A Study of the Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

Sonia Kruks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429656095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This book, first published in 1987, is an extended examination of Merleau-Ponty's political philosophy. It describes and critically elucidates the main political themes to be found in his writings, and shows how his political ideas are related to his general phenomenological philosophy.

PART I: THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF MERLEAU-PONTY’S VIEW OF POLITICS, 1935–1953

CHAPTER 1: THE DIALECTICS OF EXISTENCE

Few of Merleau-Ponty’s writings on politics are systematic. They consist mainly of articles, lectures, newspaper contributions. The two possible exceptions to this are his books, Humanism and Terror, first written as a series of articles but forming a fairly continuously argued whole, and Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955 as an attack on both the French Communist Party and on Sartre’s Marxism. But although most of the works are not systematic (even the two books being loosely structured and argued), it will be made evident in the course of this thesis that they share a common basis in a carefully worked out philosophy. That philosophy was developed in Merleau-Ponty’s earliest two books, The Structure of Behaviour (1942) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945), the latter generally being regarded as his major contribution to philosophy¹. What, therefore, this chapter sets out to do is to give an account of Merleau-Ponty’s general theory of human existence, or “philosophy of existence”, as he develops it in The Structure of Behaviour and Phenomenology of Perception, as a necessary prerequisite to understanding his political philosophy.

1 It is interesting to note, however, that some of the main ideas elaborated in these works were sketched out as early as 1935, in Merleau-Ponty’s first publication, the article “Christianisme et ressentiment”, La Vie Intellectuelle, XXXVI, No. 2, 1935.

THE CRITIQUE OF SCIENTISM AND IDEALISM

The notion of dialectic is central to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, to his view of the world and of what constitutes human existence within it. His first work, The Structure of Behaviour, is an analysis of animal and human behaviour from a dialectical stand-point. Merleau-Ponty argues that we cannot understand behaviour adequately by saying that it is “caused” by stimuli or environmental conditioning. Nor at the other extreme can we explain all human behaviour as the outcome of conscious acts of human will. In this earliest work, as in his later works, Merleau-Ponty is trying to develop a mode of explanation which avoids the problems of the traditional alternatives of either a materialism or “scientism”, which reduces all to simple physical causation, or an idealism, which traps itself in unreality (and even solipsism) by positing man as the conscious constituter of the universe. Much of the work is taken up with detailed criticism of scientism and idealism elaborating at length upon the problems they incur, the questions they cannot adequately answer.

Merleau-Ponty attempts in this work to develop “a middle position”², between the extremes of objectivist and subjectivist, or materialist and idealist epistemology. It is through the notion of dialectic that Merleau-Ponty develops this middle position: behaviour is neither determined nor the outcome of acts of pure volition; it arises through the dialectical interaction of the organism and its environment or of man and his world, an interaction through which structures of meaning are created and in which the alternatives of exteriority and interiority, objectivity and subjectivity are transcended.

2 De Waelhens, op. cit., p. 314. De Waelhens uses the phrase to describe Merleau-Ponty’s doctrine of freedom, but it is also more widely applicable to his philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty claims that causal “scientific” explanation is inadequate even in accounting for the behaviour of animals. The theory of reflex behaviour, for example, is based on an atomised conception of the nervous system, whereas in fact the nervous system is an integral whole. In isolating chains of cause and effect – i.e. stimulus and response – reflex theory reduces the animal to an object, a “thing” on which external forces act. Such a theory fails to allow for the integrated nature of animal behaviour; it artificially views the brain as split into separate segments, each of which, when subject to a particular stimulus, must produce a particular response. It cannot explain deviations from this pattern. It cannot explain the way behaviour adapts if sections of the brain are damaged³; nor the fact that the same stimulus can produce different responses in different situations⁴. The explanation for such phenomena can only be found in the total relation of the animal to its environment.

3 The Structure of Behaviour, p. 62.

4 Ibid p. 52–56.

Clearly, if mechanistic causal explanation is inadequate in biological explanation, it is also inappropriate in explaining human behaviour. As man is an integrated being we cannot simply partition off different levels of human activity: we cannot make clearcut distinctions between instincts, reflexes and conscious activity. “Man is not a rational animal. The appearance of reason and mind does not leave intact a sphere of self-enclosed instincts in man⁵.” Behaviourist psychology tries to explain human learning in terms of stimulus and response, seeing rewards as the stimuli for learning. But, says Merleau-Ponty, this must mean that learning is a chance process, for the child must accidentally perform correctly before he is rewarded and therefore “learns” the behaviour. Learning is not such a chance activity, either for animals or for humans, according to Merleau-Ponty, for learning is not acquiring a capacity to repeat an action mechanically, but consists in learning the appropriate but differing responses required by situations; learning involves adaptation to situations and must pre-suppose an intentional interaction with the environment.

“Thus to learn never consists in being made capable of repeating the same gesture, but of providing an adapted response to the situation by different means⁶.” This point is illustrated⁷ by the example of a child who, having learnt to distinguish red and green from each other, has in fact learnt the general facility of distinguishing colours.

