Introduction: Flight From Phenomenology?

As readers of Phenomenology of Perception are aware, Merleau-Ponty concluded this work (PhP 520) with the following series of enigmatic sentences selectively excerpted from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s 1942 book, Pilote de guerre:¹

Ton fils est pris dans l’incendie, tu le sauveras. . . . Tu vendrais, s’il est un obstacle, ton épaule contre un coup d’épaule. Tu loges dans ton acte même. Ton acte, c’est toi. . . . Tu t’échanges. . . . Ta signification se montre, éblouissante. C’est ton devoir, c’est ta haine, c’est ton amour, c’est ta fidélité, c’est ton invention. . . . L’homme n’est qu’un nœud de relations, les relations comptent seules pour l’homme.²

Your son is caught in the fire, you will save him. . . . If there is an obstacle, you would give your shoulder to knock it down. You live in your act itself. Your act is you. . . . You give yourself in exchange. . . . Your true significance becomes dazzlingly evident. It is your duty, your hatred, your love, your loyalty, your inventiveness . . . . Man is but a knot of relations, relations alone matter to man.

It is, however, a remarkable fact about Merleau-Ponty scholarship that these lines—which, coming at the very end of his most important work, occupy, so to speak, the single most prestigious piece of textual real estate in his entire corpus—have received virtually no critical attention whatsoever.³ Many otherwise comprehensive philosophical commentaries on Merleau-Ponty (e.g. De Waelhens 1951; Kwant 1963; Dillon 1988; Barbaras 1991; Priest 2003), even those whose explicit raison d’être is to examine Phenomenology of Perception in detail (e.g. Marshall 2008; Romdenh-Romluc 2010), simply make no reference to the way the book ends.⁴ To be sure, many others do refer to it, albeit usually only to the very last line, namely, “Man is but a knot of relations, relations alone matter to man.”⁵ But without exception, these commentators do so by way of giving to Saint Exupéry’s words an approving but otherwise inconsequential Merleau-Pontian gloss. That is, they tacitly assume that over and above simply quoting from Pilote de guerre, Merleau-Ponty was expressing a philosophical agreement with or endorsement of Saint Exupéry’s words taken in some more or less literal way. The underlying assumption is that, in philosophical terms, there is a “continuity between the phenomenological analysis of perception developed by Merleau-Ponty . . . and the lines quoted from Antoine de Saint Exupéry” (Noble 2011, 76, emphasis added). Monika Langer expressed the conventional wisdom in this way: “As an ‘intersubjective field’ we are, as Saint-Exupéry noted, ‘but a network of relationships’ ” (1989, 147, emphasis added; see also Bannan 1967, 138; Steeves 2004, 158; Reynolds 2004, 24). The same assumption is standardly made in the literature on Saint Exupéry whenever Merleau-Ponty’s allusion to him is discussed (Major 1968, 150, 243, 260f; DeRamus 1990, 134f; Devaux 1994, 81). The idea, as expressed by Colin Smith, is that at the end of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty “allows the author of Pilote de guerre to speak for him” (1980, 271).⁶

Yet, qua philosopher, Merleau-Ponty deliberately and conspicuously cut himself off here—the cited lines are preceded immediately by an unequivocal assertion that “it is at this point that we must fall silent [c’est ici qu’il faut se taire].”⁷ Taken at his word, then, Merleau-Ponty was not even quoting Saint Exupéry, because he was no longer speaking at all.⁸ A fortiori, he was not being spoken for. As Merleau-Ponty put it, with regard to Saint Exupéry, “it would be inappropriate for another to speak in his name” (PhP 520, emphasis added). We are to suppose, then, that Saint Exupéry is speaking for himself at the end of Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty thus deferred to Saint Exupéry, ceding authorial voice to him qua “hero,” that is, as someone who “lives to the limit [jusqu’au bout] his relation to men and the world” by enacting an affirmative response to the practical question: “Shall I give my freedom to save freedom? [Donnerai-je ma liberté pour sauver la liberté?]” (PhP 520). And, most importantly, Merleau-Ponty tied this deference directly to the realization of philosophy. Taking his cue from the young Marx (1975b, 181; cf. 187), albeit with a twist, he affirmed that philosophy “realizes itself by destroying itself as separate philosophy” [se réalise en se détruisant comme philosophie séparée] (PhP 520; cf. SNS 136, 235/79, 133; NI 99, 108, 123, 174),⁹ with the implication that this destruction of philosophy’s erstwhile separateness (as opposed to its destruction simpliciter, as Marx had seemed to imply) occurs somehow through the work of heroism.¹⁰ Although the precise meaning of this dialectical claim is far from clear, what is clear is that on the final page of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty drew an unmistakable line between philosophy and non-philosophy that is meant to bear directly on nothing less than the success or failure of his philosophical project. Yet this seems to have passed under the radar of virtually all commentary. It is almost as if the book itself has not yet been read jusqu’au bout.

