Biography
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born 14 March 1908, before
the first World War. As with many of his generation, Merleau-Ponty lost
his father to the war. Unfortunately, much of European philosopher emerged
from the ruins of the two World Wars and the horrors of these conflicts.
Following World War II, Merleau-Ponty emerged as one
of the leading French philosophers. He was closely associated with his
former classmate, Jean-Paul Sartre, who had
introduced Merleau-Ponty to the writings of Edmund
Husserl. Merleau-Ponty would spend most of his career working to
refine phenomenology, the study of human perceptions.
Few philosophers dared match wits with Jean-Paul
Sartre, but Merleau-Ponty was always up to the task. The two enjoyed
long discussions, with Merleau-Ponty and Sartre often agreeing on all
but the most minor of points.
In the years following World War II, Merleau-Ponty
defended the Soviet Union, to the point of defending the Moscow Trials
and Soviet purges. Eventually, though, he could no longer defend the
Soviet Union and its abuse of power in the name of communism. Merleau-Ponty’s
split from Sartre, much like the more famous split between Camus and
Sartre, was a result of Sartre’s unflinching defense of the Soviet Union
and its cruelty toward its own citizens. The actions of the USSR against
satellite nations only aggravated the opinions of many dedicated socialists,
like Merleau-Ponty. Until his death, Merleau-Ponty remained a Marxist,
but a critic of the Soviet Communist party.
Creating Mrs. Orwell
Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of a mistress might have
resulted in her marriage to George Orwell. It was a short, unromantic
marriage, at that.
This information first came to my attention in the New
York Times book news, 14 June 2003. Reviewed by Stacy Schiff,
a biography of Sonia Brownell came to my attention. The book, The
Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell,
by Hilary Spurling, paints an interesting picture of Merleau-Ponty,
which has me intrigued. Apparently, Merleau-Ponty was charming… like
Camus and Sartre. With popularity comes certain perks.
The Orwells were married for 14 weeks, a fact that
increased my curiousity regarding Merleau-Ponty’s potential role in the
matter. George Orwell was a bed-ridden invalid when he proposed to and
married Sonia. Why would a woman marry a man not able to leave the hospital?
Even the wedding party was held, following a hospital ceremony, at a
hotel without the groom. What made Sonia marry someone without necessarily
loving him? Pity or a broken heart?
Spurling’s biography of Sonia Orwell describes Merleau-Ponty
as charismatic. “Jilted” by Merleau-Ponty, Sonia accepted a proposal
from Orwell, for whom she had been a babysitter and typist. Sonia apparently
attracted scandal, since her second husband had been a defendant in a
trial for homosexuality. She continued to miss Merleau-Ponty.
Commentaries
Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his existential philosophy
by drawing heavily upon the works of Edmund Husserl.
Merleau-Ponty has been categorized as both an phenomenologist and an
existentialist, indicating the difficulty of separating the two schools.
Each holds as a primary tenet that the individual defines both self and
the world experienced. Merleau-Ponty rejected the Western philosophical
tradition of ideals and transcendent “truth” to emphasize human experience.
For Merleau-Ponty, experience did encompass more than sense / reason:
he included nonsense / un-reason.
Merleau-Ponty suggested that philosophers, scientists,
and educators of all manner, were limited by their own physical existences
and experiences. One of the challenges presented by Merleau-Ponty is
that while he thought science and emperical data were paths towards the
truth, he also rejected the notion that science, as a set of methods,
could discover philosophical truths. As Continental philosophers were
rejecting “scientism” in the aftermath of the two World Wars, Merleau-Ponty
was suggesting there was still a value in science, but not in science
alone.
Immediate Experience: The Lebenswelt
It was Merleau-Ponty’s contention that science and
too much abstraction had resulted in a philosophical tendency to reduce
every phenomena, every object, every person to nothing more than collected
data. Merleau-Ponty believed that philosophers had a duty to relate things
as they were viewed, not as science described them.
We must return to the Lebenswelt, the world in which we meet in the
lived-in experience, our immediate experience of the world.
