far afield. I shall therefore just focus on those aspects that are directly relevant to the purposes of this chapter.
Noting the paradoxical nature of interpersonal relations, that is, the dialectical mixture of autonomy and dependence that they exhibit, Merleau-Ponty expressed their possibility in terms of situated corporeality: they are possible only because Ego and Other are “defined by their situation and are not freed from all inherence.” That is, they are only possible
provided that at the very moment when I experience [éprouve] my existence, even at the extreme limit of reflection, I lack the absolute density which would place me outside time, and that I discover within myself a kind of internal weakness standing in the way of my being totally individualized, which exposes me to the gaze of others as a man among men. (PhP vii, emphasis added)
As Merleau-Ponty pointed out, this is at odds with the traditional understanding of the cogito, which identified egoic existence with self-awareness, thus occluding being-for-others. The “true cogito” is the result of a “radical reflection” that is able to account for being-for-others. It does this by discovering in me “not only my presence to myself, but also the possibility of an ‘outside spectator’ [« spectateur étranger »]” (PhP vii, emphasis added). Radically pursued, reflection attains “an affirmation of myself by myself [une épreuve de moi par moi]” that reveals me in a social and historical situation (PhP 462; cf. vii). “The certitude I have of myself here is a real [véritable] perception: I grasp myself . . . as a particular thought, as a thought engaged with certain objects, as a thought in act [une pensée en acte]” (PrP 61/22). Rather than identifying my existence with my thoughts thereof, radical reflection “recognizes my thought itself as an inalienable fact, and eliminates any kind of idealism in discovering me as ‘being toward the world’ [« être au monde »]” (PhP viii).
By focusing on “the presence of oneself to oneself” (PhP 462) in this way, this approach to the self-experience of the thinking subject follows an alternative path that is supposed to cut between, on the one hand, the wholly constituted private psyche of objectivism, and, on the other hand, subjectivism’s wholly constituting universal thinker. This is the sense in which Merleau-Ponty claimed that “the tacit cogito . . . is anterior to all philosophy” (PhP 462). It is also the case, however, that, paradoxically, “the tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself” (PhP 463). It is a matter of reflection “recapturing itself” and acquiring an “awareness of its own dependence on an unreflective life which is its initial, constant, and final situation” (PhP ix). This unreflective life is life-as-such, and so, in a manner of speaking, the true cogito concerns its self-experience—an experience that comes to “know itself [se connaît],” that is, to gain self-consciousness, only by becoming my thought, a shift that occurs “only in those extreme situations in which it is threatened” (PhP 462).
Given what we have seen of Merleau-Ponty’s view of death and its connection to alterity, it not surprising that the examples he gives of such threatening situations are “the dread of death or of another’s gaze upon me” (PhP 462). Merleau-Ponty argued that there is a fundamental link between “the reflective recapture [reprise] of the unreflective,” that is, the openness of my reflection to life-as-such as the unreflective basis of my existence, and “the tension of my experience towards another” (PhP 413). Both involve the same apparent paradox. In each case, “it is a matter of knowing how I can break outside myself [faire une pointe hors de moi-même] and have a lived experience of the unreflective as such [vivre l’irréfléchi comme tel]” (PhP 413). The underlying idea that serves to resolve the seeming paradoxicality is that because life-as-such is universal, the experience of self-givenness can be achieved—in fact, can only be achieved—within the intersubjective dynamics of social and historical situations.
This is why for Merleau-Ponty, the archetypical instance of the tacit cogito lies in the “tacit commitment” with which one comports oneself un-self-consciously with respect to the sociohistorical background of a given situation, and which can—in the event that that background becomes foregrounded, that is, focal—be transformed into a more explicit and possibly collective self-consciousness. As Merleau-Ponty expressed it: “during periods of calm, nation and class are there as stimuli to which I respond only absent-mindedly or confusedly; they are merely latent. A revolutionary situation, or one of national danger, transforms those preconscious relationships with class and nation, which were merely lived, into the definite taking of a stand.” Just as with Saint Exupéry’s Barcelonan bookkeeper-turned-soldier, “the tacit commitment becomes explicit” (PhP 417, emphasis altered).
It is in this context that Merleau-Ponty presented the clearest phenomenological formulation of the problem that gives the tacit cogito its meaning, to wit, “how the presence to myself (Urpräsenz) which defines me and which conditions every alien presence, is at the same time de-presentation (Entgegenwärtigung) and throws me outside myself” (PhP 417, italics removed). As to the significance of this problem, Merleau-Ponty was clear: “this double sense of the cogito is the basic fact of metaphysics” (SNS 164/93). This is why, as he put it—with clear import for the question concerning the deference to Saint Exupéry at the end of Phenomenology of Perception—“philosophy does not culminate in a return to the self” (PhP vi). And what is crucial is that for Merleau-Ponty, this double sense of the cogito—which Merleau-Ponty related to the “double anonymity” of our être-au-monde—is best captured through a Marxist-inspired approach to historicity.
In general, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the tacit cogito would thus provide the outstanding theoretical grounds for the analysis of “the moment when the subjective and objective conditions of history become interwoven, the mode in which class exists before becoming aware of itself—in short, the status of the social and the phenomenon of coexistence” (SNS 140/81). Specifically, this would enable a viable approach to the intersubjective nature of class consciousness as “a fact-value” [fait-valeur] or “incarnated value” [valeur incarnée] (SNS 140/80), by approaching it in the context of “absolute history”—that milieu wherein “man no longer appears as a product of his environment nor an absolute legislator but [rather] emerges as a product-producer, the locus where necessity can turn into concrete liberty” (SNS 226, 237/128, 134).
In this way, the tacit cogito is the fulcrum of history, and a fortiori of the realization of philosophy. For both philosophy as well as for Marxism, inasmuch as they accept the need to apprehend “the process of knowing,” the upshot is clear: “we must not only adopt a reflective attitude, in an irrefutable cogito, but also reflect on this reflection, understand the natural situation which it is conscious of succeeding and which is therefore part of its definition.” We must “not merely practise philosophy, but also become aware [nous rendre compte] of the transformation which it brings with it in the spectacle of the world and in our existence. Only on this condition can philosophical knowledge cease to be a specialization or a technique [i.e., cease to be ‘separate’] and become absolute knowledge” (PhP 75, emphasis added), that is, “integrated with the very phenomenon of the real.”
Class consciousness
This account of the “tacit cogito” relates directly to the Marxist—and especially Lukácsian—problematic of proletarian class consciousness. Readers of Phenomenology of Perception know that Merleau-Ponty included a somewhat lengthy discussion of this problematic (PhP 505–12) in the middle of the final chapter of the book (PhP 496–520)—the chapter devoted, at least nominally, to freedom.12 But what is the point of this discussion? Is it, for instance, an illustrative reiteration of the conceptual analysis of freedom as situated freedom that is developed in the preceding parts of the chapter as a critique of the Sartrean idea of absolute freedom? After all, the segue with which Merleau-Ponty launched into the discussion of class consciousness stated that “we would arrive at the same result by considering our relations with history” (PhP 505, italics added). One may thus be tempted to regard this discussion as an incidental supplement to the main argument, an example that may be illuminating and perhaps even have some corroborative value, but one the specific content of which is inessential to the philosophical thrust of the work. Indeed, something along these lines is probably the standard wisdom in contemporary philosophical scholarship on Merleau-Ponty (inasmuch as it considers the question at all), which—as discussed earlier—discounts all allusions to Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism in a similar way.
