Maurice Merleau-Ponty Communicates to the French Middle Classes
The World of Perception (2002 Publication of 1948 Radio Lectures)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Mid-twentieth century revolutions in thought
have overturned much of the basis for an easy acceptance of Descartes
and later Kant as guides to life, with Kierkegaard and Nietzche as early
pioneers in unravelling some of the presumptions of essentialism. This is not to denigrate these 'great thinkers' of the canon but only to say that new thinking will inevitable emerge from old thoughts. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty is a very significant figure in this context, not merely
within modern continental philosophy but in preparing the ground for
what looks likely to be seen as a much wider and consequent cultural
revolution, one derived from the extension of the insights of the
existentialist, phenomenological and hermeneutic schools, first into art
and culture and increasingly into society and politics.
This slim volume represents seven radio lectures given by Merleau-Ponty in 1948. The form should warn you about the content. They are slight, an attempt to popularise complex thoughts and ideas, equivalent to the sort of 'Brains Trust'-type talks given by intellectuals like Bertrand Russell or JB Priestley in Britain (as well as the Brains Trust itself) around the same time. They are of their place and time. Some of the ideas will seem oddly obvious to a later generation but the lectures were bringing ideas that were reasonably well understood at the leading edge of the French intelligenstia to the educated French middle classes where they were not so well understood. Bertrand Russell had brought analytical philosophy (very much more to the taste of the Anglo-Saxon) to the British middle classes through similar means.
Radio was an essential medium of public education at this time. Merleau-Ponty appears to be doing a reasonable job here of boiling down complex and radical thought to the level of a reasonably educated member of the French general public. But the book could be slimmer. Thomas Baldwin's introductory notes add little to appreciation of material that stands on its own merits. His determination to put his own critique of Merleau-Ponty's claims is irritating when what we really want is an explication of what Merleau-Ponty was trying to get across to a mass audience - and why.
Similarly, the first four lectures are scene-setting potboilers. Complex research and thought is boiled down to short gobbets of information that are not always entirely clear. The lectures only come alive, to become a useful summary of his ideas, in the last three: a sensitive critique of Cartesianism from what is clearly an existentialist or rather phenomenological point of view; how art must be seen as distinct from reality (a message that needs hammering even today); and a powerful, short and, in my view, important critique of the assumptions of the Enlightenment.
To be honest, this book is for completists in French philosophy or for those interested in how philosophy was communicated to the French public in the vibrant 1940s. Merleau-Ponty's views are probably best investigated through more substantal works or through one of the very many general works on existentialism - even perhaps from Wikipedia. Where the book is useful is in providing unusually succinct (for a working philosopher) expressions of his position. This reader is wholly persuaded by his approach. Merleau-Ponty seems to be describing not so much how educated people should think (as was the case in the 1940s) but how educated people actually think today, sixty years on.
This shows the extent of a revolution that marks out the wiser part of the liberal West today both from its ideological rivals overseas and from the fundamentalist version of liberal thinking that is now fighting its own rear-guard action to preserve the dominance of its absolute values in a changing society. Merleau-Ponty's legacy is the challenge being undertaken, as I write, to sustain in place some of the rigidities and essentialisms that were the consensus in 1948. These still hold sway in the elites of the West (though not necessarily in the general population) and are the basis of all the 'grand projets' that are so damaging within Western politics - from the American Empire through Israel under some of its manifestations to the European Union. We might confess 'Global Britain' to have fallen into the same abyss.
In essence, Merleau-Ponty's project is an extended critique of classical rationalism (though not, it should be said, a call for the rule of unreason). For Merleau-Ponty, the rule of pure reason is neither possible nor truly human because we are, as human beings, embedded in our perceptions. We must be seen in the context of our history and of social reality and its history - as well as of the constant negotiation of our position with our own drives and with other persons. This is a nice French humanisation of the denser Germanic insights of Martin Heidegger.
This is the middle ground between matter and intellect where we actually live. This critique of abstract reason is important in a French context where Reason has often been over-respected ever since the Enlightenment. As he puts it, rather than accepting the Cartesian dualism of their being, here, a mind and, there, a body, we should see ourselves and others as minds with bodies - "a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things." Let the man speak for himself:
Lecture 5
" Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being ... humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally, and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people ... there is no 'inner' life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person, In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things that we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people."
