Abstract
I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account of Being is best understood when we attend to its provenance, situated within the continuous development of his thought over his career. More specifically, we need to call attention to the political horizon of this ontology as it emerged in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, which has received insufficient attention in secondary literature. The impulse for Merleau-Ponty’s ontology develops from his political disagreements with Jean-Paul Sartre, and emerges through several phases: a new philosophy of history, a philosophy of nature, which leads finally to the incomplete ontology of his final works.
I dedicate this essay to my friend and colleague Tony O’Connor. From an outsider’s perspective, Tony has done more than anyone to animate the venerable British Society for Phenomenology by painstakingly calling for dialogue between orthodox phenomenology (if indeed there is such a thing) and more contemporary Continental work. And please note that it is not the sort of stultifying dialogue of compromise and “meet in the middle” that I have in mind here. His spirit of friendship complements his infectious passion for philosophical argument. I am forever indebted to Tony for opening my eyes to new possibilities in the work of Michel Foucault. I salute Tony’s generosity and dedication to philosophy and to his friends. I am proud to contribute this essay to this volume in his honor.
One very important mutual friend of ours was Martin C. Dillon, who died in spring 2005. I shall always cherish the memories with Tony of feasting and spirited conversation long into the night at the Dillons’ house. The memories are as sweet as the loss is painful.
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- 1.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, “Réversibilité,” (Paris: Garnier-Flannarion, 1964), 69.
Angel full of happiness, do you know the anguish,
The shame, the remorse, the sobs the ennui,
And the vague terrors of these frightful nights
That compress the heart like a paper one wads up?
Angel full of happiness, do you know the anguish?
[All translations are mine unless noted.]
- 2.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Situations, trans. B. Eisler (Braziller: New York, 1965), 228.
- 3.
Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and F. Alqui, eds., Les Philosophes Célèbres (Paris: Mazenod, 1956), 250–251; “La découverte de l’histoire,” where Merleau-Ponty concludes that the structure of history is anguish. [Cf. also my translation: Man and World 25, no. 2 (April 1992):203–209]. Here I translated the aforementioned piece as well as “Les fondateurs.” These short pieces were introductory blurbs that Merleau-Ponty wrote for the sections of the anthology he and Alqui edited together. He gathered all of the introductory blurbs—save these two—and published the rest as the essay “Everywhere and Nowhere,” which appeared in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 203–258.
- 4.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit,” in No Exit and Three other Plays, trans. S. Gilbert (New York: Vintage, 1989), 45.
- 5.
Simone de Beauvoir, L’Invitée (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 8 [quoting Hegel].
- 6.
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (op. cit.), p. 228.
- 7.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1990), 1.
- 8.
But cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 263: “For us, it is not a question of a theory of consciousness of nature….” This is consistent with various critiques of a philosophy of consciousness in the working notes to Le Visible et l’invisible. However, although Merleau-Ponty seemed to critically recast his own earlier work in Phénoménologie de la perception in this light, most of Merleau-Ponty’s early work on consciousness is, contrary to his own account, consistent with the explicitly ontological reflections of his later work. His inquiry into consciousness was always very radical and ineluctably situated in the pre-personal. Cf. also La Nature (op. cit.), p. 267, when Merleau-Ponty calls for “a rapport of the nature in us with the nature beyond us.”
- 9.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), viii.
- 10.
Ibid., 10.
- 11.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kauffman (New York: Meridian, 1975), 348.
- 12.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Letters of the Break-up, trans. B. Belay and, ed. Duane H. Davis, Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works and Their Practical Implications (Amherst: Humanity Books, Prometheus Press, 2001), 49.
- 13.
Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. J. Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 95–201. There is some uncertainty about what the piece was that Merleau-Ponty sent in to Les Temps Modernes. Also, Merleau-Ponty mentions another essay to follow along later. Claude Lefort could not remember exactly which essay was rejected when I asked him about this in 2003.
- 14.
Whether any of these stages of dialectical development accurately represent the positions of the individuals Merleau-Ponty names is a matter of great contention. I do not think that this discounts Merleau-Ponty’s position, so long as one keeps in mind his penchant for using creative readings of his interlocutors as dialectical mediations. His analyses are brilliant; but I would not look to Merleau-Ponty as a paragon of hermeneutic fidelity.
- 15.
It is important to note that Albert Rabil stated long ago that Merleau-Ponty and Sartre later reached a “partial rapprochement.” Rabil, who could not have had access to these letters in 1967, speculates that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty “put aside their intellectual differences” in 1958 to rekindle their friendship. Admittedly, Rabil notes that Sartre is surely overly optimistic—even downright revisionistic—in his reflections about the friendship after Merleau-Ponty’s death; nonetheless, I think Rabil still relies too much on Sartre’s reflections in his own account of the relationship. Rabil is not entirely accurate in his speculation that it was the somewhat friendly exchange at a 1958 conference that occasioned their partial rapprochement. There was a partial rapprochement, but the first steps toward that took place at a colloquium at the École normale supérieure. Alain Badiou, who was a student there at the time, and quite close to Jean Hyppolite, the Director of the Philosophy Program, told me that Hyppolite probably wanted to see Merleau-Ponty and Sartre mend their relationship. Badiou suggested to Hyppolite that he invite Sartre—the notorious anti-academic—to speak at the École normale. Hyppolite offered the invitation, and Sartre accepted. Perhaps Hyppolite privately suggested to Merleau-Ponty that he should attend. According to Badiou, no one knew that Merleau-Ponty was coming, especially Sartre. Apparently Sartre was moved by Merleau-Ponty’s unexpectedly conciliatory gesture. So Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hyppolite, Badiou, and one or two others, went to a café where the crucial conversation took place. According to Badiou, it was clear that they had not spoken except in the most formal ways since the 1953 break-up. And, after a long conversation, they parted—not as friends, as Rabil suggests—but at least with a newfound tolerance and renewed respect for one another. Mme. Merleau-Ponty confirmed this story when I spoke with her in 2002. She remembered vividly Merleau-Ponty’s animated description of the conversation when he came home and told her about the evening. I asked her why she thought Sartre had written in his eulogy of Merleau-Ponty that the latter had died “unreconciled” with Sartre. Her response was immediate and visceral—even after more than 40 years: clenching her fists, her face turning red, she said, “Certainly they were unreconciled—after what Sartre did to him!”