But this view is unsatisfactory. Here, it must be noted that Merleau-Ponty’s statement about reaching “the same result” can easily mislead. For while it is certainly true that the discussion of class consciousness supports the account of situated freedom that Merleau-Ponty had outlined contra Sartre in the initial part of the chapter, it is also the case that this discussion goes well beyond that result. And it is on this basis alone that Merleau-Ponty was able to claim that our être-au-monde is the “concrete bearer” of a “double anonymity,” the fact that our existence unfolds between impersonal poles of generality and idiosyncrasy—which is, as he immediately added, the transcendental condition of there being “situations, a meaning [sens] of history, and a historical truth—three ways of saying the same thing” (PhP 512). Moreover, it is from here that he was able to go on to claim that “I am an intersubjective field” and pose the question: “From this point of view, then, what becomes of the freedom we discussed at the outset?” (PhP, 515, italics added). After a brief critique of the idea of freedom as absolute choice, which does not repeat what had been developed earlier, Merleau-Ponty finally asks: “What then is freedom?” (PhP 517), and takes this up in the final few pages that follow.
A straightforward reading would thus show that the discussion of class consciousness lies at the very heart of the chapter on freedom (corollary to which it could be claimed that, if anything, it is the beginning of the chapter, i.e., the part explicitly focused on Sartre, that is inessential to the chapter as a whole). For it is with regard to class consciousness that the philosophical heavy-lifting, so to speak, in Merleau-Ponty’s argument is accomplished. Again, that this is lost on most readers nowadays can be attributed in large part to the widely-held assumption that, however strong his proclivities may have been, for Merleau-Ponty, Marxism is theoretically secondary to phenomenology. As discussed in the Preface, I believe that this assumption is false, and that on the contrary, Marxism and phenomenology are equally important and essentially interdependent aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, but also that, in certain respects, Marxism has priority. The interdependence of Marxism and phenomenology has primarily to do with method, and it manifests itself at numerous places within Merleau-Ponty’s work. But it is the discussion of class consciousness in Phenomenology of Perception that provides perhaps the most insightful glimpse into the methodological ground of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology.
The methodological significance of freedom
I suggested that the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception is “at least nominally” about freedom. It is about freedom, but this qualification is appropriate because the point of this chapter has not been well understood. (One will search the literature on Merleau-Ponty in vain for a compelling account of the philosophical raison d’être of the “freedom” chapter.) In particular, it is not simply about freedom per se, as if the point were to give a phenomenological account of freedom as just another—even if the most important—in a motley list of topics that Merleau-Ponty wished to address. Nor is it the case, as suggested above, that Merleau-Ponty was principally concerned with the view of freedom that Sartre had presented in Being and Nothingness, and which was being widely discussed in France at the time. To be sure, that was a concern. But we miss the true rationale for the chapter if we fail to locate it within a broader frame of reference. We thus need to ask why Phenomenology of Perception ends with a discussion of freedom at all.
We need to approach the chapter on freedom as belonging to the Third Part of the book which, in structural terms, was methodological, offering a meta-level “phenomenology of phenomenology,” that is, a transcendental account of the phenomenological reduction (see above, Preface). The point of the last part of Phenomenology of Perception (which also includes the chapters on the cogito and temporality) is thus to offer a methodological validation of the approach taken in the preceding (two) parts of the book. It is crucial to recognize the location of the chapter on freedom as the culmination of this metalevel exercise, and the implication that this discussion represents the highest expression of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the phenomenological reduction—in other words, the deepest justification of the pretensions of Phenomenology of Perception to convey genuine philosophical truth.
Rather than the Sartrean account of radical freedom, then, the primary point of reference here is Husserl’s idea of the “perfect freedom” [vollkommenen Freiheit] that stands behind the performance of the reduction, a view initially stated in the first book of Ideas (Husserl 1982, 58), and his subsequent recognition of the inadequacy of this idea. Merleau-Ponty picks up on this in his treatment of freedom, and in characteristic fashion, he writes as if he were elaborating what was implicit in Husserl’s own thought. Notably, the only philosophical reference that Merleau-Ponty makes in the final part of the chapter is indeed to Husserl, where he attributes to him an idea of “conditioned freedom” [liberté condtionnée] (PhP 518). More notable, in fact, is that this reference to Husserl is made indirectly by way of Fink—Merleau-Ponty cited Fink’s use of the expression “bedingte Freiheit” (Fink 1930, 285). This is significant because, as we know, a principal motivation behind Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to work out a “phenomenology of phenomenology” was to respond to the claims that Fink himself had made in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation. This work was instrumental for Merleau-Ponty in terms of grasping the fundamental methodological question that phenomenology must be able to answer: if all human experience—including “phenomenologically reduced” experience—has horizons that condition it, then how can phenomenology ever attain true philosophical insight? Is the project not doomed to uncritical dogmatism or else vicious regress?
As discussed in the Preface, Fink’s response to this problem was premised on the possibility of an ideal reduction as Husserl had originally conceived it. However, recognizing that this involved an extramundaneness (or freedom from horizons) that is, in fact, not humanly possible, Fink developed a highly speculative interpretation of phenomenological methodology which, among other things, construed the active subject of the reduction in suprahuman terms—the “non-participating transcendental onlooker.”
For his part, Merleau-Ponty premised his response on the idea that phenomenology is indeed a human activity, and that the outermost horizons of human experience are those of the totality of history. Owing to what he took to be the metaphysical fact of our corporeal situatedness, Merleau-Ponty agreed with Fink’s claim that an ideal (or complete) reduction was not a human possibility—hence his well-known remark about its necessary “incompleteness.” So whereas Fink assumed that a complete reduction was possible in nonhuman terms and speculated about what must be the case if that were so, the question for Merleau-Ponty is whether human situatedness nonetheless affords sufficient freedom for the phenomenological reduction—or, more to the point, whether a phenomenological reduction that is necessarily “incomplete” can nonetheless provide an adequate methodological basis for genuine philosophical results.
On the face of it, the answer would be no. If there are only situated perspectives, then there can be no bona fide truth. Something needs to be added to the picture. As we saw above, Merleau-Ponty approached this problem by considering whether, after all, there might not be certain experiences characterized by an indistinction between object and its historical horizons—in particular, whether self-experience could have this property. If so, then this would be an experience of “absolute knowing,” which is the formal condition that would need to be met in order to uphold the philosophical credentials of a situated reduction.
