Merleau-Ponty’s Existential

Phenomenology and the Realization

of Philosophy
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 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential
Phenomenology and the Realization
of Philosophy

Bryan A. Smyth

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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© Bryan A. Smyth, 2014

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3705-2

ePDF: 978-1-7809-3786-1
ePub: 978-1-7809-3787-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smyth, Bryan A.
Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy/Bryan A. Smyth.
pages cm. – (Bloomsbury studies in continental philosophy)
Summary: “An original re-reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology by way of a
critical investigation of its crucial yet enigmatic references to ‘heroism’”– Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78093-705-2 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-78093-787-8 (epub) –
ISBN 978-1-78093-786-1 (epdf) 1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961.
2. Phenomenology. 3. Heroes. 4. Courage. I. Smyth, Bryan A. II. Title.
B2430.M3764S58 2014
142’.7–dc23
2013039128

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Merleau ponty.indb iv 11/5/2013 3:30:27 PM

 Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Abbreviations Used in Text vii
Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception ix

Introduction: Flight From Phenomenology? 1

1 Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “Soliloquizing Angel” 7
2 Embodiment and Incarnation 23
3 Totality and Embodiment 53
4 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 71
5 Contemporary Heroism 107
Conclusion: Heroic Sublimation 141

Notes 151
Afterword 177
Bibliography 179
Index 199
 Acknowledgments

The ideas in this book have been brewing for many years, and as is often the case,
they stem from much wider explorations. This means, among other things, that a large
number of people have contributed helpfully to them in various ways over the years.
For their particular forms of assistance, I would like to thank Alia Al-Saji, Renaud
Barbaras, Robert Bernasconi, Ronald Bruzina, Philip Buckley, Anna Carastathis,
Françoise Dastur, Duane Davis, Bernard Flynn, George di Giovanni, Wayne Froman,
John Hellman, Richard Holmes, Jonathan Kim-Reuter, Don Landes, Len Lawlor, Mary
Beth Mader, Iain Macdonald, Darian Meachum, Arsalan Memon, David Morris,
Stephen Noble, Richard Nutbrown, and Michel Rybalka. I would also like to thank
Suzanne Merleau-Ponty for kindly making available to me her volume of Merleau-
Ponty’s unpublished personal notes from the late 1940s (Notes inédites de Merleau-
Ponty, 1946–1949), and Kerry Whiteside for having transcribed these notes and for
conveying copies of the originals to me.
Very special thanks to Anne Quinney for her patient support and encouragement,
and to Fyntan and Aurélia for making everything so much more intensely rewarding. It
is to my parents that I owe the greatest debt—the book is dedicated to their memory.
Parts of the Preface and Conclusion are reprinted from “The Meontic and the
Militant: On Merleau-Ponty’s Relation to Fink,” International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, 19:5 (2011), 669–99, with the kind permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd.
Parts of Chapter 5 are reprinted from “Heroism and History in Merleau-Ponty’s
Existential Phenomenology,” Continental Philosophy Review, 43:2 (2010), 167–91, with
kind permission from Springer Science  Business Media.
 Abbreviations Used in Text

See bibliography for complete bibliographic information. Where applicable, page

references are given in the form “original/translation.” Translations are, however,
frequently modified.

Works by Merleau-Ponty
AD Les aventures de la dialectique (1955)/Adventures of the Dialectic (1973).
CR “Christianisme et ressentiment,” in Merleau-Ponty (1997), pp. 9–33.
EP Éloge de la philosophie (1953)/“In Praise of Philosophy,” in Merleau-Ponty
(1988), pp. 3–67.
HT Humanisme et terreur (1947)/Humanism and Terror (1969).
NI Notes inédites de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1946–1949.*
PhP Phénoménologie de la perception (1945).
PNPH “Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel. Cours de 1960–1961,” in
Merleau-Ponty (1996b), pp. 269–352.
Pros. “Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty (2000), pp. 36–
48/“An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His
Work,” in Merleau-Ponty (1964b), pp. 3–11.
PrP “Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques,” in Merleau-
Ponty (1996a), pp. 41–104/“The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical
Consequences,” in Merleau-Ponty (1964b), pp. 12–42.
Signs Signes (1960)/Signs (1964d).
SC La structure du comportement (1942)/The Structure of Behavior (1963).
SNS Sens et non-sens (1948)/Sense and Non-Sense (1964c).
TT “Titres et travaux: Projet d’enseignement,” in Merleau-Ponty (2000), pp.
9–35.
VI Le visible et l’invisible (1964a)/The Visible and the Invisible (1964e).
*  Unpublished notes from the late 1940s. Collated, paginated, and transcribed by Kerry
Whiteside (see Whiteside 1988, 312ff). I would like to thank Suzanne Merleau-Ponty
and Kerry Whiteside for making copies of the originals as well as the transcription
available to me. Original assigned pagination is followed by transcription pagination
in square brackets. At Mme. Merleau-Ponty’s request, it should be noted that these
materials were never intended for publication.
viii Abbreviations Used in Text

Works by others
Carnets Saint Exupéry (1975), Carnets, édition intégrale.
EG Saint Exupéry (1982), Écrits de guerre.
EN Sartre (1943), L’être et le néant/Sartre (1956) Being and Nothingness.
ES Roger Caillois, (2003), The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader.
FTL Husserl (1969), Formal and Transcendental Logic.
HCC Lukács, (1967a), Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein/Lukács (1971), History
and Class Consciousness.
KrV Kant (1998), Critique of Pure Reason (standard A/B pagination).
KS Fink, “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Husserls in der gegenwärtigen
Kritik,” in Fink (1966), pp. 79–156/Fink (1970), “The Phenomenological
Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism.”
KU Kant (2000), Critique of the Power of Judgment (Akademie pagination).
MAM Saint Exupéry (1981), “Le marxisme anti-marxiste.”
MH Roger Caillois (1938), Le mythe et l’homme.
PG Saint Exupéry (1942c), Pilote de guerre (Gallimard).
SCM Fink (1988a), VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 1/Fink (1995), Sixth
Cartesian Meditation.
SV Saint Exupéry (1956), Un sens à la vie.
SZ Heidegger (1957), Sein und Zeit/Heidegger (1962), Being and Time.
TD Lukács (2000), A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the
Dialectic.
TE Binswanger, “Traum und Existenz,” in Binswanger (1994), pp. 95–119.
TH Saint Exupéry (1939), Terre des hommes.
ÜP Binswanger, “Über Psychotherapie,” in Binswanger (1994), pp. 205–30.
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology
of Perception

As with other figures of like stature, there is a vast amount of secondary literature
devoted to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The last decade or so in particular
has seen the publication of numerous new books. Why one more?
A critical glance at the situation in recent English-language Merleau-Ponty
scholarship may be instructive here. For we see that the vast majority of recent volumes
fall into one of the following two categories: (1) general introductions and reference
works,1 including several edited collections of a general nature,2 and (2) applications
of Merleau-Ponty’s work to specific topics or problems.3 Many of these contributions
are, in whole or in part, of significant scholarly value. But nonetheless, a clear pattern
emerges: in recent years little new basic interpretive research on Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophical work itself has been accorded book-length treatment, and what has
been published has invariably tended either to adopt an overall view of his corpus
that emphasizes his later works, or else to focus exclusively on the latter.4 In other
words, even though recent years have seen a marked upsurge in the level of interest
in Merleau-Ponty’s work, both within and beyond the disciplinary boundaries of
philosophy, and even though Phenomenology of Perception remains, by all accounts,
his magnum opus,5 there has been no new book-length scholarly contribution aimed
principally at coming to terms with the formulation of existential phenomenology that
this text epitomizes. There is, rather, an overwhelming tacit consensus that this early
stage of Merleau-Ponty’s work has, over the last 60-plus years, already been sufficiently
studied, such that there is really nothing new (of any philosophical consequence) to be
said about it.6 It might be expounded or elucidated or spun or summarized or applied
in this or that new way, but the standard working assumption is that with regard to
Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology in the immediate postwar period, there
remain, so to speak, no unturned stones.

Methodological questions
There can be no denying that Merleau-Ponty’s later works are of immense philosophical
interest, and this is especially true of the recently published and as-yet still unpublished
materials from his lectures at the Collège de France. Be that as it may, however, it
is fundamentally mistaken to maintain that critical scrutiny of Merleau-Ponty’s early
reinterpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology as expressed primarily
in Phenomenology of Perception is, for all intents and purposes, an exhausted project.
There may be several reasons for this, but one aspect stands out quite prominently—to
x Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

wit, the question of method. It would be very difficult for any Merleau-Ponty scholar
to disagree with the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s work from the early postwar period,
and Phenomenology of Perception in particular, is (or at least appears to be) rather
elusive with regard to conveying the underlying methodology on the basis of which
its claims unfold. Such methodological elusiveness or unforthcomingness may also
be found in some of Merleau-Ponty’s later works too, and no doubt something similar
is true of many (or even most) other philosophers as well. But reticence of this kind
is particularly problematic in the context of phenomenology, and of transcendental
phenomenology especially. For here, methodological issues concerning the nature of
the phenomenological reduction—in general terms (including the epoché) and in its
various possible modes (e.g. eidetic reduction)—are of paramount importance. As
a distinctive approach to philosophical problems, transcendental phenomenology
stands or falls with its conception of the reduction for at least two related reasons.
First, the reduction is indispensable for any genuine phenomenology to get off the
ground. As Eugen Fink once put it, “There is no phenomenology that does not pass
through the ‘reduction.’ Anything calling itself ‘phenomenology’ while renouncing the
reduction would in principle be a mundane philosophy, which is to say, a ‘dogmatic’
one (in the phenomenological sense)” (KS 105n1/146n11, translation modified).7
Second, whatever philosophical insights to which phenomenology may lay claim are
unavoidably conditioned by the manner in which the reduction is performed, since
those insights can only be based on the evidence of the phenomena that are thereby
disclosed. It is thus simply not possible to overstate the extent to which the philosophical
coherence and viability of transcendental phenomenology depend essentially upon
its methodological self-understanding. And yet this self-understanding is not easily
achieved. As Merleau-Ponty himself noted, even Husserl struggled at length with
the “problematic of the reduction”—“there is probably no other question on which
Husserl spent more time trying to understand—nor one to which he returned more
often” (PhP v).8 Consideration of these points—namely, the vital indispensability of
the reduction, and the importance of getting clear about it—cannot but render the
apparent elusiveness of Merleau-Ponty’s early work with regard to methodology all the
more puzzling and frustrating.9
Take, for instance, the well-known and oft-cited remark made in the Preface to the
effect that “the best formulation” of the reduction was given by Fink “when he spoke
of a ‘wonder’ [« étonnement »] before the world” (PhP viii; cf. 341f).10 This was a point
that Fink made in all of his important summary expositions of Husserl’s project that
he produced in the 1930s, articles which had a crucial formative impact on Merleau-
Ponty’s understanding of phenomenology: “the origin of philosophical problems is
wonder” [Verwunderung] (Fink 1966d, 182; cf. Fink 1966c, 168.).11 Such is, of course,
a venerable sentiment, one that may be traced back at least to the Socratic claim
that “wonder [thaumazein] is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in
wonder.”12 And Fink’s connecting this to phenomenology is by no means an eccentric
claim peculiar to him. Beginning with Husserl himself, phenomenologists have often
conceived their work as rooted in something like that ancient sense of wonder.13
Yet, surely the best formulation of the phenomenological reduction cannot simply
amount to a reiteration of a traditional notion, and one to which, needless to say,
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xi

phenomenology has no proprietary claim. Fink himself was more specific. For him,
philosophical wonder concerned the being of the world itself, and he claimed that the
philosophical uniqueness of phenomenology lies in its effort radically to inculcate and
operationalize this wonder methodologically. Phenomenological inquiry begins with
the phenomenological reduction which, through the suspension of the natural attitude,
brings about “the awakening of an immeasurable wonder over the mysteriousness” of
the state of affairs [Sachlage] confronting philosophy at its beginning [das Erwachen
einer maßlosen Verwunderung über die Rätselhaftigkeit dieser Sachlage] (KS 115f/109).14
This wonder involves the loss of naïve obviousness, the disconcerting astonishment of
which “displaces man from the captivation [Befangenheit] in everyday, publicly pre-
given, traditional and worn-out familiarity with existents.” It “drives one from an always
already authorized and expressly laid-out interpretation of the sense of the world,”
with the result that the phenomenologist “once again opens himself primordially
[uranfänglich] to the world, finding himself in the dawn of a new day of the world
[in der Morgendämmerung eines neuen Welttages] in which he, and everything that is,
begins to appear in a new light” (Fink 1966d, 183).
As we shall see, Fink had much more to say about the reduction. But Merleau-Ponty
may have been echoing these general ideas in glossing as follows his own view of the
reduction in terms of wonder: “reflection does not withdraw from the world toward the
unity of consciousness as the foundation of the world; rather, it steps back in order to
see transcendences surge forth [jaillir] and it slackens [distend] the intentional threads
that connect us to the world in order to make them appear” (PhP viii). It is in this way
that, for Merleau-Ponty, “true philosophy is a matter of learning to see the world anew
[rapprendre à voir le monde]” (PhP xvi).
Merleau-Ponty thus concurred with Fink’s main criticism of Kantian philosophy,
namely, that it is not genuinely transcendental but rather remains “worldly”
[« mondaine »], in that it ultimately takes the world for granted and makes use of it,
rather than, as Merleau-Ponty put it, “wondering about the world and conceiving the
subject as a transcendence toward it” (PhP viii). But he also self-consciously deviated
from Fink—and, indeed, from everyone, including Husserl himself—inasmuch as
he took this interpretation of phenomenology decisively in a particular existential
direction that emphasizes what he called the “paradoxical” nature of the world.15
By this, Merleau-Ponty meant that the being of the world does not simply present a
“mysterious” state of affairs, the resolution of which could be achieved through the
insights of transcendental phenomenology. Rather, his point was that the world is a
mystery, that it is “defined” by its mysteriousness, and that therefore “there can be no
question of dispelling it [the mystery] through any sort of ‘solution’ ” [il ne saurait être
question de le dissiper par quelque « solution »]—it is “below the level” of any solution
[il est en déça des solutions] (PhP xvi). Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, not only is it
necessary to “break” [rompre] our familiarity with the world, but moreover—and this is
what’s crucial—what this rupture can teach us is “nothing but the unmotivated upsurge
[le jaillissement immotivé] of the world” (PhP viii). This is crucial because from it follows
immediately the most famous and celebrated claim regarding the phenomenological
reduction in Phenomenology of Perception, namely, the claim that “the most important
lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction” (PhP viii).
xii Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

The point of this well-known assertion is to emphasize the spatial and temporal
inherence of phenomenology in the world, such that the “radical reflection” it
undertakes by way of the reduction is inescapably dependent upon pregiven layers
of “unreflective life.” Most readers of Merleau-Ponty who incline favorably toward
his project view this claim as a concise expression of the way in which he takes up
Husserlian phenomenology without succumbing—as Husserl himself supposedly
did—to idealism or “intellectualism” and all its concomitant philosophical deficiencies.
In other words, it is taken as an expression of how Merleau-Ponty goes Husserl one
better methodologically.
Leaving aside the question as to whether or not this is fair with regard to Husserl,
there is, on the face of it, something suspect about Merleau-Ponty’s assertion. For even
if it is granted that the reduction as envisioned by Husserl is indeed something that
cannot in all strictness be completely carried out, it still doesn’t quite make sense to
say that the reduction itself could supply us with this lesson. The underlying point
is a general one: how could any methodological procedure all by itself indicate its
own limitations in an epistemically reliable way? To be sure, one may take up the
phenomenological reduction in an attempt to do what Husserl had supposedly hoped
to do and then find that it always comes up short. But in that case, the conclusion that
would be warranted is not that the reduction is all well and good up to that point but
no further, that is, in an incomplete form, but rather that the reduction is inherently
flawed and should simply be discarded altogether. Just as archers, for example, may not
legitimately claim technical mastery when they move their targets to wherever their
arrows happen to land, no philosophical method that fails to achieve its own ostensible
goals can be simply retained—that is, retained with further ado—as a successful way
of reaching whatever unexpected results at which it chanced to arrive. Absent a sound
and lucid methodological self-understanding as to how they were reached, and why
any further targets are illusory, those results are, technically speaking, meaningless
noise—or, in phenomenological parlance, they are transcendentally naïve. In short,
if the phenomenological reduction grinds to a halt before attaining the goal it was
designed to achieve, then the immediate implication is one of failure, with the result
that no putative insights at all, whether with reference to the intentional objects
under consideration up to that point or to the reduction itself qua method, could be
considered reliable.
The point here is that while it is no doubt true that a complete reduction in the sense
intended by Merleau-Ponty is indeed impossible, it makes no sense to say that one
could learn this as a truth from an incomplete performance of that same reduction—a
truncated implementation of a misguided procedure is not a recipe for insight. Pending
further methodological elaboration, then, it remains entirely unclear as to why and
how the reduction would be retained at all.
As mentioned above, the idea of an incomplete reduction is widely held and even
celebrated as a positive virtue of Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of transcendental
phenomenology—an existentially modified version of an originally idealist procedure
that nonetheless remains methodologically central. But what exactly this means and
amounts to has not been fully examined. In particular, the consequences that would
follow in terms of the status of Phenomenology of Perception as a work of philosophy, if
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xiii

it is allowed that its central methodological procedure is necessarily incomplete, have

been left unscrutinized. For while it may be clear enough how a complete reduction
would (per impossibile) yield definitive philosophical truth, it would seem that on its
own, an existentially limited performance of the same procedure could never attain
any comparable degree of philosophical conclusiveness (including, of course, with
regard to metaphysical claims concerning “ambiguity,” since these would be pointless
if they themselves were ambiguous). For it could never achieve the sort of determinate
epistemic closure that is necessary to make compelling truth claims. That is, unless it
borrows covertly the principles of verification or claims of apodicticity, for example,
from the idealism it vigorously rejects, an existentially modified version of the reduction
can never find itself in a position to make bona fide philosophical claims.
This is not to say that such is in fact the case with Phenomenology of Perception.
Rather, it is to suggest that the incomplete reduction is not the whole methodological
story here. Surely no one is prepared to draw the scandalous conclusion that “one of the
great texts of twentieth-century philosophy” (Carman 2012, vii)16 is actually—and even
by its author’s own admission!—methodologically incomplete, that is, lacking in rigorous
methodological completeness of any kind. To be sure, such is a possible outcome. Before
it is conceded, though, it strongly behooves anyone who holds that Phenomenology of
Perception is indeed a text that makes vitally important philosophical claims to first
make some concerted effort to disclose and to come to terms positively—rather than
by privative reference to an impossibility17—with how it is that this work might indeed
be considered methodologically complete. There is no room for ambiguity here—
Phenomenology of Perception either is or is not methodologically complete, and only
one option would allow us to take its results seriously.
Philosophical scholarship on Phenomenology of Perception has yet to settle this
question. More specifically, those who appreciate the work as a major contribution
to philosophy—as opposed to a very sophisticated contribution to psychology, say,
or even to literature—have yet to render explicit the methodological completeness
that they effectively assume is there, even if, as is not uncommon, they are unaware
of making this assumption, or take no cognizance of the problem at all. It is first and
foremost on this basis, then, that the idea, according to which there is fundamentally
nothing new to say about Phenomenology of Perception, should be flatly rejected. This
rejection opens up a space for genuinely fresh exegetical and interpretive work on this
text related to issues of method, and it is in this space that the present book should be
located.
■
This book thus aims at something like a rereading of Phenomenology of Perception.
But if by rereading is understood an undertaking of comprehensive critical exegesis
cover-to-cover, then a rereading as such goes well beyond its scope. Rather, the
much more modest aim of this book is merely to do some of the groundwork for
a critical rereading of Phenomenology of Perception by coming to terms with the
problem of its methodological completeness. Its aim, in other words, is to articulate a
previously uncharted angle of critical analysis which, by being based on the immanent
methodological commitments of Merleau-Ponty’s work, would be able to support
xiv Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

insightful new approaches to the exegesis, interpretation, and ultimately the evaluation
and, if possible, the further development and application of Merleau-Ponty’s text.
In a certain way, though, this book does in fact deal with Phenomenology of
Perception cover to cover. For there are two moments in the text that are of crucial
importance to the overall discussion here, and they happen to fall—although this is
anything but coincidental—on the very first and the very last pages. The first of these
two moments is the reference to Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation that occurs
in the first paragraph of the Preface (PhP i) and the second is comprised of the lines
drawn from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre with which Merleau-Ponty’s
book, as is well known, ends (PhP 520). Neither of these moments has been the
object of critical scrutiny in the scholarship devoted to Merleau-Ponty,18 although
their importance in terms of understanding Phenomenology of Perception is without
parallel. The initial reference to Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, a work devoted
to “the idea of a transcendental theory of method,” properly interpreted along with
other explicit and implicit allusions made in the text, serves to indicate the basic
methodological problem with which Merleau-Ponty had to grapple in composing
Phenomenology of Perception, resolution of which was the conditio sine qua non for
the wholehearted embrace of and identification with the phenomenological project,
duly reconceived, that this book represents. The second key moment, the passage
drawn from Saint Exupéry, manifests quite spectacularly Merleau-Ponty’s resolution
of this problem, and as such, it possesses superlative significance with regard to
understanding the specific inner nature of Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of
Husserlian phenomenology.
The present book focuses primarily on coming to terms with the second of these
moments, that is, the Exupérian climax of Phenomenology of Perception. Although
the cited passage is invariably given a warmly affirmative but inconsequential gloss
whenever it is referred to in the scholarly literature on Merleau-Ponty, there is, as we
shall see, actually much more going on than is readily apparent, and there are some
unexpected interpretive difficulties that demand resolution.19 Critical scrutiny will
bring to light that, at least prima facie, it is deeply puzzling that Phenomenology of
Perception concludes as it does. The main thrust of this book is devoted to dealing with
this problem and its attendant difficulties by construing the end of Phenomenology
of Perception in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s solution to certain methodological issues
concerning the reduction that had been posed by Fink—and more specifically, in
terms of the solution that Merleau-Ponty had conceived as an alternative to that
offered by Fink himself. In order to contextualize this in a way that will allow for a
full appreciation of the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s position and what is at stake in
it, then, it is necessary to first discuss the relevant aspects of Fink’s Sixth Cartesian
Meditation.20

Eugen Fink and the idea of constructive phenomenology

In his capacity as Husserl’s assistant, Fink drafted the Sixth Cartesian Meditation in 1932
as part of the project of systematically reworking the (five) Cartesian Meditations
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xv

which, subsequent to their publication in French translation, Husserl had come to

regard as still beholden to a certain transcendental naïveté.21 For most of the time
since then, this work led a sort of underground existence. In addition to Husserl, a
small circle of others close to him were able to consult it shortly after its composition,
including Gaston Berger, to whom Fink actually lent his (one) carbon copy of the text
in 1934—a copy which apparently was never returned.22 When he left Leuven in 1940,
Fink retrieved the original typescripts from the newly established Husserl archive in
Leuven (Bruzina 1995, xxxiii). Following the war, Fink submitted the work—as he
had intended to do, with Husserl’s support, in 1933, only to be thwarted for “political
reasons” having to do with his connection to Husserl (Bruzina 1995, xx; cf. lxxv n63)—
as his Habilitationsschrift at Freiburg (Bruzina 1995, xxxiv). As he noted at the time,
Fink chose to submit the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, as opposed to newer and more
substantial work, largely because it did carry that original endorsement from Husserl.
The choice was thus more ceremonial than philosophical. Fink saw its submission
as “an act of piety [Pietät],” a statement of critical allegiance to Husserl and to his
project.23 And as he noted in a letter to Hermann Van Breda, his Habilitation was in
fact seen by the University as a case of “political reparation.”24 Unlike most, however,
this Schrift faded from view. In part, this is because the work was somewhat extraneous
to Fink’s own emerging intellectual trajectory. But it is also the case that it had far-
reaching critical implications for transcendental phenomenology that were easily
liable to misunderstanding, for which reason Fink had never intended it to be widely
available.25 And this reluctance to disseminate the work did not change after the war.
The text thus remained unpublished in Fink’s lifetime—it did not appear until 1988,
13 years after his death.
These facts are significant for two reasons. First, it was only on account of Berger’s
extended possession of the carbon copy that Merleau-Ponty was able to read the
Sixth Cartesian Meditation, which he did in  1942.26 It has always been known that
Merleau-Ponty had read this monograph, as he explicitly cited it three times in the
Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, including—as mentioned above—on the very
first page. Second, however, owing to its subsequent history, Fink’s text was entirely
inaccessible to anyone interested in Merleau-Ponty’s book for over 40 years. It was thus
never discussed, let alone established as an important point of reference, in scholarly
commentary on Phenomenology of Perception. The references to Fink’s text were simply
passed over in silence.
Yet, despite the lack of attention that it has received in the literature, the impact that
the Sixth Cartesian Meditation had on Merleau-Ponty’s thought at the time of writing
Phenomenology of Perception was singularly important.27 This impact, however, had
to do with the formal terms in which Fink posed the basic methodological problem
faced by phenomenology, rather than with the actual solution that he proposed—for
Merleau-Ponty disagreed quite sharply with that and offered a radically different
solution. Fink’s text was thus a decisively important methodological foil against
which Merleau-Ponty worked out the basic terms of his own reinterpretation of
phenomenological methodology.28 In order to fully understand Phenomenology of
Perception (and by implication any of Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent work inasmuch as
it represents either an extension or critique of Phenomenology of Perception), then, it is
xvi Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

imperative to understand the salient aspects of “the idea of a transcendental theory of

method” that Fink had developed in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation.29
To begin, consider Merleau-Ponty’s initial reference to Fink. As is well known,
Merleau-Ponty opened the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception by asking: “What
is phenomenology?,” and he motivated this question, insisting on its still being open,
by noting several pairs of seemingly incompatible tendencies within phenomenology
which would have led those of Merleau-Ponty’s readers who were aware of them to doubt
seriously the philosophical coherence of the project. Merleau-Ponty thus juxtaposed
a search for essences with a concern for facticity, a standpoint of transcendental
reflection with perspectives based in the pregivenness of the world, and the goal of
rigorous scientificity with the relativeness of something like Lebensphilosophie. These
points of contrast—or, as he put it, “contradictions”—roughly track idealist versus
existentialist understandings of phenomenology, and they effectively boil down to the
apparent opposition between a transcendental eidetic science and a concrete account
of lived experience. It is within the final “contradiction” that the reference to Fink
appears, and at issue here is methodology: Merleau-Ponty juxtaposed phenomenology
construed as a project of “direct description” with two further developments: first,
Husserl’s reference to “genetic phenomenology” in his Cartesian Meditations (which,
as it had been published in a French translation, was something that many of Merleau-
Ponty’s readers would have been familiar with) and second, the idea of “constructive
phenomenology” that Fink discussed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation (of which
literally only a handful at most of Merleau-Ponty’s readers in France could possibly
have had any idea at all).
Merleau-Ponty’s point here was that each of these developments is at odds
with phenomenology understood as presuppositionless description of intuitional
givenness in strict accordance with Husserl’s original “principle of all principles.”30
For he implied that “genetic phenomenology” would take into account aspects of the
“psychological genesis” of experience, in order to situate critically its intuitionally
given content, and that “constructive phenomenology” would go further by
introducing into consideration “the causal explanations [of experience] that the
scientist [le savant], historian, or sociologist could provide,” which is to say, broader
third-personal or “external spectator” perspectives on human existence that would
serve in turn to situate critically even “genetic” accounts of lived experience. In each
case, it is a matter of reorienting phenomenological attention to the background of
a given level of experience.
Merleau-Ponty did not elaborate in any detail in this opening paragraph. But
he made it clear that he saw a profound tension between the idea of direct descrip-
tion and the sort of critical philosophical comprehension that phenomenology ide-
ally aspires to achieve. For the latter demands a dimension of transcendental critique
that straightforward description alone is incapable of providing. And if we admit “the
unmotivated upsurge of the world,” then how could it be otherwise? Direct descrip-
tion could not but reflect that opaque facticity naïvely. Merleau-Ponty wanted to insist,
however, that this tension is not a shortcoming, but on the contrary, that phenomenol-
ogy lives in and through it—and, in particular, that its “contradictoriness” is not extra-
neous to but rather fully present within Husserl’s own work.31 Merleau-Ponty’s initial
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xvii

reference to Fink is thus ambivalent. On the one hand, the suggestion is that Fink’s
idea of constructive phenomenology implies a salutary openness to supplement first-
person description with insights drawn from an external standpoint. On the other
hand, however, the tone of the reference indicates unmistakably that Merleau-Ponty
regarded Fink’s idea with some suspicion, as being another one-sided expression of
a particular metaphysical tendency internal to phenomenology. What is thereby sug-
gested is that while there is something partly correct about the idea of constructive
phenomenology, along with all the other “contradictory” aspects of the project, it too
needs to be reconciled under the auspices of a genuinely phenomenological under-
standing of what phenomenology is.
Such is Merleau-Ponty’s task, both in the Preface itself and beyond. In order to
appreciate fully his efforts, it is necessary to lay out in some detail the account of
constructive phenomenology that Fink developed in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation.
To this end, I will unpack Fink’s dense and technical text in terms of the problem of
phenomenological self-reference, and the fundamental parameters of his own proposed
solution. This will unfold as follows: I will provide (1) an account of Fink’s construal
of the phenomenologist as a detached theoretical “onlooker” [Zuschauer] that does
not participate in the constitution of the world, and show (2) how this gives rise to a
specific problem of transcendental “illusion” [Schein] which requires for its resolution
(3) a speculative interpretation of phenomenology as the “absolute science” of the
constitution of worldly Being [Sein] in terms of processes obtaining in the extraworldly
dimension of “pre-Being” [Vor-Sein].32 I shall then consider Merleau-Ponty’s response
to this, as well as some of the issues that it raises and how these serve to motivate taking
a fresh look at Phenomenology of Perception.