This point is neither trivial nor pedantic. The underlying concern may be initially motivated in this way: given that a fundamental leitmotif of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is its opposition to “la pensée de survol”—literally, “fly-over thinking,” but this phrase, which denotes the style of thought that takes itself as de-situated and thus as having an absolute perspective, is conventionally translated as “high-altitude thinking”¹¹—given this leitmotif, is it not rather astonishing that Phenomenology of Perception concludes with the thoughts of an aerial reconnaissance pilot? Indeed, an aerial reconnaissance pilot who held that “flying and writing are the same thing,” that they form a seamless “total experience” such that “the pilot and the writer converge in an equivalent act of awareness,”¹² and whose typical literary construction took the form: “flying over A, I was thinking of B” (Schiff 1995, x, emphasis added). Qua “hero,” Saint Exupéry exactly paradigmatizes la pensée de survol. Surely, then, a complete understanding of Phenomenology of Perception demands a convincing explanation as to why it culminates with this turn to Saint Exupéry which is, at least prime facie, extremely incongruous.¹³

This work seeks to provide such an explanation. The “heroic” ending of Phenomenology of Perception is long overdue for serious critical scrutiny.¹⁴ As we shall see, such scrutiny will reveal that there is in fact much more going on here than meets the eye. The deference to Saint Exupéry is a dense, liminal node into which are woven the main theoretical and practical postulates to which Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology was implicitly committed. In this way, the “hero” turns out to be nothing less than the methodological linchpin of this audacious project—for better or for worse, the key to its philosophical identity and distinctive standpoint within the traditions of phenomenology, Marxism, and post-Kantian transcendental thought in general.

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With the Preface above having set out the specific methodological context within which an explanation for the ending of Phenomenology of Perception will be located (I will return to this in the Conclusion), the discussion will proceed as follows:

Chapter 1 does some of the groundwork by way of supplying what any serious reader of Merleau-Ponty needs to know about the person to whom Merleau-Ponty ceded authorial voice at the very end of his own magnum opus. Here, I marshal background material concerning Saint Exupéry’s work and its reception, with a particular focus on Pilote de guerre. The aim is to render as manifest as possible the incongruousness of the passage with which Phenomenology of Perception culminates by showing that its literal meaning is unmistakably a matter of self-sacrificial disincarnation. In other words, the aim is to show that the passage in question is essentially, and not just circumstantially, an exemplary moment of la pensée de survol, and that as a result there is a major problem of interpretation in need of resolution.

Chapters 2 and 3 are based around the pair of references that Merleau-Ponty made to same part of Pilote de guerre in the first chapter of Part I of Phenomenology of Perception, “The Body as an Object and Mechanistic Physiology.” The aim here is to show that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of heroism reveals something crucial about the structure of human embodied existence or être-au-monde, to wit, that it forms an existential totality inclusive of the natural organism. Based upon his claims that être-au-monde involves a constitutive temporal duality between “habitual” and “actual” dimensions of embodiment, and that its historicity is emergent upon that duality but that it generates a single history, Merleau-Ponty uses the claim that heroic action involves the complete repression of “actual” embodiment to show the latent existence within the habitual dimension of an operative intentionality toward universal life, and that this intentionality represents an a priori condition of historical action.

Simply making these points might not require an entire chapter, let alone two. But truly to establish and appreciate them and their significance for Merleau-Ponty involves recognizing their underlying connection with the very important but largely overlooked impact that Georg Lukács’ 1923 work, History and Class Consciousness [Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein] had on Merleau-Ponty’s thought. In the case at hand, this has to do with Lukács’ claim regarding the methodological primacy of the category of totality. The bulk of Chapters 2 and 3 is thus actually devoted to this connection. After introducing the problem that the earlier references to Saint Exupéry pose, Chapter 2 lays out some contextual considerations concerning Lukács, along with some extended sociobiographical conjectures concerning the backstory of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical embrace of Marxism. The point of all this is to render more plausible the importance that my reading of Merleau-Ponty attaches to Lukács, and more generally, the relative priority of Marxism over phenomenology that I will claim obtains in Merleau-Ponty’s postwar project, and how it forms the basis of his response to Fink. But in showing how Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism originated in the context of left-wing Catholicism in the interwar period, it also serves to foreground the crucial theme of incarnation that remained fundamental in Merleau-Ponty’s postwar work.

With this set out, Chapter 3 begins by considering Lukács’ work directly. In then bringing this to bear upon Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of embodiment, I claim that Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception should be seen as situated within the framework of his interpretation of Marxism’s conception of history. In other words, within the terms of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar project, history has logical and phenomenological priority over embodiment. Such is how Merleau-Ponty could claim the habitual dimension of embodiment as the locus of historical apriority, and some preliminary consequences are drawn on this basis.

In order to develop further the suggestion that Merleau-Ponty’s postwar project was, to a significant extent, an attempt to update and redeem a Lukácsian perspective, in Chapters 4 and 5, I consider in more detail what I term Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnational Marxism” and show how his notion of heroism was related to this.