This is why Merleau-Ponty was drawn to the Lukácsian conception of the proletariat as the “identical subject-object” of history, in the sense that it represented the effective convergence of self-knowledge and knowledge of the historical totality. That is, Merleau-Ponty was drawn to this conception because of his need to identify an experiential moment in which human activity would be indistinct from its historical horizons, something which could only be the case if that activity were a matter of actively generating those horizons—in other words, a participatory experience of making history.
Where Merleau-Ponty deviated from Lukács, however, albeit in an attempt to redeem his account, was in making an explicit attempt to construe class consciousness as primarily a matter of perception and feeling rather than of cognition or explicit awareness. Employing what he called “a genuinely existential method” [une méthode vraiment existentielle] (PhP 506), Merleau-Ponty thus regarded class consciousness as emerging from class belonging understood in terms of a pre-reflective existential project—a “mode of communication” with the social world that motivates my basic political orientation and explicit judgments about class. In the case of the proletariat, “j’existe ouvrier,” in the sense of existing a certain repressed style of être-au-monde “within [the] institutional framework” of capitalist society (PhP 506)—which is to say, in the sense of repressedly embodying these institutions as pre-reflective operative intentionalities, carrying them in my habitual body and living them accordingly as a kind of “obsessive presence” [présence obsédante] (PhP 509f)—the “inborn complex” of the proletarian situation.
Merleau-Ponty offered a description of the molecular emergence of proletarian class consciousness using the figures of a factory worker [ouvrier], day-laborer [journalier], and a tenant farmer [tenancier]. Although quite different, all do comparable work in similarly alienating conditions—they “coexist in the same situation” and thus feel alike, not through any explicit comparison, but on the basis of their “tasks and gestures” (PhP 507). This common feeling does not imply any explicitly chosen judgment or objective awareness of the alienating conditions, but in each case, there is a tacit normative claim to the effect that this life is “difficult and constraining” (PhP 507)—that there is some degree of dehumanization and that consequently “things must change” [« il faut que ça change »] (PhP 508). The initial situation of the proletariat can be described as a “multiple solipsism” [solipsisme à plusieurs], in that mutual detachment is partly constitutive of (but not unique to) proletarian existence, and Merleau-Ponty sketched out the passage to class consciousness that represents the overcoming of this separation. The main point that he wanted to make was that this passage was not primarily a theoretical or cognitive achievement, but rather was a matter of altered historical perception. For example, in the case of the day-laborer vis-à-vis factory workers, if class consciousness does emerge, then this is not due to a decision on his part to adopt a revolutionary perspective, but rather because “he perceived concretely the synchronicity [synchronisme] between his life and that of the workers, and their common destiny” (PhP 507, italics added). This perception of historical synchronicity with some groups—and by implication, historical asynchronicity with others—motivates a perceptual “regrouping” [regroupement] or Umgestaltung that polarizes the perception of social space in a way that brings to appearance “a region of the exploited” (PhP 508). This is how, for example, the farmer can feel himself [se sent] to be on the same side as the others, even though superficially, he may have nothing in common with them. For Merleau-Ponty, this is how the proletariat as such comes into being [se réalise], and this means that a revolutionary situation is one in which different exploited groups feel themselves moving toward a common “crossroads,” that is, when the objective unity of the exploited “is finally lived in the perception of a common obstacle to the existence of each” (PhP 508). Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, “the revolutionary project is not the result of a deliberate judgment, or the explicit positing of a goal” (PhP 508f). While in many cases it does come to take such form, Merleau-Ponty viewed this as just the completion or fruition of the deeper existential project that provides the fundamental orientation for my existence, and which “merges [se confond] with my way of giving form to the world [mettre en forme le monde] and coexisting with others” (PhP 511). This existential project is anchored on the “tacit commitment”—« il faut que ça change »—discussed above. Usually lived pre-reflectively, in “extreme situations,” this commitment can be transformed into a “conscious taking of a stand.” What happens in the advent of a revolutionary outlook, that is, an outlook in which historical horizons are engaged transformatively, is—as we saw above—that “this tacit commitment becomes explicit” (cf. PhP 417).
Thus it is that, in the case of proletarian class consciousness, “the horizon of a particular life and revolutionary goals coincide” (PhP 510, italics added). In the case of the proletariat, then, Merleau-Ponty identified prereflective class existence with the object of the “tacit cogito” understood as immediate historically situated self-awareness, and he similarly took class consciousness per se to represent the coming to expression of the “tacit cogito.” What we have here, in other words, is the sort of experiential indistinction between self and outer horizons that Merleau-Ponty needed—and in this case, that of the proletariat, what results is not just some arbitrary perspective, but one with universal import.
This is what is crucial. It is not simply that the discussion of class consciousness does the substantial work enabling Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of unconditioned freedom. More importantly, it shows that and how the “incomplete” phenomenological reduction can be a philosophically viable method. For it shows the possibility of gaining universally valid insight without detaching from one’s particular historical standpoint. What we need to appreciate, in other words, is that Merleau-Ponty’s initial analysis of freedom (i.e., the critical discussion of Sartre) that supports the claim about its situatedness is wholly inadequate with regard to the rationale of the chapter, which has to do with warranting the claim that we are sufficiently free to perform the phenomenological reduction successfully—how it could be that situated freedom suffices for philosophy. For, indeed, far from showing that such is the case, simply affirming the situatedness of human freedom actually points in the opposite direction, that is, it would lend credence to the claim that the reduction is, in fact, not philosophically viable, that its necessary incompleteness is a devastating defect. What Merleau-Ponty needs is to show how our being corporeally situated is nonetheless consistent with the possibility of a universal view, a view that would not be compromised by the particularities of life. And this is precisely what he took the historical situation and transformative praxis of the proletariat to represent, the actuality of a (collective) form of human embodied subjectivity that is at once empirically concrete and yet also capable of underwriting the tasks of transcendental phenomenology. This is because the vital structures that necessarily remain horizonal to—and therefore ineluctably presupposed by—phenomenological experience, are one and the same as the structures of historical apriority that are effectively thematized in the class consciousness of the proletariat, and which, through the revolutionary praxis of the latter, are incorporated into the historical truth which phenomenology aspires to articulate.
This is the methodological key to Merleau-Ponty’s view of the realization of philosophy, and it was on this basis that he was able to obviate the need for what Fink had called the “secondary enworlding” of phenomenology. I shall return to that in the Conclusion. For now, we need to consider in more general terms what it is that makes the historical situation of the proletariat so philosophically significant for Merleau-Ponty. For while a class of people being in that situation may be essential for the realization of philosophy, it is certainly not essential for them to be in it, and them alone, and so, there must be some human feature that becomes particularly salient in that situation.