The phenomenological onlooker

Fink’s proposed revisions to the original Cartesian Meditations cut strongly against
their “Cartesian” character, in particular by insisting upon the pre-givenness of the
world as phenomenology’s initial situation, and emphasizing that, just as much as it
encompasses transcendent being, the world includes the sphere of human immanence.
To deflect the common but mistaken view that performing the phenomenological
reduction entails withdrawing into an inner domain of apodictic self-certainty, Fink
locks human existence within the mundane world by circumscribing it ontologically,
that is, by interpreting the “natural attitude” as a necessary transcendental fact of
human existence. Rather than as any kind of psychological complex within the world,
it is a matter of the constant world-apperception that is essentially constitutive of
human experience. For Fink, world-belief is “the primal happening [Urgeschehen] of
our transcendental existence” (Fink 1988b, 187), such that “existing-within-the-belief-
in-the-world and believing oneself to be human are inextricably one and the same”
[Im-Weltglauben-sein und im Selbstglauben als Mensch sein sind untrennbar eins] (KS,
115/109, translation modified). Hence, rather than as the “natural attitude,” Fink
preferred to denote the mundane predicament of human existence as Weltbefangenheit,
captivation in/by the world (see Bruzina 1998, 57–60; Cairns 1976, 95). Human beings
as such are imprisoned by ontic preoccupations.
xviii Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

Although familiar with the disagreements between Husserl and Heidegger over
the being of transcendental and mundane subjectivity, in thus posing the “question
of being,” Fink was not following Heidegger (cf. Bernet  1989). For he rejects the
“ontological priority” of Dasein. Instead, his move is to rethink Husserl’s project on
the basis of a sharper ontological difference between mundane and transcendental
subjectivity, construing the former as the latter’s worldly self-apperception, that is, as
the constituted product of extramundane constitution. For Fink, “the existent is only
the result of a constitution,” and “constitution is always constitution of the existent” (SCM
23/21; cf. 108/99). Key here is that the constitutive coming-to-be of an existent is not
itself an existent (SCM 82/73), and thus cannot be understood in terms of worldly
ontology. Fink argued that, pending a special reduction of it, our idea of being pertains
exclusively to constituted objectivity of the natural attitude—hence the transcendental
naïveté of the original Meditations (cf. SCM 78–84/70–5). As constitutive origination
and becoming of the world, what we would call transcendental being “is” “simply and
solely in the process” (SCM 49/45; cf. 107/97). Fink denotes this constitutive process as
“enworlding” [Verweltlichung], or more precisely, as “primary” or “proper [eigentliche]
enworlding” (SCM 108/99; cf. 23/21). And he refers to its “being-mode,” which
transcends the mundane idea of being, as “pre-being” [“Vor-Sein”]. Initially, at any rate,
this is the central object of phenomenological investigation.
Radicalizing phenomenology’s basic problematic in this way, however, it follows for
Fink that, as weltbefangen entities, human beings are constitutively incapable of effecting
the epoché, performing the reduction, and of carrying out the phenomenological
investigation of primary enworlding. This could only occur outside the world; hence,
the proper agency of phenomenological reflection must have transcendental status.
Yet, at the same time, this agency must be separate from, that is, not participate
in, the process that it is supposed to investigate. Consequently, in tandem with the
ontological difference between mundane and transcendental, Fink further posits a
radical “splitting” [Spaltung] within transcendental being—hence what Fink called the
triadic “performance-structure” [Vollzugsstruktur] of the phenomenological reduction
(KS 122/115). This splitting is the epoché, a “structural moment of transcendental
reflection” (KS 121/115) whereby transcendental life “steps outside itself,” producing
the “non-participant” [unbeteiligte] “phenomenological onlooker” (SCM 26/23;
Fink 1988b, 187; cf. Husserl, Crisis 285). The result is an antithetical duality at the
transcendental level whereby the onlooker breaks with the “innermost vital tendency”
of transcendental life (SCM 12/12), namely, the constitutive realization of the world,
setting up a countertendency to it (SCM 26/24). As this countertendency, the onlooker’s
phenomenologizing is the becoming-for-itself of transcendentally constituting life. Fink
describes the resulting dynamic in dialectical terms: “Split in this way, transcendental
life turns upon itself, becomes objective [gegenständlich] to itself, and comes to itself
through theoretical self-illumination” (Fink 1988b, 187; cf. SCM 163/147).33
Fink does not deny that the reduction is played out at the mundane level. But
he insists that as “a theoretical self-surmounting [Selbstüberwindung] of man”
(KS 134/126), the action it implies cannot be understood in worldly terms. For the
reduction “de-objectifies, de-worlds intentional life by removing the self-apperceptions
that enworld it, that situate it in the world,” rendering wholly immanent the “depths of
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xix

the intentional life of belief where the psychical life’s self-apperception is first validly
constructed” (KS 142/133). While a human subject may undergo such an experience,
she is not the active reducing subject per se. Rather, the active element can only be
the onlooker, the transcendental subject’s tendency toward self-consciousness as
it may happen to “awaken” in her. It is not any kind of human self-reflection, but
rather transcendental subjectivity, “concealed in self-objectivation as man, reflectively
think[ing] about itself ” (SCM 36/32). In fact, on account of how he poses the
basic problem of phenomenology, Fink is committed not only to denying that the
reduction cannot be independently motivated in the natural attitude,34 but moreover
that “phenomenologizing is not a human possibility at all, but signifies precisely the
un-humanizing [Entmenschung] of man, the passing of human existence . . . into the
transcendental subject” (SCM 132/120; cf. 36, 43–4/32, 40; KS 110/104).
That the agent of phenomenology must be the non-participating transcendental
onlooker is the guiding idea in Fink’s attempt to redress the transcendental naïveté
of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. But what is also required is a “self-objectification”
[Selbstvergegenständlichung] of the onlooker (SCM 14/13), a self-referential themati­
zation of its phenomenologizing (SCM 25/23), lacking which a new naïveté would
simply replace the old. For even if, through the onlooker’s phenomenologizing,
primary enworlding gains self-consciousness, the being of the onlooker itself remains a
mystery. As Fink put it: “In the field of ‘transcendentality’ there remains . . . something
still uncomprehended, precisely the phenomenological theorizing ‘onlooker’” (SCM
13/12; cf. 24–5/22–3). This is the focus of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation as a work of
methodology. Taking up Husserl’s own directive that transcendental phenomenology
subject itself to rigorous methodological self-critique (Husserl 1969, 289; 1960, 29, 151f;
see also Luft 2002, 8–22), Fink’s aim is to clarify how the transcendental experience of the
phenomenological onlooker could gain a complete self-conscious comprehension of its
own activity and thereby establish itself scientifically. Phenomenological methodology
is “the phenomenological science of phenomenologizing, the phenomenology of
phenomenology” (SCM 13/12), in the sense of “submit[ting] the phenomenologizing
thought and theory-formation that functions anonymously in phenomenological
labors to a proper transcendental analytic, and thus to complete phenomenology in
ultimate transcendental self-understanding about itself” (SCM 8–9/9).

The problem of transcendental illusion

The view of transcendental phenomenology presented in the Sixth Cartesian
Meditation conspicuously reflects the structure of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in
a number of ways. For example, Fink distinguished the transcendental theory of
method, as the dimension of phenomenology that thematizes itself, from what he
called the “transcendental theory of elements,” the dimension of phenomenology
that thematizes transcendental subjectivity as primary enworlding. While initially
the latter may be the central object of phenomenological investigation, it would be
wrong to regard that as phenomenology proper, to which the theory of method would
be a sort of appendix (as many readers of Kant’s first Critique mistakenly regard his
theory of method).35 Rather, Fink’s account of the phenomenological investigation of
xx Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

primary enworlding shows that its scientificity depends crucially on what the theory
of method offers—in particular, on what he called, again echoing Kant, the “canon of
phenomenological reason.”36 For while the ontological status of the onlooker makes
transcendental cognition possible, it also presents phenomenology with certain
paradoxes, such that its quest for transcendental truth is congenitally susceptible (here
we hear Kant again) to “transcendental illusion.” For Kant, this has to do with certain
rationally necessary transcendental fictions which, if applied theoretically beyond the
scope of experience, give rise to the dialectical fallacies of dogmatic metaphysics, but
which are not necessarily deceptive (KrV A645/B673), as they possess indispensable
heuristic value when employed regulatively (see Grier 2001, 268–88). In contrast, for
Fink, transcendental illusion is not something that bears directly upon transcendental
insight at all, but is a problem having to do with how transcendental truth appears,
that is, with the fact that it can only appear in mundane form as “appearance-truth”
[Erscheinungswahrheit] or “seeming truth” [Scheinwahrheit].37 Whereas for Kant, then,
there can be no canon of pure theoretical reason—there is a negative discipline for
that, while he strictly limits the positive canon to reason’s practical use (KrV A797/
B825), as conceived by Fink, the canon of phenomenological reason is precisely
that which enables us to distinguish between “mere appearance-truths” and “proper
transcendental truths” with respect to phenomenologizing (SCM 111, 120f, 129f,
134/101, 110, 118, 121).
We can distinguish two levels within phenomenology’s problem of transcendental
illusion. First, there is the matter of communicating transcendental truth—how it appears
to others. (Fink’s Kant-Studien article is mainly limited to this level of the problem.)
The issue here is that phenomenology faces profound, paradoxical difficulties when it
tries to express its transcendental insights within the weltbefangen conceptual confines
of ordinary language and formal logic (KS 153/142; cf. 155, 80/145, 75). However,
strictly speaking, that is not a problem within phenomenology. Rather, it is a matter of
others’ limited understanding—a symptom of the growing pains of phenomenology at
an early stage of its development.38
But the problem of transcendental illusion is not limited to the difficulties
attaching to the communication of phenomenological truth. There is a deeper level to
the problem, (upon which Fink deliberately held back from elaborating in his Kant-
Studien article)—namely, how transcendental truth appears at all (KS 153/142). For in
Fink’s account, phenomenology is separate from enworlding. How then does it appear?
How is it that phenomenology “un-performs” the reduction, as it were—how does it
effect an un-un-humanizing—so as to avoid being stranded in transcendence?
The second level of the problem of transcendental illusion takes us inside
phenomenology. There are two aspects to consider. First, there is the nature of
transcendental cognition itself. In a sense, illusion obtains here germinally. For the
onlooker’s experience of enworlding necessarily involves a “transcendental ontification.”
That is, it necessarily reproduces the framework of mundane ontology at the “pre-
existent” level (SCM 83/74). “[T]he theoretical experience of the phenomenological
onlooker ontifies the ‘pre-existent’ life-processes of transcendental subjectivity and is
therefore in a sense—a sense not comparable to any mode of productivity pregiven in
a worldly way—‘productive’ ” (SCM 85f/76). But because this “productivity” transpires
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xxi

at the level of apperception presupposed by any mundane experience, there is no

“appearing,” and therefore no deception—this is just the form that transcendental
insight must take. And this will become progressively more suitable as the reduction
of the idea of being that is required to properly understand primary enworlding gets
worked out philosophically. It is just that this process starts in the natural attitude.
The natural attitude, however, “is not only the wherefrom [Wo-von-aus] but also
the whither [Wo-für]” of phenomenology (SCM 109/99). Even if transcendental
cognition is veridical in the “pre-existent” realm, what ultimately matters is how it
surfaces in the natural attitude (SCM 109/99). The second—and more important—
aspect of how phenomenology appears lies in what Fink called “secondary” or
“non-proper” [uneigentliche] enworlding, by which he denotes “the summation of
the constitutive process which places phenomenologizing itself into the world” (SCM
108/99; cf. 120, 142/110, 129). This is labeled “secondary” because it is the enworlding
of the transcendental cognition of primary enworlding. But it is deemed “non-proper”
because—significantly—it is a process with respect to which the onlooker is passive—it
is a “being taken along” (SCM 127/116; cf. 125/113) that “does not rest upon its own
activity” (SCM 119/109). Herein lies the real problem of transcendental illusion.39
Secondary enworlding results from what Fink describes as a “self-concealment, a
self-apperceptive constitution lying back over constituting life” (SCM 120/109). He does
not spell this out (SCM 120/110), but his point is that the transcendental acts of sense-
bestowal in virtue of which a phenomenological cognition appears necessarily exceed
its scope. Any rigorous science must grasp its own functioning, and so, this situation
is potentially devastating for phenomenology. Unlike primary enworlding, the
transcendental origins of which remain “anonymous” and are “forgotten,” secondary
enworlding is “precisely the worldly objectivation of knowing about transcendental
origin,” including its own (SCM 128/116, emphasis added). This must be the case not
only with the transcendental “ontification” inherent in its (proper) phenomenological
cognition, but also the mundane ontification brought about by its (non-proper)
enworlding. The latter must therefore involve a twofold transparency with respect to
transcendental constitutive essence: “transparency with respect to the transcendental
process of phenomenologizing,” and “transparency in the ‘appearance’ with respect to
the constitutional processes that fashion that ‘appearance’ ” (SCM 128/117).
This is crucial. For this twofold transparency announces nothing less than the canon
of phenomenological reason. As Fink put it (envisioning phenomenology at a more
advanced stage): “This twofold transparency provides the phenomenological cognizer
with the possibility of forming at any time an insight-based judgment regarding that
which is only a truth with respect to worldly appearance, and that which is a truth
that forms the proper transcendental essence of phenomenologizing” (SCM 128/117).
Nothing more is required to overcome the transcendental illusion of “seeming truth”—
not to abolish it, since that is not possible, but rather to ensure that it is not deceptive.
For inasmuch as we have gained this twofold transparency with respect to it, “seeming
truth is itself ‘sublated’ [‘aufgehoben’] in transcendental truth” (SCM 147/134). This
means that the onlooker’s self-understanding preserves the appearance-truths of
phenomenologizing by accounting for their mundane one-sidedness in terms of
transcendental truth. All distinctions between apparent and genuine truth made on
xxii Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

the basis of the canon of phenomenological reason would be characterized by this sort
of dialectical Aufhebung (SCM 129f/118).
This points to Fink’s notion of the Absolute. To get to that, we need but ask: Granting
the first, how is that second transparency possible? The answer lies in Fink’s account of
“constructive phenomenology.”
According to Fink, phenomenology cannot limit its theoretical activity to
regressive analysis of primary enworlding. This is because the onlooker cannot limit
the scope of its investigation to the “internal horizon of constituting life”—which
amounts to saying that it cannot adhere to Husserl’s “principle of all principles.” For
regressive analysis of certain elements of the reductively given phenomenon of the
world—for example, birth and death, psychological development, intersubjective
relations, and world history—will necessarily founder, inasmuch as such phenomena
prompt the onlooker to seek the transcendental sense of various forms of totality
(SCM 71/63; cf. 12/11). But as transcendental constitution is always already
unfolding within them, these totalities as such are not given (SCM 69f/62). This
motivates a “movement out beyond the reductive givenness of transcendental life” to
an examination of what Fink calls its “ ‘external horizons’ [Aussenhorizonte]” (SCM
7/7). The resulting investigation, insofar as it “abandons the basis of transcendental
‘givenness’, no longer exhibits things intuitively, but necessarily proceeds,” as Fink put
it, “constructively” (SCM 7/7).
Thus, it is not just that phenomenology is hampered by the difficulty of having an
object that is non-existent, and thus mundanely inexpressible. It is also the case that its
object as a whole is non-given, and thus even transcendentally unintuitable. Thus, in
keeping with the structural echo of Kant’s first Critique, Fink characterizes constructive
phenomenology as “transcendental dialectic.” For there is, he claims, a “material
[sachliche] affinity” here, in that both deal with “the basic problem of the relation of the
‘given’ to the ‘non-given’ ” (SCM 71/64). But with respect to transcendental knowledge,
there is a profound difference. For Fink’s construction is precisely meant to enable
reason to go beyond the merely regulative role assigned to it by Kant, by granting it
cognitive access to objects that are in principle non-given.
Although it belongs to one of the more provisional parts of the Sixth Cartesian
Meditation, Fink’s claim that regressive inquiry is inadequate to fulfill the aims of
phenomenology, which is consequently required to pursue constructive inquiry—
his calling into question, that is, “the intuitional character of phenomenological
cognition itself ” (SCM 29/26)—is certainly one of the most striking features of
the work. At first blush, it might seem to be a phenomenological non-starter. But
recall the problem of secondary enworlding: if it is the case that transcendental life
is composed exclusively of constituting and phenomenologizing activity, then it
follows that the constitutive processes of secondary enworlding—which as such are,
in principle, non-given—belong to the “external horizon” of reductive givenness,
and that the transparency the onlooker gains with respect to them—and hence its
own being—must be achieved through phenomenological construction. This is
consistent with the “‘precedence’” [“Vorhergehen”] of the onlooker that distinguishes
constructive from regressive phenomenology (SCM 72f/65f), and with the centrality
of secondary enworlding to the “coincidence in Existence [Existenzdeckung] between
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xxiii

the transcendental subject and its enworlded self-objectivation”—inquiry concerning

which Fink explicitly placed in the province of constructive phenomenology (SCM
71/64).
We thus have the following: (i) the naïveté that the account of the transcendental
onlooker is meant to overcome is transposed into the problem of the transparency
of secondary enworlding. That is, that naïveté is solved by going outside the world,
thus introducing the new problem of understanding how phenomenological cognition
gets (back) into the world. (ii) Fink’s solution to this problem would necessarily be
“constructive.” (iii) Constructive phenomenology thus plays a key role in arriving at the
canon of phenomenological reason. But how would this be carried out non-arbitrarily
in advance of the canonical distinction? Fink admittedly cannot shed much light on
this. But we can glimpse where he was heading from his portrayal of phenomenology
as “absolute science.”

Phenomenology as “absolute science”

Fink’s basic claim is that transcendental insights gained through the phenomenological
reduction can be established scientifically only if the problem of transcendental
illusion with respect to secondary enworlding is constructively overcome. A coherent
system of phenomenological reason must be underpinned by a self-consciousness that
comprehends completely the productive force of the project. The problem, however,
is that the canonical distinction required for this constructive process can only come
about through it. This circularity is redolent of the “dilemma of the criterion” attributed
to Sextus Empiricus, and Fink proceeds in a way that situates phenomenology in
close proximity to the speculative tradition of post-Kantian German Idealism, Hegel
in particular (SCM 86, 173–9/77, 155–9; see also Bruzina 1986, 24; 1992, 279; cf.
Westphal 1998). He does this by approaching secondary enworlding in terms of the
complex “identity” of the phenomenologizing with the human and constituting “egos”
(KS 123/116; cf. SCM 43/39)—within which, he noted, lie concealed “the most basic
insights into the architectonic of the phenomenological system” (KS 123/116; cf. SCM
45–6/42). How is this “identity”—that is, the triadic “performance-structure” of the
reduction—to be understood?
Fink answered this question in terms of the Absolute, understood as the inclusive,
synthetic unity of the different moments of the performance structure of the reduction.
Fink’s Absolute thus straddles the boundary of worldly ontology: “the Absolute is
not . . . a homogeneous universal unity of that which is existent . . ., but precisely the
comprehensive unity of the existent as such and the pre-existent” (SCM 157/143).
Since it thus includes being as a moment, this unity itself is beyond being. Fink thus
characterized the Absolute as meontic—a notion that occupied a central place in Fink’s
thought during the period in question (Bruzina 1995, lv–lvii; 2004, 366f).
The unity of the Absolute can be thought of as joining world-constitution with both
its being-for-itself (the onlooker as a moment of knowing) and with its self-apperceiving
end-product (human being as a moment of believing). For there is an important sense
even here—or especially, since world-constitution is teleologically directed at the
world—in which knowledge implies belief. Yet, that is something the onlooker lacks.
xxiv Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

This is why the style of the canon of phenomenological reason is one of dialectical
sublation rather than simple supersession of appearance-truth. Transcendental
insight is meaningless if not tied to that which it surpasses. Thus, not unlike in Hegel’s
Phenomenology, the appearance of phenomenologizing is recognized as a necessary
constituent of the project. And the opposition between onlooker and human being is
now comprehended as a “necessary antithesis in the synthetic unity of the Absolute”
(SCM 166/150). The apparent contradiction in phenomenological agency is resolved
through its being “sublated in the absolute truth that phenomenologizing is in itself a
cognitive movement of the Absolute” (SCM 167/150; cf. 129/117f).
From the standpoint of the meontic Absolute, phenomenology can be seen as a
“transformation [Verwandlung] of the ‘self ’ ”: the reductive performance “doubles” the
human ego by bringing its transcendental ground to self-evidence, and transcenden-
tal reflection reunites these at a “higher” level by realizing in self-consciousness the
“identity” of the whole (KS 123/117). Thus, the “ ‘concrete’ concept of the ‘phenom-
enologizing subject’ ” is the “dialectical unity” of the two “antithetic moments”—that
is, “­transcendental subjectivity ‘appearing’ in the world” (SCM 127/116; cf. 147, 157,
163/134, 142, 147). As the science of enworlding, phenomenology thus amounts to
the theory of the appearance of the Absolute in being. This is, in a sense, the “self-cog-
nition” of the Absolute, and phenomenology is, accordingly, “absolute science”—the
absolute self-understanding of the Absolute (SCM 169/152).
The problematic circularity of the onlooker’s self-understanding would be worked
out within this absolute self-referentiality. The Sixth Cartesian Meditation is short
on details, but the idea is that all metaphysical questions are answerable, and that
transcendental illusion can, in principle, be fully mastered theoretically in a new
dimension of transcendental philosophy which, surpassing intuitional givenness, would
grasp the constitutedness of human worldly finitude on the basis of a speculative sort
of “intellectual intuition,”40 “thereby taking it back into the infinite essence of spirit”
(KS 155/144f). Such is what the Sixth Cartesian Meditation anticipates as the only
methodologically coherent form of phenomenology, and Fink glosses it as “a meontic
philosophy of absolute spirit” (SCM 183/1).