Lecture 6
" The meaning 'table' will only interest me insofar as it arises out of all the 'details' which embody its present mode of being. If I accept the tutelage of perception, I find I am ready to understand the work of art. For it too is a totality of flesh in which meaning is not free, so to speak, but bound, a prisoner of all the signs, or details, which reveal it to me. Thus the work of art resembles the object of perception: its nature is to be seen or heard and no attempt to define or analyse it, however valuable that may be as a way of taking stock of this experience, can ever stand in place of the direct perceptual experience."
Lecture 7
" In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion."
" ... absolutely objective historical knowledge is inconceivable, because the act of interpreting the past and placing it in perspective is conditioned by the moral and political choices which the historian has made in his own life ... Trapped in this circle, human existence can never abstract from itself in order to gain access to the naked truth: it merely has the capacity to progress towards the objective and does not possess objectivity in fully-fledged form."
" ... if ambiguity and incompletion are ... written into the very fabric of our collective existence rather than just the works of intellectuals, then to seek the restoration of reason ... would be a derisory response ... liberal regimes should not be taken at their word ... noble ideologies can sometimes be convenient excuses."
Merleau-Ponty's message in these lectures is optimistic, far from the doom-and-gloom often ascribed to those moving in existentialist circles at this time. Contestability and ambiguity are not becessarily bad things to Merleau-Ponty because they permit self- and social creation that accords with our complex natures. He stands in opposition to rationalist and intellectual models that bend humanity into fixed shapes.
Not only God but Reason are 'dead'. This is to be embraced but not from a position of reactionary conservatism. On the contrary, while clearly highly critical of the Soviet model, he is equally critical of Liberal nostrums (as he should be). The strong implication is that we can change things for us personally and for society in a progressive way through embracing uncertainty and making humane judgements for which we must take personal responsibility.
Of course, it is hard not to see this as part of the same movement that embraced Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Arendt and so it is - but Merleau-Ponty should, I believe, be considered differently. His humane phenomenological approach leads him to existentialist conclusions but it does not lock him into its 'system' (such as it is) or ideology.
His ideological approach is, in fact, anti-ideological. He is sensibly respectful of science and is determined not to be led by the nose by Sartre whose genius and ego may place him amongst the 'greats' of Western philosophy but who must always be taken with a pinch of salt as a guide to life. For Merleau-Ponty, life need not be 'absurd' if we do not wish it to be.
This slim volume represents seven radio lectures given by Merleau-Ponty in 1948. The form should warn you about the content. They are slight, an attempt to popularise complex thoughts and ideas, equivalent to the sort of 'Brains Trust'-type talks given by intellectuals like Bertrand Russell or JB Priestley in Britain (as well as the Brains Trust itself) around the same time. They are of their place and time. Some of the ideas will seem oddly obvious to a later generation but the lectures were bringing ideas that were reasonably well understood at the leading edge of the French intelligenstia to the educated French middle classes where they were not so well understood. Bertrand Russell had brought analytical philosophy (very much more to the taste of the Anglo-Saxon) to the British middle classes through similar means.
Radio was an essential medium of public education at this time. Merleau-Ponty appears to be doing a reasonable job here of boiling down complex and radical thought to the level of a reasonably educated member of the French general public. But the book could be slimmer. Thomas Baldwin's introductory notes add little to appreciation of material that stands on its own merits. His determination to put his own critique of Merleau-Ponty's claims is irritating when what we really want is an explication of what Merleau-Ponty was trying to get across to a mass audience - and why.
Similarly, the first four lectures are scene-setting potboilers. Complex research and thought is boiled down to short gobbets of information that are not always entirely clear. The lectures only come alive, to become a useful summary of his ideas, in the last three: a sensitive critique of Cartesianism from what is clearly an existentialist or rather phenomenological point of view; how art must be seen as distinct from reality (a message that needs hammering even today); and a powerful, short and, in my view, important critique of the assumptions of the Enlightenment.
