Abstract
This is a study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s social thought, its often troubled relations with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy, and its equally ambivalent stance toward those approaches in the human sciences which take Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics as their point of departure. It seeks to do justice to one of the more complex and elusive figures in contemporary philosophy and social theory. By the time of his death, Merleau-Ponty was regarded as ‘the greatest of French phenomenologists’; yet his last writings questioned the very coherence of Husserl’s project.1 He built a case for Marx’s philosophy of history which is among the most subtle in the Marxian tradition; and he produced one of the most powerful and merciless critiques Marxism has ever received.2 He was the first French philosopher to appreciate the importance of Saussure’s linguistics; but even his admirers admit that the things he purported to find in Saussure are simply not there to be found.3 He was the author of a corpus of works whose relevance for contemporary social theory has been matched only by the striking indifference which they all too often have received.4 He was and remains an enigmatic and compelling thinker. As one of his most able readers once confessed, ‘Thinking about him produces a kind of verbal vertigo.’5
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Notes
The characterisation of Merleau-Ponty is that of Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology’, trans. K. McLaughlin, in The Conflict of Interpretatons (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974) p. 247, ft.7. See also Ricoeur’s brief ‘Hommage à Merleau-Ponty’, Esprit, 29 (1961) pp. l 115–20. For a general account of Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to phenomenology, see Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981).
For George Lichtheim, the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic marked the moment at which ‘the French discussion had recovered the level of the earlier German one’: Marxism in Modern France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966) p. 80, ft.5. Note also the central role given to Merleau-Ponty’s writings in Jürgen Habermas’s 1957 literature review on the ‘philosophical discussion of Marx and Marxism’, reprinted in Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971) pp. 425–8.
Merleau-Ponty’s pioneering role was noted by Roland Barthes in his Elements of Semiology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967) p. 24. Maurice Lagueux, ‘Merleau-Ponty et la linguistique de Saussure’, Dialogue, V (1965) pp. 351–64, gives the most complete discussion of the idiosyncracies of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Saussure.
To cite two fairly recent examples, Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) carries out a penetrating critique of the metaphors of ‘mirroring’ and ‘reflection’ which have stood at the heart of western philosophy since Descartes, but gives no indication that he is aware of the similar critique Merleau-Ponty mounted in his discussion of Descartes’s Dioptric in ‘The Eye and the Mind’ (PrP, pp. 169–78). Likewise, the exhaustive Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. T. Bottomore et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) contains no entry for Merleau-Ponty, despite the fact that the use of the term ‘Western Marxism’ virtually begins with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion in Adventures of the Dialectic.
Marjorie Grene, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Renewal of Ontology’, Review of Metaphysics, XXIX:4 (1976) p. 622.
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty’, in Situations, trans. B. Eisler (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1966) p. 157. The most detailed biography down to 1945 is in Theodore F. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) pp. 4–31. Barry Cooper, Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: From Terror to Reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979) pp. 4–16, covers the same period, with a greater stress on the importance of Kojève’s lectures for his abandonment of Catholicism.
SB, p. 199.
H. L. Van Breda, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl à Louvain’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 67:4 (1962) pp. 410–30 gives a detailed account of Merleau-Ponty’s use of Husserl’s Nachlass.
The most comprehensive account of Merleau-Ponty’s courses in the late 1940s is Hugh J. Silverman, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in CAL, pp. xxxiii-viii.
Sartre’s account of the break, in ‘Merleau-Ponty’, pp. 188–206, remains the basic source, subjected to different interpretations in Michel-Antoine Burnier, Choice of Action: The French Existentialists on the Political Front Line, trans. B. Murchland (New York: Random House, 1968) pp. 69–76 (mainly from Sartre’s side), and Cooper, pp. 102–6 (more sympathetic to Merleau-Ponty).
VI, p. 274.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) pp. 245–69; see also Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of his friendship with Merleau-Ponty, On Merleau-Ponty’, trans. C. Gross, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 7:2 (1978) pp. 179–88.
Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) pp. 71–2.
Gilles Deluze, ‘Un nouvel archiviste’, Critique, no.274 (1970) p. 195.
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. D. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977) p. 170.
See Bernard Pingaud’s comment at the close of a special issue of L’Arc devoted to Merleau-Ponty on the tenth anniversary of his death: ‘a strange silence reigns in so-called “advanced” intellectual milieux: the name Merleau-Ponty is almost never cited by fashionable thinkers although he had posed before them a certain number of the problems they still confront and his reflection — whether it concerns politics or language, psychoanalysis or art — has not entirely lost its actuality’: L’Arc, no.46 (1971) p. 96.
PrP, p. 3.
PrP, p. 7.