Merleau-Ponty’s response to Fink

Although the foregoing might seem to bear no resemblance to anything found
in Phenomenology of Perception, there are, as we shall see, some important formal
similarities. But at the same time, analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s own conception of the
“phenomenology of phenomenology” will show that his view of phenomenological
methodology—or his own operative “idea of a transcendental theory of method”—
differs radically from that presented by Fink in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation. For
it becomes clear that it is based upon a fundamentally different orientation, one that
sees phenomenology as participating actively in the ongoing historical realization
of the world, rather than spectating passively upon a transcendental process that is
always already determined from the empirical standpoint. But it is also the case that
this raises some new methodological questions concerning the nature and possibility
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xxv

of the phenomenological reduction in Phenomenology of Perception—questions

that are sufficiently important yet disconcerting as to motivate a certain rereading of
that text.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology

When we recall that Merleau-Ponty’s first book, The Structure of Behavior, completed
by 1938 but published in  1942, concluded with the methodological desideratum to
“define transcendental philosophy anew in such a way as to integrate with it the very
phenomenon of the real” (SC 241/224, emphasis added), and when we take seriously
Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Phenomenology of Perception was “only a preliminary
study,” the intention of which was to “define a method for getting closer to present
and living reality” (PrP 68/25, emphasis added), we can recognize that the latter work,
far from exhibiting any sort of reticence about methodological issues, was, like the
Sixth Cartesian Meditation, principally concerned with formulating the idea of a
transcendental theory of method.
This claim may seem surprising and implausible. But some reflection upon the
overall structure of Phenomenology of Perception can, at least to some extent, make
it seem fairly unremarkable. Simply consider the way the text progresses through
the different sections: in the Introduction, critical consideration of the “traditional
prejudices” of “objective thought” [la pensée objective] in its empiricist and
intellectualist forms serves to motivate a return to the “phenomenal field” [le champ
phénoménal] (PhP 64–77; cf SC 222 n2/248 n40). Part I of the text is then devoted
to investigating the paradigm of pre-objective experience, namely, experience of the
body, that is, of one’s own lived body, on the basis of which—or, more precisely, on
the basis of the claim that “the theory of the body is already a theory of perception”
(PhP 235–9)—Merleau-Ponty can then lay out in Part II his phenomenological
account of “the perceived world” [le monde perçu]. This is not the place to discuss
any of this in detail. For immediate purposes, the point is simply that while Merleau-
Ponty may nowhere provide in Phenomenology of Perception a concise statement of
his methodology, it could be the case that such a statement is in fact writ large and
demonstrated across the structure of the work as a whole.
This sort of view makes a good deal of sense—at least up to the end of the second
Part of Merleau-Ponty’s book. But there is the matter of Part III (comprising the
chapters on the cogito, temporality, and freedom). We need to ask: why is there another
major section over and above the account of the perceived world?
That Phenomenology of Perception was ultimately concerned with phenomenological
method, and moreover, that it was structurally conceived specifically in response to
Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, is evinced by the fact that, in contrast to “direct
description,” Merleau-Ponty refers to Part III of the book as a “phenomenology of
phenomenology” (PhP 419). This is clearly set off as a distinct methodological project,
its point being to use the phenomenological descriptions laid out in Parts I and II as an
opportunity “for defining a more radical comprehension and reflection than objective
thought” (PhP 419, emphasis added). This task of “second-order reflection” is explicitly
announced at the end of Part II, but it is prefigured throughout the work, including at
xxvi Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

the end of the Preface (PhP xvi), and at the end of the Introduction (PhP 74–7). There,
Merleau-Ponty reminds us that “the meditating Ego” is essentially situated within the
perspective of a particular concrete subject, and that radical reflection must take this
into account. “We must not only adopt a reflective attitude,” therefore, “but also reflect
on this reflection, understand the natural situation which it is conscious of succeeding,
and which therefore belongs to its definition” (PhP 75).
The aim of Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of phenomenology” is thus to validate
the descriptive account of Parts I and II as a philosophical contribution, rather than
a mere “psychological curiosity” (PrP 55/19). For on its own, that account does not
rule out there being a realm of pure thought over and above perception, and hence,
the possibility of establishing a system of truth capable of disambiguating perceptual
experience and resolving the contradictions and paradoxes that Merleau-Ponty had
described. In other words, the point of Part III—developed in and through the chapters
on the cogito, temporality, and freedom—is methodological: to show the impossibility
of an absolute science in Fink’s sense.41 Whereas Fink had claimed that “to know the
world by returning to a ‘transcendence’ which once again contains [einbehält] the
world within it signifies the realization of a transcendental knowledge of the world
[bedeutet eine transzendentale Welterkenntnis realisieren],” and that “in this sense
alone is phenomenology ‘transcendental philosophy’ ” (KS 106/100, translation
modified), for his part, Merleau-Ponty made the very contrary claim that “a philosophy
becomes transcendental, that is, radical . . . not by postulating the total making-explicit
[explicitation] of knowledge, but rather by recognizing this presumption of reason as
the fundamental philosophical problem” (PhP 76).
Although he agreed with Fink about the methodological limits of regressive
phenomenology, it was not the intuitional but rather the cognitive character of
phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty restricted. His interpretation of phenomenology
is therefore radically different. Tellingly, he took his bearings, not (like Fink) from the
speculative and systematic Hegel, but rather from the young Hegel—whom Merleau-
Ponty viewed in decidedly existential terms (SNS 109–21/63–70) and conflated rather
freely with Marx. He thus regarded the emergence of phenomenological philosophy—
Fink’s problem of secondary enworlding [Verweltlichung]—as a special case of the
emergence of self-conscious historical collectivities in general, which is essentially
the idea of the “realization” [Verwirklichung] of philosophy that Marx proposed in his
early critique of (the “older,” i.e., speculative and systematic) Hegel.42 Both are matters
of transformatively overcoming the silence of a “multiple solipsism” [solipsisme à
plusieurs] by establishing “effective communication” between isolated individuals (PhP
412; cf. 76). Merleau-Ponty thus dismissed Fink’s problem of secondary enworlding. For
in saying—as he repeatedly did, including at the end of Phenomenology of Perception—
that philosophy “realizes itself by destroying itself as separate philosophy [se réalise en se
détruisant comme philosophie séparée]” (PhP 520, emphasis added),43 he embraced the
claim that philosophy cannot be realized without being “transcended” [aufgehoben],
that is, without being integrated with reality through transformative praxis (cf.
Marx 1975b, 181, 187). In other words, Merleau-Ponty founded the scientificity of
phenomenology on the same “productivity” that makes historical agency in general
possible (cf. SNS 229/129). It is thus a praxiological idea of method that Merleau-Ponty
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xxvii

developed in response to Fink, a view based on the claim that transcendental subjectivity
is intersubjectivity—a claim upon which he repeatedly insisted44—and hence that the
nexus of concrete intercorporeal praxis is itself the absolute.45
Ultimately, it is this claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology
was intended to substantiate. For this is what underlies the method that he was aiming
to define, which involves a sort of “plunge” into “present and living reality.”46 As he
says in no uncertain terms, “the solution of all problems of transcendence is to be
sought in the thickness of the pre-objective present” (PhP 495). That is, it is here that
all philosophical problems will be resolved, insofar as they are legitimately resolvable.
This qualification is crucial, for Merleau-Ponty did not maintain that all philosophical
problems that can be posed are resoluble (the world itself is, recall, en déça des solutions).
In an especially important footnote at the very end of Part II of Phenomenology of
Perception, he presented a dilemma with respect to Husserl to the effect that either
second-order phenomenological reflection clarifies the world completely, in which
case first-order description would be superfluous; or else second-order reflection can at
best only remove some but not all obscurities left by description (PhP 419). Inasmuch
as it is agreed that phenomenology must begin in the natural attitude, then, first-order
description is not superfluous, and we must opt for the latter prong and accept a certain
degree of opacity. This has the implication that Merleau-Ponty rejected in principle
the possibility of complete theoretical transparency with respect to the enworlding of
phenomenology—precisely that for which Fink sought a “constructive” solution.
This is crucial. The Merleau-Pontian absolute is insuperably ambiguous, yet it is
here that the problems of transcendence are to be resolved (PhP 418f). According
to Merleau-Ponty, it is precisely the “contradictory” nature of human intercorporeal
involvement, our being constituted and (contra Fink) constituting, that enables
phenomenological achievements, and so, this must not be ontologically written off
or sublated away. What we see, then, is that by aiming to “discover time beneath the
subject [and to] link the paradox of time to those of the body, the world, the thing,
and others,” Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology poses a deflationary
argument against Fink. The idea is to dissolve the dilemma of either “believing our
descriptions” or “knowing what we are talking about” by showing that, beyond the
paradoxical intercorporeal involvement revealed through descriptive analysis, “there
is nothing to understand” (PhP 419). Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s account
thus leaves no “uncomprehended residue” (cf. SCM 25/23)—none, that is, that
could be comprehended theoretically. It thereby upholds Husserl’s contention that
phenomenology provides an “ultimate understanding of the world”—an understanding
behind which “there is nothing more that can be sensefully inquired for, nothing more
to understand” (Husserl 1969, 242)—while also obviating the need for constructive
phenomenology as conceived by Fink.
Merleau-Ponty’s aim is to maintain the intuitional basis of phenomenological insight.
But recognizing its essential perspectivity, he decoupled intuition from apodictic truth.
This decoupling is tied to his notion of “le préjugé du monde”—the naïve assumption,
upon which objective thought is based, that a fully determinate world obtains (PhP
11, 62, 296, 316). For Merleau-Ponty, there is no such world—not yet, anyway—and
therefore, no such determinateness is being constituted. As an active intervention into
xxviii Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

an “unfinished world,” phenomenology has no privileged epistemological guarantee.

The world and truth are à faire—to be made. For Merleau-Ponty, the philosophical
validity of phenomenological claims accrues from their intersubjective appropriation
and ratification—prior to which they are, strictly speaking, non-sense (SNS 32/19;
PhP 491, 509).47 Even—or especially—in the case of a theoretically detached onlooker.
Thus, whereas in Fink’s meontic interpretation, phenomenology’s basic methodological
problematic is structured in terms of the relation between Sein and Vor-Sein, Merleau-
Ponty framed it in entirely human terms, such that “the question is ultimately one of
understanding . . . the relation between sense and non-sense” (PhP 490).
Though considerable, such differences do betray some important formal affinities
underlying the respective positions of Fink and Merleau-Ponty. This is particularly true
with regard to outdoing the uncritically limited transcendental approach characteristic
of Kantianism by ceasing to take the world for granted and inculcating a pathos of
philosophical wonder that effects a certain kind of extramundane standpoint, that
is, a standpoint that is without the world. Such is the core of their respective views of
the reduction. Yet, there is at least one substantive claim on which Fink and Merleau-
Ponty would agree entirely: that a complete reduction is not humanly possible. They
agree on this point, but diverge completely with respect to its implications, with
Fink retaining the possibility of the complete reduction and Merleau-Ponty insisting
conversely on phenomenology as a human practice. The respective ways in which
they understand what it would mean to adopt an extramundane standpoint thus
differ drastically, since for Fink, there is a fully determinate world, albeit one whose
origins remain shrouded in mystery, whereas for Merleau-Ponty, such a determinate
world is the object, not simply of a naïve belief, that is, a true belief naïvely held, but
of a naïve prejudice, that is, a false belief naïvely held, the placing in abeyance of which
is the key to the reduction and thus to a truly transcendental standpoint. He thereby
implies that even with regard to the world, Fink has an insufficiently radical sense of
philosophical wonder.48
Inasmuch as it denies the existence of a fully determinate world, then, there is no
basis for reading le préjugé du monde as understood by Merleau-Ponty as bearing any
substantive similarity to Fink’s notion of Weltbefangenheit (cf. Bruzina 2002, 194).
We are not imprisoned, ontologically or otherwise, in the world. Merleau-Ponty had
already shown in The Structure of Behavior that the nature of human existence is to
project itself beyond given situations, that it fundamentally involves an orientation
to the possible, even if this lies “beyond the world”—indeed, “beyond any milieu” (SC
189f/175f, 245n97, emphasis added). Thus, whereas for Fink, Weltbefangenheit is a
necessary condition of human existence, for Merleau-Ponty, it could at most be taken
as describing the natural attitude in normal cases. Nor did Merleau-Ponty agree with
Fink’s claim that the phenomenological reduction represents the first breakthrough
(SCM 124/113). Rather, it is precisely the capacity of going “beyond any milieu”
exhibited by certain forms of non-phenomenological activity that phenomenology
itself relies on. Interestingly, what these have in common is a certain structural (but
not etiological) filiation with schizophrenia. Concerning phenomenology, therefore,
whereas Fink posited an Ich-Spaltung (splitting of the I) at the transcendental level,49
Merleau-Ponty held that such is precisely what can and must occur in the concrete.
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xxix

Hence his claim, for example, that “the highest form of reason borders on madness
[déraison]” (SNS 9/4; cf. 121/70).
This is why Merleau-Ponty will describe the suspension of le préjugé du monde
as a venturesome staking of one’s life. It requires the capacity for a kind of selfless
engagement which, not unlike death, imposes distance from vital egoic particularity
in the direction of human universality (SNS 115ff/67). As we shall see, this is the
standpoint of “the living subject, man as productivity” (PhP 171, emphasis added; cf.
SNS 328f/185f; HT xli/xlv), that affords the transcendentally disclosive experience of
the indeterminacy of the pregiven world.
This kind of selfless engagement clearly bears a formal similarity to Fink’s idea of
“un-humanization.” But in substantive terms, it differs markedly. For Merleau-Ponty’s
radical emphasis on the contingent emergence of the world is more phenomenologically
consistent than Fink’s overarching Absolute. This is because even though Fink does not
take the world for granted, he does take for granted that there is a world to be taken
for granted. That is, he does not say uncritically that the world is there. But in taking
for granted its determinacy, he does thereby presume that the constitution of the world
“is” there (i.e., “pre-existently”). In an important way, then, Fink just shifts the locus
of uncritical dogmatism. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, le préjugé du monde is just
that—a prejudice. The determinate world is not, but rather is à faire, to be made, and the
philosopher interested in truth is therefore required to engage in normatively-oriented
creative activity that is necessarily fraught with uncertainty and possible failure.
This is the sense of Merleau-Ponty’s alternative to the Finkian onlooker. Rather than
severing from the mundane, the phenomenologist plunges into its thickness. In contrast
to Fink’s ideal of non-participation, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology involves an
intensification of constitutive participation. In terms of productivity, he thus associates
phenomenology with activities of creative transgression, those which generate from
within themselves the ability to push the bounds of sense and expand the domain of
reason,50 albeit without any pre-given metaphysical guarantees of success.51 Although
he also refers to revolutionary politics, in general, the kind of activity Merleau-Ponty
had in mind can best be termed art. Thus, whereas Fink had stated in no uncertain
terms that the productivity of the phenomenological onlooker is “not comparable to
any mode of productivity pregiven in a worldly way” (SCM 86/76, emphasis added),
Merleau-Ponty replies—unmistakably—that “philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-
existing [préalable] truth, but, like art, the realization [réalisation] of a truth” (PhP xv,
emphasis added). There could not be a more concise statement of Merleau-Ponty’s
methodological departure from Fink.
But he goes further. Consider how Merleau-Ponty glosses the upshot of
Phenomenology of Perception. In explicit and unequivocal opposition to the Sixth
Cartesian Meditation, Merleau-Ponty wrote that “[t]he phenomenological world is not
the making-explicit [explicitation] of a pre-existing being [un être préalable], but the
laying down [la fondation] of being” (PhP xv, emphasis added). Directly challenging
Fink’s view, Merleau-Ponty claimed that “the meditating Ego, the ‘impartial spectator’
[le « spectateur impartial » (uninteressierter Zuschauer)] do not return to an already
given rationality [une rationalité déjà donnée].” Rather—and here Merleau-Ponty
quotes Fink again but slightly out of context (see note 33) —“they ‘establish themselves’
xxx Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

[« s’établissent »],52 and establish it [rationality], through an initiative which has no

guarantee in being, and whose justification rests entirely on the actual power that it
gives us for taking responsibility for our history [le pouvoir effectif qu’elle nous donne
d’assumer notre histoire]” (PhP xv, emphasis added).
As a human endeavor in an unfinished, indeterminate world, phenomenology is
fittingly dramatic—and dramatically different from Fink’s portrayal of the onlooker’s
theoretical experience: “We take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for our
history [notre histoire] through reflection, as well as through a decision whereby we
commit [engageons] our lives, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act that
proves itself in practice [un acte violent qui se vérifie en s’exerçant]” (PhP xvi).53

Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

Madness, art, violence—such is how Merleau-Ponty depicted the methodological
basis of his existential reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology. The above
statements, and many others like them, are familiar to readers of Phenomenology of
Perception. But they are usually not read in quite the way they were intended nor with
the full gravity that they possess in the context of this work. For they are typically
taken as rhetorical flourishes redolent of certain impetuous aspects of the immediate
postwar atmosphere in Paris They add a certain polemical spice to the text, but nothing
of philosophical substance—the dish can, it is assumed, be served more blandly. This
view is, however, quite mistaken. Consideration of “the idea of a transcendental theory
of method” that Fink had outlined in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, and recognition
that Merleau-Ponty’s encounter with it was the pivotal moment on the philosophical
trajectory through which he overcame the methodological impasse with which The
Structure of Behavior concluded, make it clear that what Merleau-Ponty was expressing
in these claims was nothing less than his own meta-theory concerning the possibility
of the transcendental phenomenological reduction. An account, that is, not so much
of the reduction per se, but of the transcendental conditions of its performance—for
example, the nature of its agency, and of the “productivity” that makes it possible—
and hence of the possibility of the reduction serving in a viable way as the central
methodological maneuver of genuine philosophical inquiry.
It is far from clear, however, how we are to square this fundamental and high-
minded aim with the heady and provocative content of Merleau-Ponty’s statements.
It is unclear, in other words, precisely how to understand the existential alternative
that Merleau-Ponty posed to Fink’s conception of the reduction’s “performance-
structure” [Vollzugsstruktur], and to the role played in his account by a form of
“intellectual intuition” that goes beyond any sort of phenomenal givenness. If not
the theoretical experience of a non-participating onlooker, then upon what exactly
are the phenomenological results of Phenomenology of Perception based, who or
what is responsible for them, and how are they justified? What secures their rational
epistemic status? What are the methodological commitments concerning the agency
of existential phenomenology that ensure its veritable philosophical credentials? How,
in short, is philosophy realized within the terms of this project? Lacking tangible
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xxxi

answers to these questions, it remains unclear whether any genuine philosophical

insight is, in fact, achieved in this text—and this, not in some ahistorical idealist sense
of philosophical insight that Merleau-Ponty rightly rejected, but precisely in the sense
that he did intend—a sense which still implies a progressive movement toward truth
understood in universal terms, and which as such, by “bringing rationality and the
absolute down to earth,” would supply “the remedy for skepticism and pessimism”
(PrP 43, 70/13, 26).
The purpose of this Preface has been to motivate provocatively paying renewed
interpretive attention to Phenomenology of Perception by showing that central
methodological questions remain unanswered, and that this situation places a serious
question mark over the work as a whole. To dispel this questionableness, we need to
come to terms with the idea of “the realization of philosophy” as implied by Merleau-
Ponty in his claim that “philosophy realizes itself by destroying itself as separate
philosophy.” We need to understand, in other words, the dialectical conception of
phenomenological method that enabled Merleau-Ponty to overcome transcendental
phenomenology’s need for what Fink had termed “secondary enworlding.”
In the chapters to follow, I take up this task by approaching Phenomenology of
Perception from its very end, problematizing the textual fact of its culminating with a
set of lines drawn from Pilote de guerre and offering a methodological explanation for
it. This amounts to investigating Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “heroism” and its role in his
existential reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology, an undertaking that will
shed valuable light on the methodological commitments operative in Phenomenology
of Perception—light which will reciprocally illuminate and corroborate the claims
sketched out in the foregoing discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s critical encounter with
Fink.
■
A final word or two before taking the plunge. It may be wondered how it could possibly
be the case that issues of the significance and magnitude that I am suggesting have
evaded scholarly attention for so long. To this sort of worry, there are three main
replies. First, as mentioned, the simple fact of the publication history of the Sixth
Cartesian Meditation goes a long way toward explaining the absence in the literature
of any serious discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s response to it, and of the deeper stakes
of his own phenomenology of phenomenology. Although that text has now been
available for over two decades, as far as Merleau-Ponty scholarship is concerned, the
significance of its appearance was obscured by the tacit assumption, alluded to earlier,
that all significant avenues of research on Phenomenology of Perception had already
been explored.
Second, but not unrelated to this first point, it is also the case that the lines drawn
from Saint Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre with which Phenomenology of Perception ends
have never elicited any critical scrutiny within Merleau-Ponty scholarship. It is, as
we shall see, very perplexing that the book ends as it does, and some scholars over
the years may well have felt this perplexity. But without access to Fink’s text and
the methodological problematic that it posed, it is very difficult, if not impossible,
to formulate a compelling philosophical explanation. Thus, along with many other
methodological statements, even the very zenith of Phenomenology of Perception has
xxxii Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception

typically been wrongly discounted as a philosophically inconsequential rhetorical

flourish (more on this below).
The third reply by way of assuaging the doubt that what I propose to say about
Merleau-Ponty’s project of existential phenomenology could possibly have been
overlooked hitherto has to do with a more general feature of the relevant scholarship.
And this point will invoke the political dimensions of Merleau-Ponty’s thought—
specifically, the existential form of Marxism that he espoused in the postwar period,
and the fact, broached above, that this is the source and inspiration for his idea of
“the realization of philosophy.” Although in earlier years it was more common
for commentary on Merleau-Ponty’s work to address both its philosophical and
political aspects, it is currently the case, and has been for some time, that Merleau-
Ponty scholarship is marked by a crisp division of labor between those who study
Merleau-Ponty as a phenomenological philosopher and those (far fewer) who study
him as a political philosopher. By way of illustration, consider that neither of the two
most widely-cited philosophical treatments of Merleau-Ponty’s work (Dillon 1988;
Barbaras 2004) make any significant reference to Marx or to Marxism at all, while
the two most important studies of Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy (Whiteside
1988; Coole 2007) are both written by political scientists who do not have a specialized
understanding of Husserlian phenomenology. In other words, although his works
receive a considerable amount of scholarly attention, the intimate connection between
Marx and Husserl, or more generally between Marxism and phenomenology, that was
fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s postwar position tends to fall systematically between
the cracks.
As with the idea that there is nothing fundamentally new to say about Phenomenology
of Perception, there is a widespread tacit assumption at work here to the effect that,
however strong his Marxist proclivities may have been, especially in the immediate
postwar years, for Merleau-Ponty, Marxism was nonetheless theoretically secondary
to phenomenology. This assumption does not imply that for Merleau-Ponty Marxism
was entirely separate from phenomenology—there is no question that he brought the
latter to bear upon problems facing the former, that is, that he explored the idea of a
phenomenological Marxism. But it is the point of that assumption to deny the converse
claim, that is, that Merleau-Ponty brought Marxism to bear upon problems facing
phenomenology. And this denial has the implication that any references to Marxism
found within his phenomenological work are philosophically inconsequential, however
interesting they might be from the perspective of political theory, say, or intellectual
or cultural history.
It is, however, a corollary claim of this book, albeit a major one, that this denial is
incorrect, and that the assumption in question is consequently false. For in considering
the outstanding methodological issues surrounding Phenomenology of Perception,
and approaching them by way of the exegetical problem of Exupérian heroism,
what we shall find is that alongside his efforts to give Marxism a phenomenological
reinterpretation, Merleau-Ponty also drew from Marxism in his reinterpretation
of transcendental phenomenology. In particular, as we will see, certain of the
methodological commitments operative in the latter are based in a philosophy of
history of Hegelian-Marxist inspiration. Contrary to the assumption of the theoretical
 Preface: Rereading Phenomenology of Perception xxxiii

secondariness of Marxism, then, at least in the immediate postwar period, Marxism

and phenomenology stood on a roughly equal footing in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as
essentially interdependent and complementary projects. It was within the terms of this
intersection with Marxism that Merleau-Ponty sought to solve the methodological
problems of phenomenology. Just as his Marxism was phenomenological, then, there
is a specific sense in which Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology was—at its
core and not merely in a superficial way—“Marxist.”
The resolution of the methodological questions concerning Phenomenology
of Perception can thus be achieved only on the basis of a unified comprehension of
Merleau-Ponty’s postwar philosophical and political thought. Inasmuch as attempts at
such a comprehension tend to predate the availability of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation,
the claim that such questions could indeed be real and important yet still outstanding
is far less implausible than it may initially seem. Had Fink’s text been available to earlier
generations of Merleau-Ponty scholars, the situation may well have been different.
But given the artificial isolation from his Marxist concerns in which Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenological work tends to be approached nowadays, plus the fact that Fink’s
text is still not a major point of reference for philosophical commentary, it is actually
not at all surprising that the issues in question remain unexplored and even, so to
speak, off the radar of most contemporary Merleau-Ponty scholars.
Going against this trend by recovering the essential and vital connection between
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical and political thought, only now with a full appreciation
of his response to Fink, the following investigation of the methodological significance
of Exupérian heroism will serve to disclose and foreground the praxiological
understanding of transcendental philosophy that is implicated in Merleau-Ponty’s
existential reformulation of phenomenology. It will thus begin to recover what I
shall call the “militant” dimension of his thought, a dimension that has been lost or
overlooked by virtually all scholarly commentary.54 The new perspective that results
will thus cast important new light on how Merleau-Ponty initially oriented himself
in the transcendental tradition. But this light will not necessarily be philosophically
flattering, and it may expose certain problematic or contentious aspects of Merleau-
Ponty’s early phenomenology that are typically unrecognized or glossed over—often
with palpable obsequiousness—in existing scholarship. The following discussion
is therefore intended to motivate and lay some of the interpretive groundwork for a
critical rereading of Merleau-Ponty’s work. This applies first of all to Phenomenology
of Perception itself, in particular with respect to the methodological commitments to
which the phenomenological descriptions therein presented are inescapably bound.
But it also meant to play a prolegomenal role with regard to a critical rereading of
the Merleau-Pontian oeuvre as a whole, inasmuch as its development was driven by a
self-critical attempt on the part of Merleau-Ponty to work out more satisfactorily the
philosophical and methodological grounds of his phenomenological project.
xxxiv
 Introduction: Flight From Phenomenology?

As readers of Phenomenology of Perception are aware, Merleau-Ponty concluded this

work (PhP 520) with the following series of enigmatic sentences selectively excerpted
from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s 1942 book, Pilote de guerre:1

Ton fils est pris dans l’incendie, tu le sauveras. . . . Tu vendrais, s’il est un obstacle,
ton épaule contre un coup d’épaule. Tu loges dans ton acte même. Ton acte, c’est
toi. . . . Tu t’échanges. . . . Ta signification se montre, éblouissante. C’est ton devoir,
c’est ta haine, c’est ton amour, c’est ta fidélité, c’est ton invention. . . . L’homme n’est
qu’un nœud de relations, les relations comptent seules pour l’homme.2

Your son is caught in the fire, you will save him. . . . If there is an obstacle, you
would give your shoulder to knock it down. You live in your act itself. Your act is
you. . . . You give yourself in exchange. . . . Your true significance becomes dazzlingly
evident. It is your duty, your hatred, your love, your loyalty, your inventiveness . . . .
Man is but a knot of relations, relations alone matter to man.