In contrast to Sartre’s
contention “we are condemned to freedom,” Merleau-Ponty stated “we are
condemned to meaning.” According to his theories, since we are only able
to know ourselves based upon the input of others, all our actions, thoughts,
and statements define us and have historical consequences. In accordance
with the idea that true human nature never ceases to change, Merleau-Ponty
described philosophy as “like art, the act of bringing truth into being.”
Body and Subject
For Merleau-Ponty, people are both bodies and subjects
of thought. The act of self-contemplation is not the same as the tradutional
dualism of mind-body; Merleau-Ponty is not discussing the “spirit” when
he writes of the body-subject. There is a curious ambiguity, a tension,
between bodily existence and the self as a subject of contemplation.
The body-self relationship cannot be severed, yet the two are not one
thing. Unity was also considered by Merleau-Ponty when he wrote on the
relationships of thought-to-speech and fact-to-value.
You must exist physically before you can think about
what it means to exist. This extends the notion of self-definition to
recognize that you first need a physical body and brain before you can
create an “essence” that is you. Merleau-Ponty wrote in The Phenomenology
of Perception:
It is the definition of the human body to appropriate in an indefinite
series of non-continuous acts “centers of meaning” which go beyond
its natural powers and transform it.
Our thoughts move us to act physically. The complication
is that even our thought process is a physical, concrete process of chemical
and electrical signals in the brain. Without the physical, there is no
self-conception. If self-conception itself is a physical act, then we
are always at risk of reducing our view of humanity to the empirical
study of the brain.
About the only thing clear in Merleau-Ponty’s view
is that nothing can be certain. We struggle to define terms like “self”
and “body” which are the very basis for philosophy. If we cannot define
“person” without creating a tangled web of relationships, then nothing
else can be reduced to an ideal. It would seem the one thing we should
know, ourselves, is impossible to know.
In The Structure of Behavior, a study
of psychological theories, Merleau-Ponty wrote that his aim was “to understand
the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or
even social.” According to Merleau-Ponty, humans and our world are interconnected:
neither causes the other, instead we shape and are shaped by our
environment. Furthermore, we have both a natural (predefined) existence
and the ability to change that nature via conscious choice.
[If] one understands by perception the act which makes us know existences,
all the problems we have just touched on [in the book] are reducible
to the problem of perception.
The Phenomenology of Perception
Merleau-Ponty’s Primacy of Perception,
published in 1945, further explained his theory of perception.
[Our experience of perception comes from our being present] at the
moment when things, truths, and values are constituted for us; that
perception is a nascent Logos; that it teaches us, outside of all dogmatism,
the true conditions of objectivity itself; that is summons us to the
tasks of knowledge and action. It is not a question of reducing human
knowledge to sensation, but of assisting at the birth of this knowledge,
to make it as sensible as the sensible, to recover the consciousness
of rationality. This experience of rationality is lost when we take
it for granted as self-evident, but is, on the contrary, rediscovered
when it is made to appear against the background of non-human nature.
Merleau-Ponty’s theories were advanced in his major
work The Phenomenology of Perception. The text opens with
a preface and long introduction. Merleau-Ponty used these pages to explain
his phenomenology, including both its concepts and procedures. Again,
Merleau-Ponty was setting his approach apart from that of Husserl.
Phenomenology, as proposed by Merleau-Ponty, is concerned
primary with physical existence. The human body, and its perceptions,
is the way we relate to and understand existence. Merleau-Ponty suggested
meaning therefore begins with perception. Because meaning begins with
perception, Merleau-Ponty found it necessary to discuss how perception
works. Perception starts, according to Merleau-Ponty, with the preconscious
moment the external comes into contact with the body. The conscious interpretation
of input, as neurologists have affirmed, follows the experience by a
significant lapse.
Free Will
Merleau-Ponty did not advocate a concept of “absolute
free will” in his works. Instead, there are limitations on human choice. The
Phenomenology of Perception served to illustrate differences between Jean-Paul
Sartre’s understanding of free will and that of Merleau-Ponty. Though
a simplification, it has been suggested that Sartre’s “free will” is
always absolute. As Albert Camus and others
have written, the radical interpretation is that even choosing to live
each day is a choice. For Merleau-Ponty, the suggestion that reality
is created by individuals was too simplistic. Sartre, according to Merleau-Ponty,
was too quick to imply that the only obstacles one faces are created
by the individual. Absolute free will is impossible, Merleau-Ponty believed,
because real barriers to choice are all around us.
