Phenomenology of Perception is not unique among Merleau-Ponty’s works in terms of ending with heroism. It is also the case that Merleau-Ponty crowned Sense and Non-Sense—a collection of articles from 1945 to 1947, published in 1948—with “Man, the Hero” [“Le Héros, l’Homme”], a short essay which took up this theme explicitly (SNS 323–31/182–7). Although this piece has an obvious potential to shed light on the ending of Phenomenology of Perception, it has received negligible scholarly attention. Of course, this is presumably because, as discussed above, no one has seriously thought that this ending was in need of any critical illumination. As in the case of Phenomenology of Perception, then, the invocation of heroism at the end of Sense and Non-Sense is typically ignored or glossed over. Even the relatively detailed treatment (nearly two paragraphs) recently given to it by Bernard Flynn (2007, 136f) still skirts the basic question as to the philosophical significance of heroism for Merleau-Ponty in the first place.
The first part of this chapter undertakes a close examination of “Man, the Hero” as a source of insight into Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the immediate postwar period, and particularly, into his deference to heroism at the end of Phenomenology of Perception. The discussion is framed by the original intentions behind the essay, which had to do with Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to rethink Marxist praxis on the basis of an existential attitude vis-à-vis post-Hegelian philosophy of history. Unpacking the implicit contrasts that Merleau-Ponty drew with respect to other positions—including those of Kojève, Aron, Caillois, and Bataille—I analyze his rejection of traditional understandings of heroism, and then examine his account of what he called “the contemporary hero” [le héros contemporain, le héros des contemporains], which is the term he uses to denote his own view. What emerges is that Merleau-Ponty intended this sense of “heroism” to supply experiential evidence attesting to the latent presence of human universality. It is ultimately a mythic device intended to encourage the militant faith needed for the political project of a universal society, by showing that such a project is indeed possible, and that the transformative political praxis required need not imply agonistic sacrifice.
In the light of negative responses to “Man, the Hero,” in the second part of this chapter, I discuss some comparative considerations between Merleau-Ponty and Saint Exupéry as a way of ascertaining what difference there is, if any, between the standpoint of engagement of the former and the sort of pensée de survol associated with the latter.
“Le Héros, l’Homme” was originally published under the title “Le Culte du héros” [“Hero Worship”] in the pro-PCF (Communist Party of France) weekly action [sic] in February 1946.1 Aside from a few words quoted in the frosty and dismissive editorial preface, signed by Francis Ponge,2 that accompanied its publication in action,3 no documentary evidence is available to explain exactly why Merleau-Ponty submitted this piece to this particular publication.
However, it is reasonable to say that this submission was linked to Merleau-Ponty’s active efforts to publicly promote the political credentials of existentialism. For action was not a dogmatic organ of PCF policy—on the contrary, it was “l’enfant terrible” of the Party (Desanti 1997, 260; cf. Leduc 2006, 85–114). In particular, following the end of the European war, action was (along with Les temps modernes) an important forum for debate between Marxism and existentialism.4 Of special interest to Merleau-Ponty with regard to his existentialist proselytizing were relatively open-minded intellectuals within the PCF. Among these, Merleau-Ponty’s “privileged interlocutor” was Pierre Hervé, a leading figure in the party who was at the time “at the very centre of a liberalizing movement within the party” (Whiteside 1988, 211),5 a movement that aimed, as did Merleau-Ponty, for a broad unification of the Left in France, including left-wing Catholicism (see Poster 1975, 110f). Most importantly, Hervé was on the executive committee of action (along with Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Victor Leduc, Pierre Courtade, Alfred Malleret-Joinville, and Marcel Degliame-Fouché). Thus, in the context of his active promotion of existentialism, the key reason why Merleau-Ponty sent his essay on heroism to action was because it formed a moment in his ongoing political dialogue with the milieu of Marxist thinkers and activists who, centered around Hervé, were relatively open to existentialism.
Broadly following the main claims of Lukács’ “What is Orthodox Marxism?,” the general idea that Merleau-Ponty aimed to establish in this dialogue was that as a practical project of proletarian self-emancipation, Marxism was less a body of truth than a method for interpreting political phenomena, and that with respect to subjectivity and consciousness, what its advancement required could be supplied by existential phenomenology. “A living Marxism should ‘save’ and integrate existentialist research instead,” as was its tendency, “of stifling it” (SNS 143/82). If Marxism is still true, he wrote, “then we will rediscover it on the path of present-day truth [la vérité actuelle] and in the analysis of our time” (SNS 303/171). For Merleau-Ponty, it was always a matter of being attuned to historical actuality—“our time” [notre temps], and he believed that in the postwar context, existential analysis had a better grip on this than Marxist theory. Concerning the former, he wrote that “we don’t have the feeling of doing sectarian work, but of taking up research at the point where it was carried [portée] by our time” (NI 63 [153], italics added).
Existential research and analysis as such, however, are not what the essay on heroism offered. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty stated in the cover letter that he sent to action, its task was more specific: to define “the existential attitude (as a general phenomenon of our time, and not as a school of thought),” and to do so “positively and on the basis of examples” (quoted in the editorial preface, see note 3). The aim of the essay was to offer this “existential attitude” as a heuristic principle of orientation in the neo-Marxist political hermeneutics called for by the postwar situation.
Heroism and history
Merleau-Ponty defined the “existential attitude” by personifying it in what he called “the contemporary hero.” Because he did so by way of a critique of what I will call traditional and ideological views of heroism, I will first examine Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of these before turning in the next section to the account of “contemporary heroism” itself.
Traditional heroism
Merleau-Ponty claimed that “hero worship” has “always existed,” but identified Hegel as the key turning point in its history. Previously, the idea of the hero was essentially that of an “agent of a Providence,” paradigmatically the (Christian) saint. Here heroic action is understood as self-sacrifice in the name of certain transcendent, other-worldly goals. This changed when Hegel brought heroism down to Earth by conceiving it in terms of “the individuals of world history.”6 In this view, heroes are particular concrete individuals who gain an awareness that their social world “has no future,” and who take it upon themselves to intervene, in effect, on behalf of historical progress. They were “the new race [la race nouvelle] that already existed within the old.”7 World-historical individuals are the state-founding agents of the Weltgeist, inchoately grasping the needs of History and acting accordingly. “They have a presentiment of the future, but of course they have no science of it. . . . They forsake happiness and by their action and their example create a new law [droit] and a morality [morale] in which their time will later recognize its truth” (SNS 324/183).
The Hegelian hero is thus an historical individual who, based on a vague sense of universal history, acts against her own time. Retrospectively, such action could be seen as a matter of historical wisdom. But only retrospectively. Such heroes are in general not heroes for their contemporaries. For the latter come too soon to benefit from the world-historical actions in question. Hegelian heroism consists in “carrying out and winning for others . . . what will afterwards seem the only possible future and the very meaning of history” (SNS 324f/183, italics added).
In contrast to this Hegelian view, which dialectically embeds the hero in the unfolding of universal history, Merleau-Ponty also extracts a view of heroism from Nietzsche’s account of the Übermensch. The idea here is of being situated outside of both providence and historical reason—there is no meaning or logic in history, no nonarbitrary substantive goals to aspire toward. This Nietzschean idea of heroism thus involves a rejection of any overarching framework as a condition of historical action. So whereas the Hegelian hero sacrifices happiness and personal well-being for the sake of achieving historical order, the Nietzschean hero “is beyond everything that has been or is to be done; he is interested only in power itself” (SNS 325/183). That is, this figure is situated beyond history, and is thus concerned solely with the assertion of pure power against others. There can be no constructive exercise of power here, for there is nothing to do: there are no historical tasks to fulfill, and there is no dialectical framework within which the exercise of power could be sublimated as sacrifice and deployed in a transformative way. Conquest alone remains meaningful, and in particular, the conquest of death, “the most powerful opponent of all.” The Nietzschean hero is thus ultimately caught up in the impossible quest for “a life which truly integrates death into itself and whose free recognition by others is definitely assured” (SNS 326/184).
Merleau-Ponty reverted to Hegelian terminology in this reading of Nietzsche. As he described it, the Nietzschean hero, seeking unreciprocated recognition, finds himself precisely in the existential impasse of the Hegelian “master.” The contrast is thus posed in an unexpectedly simple way: the Nietzschean hero is the Hegelian “master” [Herr], while the Hegelian hero is the Hegelian “slave” [Knecht], that is, the one who has “chosen life and who works to transform the world in such a way that in the end there is no longer a place for the master” (SNS 326/184; cf. SNS 118f/68f).
There is clearly little exegetical rigor in these interpretations of Hegel and Nietzsche. Although they might prove defensible, were they to be developed more carefully, that was not Merleau-Ponty’s purpose. Rather, as was his wont, he was primarily interested in outlining certain philosophical tropes that would serve his own argumentative purposes. It is in simultaneous contrast to both the so-called Hegelian and Nietzschean figures of heroism that he presented his own account of “the contemporary hero.”
But we would overlook the significance of what Merleau-Ponty was doing if we fail to recognize that these tropes do represent opposed orientations with respect to Hegelian philosophy of history among which Merleau-Ponty found himself at the time compelled to stake out an interstitial position. “There are,” as he said elsewhere, “several Hegels,” and “interpreting Hegel means taking a stand on all the philosophical, political, and religious problems of our century” (SNS 110/63f).
First, the view he attributes to Hegel himself is the “triumphant” view that maintains that there can no longer be heroes because all of the tasks of universal history have been fulfilled (cf. Hegel 1967, 245). This “Hegel” is more accurately associated with Alexandre Kojève, whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s Merleau-Ponty had attended (see Chapter 2, notes 13–15). According to this interpretation (Kojève 1947), the “end of History” had been attained—that is, human consciousness had become the Concept, thus concluding the movement by which it had sought to overcome the opposition between thought and being. We need not enter into the details of this view here. It suffices to point out that the linchpin of Kojève’s view is his assertion of the possibility of what he termed the “Sage,” someone who is “fully and perfectly self-conscious” (Kojève 1947, 271; see Preface, note 41). This is crucial because it is only on the basis of the total historical knowledge thereby implied that one could legitimately claim of historical heroes, not only that they did, in fact, attain a partial glimpse of the universal truth, and thus did, in fact, engage in genuine heroic activity, but also that as a whole, they have been rendered obsolete—that is, that History, the domain of the hero, had ended.
However, in The Structure of Behavior, completed in 1938, Merleau-Ponty had demonstrated that Kojève’s Sage is not humanly possible, by showing that the integration constitutive of acquired self-consciousness “is never absolute and it always fails.” In fact, the impossibility of “complete integration”—that is, Sagely wisdom—is precisely what Merleau-Ponty aimed to substantiate in that work, by showing that “all integration presupposes the normal functioning of the subordinated forms, which always demand their own due” (SC 227/210, emphasis added; see Chapter 2).