Human productivity
The key idea here for Merleau-Ponty is what he called “human productivity” [la productivité humaine] (SNS 229/129). This idea can be seen as an elaboration of the notion of “transcendence” as a response to the need to spell out and elucidate the creative capacity—ostensibly distinctive to human existence, if not the very principle of anthropogenesis—in virtue of which human beings are able to overcome the monotonous rhythms of their “natural” being: how one can, as Merleau-Ponty put it, faire une pointe hors de soi-même and in this way “draw life”—life-as-such—“away from its spontaneous direction [sens spontané]” (PhP 519).
We should be wary of Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “spontaneity” and its various cognates, however, at least as he applies these to vital phenomena. For they tend to be infected with the same ambiguity found in his usage of the notion of life, namely, that between the generality of life-as-such and the particularity of lived lives. For the sake of clarity, we should reserve the term “spontaneity” for the sense of passive momentum that pertains to life-as-such, that is, to that which underlies the human body as a “natural self, a current of given existence” (PhP 199). As for the sense of spontaneity that pertains solely to individual particularity, Merleau-Ponty gave a clear expression of this when he described it—in a way reminiscent of Sartrean mauvaise foi—as “a sort of escape [échappement],” but one that involves “a process of mystification” or “equivocation” (PhP 199, 201). For short of death, it is not really an escape, remaining rooted in life-as-such. Inasmuch as someone presumes to escape the latter, to repress her “actual” body, she is engaged in a kind of self-deceiving “metaphysical hypocrisy” that works through “the medium of generality,” that is, the generality of the habituated organism. But just like repression, as discussed above, this sort of “hypocrisy” is “part of the human condition”—it is even, or perhaps especially, to be found “in the ‘sincere’ or ‘authentic’ man whenever he claims to be something unreservedly [sans réserves]” (PhP 190).
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of productivity is related very closely to that of freedom, and may be understood as the generative quality of historicity.13 For while historicity may be an essential feature of human être-au-monde, its effective quality can vary considerably. That is, the dialectical relation between the habitual and “actual” dimensions of embodiment can unfold more or less dynamically depending on the nature and degree of repression. At its core, the idea of productivity points to a normative balance or harmonization between the two respective forms of activity: on the one hand, the spontaneous vital force that propels life, albeit blindly, that is, as a matter of subjective passivity; and on the other hand, the active decisiveness of individual “escape,” the nihilating power of consciousness whereby “we tear ourselves away from ourselves” (PhP 489). It is important for Merleau-Ponty that both aspects are required—in particular, lacking substantial effectivity of its own, conscious decision in isolation can only manifest itself negatively by turning that positive vital force against itself sacrificially. Both aspects belong to the “human condition,” and the idea of productivity is meant to encompass them in a way that captures the meaning of “the living subject” [le sujet vivant] in terms of (a) the transcendence and (b) the decentered relations to alterity that are implicit in the notion of historical development (cf. PhP 200). In this way, it is meant as a generalization of the concept of human production that would be able to provide the philosophical ground for Marx’s theory of the self-realization of humanity. It would do so by showing that “the living subject,” as “the real [réel] subject of history” (PhP 200)—that is, “the vehicle [porteur] of history and the motor [moteur] of the dialectic” (SNS 228/129, italics removed)—is “man as productivity” [l’homme en tant que productivité] (PhP 200, emphasis added). This makes it clear that the historical subject cannot be understood in individual terms, but rather that it is “man engaged in a certain way of appropriating nature in which the mode of his relationship with others takes shape.” In other words, “it is concrete human intersubjectivity, the successive and simultaneous community of existences in the process of self-realization, each created by and creating the other” (SNS 228/129, emphasis added).
Although this intersubjectivity is understood to be concrete, in that it is understood on a corporeal basis, it is not taken in material terms in any reductive sense. As discussed above, Merleau-Ponty was quite dubious with respect to the materialist basis of historical materialism, in particular with respect to nature. It is important to recognize that Merleau-Ponty thought that the basic reason for the morbidity of Marxist theory was that what he later called Marx’s “ground-breaking intuition” [intuition si neuve] (EP 43/53) had never been given a proper theoretical formulation, and this because it had never been placed on a proper philosophical foundation. According to Merleau-Ponty, this intuition amounts to Marx’s discovery of “a historical rationality immanent in the life of men,” immanent in interhuman praxis, in “the meaning [sens] which works itself out spontaneously in the inter-twining [entre-croisement] of those activities by which man organizes his relations with nature and with other men” (EP 41/50). Or more simply, Merleau-Ponty described “the principal thought” [la pensée principale] of Marxism as the claim that “there is an incarnation of ideas and values” (SNS 190/108). The problem was that this “put into question the usual categories of philosophy” without furnishing the “intellectual reform” that the transcendence of these categories required (EP 43/53). Merleau-Ponty intended his rethinking of Marxism based on the idea of human productivity to furnish the outstanding philosophical foundation of historical materialism and thereby to supply precisely the “intellectual reform” needed to redeem Marx’s “ground-breaking intuition.”
As discussed above (Chapter 3), Merleau-Ponty followed Lukács in conceiving the historical totality as exclusive of nature as such. Concerning materialism as traditionally and “crudely” understood, then, Merleau-Ponty was blunt: “there is no question of any pure [nue] matter, exterior to man and in terms of which his behavior could be explained” (SNS 231/130). In fact, Merleau-Ponty argued—as did Sartre in “Matérialisme et révolution” (1946), although to different effect—that the idea of a dialectical materialism is ultimately self-contradictory, inasmuch as matter is self-coincident, hence inert, and thus incapable of carrying “the principle of productivity and novelty [nouveauté]” as exhibited in human history. But he also maintained that Marx had already recognized that it would be “the height of subjectivism” to locate the dialectic of praxis in things considered materialistically. According to Merleau-Ponty, what Marx did was to “shift it into men” (EP 42/52) through the proto-phenomenological “expedient” of “human matter” or “human objects” (EP 44/54; SNS 232/131). Merleau-Ponty’s solution to the problem of materialism was to suggest that Marx had really only seriously considered matter within “the system of human coexistence” (SNS 229/129), where it becomes dialectically animated by “human productivity,” and that “all the ideological formations of a given society are synonymous with or complementary to a certain type of praxis” (SNS 231/130). “When Marx speaks of human objects, he means that . . . significance adheres to the object as it presents itself in our experience. . . . The spirit of a society is realized, transmitted, and perceived through the cultural objects which it bestows upon itself and in the midst of which it lives” (SNS 232/131).
It is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty could say, citing Marx by way of defending Lukács, that the milieu of history is neither natural nor supernatural, but rather “transnatural” [transnaturel], where this means that within this environment, “man’s natural behavior has become human . . . human being has become his natural being, [and] his human nature has become his nature.” In short, that “history is the genuine natural history of man” (SNS 230/130). And this makes it clear how the idea of human productivity was intended to show that the theoretical development required by Marxism calls for a philosophical union with Husserl’s phenomenology of the Lebenswelt. For this, Merleau-Ponty suggested, had contributed more than anything to “describing consciousness incarnate in an environment of human objects and in a linguistic tradition” (SNS 239/135).