Chapter 4 charts a path through a cluster of related themes—sacrifice, death, politics, the proletariat, the tacit cogito, class consciousness, human productivity, and rationality—some of which are familiar, some not so familiar in Merleau-Ponty scholarship, but which, taken together, sketch out the militant sense of Merleau-Ponty’s existential conception of Marxism, and of his rethinking of Lukács in particular. Discussion of these themes shows that they point back to a certain conception of the philosophy of history, and this partly anticipates the answer that will be given concerning the ending of Phenomenology of Perception.

But this conception of the philosophy of history ultimately hinges on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “heroism”. Before getting to that answer, then, Chapter 5 will address this notion directly. This will be primarily by way of a close reading of “Man, the Hero”—a short but important essay with which Merleau-Ponty concluded the volume Sense and Non-Sense. This will show that Merleau-Ponty intended his idea 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. The chapter concludes with some comparative considerations on Merleau-Ponty and Saint Exupéry intended as a way to ascertain just how the standpoint of the former does indeed differ from the pensée de survol associated with the latter.

In laying out the significance of Exupérian heroism for Merleau-Ponty’s political thought, and clarifying the priority that the latter has with regard to his philosophical thought, these chapters provide the context for answering the question concerning the ending of Phenomenology of Perception. By way of conclusion, then, I will briefly recapitulate the relevant claims and draw them together in terms of the basic meaning of Exupérian heroism for Merleau-Ponty, the place and role of this notion within his postwar political thought, and finally, its significance for the methodological coherence of his reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. This relates to the methodological problem posed by Fink (see Preface), with regard to which I draw out some further consequences. The principal claim that emerges is that the alternative conception of phenomenological methodology with which Merleau-Ponty responded to Fink was based on his incarnational conception of Marxism, and this in a way that made phenomenology out to be a project of militant engagement premised upon the dialectical sublimation of heroism. As will become apparent, this analysis is crucial for appreciating and understanding the ending—and thus quite possibly the whole—of Phenomenology of Perception.¹⁵

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Two final points by way of wrapping up this Introduction.

First, I should perhaps underscore that this book is not itself an introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s work, in particular, to Phenomenology of Perception. It could certainly be read profitably by anyone, irrespective of familiarity with the latter. But I do not spend much time recapitulating specific claims or rehearsing familiar themes, even very important ones. In part, this is because there are many fine books and articles available that do a fine job with those—at least within the relevant parameters of contemporary scholarship—and it is not my intention to produce superfluous commentary. But more importantly, it is because I am convinced that those parameters are unsatisfactory. My main priority in this book, then, is to motivate and articulate, at least in outline, a fundamentally new interpretive perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. There is admittedly something polemical about my intentions in this work. But I believe that this is productive. For if I have done what I set out to do, then reading this book will not be an anodyne afternoon stroll along the predictable grands boulevards of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, but rather a somewhat more intrepid and stimulating exploration of the unfamiliar back alleys from which his work derives much of its basic impulse, guiding orientation, and characteristic verve. So while it should be of interest to anyone who has an interest in Merleau-Ponty, the meaning and significance of the main claims that I shall make in this book will be felt much more keenly by those who are already familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work, and with the general contours of the secondary literature devoted to it.

Second, I should just like to point out that, as is conventional, gender-exclusive language in original texts—of which there is an abundance in the works under consideration—is reproduced in quotation. According to the sense, however, it is often also retained in discussion, in order to avoid conveying a misleading impression of inclusivity. There is not merely a matter of style, though, as there is an important philosophical motivation. For the broader context in which Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology took shape was formed by the discourse of renewed French humanism (see, e.g. Arbousse-Bastide 1930; George et al. 1946; cf. Kelly 2004, 128–38). And although Merleau-Ponty was, like so many others at the time, ostensibly committed to a universally inclusive humanism, it is patent that much of the relevant discursive context was compromised by implicit (and often explicit) masculinist and androcentric assumptions (among other forms of exclusion). The very fact that humanist discourse at the time was conceptually anchored on the idea of “Man” [l’Homme] makes this hardly surprising. Saint Exupéry is a case in point. No one seriously wonders about his feminist credentials. But the case of Merleau-Ponty is different. For it is a live and important question whether his work is similarly compromised by sexist ideology (e.g. Butler 1989; S. Sullivan 1997), or else whether it could actually serve as a valuable resource for feminist phenomenology (e.g. Bigwood 1991; Fielding 1996; Stoller 2000). I do not take up this question in this book, but I certainly hope that the discussion here, and the light that it throws on Phenomenology of Perception, is not without some relevance. In particular, I should just like to suggest that the methodological emphasis that my reading places on the significance of this text, and the resulting implication that a normative orientation to history is logically and phenomenologically primary within the Merleau-Pontian approach to embodiment, could be taken up in such a way as to show that both sides of the debate are right. Specifically, it could help to show that Merleau-Ponty’s potential usefulness for feminist work—as well as, mutatis mutandis, for other forms of anti-oppression theory and practice—does not necessarily hinge on the absence of masculinist bias from his actual phenomenological descriptions. For it may not depend on those descriptions at all, but rather have mainly to do with a broader rethinking of phenomenology that would take it up—as I will describe Merleau-Ponty’s existential project below—as a kind of “militant” philosophy.