- 16.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (op. cit.), p. 227.
- 17.
Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux, trans. P. O’Brian (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 269.
- 18.
Davis ed. (op. cit.), p. 47.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 33.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 36 (my emphasis).
- 21.
Ibid. (my emphasis).
- 22.
Ibid. (my emphasis).
- 23.
Ibid. (my emphasis).
- 24.
Gary B. Madison, The Ethics and Politics of the Flesh, in Davis (op. cit.), p. 175.
- 25.
Letters of the Break-Up, in Davis (op. cit.), p. 48.
- 26.
Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (op. cit.), p. xiv.
- 27.
Letters of the Break-Up, in Davis (op. cit.), p. 47.
- 28.
Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (op. cit.), p. xiv. [Sens: that is directed meaning.]
- 29.
Letters of the Break-Up, in Davis (op. cit.), p. 41.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 44.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 43.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 40.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 36.
Cf. John O’Neill’s careful explication of this point in his Perception, Expression, and History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 47.
- 37.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France,” in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, ed. and trans. J. O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 97–98
- 38.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Philosophie dialectique, vol. XIV, course notes in manuscript form on reserve in the Occidental Manuscripts Reading Room in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, France, p. 5 [my emphasis].
- 39.
Ibid., p. 8.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 11: “Nothing exists in a pure state.”
- 41.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 42.
Ibid., pp. 22f.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 28.
- 44.
Vallier has also pointed out the influence of Schelling on Merleau-Ponty’s account of Nature. Given what we have just observed above of the course in Dialectical Philosophy, we can see even better why Schelling’s dialectic is crucial to understanding the transition of the mediation of history to nature.
- 45.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 237.
- 46.
I am drawing upon personal conversation with Lefort in 2003. As a kind of commiseration with someone who has struggled more than anyone with Merleau-Ponty’s notorious handwriting, I joked with Lefort that I would 1 day write a book about reading the manuscripts that I would title, Le Lisible et l’ilisible.
- 47.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 13 [Eye and Mind, p. 161].
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty,“le langage indiret et les voix du silence”, in Signes, p. 132. [Signs, p. 82].
- 50.
Ibid., p. 121 [Signs, p. 75].
- 51.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, unpublished working note, 1958, Box III [old pagination, BnF].
- 52.
Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et esprit, p. 12 [Eye and Mind, p. 160].
- 53.
Ibid., pp61–62 [Eye and Mind, p. 179].
- 54.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) [p. 9E?] One is reminded of Mao’s primary and secondary contradictions.
- 55.
Ibid., pp. 20–21. [Signs, p. 10]. Again, one is reminded of what Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus have called the saturation of the party-state in the cultural revolution. Cf. Badiou’s brilliant analysis in his La Révolution culturelle: la dernière révolution ?, Les conférences du Rouge-Gorge, Paris, 2002. What could account for this remarkable parallel, since the cultural revolution is several years away when Merleau-Ponty wrote these words?
- 56.
Merleau-Ponty, Signes (op. cit.), p. 61 [Signs, p. 35]. And once more, one sees a striking resemblance between Merleau-Ponty’s position here and Badiou’s controversial movement beyond Maoism—or as I prefer, a movement through the ideal of the party-state in Mao. Is this a hidden dimension in Merleau-Ponty’s thought—perhaps even hidden from himself? Or is it a manifestation that Badiou was never a Maoist? One could pose the question to Badiou: “Are you now, or were you ever really, a Maoist?” One could—I wouldn’t!.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 26 [Signs, p. 13].
- 58.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, unpublished notes BnF, Preface to Signes, vol. IV, p. 19 (back) (my emphasis).
- 59.
Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et L’esprit (op. cit.), pp. 92–93 [Eye and Mind, p. 190].
- 60.
Merleau-Ponty, Signes (op. cit.), p. 61 [Signs, p. 35]. His reference to an “unremitting virtu” surely parallels the “a right of rectification” implicit in any event that he accused Sartre’s position of abandoning. Cf. p. 13 above. Please also note that Dallery’s translation of l’oeil et esprit misses the political use of virtu completely. Cf. Eye and Mind, p. 160, for example, where virtu is translated “meaning and force.”
- 61.
Davis (op. cit.), p. 42.
- 62.
Signes (op. cit.), p. 13 [Signs, p. 5].
- 63.
Versions of this essay were delivered at invited lectures at: McMaster University [Canada], DePaul University [USA], and Manchester University [UK]. I very much appreciate the questions and discussion on those occasions. This essay is stronger because of the kind attention it received there, and from the editors of this volume.
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Davis, D.H. (2012). The Political Horizon of Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. In: Halsall, F., Jansen, J., Murphy, S. (eds) Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1509-7_10
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