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Given the general sense and significance of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of human productivity, what exactly does it mean?
Human productivity is that whereby existential transcendence is achieved through praxis. It is a matter of a dialectical relation—internal to the context of intersubjective involvement in the world—whereby a certain harmonization of the impulses of vital inherence with the intentions of symbolic thought is achieved. The former represent the indeclinable bases of the living subject, the structures of the habituated organism that comprise the historical apriority of a given context, but they are typically dissembled by the latter. For most humans throughout history, this may actually have been existentially favorable. But in the contemporary world, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, transcendence no longer requires alienating repression, and the time is ripe finally to overcome it. The salience of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of productivity thus shows itself most clearly in the sense of therapeutic transformation at the individual as well as at the social level.
Human productivity is thus not a matter of achieving an exact synchronization between vital spontaneity and the negativity of consciousness—in general, that would imply the death of historicity and the end of history. The harmonization in question may have an intentional orientation toward such an impossible coincidence, but it is primarily a dialectical coordination geared for vital flourishing and personal integration. It is the means of individual and collective self-realization that proceeds by taking up a meaning offered by the world and re-projecting it symbolically through a “series of shifts [glissements]” (PhP 519). Through interaction and dialogue, the otherwise blind evolution of vital spontaneity can be reoriented consciously and deliberately. At the social level, this is history in the making, and Merleau-Ponty was content to leave the mechanics of such moments of genuinely engaged participation in the realm of mystery. With an immoderate rhetorical flourish even by his own standards, Merleau-Ponty described such moments in fulgurant terms: “sometimes there is that blaze of fire, that flash of lightening, that moment of victory, . . . that gloria that eclipses everything else” (SNS 330/186; cf. SNS 171/98).
Nonetheless, some substantive points can still be made about human productivity. The first relates to death. I argued above that transcendence depends upon “the negativity of death.” In this way, death is an aspect of life-as-such. This can be related to self-realization as a transformative matter of self-overcoming, that is, an overcoming of one’s given or previously realized empirical self. The suspension of or detachment from the latter that self-realization implies could be described as a quasi-suicide or self-sacrifice—for example, what Emile Bernard called “Cézanne’s suicide” (SNS 21/12). This is merely quasi, though, in that one remains vitally rooted in life-as-such.14 This would express the gist of the incarnational alternative that Merleau-Ponty would propose to the mistaken understanding of revolution in terms of the “self-annihilation” of the proletariat. Given how Merleau-Ponty linked death with the universal in thought, the idea is that inasmuch as the process of self-realization is taken as a matter of coinciding with or reappropriating vital spontaneity, this can only occur through the death-like denial of personal particularity.
More specifically, for Merleau-Ponty, this is a matter of “exchange.” We saw in Chapter 1 that this notion was central to Saint Exupéry’s thinking, where it was
effectively synonymous with self-sacrifice. It thus represented an alternative to the modern ideal of individual autonomy, which Saint Exupéry regarded as just an expression of flight from the world and from the possibility of authenticity (Geneste 1968). For Saint Exupéry, “true freedom” is a fundamental mode of becoming that “is found only in the creative process” (EG 182)—it obtains only in and through participation with the world and with others. Saint Exupéry thus proposed “a freedom that resides in acts rather than in rights or in ideas, and which is realized in concrete relationships rather than in escapism or detachment from bonds [liens]” (Major 1968, 167). Through these bonds, necessity is viewed positively with regard to self-realization, and there is a richer sense of self-conscious, self-assured autonomy that Saint Exupéry valorized. “If I look for the example of a genuine freedom,” he once wrote, “I will find it only in a monastery, where men have a choice between different impulses in the richness of their interior life” (EG 182). This is a telling example, in that Saint Exupéry’s cosmic worldview—especially in Pilote de guerre—amounts to a secularized Christianity, with Man substituting for God—recall that “that the primacy of Man founds the only meaningful Equality and Freedom” (PG 241). And indeed, it is only in an eschatological context of this kind that freedom as the metabolic condition of human growth and creative self-realization could possibly take the form of self-sacrificial exchange.
The Exupérian notion of freedom has much in common with Merleau-Ponty’s view. Here, too, for example, freedom and necessity are two sides of a single coin—recall Merleau-Ponty defining existentialism partly in terms of a freedom “which becomes what it is by giving itself bonds [liens]” (SNS 121/70). In both views, one can detect palpable misgivings with respect to the liberal idea of “negative” freedom, understood in terms of deracination and alienability. Both opposed this as a kind of inauthentic escapism, and did so in terms of a notion of freedom as “exchange.” In particular, Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of freedom can be seen as based upon a sharp critique of the Sartrean view, and Saint Exupéry’s account can likewise be approached as offering “a conception of freedom exactly opposite to that of Sartre” (Simon 1950, 150f; Ouellet 1971, 106f; but cf. Major 1968, 169 n108).
But Merleau-Ponty’s view of freedom as exchange is ultimately quite different from that of Saint Exupéry. In particular, it denies sacrifice by denying the sort of eschatology that sacrifice implies. So from Merleau-Ponty’s view, while Saint Exupéry may have moralized ad nauseam about creating bonds, his position failed to articulate any means of achieving them. Turned away from the living present, he “[can]not offer us so much as a single example of a pilot successfully reintegrated into one of those villages over which he flies so patronizingly” (Harris 1999, 33). It remains a dream, and unfulfilled aspiration to immanence. Occurring solely as a one-way relation between the individual and the whole, exchange in the Exupérian scheme fails to be historically creative, at least in a politically progressive sense.
Matters are otherwise with Merleau-Ponty (and with his interpretation of Saint Exupéry), for whom exchange occurs fundamentally within the structure of embodiment: “there is an exchange between generalized and individual existence in which each receives and gives” (PhP 513, italics added; cf. 501, 517). The idea is that concrete freedom as an event of human productivity occurs when a meaning [sens] that was adumbrated in the realm of anonymous intersubjective generality [l’On], “and which was nothing but an insubstantial possibility threatened by the contingency of history, is taken up by an individual” (PhP 513). There is a reciprocal exchange of real significance and concrete actuality that occurs through an appropriative “shift” [glissement] (as opposed to an outright negation or rupture) made in the living present. Consider, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the act of the artist or philosopher is free. . . . Their freedom resides in the power of equivocation . . . or in the process of escape. . . . It consists in taking up a factual situation by giving it a figurative meaning [sens figuré] beyond its real meaning [sens propre]” (PhP 201). In art as in philosophy—and Merleau-Ponty said something similar about revolutionary politics—it is a matter of seeing differently by effecting a perceptual Gestalt-switch. In each case, this implies “the power to suspend vital communication” with the world, “or at least to limit it” (PhP 279). It is in conjunction with the universal, and hence with some degree of self-denial, that such “shifts” can transcend the given. This does not involve an eclectic mixture of determinism and radical choice, but rather a motivated reconfiguration of tacit and focal existential commitments.