It is, however, a remarkable fact about Merleau-Ponty scholarship that these lines—
which, coming at the very end of his most important work, occupy, so to speak,
the single most prestigious piece of textual real estate in his entire corpus—have
received virtually no critical attention whatsoever.3 Many otherwise comprehensive
philosophical commentaries on Merleau-Ponty (e.g. De Waelhens 1951; Kwant 1963;
Dillon 1988; Barbaras 1991; Priest 2003), even those whose explicit raison d’être is to
examine Phenomenology of Perception in detail (e.g. Marshall 2008; Romdenh-Romluc
2010), simply make no reference to the way the book ends.4 To be sure, many others do
refer to it, albeit usually only to the very last line, namely, “Man is but a knot of relations,
relations alone matter to man.”5 But without exception, these commentators do so by
way of giving to Saint Exupéry’s words an approving but otherwise inconsequential
Merleau-Pontian gloss. That is, they tacitly assume that over and above simply quoting
from Pilote de guerre, Merleau-Ponty was expressing a philosophical agreement with
or endorsement of Saint Exupéry’s words taken in some more or less literal way. The
underlying assumption is that, in philosophical terms, there is a “continuity between
the phenomenological analysis of perception developed by Merleau-Ponty  .  .  .  and
the lines quoted from Antoine de Saint Exupéry” (Noble 2011, 76, emphasis added).
Monika Langer expressed the conventional wisdom in this way: “As an ‘intersubjective
field’ we are, as Saint-Exupéry noted, ‘but a network of relationships’ ” (1989, 147,
emphasis added; see also Bannan 1967, 138; Steeves 2004, 158; Reynolds 2004, 24).
The same assumption is standardly made in the literature on Saint Exupéry whenever
Merleau-Ponty’s allusion to him is discussed (Major 1968, 150, 243, 260f; DeRamus
2 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

1990, 134f; Devaux 1994, 81). The idea, as expressed by Colin Smith, is that at the end
of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty “allows the author of Pilote de guerre
to speak for him” (1980, 271).6
Yet, qua philosopher, Merleau-Ponty deliberately and conspicuously cut himself off
here—the cited lines are preceded immediately by an unequivocal assertion that “it is
at this point that we must fall silent [c’est ici qu’il faut se taire].”7 Taken at his word, then,
Merleau-Ponty was not even quoting Saint Exupéry, because he was no longer speaking
at all.8 A fortiori, he was not being spoken for. As Merleau-Ponty put it, with regard to
Saint Exupéry, “it would be inappropriate for another to speak in his name” (PhP 520,
emphasis added). We are to suppose, then, that Saint Exupéry is speaking for himself at
the end of Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty thus deferred to Saint Exupéry,
ceding authorial voice to him qua “hero,” that is, as someone who “lives to the limit
[jusqu’au bout] his relation to men and the world” by enacting an affirmative response
to the practical question: “Shall I give my freedom to save freedom? [Donnerai-je ma
liberté pour sauver la liberté?]” (PhP 520). And, most importantly, Merleau-Ponty tied
this deference directly to the realization of philosophy. Taking his cue from the young
Marx (1975b, 181; cf. 187), albeit with a twist, he affirmed that philosophy “realizes
itself by destroying itself as separate philosophy” [se réalise en se détruisant comme
philosophie séparée] (PhP 520; cf. SNS 136, 235/79, 133; NI 99, 108, 123, 174),9 with the
implication that this destruction of philosophy’s erstwhile separateness (as opposed to
its destruction simpliciter, as Marx had seemed to imply) occurs somehow through the
work of heroism.10 Although the precise meaning of this dialectical claim is far from
clear, what is clear is that on the final page of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-
Ponty drew an unmistakable line between philosophy and non-philosophy that is
meant to bear directly on nothing less than the success or failure of his philosophical
project. Yet this seems to have passed under the radar of virtually all commentary. It is
almost as if the book itself has not yet been read jusqu’au bout.
This point is neither trivial nor pedantic. The underlying concern may be initially
motivated in this way: given that a fundamental leitmotif of Merleau-Ponty’s thought
is its opposition to “la pensée de survol”—literally, “fly-over thinking,” but this phrase,
which denotes the style of thought that takes itself as de-situated and thus as having an
absolute perspective, is conventionally translated as “high-altitude thinking”11—given
this leitmotif, is it not rather astonishing that Phenomenology of Perception concludes
with the thoughts of an aerial reconnaissance pilot? Indeed, an aerial reconnaissance
pilot who held that “flying and writing are the same thing,” that they form a seamless
“total experience” such that “the pilot and the writer converge in an equivalent act
of awareness,”12 and whose typical literary construction took the form: “flying over
A, I was thinking of B” (Schiff 1995, x, emphasis added). Qua “hero,” Saint Exupéry
exactly paradigmatizes la pensée de survol. Surely, then, a complete understanding of
Phenomenology of Perception demands a convincing explanation as to why it culminates
with this turn to Saint Exupéry which is, at least prime facie, extremely incongruous.13
This work seeks to provide such an explanation. The “heroic” ending of
Phenomenology of Perception is long overdue for serious critical scrutiny.14 As we shall
see, such scrutiny will reveal that there is in fact much more going on here than meets
the eye. The deference to Saint Exupéry is a dense, liminal node into which are woven
 Introduction: Flight From Phenomenology? 3

the main theoretical and practical postulates to which Merleau-Ponty’s existential

phenomenology was implicitly committed. In this way, the “hero” turns out to be
nothing less than the methodological linchpin of this audacious project—for better
or for worse, the key to its philosophical identity and distinctive standpoint within the
traditions of phenomenology, Marxism, and post-Kantian transcendental thought in
general.
■
With the Preface above having set out the specific methodological context within
which an explanation for the ending of Phenomenology of Perception will be located (I
will return to this in the Conclusion), the discussion will proceed as follows:
Chapter 1 does some of the groundwork by way of supplying what any serious reader
of Merleau-Ponty needs to know about the person to whom Merleau-Ponty ceded
authorial voice at the very end of his own magnum opus. Here, I marshal background
material concerning Saint Exupéry’s work and its reception, with a particular focus on
Pilote de guerre. The aim is to render as manifest as possible the incongruousness of the
passage with which Phenomenology of Perception culminates by showing that its literal
meaning is unmistakably a matter of self-sacrificial disincarnation. In other words, the
aim is to show that the passage in question is essentially, and not just circumstantially,
an exemplary moment of la pensée de survol, and that as a result there is a major
problem of interpretation in need of resolution.
Chapters 2 and 3 are based around the pair of references that Merleau-Ponty
made to same part of Pilote de guerre in the first chapter of Part I of Phenomenology
of Perception, “The Body as an Object and Mechanistic Physiology.” The aim here
is to show that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of heroism reveals something crucial about
the structure of human embodied existence or être-au-monde, to wit, that it forms
an existential totality inclusive of the natural organism. Based upon his claims that
être-au-monde involves a constitutive temporal duality between “habitual” and “actual”
dimensions of embodiment, and that its historicity is emergent upon that duality but
that it generates a single history, Merleau-Ponty uses the claim that heroic action
involves the complete repression of “actual” embodiment to show the latent existence
within the habitual dimension of an operative intentionality toward universal life, and
that this intentionality represents an a priori condition of historical action.
Simply making these points might not require an entire chapter, let  alone two.
But truly to establish and appreciate them and their significance for Merleau-Ponty
involves recognizing their underlying connection with the very important but largely
overlooked impact that Georg Lukács’ 1923 work, History and Class Consciousness
[Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein] had on Merleau-Ponty’s thought. In the case at
hand, this has to do with Lukács’ claim regarding the methodological primacy of
the category of totality. The bulk of Chapters 2 and 3 is thus actually devoted to this
connection. After introducing the problem that the earlier references to Saint Exupéry
pose, Chapter 2 lays out some contextual considerations concerning Lukács, along with
some extended sociobiographical conjectures concerning the backstory of Merleau-
Ponty’s philosophical embrace of Marxism. The point of all this is to render more
plausible the importance that my reading of Merleau-Ponty attaches to Lukács, and
4 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

more generally, the relative priority of Marxism over phenomenology that I will claim
obtains in Merleau-Ponty’s postwar project, and how it forms the basis of his response
to Fink. But in showing how Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism originated in the context of
left-wing Catholicism in the interwar period, it also serves to foreground the crucial
theme of incarnation that remained fundamental in Merleau-Ponty’s postwar work.
With this set out, Chapter 3 begins by considering Lukács’ work directly. In then
bringing this to bear upon Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of embodiment, I claim that
Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception should be
seen as situated within the framework of his interpretation of Marxism’s conception of
history. In other words, within the terms of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar project, history
has logical and phenomenological priority over embodiment. Such is how Merleau-
Ponty could claim the habitual dimension of embodiment as the locus of historical
apriority, and some preliminary consequences are drawn on this basis.
In order to develop further the suggestion that Merleau-Ponty’s postwar project was,
to a significant extent, an attempt to update and redeem a Lukácsian perspective, in
Chapters 4 and 5, I consider in more detail what I term Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnational
Marxism” and show how his notion of heroism was related to this.
Chapter 4 charts a path through a cluster of related themes—sacrifice, death,
politics, the proletariat, the tacit cogito, class consciousness, human productivity,
and rationality—some of which are familiar, some not so familiar in Merleau-Ponty
scholarship, but which, taken together, sketch out the militant sense of Merleau-Ponty’s
existential conception of Marxism, and of his rethinking of Lukács in particular.
Discussion of these themes shows that they point back to a certain conception of
the philosophy of history, and this partly anticipates the answer that will be given
concerning the ending of Phenomenology of Perception.
But this conception of the philosophy of history ultimately hinges on Merleau-
Ponty’s notion of “heroism”. Before getting to that answer, then, Chapter 5 will
address this notion directly. This will be primarily by way of a close reading of “Man,
the Hero”—a short but important essay with which Merleau-Ponty concluded the
volume Sense and Non-Sense. This will show that Merleau-Ponty intended his idea
of heroism to supply experiential evidence attesting to the latent presence of human
universality. It is ultimately a mythic device intended to encourage the militant faith
needed for the political project of a universal society, by showing that such a project is
indeed possible, and that the transformative political praxis required need not imply
agonistic sacrifice. The chapter concludes with some comparative considerations
on Merleau-Ponty and Saint Exupéry intended as a way to ascertain just how the
standpoint of the former does indeed differ from the pensée de survol associated with
the latter.
In laying out the significance of Exupérian heroism for Merleau-Ponty’s political
thought, and clarifying the priority that the latter has with regard to his philosophical
thought, these chapters provide the context for answering the question concerning
the ending of Phenomenology of Perception. By way of conclusion, then, I will briefly
recapitulate the relevant claims and draw them together in terms of the basic meaning
of Exupérian heroism for Merleau-Ponty, the place and role of this notion within
his postwar political thought, and finally, its significance for the methodological
 Introduction: Flight From Phenomenology? 5

coherence of his reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. This relates to the

methodological problem posed by Fink (see Preface), with regard to which I draw out
some further consequences. The principal claim that emerges is that the alternative
conception of phenomenological methodology with which Merleau-Ponty responded
to Fink was based on his incarnational conception of Marxism, and this in a way that
made phenomenology out to be a project of militant engagement premised upon the
dialectical sublimation of heroism. As will become apparent, this analysis is crucial for
appreciating and understanding the ending—and thus quite possibly the whole—of
Phenomenology of Perception.15
■
Two final points by way of wrapping up this Introduction.
First, I should perhaps underscore that this book is not itself an introduction to
Merleau-Ponty’s work, in particular, to Phenomenology of Perception. It could certainly
be read profitably by anyone, irrespective of familiarity with the latter. But I do not
spend much time recapitulating specific claims or rehearsing familiar themes, even
very important ones. In part, this is because there are many fine books and articles
available that do a fine job with those—at least within the relevant parameters of
contemporary scholarship—and it is not my intention to produce superfluous
commentary. But more importantly, it is because I am convinced that those parameters
are unsatisfactory. My main priority in this book, then, is to motivate and articulate,
at least in outline, a fundamentally new interpretive perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s
existential phenomenology. There is admittedly something polemical about my
intentions in this work. But I believe that this is productive. For if I have done what
I set out to do, then reading this book will not be an anodyne afternoon stroll along
the predictable grands boulevards of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, but rather a somewhat
more intrepid and stimulating exploration of the unfamiliar back alleys from which his
work derives much of its basic impulse, guiding orientation, and characteristic verve.
So while it should be of interest to anyone who has an interest in Merleau-Ponty, the
meaning and significance of the main claims that I shall make in this book will be felt
much more keenly by those who are already familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work, and
with the general contours of the secondary literature devoted to it.
Second, I should just like to point out that, as is conventional, gender-exclusive
language in original texts—of which there is an abundance in the works under
consideration—is reproduced in quotation. According to the sense, however, it is
often also retained in discussion, in order to avoid conveying a misleading impression
of inclusivity. There is not merely a matter of style, though, as there is an important
philosophical motivation. For the broader context in which Merleau-Ponty’s existential
phenomenology took shape was formed by the discourse of renewed French humanism
(see, e.g. Arbousse-Bastide 1930; George et  al. 1946; cf. Kelly 2004, 128–38). And
although Merleau-Ponty was, like so many others at the time, ostensibly committed
to a universally inclusive humanism, it is patent that much of the relevant discursive
context was compromised by implicit (and often explicit) masculinist and androcentric
assumptions (among other forms of exclusion). The very fact that humanist discourse
at the time was conceptually anchored on the idea of “Man” [l’Homme] makes this
 6 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

hardly surprising. Saint Exupéry is a case in point. No one seriously wonders about
his feminist credentials. But the case of Merleau-Ponty is different. For it is a live and
important question whether his work is similarly compromised by sexist ideology (e.g.
Butler 1989; S. Sullivan 1997), or else whether it could actually serve as a valuable
resource for feminist phenomenology (e.g. Bigwood 1991; Fielding 1996; Stoller 2000).
I do not take up this question in this book, but I certainly hope that the discussion
here, and the light that it throws on Phenomenology of Perception, is not without some
relevance. In particular, I should just like to suggest that the methodological emphasis
that my reading places on the significance of this text, and the resulting implication
that a normative orientation to history is logically and phenomenologically primary
within the Merleau-Pontian approach to embodiment, could be taken up in such a way
as to show that both sides of the debate are right. Specifically, it could help to show that
Merleau-Ponty’s potential usefulness for feminist work—as well as, mutatis mutandis,
for other forms of anti-oppression theory and practice—does not necessarily hinge
on the absence of masculinist bias from his actual phenomenological descriptions.
For it may not depend on those descriptions at all, but rather have mainly to do with
a broader rethinking of phenomenology that would take it up—as I will describe
Merleau-Ponty’s existential project below—as a kind of “militant” philosophy.

Merleau ponty.indb 6 10/23/2013 7:56:42 PM

 1

Antoine de Saint Exupéry,

“Soliloquizing Angel”

It was claimed in the Introduction that even cursory scrutiny of the Exupérian
ending of Phenomenology of Perception shows that it exhibits, at least prima facie,
a surprising incongruity with the rest of that work, and that as such, it is overdue
for critical analysis. Such analysis is the task of the book and the purpose of this
first chapter is to do some of the initial groundwork for it by presenting a concise
but critical introduction to Saint Exupéry as the figure who gets the final word in
Phenomenology of Perception, yet whose presence within the parameters of Merleau-
Ponty scholarship tends to be a matter of only vague familiarity. The intention is to
examine Saint Exupéry’s works and their reception, with a particular focus on Pilote
de guerre, in a way that will lay the basis for a contextually accurate reading of the lines
cited by Merleau-Ponty—surely something the hermeneutical importance of which
every serious reader of Phenomenology of Perception should appreciate.1 As we shall
see, beyond simply affirming it, this reading will, in fact, amplify greatly the apparent
incongruousness of the lines in question, thereby providing irresistibly compelling
motivation for undertaking a fresh interpretive approach to Merleau-Ponty’s text by
way of its ending.2

Introduction
Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger Pierre de Saint Exupéry was born in  1900 in
Lyon into an aristocracy in decline.3 Not really knowing what to do with himself, he
found meaning and fulfillment in the fledgling world of aviation.4 Beginning in 1926,
when he was hired on by the Société d’Aviation Latécoère, which later became the
Compagnie Générale Aéropostale (usually known simply as Aéropostale, a forerunner
of Air France), Saint Exupéry flew and helped expand the mail delivery lines along the
northwest coast of Africa and in Argentina. And he wrote about his experience, doing
so quite successfully. In fact, by the time of World War II, Saint Exupéry had already
become a renowned pilot-writer on the basis of his novels Courrier sud (1929), Vol
de nuit (1931), which won the Prix Fémina, and Terre des hommes (1939), winner of
the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française. And, of course, he also wrote Le
petit prince, a book which, since its original publication in 1943 (it did not appear in
8 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

France until 1946), has become one of the best-selling books of all time. Saint Exupéry
died in 1944, failing to return from an aerial reconnaissance mission over southern
France just weeks before the liberation of Paris.5 He remains one of the most widely-
read and translated authors in the French language, and until the conversion to the
Euro in 2002, his likeness (along with that of the “little prince”) appeared on France’s
50-franc note.
The above paragraph probably contains about as much as—if not, indeed, actually
a fair bit more than—the average contemporary reader of Merleau-Ponty knows about
the man who gets the final word in Phenomenology of Perception. This chapter aims
to redress this situation by providing background material concerning Saint Exupéry
and his work that is crucial for understanding Pilote de guerre and hence for fully
appreciating the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s strategically located deference to
Exupérian heroism.
The discussion will unfold as follows: I will first trace the development of Saint
Exupéry’s humanistic Weltanschauung as this culminates in Pilote de guerre, and
situate this text in its historical context, in particular with regard to political debates
concerning French opposition to German Occupation. I will then examine the main
claims of Pilote de guerre, showing—and this is the most important thing—that it
is based on religious invocations of self-sacrificial disincarnation, and discuss the
death and immediate posthumous legacy of Saint Exupéry as factors of the context
within which Merleau-Ponty’s deference to him qua “hero” occurred. All of this will
serve to confirm the unexpected fact that the ending of Phenomenology of Perception
is wildly and disarmingly incongruous with respect to generally received views
concerning the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s text, such that a significant question
mark must be placed over these views until the ending can be properly understood
and accounted for.

Toward a cosmic humanism

At a narrative level, Saint Exupéry’s principal published works can be described as
“heroic aviation stories.” In contrast, however, to an earlier heroic literature based on
the experience of World War I fighter aces—which, even though it typically presented
a sanitized and chivalrous dimension of that conflict, was ineluctably constituted
by division and enmity—Saint Exupéry’s writing reflects the pioneering years of
commercial flight. Its horizons are thus broader and its backdrop more universal as it
vividly evokes the perilous human struggle against nature that this enterprise entailed.
In this “golden age” of aviation, one literally flew “by the seat of one’s pants.”6 Piloting
was an undertaking still fraught with tremendous mortal risk, but one willingly
engaged in by individuals such as Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet, legendary
men of the air whom Saint Exupéry knew personally and admired as heroes.7 These
were men who, over and above the adventurous derring-do and camaraderie that
Saint Exupéry made central themes in his writing, felt themselves implicitly duty-
bound to participate in the larger project of conquering and domesticating nature’s
wildest elements—mountains, deserts, oceans—that had previously separated
 Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “Soliloquizing Angel” 9

peoples, with the aim of forging closer communicative bonds across the globe. In
effect, in piloting, “Saint-Exupéry had discovered a last bastion of noblesse oblige”
(Schiff 1994, 140).
Although pilots flew alone, this calling was anything but individualistic. It was
certainly true for Saint Exupéry that, as André Gide wrote in his Preface to Vol de
nuit, “man’s happiness does not lie in freedom, but in the acceptance of a duty.”8 But
for Saint Exupéry, a pilot’s sense of duty included a pronounced submission to the
discipline of the profession—the noble virtue of individual pilots only emerges from
the context of aviation as a collective métier.9 Fraternity and esprit de corps were in this
way fundamental Exupérian themes, understood as involving the spiritual communion
of those who challengingly transcend themselves through wholehearted participation
in a common, existentially trying vocation. Saint Exupéry believed that human beings
possess a natural propensity toward such comradeship, and that this is what ultimately
gives meaning to human life. But he also held that the actualization of this requires a
hierarchical and paternalistic structure to organize and uphold the collective project as
the appropriate sort of ordeal, in the strict sense of the term.
This is how Aéropostale worked, and Saint Exupéry—nostalgic for authority, and
increasingly critical of interwar French society—tended to see this organization as a
paradigm for a renewed harmonization of individual fulfillment and collective needs
in society as a whole. In the 1930s, he was increasingly concerned, as were many others
as well, not just about the threats posed by fascism and communism, but also and
especially about the spiritual vacuity and decadence of modern liberalism. In line
with a wider conservative critique of culture at the time, Saint Exupéry deplored the
growing massification and mechanization of humanity. In his preferred metaphors,
the contemporary world was being reduced to a “termite mound” [termitière] or a
society of “robots” (SV 174; PG 222, 232; EG 341, 377). As he expressed it in June 1943:
“Robot-man, termite-man, man oscillating between assembly-line work and card
games; emasculated of all his creative power, . . . spoon-fed a ready-made, standardized
culture, as one feeds hay to cattle. That’s what man is today” (EG 380). And in what
must surely be the final thing he wrote (a letter dating from 30 or 31 July 1944), Saint
Exupéry said: “If I’m shot down, I won’t regret anything. The termite mound of the
future appals me, and I hate their robot virtues” (EG 516).
In Saint Exupéry’s view, the underlying problem with modern liberal democratic
society was that its organization precluded “love,” or more precisely, “genuine love”
[l’amour veritable], understood in social-structural terms as a “network of bonds
that fosters becoming” [un réseau de liens qui fait devenir] (PG 198). Saint Exupéry
emphasized that such a network must be hierarchical. Human existence can enjoy
a vibrant and vital meaningfulness only when interpersonal relationships are not
directly horizontal or lateral, but are rather mediated by the vertical relationship that
each individual has with a common transcendent goal. “We breathe freely only when
bound to our brothers by a common and disinterested goal. Experience shows that love
does not mean gazing at one another, but looking together in the same direction” (TH
198). Expressing a distressed but also fascinated concern about the rise of fascism in
the late-1930s, Saint Exupéry put it thus: “pilots meet if they are struggling to deliver
the same mail; the Nazis, if they are offering their lives to the same Hitler; the team
10 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

of mountaineers, if they are aiming for the same summit. Men do not unite if they
approach each other directly, but only by losing themselves in the same god.”10
According to Saint Exupéry, then, what was lacking in France was any such “god” or
“summit,” there was no recognizable “common goal”—in a word, no “love,” and thus no
genuine becoming. By the time he published Terre des hommes in 1939, Saint Exupéry’s
writing had thus increasingly taken on the form and metaphorical style of a parable
on the deeper meaning of human action. Pressing the question as to why Mermoz and
Guillaumet, for example, (not to mention himself), would risk their lives to deliver a
few sacks of other people’s mail;11 or why, to take another example from Saint Exupéry,
a bookkeeper from Barcelona would become a Republican soldier willing to die in a
civil war “that at bottom meant little to [him]”12—and asking this amid the growing
spiritual decadence that he sensed within interwar French society, Saint Exupéry
adopted an exalted tone of moral edification. Regarding the pilot increasingly as a
special illustrative case,13 he depicted variously engaged, seemingly selfless individuals
as inspirational exemplars of self-overcoming.

It must be understood that the gift of oneself, the risk of one’s life, loyalty unto
death—these are the actions that have greatly contributed to establishing the
nobility of man. If you are searching for a model, you will find it in the pilot who
gives his life for the mail, in the doctor who dies on the front line of an epidemic, or
in the meharist who, at the head of his Moorish platoon, plunges into destitution
and solitude. (SV 173)14

In consenting “to die for all men, to be part of something universal” (SV 141), such
individuals “accept a truth which [they] could never translate into words, but whose self-
evidence seized hold of [them]” (SV 138). What Saint Exupéry said of the Barcelonan
bookkeeper-turned-soldier, prepared to engage in an absurd attack that would almost
certainly cost him his life, applies to all: “owing to an ordeal . . . that stripped you of
all that is not intrinsic, you discovered a mysterious character born of yourself. . . . A
great breath [souffle] swept over you and delivered from its shackles the sleeping prince
you sheltered—Man” (SV 141). The apparent selflessness of Saint Exupéry’s exemplars
thus, in reality, manifests a liberating metamorphosis into one’s true self, whereby
one incarnates “Man” [l’Homme], the “sovereign truth” [vérité souveraine] of human
existence (SV 139). Thus, as Saint Exupéry said of Mermoz, “truth is the man that is
born in him as he passes over the Andes” (SV 173).
Man is, in effect, Saint Exupéry’s notion of human nature. This is not so much
an objectively given fact, however, as a latent ideal that implies a moral task. Note
that Terre des hommes ended on this enigmatic, conditional note: “Only Spirit
[l’Esprit], if it breathe [souffle] upon the clay [i.e., “raw” humanity], can create Man”
(TH 213, emphasis added).15 As in the case of the pilot or the soldier, this “spiritual
breath” would manifest itself in the form of an ordeal that eliminates from the
lived experience of the individual that which is inessential and accidental from the
standpoint of the species. For example, Saint Exupéry described the enlistment of the
bookkeeper, upon hearing of the death of a friend on the Málaga front, as happening
thus: “He was not a friend for whom you would have ever felt you had to lay down
your life. Yet that bit of news swept over you, over your narrow little life, like a wind
 Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “Soliloquizing Angel” 11

from the sea” (SV 137f). Man thus denotes human universality, posited as the as-yet-
unrealized “common goal” of humanity, a goal which could—if Spirit “breathes”
appropriately—unite a world divided, for example, along political, national, or
religious lines. Man signifies the becoming of that specific organization of human
coexistence which, transcending any opposition between individuality and totality,
would optimize freedom and equality through the actualization of what we might call
humanity’s “natural fraternity.” It must be emphasized, though, that this vision was
deeply hierarchical—Saint Exupéry was not particularly concerned with democratic
egalitarianism (Carnets, 67, 187, 228; PG 182, 241; cf. Thuillier 1957, 577ff). For him,
neither equality nor democracy as generally understood in the modern context was a
condition of fraternity. On the contrary, “[Saint Exupéry] thought that fraternity will
follow from the establishment of a hierarchy between beings and will be its crowning
achievement” (Ouellet 1971, 97).
Significantly, Saint Exupéry illustrated this sort of coexistence with anthro­
pomorphizing “analogies” to the animal world. For example, in an extended simile, he
pointed to the transformation of domesticated ducks when wild ones fly overhead:

as if magnetized by the great triangular flight, . . . the call of the wild strikes in

them some vestige of savagery. The ducks on the farm are thus transformed for an
instant into migrant birds. In those hard little heads, until now filled with humble
images of ponds, worms, and henhouses, there develops a sense for continental
expanses and seascapes, the taste of the wind on the open sea. Tottering from right
to left in its wire enclosure, the duck is gripped by a sudden mysterious passion,
and by a far-reaching love whose object is unknown. (SV 138)16

Humans, too, have a natural tendency to a specific authentic existence. “There are two
hundred million men in Europe whose existence has no meaning and who yearn to
be born into life” (SV 177, emphasis added; cf. 179). “In a world become desert, we
thirst for comradeship” (SV 178). But not unlike the ducks, the overcoming of our own
domesticity typically requires some kind of instigating vision. The significance of pilots
is that they provide a particularly apt image when they, too, literally rise above the vain
mundanity and tedious mediocrity of ordinary everyday life. In this way, they were
harbingers of a new humanistic creed.
Of course, the interspecific analogy breaks down when we contrast the respective
metamorphoses. Humans are not ducks, and Man is not wild. What characterizes the
specific “sovereign truth” of humanity is not a movement of reversion that in some
sense recovers the primordial body, but an ecstatic, projective movement out of the
body and into social relationships. This is illustrated in one of the most well-known
passages from Terre des hommes. Here, Saint Exupéry recounted how Guillaumet, after
crashing in the Andes, walked, thinking only of others, for five days out of the freezing
mountains, uttering upon his return: “what I did, . . . no animal would ever have done”
[Ce que j’ai fait, . . . jamais aucune bête ne l’aurait fait] (TH 52).17 The idea is that any
nonhuman animal would have welcomed the release of death before instrumentalizing
its body in this way and to this extent for invisible symbolic ends.18 Saint Exupéry
presented Guillaumet’s remark as “the noblest ever spoken,” for it “situates and honors
man” by re-establishing the “true hierarchies”—humanity’s transcendence of animality
12 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

through the subordination of corporeality to projects of meaning. This is the kernel of

Exupérian humanism.
This view elicited a range of reactions from Merleau-Ponty’s generation. Jean-Paul
Sartre, for example, who was otherwise fairly positively inclined to Saint Exupéry on
account of the quasi-Heideggerian descriptions he offered of his métier (Sartre 1984,
66, 107, 146f, 327f; cf. 1983, 326, 501, 503f), objected to it as a mawkish vestige of an
outdated moralism.19 Conversely, in a short but glowing review of Terre des hommes
that acknowledged the centrality of that passage, Paul Nizan claimed that Saint Exupéry
had “assessed with the greatest possible precision what is possible or impossible for
man to be and to do.”20 Simone de Beauvoir had a more moderate view that struck
a certain balance between these positions. She wrote that “although [Saint Exupéry]
talks drivel [déconne] when he’s thinking abstractly and in general,” Terre des hommes
“represents a radical change of scene, so that you feel strongly – so very, very strongly
– the general possibility of another life for the human reality in general which each of
us is. It’s one of those rare books in a long while that has made me dream.”21
This evocative quality stems from the central motif of Saint Exupéry’s work—namely,
that of le survol—and the growing recognition that flying provides a perspective that
can reveal both the world and humanity in a new light. As he put it, the airplane is an
instrument that “has disclosed for us the true face of the earth” (TH 63).22 Freeing us
from well-worn pathways of both movement and thought, it “has taught us to travel
as the crow flies.” Offering the vantage of “Spirit,” it shows that “there is a truth that is
higher than the pronouncements of intelligence [l’intelligence]” (PG 145). Whereas the
latter takes an external, detached, analytical view of visible objects, the former takes
a global, involved, and holistic view that focuses, not on objects as such, but on the
invisible relations between them. “Spirit is not concerned with objects, but with the
meaning that links them together” [le sens qui les nous entre eux] (PG 28). In this way,
flying “plunges [one] directly into the heart of mystery” (TH 79), revealing nature as
an indifferent cosmos that forms the backdrop for the “life of Spirit” (TH 61; cf. EG
377). “Only from the height of our rectilinear trajectories do we discover the essential
foundation, the fundament of rock and sand and salt in which, here and there, like a bit
of moss in the crevices of ruins, life has occasionally ventured to blossom” (TH 64). In
this way, it becomes possible “to judge man in cosmic terms” (TH 65), that is, in terms
of the coming of Man.
This perspective—which André Gascht (1947) aptly dubbed Saint Exupéry’s “cosmic
humanism”—came to the fore most clearly in Pilote de guerre, in the account Saint
Exupéry gave in that text of the defeat of France in 1940 in the context of his military
role as a reconnaissance pilot. This is the key text for our purposes. Before considering
this work in textual terms, I will first situate it in its relevant historical context.