5 Ibid p. 181.

6 Ibid p. 96.

7 Ibid.

The causal or mechanistic approach to explaining behaviour is not, however, the only approach that is open to criticism in Merleau-Ponty’s view. At the other end of the spectrum, extreme idealist, or what he calls “critical” or “intellectualist” approaches, are also unable adequately to describe behaviour, since they divorce man from the world and from his own body in asserting the priority of consciousness over matter. Descartes’ “cogito”, for example, might reveal a world – but it is a world of thoughts only. Thus, commenting on Descartes’ theory of perception in La Dioptrique he writes:

“ … the universe of consciousness revealed by the cogito and in the unity of which even perception itself seemed to be necessarily enclosed was only a universe of thought in the restricted sense: it accounts for the thought of seeing, but the fact of vision and the ensemble of existential knowledge remains outside of it⁸.”

Merleau-Ponty adds: “… Thus Descartes did not attempt to integrate the knowledge of truth and the experience of reality, intellection and sensation.” The conscious knowledge of “ideas” and our pre-conscious experiential knowledge of the reality of the material universe are, for Merleau-Ponty, part of one and the same process, part of a continuum of knowing. But for Descartes and his successors the priority of mind must lock man in a world of pure consciousness, of purely intellectual knowing, while reducing the world to an object of consciousness. In Kant’s philosophy too, the distinction between a priori forms of consciousness and the empirical content of thought, results in a consciousness which fails to root itself in the world and reduces the world to an object of thought⁹.

8 Ibid p. 197.

If, for Merleau-Ponty, man is neither a causally determined “thing”, nor an undetermined consciousness we must ask: what are the main characteristics of his being? What is the basis of his behaviour? The full answer to these questions is not to be found in The Structure of Behaviour alone, but also in the Phenomenology of Perception¹⁰.

As we have already seen Merleau-Ponty’s analysis starts from the notion of dialectic; in The Structure of Behaviour this dialectic is initially seen as an interaction between an animal and its environment in which each is necessary for the existence of the other:

“In describing the physical or organic individual and its milieu, we have been led to accept the fact that their relations were not mechanical, but dialectical¹¹.” Out of the dialectical interaction arise meaningful structures or “forms”. To describe behaviour adequately is to elucidate the genesis and meaning of such forms.

9 Ibid p. 171.

10 It has been argued by T. Geraets (in Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale, Martinus Nijhoff, Hague, 1971) that there is a partial break in method between The Structure of Behaviour and Phenomenology of Perception, because Merleau-Ponty had not yet fully absorbed the ideas of Husserl when he wrote the former. However, for my purposes the two works can be regarded as developing one and the same approach to human existence.

But in what we may ask does their meaning consist? Primarily Merleau-Ponty asserts meaning exists in the “intentionality” of all things: “Whether we are concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or a doctrine, to “understand” is to take in the total intention … the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the pebble, glass or piece of wax, in all the events of a revolution, in all the thoughts of a philosopher¹²

The assertion that a pebble or a piece of glass has “intention” or a “unique mode of existing” is at first glance puzzling, especially to one unfamiliar with the vocabulary of Husserl and the phenomenological tradition. In equating “intention” with having a “unique mode of existing” and in applying the terms to inanimate objects, Merleau-Ponty is obviously not using the notion of intention in its usual sense of a goal towards which action is consciously motivated. The use of the word is almost metaphorical, implying a reaching out or a reciprocal relationship between us and objects. The world is not random or chaotic, it consists of intelligible relationships between things. Thus there is meaning and “intention” in the basic structure of the world. It is a world of relationships.

11 SB p. 160.

12 PP p. xviii.

But such relationships do not exist for things “in themselves” as pure objects, but for things which we perceive. Thus, for example, the structures that the physicist discovers do not exist in things themselves, independently of the physicist, but as the objects of his perception. This is not to say that they are “only” objects of his perception, but that his perceiving is what brings them into being for him. In other words, the intentionality of objects or their uniqueness is a function of our dialectical relationship with the world of human existence. In the Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty expresses it as follows:

“I am the absolute source … for I alone bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished … if I were not there to scan it with my gaze¹³.” Merleau-Ponty is at pains to distinguish his views from traditional idealism – “This move” he says, “is absolutely distinct from the idealist return to consciousness¹⁴” – for it recognises that the world actually exists and that I am of it and in it, while idealism places man “outside” the world as a consciousness which surveys it.

13 Ibid p. ix.

14 Ibid.

If man’s relationship with the world, in which he draws from it its intentions, is not one of a conscious subject to the objects of consciousness, we have to ask how this relationship does arise. If man is in a dialectical relationship with the material world he cannot be outside it. For a dialectical relationship is, for Merleau-Ponty, one in which subject and object not only imply each other, but form a unity, interpenetrating each other¹⁵. Thus man has to be both subject and abject and the world has to be the sou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Abstract
• List of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: The Philosophical Basis of Merleau-Ponty’s View of Politics, 1935–1953
• Part II: Merleau-Ponty’s Political Philosophy, 1945–1953
• Part III: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and Political Philosophy, 1954–1961
• Concluding remarks
• Chronology
• Bibliography One
• Bibliography Two