Second, with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s trope of Nietzschean heroism, one might be tempted to think of Georges Bataille, with whom Merleau-Ponty was likewise personally acquainted. Bataille was a major proponent of Nietzschean ideas in France. Yet, this was primarily because he accepted Kojève’s thesis that human society was entering a terminal stage of universal homogeneity in which human negativity had nothing to do. In his terms, this gave rise to the problem of “unemployed negativity” [la négativité sans emploi], and in particular, to the problem of securing recognition for it as such.8
For Bataille, however, the end of History was rolled together with the death of God in a way that at once opened up and radically undermined the possibility for genuine subjectivity. This yielded the paradoxical or “impossible” situation of “sovereignty” that was central to Bataille’s thinking. In this sense, he was not so much a follower of Nietzsche as someone who aspired to imitate Nietzsche. He took up Nietzsche as a sacred “hero” of nonconformism, but this precisely in his tragic, mad solitude—it was a matter, so to speak, of an imitatio anti-Christi. This is why, in his works from the war years, including Le coupable, Bataille stated that his aim is “to invent a new way to crucify myself” [un nouveau moyen de me crucifier] (Bataille 1973, 257). He made of his existence a “combat” [bataille] that incarnated sacrifice by trying to mimic the sacrifice of God.
This effort on the part of Bataille was the result of his having accepted—and having tried to live out the consequences of—the basic premises of both the Hegelian and Nietzschean tropes of heroism. This made Bataille himself the focal point of their underlying conflict. Thus, while his uptake of Nietzsche was infused with the themes of war and violence, it was primarily directed inward in a self-destructive way that does not conform to the model of self-assertive mastery sketched by Merleau-Ponty. So although Bataille was one of Merleau-Ponty’s more or less covert interlocutors (he will resurface below), he does not, as we might be tempted to think, represent the trope of Nietzschean heroism.
To capture the contrast that Merleau-Ponty wanted to establish with Kojève, our attention should rather turn to Raymond Aron, someone who was sharply critical of Kojève. Aiming to directly refute him (among others), Aron wrote in 1938 that “the traditional philosophy of history is completed in Hegel’s system. Modern philosophy of history begins with the rejection of Hegelianism” (Aron 1969, 15, emphasis added). He went on to develop a decidedly skeptical position concerning the limits of historical objectivity, which regarded historiography as inescapably based on subjective mises en perspective. To be sure, this view shares a certain measure of common ground with Merleau-Ponty’s own disagreement with Kojève. But Merleau-Ponty thought that Aron went too far in the direction of perspectivism.9 At least in theory. Although he does not name him directly, Merleau-Ponty was undoubtedly referring to Aron when he wrote the following:
It has not been sufficiently noted that, after demonstrating the irrationality of history, the skeptic will abruptly abandon his methodological scruples when it comes to drawing practical conclusions. . . . A skeptical politics is obliged to treat, at least implicitly, certain facts as more important than others and to that extent it harbors an embarrassing [honteuse] philosophy of history—one which is lived rather than thought, but which is no less effective. (SNS 297/168)
In case there is any doubt, we can consider Merleau-Ponty’s response to Jaspers in Geneva in 1946 alluded to earlier (see Chapter 3). Immediately after defending the Lukácsian conception of totality against Jaspers’ concerns by claiming that “anyone, from the moment he takes a political position, has a certain conception of the whole of historical life, and even if he does not formulate it in words, he nonetheless expresses it in action” (EE 253), Merleau-Ponty referred explicitly to Aron:
I see, for example, in France, that a theorist like Raymond Aron, who has defended this idea that history is not amenable to objective interpretation, is nonetheless brought, when he personally takes a stand, to implicate therein an entire conception of the future. (EE 253)
Merleau-Ponty was alluding to the increasingly Gaullist and pro-imperialist political views that Aron defended after the war (Aron 1946; cf. Whiteside 1986, 147f). Merleau-Ponty reasoned that Aron’s practical pragmatism stemmed from the fact that his theoretical skepticism was based on an at least tacit acceptance of Kojève’s overly strong criteria concerning what would count as historical objectivity (cf. NI 347f [103f]). Correctly rejecting the possibility of this sort of absolute knowledge, he thus wrongly rejected historical objectivity as such, leaving his practical assessments with no principled basis beyond sociological facts. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “historical skepticism is always conservative, although it cannot, in all strictness, exclude anything from its expectations—not even a revolutionary phase of history. Under the pretext of objectivity it freezes the future and eliminates change and the will of men from history” (SNS 298/168).
Although Merleau-Ponty contrasts the Hegelian and Nietzschean tropes of heroism, we can see that because they are rooted in the same absolute view of historical objectivity—the one accepting it, the other rejecting it—the conceptions of subjectivity they respectively embody actually share a fundamental infirmity: each is oblivious to concrete historical praxis. What Merleau-Ponty noted of Aron’s skeptical position applies equally well to Kojève’s posthistorical view: he sees “neither true subjectivity, which is never without motives, nor true objectivity, which is never without evaluation, nor the junction of the one with the other in Praxis” (NI 348 [104]). There is in neither case any recognition of historical tasks to be performed, either on the grounds that they have all been accomplished (Kojève), or else because there never were any to begin with (Aron). For what goes unperceived in both cases is the present’s being oriented toward and predelineating a future that is “à faire,” to be made. Both Kojève and Aron consequently exhibit a conservative acquiescence in events that is antithetical to historical subjectivity and agency concretely understood. This is why neither offers a suitable framework for a neo-Marxist hermeneutics—in this regard, Merleau-Ponty was actually closer to Fessard!10
What is lacking in the positions of both Kojève and Aron (and this would apply as well to Fessard), according to Merleau-Ponty, is living contact with the present as the germinal origins of the future. “Our only recourse lies in a reading of the present which is as full and as faithful as possible, which does not prejudge its meaning, which even recognizes chaos and non-sense where they exist, but which does not refuse to discern a direction and an idea where they manifest themselves [in the present]” (SNS 299/169). This “reading of the present” is the central plank of Merleau-Ponty’s proposed political hermeneutics. As we have seen, his was not so much a philosophy of history, but a perception of historical phenomena that calls philosophies of history into question (NI 352, 350 [107, 105]). The reform of Marxism that Merleau-Ponty had in mind would thus extract it from all such frameworks. The course he tried to steer between Kojève and Aron, between abstractly one-sided views of history in either objective or subjective terms, was intended in part against the background of long-standing disputes within Marxism between evolutionism and voluntarism, between falling back on the inexorable movement of history, or else making it out to be simply a matter of decision and will.
Although Merleau-Ponty associated his approach with Marx, he did so only inasmuch as Marx could be read in conformity with Merleau-Ponty’s own (idiosyncratic) reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. “There can be no definitive understanding of the whole import of Marxist politics without going back to Hegel’s description of the fundamental relations between men” (HT 110/101f). This reading rejected the gnosiological understanding of absolute knowledge that forms the reference point for both Kojève and Aron. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the “contemporary hero” will aim to bring about an Aufhebung of the Hegelian and Nietzschean tropes in order to account at once for what is held artificially separate in this distinction, namely, objective historical progress as an agentive possibility and the subjective motivation to pursue it. It is thus meant to flesh out an alternative view of absolute knowledge, understood as a “way of living” [manière de vivre] wherein “consciousness at last becomes equal to its spontaneous life and regains its self-possession” (SNS 112/64).
As traditionally understood, such would not be a moment of knowledge at all. But that is the case only inasmuch as the tradition fails to recognize knowledge as a normative practice of embodied perception. And this includes historical knowledge. Merleau-Ponty thus made historical objectivity relative to practical participation in the project of realizing human universality. Such participation consequently possesses a certain epistemic privilege. As noted in the previous chapter, citing the perspicacity of Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian Revolution, for example, Merleau-Ponty affirmed that “the greatest objectivity is often the subjectivity of he who lived it” (NI 18 [6]); cf. Whiteside 1988, 122). The point is not that all lived experience carries equal epistemological weight. It is rather that, even if it cannot be captured discursively, the object of individual lived experience can be the “the total intention” of society, “the Idea in the Hegelian sense” (PhP xiii, emphases added).
Merleau-Ponty’s broader point was that this possibility could underwrite a common framework within which all those engaged in history as the process of fulfilling “the promise of humanity”—Marxists and militant Christians in particular—could be reconciled. The idea is that substantive ideological disagreement is superficial and that it stems from a prior epistemological agreement—exemplified by Kojève and Aron—concerning objectivity which stipulates what would count as substantive agreement in a way that actually renders it impossible. In occluding the living present, this common theoretical prejudice prevents people from seeing that what motivates genuine historical engagement is ultimately not a matter of ideological profession.
Ideological heroism
Concerning historical action, Merleau-Ponty was gripped by the phenomenon of uncompromising engagement, especially on the part of Communists (like Nizan), where there was little or no expectation that the goals pursued would be realized during the agent’s own lifetime. Let’s call this “ideological heroism.” In contrast to the traditional Hegelian hero, whose vision of human universality is inchoate and whose projects contribute to it only inadvertently, the ideological hero clearly imagines the universal and sees that there is an unfulfilled historical objectivity, on behalf of which she acts self-consciously. But Merleau-Ponty did not think that this offered a viable model for political agency. In “Man, the Hero,” where he hinges his discussion on selected literary examples of communist political action, his strategy is to parlay a critique of the roman à thèse as a “self-defeating genre” (Tane 1998, 11) into a broader critique of political ideology as a motivating force. The problem with the roman à thèse is that its political didacticism necessarily involves a closed teleology—heroes are modeled on pregiven prototypes, with the result either that the political message is delivered ventriloquially or else that it is actually overshadowed by characters’ subjective deviations from orthodoxy (Tane 1998, 453). Either way, ideologically motivated heroic action remains an abstract idea that is not brought into living connection with particular individuals.
For instance, Merleau-Ponty considers Hemingway’s Robert Jordan (For Whom the Bell Tolls), the idealistic American college professor who volunteers to fight for the Loyalist cause against the fascists in Spain, and who ultimately gives his life in doing so. Unlike Hemingway’s earlier protagonists, who tended to be detached and individualistic, Jordan is strongly socially-oriented and concerned with communion and fraternity (Smetana 1965, 124ff). Nonetheless, as Merleau-Ponty notes, in risking his life for the “interests of humanity” (Hemingway 1940, 11), “Jordan cannot manage to make the society of the future the sole motive for his sacrifice.” Rather, such sacrifice is tied to the living present such that “the society of the future” “is desirable to [Jordan] only as the probable guarantee, for himself and for others, of the freedom he is exercising at that very moment” (SNS 327/184).
Turning to Malraux’s Kyo Gisors (La condition humaine.), a leader of a failed socialist insurrection in Shanghai, Merleau-Ponty notes that here the same question is confronted “at the very core of Marxism.” The problem is that with respect to political action, in principle there cannot be any a priori determination of when to cede to the objective momentum of history and when to subjectively “force its hand,” as it were. Either way, it seems to be an inescapably subjective decision. Merleau-Ponty draws the same conclusion concerning the “paradoxes of liberty” from Roger Vailland’s 1945 work Drôle de jeu (cf. Lloyd 2003, 165f). The idea is that communist discipline results from a free choice to limit free choice for the sake of effective collective action, but that this basic choice itself cannot be objectively determined.
Merleau-Ponty wanted to show that this basic “choice” should not be understood as an intellectual decision, but rather in terms of existential style. Merleau-Ponty used the example of Hemingway’s Jordan to illustrate this. Wounded behind enemy lines, and having urged his comrades to go on, Jordan remains with them in spirit, prepared until the very end to do what he could to protect them. As he says, “there is something to do yet” (Hemingway 1940, 470, italics added). But does Jordan truly believe the ideological rationale he gives himself for his actions, and is this what actually motivates him? Is it the case that “right up to the end [jusqu’au bout], he will satisfy the highest demand: ‘uphold through action the honor of being a man, and do something useful for the others’ ” (Smetana 1965, 126, citing Astre 1959, 153, italics added)? Is heroism a matter of service to the “interests of humanity”?