In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
developed the argument that humans are “situated” within their environments.
There are physical and cultural limits on choice. While Sartre argued
one can always reject such limits, especially cultural limits, Merleau-Ponty
proposed conditional free will. People can act on their environments,
and via these constant interactions the individual and the environment
are changed.
Merleau-Ponty wrote in
The Phenomenology of Perception:
The view which we oppose [Sartre’s] is wrong in that it pays attention
only to our intellectual projects, and does not take into account the
existential projects which polarize life toward a purpose in which
being-determined and being-undetermined fuse.
Terrorism and Marxism
Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror is
a troubling book. It is difficult to comment on Merleau-Ponty’s defenses
of the Soviet Union without reflecting the biases that time affords:
we know the Soviet Union to have been a cruel, oppressive power and not
a model of Marxist ideals. The French Left embraced Marxism and the Communist
Party in ways that might defy explanation, until one considers the absolute
destruction of the two World Wars on the Continent. People were left
with nothing; socialism promised to provide for everyone. The Soviet
Union became the idealized model for socialists.
The question posed by Merleau-Ponty, in the context
of Marxism, is if violence can be justified in the name of revolution.
The difficulty for Merleau-Ponty is that he did not ask this about a
full-scale revolution against injustices, but rather in the context of
Soviet Stalinist purges. According to Humanism and Terror,
terror might be justified by history if the Marxist ideal were realized
by the Soviet Union.
In 1938, the Soviet Union, under the iron-fisted leadership
of the dictator Joseph Stalin, began a series of show trials to purge
the Communist Party of individuals Stalin feared would challenge his
authority. This was following the the footsteps of Lenin, and it might
be considered evidence that Russia had only traded one style of authoritarian
rule for another. Stalin managed to have tried and executed numerous
high-ranking Communist Party officials, most charged with treason and
crimes against the people.
Merleau-Ponty thought it was necessary to first refute
Arthur Koestler’s interpretation of events, which appeared in Darkness
at Noon. For Merleau-Ponty, the trials could have been part of
the Marxist evolution of history. In other words, the Moscow Trials were
merely a step, a phase like capitalism or feudalism, as the Soviet Union
matured towards utopia. Of course, this all had much less to do with Karl
Marx than basic modern politics.
Today it seems shocking, but in Humanism and
Terror Merleau-Ponty casts Stalin’s rivals as threats to the
Soviet Union and even the totality of Europe. Merleau-Ponty suggested
that without Soviet unity and Stalin’s leadership, World War II might
have been lost to Germany. The text argues that the violence against
possible traitors to the Communist Party was, therefore excusable.
Even if the individuals tried and executed were innocent,
as many historians believe, Merleau-Ponty argued that the deaths were
still possibly minor mistakes that could result in a better Soviet Union
at a later date. This argument attempts to either raise the dead to martyrdom
or it casts them as meaningless lives that had value only insofar as
they were sacrificed to Marxist historical progress. The least tenable
argument is that the terror was justified if a more egalitarian society
evolved, while other forms of oppression might have continued without
the deaths.
For Merleau-Ponty, history was, at best, uncertain
and ambiguous. Only as we approach a full century since the Russian Revolution
can we look back and pass judgment on the figures involved in shaping
the Soviet legacy. However, this line of reasoning would allow one to
avoid passing judgment on almost any action, as long as the ultimate
aim was an egalitarian society. Later in life, Merleau-Ponty would recognize
that actions must be judged in a moral context at all times.
True, we make mistakes and what seems like a good choice
can be viewed historically as a disaster. However, the killing of innocent
individuals and the use of terror to exercise power seems difficult to
justify in any context. Choices are often based on the odds of future
results, but humanism seems to demand that we not sacrifice people for
a future we cannot predict will be better.