The historical context of Pilote de guerre

Following the French defeat and the signing of the Vichy armistice, Saint Exupéry
wrote Pilote de guerre primarily as an intervention into the counterproductive and,
to his mind, pointless sectarianism that bitterly divided the French opposition to
 Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “Soliloquizing Angel” 13

Nazism, both within France as well as abroad. By and large, the French were divided
between, on the one hand, those factions who had sympathies or were apologetic for
Pétain,23 and, on the other hand, Resistance factions, which themselves were divided
into pro- and anti-Gaullist camps. Pilote de guerre was an earnest call for unity that
explicitly attempted to position itself above all political and ideological disputes. This
is a standpoint to which he was first explicitly drawn while in Spain during the Civil
War as a correspondent for Paris-Soir. The basic idea is this: “To understand mankind
and its needs, to know its essential reality, we must never set one man’s truth against
another’s. . . . What’s the point of discussing ideologies? If they are all sound, they all
cancel each other out, and such discussions lead us to despair of mankind’s salvation—
whereas everywhere about us men manifest the same needs” (TH 201f).
The same, that is, if seen from sufficiently high above, from the point of view of
Spirit. Surveying in 1940 the drôle de guerre in this way, Saint Exupéry elaborated the
idea of Man as the “common denominator” [commune mesure] of human reality, the
universal human essence underlying the disorder that overwhelmed the perception of
those caught up in the débâcle on the ground. According to Saint Exupéry’s account of
the defeat, France had sacrificed itself for the greater cause of realizing “the community of
Man.” “France played its part, which consisted in offering itself up to be crushed . . . and
to have itself buried for a while in silence” [la France a joué son rôle. Il consistait pour
elle à se proposer à l’écrasement . . . et à se voir ensevelir pour un temps dans le silence]
(PG 140), and it should be judged by its willingness to sacrifice [son consentement au
sacrifice] (PG 138). Saint Exupéry thus sought to establish the “transcendental image”
of Man—the truth of the otherwise “phony” war—as a common goal and rallying point
for those opposed to Nazism.24
Unsurprisingly, within the French exile community, who read the work first, in
February 1942, and who took their political differences with the utmost seriousness,
this standpoint did not win Saint Exupéry supporters on any side. With few exceptions
(e.g. Maurois 1942), the work was simultaneously denounced from all directions: either
for being defeatist, an apology for collaboration, or a treasonous call to arms. “Allying
himself with no camp, [Saint Exupéry] was calumniated by all” (Schiff 1994, 350).
As an attempt to articulate the deeper meaning of the fall of France and of the
seemingly futile deaths of its soldiers, Saint Exupéry also hoped that Pilote de guerre—
translated as Flight to Arras—would boost the sagging prestige of France and help
persuade America to look beyond the factional quarrels and to intervene in the war—if
not on behalf of France, then at least on behalf of Man. In this regard, Pilote de guerre
proved vastly more successful than it was among French émigrés. The reaction from
American readers, even among those who had been dubious with respect to Saint
Exupéry’s earlier works,25 was generally laudatory, and the book was regarded as “the
single most redeeming piece of propaganda” on behalf of France (Schiff 1995, 363f).
By early March, the anti-Vichy weekly Pour la victoire could state that “the American
press was unanimous in greeting the emergence of the first great book of this war as
an unquestionable masterpiece” (EG 232; cf. 229–33). “More than any other book at
the time, this work by Saint-Exupéry created, in the American public, the desire to aid
a country that had offered itself so fully to sacrifice” (Crane 1957, 118). In a comment
that was endorsed by many others, Edward Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly,
14 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

declared that “this narrative [i.e., Pilote de guerre] and Churchill’s speeches stand as the
best answer the democracies have yet found to Mein Kampf” (cited in Cate 1970, 450;
cf. EG 233; Schiff 1994, 363).
Finally, the reception of Pilote de guerre in France when it was published there in
November 1942 was, aside from many reactionary detractors, certainly more favorable
than it had been among the French exile community.26 The first printing sold well, and
there were numerous positive reviews (see EG 293–8, 312f). But owing to the hazards
of speaking freely in Occupied France, this response was rather more muted than it had
been in America. It was thus the hysterical furor that Pilote de guerre provoked among
unabashed anti-Semitic collaborationists, and the campaign they orchestrated against
it, that dominated the book’s initial reception until its banning in early 1943 (see EG
298–312, 316–22). Ironically, perhaps, it was this more than anything that contributed
to the book’s popularity and reputation, for it served to mitigate certain lingering
suspicions of Saint Exupéry’s sympathies for collaboration.27 Although it is difficult to
trace the uptake of the book once it was driven underground and clandestine editions
appeared (on which see Rude 1978; cf. Bounin 1999, 1320f), it is safe to say that it was,
in fact, read (cf. EG 324), and that it resonated well, inasmuch as it was judged less as a
failed political intervention than as a sincere expression of solidarity with those living
under Nazi occupation and a moral call to arms in the name of their liberation.
Perhaps le mot juste from among the contemporary reviews of Pilote de guerre
belonged to Irwin Edman when he judged that Saint Exupéry wrote like “a
soliloquizing angel” (Edman 1942, 1). This rings no less true of the military call
to arms against the Nazi Occupation that Saint Exupéry issued to all fighting-age
Frenchmen abroad at the same time as Pilote de guerre appeared in France.28 For
he did this within a broader call for reconciliation and unity against the common
enemy, reiterating the standpoint that had informed Pilote de guerre. “Our political
discussions are the discussions of ghosts. . . . Men of France, let us be reconciled in
order to serve. . . . It is time to unite, not to divide; to embrace, not to exclude. . . . Let
us abandon all party spirit” (EG 265, 268).
This piece made Saint Exupéry the object of no small amount of ridicule and
vilification—not least because in his call to “abandon all party spirit,” he seemed
content to send French men to war while delegating the “provisional organization
of France” to Britain and America (EG 269). Perhaps the most devastating—and, for
present purposes, the most pertinent—response was that by Jacques Maritain (1942),
whom Saint Exupéry held in high esteem. Although not one easily given to polemic,
Maritain engaged in it here, accusing Saint Exupéry’s attempt to rise above politics
of vagueness, irrealism, and equivocation, in particular with respect to the question
of the armistice. Saint Exupéry’s appeals to French unity, Maritain argued, cannot do
away with the fact that some French people are partly responsible for the situation
and need to be excluded from the movement for liberation. “The men who made the
armistice did not have faith in the people of France, nor in the calling of France. Their
resentment against the people and their political hatreds played an essential role in this
event. Saint Exupéry would be aware of that if he did not close himself off in a biased
way from all political considerations.” Although Saint Exupéry did not want to speak
about politics, “he broaches it despite himself, and this in a rather regrettable way.”
 Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “Soliloquizing Angel” 15

According to Maritain, in the conflicts that divide the French, Saint Exupéry “sees only
personal rivalries and ambitions,” and not the political grounds for these conflicts.
Although he does not want to set himself up as a judge, “despite himself, he cannot not
judge, and he does not judge correctly” (EG 279f).
This is broadly applicable to Pilote de guerre itself. Although this work offered a
grandiloquent moral vision of liberation, it was gravely compromised by being utterly
detached from political reality. As we shall see, Saint Exupéry’s moral arguments
resorted to a religious discourse that “expressed the escape from history into the realm
of eschatology” (John 1985, 103). In this way, the view of Man developed in Pilote
de guerre, which makes this work “the highest expression of Exupérian humanism”
(Ouellet  1971, 81), can indeed be fairly and accurately described—that is, with all
due approbation but also, and especially, pejorativeness—as la pensée de survol of a
“soliloquizing angel.”

The claims of Pilote de guerre

Saint Exupéry’s account of the situation in France was ultimately based on a sort
of epiphany that he claimed he underwent during an extremely dangerous aerial
reconnaissance sortie that he flew over Arras in May 1940, during which his aircraft
came under heavy fire and was very nearly shot down.29 Saint Exupéry’s recounting
of this episode is the centerpiece of Pilote de guerre, and it was from here that the
sentences with which Phenomenology of Perception ends were drawn.
The overriding theme in Saint Exupéry’s account of this experience is that it
excluded any concern with his personal physical survival. On this basis, he proposed a
more general claim to the effect that in those extraordinary situations when existence
itself is at stake, “man ceases to be concerned with himself: what matters to him is
only that of which he is a part. If he should die, he would not be severed from that,
but would rather meld into it. He would not be losing himself, but finding himself ”
[l’homme ne s’intéresse plus à soi. Seul s’impose à lui ce dont il est. Il ne se retranche pas,
s’il meurt: il se confond. Il ne se perd pas: il se trouve] (PG 169).
It is of the greatest significance to recognize that, according to Saint Exupéry’s story,
not only was it known that the odds of returning alive from this mission were extremely
low, but it was also known that on account of the sorry state of the French forces at
the time, there was no chance, even if he and his crew did manage to return alive,
that any reconnaissance information could ever be put to use. In other words—and
Merleau-Ponty also drew attention to this (SNS 328/185)—the highly perilous mission
was objectively useless. Useless, that is, from the perspective of “intelligence.” The point
that Saint Exupéry went to great lengths to insist upon was that in willfully proceeding
anyway, far from resigning themselves to a dismal fate, he and his crew had tacitly
responded to a higher moral calling, one rooted in Spirit. According to Saint Exupéry’s
account, as with this particular flight, so too with the French war effort in general:
“Spirit dominated Intelligence” [l’Esprit . . . a dominé l’Intelligence] (PG 139).
In Saint Exupéry’s account of that flight, the theme of the existential primacy of
meaning over life that had been brewing in his earlier works came to full fruition as
16 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

the claim that bodies lack intrinsic worth, that one’s body is nothing more than the
dispensable instrument for one’s acts of transcendence—and that the “essential act,”
historically neglected by humanism, is sacrifice: “a gift of oneself to the Being to which
one will claim to belong” [un don de soi-même à l’Être dont on prétendra se réclamer]
(PG 231). Note the future tense—as with Mermoz et al., what matters is what Saint
Exupéry becomes through this ordeal. “What ultimately justifies his mission over Arras
is not the War, nor Duty, nor Civilization, but rather the concrete Man that he becomes
through this act” (Major 1968, 140).
More than just a riveting tale, Saint Exupéry’s account of that near-fatal flight,
presented as a mise en abyme for the larger national sacrifice, generated a didactic,
sermonizing conclusion concerning the spiritual resurrection of France in terms of
Man. As one commentator put it, “the experience of the flight to Arras taught the
author of Pilote du guerre the mystery of the supreme sacrifice consummated by Jesus
and the Christian martyrs: ‘ “To bear the sins of men . . .” And each bears the sins of
all men’ [citing PG 212]. With this claim, the most radical of Exupérian ethics, we are
urged to imitate Christ by expiating the lapse of humanity” (Wagner 1996, 123). Pilote
du guerre thus culminated in a “Credo” that reads like a homily to self-sacrifice in the
name of higher collective ends (PG 240ff). For instance:

I shall fight for the primacy of Man over the individual, and of the Universal over
the particular.
I believe that the veneration [culte] of the Universal exalts and builds up [noue]
the riches of particularity, and that it founds the only true order, which is that of
life. . . .
I believe that the primacy of Man founds the only Equality and the only
Freedom that possess significance. . . . I shall fight anyone seeking to subject the
freedom of Man to an individual or to a mass of individuals.
I believe that what my civilization calls Charity is the sacrifice granted to Man
to establish his dominion. Charity is the gift made to Man through the mediocrity
of the individual. It founds Man. . . .
I shall fight for Man. Against his enemies. But also against myself.

Although Saint Exupéry’s tone in the conclusion is tediously sanctimonious, such

that there is a strong temptation to simply dismiss this part of the book,30 it is crucial
to recognize that it is this alone that clinches the philosophical significance of the
reconnaissance misadventure in terms of Saint Exupéry’s account of Man. For, in
these passages, Saint Exupéry establishes the specific nature of the secularization of
the Christian tradition that his account of Man represents. Positing (a) traditional
Christian values and (b) their vitiation by rational humanism, Saint Exupéry then
proposed, as a kind of “negation of a negation,” (c) the re-foundation of those values
in a new, “cosmic humanism.” “The profession of faith with which Pilote de guerre
concludes is at once a vibrant tribute to Christianity for founding in God the values of
equality, dignity, fraternity, hope, and charity; but it is also a farewell to Christianity
and a call to a new religion [religion] of Man in which Man will henceforth be the
‘common denominator’ required to secure the universality of these values, which alone
make life livable” (Devaux 1994, 78). In his own words, the religion of Man proposed by
 Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “Soliloquizing Angel” 17

Saint Exupéry seeks “to found human relations on the worship [culte] of Man beyond
the individual, in order that the behavior of each with respect to himself and to others
would no longer be blind conformism to the customs of the termite mound, but the
free exercise of love” (PG 221f).
Saint Exupéry’s main contention in Pilote de guerre—and this is why the narrative
and the moral cannot be disunited—is that this loving religiosity cannot be based on
a passive relation to Spirit, but only on human acts. “It is only through acts that we
found within ourselves the Being to which we claim to belong” [on ne fonde en soi
l’Être dont on se réclame que par des actes] (PG 230). Meaning is founded by active
self-creation. According to Saint Exupéry, traditional rational humanism, based on the
individualistic prejudices of intelligence, has failed to take action seriously (PG 231).
In particular, it has neglected what he regarded as the essential act, namely, sacrifice,
which he understood as a “gratuitous gift” (EG 209, 460), where “gratuitous” [gratuit]
means that “the useful [utile] part is useless [inutile]” (Carnets 67). Yet, this is what is
required for love, and for the founding of the new “Community of Man,” which can
only be the “sum of our gifts” (PG 239).31
Thus, “the fundamental discovery of Pilote de guerre could be defined as the passage
from humanism as abstract and ‘given’ to a concrete and creative [because giving]
humanism. The only Spirit who can create Man is man himself ” (Major 1968, 140).
The conclusion that turns Pilote de guerre into a “breviary of humanism” (Losic 1965,
77) expresses—codifies, in fact—this passage as the move from an attitude of passive
spectation to one of creative activity in the context of a collective métier. Saint Exupéry
called this “participation.” This has an existential priority: “to know is not to demonstrate
or explain, but to attain vision. To see, however, one must first of all participate” (PG
54). Saint Exupéry thus claimed that “the role of spectator or a witness has always
disgusted me. What am I, if I do not participate? I have to participate in order to exist”
[le métier de témoin m’a toujours fait horreur. Que suis-je, si je ne participer pas? J’ai
besoin, pour être, de participer] (PG 183). It is only through effective creative action that
participates in a larger social endeavor that abstract individuality can be overcome, and
it is only in such overcoming that new bonds with others are effectively established.
“It is in participation that man makes himself, that his whole being will shed its skin
[muer] and acquire a new dimension” (Ouellet 1971, 41).
Participatory action is a matter of giving oneself; it is ultimately a process of self-
sacrifice that is properly justifiable only in terms of the new humanity that comes into
being through it. As Saint Exupéry put it: “the individual is only a path. What matters is
Man, who takes that path” [l’individu n’est qu’une route. L’Homme qui l’emprunte compte
seul] (PG 214). One must become Man, see as Man, as Saint Exupéry claimed happened
to him during the flight over Arras, when Man “took the place” of his self-concerned
individuality [s’est installé à ma place] (PG 217). Whence the high-altitude thoughts
with which Phenomenology of Perception concludes.
Thus, to readers familiar with Pilote de guerre—and it is scarcely conceivable that
anyone reading Merleau-Ponty’s tome in postwar France would not have been familiar
with it—the lines cited by Merleau-Ponty literally aver that the proper fulfillment of
human life lies in a kind of self-sacrificial ekstasis, whereby corporeality is transmuted
back into the intersubjective relationships wherein its subjectivity was originally
18 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

constituted. Crucially, Saint Exupéry referred to this as “exchange.” This notion was
anticipated in Terre des hommes, but only elaborated in Pilote de guerre. For Saint
Exupéry, exchange was effectively synonymous with sacrifice in the sense of creative
participation (Losic 1965, 56; Major 1968, 143; Ouellet 1971, 30), and as such, it can
be deemed with little controversy to be the central concept in Exupérian humanism
(and it is also central to Merleau-Ponty’s account of freedom, which will be discussed
below). Key here is that the body is not the ultimate locus of personal existence, but
rather a source of alienation, which is to be literally exchanged, up to and including the
point of death, against projective meaningfulness. This is precisely what it means when
we read at the end of Phenomenology of Perception, “you give yourself in exchange” [tu
t’échanges] (PhP 520).
But as Saint Exupéry immediately added—although this fell to Merleau-Ponty’s
ellipsis—“you do not experience the feeling of loss in the exchange” [tu n’éprouves pas
le sentiment de perdre à l’échange] (PG 168). In an important sense, then, this is not
really sacrifice. As with the Maussian view of potlatch as ultimately not disinterested,32
Exupérian exchange is a matter of restitutive equivalency. “Rien ne se perd” (SV
174). Although it demands nothing in return, sacrifice does not go uncompensated
in the Exupérian economy. “From the moment one consents to sacrifice oneself for
one’s ideal, one’s whole being enlarges to the dimensions of that ideal” (Ouellet 1971,
34). “What you give to the community founds the community—and the existence of
a community enriches your own substance” (EG 209). And this holds true even of
the ultimate sacrifice. “If one ‘participates’ in something wholeheartedly, and with
the thought of getting nothing in return [non-récompense] – to save one’s country, for
example – exchange in death will be rewarded” (Losic 1965, 56f). For Saint Exupéry,
“death, far from severing the knot [nœud] that ties the individual to the community
of men, gains him a further bond. Through the gift of his life, supreme measure of his
loyalty, [he] seals a pact with the living and the dead; and this bond, founded in blood,
more tightly ensures their communion” (Ouellet 1971, 80f).
Thus, in the Exupérian world, self-sacrificial disincarnation leads to authentic
liberation in spiritual communion. Nothing less nor different than this is expressed
in the final words of Phenomenology of Perception—that is, the line about the “knot of
relations”—that have so strongly endeared themselves to so many of Merleau-Ponty’s
latter-day readers. For as Saint Exupéry wrote in the immediately preceding line: “one’s
essence appears when the body comes undone” [Quand le corps se défait, l’essentiel se
montre], that is, when that “knot of relations” [nœud de relations] is untied through
the individual’s death. And the line immediately following drives the point home
unmistakably: “The body is an old crock that gets left behind” [Le corps, vieux cheval,
on l’abandonne] (PG 171).

The death of Saint Exupéry

Perhaps the single most significant detail concerning Saint Exupéry’s life actually
concerns his death: the fact that Saint Exupéry—who, despite being not only one of
France’s best-known men of letters, but also too old and physically unfit to fly, had
 Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “Soliloquizing Angel” 19

publicly insisted on being remobilized and finagled his way back into active military
duty—famously disappeared while on a reconnaissance mission over southern France
on the last day of July 1944. This was just a few weeks before the liberation of Paris,
and not long before the completion of Phenomenology of Perception (Noble 2011, 73f).
Although it was not immediately known precisely what happened to Saint Exupéry,
such that for a short period of time the possibility was held open that he had survived
and been taken prisoner, with the end of the German occupation, it grew increasingly
apparent that he had perished, leaving behind that “old crock” that was his body.
And although it was not until April 1948 that he was officially declared as having
died for his country (Schiff 1994, 438), by the time Phenomenology of Perception
was published in April 1945, it was generally taken for granted that its final words
were those of a dead man, someone who had died “une mort glorieuse” (e.g. Morgan
1944; Cohen 1944; Barjon 1945; Gide 1945). This is directly tied to Merleau-Ponty’s
pronouncing Saint Exupéry a hero. In case there is any doubt as to what Merleau-
Ponty intended the phrase “living one’s life to the limit” to mean, it suffices to recall
that in his contribution to the inaugural issue of Les temps modernes, “La Guerre a
eu lieu,” Merleau-Ponty had written, in no uncertain terms, that when it comes to
heroism, “the man who is still able to speak does not know what he is talking about”
(SNS 258/146).
The fact of Saint Exupéry’s high-profile death—which quickly acquired a legendary,
even quasi-hagiographic status—must be borne in mind throughout this discussion.
This renown was reinforced by two posthumous publications. First, in December
1944, Saint Exupéry’s Lettre à un otage [“Letter to a Hostage”] appeared in France.
This short elegiac text—which was originally written in 1942 as a letter to (and as a
preface to a book by) his close friend Léon Werth, a French Jew living under Nazi
Occupation—was regarded by some at the time as “the most beautiful text since the
Liberation” (Fouchet 1945, 4). And in hindsight, it is arguably “the most crystalline
expression of Saint Exupéry’s thinking” (Schiff 1994, 398). Here, Saint Exupéry pours
out his distress over the peril faced by his friend—and, by extension, himself. For as he
wrote in Terre des hommes, anticipating the lines of Pilote de guerre found at the end
of Phenomenology of Perception, “there is only one veritable treasure—the treasure of
human relations.”33 But Werth was just one of the millions of “hostages” trapped in
Occupied France. An ode to friendship, Saint Exupéry’s text is ineluctably an empathic
and emphatic paean to France as the living force that sustained his being, and to which
he would not hesitate to give his life. “One only dies for that by which one can live”
[On meurt pour cela seul dont on peut vivre] (PG 236). For him, France was “neither
an abstract goddess nor a historical concept, but rather a flesh [chair] on which I
depended, a network [réseau] of bonds that governed me, a set of centres that founded
the contours of my heart” (EG 334).
More generally, then, Lettre à un otage was about Man. Saint Exupéry offered two
important illustrations of this. First, he described the “wordless contentment” that
emerged one day in 1939 when he and Werth shared an impromptu Pernod with two
bargemen—one German, the other Dutch—at a café in Fleurville overlooking the
Saône. Saint Exupéry was struck by the spontaneous yet profound understanding,
solidarity, and sense of human goodwill that this encounter seemed to epitomize. As
20 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Saint Exupéry described it, Man is the “substance” of this natural concord—just as it had
been earlier in Spain when, captured by Catalan anarchist militiamen, unable to speak
their language, and unsure of his fate, Saint Exupéry broke the dehumanizing distance
and tension through the “very discrete miracle” of smiling and bumming a cigarette.
This is the second example. The idea is that by betokening a “spiritual certainty” among
all those present, this gesture invoked the reciprocity of Man, utterly transforming the
relationality of the situation. As Saint Exupéry touchingly (if somewhat mawkishly)
put it: “We meet in the smile that is above language, class, and party politics” (EG
339f, 342). These two situations were essentially the same. In Fleurville, as in Spain,
“our agreement was so complete, so solid and profound, and concerned with a creed
which, although inarticulable, was so self-evident in its substance that we would have
gladly agreed to . . . die behind machine guns in order to preserve the substance of that
agreement” (EG 336).
By the time Saint Exupéry wrote Lettre à un otage, all this lay in tatters and under
the boot of fascism. This anguished text thus expresses an unmistakable predisposition
to sacrifice that buttressed the legend of Saint Exupéry’s death.
The other posthumous publication that contributed to the Exupérian aura was, of
course, Le petit prince, which was published by Gallimard in France in 1946 (it had been
published in both French and English in 1943 by Reynal & Hitchcock in New York).
This has become by far the best known of Saint Exupéry’s works, despite being—or
perhaps because it is—typically classified as a children’s book (but cf. Rickman 1996).
Sixty years ago, however, this story of a cherubic, cosmic urchin who descends to Earth
but who ultimately returns to the heavens, leaving no trace, was read as having eerily
and poignantly foreshadowed Saint Exupéry’s own death. It stoked the mystique of
saintly self-sacrifice, in the sense of life in imitatio Christi, which Saint Exupéry seemed
to represent in the immediate postwar period.
But the hagiography was not to last. In 1948, to the vexation of most of those who
were close to Saint Exupéry, Gallimard published Citadelle, a large, unfinished (possibly
by design) manuscript that Saint Exupéry had been working on during the last decade
of his life, and which presents, in its 219 chapters, the first-person ruminations of a
desert chieftain passing down paternalistic wisdom to his son. This wide-ranging work
is beyond present concerns. Suffice it to say that it is a didactic, turgid, repetitive, and
disorganized tome that met with a decidedly cool if polite reception by critics at the
time (e.g. Barjon 1948; Henriot 1948; Roy 1948). But this marked the beginning of
the end of Saint Exupéry’s apotheosis—his star would henceforth fade considerably.
Although some would continue to indulge the legend and to regard him as “one of
the universal geniuses of the age” (Maxwell Smith 1956, 4), and although even to this
day, he continues strongly to inspire those who take him up in spiritual or religious
terms (Weldon 2011; cf. Harris 1990), Saint Exupéry’s status and reputation have
suffered badly since the postwar period. Since the 1950s, there has thus tended to be
“either an annexation of Saint-Exupéry,” that is, the reduction of his work to some
larger, more tractable movement or genre, “or else his total rejection, often motivated
by the ‘edifying author’ interpretation with which he is saddled” (Major 1968, 256).
Most efforts of “annexation” tend to follow Sartre’s 1947 claim, made in “Qu’est-ce que
la littérature?,” that Saint Exupéry belongs “to our generation,” and more specifically,
 Antoine de Saint Exupéry, “Soliloquizing Angel” 21

that he was an important “precursor” of engaged existentialist literature (Sartre 1948,

326f n9, italics added; cf. 250f, 264).
As for the “total rejection” of Saint Exupéry, this is typically based on a developing
image of him as an intellectual lightweight with an outmoded antidemocratic—if not
fascistic (see Price 1957, 1960; Fife 1959)—message. Thus, for example, in the mid-
1960s, Serge Losic commented that “in our youth we admired the heroism of Saint-
Exupéry. Today we no longer believe in it: it over-idealized the man of action” (1965,
165). And around the same time, Jean-François Revel wrote: “Saint-Exupéry showed
the French that a verbose piece of nonsense becomes profound philosophical truth if
one takes it off the ground and raises it to an altitude of seven thousand feet. Stupidity
in the cockpit takes on the allure of wisdom” (Revel 1965, 36f). Thus today, while the
“broader reading public warmly but mistakenly regards him as a children’s author,”
critics tend to make of Saint Exupéry “a footnote to existentialism, and a figure who is
otherwise best passed over” (Harris 1999, 3).