However, as a kind of equivocating escape from the reality of alienating repression, such a “shift” can be realized concretely only on condition that the new structure of commitment is “worked out in interhuman relations” (PhP 509). As Merleau-Ponty put it, “it is not enough for a painter like Cézanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root in the consciousness of others. A successful work has the strange power to teach its own lesson [s’enseigner elle-même]” (SNS 33/19). Ideally, then, the self-denial of freedom as exchange will prove contagious. For thereby death would be, in a certain sense, overcome by being transmuted into intersubjectivity, or communalized. “I thus live not for death but forever [à jamais], and in the same way, not for myself alone but with others” (SNS 121/70).
The commitments relevant to freedom are therefore not arbitrary. Contrary to the Sartrean view of freedom as an essentially centrifugal process of signification, Merleau-Ponty argued that freedom concretely understood is rooted in a pregiven field of intersubjective meaning. This results in a view of freedom that emphasizes centripetal appropriation over centrifugal nihilation—it is primarily a matter of taking up the “autochthonous meaning [sens] of the world” and making agentive decisions on that basis (PhP 503). It is a question for Merleau-Ponty of according proper weight to the historical situation of the world as a field of possibilities for meaningful action. Freedom needs to be enabled by existing structures, in the sense of truly having something to do—in general, it obtains when we take up “open situations calling for a certain completion” (PhP 500; cf. SNS 294/166). This does not necessarily diminish the sense of autonomous commitment in freedom. Rather, the idea is that we are always already committed, albeit in an ambiguous and prereflective way, to a more basic project concerning the world and our être-au-monde. This is the “tacit commitment” discussed above. To take up the “autochthonous meaning of the world” is thus to take up “a spontaneous meaning [sens] of my life” (PhP 511, emphasis added). “It is I who give a direction [sens] and a future to my life,” it is just that this does not originate with me as a thinking subject. Rather, that direction and future “spring from my present and past, and in particular from my present and past mode of coexistence” (PhP 510). It is a matter of the existential style of my life, that is, its orientation as an existential project toward a certain “determinate-indeterminate” goal that is mine, but not mine alone (PhP 509). In this way, productivity through freedom as exchange is ultimately an expression of the dialectical reciprocity within the synergic system of self–others–world.
Rationality
This operation of human productivity represents the advent of rationality which is, in a word, the solution to “the human problem,” the problem of “establishing human relations among men” (HT xi/xv). Rationality is the “marvel [prodige] of the connection of experiences” (PhP xvi). “To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives intersect, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning [sens] emerges” (PhP xv). As witness to the primordial emergence of sens from non-sens, perceptual consciousness amounts to the “consciousness of rationality” itself. This awareness is lost when the achievement of rationality is taken for granted, as it is by objective thinking. Merleau-Ponty wanted us to rediscover it “by making it appear against the background of inhuman [inhumaine] nature” (PrP 67f/25).
This is a Gestalt-switch that is exactly analogous to—or rather, that is the general form of—that which Merleau-Ponty performed with respect to violence and political order in Humanism and Terror. There, he tried to show that instead of judging violence as aberrational against the background of political order, a better grip on matters is attained if one approaches political order in general as emerging from a background of violence. By establishing that all political order originates in violence, Merleau-Ponty was concerned in particular with restructuring the moral optics of liberalism, in order to make it at least possible to perceive violence as progressive with respect to advancing the cause of human reconciliation. Merleau-Ponty thought that Marxist political analysis of the present “deciphers events, discovers in them a common meaning and thereby grasps a leading thread which, without dispensing us from fresh analysis at every stage, allows us to orient ourselves toward events” (HT 105/98). He was prepared to defend a “perception of history” supportive of judgments calling for violence to realize the human universality that liberalism takes for granted (cf. HT 38 n1/35 n11). This would be legitimate and defensible, he thought, to the extent that it could be reasonably expected to help “bring reason out of madness [déraison]” (HT 105/98), that is, help to realize a world of non-violence and thereby solve the human problem.
The key point, though, is that the human problem is not a “geometrical” problem in the sense that the solution is simply a determinate unknown that is related to the givens of the problem according to a rule of deduction or subsumption (HT 203/186). This is what Merleau-Ponty meant when he emphasized that “rationality is not a problem” (PhP xv). Because we are not spectators of a closed history, judgments concerning the future historical development of rationality as the solution to the current state of the human problem cannot be what Kant called “determining” [bestimmend] judgments, which work through the subsumption of particulars under a fully adequate universal concept. Rather, they must be what Kant described, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, as “reflecting” [reflectierend] judgments, that is, judgments that work without an adequate concept, yet which are no less valid (KU 5:179).
Merleau-Ponty did not develop the application of this distinction very explicitly. However, he did suggest that Kant’s account of aesthetic reflecting judgment in the third Critique has epistemological priority over theoretical reason. He argued that if there can be an awareness of “a harmony between the sensible and the concept, between myself and others, which is itself without any concept,” and if the subject of this awareness is not a universal thinker but an embodied perceiver, then “the hidden art of the imagination must condition categorial activity. It is no longer merely aesthetic judgment, but knowledge as well which rests upon this art, an art which forms the basis of the unity of consciousness and of consciousnesses” (PhP xii). Merleau-Ponty was making the same general point when he claimed that “the understanding . . . needs to be redefined, since the general connective function ultimately attributed to it by Kantianism [i.e., in the first Critique] is now spread over the whole intentional life and no longer suffices to distinguish it” (PhP 65).
Merleau-Ponty approached this “art” hidden in the human soul in terms of “operative intentionality” [fungierende Intentionalität], in order to take it up as the basis for an expanded phenomenological reinterpretation of the transcendental aesthetic—“the Logos of the aesthetic world” (PhP xii–xiii, 491). Like any art, however, this too is “aware of itself [se connaît] only in its results.” As it is with Cézanne’s painting, for example, “ ‘conception’ cannot precede ‘execution.’ ” There is no conceptual way to determine in advance whether one will hit upon sense, whether one is in fact attuned to the sense of history, or else is just caught up in a subjective dream: “only the work itself, completed and understood, is proof that there was something rather than nothing to be said” (SNS 32/19).
The upshot is that the establishment of rationality through praxis occurs “through an initiative which has no guarantee in being, and whose justification rests entirely on the actual power that it gives us for taking responsibility for our history” (PhP xv). For Merleau-Ponty, militant philosophy involves a perception of history that launches us into uncharted territory, into the “unfinished world of the revolutionary” (HT 104/97), or of phenomenology itself (cf. PhP xvi). As noted above, in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty put this quite dramatically: “we take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for our history through reflection, as well as through a decision whereby we commit our lives, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act that proves itself in practice” (PhP xvi).