Merleau-Ponty answers firmly in the negative. According to his interpretation of Hemingway’s Jordan, “the man who is still living has no other resource – but this is sovereign – than to keep on acting like a living man [un homme vivant]” (SNS 329/186, emphasis added). In continuing to act, in particular, by not taking his own life, Jordan was just living out his existential style—just being himself. He was wounded, but alive, and so, however short it might be, there was still a future to be made to which he would belong. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, this evinces sovereignty, not service. This is why it is not the society of the future that is the key to understanding Jordan, but rather “the freedom he is exercising at that very moment.” And this is why it is immaterial whether he was actually able to do anything useful for the others.
Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, heroic action is not a self-sacrificial matter of one’s reflective ideological commitments tragically piloting one’s body into a lethal situation. That is to say, in the terms drawn from Part I of Phenomenology of Perception, it is not a matter of a temporal dislocation in which the “actual” body fatally detaches itself from the habituated organism. For Merleau-Ponty, to say that heroic action is a matter of existential style is to affirm that the locus of heroic action is the habituated organism. Hence, inasmuch as ideology informs heroism, it does so only as a kind of corporeal sedimentation. But again, this does not mean that heroic action is a matter of sedimented ideological commitment fatally compromising the “actual” body. Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s view is that heroic action precisely instances the coincidence—or the contemporaneousness—of the “actual” body and the habituated organism. This is the condition of absolute knowledge, “the point at which consciousness finally becomes equal to its spontaneous life and regains its self-possession” (SNS 64/112).
To clarify this, Merleau-Ponty turns to Saint Exupéry, who, significantly, was a real person, not a fictional character (even if his stories are highly stylized).
The idea behind the contemporary hero is that “our time,” as Merleau-Ponty very frequently put it, appears as a time neither of faith nor of reason, but rather of a world out of joint. Events exhibit no clear overarching pattern, and in particular, the schemata of Marxism are unable to account for them (SNS 288/162f; cf. 216f/123). It is thus a time when “duties and tasks are unclear,” for there are no absolute reference points for historical action. Not even utility. Merleau-Ponty seizes on the fact that the flight described in Pilote de guerre was, as Saint Exupéry’s account of it likewise emphasized, objectively useless. As noted above (Chapter 1), not only was the mission extremely perilous, but it was understood that due to the state of the French forces at the time, no reconnaissance information could be put to use anyway. “What sense did it make” to fly that mission? “How is [Saint Exupéry] to serve if service is useless?” (SNS 328/185).
The answer, of course, is that he was not serving anything. Not unlike Jordan, Saint Exupéry was “sovereign” because his action was useless, because it made no sense, that is, because it was not intelligible according to existing parameters of rationality.11 But Merleau-Ponty added that this was not a demonstration of a morbid fascination with death or a cavalier contempt for it in the manner, for example, of Montherlant’s Service inutile (1935). “It is not death that I love, said Saint-Exupéry, but life” (SNS 330/186).12 Merleau-Ponty thus interpreted Saint Exupéry’s action in 1940 in this way (SNS 328/185):
Saint-Exupéry throws himself into his mission because it is an intimate part of himself, the consequences of his thoughts, wishes and decisions, because he would be nothing if he were to back out. He recovers his own being to the extent to which he runs into danger. Over Arras, in the fire of anti-aircraft guns, when every second of continuing life is as miraculous as birth, he feels invulnerable because he is in things at last; he has left his inner nothingness behind, and death, if it comes, will reach him right in the thick of the world.
And without question, Merleau-Ponty meant to imply that what was true of Saint Exupéry’s flight in 1940 also applied to his final flight in 1944. Incarnating pure human productivity and eschewing all circumstantial compromise, Saint-Exupéry melded with the world, thereby achieving the organically complete agentive integrity characteristic of absolute knowledge.
For Merleau-Ponty, heroes are those who “really were outwardly what they inwardly wished to be” and thus “became one with history at the moment when it claimed their lives” (SNS 258/146). Equivalently, the hero is someone who “lives to the limit [jusqu’au bout] his relation to men and the world” by enacting an affirmative response to the question: “Shall I give my freedom to save freedom?” (PhP 520). Subjectively, the hero is fully invested in the realization of freedom, understood in universal terms. Owing to her tacit acceptance that true freedom knows no singularity, the hero gives the appearance of a wholehearted readiness for personal sacrifice. This just means that heroic living embodies an uncompromising commitment to life considered universally—the hero is an individual who lives out her own vital particularity as human universality. The hero is thus an exemplary vivant, or living person (SNS 328f/185f; cf. HT xli/xlv), whose thinking and acting are fully saturated with that “love of life” that is irreducible to biological existence. This fulfills Merleau-Ponty’s claim 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). It would kill us, but we can do it.
In a paradoxical way, then, the hero is pathologically alive. Merleau-Ponty endorsed Hegel’s idea that human beings are “sick animals” (SNS 116/67). That is, normal human existence is constitutively “sick” on account of the schizoidal duality of being-in-itself and being-for-itself to which anthropogenetic reflective self-consciousness leads. Through his complete internalization of the negativity of death, the hero effectively heals this split by achieving a self-coincidence that amounts to a condition of pathological health. Subjectively, this parallels the Marxist account of the proletarian that Merleau-Ponty presented in Humanism and Terror. The contemporary hero is likewise a de-humanized—which is to say, de-particularized—agent of the species, but without the objective social conditions.
The case of Saint Exupéry thus addressed the motivational problem of how human universality can be concretely realized without sacrifice. This is because, as Merleau-Ponty put it, his self-giving resulted, not from pursuing this or that ideological goal, but rather from living out the “loyalty to the natural movement that throws us toward things and toward others” (SNS 330/186, emphasis added), something Merleau-Ponty implied is equivalent in the hero’s case to remaining “poised in the direction of his chosen ends” (SNS 330/185, emphasis added).
What were those ends? Simply to leave “his inner nothingness behind” and to “recover his own being.” Whatever his real military contribution may have been, what he was doing was living out his subjectivity, “recovering his being” by personally incorporating the centrifugal thrust of natural spontaneity. Attaining the condition of sovereignty, the hero becomes a kind of natural purposiveness, a living embodiment of humanity’s being its own highest end.
Unlike the Hegelian hero, who, in working against her time, suffered a pronounced dislocation between habituated organism and “actual” body, the contemporary hero simply lives her time—this is the deeper sense of her “contemporaneity.” The heroic achievement is to subjectively exist one’s own corporeality as a prototype of one’s sociohistorical milieu. For Merleau-Ponty, this means that the hero lives out explicitly the universality that world-historical heroism in the Hegelian sense realized only to the point of latency. He thus argued that it is “by living my time,” “by plunging into [en m’enfonçant] the present and the world . . . that I am able to understand other times” (PhP 520)—that is, accede to the universal.
Merleau-Ponty held that the disordered and contingent appearance of “our time” harbored a “logic of history” that could be taken up and realized. As we saw earlier, by a “logic of history,” Merleau-Ponty meant (a) that history is an integral whole, “a single drama” in which all events have a human significance; and (b) that the phases of this drama do not follow an arbitrary order, “but move toward a completion and conclusion” (SNS 212/121). The distinctive feature of a Marxist view, according to Merleau-Ponty, is that it makes the completion of history dependent upon contingent acts of revolutionary agency—it “admit[s] that history is both logical and contingent, that nothing is absolutely fortuitous but also that nothing is absolutely necessary” (SNS 211f/120). In other words, for Marxism, the logic of history is just one possibility among others (SNS 213/121). But this would seem to reduce it, when the class struggle wanes, as in “our time,” to the conjured product of revolutionary ideology. In a disordered world, can there be any evidential basis for upholding the Marxist hypothesis?
For Merleau-Ponty, the hero provides such evidence. Although the hero incarnates a historical period that is, to all appearances, one of disorder, the hero himself, his manière de vivre, is not at all disordered. “Today’s hero is not skeptical, dilettantish, or decadent.” Rather, “it is simply the case that he has experienced chance, disorder, and failure. . . . He [thus] has a better experience than anyone has ever had of the contingency of the future and the freedom of man” (SNS 330/186). The hero thus surpasses the theoretical failure of abstract discourses of history. Committed to universality and accepting that freedom knows no singularity, the practical lesson that he draws from this experience is to detach from freedom in its given forms and to ground his commitment within a deeper, transhistorical level of being. The hero thus withdraws to the sovereignty of “absolute knowledge”—a move which, through a transgression of existing rationality, places the hero in the extrahistorical realm of non-sense. While this makes of the contemporary hero, not unlike the Hegelian hero, a “junction of madness [déraison] and reason [raison]” (SNS 324f/183; cf. 9/4), it is precisely in virtue of this departure from history that the hero is able to play an evidentiary role with respect to its logic.
By incarnating human productivity, and despite being paradoxically lethal, heroic self-realization evidences history’s being a dramatic, teleological whole driven by contingent human agency. It thus presents a mise en abyme of the possible self-realization of humanity. If we accept the account of Saint Exupéry’s death that Merleau-Ponty offers, then we have grounds for positing a natural spontaneity that is in harmony with our aspirations to the realization of concrete universal reconciliation. This rationalizes the need Merleau-Ponty felt to rank this possibility as more than just one among many. The heroic spectacle legitimizes the privileging of fulgurant moments of transgressive communication by seeing them as based in and expressive of “that very movement which unites us with others, our present with our past, and by means of which we make everything have meaning” (SNS 330/186). This movement is what Merleau-Ponty later described as the “spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole,” and which thus “accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements” (Pros. 47f/10). To be clear, being a matter of extrahistorical non-sense, the action of the contemporary hero does not itself accomplish such results. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Rather, its significance lies solely in its bringing to phenomenological self-givenness the natural teleological purposiveness that (possibly) stands behind those achievements. In this way, the contemporary hero motivates and rationally substantiates the militant faith of a neo-Marxist historical praxis.
This militant faith is what Merleau-Ponty meant by “the existential attitude.” To renew Marxism, which, he thought, is weakest “when faced with concrete events taken moment by moment” (SNS 217/123), Merleau-Ponty wanted to trace the molecular emergence of transformative political consciousness from the “living present” up. This presupposes the heroic manifestation of humanity’s intrinsic purposiveness. The evidentiary value of heroism is thus perceptual, not theoretical. By providing an appropriate new perceptual background, it supports a Gestalt shift that discloses historical significance in the seemingly insignificant phenomena of everyday life. It is what enables us to see, in other words, that even “the least perception, the slightest movement of the heart, the smallest action, bear incontestable witness” to human universality (cf. SNS 121/70).
Saint Exupéry and Schn.
It would be appropriate at this point briefly to relate Merleau-Ponty’s view of the contemporary hero to his existential interpretation of Adhémar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein’s analyses of their patient “Schn.” (Johann Schneider). As is well known, Schn. suffered a serious occipital injury during World War I that resulted in his being diagnosed by Gelb and Goldstein with a manifold of psychosomatic disorders, central to which, however, was apperceptive visual agnosia.13 And this case played a major role in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of embodiment.