Conclusion
Be that as it may, it is clearly imperative for those seriously interested in Merleau-
Ponty to cease simply passing over Saint Exupéry’s role in a particular “footnote to
existentialism,” namely, the final lines on the final page of Phenomenology of Perception.
For in its phenomenological rehabilitation of corporeality as the central locus of
existence, the thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s work is powerfully opposed to Saint Exupéry’s
self-sacrificial disdain of embodiment. Isn’t it? And yet it is—unmistakably—on a note
of such “high-altitude” disincarnation that Phenomenology of Perception ends. Is there
a reader of this book today who would not be taken wholly aback were it to conclude
with the final line reunited with those immediately preceding and following it in Saint
Exupéry’s text (PG 171) as follows:

Quand le corps se défait, l’essentiel se montre. L’homme n’est qu’un nœud de

relations, les relations comptent seules pour l’homme.
Le corps, vieux cheval, on l’abandonne.

One’s essence appears when the body comes undone. Man is but a knot of relations,
relations alone matter to man.
The body is an old crock that gets left behind.

In this light, and given how representative these lines are of the Exupérian œuvre,
it is clear that the ending of Phenomenology of Perception can no longer be given a
convenient and facile Merleau-Pontian gloss. Rather, it is patently the case that Saint
Exupéry’s being given the final word is nothing short of baffling. At least in some way,
this is surely inconsistent with the main thrust of the work. So why does the book end
this way? What is going on there? What was Merleau-Ponty thinking? So long as this
situation remains unexplained, a very serious and potentially devastating philosophical
question mark is left hanging over the work as a whole.
22
 2

Embodiment and Incarnation

To reiterate the point with which the previous chapter concluded, it seems safe to say
that virtually all readers of Phenomenology of Perception today would be confused,
shocked, or even scandalized were the book actually to conclude as follows, with the
final line re-embedded in its original context:

Quand le corps se défait, l’essentiel se montre. L’homme n’est qu’un nœud de

relations. Les relations comptent seules pour l’homme.
Le corps, vieux cheval, on l’abandonne. (PG 171)

One’s essence appears when the body comes undone. Man is but a knot of relations,
relations alone matter to man.
The body is an old crock that gets left behind.

For the central thrust of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, in

its philosophical rehabilitation of corporeality as the locus of human existence, is
powerfully opposed to the antipathetic disdain of embodiment that Saint Exupéry
expressed unambiguously in these lines. Or at least that is how Phenomenology of
Perception is overwhelmingly understood. Yet, it is on a note of such “high-altitude”
disincarnation that it ends. That Saint Exupéry is given the final word—and that that is
the word he gets—is, to say the least, quite puzzling. Why then does the book conclude
in this way? Why is the final morsel of this otherwise delectable phenomenological feast
so unpalatably bitter? For anyone with a modicum of familiarity with Pilote de guerre,
the ending of Phenomenology of Perception is plainly inconsistent with the thrust of the
work. Is it then merely, say, some sort of throwaway remark, the inconsistency of which
is of no philosophical consequence? Or is there a deeper level at which some kind of
consistency or coherence may be discerned? This is what we need to ascertain. For as
long as the ending of Phenomenology of Perception remains unexplained, a serious and
disconcerting philosophical question mark is left hanging over the work as a whole, as
well as over standard interpretations of it.

Further remarks on the Exupérian ending

In fact, the more one probes this ending, the more one uncovers numerous unexpected
and disquieting anomalies that add further emphasis to this question mark. These
details can be boiled down to the following three observations.
24 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

First, according to his own account, Saint Exupéry was daydreaming or hallucinat­
ing during the death-defying episode in question. This may be fictionalized in this
particular case, but he was, as a matter of fact, notorious for his absentmindedness
while flying. Indeed, the whole of Pilote de guerre is written in an oneiric tone as
established by its very opening line: “Sans doute je rêve” [“I must be dreaming”] (PG
9), and the text drifts regularly between dream and reality—in particular, between
immediate actuality and the quasimythic irreality of Saint Exupéry’s recollection
of his childhood (see Ton-That 2000). The question at hand is thus not just why
Phenomenology of Perception ends by deferring to a paradigmatic case of la pensée de
survol. It is, moreover, the question as to why this philosophical work dealing with
perception would conclude with a moment, not simply of nonperception, but one
that would seem to lack reliable epistemic warrant of any kind.
Second, the episode from which the final lines of Phenomenology of Perception were
drawn did not stem simply and directly from Saint Exupéry’s own close encounter
with death. Rather, it involved the recollection of the real death of his younger brother,
François, as a result of heart failure caused by rheumatic fever nearly a quarter-century
earlier, when Saint Exupéry’s own life was under no threat whatsoever (PG 170f.).1 It
was his brother’s words—“I can’t help it, it’s my body” [Je ne peux pas m’en empêcher.
C’est mon corps]—and the pressing need he felt, shortly before dying, to bequeath to
Antoine his modest worldly goods, in order to ensure a kind of vicarious survival of
that which gave his life meaning, that first implanted in Saint Exupéry, albeit tacitly,
the fundamental insight of Man concerning the priority of relations over the alien,
contingent character of the body. This was later reinforced by Saint Exupéry’s experience
in Aéropostale, in particular by Guillaumet’s walking ordeal in the Andes—an example
that Saint Exupéry himself (along with his mechanic, André Prévot) emulated some
years later in 1935 after crashing in the Libyan desert and having to walk for several
days with minimal provisions before finally being rescued (an episode he described
at length in Terre des hommes). Here, he claimed our striving toward others in this
remarkable way as a “universal truth,” and in the text, he gave Prévot the key line: “If
I were alone in the world, I’d lie down right here” [Si j’étais seul au monde . . . je me
coucherais] (TH 166).
Thus, even if we grant that for Saint Exupéry such thoughts were not fully driven
home until his perilous flight over Arras in 1940, the ideas expressed in the lines drawn
from Pilote de guerre at the end of Phenomenology of Perception do not exactly have the
“heroic” pedigree that is implied by Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of them.
Third, that fact may actually be felicitous, however. For whatever may have been
the situation in 1944 (when he fatally disappeared), according to Merleau-Ponty’s own
express stipulation concerning heroism—namely, that “the man who is still able to
speak does not know what he is talking about” (SNS 258/146)—Saint Exupéry could
not possibly have been a “hero” over Arras in 1940. For it is not the case that he “entered
history and melded with it” [s’est joint et confondu à l’histoire] at that moment (SNS
258/146), and he was certainly still able to speak—he was even able to write a book
about his experience! There is obviously a paradox in any appeal to heroes, if it is
effectively stipulated that they are dead. Merleau-Ponty was perhaps more circumspect
at the end of the Preface to Humanism and Terror, written in  1947, where he said
 Embodiment and Incarnation 25

that he was writing “for friends whose names we would gladly inscribe here, were it
permissible to make witnesses of the dead” [s’il était permis de prendre des morts pour
témoins] (HT xlii/xlvi, emphasis added).
Taken along with the problematic nature of the passage itself, these anomalous
details might seem to add up to a devastating objection to any construal of Merleau-
Ponty’s appeal to heroism as being philosophically significant in its own right. This
would recommend reading the ending of Phenomenology of Perception as nothing more
than a throwaway remark of some sort that may be freely glossed—or even disregarded
altogether—without actually impacting the philosophical content of the work as a
whole. And indeed, this is what we find in most scholarship devoted to Merleau-Ponty.
As was pointed out in the Introduction, the passage in question is seldom addressed
at all by commentators on Phenomenology of Perception, and whenever it is addressed,
it is—without exception—either dismissed as extraneous rhetorical ornamentation, or
else taken as a reiteration of something that Merleau-Ponty himself had, actually or
effectively, already said.
Such readings might be understood in different ways, but none is plausible. It is
worthwhile tarrying over this briefly. As noted earlier, for example, it is fundamentally
unsound to offer an explanation of the ending of Phenomenology of Perception in terms
of the sociopolitical context of the immediate postwar period (see Introduction, Note
4). To be sure, Saint Exupéry was being celebrated and eulogized in very positive terms
at that time as a symbol of the Resistance and the defeat of fascism in France. And
Merleau-Ponty’s book—completed in August or September 1944, shortly after Saint
Exupéry’s death and in the immediate aftermath of liberation (cf. Noble 2011, 73ff)—
was indelibly marked by these allegiances as well. But while Saint Exupéry may have
been among the most famous heroes of the war, he was certainly not the only one.
And he was by no means the most progressively-minded nor philosophically inspired
person to die for France. Over and above implying that qua author, Merleau-Ponty was
something of a conformist, then, a suggestion that seems disconfirmed on virtually
every other page of the book, to attribute the ending of Phenomenology of Perception
to the sociopolitical context is merely to rationalize it without offering any insight as to
why the book ends on a “heroic” note at all, and why it was Saint Exupéry in particular
to whom Merleau-Ponty turned.
Much the same could be said of claims to the effect that the ending of Phenomeno­
logy of Perception “betrays the displacement of [Merleau-Ponty’s] philosophical
concerns, and his impassioned interest in the political events of the day” (Saint Aubert
2004, 115). For aside from the most general level of allegiances that scarcely excluded
anyone in France at the time, it is simply not the case that Saint Exupéry was in any
way whatsoever reflective of Merleau-Ponty’s political views—his political writings
at the time never refer to him. And given the discussion above (Chapter 1), there
are clearly very good reasons for this. So the main problems facing the contextual
approach recur here. In general, it seems safe to say that with regard to understanding
why Phenomenology of Perception ends with those lines from Pilote de guerre, any
approach that focuses on who authored those lines while discounting or overlooking
their textual content will always only amount at most to a rationalization rather than
a genuine explanation. For the question at hand is not a matter of figuring out what
26 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

conceivable sense at all there could possibly be in recognizing Saint Exupéry as a

hero, but rather of ascertaining why Merleau-Ponty ended his book with a deference
to a hero in the first place, and then why he chose this one, Saint Exupéry, for this
purpose. Moreover, once the textual incongruity of the passage itself is also factored
into the problem, then it becomes perfectly clear that these sorts of approach are
woefully deficient.
Matters are no better, however, and probably worse, if we do focus on the textual
content of the lines from Pilote de guerre. For given what we have seen, lest we willfully
turn a blind eye to Saint Exupéry’s book, we would have to say either that Merleau-Ponty
did not notice the acute incongruity, a suggestion that seems unimaginably unlikely, or
else that he made the choice despite that incongruity, and that he crafted the excerpt
with some kind of deceitful or manipulative intent. But it is scarcely possible seriously
to imagine him thinking that his ellipses would have fooled any sophisticated reader
at the time. It is very likely that such readers would have been familiar with Pilote de
guerre, and in any case, the bulk of the passage is enigmatic in a way that invites the
reader to consult the original.2 It is thus not insignificant that the textual incongruity
of the cited passage was not called out by contemporary readers of Merleau-Ponty’s
book. But this can be accounted for satisfactorily by recognizing that those readers
were preoccupied with trying to come to terms with the other 500-plus pages of
groundbreaking philosophical investigation, combined with the fact that, at the time,
a reference to Saint Exupéry was nothing particularly noteworthy (see above, Chapter
1, note 2). In that interpretive context, the ending could easily have been regarded
as merely a rhetorical flourish or stylistic device. In other words, it could have been
safely and innocently presumed that in textual terms, what the hero expresses at the
end of Phenomenology of Perception, even if it clearly lacked philosophical rigor, was
consistent with the basic claims of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. It is
just that 65 years ago, readers were still in the process of figuring out what exactly those
claims were.
Many readers today make the same presumption, that is, that the “heroic” ideas
at the end of Phenomenology of Perception are a reflection, however enigmatic, of
Merleau-Ponty’s own thought. But given the current development of Merleau-Ponty
scholarship, this can no longer be considered innocent. Knowing what we now know
about Phenomenology of Perception and the basic claims of Merleau-Ponty’s existential
phenomenology, or at least given what we think we know about them, and given what
we know about Saint Exupéry and Pilote de guerre, it quite simply will not do to deny
that there is a major problem of interpretation here. As far as making out the end
of Phenomenology of Perception to be merely a rhetorical device of some sort, then,
this seems once again to engage in bad faith rationalization. For if Merleau-Ponty’s
interest was merely rhetorical, then why would he draw from a source so bizarrely at
odds with his own position? Why would he risk such perverse misunderstanding for
no compelling philosophical reason? This choice could only be seen as an alarming
compositional blunder, inasmuch as it would obstruct seriously the uptake of the
philosophical content of the book. Although Merleau-Ponty’s ability to communicate
clearly and effectively may have left some room for improvement, to suppose that at
 Embodiment and Incarnation 27

the very culmination of this major text, he committed such an outright authorial faux
pas would raise difficult new questions while answering none. Such a claim would thus
appear to be nothing more than a desperate attempt to avoid facing a very difficult
hermeneutical problem.
In short, all of these ways in which the ending of Phenomenology of Perception may
be discounted or disregarded are implausible. The common thread between them lies
in regarding the ending as an extraneous element tacked onto an otherwise complete
work, and rationalizing it or explaining it away on that basis. Refusing to consider the
ending as an integral and irreducible part of what Merleau-Ponty was doing, they fail
to provide any insight into it, and instead, simply tend to raise further questions and
multiply problems.
At any rate, given the manifest textual incongruity of the lines drawn from Pilote
de guerre, none of these stratagems is sufficiently plausible to justify refraining
from investigating the possibility that those lines are, in fact, a necessary part of
the phenomenological project undertaken in Phenomenology of Perception. Such
is what I wish to do in this book. For while the textual content of those lines is
inconsistent with the thrust of the work—I believe the passage is, in Merleau-Ponty’s
terms, a moment of non-sense—I would submit that there is nevertheless a deeper
level at which it makes sense. Indeed, what I shall argue for in this book is that
there is a deeper level at which the ending literally makes sense—that is, at which
it contributes to producing or generating sense—and that this is how it should be
accounted for. The fact that Phenomenology of Perception ends with those Exupérian
thoughts has primarily to do, I will contend, not with what they say, but rather
with what they do: as a subliminal experience of meaningful death, the invocation
of heroism is intended to establish intuitionally that the limits of what is humanly
knowable coincide with the scope of existential phenomenology as conceived by
Merleau-Ponty. In this way, the heroic ending is implicated performatively in the
“realization” of the philosophical content of the work as a whole. Its significance
is thus methodological, pertaining to Merleau-Ponty’s main claims regarding what,
following Husserl and Fink, he called the “phenomenology of phenomenology”—
claims which were, as we shall see, bound up inextricably with Merleau-Ponty’s
simultaneous and concomitant attempt to come to terms with what he viewed as
the central methodological problem facing Marxism. In a remarkable way, then,
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “heroism” was the single stone with which, so to speak, he
tried to kill two methodological birds at once.
So much by way of an anticipatory glimpse of what I shall argue for in this book, a
view that will be more fully elaborated, naturally enough, in the Conclusion. It might
just be added at this point, though, that even if what I will claim about the ending of
Phenomenology of Perception is true, it would by no means follow immediately that it is
philosophically unproblematic and defensible. Rather, it may emerge that it signals—
and this in an unexpectedly conspicuous way—a fundamental methodological
weakness in Merleau-Ponty’s project of existential phenomenology, a weakness that
could have important implications in terms of the epistemic status of the claims that
Merleau-Ponty made in the context of this project. But regardless of how that further
28 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

question plays out (it is beyond the scope of the present work), it is imperative for those
interested in Merleau-Ponty’s work to come to terms in the first place with the problem
of Exupérian heroism.
■
This chapter will get this investigation underway by first considering a pair of earlier
references to Saint Exupéry in Phenomenology of Perception. This will serve to further
bolster the claim that the concluding reference to Saint Exupéry is not inconsequential
by showing that there is, in fact, philosophically substantive content in Merleau-
Ponty’s interest in him. More importantly, though, my analysis of these earlier
references—which will begin presently and resume in the latter part of Chapter 3—will
also set the stage for the investigation of heroism by foregrounding the historical and
political horizons of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment. In particular, I will
be claiming that these references to Saint Exupéry help to reveal a very important
connection between Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the postwar period and the Hegelian
Marxism of György (Georg) Lukács. This claim may surprise many readers. But while
the role of Lukács’ work is largely unexplored in Merleau-Ponty scholarship, it is, I
believe, of the first importance. Thus, after initiating an analysis of the early references
to Saint Exupéry, the bulk of this chapter will be devoted to elaborating contextual
considerations that serve to strengthen the plausibility of according a central
significance to Lukácsian Marxism in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. These considerations
will pertain to the reception of Lukács’ work in France, and to the “origins” or “sources”
of Merleau-Ponty’s attachment to Marxism. Concerning the latter especially, this sort
of contextual work is unavoidably circumstantial and thus fraught with some risk.
But it is very important inasmuch as it may be able to shed light on the underlying
architectonic, so to speak, of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. Specifically,
and what is important for my purposes, it can lend credence to the claim that Marxism
has a certain theoretical priority over phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty’s postwar
project.
Many of the details of this discussion will recur later, but this general point
provides the backdrop for the discussion in Chapter 3. There, my argument will rest
upon certain philosophical connections that are demonstrable on the basis of textual
evidence. In particular, in dealing with the earlier references to Saint Exupéry in
Phenomenology of Perception, we will be brought to consider Lukács’ claims regarding
the methodological priority of the category of “totality” and the social mediation of
nature in modern society, and how these are taken up by Merleau-Ponty in Gestalt-
theoretic terms as the claim that human history forms an existential totality. It will
consequently emerge that the holistic approach to embodiment and human être-au-
monde that is central to Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology is to be understood
as situated methodologically within the horizons of the meaning of human history as
a whole. In other words, for Merleau-Ponty, history has phenomenological priority over
embodiment. As we shall see, recognition of this priority is extremely important in
terms of understanding Merleau-Ponty’s project in the postwar period, including its
appeal to Saint Exupéry and the heroism that he is taken to personify. But it is also a
point that is generally not recognized—and often even unknowingly contradicted—in
the literature.
 Embodiment and Incarnation 29

Earlier references to Saint Exupéry (Part 1)

Readers of Phenomenology of Perception will recall that in a pair of linked footnotes
found within the first chapter of Part I, “The Body as an Object and Mechanistic
Physiology,” Merleau-Ponty had already appealed to the same section (Chapter XXI)
of Pilote de guerre to which he appealed at the very end of the book. And in this case,
it was for a phenomenological illustration of a point that he was making about the
structure of human embodiment, to wit, the possibility of a person’s “human” situation
fully incorporating her “biological” situation in moments of danger, that is, for her
body to “enter into action unreservedly” [se joigne sans réserve à l’action]. The first
reference reads as follows:

Ainsi Saint Exupéry, au-dessus d’Arras, entouré de feu, ne sent plus comme distinct
de lui-même ce corps qui tout à l’heure se dérobait: « C’est comme si ma vie m’était
à chaque seconde donnée, comme si ma vie me devenait à chaque seconde plus
sensible. Je vis. Je suis vivant. Je suis encore vivant. Je suis toujours vivant. Je ne suis
plus qu’une source de vie. » (PhP 99 n1, citing PG 174)3
Thus, Saint-Exupéry, over Arras, surrounded by [enemy] fire, no longer feels
as something distinct from himself this body which, just moments before, was
recoiling: “It is as if my life were given to me every second, as if with every second
my life were becoming more palpable. I live. I am living. I am still living. I am
always living. I am nothing but a source of life.”

But Merleau-Ponty immediately added that this possibility is strictly momentary,

occurring only in limit cases. Thus, the second reference—which consists in a citation
that is actually drawn from a slightly earlier passage in Pilote de guerre—reads as
follows:

Mais certes au cours de ma vie, lorsque rien d’urgent ne me gouverne, lorsque ma

signification n’est pas en jeu, je ne vois point de problèmes plus graves que ceux de
mon corps. (PhP 100 n1, citing PG 169)4
To be sure, though, in the course of my life, when not directed by anything urgent,
when my meaning is not at stake, I see no problems more serious than those of
my body.

Granting the appropriateness of these references to Saint Exupéry for Merleau-Ponty’s

discussion of embodiment—even granting for the sake of argument that, concerning
embodied action, “what Saint-Exupéry is saying is the same as what Merleau-Ponty
says” (C. Smith 1980, 269, emphasis added)—it is not clear why Merleau-Ponty would
return at the very end of the book to a one-sided disambiguation of the point. That is,
whereas in the discussion in Part I, the body’s unqualified participation in action is
minimized and exceptionalized on account of corporeal exigencies, the heroic ending
of Phenomenology of Perception pertains to that unqualified participation taken in
isolation. Of course, it might seem on the contrary to be perfectly clear why Merleau-
Ponty would do this—the deference to Saint Exupéry qua hero at the end implies
that he was dead, and death ensures unfailingly that the problems of one’s body are
30 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

indeed nullified. As I have argued, however, it is not clear why such a deference is
needed at all. More particularly, though, it is also not clear why Merleau-Ponty made
this point about embodiment in the first place, nor why it is something that becomes
relevant again at the very end of the book. Why is it that at this preliminary stage of
his phenomenological account of embodiment, where it would occur to no one to
rationalize it as a piece of philosophically empty rhetoric or political homage,5 Merleau-
Ponty endorsed the implied distancing or even rupture between embodiment and life?
It is, after all, to those moments at which the body is least bodily, or at least at which it
is least mine, that the following statements apply: “I live. I am living. I am still living. I
am always living. I am nothing but a source of life.” It would be specious and arbitrary
to dismiss this as insignificant simply on the basis of having similarly dismissed the
ending of Phenomenology of Perception. Rather, we need first to understand these
initial references, and then, on that basis, come to terms with the reference to Saint
Exupéry with which Merleau-Ponty’s book concludes.
In order to understand these earlier references to Saint Exupéry, it is necessary
to reconstruct more fully the immediate context of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion. The
central notion under consideration here was that of the “habitual body,” understood
in conjunction with the idea of repression, which was a crucial conceptual element
in Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the ambiguity of embodiment. And as we shall
see, coming to terms with this will—somewhat surprisingly perhaps—involve us in
an excursus on the work of Lukács, which will in turn motivate considerations on
how Merleau-Ponty came to embrace Marxism philosophically in the first place.
On this basis, which we will be in a better position to understand Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenological approach to embodiment.

Embodiment and historicity

The point that Merleau-Ponty illustrated by way of reference to Saint Exupéry had
to do with the distinction that he drew between what he termed “the habitual body”
[le corps habituel] and “the ‘actual’ body” [le corps actuel] as two distinct “layers”
[couches] of our embodied being (PhP 97). In brief, the habitual body is understood
in terms of the persistence through “sedimentation” of the general form of past
experiences, and thus as a kind of impersonal existence, while the “actual” body is
understood in terms of spontaneous personal existence in the living present. He
used this distinction—especially the concept of the habitual body—to formulate
a framework for understanding cases of phantom limb syndrome and anosognosia
without reducing them to either psychological or physiological factors. But as
Merleau-Ponty emphasized, having a sedimented dimension of embodiment is not in
itself pathological, but rather an essential feature of human existence in general. For
it is in virtue of having a habitual body that a certain distance can be taken from the
immediacy of one’s “environing-world” [milieu, Umwelt], and it is only in virtue of
this distance that, unlike animals, humans can gain awareness of a “world” [monde,
Welt] properly speaking as the “common ground [raison commune] of all environing-
worlds” (PhP 103), and then, on this basis, attain a critical distance from one’s own
 Embodiment and Incarnation 31

immediate setting: “it is by renouncing a part of his spontaneity, and by engaging in

the world through stable organs and pre-established circuits, that man can acquire
the mental and practical space that will in principle liberate him from his environing-
world and enable him to see it” (PhP 103). Somewhat paradoxically, then, the sort
of “integration” that specifically characterizes human existence in contradistinction
to animal life occurs precisely through a movement that begins by decentring and
deactualizing that existence.
This movement is that of historicity, the active historical nature of human
existence. For Merleau-Ponty, the distinction between the habitual and the “actual”
body is essentially a temporal distinction, that is, between pastness and presence,
and it is within the terms of this distinction that the dynamic of historicity emerges.
The integration of human existence or être-au-monde thus occurs fundamentally
through historical action that is ultimately based in a dialectic of embodiment, and
which is oriented toward equilibrium understood in Gestalt-theoretic terms. This is a
distinctive feature of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, and it is the reason
why, for him, as we shall see, discussions of embodiment or corporeality at the level
of individuals can lead with otherwise startling suddenness to discussions of history
at the macroscopic level. This historical dialectic of embodiment is meant to provide
a unified conception of human existence that would bridge the traditional divide
between body and mind, or immanence and transcendence, thereby surpassing any
one-sided attempt to understand human existence in either objective physiological
or subjective psychological terms alone. For Merleau-Ponty, “man taken concretely
is not a psyche joined to an organism, but this back-and-forth movement of existence
[va-et-vient de l’existence] that sometimes allows itself corporeal being, while at other
times it goes into personal acts” (PhP 104). And these poles of existence are not just
connected but are interwoven—they s’entrelacent, as Merleau-Ponty put it—and they
are thus deeply implicated mutually. Between the psychological and the physiological
there are, Merleau-Ponty claimed, “relations of exchange” [rapports d’échange], such
that “there is not a single movement in a living body that is completely accidental with
regard to psychic intentions, nor a single psychic act that has not found at least its germ
or its general outline [son germe ou son dessin général] in physiological dispositions”
(PhP 104).
This general claim is, to say the least, quite audacious. It provides a good expression
of the basic sense of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the irreducible ambiguity of human
être-au-monde, and it is corroborated, at least partly, in and through the descriptive
accounts of corporeality that are elaborated in the subsequent chapters of Part I. Yet,
a moment of frank reflection would suffice to make it clear that description alone,
however extensive and richly elaborated it may be, could never suffice to prove the
full scope of the claim in any strict sense. It is thus worth noting what is at stake in it
for Merleau-Ponty. On the one hand, there is the denial of any “free-floating” mental
activity, that is, mental activity that would be autonomous of its corporeal situation.
And on the other hand, there is the converse denial of any bodily movement that
would be fully devoid of or detached from any psychological meaning. As discussed
above in the Preface, the first denial is important for Merleau-Ponty inasmuch as he
wanted to be able to claim his phenomenological descriptions as genuine philosophical
32 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

contributions, and this requires establishing that they cannot be surpassed by a

higher-level intellection capable of disambiguating them. Or, in other words, he needs
to claim that philosophy itself is not a free-floating or disembodied mental activity.
And as noted above, this is the task that Merleau-Ponty takes up explicitly in Part III
of Phenomenology of Perception. The second denial is related closely to this first one,
and can even be seen as providing its fundamental source of support. The denial that
there is any human bodily movement or gesture that would be wholly independent
of personal or existential meaning is important for Merleau-Ponty because of its
relation to the claim that human existence as a whole, hence inclusive of its natural
organismic dimension, falls within the movement of human history: “the organism and
its monotonous dialectics are . . . not extraneous to history as though inassimilable to
it” (PhP 104, emphasis added).
■
Here, we need to take a step back. A big step, in fact. For it seems likely that in making
this last point, Merleau-Ponty had György (Georg) Lukács in mind, specifically certain
points that Lukács made in his 1923 book, History and Class Consciousness. Before
getting into that directly (in the first part of Chapter 3), though, it may be helpful to
lay out some contextual considerations concerning Lukács, as well as the “origins” of
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical attachment to Marxism.