This “violence” is presumptive, in the sense that our perceptual grip on things is always an imposition that claims more than it knows. But Merleau-Ponty was not just speaking metaphorically about the violence we do to errors, say, by correcting them. The issue is that, according to his account, to perceive is to be committed to a certain perceptual background, that is, a view of the totality of history, and thus to be committed, even if only tacitly, to the future realization of a certain world as a system of rationality and truth. “To perceive is to engage all at once a whole future of experiences in a present that never strictly guarantees it” (PhP 343f, italics added). But on account of the “permanent givens” [données permanentes] (PrP 68/25; cf. HT 203f/186, 110/102) of the human problem, this is a site of conflict and contestation. That we coexist against a backdrop of nature, and that the future is open beyond any conceptual determination, all of this is conditioned by the subjectivity of perception. “This is the price of there being things and ‘others’ for us, not through an illusion, but through a violent act which is perception itself” (PhP 415).
There are two important illustrations of the sort of militant praxis that Merleau-Ponty had in mind here. The first concerns Lenin and Trotsky as leaders of the Russian Revolution, an event that was still a major point of historical reference for Merleau-Ponty. What is at issue here is political judgment in the absence of objective criteria. Although his discussion of them was fairly selective, Merleau-Ponty saw Trotsky and Lenin as gifted readers of historical situations. Contrary to portrayals of Marxism as a kind of science that issues solely in determining judgments, Merleau-Ponty cited Lenin to the effect that one must “put one’s own mind to work to find one’s bearing in each particular case” (SNS 293/165). It is a matter of reading history, trying to decipher its tendencies, and ultimately all that one has “to guide him is his own view of events” (SNS 293f/166). Likewise with regard to Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian Revolution, which he thought was based upon an apprehension of the “total intention” of society, Merleau-Ponty affirmed that “the greatest objectivity is often the subjectivity of he who lived it” (NI 18 [6]); cf. Whiteside 1988, 122). In both cases, rather than attempting to deduce concrete political judgments from the outlines of Marxist theory, a perception is attained of the “lines of force and vectors” in the present that takes into account the complex “subjective” dimensions of the situation. “The problem is to recognize the proletarian spirit in each of its momentary guises” (SNS 291/164). This can be done well or poorly, and Merleau-Ponty commented that there is something “sublime” about those who do indeed gain profound historical insight into the milieu they inhabit (HT 85/80). This is viewed in hindsight, of course, and it appears that way only to the extent that the perception in question was borne out by later events. For Merleau-Ponty, historical judgments admit of no other proof. A good appraisal of concrete political situations “requires a certain Marxist flair or a Marxist perception of the local and world situation which is on the level of talent or genius” (SNS 293/165). Merleau-Ponty was under no illusions about the potential dangerousness of this. But he accepted the general idea that “the ways of history are [ultimately] unfathomable” (SNS 290/164). Lacking a demonstrable rational structure, all historical action is adventurous, and one cannot avoid using a certain degree of cunning [ruser] (SNS 294f/166). But Merleau-Ponty did not see any justification for giving up the attempt to understand history. He thus looked to what he called Lenin’s “Marxist ‘perception’ of situations,” articulated in numerous practically oriented writings, as implicitly containing “a theory of contingency in history” that could be extended “onto the theoretical plane” (SNS 217 n1/123 n1).
The second illustration of militant praxis comes from Ludwig Binswanger. It is highly instructive to read Phenomenology of Perception in the light of Binswanger’s 1935 article “Über Psychotherapie.” Based around a case of an ostensibly successful cure of an aphonic hysteric, this article presents an account of existential psychotherapy that emphasizes not only the importance of the “inner life history” of the patient, but also and especially, the uniqueness and artistic creativity of the therapeutic intervention itself, and the necessity of deep existential bonds between patient and therapist, in order for the treatment to succeed. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty endorsed Binswanger’s principal claim, expressing it as follows:
in psychological treatment of any kind, the coming to awareness would remain purely cognitive, the patient would not accept the meaning of his disturbances as revealed to him without the personal relationship formed with the doctor, or without the confidence and friendship felt toward him, and the change of existence resulting from this friendship. (PhP 190, italics added)
Here, we find a particularly important inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s claim that philosophy and even politics are “like art.” In a way that suggests its own sort of Leninist practice, Binswanger described his therapeutic intervention not as a theoretically derived procedure, but as an “artful response” based on an impulsive, confident daring [Wagemut] (ÜP 209). He presented psychotherapy as a kind of art that doctors performed according to their particular styles. He saw psychotherapeutic cure as coming about through the establishment of an original existential relationship between the doctor and patient, a relationship involving “an original communicative novelty, a new linking of destiny—and this not only with regard to the patient-doctor relationship, but also and above all with regard to the purely human relationship in the sense of a genuine ‘with-another’ [Miteinander]” (ÜP 215).
According to Binswanger, successful therapy is a matter of establishing new intersubjective bonds that overcome the patient’s “detachment from life,” thus freeing her from captivation in and by her subjective realm. In this sense, the therapist is a link between individual idiosyncrasy (non-sense) and the shared intelligibility of the public world (sense). His task is thus to foster the “genuine communication” that will free the patient
from blind isolation, from the idios cosmos, as Heraclitus says, thus from mere life in his body, his dreams, his private inclinations, his pride and his exuberance, and to illuminate and liberate him for the ability to participate in the koinos cosmos, in the life of genuine fellowship [Koinonia] or community. (ÜP 215f; cf. TE 114f)
Binswanger’s account of the therapeutic encounter is significant for several reasons. The first has to do with the way in which, after taking it up earlier—Merleau-Ponty referred to Binswanger’s article six times in the chapter “Le corps comme être sexué”—and endorsing its principal claim, Merleau-Ponty implicitly (but unmistakably) alluded to it at the end of Phenomenology of Perception in claiming that analysis succeeds by “binding the subject to his doctor through new existential relationships,” so that the complex can be dissolved, not by “a freedom without instruments,” but rather by “a new pulsation of time with its own supports and motives” (PhP 519, emphasis added). The effectiveness of this depends on the strength of the new existential commitment, and Merleau-Ponty added—with class consciousness clearly in mind—that “the same applies in all cases of coming to awareness” [il en est de même dans toutes les prises de conscience] (PhP 519). Merleau-Ponty thus saw Binswanger’s account of the therapeutic encounter as providing important clues regarding the mechanics, so to speak, of the advent of explicit class consciousness construed as a matter of overcoming quasitherapeutically a repressed form of existence.
Binswanger’s account shed light on this from a different angle as well. He noted that the patient manifested various symptoms, and that his treatment included a variety of techniques. In particular, when the patient was suffering a violent attack of hiccoughing, Binswanger reported the following intervention: “I remember now how the idea, or if you will, the inspiration suddenly came to me, to quietly approach the patient lying in bed, to lay the fingers of my right hand across her throat, and to compress her trachea so firmly that she had difficulty breathing and tried to resist the grasp, and as the pressure decreased for a moment, a strong act of swallowing occurred” (ÜP 209f). Other such interventions were performed, although not all were mentioned in Binswanger’s article (see Lanzoni 2004). Nonetheless, this treatment figured relatively prominently in the account, as Binswanger used the contrast precisely as a way to emphasize the importance of strong existential bonds.15 This was significant for Merleau-Ponty, in that it showed a very concrete enactment of reflecting judgment, while providing an example, however dubious and disconcerting, of emancipation through violence.