Merleau-Ponty portrayed Schn. as having lost the ability to use his body freely to project around himself a situation into which he could proceed. While his intellectual capacities were sound, he had lost the power of imagination, and so, he lived in a world without possibility—he was tied to actuality and all but totally absorbed in the present. His experience appears to him as self-evident and self-sufficient. Unable to project himself into imaginary situations, Schn. lacks “living thought” (PhP 149). He is incapable of any act of authentic expression (including political opinion)—he cannot create an “opening” in being because his own being is so thoroughly closed. Based on his inability to put himself into a situation, he lacks freedom (PhP 158). This is primarily because he lacks the power of apprehending simultaneous wholes and of cognitively shifting from wholes to parts—that is, as Merleau-Ponty put it, what Schn. cannot do is survoler the objects of his experience (PhP 147, 157f). In an important sense, Schn.’s core problem is a total lack of “high-altitude thinking.”
According to Merleau-Ponty, we could say that Schn. was a model of immanence, in that his habituated organism had virtually collapsed onto his “actual” body, such that his subjective existence was entirely inscribed by his objective being. He thus has a kind of agentive integrity. But it is inverted in such a way as to imprison him in the actuality of a drastically contracted lived world. Merleau-Ponty portrayed Schn. as a kind of “perfect” Cartesian—what we would all be like were Cartesian principles true. As living negative proof that the capacity to project and competently communicate meaning is not just an intellectual exercise, but rather depends upon corporeal processes of signification and intentionality, Schn. offers powerful evidence to refute the Cartesian dualist account of human existence, and all forms of objective thinking that are based upon that.
The subjective transcendence of Merleau-Ponty’s hero and the universal scope of his world stand at the opposite end of the existential spectrum from the objective immanence of Gelb and Goldstein’s patient. Virtually, the one is all “actual,” the other all habitual. Saint Exupéry and Schn. thus provide Merleau-Ponty with the limiting cases of human être-au-monde. In them, we have the two extremes of dualistic existential style—deanimated body and disembodied spirit—two pathological poles of uncommunicative, disengaged, and ahistorical solitude between which unfolds that “third kind of existence,” which characterizes the intercorporeal coexistence of the overwhelming majority of human beings. This may have been what Merleau-Ponty had in mind in saying that “to be completely a man, it is necessary to be a little more and a little less than man” (EP 51/63f).
Merleau-Ponty’s myth of man
Without question, Merleau-Ponty’s is an unusual conception of heroism, one that verges on antiheroism. Indeed, he began “Man, the Hero” by echoing Marcel’s distrust of heroism. And he is absolutely clear that heroism does not offer a viable model for historical agency. His intervention is intended effectively to dissolve the discourse of heroism by rendering what is crucial to it a quotidian phenomenon, and raising its exceptionality to the level of humanist myth. He thus concluded “Man, the Hero” by identifying the contemporary hero with “man” qua universality incarnate. But he did so by way of contrast with two other mythic figures: “the contemporary hero is not Lucifer; he is not even Prometheus; he is man” (SNS 331/187). Untangling the meaning of this dual contrast that is found at the very end of Sense and Non-Sense will shed further light on Merleau-Ponty’s humanist myth.
Prometheus and Lucifer have, at least in modernity, often been seen as closely allied, the latter (often as Satan) being portrayed as a kind of Christianized version of the former. This is prevalent in Romantic literature, but it is also the case in German Idealism (von Balthasar 1947). The general sense shared by these Promethean and Luciferian figures is that of a spirit who liberates humanity from ignorance, one that seeks to enlighten humanity against the wishes of the prevailing powers to maintain humanity in a state of servile enthrallment.
But Merleau-Ponty evidently discerned a noteworthy difference between Lucifer and Prometheus, one that was relevant to his account of heroism. Although he offered few clues as to what exactly he had in mind, a sound account can be pieced together.
Lucifer
Although the theme surfaces in other relevant ways,14 concerning Lucifer, I submit that we are dealing with an allusion to Roger Caillois. For Caillois was the proponent of Luciferian thinking at the time, and he also had an important and closely related interest in Saint Exupéry.
We might approach this first by stepping back to consider Caillois’ views on “militant” thinking, in particular, as expressed in a short essay entitled “Pour une orthodoxie militante: les tâches immédiates de la pensée moderne” [“For a Militant Orthodoxy: The Immediate Tasks of Modern Thought”] (Caillois 1936).15 This essay is useful to consider for how it can help to contextualize Caillois’ view on Lucifer, and thereby to cast contrastive light on Merleau-Ponty’s own position vis-à-vis Saint Exupéry.
In the piece in question, Caillois sketched out a vision of a radicalized rationalism as a kind of nonconformist intellectual reform that would yield a “a scientific heterodox ‘orthodoxy’ ” (ES 130). This was to be a rigorous yet imaginative science which, as a contemporary counterpart to myth, would integrate lucidity and affect so as to compel intellect and emotion equally, and in this way contribute to revivifying society against its decadent decline and the threat of fascism. It was thus by no means anti-Enlightenment. The point was to recover the radical challenge to social order enunciated by nineteenth-century maudit poets like Baudelaire and Balzac—but with a twist. For now the problem was the oppressiveness of social disorder. This is why Caillois called for a militant orthodoxy. On the one hand, this was militant: the proposed intellectual reform had a fundamentally “activist” character, in the sense of being radically opposed to determinism—it aimed to produce phenomena, not predict them. Caillois sought “a form of revolutionary thought that would not be restricted to the intellectual sphere, but would open out onto real life,”16 “a mode of thought that would impress itself upon the real and trigger a whole series of phenomena in the real” (cited in ES 131).
On the other hand, though, this was to be an orthodoxy. For “the adversary must be defeated with its own weapons: through a more rigorous coherence and a tighter systematization – through a construction that both implicates and explicates it, rather than itself being reduced and decomposed by it” (MH 215). This implied an endlessly open-ended process of integration and generalization (MH 215f). The authority of this approach would derive, not only from “the solidity of its principles [and] the rigor of their application,” but also from “the appeal of its demands” (MH 217). A militantly orthodox system of knowledge would, at once and in a reciprocal way, be “immune to all methodological criticism” and appear to human sensitivity “directly in the form of an imperative attraction that is capable of mobilizing it instantly” (MH 220). For Caillois, militant systematicity would ultimately rest on a myth of organic human unity. That is, militant orthodoxy is premised on “the presumption that there exists an ideal unitary undertaking, that would take as its task to set the whole of man’s being to work, in such a way as to make its different functions converge in a continuous process of living creation” (MH 221). The aim and orientation of the project is to verify this myth in the sense of making it true. There is thus a dialectical logic in Caillois’ notion of militant orthodoxy that would account for its difference from both archaic myth and modern science.
Caillois presented Lucifer as a mythic prototype of this sort of militant knowing, “the incarnation of a new epistemological spirit,” the figure of an “aggressive” and “conquering” vision of knowledge (Massonet 1998, 74). As the “demon or angel of lucidity,” Caillois “viewed Lucifer as the truly effective rebel” (ES 166, 144). In this way, Lucifer superseded nineteenth-century Romantic Satanism—here, Caillois made an important distinction. For Satanism was ultimately ineffectual with respect to dealing with the sources of the alienation to which it was opposed. “Satanic rebels emanating from Romanticism foresee no recourse other than ongoing profanation or an inevitable identification with other marginal or disenfranchised groups” (Richman 2003, 36). In contrast, the figure of Lucifer represented a more transgressive, albeit elitist, individualism which, based on scientific and Nietzschean self-mastery, is able to maintain the critical demands of Romantic Satanism, but with an intensified lucidity and practical consequence.
Calculating and conquering, [Lucifer] did not believe that revolt was sufficient in and of itself, nor that bursts of instinct always led to victory. His lucidity, which he viewed as his primary and most powerful weapon, gave him a coolly detached and sometimes cynical indifference, which made him an accurate accountant of reality. (Caillois (1937), cited in ES 171)
In this way, “Lucifer is entirely focused on what is possible and undertakes it without delay. He is Satan in action; an intelligent Satan; and, in a certain sense, a courageous Satan” (Caillois (1937), cited in ES 171).
This movement from the Satanic to the Luciferian “supposes a certain education of our sense of rebellion, that would take it from riotousness to a broadly imperialist attitude and would persuade it to subordinate its impulsive, unruly reactions to the necessity for discipline, calculation, and patience” (cited in Hollier 1988, 36). Caillois asserted that “the Luciferian spirit” corresponds “to the moment in which rebellion turns into a will for power and, losing none of its passionate and subversive character, attributes to intelligence, to the cynical and lucid vision of reality, a role of prime importance for the realization of its plans. It is the passage from agitation to action” (MH 199).
Key to this “passage” is the move from empty profanation to founding acts of sacralization. The latter were a preoccupation of much post-Durkheimian sociology in France, in particular for Caillois, whose main concern was with the oppressiveness and alienation wrought by social disorder. Thus, notwithstanding the Nietzschean themes, Caillois’ Luciferian hero also bears similarities to Hegelian world-historical individuals. In each case, it is a matter of establishing order in the world. A crucial difference from the Hegelian view, however, is that what Caillois describes is ultimately arbitrary—there is no sense in which the civilization to which Luciferian praxis leads is in any way part of a larger rational scheme. That is, it cannot be justified transcendentally. At any rate, such is how Caillois saw Exupérian heroism. As a literary man of action, Saint Exupéry represented the post-Satanic, mythic hero who “conquers and brings order to a domain of nascent and still ailing civilization” [conquiert [et] aménage un domaine de civilisation naissante, encore chétive] (Roger Caillois 1953, xii). As Saint Exupéry himself stated of Aéropostale: “I do not admire men for serving the postal line, but I uphold the myth of the postal line because it forms such men” (Carnets, 69). In this way, “Saint-Exupéry, as writer and aviator, best conveyed Caillois’ new cult of individual heroism” (Frank 2003, 37; cf. Roger Caillois 1946; 1947).
Merleau-Ponty clearly saw Exupérian heroism otherwise. Although in specific contexts he could valorize the Luciferian traits of cool aplomb, cerebral lucidity, and calculated practical intervention, what interested Merleau-Ponty in Saint Exupéry was the complete absence of these traits. Specifically, the fact that Saint Exupéry was so un-Luciferian that with an absolutely naïve idiosyncrasy he directly manifested the universality in terms of which political situations can be perceived as such in the first place. This is the sense in which Merleau-Ponty placed the heroic act outside politics and history. To be sure, Merleau-Ponty shared with Caillois a militant concern for bringing order out of disorder, and their projects are both normatively driven, practical, creative undertakings that ultimately rest on humanistic myth. But in Merleau-Ponty’s view, politics and history cannot be objectively manipulated from above. Rather, they concern intersubjective phenomena of human relationality and communication, to which historical productivity is internal. There is no disjunction between ends and means—sociality is not separate from its founding moments. In this way, Merleau-Ponty took more seriously Caillois’ own militant postulate of “an ideal unitary undertaking, that would take as its task to set the whole of man’s being to work, in such a way as to make its different functions converge in a continuous process of living creation” (MH 221, italics altered).
Prometheus
Caillois’ “La naissance de Lucifer” was published alongside Bataille’s “Van Gogh Prométhée” (1937; cf. 1930), and the contrast between Lucifer and Satan in terms of a constructiveness that goes beyond disruptive insubordination—a view to which Merleau-Ponty was sympathetic—reflects important disagreements between Caillois and Bataille. Because of the importance of the issue of sacrifice, consideration of Bataille’s view of Van Gogh will, oddly enough, help shed light on Merleau-Ponty’s view of Prometheus—and hence on his view of “man.”