Considerations on Lukács
A collection of essays written and revised between 1919 and 1923, History and Class
Consciousness, is widely and duly regarded as being by far the most theoretically
sophisticated contribution to the philosophical discourse of Marxism in the early part
of the twentieth century, and as having inaugurated the philosophical tradition of
“Western” Marxism (Arato and Breines 1979, 190–209; cf. Anderson 1976)—a label
[le marxisme « occidental »] that Merleau-Ponty himself coined in Adventures of the
Dialectic to designate theoretical developments which, emerging in western European
contexts after 1917, were at variance with Marxist theory as officially promulgated by
the USSR. As is well known, this work, Adventures of the Dialectic, was a trenchant
examination of existing tendencies within Marxist philosophy that Merleau-Ponty
wrote a decade or so after Phenomenology of Perception, and it includes an important
chapter on Lukács (AD 43–80/30–58). History and Class Consciousness is thus often
addressed (though rarely in any detail) in discussions of Adventures of the Dialectic.
But it is seldom referred to in commentaries on Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work,
including Phenomenology of Perception, even those that do pay some attention to the
political views he held at the time. As I will be arguing for a view of Lukács that would
make History and Class Consciousness out to be an especially important source for
Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, a source on par with Husserl (cf. Miller
1979, 205f), it would be helpful, before getting into any substantive issues, first to
make some comments pertaining to the reception of Lukács’ text in France in order
to contextualize what I take to be its general but undue neglect within Merleau-Ponty
 Embodiment and Incarnation 33

scholarship. These comments will lend some support to my argument, although this
support will be limited and indirect. Before returning to Lukács and his connection
with Merleau-Ponty’s approach to embodiment (Chapter 3), then, it will also be helpful
to elaborate some sociobiographical conjectures concerning the advent of Merleau-
Ponty’s attachment to Marxism. These remarks will lend further indirect support to my
claims, but they will also do so in a way that casts instructive light on Merleau-Ponty’s
postwar thought in general.

History and Class Consciousness in France

As noted, Lukács, and History and Class Consciousness in particular, are seldom referred
to in commentaries on Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. There seem to be
four main reasons for this.
The first and most direct reason is quite simply that Merleau-Ponty himself hardly
seemed to talk about Lukács at the time—his only explicit written reference to him
was in an article first published in  1946 (SNS 223/126). Prima facie, this suggests a
strong presumption against the claim that History and Class Consciousness was a point
of reference at all—let alone an especially important source—for Merleau-Ponty. To be
sure, there is the countervailing fact that it was not in Merleau-Ponty’s style always to
devote explicit discussions to even his most important sources. But still, the absence of
any published discussion is suspicious.6
The second and broadest reason is that History and Class Consciousness was not
widely discussed at all in the 1930s and 1940s. This is due primarily to the fact that
shortly after its publication, Lukács, along with some other communist intellectuals,
were harshly denounced by Grigory Zinoviev and others at the Fifth Congress of the
Communist International in June 1924.7 This denunciation did not involve any sort
of detailed philosophical critique, and it is highly unlikely that Zinoviev actually read
History and Class Consciousness. Rather, fed by a series of critical reviews suggesting
that Lukács’ book amounted to a denial of objective scientific status of dialectical
materialism and hence the assertion of some form of subjective idealism with ultraleftist
implications, and fed as well as by a growing mood of anti-intellectualism, especially
with regard to new philosophical approaches to questions concerning revolution,
Zinoviev’s critique reflected the fact that the reception of Lukács’ book collided
directly with the USSR’s need to consolidate and reinforce its ideological hegemony
within the international Communist movement (see Arato and Breines 1979, 176–82,
186–9). Thus, despite some early positive accounts (Arato and Breines 1979, 182–6),
this brusque official dismissal by and large held sway, and Lukács himself effectively
capitulated, disavowing the work in order to accommodate himself, at least outwardly,
to the new emerging Stalinist orthodoxy.8
History and Class Consciousness was thus absent from subsequent political and
philosophical discussions occurring under the auspices of official Communism.
So while it continued to breathe and have what Hans Mayer called an extensive
“underground impact” (Mayer 1949, 219, cited in Arato and Breines 1979, 203) within
certain circles of intellectual subculture in central Europe—and in Germany especially
(Arato and Breines 1979, 200–9), where it was an important resource for much of
34 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

the “critical theory” that emerged from the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt
(Feenberg 1981)—it was firmly marginalized elsewhere until much later.
The third and fourth reasons follow from the second: History and Class
Consciousness was not a point of reference for the political and philosophical
debates that occurred within French Marxism during the interwar period, nor in
the immediate postwar context. With regard to the former, for example, the work
of the Philosophies group—“the first notable circle of French Marxist philosophers”
(Jay 1984, 277) in the 1920s and 1930s, including Pierre Morhange, Henri Lefebvre,
Georges Friedmann, Paul Nizan, Georges Politzer, and Norbert Guterman—was
carried out without any apparent familiarity with Lukács (Burkhard 2000, 72).
And this was the case despite sharing some common philosophical ground with
Lukács.9 Something similar may be true of others as well. The seeming exception
that serves to corroborate the political and philosophical invisibility of Lukács in
interwar France would lie in the fact that one of the earliest references to History
and Class Consciousness by a French writer was in Raymond Aron’s 1935 book on
contemporary German sociology (Aron 1981, 64f).
As for the immediate postwar period, Lukács was largely absent here too. It is widely
recognized that it was the work of Lucien Goldmann, who had studied with Lukács,
that served as the main conduit whereby Lukács’ thought was introduced into the
French intellectual context (Axelos 1960; Furter 1961; Poster 1975, 47f; Gutting 2001,
235 n17), and that it was on this basis that History and Class Consciousness became “a
most important influence on the direction of French Marxism after the Liberation”
(Poster 1975, 44)—although until the publication of a French translation in  1960,
even that was described as “a considerable underground influence” (Axelos 1960, 5,
emphasis added). Yet this work by Goldmann dates from later in the 1940s (Goldmann
1948), after the immediate postwar period that concerns us here.
Taking these considerations into account, the picture that emerges is one of Merleau-
Ponty as a pioneer with regard to the reception of Lukács in France. Jay’s comment to
the effect that Merleau-Ponty was “one of the first French thinkers to appreciate the
significance of History and Class Consciousness” (1984, 367) is thus certainly true (cf.
Schmidt 1985, 201 n196; Hughes 1968, 192), and in terms of those who took up this
work positively (unlike, say, Aron), it may even be the case that he was the first to do
so. But even if there were others—and there is absolutely no reason to exclude this
possibility—the following conditional is clearly true: if Merleau-Ponty did draw upon
History and Class Consciousness in working out his existential phenomenology, then his
encounter and engagement with this text necessarily occurred prior to the formation
of any significant context of political or philosophical discussion of Lukács’ work in
France (see Axelos 1960; Furter 1961). This point is relevant to the argument that I
shall make about Lukács being an important point of reference for Merleau-Ponty’s
existential phenomenology, inasmuch as it would offer an explanation of sorts for the
lack of explicit published discussion concerning Lukács on the part of Merleau-Ponty,
and of other forms of contextual evidence that would support my claim—the relevant
context simply did not exist yet, nor was it Merleau-Ponty’s intention to try to create
one.10 The lack of such discussion in the immediate postwar period and earlier should
thus not be taken as evidence of a lack of interest or familiarity. This does not, of course,
 Embodiment and Incarnation 35

contribute directly to showing that Lukács was an important source for Merleau-Ponty.
But it does challenge some of the assumptions that support its denial.
Here, we should just add that by the mid-1950s, when Merleau-Ponty wrote and
published Adventures of the Dialectic, such a context did indeed exist. The fact that, by
far, Merleau-Ponty’s most extended published discussion of Lukács was made on the
pages of this critique of existing tendencies within Marxist philosophy thus has the
consequence of closely associating Lukács with what is generally taken to be Merleau-
Ponty’s rejection of Marxism. Such a one-sided view is, I think, quite misleading,
but it is perhaps also partly because of it that History and Class Consciousness is not
recognized—even when the self-critical dimension of Adventures of the Dialectic
itself is recognized—as having been a crucial inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s own
Marxist politics in the immediate postwar period. That is, such a view has the effect of
distorting the fact, if it is one, that Merleau-Ponty’s earlier Marxism had drawn upon
what was by all accounts the most theoretically sophisticated and innovative precursor
of Marxist philosophy, as opposed to merely applying an existential sugarcoating to
official Communist doctrine, say, or else flirting with a voguish but theoretically flimsy
and eclectic radicalism. Recognition of this would make it more difficult to justify any
offhand dismissal of Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism as merely a short-lived misapplication
of phenomenological ideas, or else (or perhaps also) as a matter of being swept up in
the politics of the immediate postwar period in France.
This brings up the fundamental point, which concerns the relation between Marxism
and phenomenology within Merleau-Ponty’s thought. There is a common assumption
among readers of Merleau-Ponty to the effect that his attachment to Marxism is to be
understood as theoretically secondary to his commitment to phenomenology, as being
derivative from or extraneously tacked onto it. It is only in virtue of such a view that
many readers are able to subtract Merleau-Ponty’s early Marxism out of their view of
his work as a whole as an inessential—and, for most, regrettable—deviation (see above,
Preface). The superficial plausibility of this subtractive move, however, would be upset
if it could be shown that History and Class Consciousness was an important source for
Merleau-Ponty’s earlier postwar outlook. For Lukács was by no means au courant at
the time, even if Marxism more generally was in vogue, and in terms of philosophical
rigor and sophistication, Lukács’ work is arguably on the same level of that of Husserl.
This could lend indirect support to a view that sees Marxism and phenomenology as
standing on a roughly equal footing in Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, such that
rather than a blithe dismissal, what would be required to subtract the former would be
a more worked-out argument to the effect that within Merleau-Ponty’s work, Marxism
and phenomenology were “implicitly in conflict on a number of points” (Miller 1979,
205ff), that is, that their combination represents an incoherent and hence unworkable
theoretical amalgam. Or, in other words, that Merleau-Ponty dabbled temporarily in
Marxism against his better (read: phenomenological) judgment, that in doing so, he
“betray[ed] his own best instincts” (Jay 1984, 371).
This claim is, I believe, fundamentally mistaken, and it is principally against it
that my present argument is directed. For I want to claim that Merleau-Ponty did
indeed draw upon Lukács’ work, and I want to do this by identifying substantive
points of connection on the basis of what textual evidence there is. But my interest is
36 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

not primarily in claiming that Lukács was a source for Merleau-Ponty’s political views,
that is, his reinterpretation of Marxism. Given the low regard in which the latter is
currently held by most Merleau-Ponty scholars, such a result would be of limited
interest. Rather, I am primarily interested in claiming that Lukács was a philosophical
source for Merleau-Ponty, that is, that as a Marxist philosopher, he was a source for
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, that is, his reinterpretation of Husserl. Beyond simply
denying the theoretical secondariness of Marxism within Merleau-Ponty’s postwar
thought by affirming that its status is comparable to that of phenomenology proper,
I want to claim that these traditions are essentially interwoven in Merleau-Ponty’s
project of existential phenomenology and that in at least some respects, including
methodologically, priority goes to certain ideas drawn from his view of Marxism.
Contrary to the suggestion of a theoretical inconsistency, then, I submit that it is
only on the basis of certain ideas drawn from Lukácsian Marxism that Merleau-Ponty’s
reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology itself actually achieves methodological
coherence—that with regard to how the project of phenomenology could, contra Fink,
be rendered viable on an existential and corporeal basis, basing it on certain Marxist
ideas drawn from Lukács was Merleau-Ponty’s “better judgment” at the time, that he
was drawing on his “best instincts” in doing so.

Conjectures on the origins of Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism

This goes against the grain of most current views of Merleau-Ponty’s work. It may
be helpful, then, to consider the “origins” of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, and
how he first came to embrace the different traditions that are woven together therein.
For the claims that I will be making would receive further indirect reinforcement if
it could be shown that Merleau-Ponty developed a serious interest in Marxism, and
in Lukács in particular, before making a decisive turn to phenomenology.11 For this
would make it plausible to suggest that his uptake of phenomenology occurred within
the terms of a preexisting Marxist orientation. As with anything else concerning the
earlier and largely undocumented part of Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual life, however,
such a suggestion would be very difficult to substantiate conclusively.12 In particular,
there would seem to be no way to identify when Merleau-Ponty first took up History
and Class Consciousness, nor would it seem possible, even in principle, to pinpoint in
any precise way when his “definitive” uptake of phenomenology occurred.
If, however, it is accepted that The Structure of Behavior predates that uptake—a
claim that seems fairly uncontentious, and if we leave Lukács aside for now and just
focus on Marxism in general, then it would suffice to show that that text, completed
in 1938, reflects relevant Marxist commitments to a suitable degree.
Such a proposal may seem like a nonstarter, though, given that The Structure of
Behavior does not mention Marx, and does not have any readily apparent political
aspect at all. But the question is: does it have a Marxist philosophical aspect? Given
its evident Hegelian character, such a claim may not be such a stretch. Consider,
for example, Cooper’s argument (1975) to the effect that The Structure of Behavior
bears very strongly the influence of Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel (cf. Cooper
 Embodiment and Incarnation 37

1976).13 This conclusion is, I think, ultimately and quite seriously mistaken.14 But it
does emphasize the existential-Hegelian character of the book, and also raises the
possibility of a Marxist inflection of that character, given that Kojève’s reading of
Hegel’s Phenomenology did involve elements of a certain kind of Marxism (and Kojève
may even have been familiar with Lukács’ work). Thus, in pointing out that Merleau-
Ponty started studying Marx “seriously” around 1934 or 1935, and that he was among
a group organized by Marcel Moré to discuss Auguste Cornu’s 1934 work Karl Marx,
l’homme et l’œuvre, Geraets implicitly connected this to Kojève (1971, 25ff).
But there is something implausible about this connection. For even if Merleau-
Ponty later stated that Kojève’s lectures “created a deep impression” on him (1956, 436;
cited in Rabil 1967, 77), and although there are some points of philosophical common
ground,15 it would be very hard to overlook how Merleau-Ponty disagreed utterly with
Kojève on certain fundamental issues of substance, for example, whether history is a
closed or open totality, something to be known absolutely or to be lived venturesomely.
For contrary to Kojève’s retrospective contemplation of history as a completed process,
history for Merleau-Ponty was something to be engaged in and made:

we are not spectators of a completed history, we are actors in an open history, our
praxis maintains what is not to be known but rather to be done as an irreducible
ingredient of the world, and that is why the world is not just to be contemplated but
also transformed. What is for us unimaginable [irreprésentable] is a consciousness
without a future and a history with an end. As long as there are men, therefore, the
future will be open, and there will only be methodical conjectures but no absolute
knowledge. (HT 99/92, translation modified)

This militantly engaged perspective contrasts sharply with Kojève, but it is certainly
on the same wavelength as Lukács in History and Class Consciousness in terms
of subordinating historical knowledge to historical praxis: “It is true that reality
[Wirklichkeit] is the criterion for the correctness of thought. But reality is not, it
becomes. . . . Only he who is called upon and willing to bring about the future [nur
wer die Zukunft herbeizuführen berufen und gewillt ist] can see the concrete truth of
the present” (HCC 223/204, translation modified). And for both Merleau-Ponty and
Lukács, although for different reasons, there are thematic affinities with the young
Marx’s critique of Hegel from a revolutionary perspective.
But the view in question here from Merleau-Ponty stems from the postwar period—
can something along these lines be found already in The Structure of Behavior, a text
that was completed shortly after Merleau-Ponty’s attendance at Kojève’s lectures? In
an underappreciated work, Douglas Low (1987) analyzed Merleau-Ponty’s first book
in a way that supplies an affirmative answer to this question. Specifically, his argument
concerned methodology, and his central claim was that The Structure of Behavior
exhibits an existential-dialectical method that is in significant conformity with the
approach taken by Marx. What is key here is less the claim that Marx, whose dialectical
credentials are beyond dispute, was a sort of proto-existentialist than the claim that
Merleau-Ponty, circa 1938, was “a thoroughgoing dialectician” (Low 1987, 175). Low
argued for this view on the basis of a close reading of The Structure of Behavior, a reading
that serves to foreground three key features of Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt-theoretic notion
38 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

of structure: the interconnectedness of all things, the interpenetration of subject and

object, and the overall framework of a nonreductive hierarchy of mutually influencing
forms of integration—the physical order, the order of life and that of consciousness
(Low 1987, 162–75). Through comparison with representative texts from Marx, Low
then claimed that “Marx’s methodological approach parallels Merleau-Ponty’s on a
point-by-point basis” (Low 1987, 192), such that in methodological terms, there is a
“striking similarity” between them (Low 1987, 191; cf. 175, 195).
We need not, for present purposes, rehearse the exegetical details of Low’s claim. I
should just like to say that his take on The Structure of Behavior is generally sound and,
moreover, quite valuable in terms of understanding Merleau-Ponty. But it does have
some limitations that are worth mentioning.
For instance, we should note that although Merleau-Ponty does not explore this
explicitly in The Structure of Behavior, for which reason Low does not touch on it either,
the dialectical methodological perspective under consideration here would lend itself
readily to considerations of social and historical transformation. For, as Merleau-Ponty
saw it, with a direct allusion to Hegel’s philosophy of history, each “order” represents
“the institution of a new dialectic” in such a way that “higher behavior retains the
subordinated dialectics in the present depths of its existence, from that of the physical
system and its topographical conditions to that of the organism and its ‘milieu’” (SC
224/207f). Thus in the same way that animal life is conditioned by but irreducible to
mere physical existence, the structure of human life likewise sublates the vital order
of animal life dialectically—both human existence and animal life alike involve “a
retaking and ‘new structuration’ [« nouvelle structuration »]” of the preceding level (SC
199/184), while in both cases, “all integration presuppose[es] the normal functioning
of subordinated formations, which always demand their own due [réclament toujours
leur propre bien]” (SC 227/210). This implies a point about historicity which, as such,
can be taken as having significant political ramifications: “What defines man is not
the capacity to create a second nature – economic, social, cultural – beyond biological
nature; it is rather the capacity of going beyond created structures in order to create
others” (SC 189/175).16
More importantly, though, Low’s discussion of The Structure of Behavior tends
to overlook what is actually most interesting. For in presenting Merleau-Ponty as
attempting to avoid both materialist reductionism or critical idealism by claiming
that “[d]ialectical structure does not occur only in nature or only in consciousness,”
but rather that “[i]t requires a synthesis of both, [a] synthesis which takes places in
perception or lived, active experience” (Low 1987, 192), Low does not consider how this
result presented Merleau-Ponty with a major new problem, to wit, how to understand
perceptual consciousness, as well as its relation to intellectual consciousness. For in
affirming that “the dialectic is found in the synthesis of the in-itself and the for-itself,”
and that this synthesis occurs in “lived perception” (Low 1987, 174), Merleau-Ponty
may have definitively nullified the threat of materialist reduction. But he thereby
admittedly came very close to some kind of idealism. This is the reason why The
Structure of Behavior is in a certain way inconclusive, culminating as it does with a call
to “to define transcendental philosophy anew” (SC 241/224). Low thus seems to read
The Structure of Behavior partly through the lens of Phenomenology of Perception, in
 Embodiment and Incarnation 39

the sense that this problematic aspect of his understanding of “structure” is not seen as
being particularly problematic at all.
Furthermore, though, Low does exactly the same thing with Marx, only in this
case, the situation is slightly more complicated. For in claiming that Marx grounded
his understanding of dialectic in “lived, active experience” and that he performed “the
same synthesis between the in-itself and the for-itself that we find Merleau-Ponty
performing” (Low 1987, 195), Low goes well beyond the textual evidence from Marx
that he presents in his discussion. It is not that the point is incorrect. But here, too, the
texts are clearly being read retrospectively, except that in this case, the relevant lens is
not a subsequent text from Marx himself. What is it, then? Low himself tells us in an
overview statement concerning his analysis of Marx: “with the help of Lukács, we will
point up the dialectical character of Marx’s method” (Low 1987, 161, italics added).
And indeed, Low’s account of the dialectical character of Marx’s method, although
relatively brief, relies heavily on points made in History and Class Consciousness (Low
1987, 189ff).
There is thus a plausible case to be made to the effect that The Structure of Behavior
does indeed betray a philosophical orientation to Marxism, which would—on the
assumption that that text does likewise—precede Merleau-Ponty’s definitive turn
to phenomenology. More specifically, given what we have just seen, it may even be
plausibly suggested that this orientation is one that bears its affinities less with Marx
himself directly than with Lukács, in particular, with regard to the pivotal point
concerning the mediation of dialecticity in general by consciousness, that is, by the
dialectical relation between subject and object. To be clear, this would not necessarily
imply any sort of direct influence. There may well have been some, but I am not going
to make an argument to that effect—pointing out the plausibility of the connection
suffices for my purposes here.
But I also want to highlight a pair of important related points. First, Merleau-
Ponty was clearly not fully content with the position elaborated in The Structure of
Behavior, and he felt the need to develop it further in terms of a more worked-out
account of perceptual consciousness—something he did, of course, in Phenomenology
of Perception. If what I claimed above is true, then this suggests that the latter work
stems as much (or more) from a desire to supply a corrective to Lukácsian Marxism
as from simply advancing phenomenology for its own sake or for any other reason.
Second, though, this working out, which certainly pertains to his definitive uptake
of phenomenology, remained consistent with the overall dialectical framework
presented in The Structure of Behavior. Given these points, it could be maintained
with a high degree of plausibility that the underlying rationale behind Merleau-Ponty’s
reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology was to shore up a Lukácsian-Marxist
philosophical framework with regard to its account of consciousness. I will return to
this below.
■
Some readers may remain skeptical, and so we might still wonder about the origins of
the Marxist perspective which, following Low, I have claimed exists in The Structure of
Behavior. After all, it may remain somewhat implausible to claim that the material dealt
40 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

with in that text would just by itself prompt a Marxist orientation—although there were
certainly contributions being made to the field of psychology in France from theorists
with distinctively Marxist outlooks (e.g. Politzer 1928).17 Having claimed that Kojève
cannot be considered a major positive influence on Merleau-Ponty in this regard, how
might we make sense of the latter’s having adopted a dialectical framework consistent
with Marxism by 1938?
Usually when Merleau-Ponty’s earlier intellectual development is considered, a
prominent role is assigned to his Catholic religious outlook. This is entirely appropriate.
However, it is also usually assumed that a sharp break separates his religious faith from
his Marxism, that is, that they are basically incompatible, such that the demise of the
former is a necessary condition of the advent of the latter. To be sure, there is a certain
conceptual incompatibility. But concerning how Merleau-Ponty came to Marxism, the
assumption in question is seriously misleading, and as such contributes to rendering
falsely implausible the suggestion that Merleau-Ponty’s attachment to Marxism dates
from the mid-1930s, prior to his definitive uptake of phenomenology. For as a matter of
fact, the context within which Merleau-Ponty initially developed a serious philosophical
interest in Marxism was precisely a religious one—the Catholic “discovery” of the
young Marx in the period of the Popular Front (1934–38). Approaching this within
the broader context of intellectual engagement in interwar France, (a theme to which
I shall return in the Conclusion), we will see how this interest on the part of Merleau-
Ponty came to transform the Christian conception of “incarnation” and thus ultimately
to eclipse his erstwhile religious faith from within. These considerations will complete
the conjectural excursus on the backstory, so to speak, of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar
Marxism. This will lead us back in the next chapter to consider Lukács directly, which
will then return us to the discussion with which the present chapter began, namely, the
initial analysis of embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty
made the first references to Saint Exupéry.