To be honest, this book is for completists in French philosophy or for those interested in how philosophy was communicated to the French public in the vibrant 1940s. Merleau-Ponty's views are probably best investigated through more substantal works or through one of the very many general works on existentialism - even perhaps from Wikipedia. Where the book is useful is in providing unusually succinct (for a working philosopher) expressions of his position. This reader is wholly persuaded by his approach. Merleau-Ponty seems to be describing not so much how educated people should think (as was the case in the 1940s) but how educated people actually think today, sixty years on.
This shows the extent of a revolution that marks out the wiser part of the liberal West today both from its ideological rivals overseas and from the fundamentalist version of liberal thinking that is now fighting its own rear-guard action to preserve the dominance of its absolute values in a changing society. Merleau-Ponty's legacy is the challenge being undertaken, as I write, to sustain in place some of the rigidities and essentialisms that were the consensus in 1948. These still hold sway in the elites of the West (though not necessarily in the general population) and are the basis of all the 'grand projets' that are so damaging within Western politics - from the American Empire through Israel under some of its manifestations to the European Union. We might confess 'Global Britain' to have fallen into the same abyss.
In essence, Merleau-Ponty's project is an extended critique of classical rationalism (though not, it should be said, a call for the rule of unreason). For Merleau-Ponty, the rule of pure reason is neither possible nor truly human because we are, as human beings, embedded in our perceptions. We must be seen in the context of our history and of social reality and its history - as well as of the constant negotiation of our position with our own drives and with other persons. This is a nice French humanisation of the denser Germanic insights of Martin Heidegger.
This is the middle ground between matter and intellect where we actually live. This critique of abstract reason is important in a French context where Reason has often been over-respected ever since the Enlightenment. As he puts it, rather than accepting the Cartesian dualism of their being, here, a mind and, there, a body, we should see ourselves and others as minds with bodies - "a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things." Let the man speak for himself:
Lecture 5
" Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being ... humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally, and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people ... there is no 'inner' life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person, In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things that we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people."
Lecture 6
" The meaning 'table' will only interest me insofar as it arises out of all the 'details' which embody its present mode of being. If I accept the tutelage of perception, I find I am ready to understand the work of art. For it too is a totality of flesh in which meaning is not free, so to speak, but bound, a prisoner of all the signs, or details, which reveal it to me. Thus the work of art resembles the object of perception: its nature is to be seen or heard and no attempt to define or analyse it, however valuable that may be as a way of taking stock of this experience, can ever stand in place of the direct perceptual experience."
Lecture 7
" In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion."
" ... absolutely objective historical knowledge is inconceivable, because the act of interpreting the past and placing it in perspective is conditioned by the moral and political choices which the historian has made in his own life ... Trapped in this circle, human existence can never abstract from itself in order to gain access to the naked truth: it merely has the capacity to progress towards the objective and does not possess objectivity in fully-fledged form."
" ... if ambiguity and incompletion are ... written into the very fabric of our collective existence rather than just the works of intellectuals, then to seek the restoration of reason ... would be a derisory response ... liberal regimes should not be taken at their word ... noble ideologies can sometimes be convenient excuses."
Merleau-Ponty's message in these lectures is optimistic, far from the doom-and-gloom often ascribed to those moving in existentialist circles at this time. Contestability and ambiguity are not becessarily bad things to Merleau-Ponty because they permit self- and social creation that accords with our complex natures. He stands in opposition to rationalist and intellectual models that bend humanity into fixed shapes.
Not only God but Reason are 'dead'. This is to be embraced but not from a position of reactionary conservatism. On the contrary, while clearly highly critical of the Soviet model, he is equally critical of Liberal nostrums (as he should be). The strong implication is that we can change things for us personally and for society in a progressive way through embracing uncertainty and making humane judgements for which we must take personal responsibility.
Of course, it is hard not to see this as part of the same movement that embraced Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Arendt and so it is - but Merleau-Ponty should, I believe, be considered differently. His humane phenomenological approach leads him to existentialist conclusions but it does not lock him into its 'system' (such as it is) or ideology.
His ideological approach is, in fact, anti-ideological. He is sensibly respectful of science and is determined not to be led by the nose by Sartre whose genius and ego may place him amongst the 'greats' of Western philosophy but who must always be taken with a pinch of salt as a guide to life. For Merleau-Ponty, life need not be 'absurd' if we do not wish it to be.