PrP, pp. 8–9; the list of authors comes from a résumé of Sartre’s What is Literature? from 1948 or 1949, cited by Claude Lefort in his preface to PW, p. xvi; Valéry is not mentioned on this list, but figures prominently (along with Breton) in a section from Merleau-Ponty’s 1951 lecture ‘Man and Adversity’ (5, pp. 232–5) which appears to be a sketch of the proposed argument of The Prose of the World. Merleau-Ponty had written an essay on Montaigne as early as 1947 (S, pp. 198–210) and Proust had been discussed at a number of points in Phenomenology of Perception.
Lefort, ‘Preface’ to PW, p. xvi.
PrP, p. 9.
Ibid; an argument of this sort is developed in ‘Man and Adversity’, where the section on Breton and Valéry is followed by a discussion of politics and history; see S, pp. 235–9.
IPP, p. 54.
‘The Sensible World and the World of Expression’ (1952–3) TFL, pp. 3–11; ‘Studies in the Literary Use of Language’ (1952–3) TFL, pp. 12–18; ‘The Problem of Speech’ (1953–4) TFL, pp. 19–26; ‘Materials for a Theory of History’ (1953–4) TFL, pp. 27–38; and ‘Institution in Personal and Public History’ (1954–5) TFL, pp. 39–45.
AD, p. 3.
Claude Lefort, ‘Editor’s Foreword’ to VI, pp. xi-xxxiii; cf. Merleau-Ponty’s own approach to Husserl, S, pp. 159–60.
Claude Lefort, ‘Editor’s Foreword’, VI, p. xxxiv; see also SNS, p. 94, ft.13.
VI, pp. 168, 183.
VI, pp. 176, 167.
Samuel B. Mallin, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) attempts to articulate an ‘ontology of situations’ which rests on this sort of understanding of the relationship between the Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. For reasons which will become obvious shortly, this is not an interpretation of the relation between the books that I share. See also my discussion of Mallin in ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Politics, Phenomenology, and Ontology’, Human Studies, VI:3 (1983) pp. 301–4.
VI, p. 183.
VI, p. 200.
VI, p. 224.
The sudden appearance of these new terms has been noted by Madison, p. 97.
PrP, p. 167 (also see VI, p. 139); VI, p. 194 (also see VI, pp. 185, 190).
Remy C. Kwant, From Phenomenology to Metaphysics (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966).
J. F. Bannan, ‘The “Later” Thought of Merleau-Ponty’, Dialogue, V:3 (1966) pp. 383–403.
Xavier Tilliette, Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Seghers, 1970) pp. 136–7; Madison, pp. 32, 170, 186–7, 240, 273.
Claude Lefort, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, in R. Klibansky (ed.), Contemporary Philosophy: A Survey. Vol. III: Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Language, and Structure (Firenze: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1969) pp. 206–14.
Marcel Gauchet, ‘Le lieu de la, pensée’, L’Arc, no.46 (1971) pp. 19–30.
Marc Richir, ‘La défenestration’, L’Arc, no.46 (1971) pp. 31–42.
Gérard Granel, Le sense du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) p. 103.
Grene, p. 605.
Madison’s account of the relationship between these three works can be recommended as the most thoughtful of the discussions which focus on the philosophical dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Albert Rabil, Jr, Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967) is the most useful of the earlier studies on Merleau-Ponty.
The most exhaustive discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s political writings can be found in Cooper’s book. I have found Sonia Kruks, The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Sussex: Harvester, 1981) less satisfactory; see my discussion in ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Politics, Phenomenology, and Ontology’, pp. 298–300.
There is a quite comprehensive discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Gestalt psychology in Lester Embree, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Examination of Gestalt Psychology’, in John Sallis, Merleau-Ponty: Perception, Structure, Language (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981) pp. 89–121. Mention should be made here of one other study which, concerned as it is with Merleau-Ponty’s significance for sociology, is fairly close to my focus: Laurie Spurling, Phenomenology and the Social World (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). Spurling, however, is primarily interested in the relationship of Merleau-Ponty’s writings to works within the tradition of phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology; as I have tried to argue here, that is only half the story.
The impact of Heidegger’s work on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is both pervasive and elusive. It is obvious that much in his reading of Husserl and Sartre was influenced by Being and Time and perhaps by the ‘Letter on Humanism’. It is equally obvious that Heidegger’s later writings on language and the question of technology exercised a profound influence on Merleau-Ponty’s later work. But, at the same time, most of Merleau-Ponty’s explicit discussions (and, it should be noted, they are by no means plentiful) are quite ambivalent; see, for example, PrP, pp. 94–5 and TFL, pp. 109–12.
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Schmidt, J. (1985). Introduction: Merleau-Ponty and Social Thought. In: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17869-8_1
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