Bataille related contemporary cases of self-mutilation, in particular that of Van Gogh, to human-divine relationships in archaic religion, which he took to be mediated by sacrificial mutilation. Such acts, he thought, represented “the desire to resemble perfectly an ideal term, generally characterized in mythology as a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs” (Bataille 1985, 66). Citing the work of Mauss and Hubert (1964), Bataille noted that unlike many acts of sacrifice performed by humans, which make use of animal avatars, “the god who sacrifices himself gives himself irrevocably. . . . The god, who is at the same time the sacrifier [sic], is one with the victim and sometimes even with the sacrificer. All the differing elements that enter into ordinary sacrifice here enter into each other and become mixed together” (Bataille 1985, 69f).
Bataille argued, however, that Mauss and Hubert wrongly assumed that this was “only possible for mythical, that is ideal, beings.” In his view, in cases of human self-mutilation there remain vestiges of this divine phenomenon. “There is . . . no reason to separate Van Gogh’s ear . . . from Prometheus’ famous liver” (Bataille 1985, 70). “If one accepts the interpretation that identifies the purveying eagle [aetos Prometheus] with the god who stole fire from the wheel of the sun, then the tearing out of the liver presents a theme in conformity with the various legends of the ‘sacrifice of the god’ ” (Bataille 1985, 70). For Bataille, Prometheus and the eagle form a single system of self-mutilation, and in this way manifest the deepest significance of the spirit of sacrifice, to wit, “throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself.” This is not fundamentally a matter of expiation or propitiation, but simply of the “radical alteration” of the person—self-mutilation epitomizes personal transformation that disrupts the social context. The claim is that this has “the power to liberate heterogeneous elements and to break the habitual homogeneity of the individual” (Bataille 1985, 70).
Thus, for Bataille, Van Gogh is an instance of the sovereign Promethean gesture of self-transcendence, the unity of sacrificer and sacrificed. His self-mutilation is interpreted by Bataille as an expression of the sacrificial impulse at the root of human religiosity in general, the aim of which is to overcome individuality by mimicking divine self-immolation. In particular, it exemplifies the “absolute dismemberment”—déchirement absolu, absolute Zerrissenheit—around which Bataille’s reading of Hegel pivots: “Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment” (see Bataille 1955).
Bataille thus rejected the Durkheimian view of sacrificial ritual as primarily reasonable and useful with respect to social order and unity, emphasizing instead its irrational, purposeless, and unassimilably destructive qualities. Whereas for Durkheim, sacrifice forged bonds of social integration, for Bataille, it was primarily a matter of disintegration through insubordination, refusal, revolt. It was a subversive, self-divinizing act whereby a disenchanted individual amputated himself from the established social order and its values (cf. Bataille 1970, 275f).
However, Bataille did think that sacrifice thus understood could also have a communally unifying function. Through this violent rupture of her empirical wholeness, the self-mutilator can also experience an ecstatic union with the whole. She can, that is, “come to embody and reflect the larger community, just as Durkheim’s person does when [she] engages in sacrificial ritual” (Stoekl 1992, 51f). For Bataille, sacrifice can generate an affective power that achieves a sort of interpenetration between self and other, such that “the different separate beings communicate, come to life by losing themselves in communication with one another” (Bataille 1973, 263; cf. 37).
Notwithstanding such gestures, Bataille’s account of sacrifice remained, for Caillois, precisely the kind of Romantic Satanism which he thought should be superseded by the Luciferian spirit (see Frank 2003, 27, 31, 167). Fundamentally, this was because Bataille had an overly deathly view of the sacred, to which Lucifer offered a more vivacious alternative. Caillois’ position “does not call for crime, transgression, or sacrifice; as the basis of sacred community, he highlights not death but a reason to live” (Frank 2003, 27). In this way, “the cerebral Luciferian self-mastery” championed by Caillois offered a radical antithesis to the “ecstatic self-sacrifice of Van Gogh’s life and work” that Bataille held up as a paradigm of Promethean self-overcoming (Frank 2003, 168).
Bataille’s view of self-mutilation clearly shows the link between Prometheanism and self-sacrifice. As from the latter, Merleau-Ponty also always disinclined from the Promethean myth,17 and thus, he did not accept Bataille’s view, the upshot of which would be to analogize the proletariat and Van Gogh in terms of the need for self-directed violence. Yet it remains the case that Bataille’s account of communication does have affinities with Merleau-Ponty’s own view. It is just that whereas Bataille invoked death simpliciter, Merleau-Ponty spoke of vital universality. This put Merleau-Ponty closer to Caillois, who also sought a more affirmative approach. But Merleau-Ponty rejected the arbitrariness of the Luciferian solution. For Merleau-Ponty, Caillois was not so fundamentally different from Bataille—he just deployed impersonally at the level of historical apriority the arbitrary violence that the latter directed internally against the habituated organism of the individual.
For Merleau-Ponty, what Caillois and Bataille had in common—and what distinguished them from the historical apraxia (so to speak) shared by Kojève and Aron—is a genuine orientation toward transformative action. But in their respective admixtures of Hegelian and Nietzschean ideas, what they powerfully illustrate are the impasses to which historical agency is led in the absence of an alternative philosophical interpretation of absolute knowledge. Merleau-Ponty’s construal of absolute knowledge as a possible “way of living” is his crucial (albeit mythic) gambit. For it supports his postulates of latent human universality and purposiveness. Whereas both Caillois and Bataille invoke a violent rupture, the one directing it outward, the other inward, Merleau-Ponty’s founding gesture is one of perceptual violence (cf. PhP xvi, 415). It amounts to the motivated decision to see heroism as an extrahistorical manifestation of human productivity, and to make this the background of historical perception, against which vital communication can become the means and end of historical agency.
Marxism
Bataille was neither a principal interlocutor of Merleau-Ponty, nor a key player in the political debates in which Merleau-Ponty was engaged. But he did give the clearest expression of the existential implications of the valorization of the Promethean myth. The significance of this lies in the fact that Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Prometheus was surely also—and, indeed, primarily—an allusion to classical Marxism. It is well-known that Marx himself admired Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, and that he regarded Prometheus as a revolutionary figure of Greek mythology, appealing to him as a symbol of human divinity and self-emancipation: “Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar” (Marx 1975a, 31). And this sentiment was reflected by many Marxists in the postwar French context, including Hervé (1948, 37).
It is often raised as a criticism of Marxism that it indulges in an overly strong motif of Promethean self-divinization in ways which could, in principle, be avoided (e.g. Kolakowski 1978, 412ff). As Wessell argued, however, beyond being a “mythopoetic symbol in Marx’s thinking,” the “salvational archetype” of Prometheus actually provides the “mythico-ontological root metaphor” for historical materialism. “The ‘myth’ of the fall, suffering, and ultimate self-redemption of Prometheus constitutes the dramatic model underlying and informing Marx’s Marxism” (Wessell 1984, 62ff; cf. 22, 38f, 189). That is, this myth plays a crucial transcendental role by structuring the antepredicative background of Marxism’s historical perception. In particular, owing to its dual role in the soteriological myth as Prometheus both bound and unbound, the proletariat in this view comes to embody “an absolute agonal tension”—the “ontological form of the proletariat is to be a self-abolishing tension” (Wessell 1984, 187).
For Merleau-Ponty, such sacrificial implications represented the main problem with classical Marxism—not that it was based on myth, but that it was based on the wrong myth. Promethean assumptions are what stand behind the problem discussed earlier, that of seeing the revolutionary moment as the self-annihilation of the proletariat. It was precisely to avoid this sort of lethal rupture that Merleau-Ponty sought to ground a commitment to Marxism in the incarnational myth attested to by the universal purposiveness evinced by the contemporary hero. Presupposing the agonistic drama of the proletariat would not only lead to distorted practical strategies, but it would also impose an ideological structure that conceals rather than reveals genuine political phenomena—most crucially, those of the possible emergence of genuine agencies of universality, and other concrete manifestations of the proletariat.
For Merleau-Ponty, the aim of a neo-Marxist hermeneutics would be to “decipher facts, discover in them a common meaning, and thereby grasp a leading thread which, without obviating the need to analyze each period on its own terms, allows us to discern an orientation of events.” Far from any utopianism or dogmatic philosophy of history, it would aim “to provide a perception of history which would continuously bring to appearance the lines of force and vectors of the present” (HT 104f/98). Merleau-Ponty’s incarnational humanist myth was meant to provide the transcendental horizons for this perception. What is needed is to learn to see the world anew. Generalizing from production to productivity, Merleau-Ponty thus sought to reform Marxism by reconfiguring the perceptual field as the human world that is to be made, that is in the process of being made, knowing full well that this means taking a new perceptual background on faith. “To perceive is to engage in a single stroke a whole future of experiences in a present that never strictly guarantees it—it is to believe in a world” (PhP 343f). The singular human world as an unfinished historical project is the object of this militant Weltglaube—faith in the possibility of the complete realization of which is no arbitrary dream to the exact extent to which Exupérian heroism is accepted as a limit form of être-au-monde that evinces the living presence of a universal purposiveness.
Response to Merleau-Ponty’s “Hero”
Merleau-Ponty’s essay on heroism, “Man, the Hero,” and particularly, the central significance he accorded in that essay to Saint Exupéry in preference to recognizably communist heroes, met with a hostile reaction from the readership of action (Blanc-Dufour et al. 1946).18 Indeed, this reaction was all but prefigured in the editorial preface that preceded the essay itself (see note 3). It is difficult to know the extent to which (if at all) this surprised Merleau-Ponty. In any event, his attempt to define “the existential attitude” specifically failed to draw Hervé any closer to existentialism. A fortnight later, Hervé responded quite harshly to the claims Merleau-Ponty had made in “Pour la vérité” (SNS 271–303/153–71), originally published in the previous issue of Les temps modernes (January 1946), to the effect that classical Marxism—and in particular, the politics of action—“no longer has a grip on the facts” (SNS 299/169). Significantly, in a way reminiscent of Maritain’s criticism of Saint Exupéry, Hervé accused Merleau-Ponty of being disengaged and noncommittal, a “solitary spectator” [spectateur solitaire] hovering indecisively “above the fray” [au-dessus de la mêlée] (Hervé 1946, 3).
And Hervé did not do so without grounds. Consider how Merleau-Ponty expressed his approach to political phenomena at the time: “It is up to us to observe the world during these years when it begins to breathe again. . . . If the class struggle once again becomes the motivating force of history and, definitely, if the alternative of socialism or chaos becomes clearer, then it is up to us to choose a proletarian socialism” (SNS 218/124, emphasis added). And even more tellingly, Merleau-Ponty admitted that “to speak of humanism without being on the side of ‘humanist socialism’ in the Anglo-American way, to ‘understand’ the Communists without being a Communist, is to set oneself very high [se placer bien haut], at any rate, above the fray [au-dessus de la mêlée]” (HT 203/185f).