In this way, Binswanger’s account sheds light on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the “realization of philosophy.” This is supposed to occur dialectically through its destruction insofar as it is “separate.” At root, this separateness has to do with the mutual isolation of discrete theatres, so to speak, of subjective experience—in this regard, the philosopher, the proletarian, and the psychopathological patient are essentially in the same position of silent isolation. Significantly, Merleau-Ponty interpreted the loss of speech in Binswanger’s patient as a “refusal of coexistence,” a withdrawal from the lived situation, such that the task was to have her regain her voice (PhP 187)—for Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher is likewise the one “who wakes up and speaks” (EP 51/63). What Binswanger helps us to see is that, for Merleau-Ponty, the realization of philosophy, and the realization of revolutionary class consciousness that it presupposes, are matters of integrating, respectively, the philosopher’s and the proletarian’s silent “idios cosmos” into the concrete intersubjective horizons of discursive experience—that it is a matter of moving from the non-sens of a “multiple solipsism” to a self-consciously historical intersubjective community.
Binswanger is significant here because existential encounter in the psychotherapeutic context engages with the problem of alterity in the most general way, and this because it engages with the problem of mutual senselessness in its most acute form. It thus shows most clearly the intersubjective character of human productivity at work in the emergence of sens through the exploration of the irrational and its integration into “expanded reason [raison élargie]” (SNS 109/63; cf. PrP 77/30). It thus represents, in germinal form, the philosophical militancy advanced by Merleau-Ponty. The shared and mutually transformative understanding that results through such an encounter—whether in the clinical, quotidian, political, or philosophical context—prefigures the objectivity and truth of which authentic intersubjectivity would be the living embodiment.
In this way, Binswanger’s therapeutic encounter paradigmatized the molecular structure of achieved universality over and against the structural madness of a world of alienation. At the heart of this conception lies the idea of “a new pulsation of time.” This refers to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that it is precisely in the context of productive existential exchange, and in conjunction with the human communion that emerges, that human embodied existence “secretes” [sécrète] time (PhP 277).16 That is, it refers to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that it is in this context that existence “becomes the location in nature where, for the first time, events, instead of pushing one another into being, project around the present a double horizon of past and future and receive a historical orientation” (PhP 277). It is by being polarized and oriented in this way that, for Merleau-Ponty, “we are the upsurge [surgissement] of time” (PhP 489, italics added)—hence the “synchrony” characteristic of class consciousness.
This “proto-temporalization,” like historicity, belongs to the core meaning of human productivity as the ecstatically transgressive overcoming of nature that effectively defines anthropogenesis. But as noted earlier, this can be compromised and degraded. This points back to the dual temporal structure of embodiment, which quite literally for Merleau-Ponty is the locus of both freedom and servitude. In situations of alienating repression, there is a pathological dislocation and imbalance in which the habituated organism holds sway as an “inborn complex”—for instance, the way the proletariat lives class as an “obsessive presence.” In such ways as this, the body is problematic—for it is the locus of unfreedom in that it de-dialecticizes the historicity of individuals, thereby effectively removing them from the world and powerfully isolating them. It is certainly not natural, nor historically typical, for humans to have what we might call “bodies of freedom.” This can only be an historical achievement. And Merleau-Ponty did think that it was on the agenda. For he followed Marx and Lukács in holding that the abject de-humanization of the proletariat would, or at least could, be overturned dialectically through a kind of “return of the repressed.” In other words, he did believe that as an “inborn complex,” the habituated organismicity of the contemporary proletariat was implicitly a matter of universality and thus a force for historical progress—if only the appropriate subjective consciousness would take hold.
What Merleau-Ponty took Binswanger’s account to show is that the cure for repression in general lies in regaining an “existentially healthy” form of historical being through the dissolution of those impersonal sedimentations which, in disrupting historicity, govern the style of our (alienated) behavior. This would serve to reinsert the patient (or the proletarian or the philosopher) within a shared history or temporal synchrony, thereby overcoming intersubjective separation while enhancing the scope of effective action, increasing “tolerance of the corporeal and institutional givens” of life (PhP 518), and enabling a surer grip on one’s own life-history (cf. TE 118). That this occurs through “a new pulsation of time” means that it is based upon the projection of a shifted perception of one’s historical being, and a joint existential commitment to the temporalization that that perception implies. This is ultimately the sense in which, for Merleau-Ponty, “true philosophy is a matter of learning to see the world anew” (PhP xvi; cf. NI 139 [62])—it is a matter of a Gestalt-switch that refocuses our perception of the world by setting it out against the background of “nature” in such a way that it comes to appearance as the totality of history involving a “contingent logic” of universality. This is a better, because more complete way of seeing. “Whether it is a matter of things or of historical situations, philosophy has no other function than to teach us again to see them well” (PhP 520, italics added).
This perceptual normativity accrues directly from the militantly engaged character of Merleau-Ponty’s standpoint vis-à-vis the as-yet unrealized universality of life-as-such. Indeed, his postwar project is normatively charged through and through. But he did not see this as unproblematic—there are issues of justification that need to be addressed. It was not despite but rather because he held that, as with life in general, doing philosophy inevitably implies political commitment of some kind, whether this is embraced self-consciously or not, that Merleau-Ponty was keenly mindful of the need for justification. In other words, notwithstanding his sometimes fiery rhetoric regarding engagement, he was particularly concerned to make his decision as un-“decisionistic” as possible, that is, as broadly appealing as possible. And for him, this meant relying on the perception of the meaning and direction of history as the progressive realization of rationality. There is, of course, a certain circularity here, in that any perception will always retain a degree of decision. But Merleau-Ponty wished his perception of history to be as unambiguous as possible—he thus wanted this perception to impose itself as forcefully as possible. So while much of what he wanted to say was redolent of Lukács’ work in History and Class Consciousness, there was a crucial difference, in that the latter was developed in the immediate post-1917 context when class struggle was manifest and revolutionary change was a palpable part of social reality. Merleau-Ponty was acutely aware that his time was different, at least on the surface. Nothing fundamental had been altered, but finding compelling phenomenological evidence attesting to the veracity of the Marxist conception of history was not so straightforward. In the next chapter, we will consider Merleau-Ponty’s conception of heroism in some detail, and see how it was meant to play an evidentiary role of precisely this sort. This will then bring us to the Conclusion where, drawing upon the overall discussion, I will relate Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Marxism to his reinterpretation of phenomenology in order to lay out a methodological explanation as to why Phenomenology of Perception concludes on a note of deference to Saint Exupéry qua “hero.”