Is this not plainly inconsistent with the stance of militant engagement to which Merleau-Ponty was ostensibly committed? Does Phenomenology of Perception end on a note of Exupérian high-altitude thinking because such was in fact Merleau-Ponty’s own true standpoint? It can certainly appear that way. Thus, expressing what many Communist critics thought of Merleau-Ponty’s “policy of waiting [politique d’attente], without illusion” (SNS 303/171), or attentisme, Hervé argued that “the attitude of a solitary, spectative consciousness that would consist in placing itself outside the struggle [se mettre hors du jeu], in order to avoid any concession to tactics, is a pathetic utopia.” Contrary to Merleau-Ponty’s own express aim, Hervé regarded his position as “less a matter of political thinking than of a fascination exerted by the gestures and language of a bygone era” (Hervé 1946, 3).
In theoretical terms, then, Hervé’s criticism effectively placed Merleau-Ponty in the same boat as Saint Exupéry. Politically and philosophically, this is a damning indictment—but is it sound? In order to assess it, let us briefly take stock of the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Saint Exupéry in terms of some of the key points of convergence and divergence between them. As we shall see, although the latter plays an important role in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, it is not the case that this is based in any substantive concordance.
Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty
Saint Exupéry was at best a philosophical dilettante. As Beauvoir put it, he “talks drivel when he’s thinking abstractly and in general” (Beauvoir 1992, 175). Even Colin Smith, who dedicated the final chapter of his 1964 book on contemporary French philosophy to him, admitted that Saint Exupéry’s reputation was not based on the philosophical value of his work, and that in this regard, he did have “a tendency to say things of incredible inanity” (C. Smith 1964, 243). Nonetheless, there are some significant common themes that join the Weltanschauungen of Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty (although many of these themes are by no means unique to either of them). It is against this background that their differences can be most clearly understood.
An inventory of the key commonalities between Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty would include the following considerations:
1. Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty were both critical of the cultural condition of capitalist society in the interwar period, in particular of secular humanism as an outgrowth of abstract rationalism and liberal individualism. Although Merleau-Ponty did not directly resort to the more disparaging metaphors—“termites,” “cattle,” “robots” —through which Saint Exupéry expressed himself, he did speak in like terms of a degenerate form of human animality that would signify the (not irrevocable) loss of the living capacity of historical agency. This would be a pathological reversion to an ahistorical unconsciousness of death consequent to the stabilization—through the imposition of tyrannical oppression or traumatic repression—of the restless negativity, the Unruhe, definitive of human existence (SNS 114/66).19 To the extent that he thought people needed to be reawakened to their own historicity, and to perceive the world accordingly, Merleau-Ponty’s view tended in the same direction as that of Saint Exupéry.
In the context of Cartesianism, animals and robots are not so far apart. Specifically, it was to the general the idea of mechanism—the hegemony of the “machine-man” and the alienated and alienating “machine-society” based upon it (see Harrington 1996, xvi–xvii, 19ff)—that Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty were opposed.20 Against this, they both envisioned an organically holistic sort of sociality as a way to recover universality and therewith intersubjective relations that would be more “authentic.”21 Although Saint Exupéry tended to put this in terms of “love,” whereas Merleau-Ponty preferred idioms such as that of “communication” and “reconciliation,” their views do not differ fundamentally. At root, both are concerned with the realization of human bonds [liens] between persons. As Barral put it in a discussion of Merleau-Ponty,
“[l]ove is the growth of two consciousnesses building together a new reality, a new world” (1993, 165).22
2. Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty both advocated a new humanism that aimed to spiritualize—or re-enchant—human coexistence on the basis of a post-Christian myth of “man” (or “Man”). Although both purported to go beyond Christianity, in each case, the project was informed in a profound way by the Christian idea of the God-man, the Word become Flesh. Prioritizing active engagement, both held that universality was to be attained through humanity’s self-creation or autonomous self-realization. And, construing it against the backdrop of nature’s cosmic indifference, both saw this self-realization as a matter of self-overcoming that entailed a certain staking of one’s life, a mortal suspension of the particularities of one’s given empirical individuality. Although this is more spectacular in the case of Saint Exupéry, in each case, there is a crucial, if paradoxical, disengagement implied at the heart of this sort of self-transformative engagement. Exupérian aerial takeoff [envol] is in this way nontrivially analogous to the general idea of a phenomenological reduction, “the universal meditation which cuts the philosopher off from his nation, his friendships, his prejudices, his empirical being, in short, from the world, and which seems to leave him in complete isolation” (PhP 414). Either way, such separation and departure from the sens of rational intellect is to be redeemed through reintegration into the context of an “expanded reason” (SNS 109/63; cf. PhP xiii).23 As one of the first reviewers of Terre des hommes disapprovingly recognized from a reactionary perspective: “this World of Men is a World of the Hero, but of the Hero alone; despite the common dangers and the camaraderie, it is a World of Solitude” (Brasillach 1971, 67f, italics removed; cf. EG 585).24 However, he also noted that “this solitude has a slightly barbaric greatness [a sa grandeur un peu barbare] that a healthy [saine] philosophy will endeavor to preserve intact [ne pas mutiler] and to incorporate into a vaster and purer reason” (Brasillach 1971, 67f). (Needless to say, Brasillach did not think that Pilote de guerre moved in this direction!)
3. Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty both linked this expanded reason with a new vision, a new way of seeing the world—“a mode of perception that is at once more intimate and broader” than analytical understanding, a new “attitude of consciousness that reaches beings in their existential and affective context” (Major 1968, 63, 90). The high-altitude view of the Exupérian pilot is analogous to that of the Merleau-Pontian phenomenologist, and this precisely in terms of the practice of survoler. For Merleau-Ponty, to perceive is fundamentally to perform a Gestalt operation of picking out a figure against a given background. Inasmuch as perceptual acuity is a function of the breadth and inclusiveness of the relevant background, this operation implies a certain distance and leeway, which can be described as the power to survoler lacked by Schn. Humanity mechanically reduced to a “machine for swinging a sledgehammer or a pickaxe” (TH 211), as Saint Exupéry put it, is in a certain way epitomized by the pathological Schn. Or at least this is the case in Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of Schn., where the patient’s symptoms not only corroborate the mechanistic threat posited by the spiritual-holistic critique,25 “but also the presumption that holistic insight into the essence of experience is itself the highest mental faculty of man” (Goldenberg 2003, 298). On this basis, both Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty keenly claimed to discern the germs of universality in the smallest concrete phenomena—in “the least perception, the slightest movement of the heart, the smallest action” [la moindre perception, le moindre mouvement du cœur, la moindre action] (SNS 121/70) or “the simplest dialogue” (HT 206/189). Like Saint Exupéry’s smiling over a bummed cigarette with Spanish anarchists, the riverside drink, or the mere act of flying, such an awareness embraces the human world in its contrast with nature—it “contains indivisibly all the order and disorder of the world” (HT 206/189). “In a completely explicated human perception we would find all the originalities of human life” (PrP 99/40).
4. Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty were both anti-ideologues, and were reticent about taking sides in ideological disputes, which they tended to regard as superficial—Humanism and Terror met a similar fate as Pilote de guerre, at least among French émigrés, in that it was denounced from all sides (Campbell 1947, 49ff; Cooper 1979, 77ff; Poster 1975, 157). Both strove to surmount ideological disagreement, and the phenomena of “multiple solipsism” in general, through the disclosure, in the present, of a common universal terrain and a commitment to its realization. The self-decentering occasioned by mortal risk that we saw emphasized by Merleau-Ponty is also for Saint Exupéry a key means of this disclosure. “We make our way for years side by side, each enclosed in his own silence, or else exchanging words that convey nothing. But at the moment of danger, then we stand shoulder to shoulder. We discover that we belong to the same community. We are broadened by the discovery of other consciousnesses. We look at each other and smile” (TH 42; cf. PhP 417). However syrupy this may seem in the context of Saint Exupéry’s prose, it is precisely in the self-evidence betokened by such a “smile” that Merleau-Ponty located the fulgurant “glory” of successful dialogue and communication, that which can be taken as an indication of “the community of fate [la communauté du sort] among men,” and of the “agreement” [accord] and commonality that is more essential than even biology (SNS 171/98).
Ultimately, what the respective projects of both Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty aimed to do was to participate in giving meaning and direction—sens—to human life by disclosing its transcendental, universal basis. For both, there is a certain “love of life” which alone can lead to a genuine “life of love”.
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These convergences, however, by no means exhaust the relationship between Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty. If we examine the nature and practical consequences of their respective humanisms more closely, then we discover the following countervailing considerations:
1. While Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty can be seen as agreeing that modern, rational humanism was problematic, and that this was tied to its vitiation of Christian themes of egalitarian community and, more generally, its state of spiritual disenchantment, their views of this situation differed significantly. We can pose this in terms of the modern ideals of equality, freedom, and fraternity. At least as they are conventionally understood, Saint Exupéry regarded these ideals as fundamentally incompossible. “These words [liberté, egalité, fraternité] once comprised a fertile seed. The tree grew, but it died. . . . We need a new seed” (EG 184). He saw freedom in its modern guise of individual autonomy as the negation of communitarian equality, and posed the fraternity symbolized in Man as the negation of that negation. Taking Aéropostale as an organizational paradigm for the communal reconciliation of personal fulfillment with societal needs, Saint Exupéry effectively promoted a conservative reprise of the organically hierarchical social order of pastoral France as a way to recast freedom and equality. “I believe,” he said in the Credo of Pilote de guerre, “that the primacy of Man founds the only meaningful Equality and Freedom” (PG 241). This view implies a secularization of traditional religious community that re-situates it cosmically, thereby refounding it on its own dynamic activity. But this is hierarchical and thus historically retrograde in the sense that it views modern individual autonomy as a deviant development in need of retraction. “By assigning to each a well-defined place in the order of human relations, the hierarchy confers on the individual a unique and irreplaceable character that attributes an inestimable value to him” (Ouellet 1971, 97). Even if it is entirely this-worldly, the Exupérian social ideal remains, if not an expression of antimodern reaction, then at the very least an exceedingly illiberal attitude.
Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, regarded the apparent incompossibility of the ideals of equality, freedom, and fraternity as an indication that at the social level, they remained abstract. The task was to make them concrete by “realizing” them, in particular, by further developing, not sacrificing, freedom. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty did not think that modernity was fully unfolded, or at any rate that its anomies were irredeemable. Focusing on the intersubjective dynamics of historical becoming, he held that the ostensible ideals of modern society, as lived out in interpersonal relations, were not only not fundamentally incompatible, but that they themselves portended the positive supersession of their apparent incompossibility. Merleau-Ponty resisted the essentialization and historical stasis (or even unbecoming) entailed by the encapsulation of the truth of humanity as “Man.” Whereas Saint Exupéry in effect hypostatized the latter as a truth transcendent to human lived reality—“the Man of my civilization is not defined on the basis of men. Rather, it is men that are defined through it” (PG 219)—Merleau-Ponty let human existence speak for itself. This was a leitmotif of his phenomenology that he drew from Husserl: “it is a matter of leading experience that is still silent to the pure expression of its own meaning.”26 For Merleau-Ponty, the fulguration of evidentiary “glory” is not simply a prefigurative glimpse of the achieved universality of natural fraternity. More importantly, it is an indication of human productivity in action—it is the effervescence, not of the transcendence of contradictions, but of the creative confluence of them as contradictions. The difference between Exupérian “Man” and Merleau-Pontian “man” is thus the difference between a “top-down” approach to the phenomena of human coexistence, and one that proceeds “from below” ’ (von unten, as Husserl would say). The latter is, at least in theory, more amenable to concrete political analysis—in particular, to the task of discriminating between the phenomena of the genuinely progressive movement of history and those of chaos and repression. It can have this epistemic advantage because, as an implementation of Lukácsian totality, its survolant perspective remains anchored to the standpoint of the proletariat.
2. Notwithstanding the fact that both Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty strove to surmount ideological disagreement, there is the patent difference that Saint Exupéry did so by effectively eschewing altogether that which Merleau-Ponty explicitly sought to cultivate, namely, political thinking. Saint Exupéry aspired to have “no political agenda whatsoever” (Schiff 1994, 350). Although in the mid-1930s he travelled as a correspondent for Paris-Soir in the USSR (see SV 35–79), before going to Spain, he resisted taking sides on the basic political questions of the day.27 He “neither advocated nor denounced” (Schiff 1994, 230), upholding instead the sovereignty of Man through an equivocal mixture of aristocratic individualism and nostalgia for authority. This had certain affinities with reactionary antimodernism. In fact, rather than for de Gaulle, Saint Exupéry’s stated neutrality during the war did harbor much greater sympathies for Pétain, whom he did not publicly criticize and whom he tended to defend from disparagement. But as suggested by Maritain’s critique, even the neutrality of Pilote de guerre could not be easily justified politically. Given the conditions of occupation in terms of despoliation and persecution at the time of publication, “it hardly helps to be told that ‘le culte de l’Universel exalte et noue les richesses particulières’ . . . or that the ‘primacy of Man’ is the only proper foundation for liberty and equality. . . . Confronted with the cruel realities of 1942, these vague gestures in the direction of spirituality strike one as the last remnants of an archaic and discredited rhetoric” (John 1985, 103f, citing PG 241).
The apolitical “neutrality” of Saint Exupéry’s thought expresses his view that within the context of modernism, all sides are in the wrong. “Saint-Exupéry rejects fascism and communism, he rebuffs capitalism and socialism equally. He withdraws from or is frightened by the modern world, its termite mounds, its crowds, its mass production. . . . He dreads democracy, unable to find in it the source of legitimate power” (d’Astier de la Vigerie 1971, 109). What ultimately underwrote his attempt to rise above political divisions was his antipathy to what he constructed as a vaguely defined, indiscriminate totalitarianism. “I hate this age, where, under a universal totalitarianism, people become docile, polite, and placid cattle” (SV 229, emphasis added). Saint-Exupéry turned to Man because, in short, he had “no faith in man” (d’Astier de la Vigerie 1971, 109).
However vaguely defined that view might be, though, it clearly placed Saint Exupéry quite far from Merleau-Ponty. For as we saw above, at around the same time as Saint Exupéry was composing Pilote de guerre, Merleau-Ponty argued that certain aspects of totalitarian thinking had to be appropriated for victory, both in the war and more generally for democracy. His thought at the time was quite thoroughly imbued with holism, and so his embrace of Marxism was antipodal to Saint Exupéry’s blunt rejection of it: “what I hate about Marxism is the totalitarianism to which it leads” (EG 380; cf. SV 229).28
This statement may, however, be something of an exaggeration. For in another posthumously published text (which, appearing in 1981, was not something to which Merleau-Ponty could have had access), Saint Exupéry tempered his opposition to Marxism somewhat. He did so by distinguishing between the method of Marxism and its specific empirical claims, and by noting that the former can retain its value even if the latter are mistaken or outdated. “The only mistake of the Marxists is to rely on a fixed bible of truths set forth by Marx, the currency of which, like that of all truths, is obviously momentary – instead of nourishing it by recreating these truths in accordance with the evolution of this society using the method which itself can always remain valid” (MAM 12). Such sentiments nearly paraphrase Lukács! What Saint Exupéry objected to in general was any sort of social science that claimed strong predictive power (cf. Carnets 173f). In Saint Exupéry’s view, as carried out by most if not all of those who professed it, Marxism seemed to be especially guilty of this sort of sophism, in that it painted a very specific picture of the future. Against this, Saint Exupéry argued that “I can claim only one thing, and that is to think the world of today. . . . It is absolutely vain to claim that [social-scientific thinking] enables one to think the world of tomorrow” (MAM 19f). In methodological terms, “Marxism itself is opposed to finalism” (Carnets 174), and so, in Saint Exupéry’s estimation, “Marxism as it is understood by the Marxists is profoundly anti-Marxist” (MAM 20).
As far as it goes, this is surprisingly consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s own view, which as we have seen also emphasized the unthinkability of the future as a key tenet of Marx’s thought (EP 41/50f). “One can only validly think what one has in some way lived, the rest being nothing but imagination” (HT 136/127). Any pretension to being able to think the future would subvert Marx’s central intuition that “historical meaning is immanent in the interhuman event, and is no less fragile” (EP 42/51). Marxism properly dwells in the present, without reliance upon representations of a transcendent future. For “to live and die for a future projected by the will, rather than live and act in the present, is precisely what Marxists have always considered utopianism” (HT 85f/80).
But the import of this particular concurrence does not go very far. It certainly did not alter Saint Exupéry’s basic criticism of Marxism, a view which constituted, for him, sufficient grounds to reject it, namely, that Marxism crudely reduced human beings to producers and consumers. More importantly, though, there is at best only a verbal agreement between Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty concerning the need to focus attention on the present. The reason why Saint Exupéry thought that Marxism effected that illicit reduction, why he found it “absolutely impossible to understand what the historical mission of the proletariat could mean” (MAM 18; cf. Carnets, 73, 103, 173ff), and more generally, why the present as he saw it was populated by cattle, termites, robots, etc. is that he did not have a view of the present in its historical depth—he did not see what Merleau-Ponty called the “living present” (PhP 384, 495).29 It is true to say that “there is in Saint-Exupéry an unshakeable refusal to go beyond immediate existence” (Major 1968, 222). But Saint Exupéry uncritically accepted as given the fragmentation that characterized the surface of modern social phenomena, and contrasted this with the ideal of Man. Even granting that he could see bonds of love when they emerged against this backdrop, he was blind to their emergence itself. That is, his purview occluded the ambiguous “lines of force and vectors” (HT 104f/98) which in the present make it such that the future, while nowise determined, “is not any empty zone in which we can construct unmotivated projects,” but rather that “it is sketched [il se dessine] before us like the end of the day underway—and this outline [dessin] is ourselves” (HT 102/95, emphasis added). For Merleau-Ponty, the sense in which the proletariat could be said to have an historical mission is that universal human recognition is delineated by its spontaneous intercorporeal existence in the given historical constellation of forces and vectors, such that the realization of that recognition is achieved through the “prolongation and fulfillment” of that existence (HT 120, 125f/111, 116f).
3. In this way, the Marxism proposed by Merleau-Ponty aimed to offer a “perception of history” through which an individual could relearn to see the world in a truer way in terms of its historical emergence (HT 117/98). It was thus that Merleau-Ponty sought to help “give” meaning (sens) to human life. As at the level of intentional consciousness, it is not a simple matter of Sinn-Gebung. Sens is already there—indeed, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that “we are present [assistons] at every moment” at its emergence (PhP xvi)—it is just matter of rendering it visible and bringing it to expression. The fundamental problem of modern capitalist society was systemic bodily repression that resulted in a reified misperception of the world—a structurally endemic case of “apperceptive historical agnosia,” if I may put it that way—the remedy for which lay in a new transcendental aesthetic that would reaffirm the full dimensionality of the field of human historical experience in its totality.
Whereas Merleau-Ponty wanted in this way to be something of a therapist who might help others to see and grasp actual historical meaning, Saint Exupéry set himself up as more of an inspiring preacher, a giver of meaning to those without. As Jean-Louis Major contrasted Saint Exupéry to Merleau-Ponty, “it is less a matter of describing perception than of proposing a more human mode of knowledge—his [Saint Exupéry’s] intention is consequently of the ethical order” (Major 1968, 71 n23). However, inasmuch as Merleau-Ponty did not simply describe perception, and since it is hardly the case that his position was devoid of ethical significance, it would be more accurate to say that Saint Exupéry’s position was strictly ethical, that is, a utopian moralism. Which is to say that in an important sense, his account lacks motivation, and that its prescriptions are, at root, arbitrary. In the context of senseless disorder, this can be a matter of the instauration of an ethical order, the heroic imposition of normative bearings for action where there are none—a kind of foundational Sinn-Gebung. As we saw above, such was Caillois’ view, although he was not alone in regarding Saint Exupéry along the Luciferian lines of “a creator, a builder, a maker of laws” [un réalisateur, un bâtisseur, un faiseur des lois] (Simon 1950, 129). There is an element of secular messianism in such heroism—precisely what Merleau-Ponty sought to avoid in arguing that it was not for the introduction of new values that social transformation was necessary. As he put it, it was just that the consequences of messianic incarnation still needed to be fully worked out (cf. SNS 313/176), and that the completion of that incarnational project is the historical mission of the proletariat. In contrast, instaurational acts of signification are nowise predelineated, and there can be no discursive account of their historical genesis, thus no rational justification. This is the sense in which “[t]he work of Saint-Exupéry is not an argument. It is an example. It is made up of events which are recounted to inspire, not to persuade” (Knight 1957, 181). This would be a kind of pure action outside of truth. “Yesterday’s truth is dead, and that of tomorrow has yet to be built” [La vérité d’hier est morte, celle de demain est encore à bâtir] (EG 341). The problem is that this implies sacrificial rupture inexorably.
For Merleau-Ponty, however, even this position of sovereignty is regulated by the primordial truth of the world and of our “participation” in it. “ ‘Being-in-the-truth’
[« être-à-la-vérité »] is indistinguishable from être-au-monde” (PhP 452). Provided we are situated within the world in its historical totality, “we are in the truth” (PhP xi), “we are true through and through [de part en part]” (PhP 520). Through exploration of the “living present,” we can discover the irrepressible core of history’s existential meaning, the existential project of which we are a part. And this—contrary to the eternalness of Exupérian Man and to Saint Exupéry’s hatred of “this age”—can “make us love our time” (HT 206/189).
Strategic detachment
In turning back to consider Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with Hervé, we should note that an important extension of what Merleau-Ponty meant by “exchange” was his idealization of a Marxist political party. According to this view, the Party is the site of intersubjective exchange in the form of “a vital communication between individual judgment and historical reality” (SNS 320/180). Its democratic-centralist organization would serve the epistemic function of generating optimal historical perceptions of the present and the soundest political judgments of the reflecting kind. That is, its intersubjective structure would compensate for the absence of absolute criteria, and would allow individuals to participate collectively in history on the larger stage. In this way, the Party could be seen as playing a therapeutic role. Not that Merleau-Ponty saw the PCF as instantiating this ideal.
Commenting on Hervé in Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty argued that his Communist interlocutor was incapable of maintaining the dialectical tension between the party and the class it claimed to represent, and that, granting priority to the former, he effectively assumed “the standpoint of a God who comprehends Universal History” (HT 155/143f). This is precisely one of the forms of non-political thinking that Merleau-Ponty sought to overcome, for it is ultimately inconsistent with what it means to be a living human being. As Merleau-Ponty insisted, a key tenet of Marxism is that history is always open and that we cannot think the future. To pretend to do so would subvert Marx’s central intuition concerning historical meaning, and thus deny “the human meaning and raison d’être of communism,” which is for humanity democratically “to take their history into their own hands” (HT 158/147).
This is why Merleau-Ponty took up the young Marx’s claim against Hegel about the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy involving its dialectical transcendence [Aufhebung] along with that of the proletariat (Marx 1975b, 187), and why he interpreted this in terms of its ceasing to be “separate” (rather than being done away with altogether). As Merleau-Ponty put it: if, unlike Hervé, for example, the philosopher “forsakes the illusion of contemplating the totality of completed [italics added] history and feels caught up in it like all other men and confronted by a future to be made, then philosophy realizes itself by doing away with itself as separate philosophy.” (Although it might appear that Merleau-Ponty is here stating a sufficient condition of the realization of philosophy, it should actually be seen as a necessary condition.) “This concrete thinking, which Marx calls ‘critique’ to distinguish it from speculative philosophy, is what others”—namely, Merleau-Ponty—“propound under the name existential philosophy” (SNS 236f/133). Although Marx had centered this “critique” on the proletariat understood in terms of a certain relation to the means of production, Merleau-Ponty saw that this view needed to be contemporized by means of existential phenomenology. But he aimed to do this, if not on the same grounds, then certainly in the same spirit—the idea is that rationality is no longer taken as deriving from “the concept,” but rather from “the heart of interhuman praxis” (EP 42/51).
It is thus ironic that Hervé accused Merleau-Ponty of being enthralled by “the gestures and language of a bygone era” (Hervé 1946, 3), for example, the notion of “patrie,” or Stendhal’s idea of “sincerity” (cf. SNS 271/153). For it was precisely Merleau-Ponty’s point that contemporary debates were “still using the political vocabulary of the nineteenth century” (SNS 284/160), in particular, that Marxists still tended to deny the apparent inactuality of the proletariat qua universal class and instead accept uncritically the classical conception of it as an article of faith. Hence, they were the utopians, even by their own standards. For “to live and die for a future projected by desire rather than live and act in the present is precisely what Marxists have always considered utopianism” (HT 85f/80). Not that Merleau-Ponty preferred some sort of acquiescent Hegelianism. But true to the idea of Lukács, he did think that one could follow the “orthodox” spirit of Marx without any specific doctrinal commitment.
Perhaps Hervé failed to see that Merleau-Ponty had not invoked the idea of Stendhalian “sincerity” in order to resuscitate and endorse it. Rather, it was to cast into relief the fact that such a standpoint was, as a matter of fact, no longer a real possibility, and that Marxists themselves could not surreptitiously avail themselves of anything analogous. Merleau-Ponty’s point was that “we are all knaves [coquins] in Stendhal’s sense” (SNS 273/154, italics added). By this, he meant that “in the absence of a political thinking that would be capable both of taking in all truths and of taking a stand in the real,” all political forces in France at the time were playing a “double game” that would run afoul of nineteenth-century republican sincerity. But his argument was that the ubiquitous political duplicity and “knavery” was grounded in the “vital situation” of the world (SNS 287/162). Our time was “an ambiguous moment in history” (SNS 285/160), and this was not a salutary ambiguity. For it implied that “we are not in the truth” (cf. PhP xi), thereby portending the unavoidability of playing a double game. In such conditions, could there be an alternative? Merleau-Ponty thought so, and this is why he placed himself au-dessus de la mêlée. “In reality, it is simply a refusal to commit oneself [s’engager] within confusion and outside of the truth” (HT 203/185f, italics added). In these conditions, he thought that the role of intellectuals like himself was
to clarify the ideological situation, to underline, beyond the paradoxes and contingencies of contemporary history, the true terms of the human problem, to recall Marxists to their humanist inspiration, to remind the democracies of their fundamental hypocrisy, and to keep intact against propaganda the chances that history may still have of becoming clear once again. (HT 196/179)
We must preserve liberty while waiting for a fresh historical impulse which may allow us to engage it in a popular movement without ambiguity. (HT xix/xxiii)
The philosophical task in this situation was “to define a practical attitude of comprehension,” a “political consciousness” that would be commensurate with the central intuition of Marxism (HT 159f/148). For Merleau-Ponty, this was precisely the “existential attitude” he sought to define in his essay on heroism. Although his original intervention concerning heroism in action may not have had the immediate political effects he wanted, it is clear, given the pride of place that he later accorded it in Sense and Non-Sense (at a time when Saint Exupéry’s reputation was starting to decline),30 this response did not diminish Merleau-Ponty’s own estimation of the views he expressed therein concerning the “practical attitude of comprehension” that he made central to his existential-phenomenological project.
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We are potentially offered an intriguing elaboration of this “attitude” from an unexpected source, namely, English poet Stephen Spender. Merleau-Ponty and Spender became friends at (if not before) the first Rencontres Internationales in Geneva in September 1946, largely on the basis of their broadly congruent political sympathies.31 They surely met again over the years,32 but there is little record of their relationship. Interestingly, however, “One More New Botched Beginning,” one of Spender’s most important poems (Leeming 1999, 210), which recalls the memory of various friends, includes a touching recollection of Merleau-Ponty in its opening stanza.33
The source of the elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s position au-dessus de la mêlée comes from a piece of prose by Spender that appeared in translation in Les temps modernes in October 1946 (Spender 1946b).34 As the managing and political editor of Les temps modernes, Merleau-Ponty may have arranged for this piece at the Rencontres Internationales, or possibly during an earlier visit by Spender to France (cf. Spender 1946a). Given what we have seen regarding the controversy, both philosophical and political, over Merleau-Ponty’s use of Saint Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre, one cannot fail to be struck by the extraordinary pertinence of this work by Spender, beginning with its title: “Pensées dans un avion au-dessus de l’Europe” [“Thoughts in an Airplane over Europe”]. It seems scarcely conceivable that there was not some sort of deliberate effort on the part of Merleau-Ponty to have Spender’s piece make a critical, nondogmatic leftist contribution to debates concerning “high-altitude” political thinking. There is no basis on which to claim that Merleau-Ponty endorsed everything that Spender had to say. But the main lines of his reasoning do have clear counterparts in Merleau-Ponty’s own work, and so, Spender’s essay may be cautiously read as an elaboration of certain basic elements of Merleau-Ponty’s own thought, at least by way of expressing a divergence from Saint Exupéry.
Flying over France, Spender’s basic observation concerning contemporary society echoed Merleau-Ponty’s claim about the situation of the world itself being one of duplicity: “whatever you do is wrong . . . because you are either involved in the systems of the modern societies, or you are not involved in them” (Spender 1946b, 66). Inside or outside, one cannot do right. “Whatever you do, it is impossible for you, in the age in which you live, to be either right or wrong. Nevertheless, you must now choose. It is no longer possible to evade choice” (Spender 1946b, 76). What to do? What can one do? The response Spender gave is meant to be connected with an aerial perspective. “You can enlarge your consciousness to include humanity. . . . The world, aware of itself as a single vibrating existence in which every part acts on every other part at the same moment, is unable to integrate such an awareness into the idea of a single personality.” How to achieve such an integration? “By enlarging your personality [in such a way as] to understand the nature of all the different parts. By creating within yourself the personality of this divided humanity. By humanizing this inhuman humanity” (Spender 1946b, 77).
However vague this perspective may have been, it did express Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “accepting all truths and taking a stand in reality.” What Spender was calling for was the recognition of all political realities without overlooking the concrete effects. That is, the gaining of as complete a view as possible of the present situation. What is needed is “an internationalism of those who care for civilization, who believe in charity and have a passion for humanity” (Spender 1946c, 998).
There are certainly shades of Saint Exupéry in this, at least inasmuch as it may be “the distinctive trait of humanism to encompass all things from a certain altitude that enlarges the field of its vision and expands its outlook” (Gascht 1947, 39). But there is a critical difference. As Spender described it, the shadow of the airplane he was in, which was separate throughout the flight, “merged into the substance of the airplane” upon landing (Spender 1946b, 78). More than anything else, this is the crucial moment that is missing from Saint Exupéry, who always held that “landing is disappointing” [l’atterrissage est décevant] (SV 21). At least from a Merleau-Pontian perspective, the view offered by Spender is that of the place of philosophy in historical praxis—an initial moment of detachment in which the philosopher withdraws ascensionally in order to gain a view of the totality, followed by a moment in which this separation is overcome through the philosopher’s successful descent and re-integration. As Merleau-Ponty himself later observed, “at the conclusion of a reflection which at first isolates him, the philosopher, in order to experience more fully the ties of truth which bind him to the world and history, finds neither the depth of himself nor absolute knowledge, but a renewed image of the world and of himself placed within it among others” (EP 51/63).
Merleau-Ponty’s Marxist commitment to the category of totality clearly implies some positive sense of “la pensée de survol.”35 The idea is that precisely in order to offer, instead of a “speculative solution,” a “more acute consciousness of on-going experience” (NI 9 [21]), philosophy must premise itself on an apprehension of the movement of history as a whole as the touchstone of truth. Interestingly, inasmuch as it is geared to the proletariat, this perspective goes further—or, if you prefer, higher—than Saint Exupéry, and yet, it is in virtue of this that Merleau-Ponty could—at least in principle—reintegrate on the ground. It is on this basis that we might say of Saint Exupéry that he did not truly perceive, that his perception was repressed, and hence why he expressed such abhorrence at the world around him. His cosmic humanism was not based on perceptual contact with the living present, and therefore remained a solitary dream—recall how Pilote de guerre opens: “Sans doute je rêve.” Lacking any perceptual grip on the world, Saint Exupéry’s experience was devoid of living meaning. Over Arras, he may have achieved “absolute contact” with himself as he dreamt of his childhood home and the security offered by his governess. But the epistemic significance of his experience of human relationality was not for him. Rather, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it is for us [für uns]. Not that this implies a cognitive achievement on our part. As in Hegel’s work,36 the climax of Phenomenology of Perception takes the form of an image that serves to secure the standpoint of cognition—in this case, that of a virtually “complete” phenomenological reduction, the complete repressive coincidence of self with habituated organism, and yet this in a way that merges with history. This is what is crucial. For if transcendental philosophy is to be realized as Merleau-Ponty intended—namely, integrated with “the very phenomenon of the real” (SC 241/224)—and if the phenomenon of the real is historical, then it must be the case that the productivity operatively presupposed by transcendental philosophy belongs essentially to historical truth. In other words, if truth is historical and (contra Hegel) absolute self-consciousness impossible, then the realization of philosophy will occur, if at all, through the practical generation of rationality. The core meaning of “proletariat” for Merleau-Ponty is the collective embodiment of this generative agency, which in this way is rationality incarnate. The question of the realization of philosophy is thus tied to the existence of the proletariat so understood, something which Merleau-Ponty did not take for granted. In the postwar context, then, he held that “the question of our time is precisely to know [savoir] if the world [of tomorrow] will be rational” (NI 31 [13]). Marxism collapses without belief in a rational future. Strictly speaking, however, we could never have knowledge of this. But a basic goal of Merleau-Ponty’s project was to respond affirmatively, yet without simply begging the question, by disclosing compelling perceptual self-evidence of the rationality of human history—this is precisely what the sublimative spectacle of the hero is meant to provide. Epistemically, the decisive experience that results necessarily remains at the level of myth, but it provides the basis for the sort of rational faith in its own realizability that philosophy requires.