Merleau-Ponty and engagement

Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual development during the 1930s unfolded in a social
context in which increasing economic and political crises, along with the lessons of the
Dreyfus Affair,18 made political abstention or complacency among French intellectuals,
especially among Merleau-Ponty’s generation, increasingly disrespectable. To be sure,
in 1927, Julien Benda had written his notorious diatribe against the “treason” [trahison]
committed by intellectuals [clercs] who involve themselves directly in partisan politics,
rather than remaining independently committed to the values of truth, freedom, and
justice considered in timeless universal terms. While not per se opposed to intellectuals
publicly taking positions on political issues (he himself had been a “Dreyfusard”),
Benda was concerned about the trend he perceived in the decades following the
Dreyfus Affair in which intellectuals came to mistakenly “praise attachment to the
particular and denounce the feeling of the universal” (Benda 1927, 97). For this resulted
in the subordination of intellectual work to “political passions”—for example, those of
nation, race, or class—and in Benda’s view, this amounted to a betrayal on the part of
 Embodiment and Incarnation 41

intellectuals of their historical responsibility to give voice to universal values from a

position of detached autonomy. (It is far from clear whether Benda himself truly lived
up to this ideal, however, as the presentation of his argument was chequered by what
would appear to be a rabid anti-Germanism.)
Although Benda’s book provoked quite a stir, it did nothing whatsoever to alter the
trend of which it was ostensibly so critical. On the contrary, in the following decade,
the urgency with which intellectuals in France were faced with the question of political
commitment intensified greatly—Benda himself even came to revise his considered
view in a way that allowed, and even required, a certain measure of leftist partisanship
(Benda 1937, 164). Specifically, during the Popular Front period and thereafter, French
intellectuals were confronted with the question of engagement, which may be defined in
this way: “the political or social action of an intellectual who has realized that abstention
is a ruse, a commitment to the status quo, and who makes a conscious and willful choice
to enter the arena, never abandoning his or her critical judgement” (Schalk 1979, 25).
It is safe to say that Merleau-Ponty accepted this responsibility during the 1930s and it
led, by way of his own involvement in Resistance-related activities during the war, to
the existential Marxism that he espoused in the immediate postwar period.
But in considering this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s biography, it is very important to
keep in mind that the development of his political thinking was connected inseparably
to his early religious outlook. A believing Catholic until at least 1936,19 he had been, as
he later put it, “led ‘to the Left’ [« à gauche »] by the demands of his faith” (SNS 172).20
Initially oriented toward social Catholicism and Christian democracy, from early on,
his position was within earshot, so to speak, of Marxism.21 It may therefore prove useful
to approach Merleau-Ponty as having been, in a certain sense, pulled between the
politics of two other men, both also trained as philosophers, but who, unlike Merleau-
Ponty, had renounced their academic vocation: Paul Nizan and Emmanuel Mounier. It
is worth considering briefly that and how it was from his position as a philosopher who
chose to remain intégré—that is, within the system—that Merleau-Ponty worked out
an independent position that transcended the tension between politics and religion.
Merleau-Ponty knew of Nizan from the École normale supérieure (ENS), although
they were not particularly close (like Sartre, Nizan was a couple of years older). Like
Merleau-Ponty, Nizan was once an observant Catholic. But he foreswore that early
and joined the Parti communiste français (PCF) in 1928 (see Cohen-Solal 1980, 64–9;
Scriven 1988, 10–25). He became a very dedicated and prolific member for over a
decade, until dramatically quitting in  1939, following news of the Nazi-Soviet pact,
which he considered a bitter betrayal. He was killed at Dunkirk in May 1940.
As noted above, as part of the Philosophies group, Nizan was involved in publishing
some of Marx’s early manuscripts in France. He was also a novelist (see Leiner 1970;
Scriven 1988; Ishaghpour 1990), and a work from 1932 in particular, Les chiens de
garde, a scathing critique of the academic philosophical establishment (especially
Léon Brunschvicg) and a clarion call to philosophical activism (see Schalk 1973; cf.
Maublanc 1935), posed for academic philosophers like Merleau-Ponty a compelling
imperative to come to terms with the implicit political consequences of his chosen
profession. This work was in part a direct retort to Benda (1927), and it attempted
to put a very different spin on the idea of the “treason” of the intellectuals, in that for
42 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Nizan, this would be committed when one tried to remain au-dessus de la mêlée by
abstaining from progressive political commitment. Nizan thus represented something
for Merleau-Ponty, the importance of which was greatly out of proportion to their
actual personal relationship. For the two had similar bourgeois backgrounds, and
so, the fact that Nizan himself openly committed a kind of “treason” in the sense of
turning against his class and engaging himself uncompromisingly in the project of
revolutionary working class politics was something by which Merleau-Ponty was
philosophically but also personally fascinated. Not that he followed suit, of course.
But the fact that Merleau-Ponty devoted a considerable portion of the Preface to Signs
(Signs 32–47/23–35) to commenting critically on the Preface that Sartre had written
for the republication of Nizan’s 1931 novel Aden Arabie (Nizan 1960), along with the
fact that he also responded to the critique to which those comments were subjected
by Olivier Todd, Nizan’s son-in-law (Todd 1961; Merleau-Ponty 1961), testifies to
the deep and enduring significance of Nizan as a figure of political commitment in
Merleau-Ponty’s thought.
In contrast stood the left-wing Catholic personalism of Emmanuel Mounier. In 1932,
Mounier founded the journal Esprit (the first issue appeared in October) which, as “a
meeting ground for Catholic and non-Catholic ‘revolutionary’ intellectuals” (Curtis
1991, 166), contributed in an unsurpassed way to the conceptual formation of the
term engagement, in particular by conferring upon it a nonconformist, anti-party
connotation. Although both Nizan and Mounier spoke of radical commitment in
opposition to the prevailing order, Mounier sought a third way, that is, to “take sides
without being a party man” (Schalk 1979, 20). The difference was expressed in the
distinction articulated by Paul-Louis Landsberg—whom Ricoeur once described as
the most influential philosophical figure in the prewar development of Esprit (cited in
Hellman 1981, 286f n44) —between engagement and what he called embrigadement,
which denoted party-style activism (Landsberg 1937, 182). The personalist perspective
of Esprit, in presenting a radicalized collective sense of témoignage—that is, bearing
witness (for Christ), which originally implied individual acts of martyrdom—as the
proper realization of engagement, was thus able to convey, at least for a few years, a
viable nonconformist critique of established liberal democracy and of French (and
European) bourgeois society in general (see Rauch 1971, 98–149).
Merleau-Ponty was interested in Esprit from the time of its first appearance, while
he was teaching in Beauvais (Le Baut 2009, 136), and he accepted its orientation,
although perhaps without ever finding it fully satisfactory (see above, note 20). But
given his Catholic background, he certainly must have been closer to it than to any
PCF activists like Nizan. The fresh contrast which personalism presented to the
Christian establishment in France—and to the political scene in general—must not
be underestimated. Hellman described it as “exhilarating” for those in a situation
like that of Merleau-Ponty: “No longer need one feel oneself part of a rearguard for
the retreating Christian Middle Ages; one was now in the vanguard of the second
Renaissance.” Importantly, especially for Merleau-Ponty, this meant that affiliation by
no means entailed a “conversion” to Mounier’s own views: “Even if one found some
of Mounier’s rhetoric unrealistic it was stimulating to work with some of France’s
brightest intellectuals at elaborating something new” (Hellman 1981, 86).
 Embodiment and Incarnation 43

Merleau-Ponty most likely became more involved in the movement around Esprit
during his research sojourn in Paris in  1933–34. In late 1933, “Esprit restated its
determination to have an autonomous philosophical base,” and by early 1934, “Mounier
organized study groups with Landsberg . . . to define ‘the personalist-communitarian
philosophy of our movement’” (Hellman 1981, 80–1). In May 1934, when many
“newcomers to Esprit” were divided into research groups on various political and
scientific issues, the “philosophers group” was divided into subgroups to “ ‘define
means of spiritual efficacity’, to study Marx [as was noted above] with the aid of Marcel
Moré, and to study ‘our metaphysics of the Person and the Community’ ” (Hellmann
1981, 81), that is, Scheler’s notions of Gesamtperson and Lebensgemeinschaft. Although
Merleau-Ponty taught in Chartres in 1934–35, where he was correspondent for Esprit
and tried to establish a local “Amis d’Esprit” group, upon his return to Paris, he certainly
participated in the groups organized around Moré (cf. Geraets 1971, 25), and he may
have been connected to the “metaphysics” group as well. And in subsequent years, he
also directed Esprit’s research group on psychology.
It is crucial to note—although Geraets did not emphasize this—that the role
played by Marcel Moré in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s early interest in Marx
occurred within the context of his primarily religious affiliation with Esprit. It was
initially in connection with Moré and articles that he wrote for Esprit (Moré 1934;
1936)—including a detailed exposition of Cornu’s groundbreaking 1934 book on the
young Marx (Moré 1935), a book which “occupied a central place in the reappraisal of
Marxist philosophy which was beginning to emerge in the middle 1930s” (Kelly 1982,
29)—that Catholic intellectuals began to “discover” Marx (cf. Boivin 1936). It is crucial
to emphasize that the personalist context with which Merleau-Ponty was closely
affiliated was the original epicenter of this newfound Catholic concern with Marxism
(Curtis 1991). This was the beginning of the Popular Front period, which among other
things was marked by a strategic openness on the part of the PCF toward Catholics,
including by 1936 the explicit policy of “la main tendue.” Most believing Catholics
rejected such overtures, perceiving Marxism—which was officially condemned in Pius
XI’s encyclicals Quadragesimo Anno (15 May 1931) and especially Divini Redemptoris
(19 March 1937)—as “une doctrine diabolique” (Moré 1934, 470). And these Catholics
tended to see the Popular Front itself as merely a Communist ploy. But given its
success, and given the increasingly dynamic and influential presence of Communist
ideas in French cultural and intellectual life (Curtis 2000, 78; cf. Kelly 1982, 47), a
simple refusal would have been inadequate. Rather, what many Catholic intellectuals
came to see as necessary to retain the hearts and minds of Catholic workers was a two-
pronged reply, one that would show (i) that at the level of theoretical principles official
Communist doctrine was a consistent and coherent system of atheistic materialism,
for which reason it was, contrary to its own claims, fundamentally antihumanist, and
as such fundamentally at odds with the worldview of Catholicism;—but also (ii) that
Marxism, as a body of thought based on the work of Marx, could be given a very
different philosophical interpretation, one that would portray it as having some
profound affinities with Catholic thought.
In line with the papal view, this approach was anti-Communist. But it was pitched
as a “positive anti-Communism” (Curtis 2000, 75f). This is what Mounier referred to
44 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

as the “constructive critique of communism” that formed part of the mission of Esprit
from its inception (Mounier 1937, 307), and which aimed “to take up Marxist analyses
in order to separate the great work of lasting value from the one-sided philosophical
biases” (Esprit 1935, 5). In other words, this was a polemically charged Catholic revision
of Marxism that endorsed the most compelling aspects of its critique of capitalism
and liberal democracy, but also contended that these claims could be maintained most
securely and effectively by integrating them into a broadened Catholic perspective.
And this was the sense of Moré’s view that “accepting Marxism as a completed doctrine
was just as untenable as rejecting it entirely” (Moré 1935, 19).
Both aspects of this two-pronged critique necessitated a greatly expanded and
deepened knowledge of Marxism. Beginning with Esprit, it was thus the case that the
level of discussion concerning Marxism within and across various Catholic milieux in
France quickly rose considerably (Curtis 1991), and “an extensive literature of articles,
pamphlets, and even books” on Communism was produced (Rémond 1960, 67).
Concerning the first point, the resulting discourse primarily took shape as a critique
of anthropocentric humanism as the terms in which the PCF was then presenting its
Marxism. The idea from the Catholic side was that such a view was inexorably shaped
by Marxism’s uncompromising commitment to materialism, and that as a result, it
effectively nullified any serious concern with spirituality, thereby leading to a gravely
impoverished conception of human life. Many Marxists tried to portray their theory as
sensitive to the range and diversity of human experience, including spiritual richness.
In his philosophical selections for the Morceaux choisis volume (Marx 1934), Nizan
had included relevant passages from Marx’s early work on alienation. And Lefebvre’s
work explicitly presented Marxism as devoted to the realization of the “total man”
[l’homme total] through the overcoming of all forms of alienation (Lefebvre 1949, 147).
But from the perspective of Catholic efforts to conceptualize a complete humanism—
what Jacques Martitain called un humanisme intégral (1936), or what Gaston Fessard
called un humanisme réel (1937, 128)—unconstrained by any materialist commitments,
the humanism on offer from Marxism could not but appear to be shallow and crude.
These efforts thus aimed to highlight a contradiction or inconsistency with the basic
materialist presuppositions of Marxism (Maritain  1936, 97). The sort of complete
humanistic view that Marxism ostensibly wanted to uphold—along with the “faith
in man” that its revolutionary perspective implied (cf. Vignaux 1935; Daniélou
1938)—could only be conceived and maintained consistently and coherently within a
Catholic Christian framework—duly updated, of course, through specific theoretical
contributions from Marxism and other forms of modern thought.
Hence the second prong of the critique. Here, it was a matter of Catholic
intellectuals trying “to assimilate elements of Marxism and to challenge Moscow’s
and the PCF’s interpretation of the doctrine” (Curtis 1991, 166). Based heavily on
the newly published 1844 Manuscripts and Theses on Feuerbach (along with Cornu’s
work), the idea behind these efforts of revision was that Marx himself was, in fact,
quite far from being the hardcore materialist as depicted in official doctrine, and that
Marxism in general could be rethought accordingly. It was thus the case that despite
some efforts on the side of the PCF, especially among those in the Philosophies group,
discussion of the early philosophical work of Marx was overwhelmingly carried out
 Embodiment and Incarnation 45

in the milieux of the Catholic left as part of a strategy designed to pit Marx against
received Marxism by assigning theoretical priority to the early work. This was intended
to portray the received understanding of the doctrine as a one-sided deviation, and
thereby to effect a “surpassing” [dépassment] of it in the name of a more authentic—
because more complete—revolutionary humanism. Recognition of this fact is crucial
for understanding the intellectual development of Merleau-Ponty.
The key to these attempts to surpass Marxism, in particular in the case of the
personalist revision presented by Moré, lay in the Marxist problematic of alienation,
or more specifically, what he called Marx’s “method of alienation” (Moré 1935, 755,
italics added), which is a “genuine method of knowledge” [une véritable méthode de
connaissance] in virtue of stemming directly from revolutionary activity oriented toward
the overcoming of human alienation (Moré 1935, 29). It was this method that enabled
Marx “to cast unexpected light on the worst and most cruel drama of the modern
world, that of the worker alienating his human substance in commodities,” and Moré
claimed that essentially the same approach could enable Christians “to understand
all the humiliating and degrading aspects of the forms of labour in capitalist society”
(Moré 1935, 756). The philosophical grounds for this method lay in the dialectical
account of the relation between humans and nature that Marx sketched out in his early
work. In Moré’s gloss, this led to the following result:

the identity of the I and the not-I, which is the crowning achievement of idealist
philosophy, is replaced by a kind of synthesis between man and nature that obtains
in practical activity. . . . There is no opposition between subject and object, between
man and nature, but interpenetration: man is a product of nature just as nature is
a product of man. (Moré 1935, 29, 53)

Moré endorsed this view, but he also claimed that it could support a broader approach
than Marx actually developed. Specifically, he considered Marx’s method to be
“strangely deficient” in that it “considers man only from the angle of economic facts,
refusing to see the fulgurations that illuminate his angelic and animal sides” (Moré
1935, 19). Related to this, he thought that Marx focused almost exclusively on “social
man” to the exclusion of the “unique” individual and his relation to God (Moré 1935,
30). For Moré, it was primarily to redress such accidental shortcomings that Marxism
had to be “completed, assimilated, and expanded” (Moré 1934, 568).
But Moré could consider this possible only because he discerned a more significant
common ground. In line with Maritain’s affirmation that Marx’s problematic of
alienation was “shaped by Judeo-Christian values” (Maritain 1936, 55 n3), Moré claimed
that there is an important analogy between the Pauline view of the postlapsarian world
and Marxism’s dialectical understanding of history (Moré 1934, 464). In this way,
Moré’s critical understanding of Marxism read it into a broader theological discourse
of “incarnation” (Curtis 1991, 168), in the sense of a militant orientation toward the
worldly realization of spiritual values.22 Such a discourse was in the ascendant in the
interwar period. Seeking to “justify an attitude of incarnation among Christians in
the modern world through an appeal to the Incarnation of Christ,” this discourse was
geared toward creating the social institutions of a nouvelle chrétienté (Besret  1964,
38–50)—a new Christian civilization which, in giving expression to the “totalistic”
46 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

nature of faith (Congar 1935, 218), would be “the incarnation of a true [i.e., total]
humanism” (Curtis 2000, 85). For people like Moré, then, “it was as a Christian
‘heresy’ that Marxism needed to be ‘saved’ from its own distortions. . . . It was a mode
of thought which echoed imperfectly the incarnational themes which were central to
the ideal of a nouvelle chrétienté” (Curtis 2000, 90; cf. 84). These “incarnational themes”
were variously expressed, but they came to be articulated theologically in terms of
the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ (e.g. Mersch 1936), that is, the originally
Pauline conception of the unity of the Church and its members as one with the mystical
body of Christ, that is, the body of Christ supernaturally construed in terms of the
Christian community and its vocation as an organized and living whole. “All in all, the
unity of the Church . . . is that of a very special reality composed of men united by a
supernatural life proceeding from God and from Christ” (Congar 1937, 108).
Along these lines, perhaps the most striking—and most philosophically informed—
contribution to the Catholic revision of Marxism came from Fessard, who posed the
argument against the interpretation of Marxism as an atheistic and anthropocentric
humanism in terms of a certain equivocation in Marx’s conception of communism—
whether it is to be understood teleologically as an end of history, the final overcoming
of all alienation, or else as (merely) an open-ended movement of historical progress
(cf. Marx 1934, 227f). Based on this equivocation, Fessard presented the Marxists with
the following dilemma: either Marxism is atheistic and anthropocentric, in which
case it is not oriented to “a real and true Transcendence” [une Transcendance réelle et
vértitable] (Fessard 1937, 123; cf. 114). But in that case, it can only yield an account
of historical progress that necessarily fails to overcome alienation fully (Fessard 1937,
119ff), and its humanistic pretensions are thus effectively voided by its foreclosing
upon the existential and spiritual aspirations of humanity. In Fessard’s view, these
aspirations imply an ideal historical resolution, which in turn implies, beyond material
immanence, an affirmation of real transcendence.
And Fessard thought that the considered view of the young Marx was in agreement:
“despite its provocative appearances of atheism, Marx’s humanism was secretly but
truly open to the Infinite” (Fessard 1937, 118). For Fessard, then, “a Marxist capable
of penetrating to the spiritual core of his doctrine as revealed in the young Marx
would have to admit that his faith in Man . . . was close to the Christian’s faith in God”
(Curtis 1991, 77). On the other side of the dilemma, then, if Marxism does support
a genuine humanism, if it is in fact “a ‘total’ philosophy” [une philosophie « totale »]
(Fessard 1937, 124), then this could only be because, even if unbeknownst to itself, it
retains a theocentric perspective. In other words, Marxism can draw revolutionary
consequences from its critique of alienation only inasmuch as it affirms positively an
ideal state of disalienation as a transcendent end of history. And according to Fessard,
this affirmation can—indeed, can only—be seen as tantamount to the incarnational
views alluded to above: “all the principles of the ‘real humanism’ for which Marx
is currently celebrated have always belonged to the Christian consciousness that
understands and lives its faith in the Mystical Body of Christ” (Fessard 1937, 128). This
is the “profound truth” of Marxism that alone can give proper sense to its dialectical
account of history by helping to reveal Marx himself as “an unconscious theorist and
an unwitting builder of the Mystical Body of Christ” (Fessard 1937, 189).23
 Embodiment and Incarnation 47

Just in terms of the general historical context, it is probable that Merleau-Ponty

was familiar with Fessard’s argument. But there was a more specific connection, in
that both were regular attendees at Kojève’s seminar on Hegel. In fact, it is entirely
conceivable that Fessard—who was no less knowledgeable than Kojève about Hegel, and
who attended largely in order to challenge Kojève’s anthropocentric interpretation—
interested Merleau-Ponty as much as, if not more than, Kojève himself. Not that
Merleau-Ponty agreed with either. The key to this disagreement had to do with the idea
of an end of history, an idea that both Kojève and Fessard endorsed, even while they
disagreed between themselves as to whether it could be attained in the temporal world
(Kojève) or else only in some transcendent sense (Fessard). As we have seen, Merleau-
Ponty rejected that idea in no uncertain terms. But he also rejected the dilemma
posed by Fessard. It was ultimately not without merit, however, for it did show very
clearly that recognition of a profound affinity between Marxism and Christianity—
which Merleau-Ponty accepted—was incompatible with a transcendent religious or
theocentric interpretation, thereby strongly affirming that the philosophical task at
hand was to show how a “total” humanism could be grounded satisfactorily in this-
worldly immanence and in conjunction with a conception of historical progress as
a kind of teleology without a telos. Despite itself, then, Fessard’s argument served to
confirm that no less than the attempt on the part of Marxism to found humanism on a
strictly materialist basis, Christianity has its own self-defeating contradiction between
incarnation and transcendence. Although it may acknowledge divine Incarnation in
the human world, it also retains belief in a divine omnipotence residing outside of
that world. As a result, “God is not completely with us. Behind the incarnate Spirit
there remains that infinite gaze that strips us of all secrets, but also of our freedom, our
desire, and our future, reducing us to visible objects” (SNS 314/177). Hence, “when it is
true to the Incarnation Christianity can be revolutionary. But the religion of the Father
is conservative” (SNS 315/177), in that its primary orientation to divine transcendence
ultimately leaves it indifferent to this world. This is what accounts for the tendency
toward political quiescence that had bothered Merleau-Ponty from the start. What
Fessard inadvertently clarified, then, was that commitment to absolute transcendence
is incompatible with engagement, and that transcendence must be reconceived
accordingly, for example, in terms of historically situated humanity. As Merleau-
Ponty later put it, “whatever is sound in my belief in the absolute is nothing but my
experience of an agreement with myself and others” (SNS 166/95; HT 204f/187). To
adapt a statement quoted above from Curtis (1991, 177), what Fessard’s argument
would have helped someone like Merleau-Ponty to see was that “a Christian capable
of penetrating to the political core of his doctrine would have to admit that his faith
in God . . . was close to – or even essentially no different from – the Marxist’s faith in
Man.” It would follow that “Christians should live out the marriage of the Spirit and
human history that started with the Incarnation” (SNS 314/177)—something done
best, Merleau-Ponty thought, from a Marxist perspective.
■
Views like those of Moré and Fessard were not in line with Mounier’s own perspective,
which, less inclined to separate theory from practice, tended to draw a much sharper
48 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

line between Marxism and Christianity—for example, in his claim that “Marxism is
basically a negation of the spiritual as an autonomous, primary, and creative reality”
(Mounier 1938, 52). More on that shortly. But let us first say a few more words about
Moré’s idea of “saving” Marxism by “completing, assimilating, and expanding” it, and
how this relates to Merleau-Ponty.
In line with most revisionism of that time, Moré was mainly concerned about
rethinking the relation between the economic “base” or “infrastructure” of capitalist
society and its ideological “superstructure.” The received Marxist idea concerning
this relation founded the latter simplistically on the former, thus seeming to imply
an objectionable materialist reductionism, one that would be especially anathema
to anyone with serious spiritual concerns. This needed to be rethought, and Moré
called for sustained theoretical work to be devoted to this problem on the basis of
the latest developments in theory and science (Moré 1936, 566ff). This is the sort
of research that was promoted more generally under the auspices of Esprit. What
is significant for our purposes has to do with Merleau-Ponty’s own role with regard
to psychological research. To be sure, the research that went into The Structure of
Behavior was not instigated or commissioned by Esprit. But there is no good reason
to imagine that Merleau-Ponty’s academic work during these years prior to 1938
would have been unaffected by his involvement in the personalist milieu. In fact,
there are very good reasons to believe that the opposite is true. This would mean that
we can regard the dialectical framework developed in The Structure of Behavior as an
attempt to “complete, assimilate, and expand” the indications concerning the relation
between humanity and nature that were sketched out in Marx’s early philosophical
work, and which, by and large, were positively endorsed by Moré and others at the
time. What is of significance here is that in working this out in a philosophically
rigorous way, and because in doing so, he was also “following out the Incarnation
in  all its consequences” (cf. SNS 313/176), Merleau-Ponty arrived at a position
which, although it certainly effected a dépassement of the philosophical perspective
of official Marxism, by no means pointed in the direction that Moré or Mounier or
Fessard would have desired. For the claims laid out in that text did not at all affirm
the basic presuppositions of Catholicism—for example, no less than any good PCF
activist, Merleau-Ponty’s work squarely denied that the spiritual is an “autonomous”
or “primary” reality. But it did not do so by implying any sort of materialist reduction,
for it accorded consciousness an irreducible role with a kind of relative autonomy.
The dialectical framework presented in The Structure of Behavior thus outlined, as
least in part, the philosophical basis of a revisioned Marxism which, though secular,
laid out a potential common ground for materialism and spiritualism that supported
a reciprocally informed conception of engagement. As noted above, this work did
not represent a finished and final position. But it would be to phenomenology, not
Catholic theology, that Merleau-Ponty ultimately turned in order to complete his own
rethinking of Marxism, even though Catholic concerns were what originally brought
him to consider it seriously. But the incarnational themes remained central.
These considerations clarify how it was that Merleau-Ponty’s increasing association
with Mounier and Esprit was simultaneous with a widening philosophical and political
divergence. Recall that for Merleau-Ponty, as for so many others, “Esprit was simply
 Embodiment and Incarnation 49

the most lively vehicle for Christian thought in France” (Hellman 1981, 99), that is,
his commitment to the organization per se was not particularly deep. Thus, even if he
was far from embracing them, Merleau-Ponty was surely open to the several (quite
harsh) critiques to which Esprit was subjected by its Marxist critics in the initial
1932–34 period (e.g. Nizan 1933a, 1933b; cf. Hellman 1981, 71–4), that is, during the
formative years of its own critique of established Christian democracy. And when,
in 1934, the perspective of the organization began to succumb to the tendency, against
which Mounier had warned from the beginning, to construe engagement in an overly
individualistic way that deemphasized its basis in collectively shared values (Schalk
1979, 20f), the difficulties faced by the effort to negotiate a “third way” between
quiescent témoignage and uncritical embrigadement no doubt contributed to Merleau-
Ponty’s own heightening political consciousness. In the very effort to firm up the
philosophical basis of Esprit beginning around 1934, a project to which he was surely
drawn, Merleau-Ponty was thus out of sync with Mounier. For the motives of the latter
ultimately lay in clearly dissociating the organization from Marxism, in order to stave
off papal condemnation, rather than articulating a philosophically rigorous conception
of engagement (cf. Hellman 1981, 78f). In other words, as the theoretical basis of Esprit
matured, its radical edge dulled, such that while Mounier and the organization were
growing more distant from Marxism, Merleau-Ponty was moving closer to it.
In this regard, it is noteworthy that Nizan was “an unusually sensitive critic of
Catholicism,” a Marxist who reproached it less as simply reactionary than as subject to
an inherent dilemma whereby its politics would ultimately be torn between Catholicism
and fascism (Hellman 1981, 73)—precisely the main axis of Merleau-Ponty’s own
disillusion. Beginning in 1934, under the auspices of the PCF’s Popular Front strategy,
Nizan publicly toned down his earlier critique of Esprit and was put “in charge of
implementing a friendly approach toward the Catholics” (Cohen-Solal 1987, 111).
More specifically, “Nizan was entrusted with the task of liaising with fellow-travelling
intellectuals,” a role which later included “the very specific task of entering into contact
with the Catholic community within the framework of the PCF’s ‘outstretched hand’
policy” (Scriven 1988, 83). No specific information is available as to how this affected
Merleau-Ponty. However, given it as a contextual factor, and the fact that Merleau-
Ponty was increasingly exposed to and had good relations with other Marxist activists,
both in the PCF (e.g. François Cuzin) as well as in the Fourth International (e.g. David
Rousset), it is safe to say that during the period of the Popular Front, his sympathy for
the style of engagement and the “spiritual revolution” of Esprit began to be questioned
by his deepening philosophical interest in political issues about which Mounier et al.
tended to be reticent (Rauch 1972, 80ff; cf. Hellman 1981, 87).
Communist overtures to Catholics intensified in the run-up to the historic national
election on 3 May 1936, but only fringe elements responded agreeably. Nevertheless,
this was apparently enough to raise fears within Esprit that it would be censured
by the nuncio, and once again, this motivated a sharper self-distinction from the
nonbelieving left (Hellman 1981, 111f). But following the Popular Front victory, “there
was a certain disparity between Mounier’s public and his private reactions” (Hellman
1981, 112). Publicly, he warmly greeted the regime of Léon Blum, but privately, he
was wholly committed to his own personalist movement. At the end of June, for
50 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

example, a “well-publicized” debate concerning Christianity and communism, in

which Mounier faced Nizan and André Malraux, presented an amicable discussion
of common ground (Hellman 1981, 113f). Yet in his report for the same month
to Cardinal Verdier, Mounier privately claimed that his was “almost alone among
the . . . movements of the young to oppose communism on the metaphysical plane
at the same time as competing with it . . . on the plane of technical research.” And
later that summer, Mounier composed a new Personalist Manifesto (Mounier 1938),
which “articulated the basic doctrine of the personalist movement” as an alternative
to capitalism and communism, and did so in more strongly anti-Marxist terms than
had ever been previously used, suggesting that “nothing could be done with Marxists
unless they abandoned several basic tenets of their ideology.” Needless to say, “[t]he
Personalist Manifesto’s Third Way did little to encourage co-operation with Blum’s
coalition, or with Marxism” (Hellman 1981, 116). Although there is no precise record,
given his leftward development, it is reasonable to suppose that Merleau-Ponty felt
alienated from these developments.
There is no question that Mounier recognized the importance of Marxism, and that
he drew from it. In that same report to Verdier, Mounier stated that the goal was to
“realize in the name of God and Christ the truth that the Communists are realizing in
the name of an atheistic collectivity” (Rauch 1972, 180). Yet, although Esprit is often
thought of as having had a sympathy, unusual among Catholics, for the Popular Front,
“in fact this whole episode illustrated Esprit’s unwavering determination to create a
‘new politics’ on its own” (Hellman 1981, 117).
It was not for that, though, that Merleau-Ponty aligned himself with Esprit. Even as
he was evolving along a different trajectory, Merleau-Ponty remained associated with
Esprit because it offered a space of optimism and latitude for coming to nonconformist
terms with the meaning of engagement, that is, a way in which one could s’engage in
a collective project without having a Party line to toe as in the case, for example,
of Nizan. In late 1936, however, Mounier became “determined to form a more
broadly based, and more disciplined, movement.” Membership requirements were
made more stringent, activities became more regimented, and agreement with the
tenets of the Manifesto became necessary—Mounier saw this time as “the end of our
youthful years” (Hellman 1981, 126f). The Esprit congress held in the late-summer
of 1937 at Jouy-en-Josas may have marked the last straw for Merleau-Ponty. At Jouy,
the organization became tighter, less democratic, and “disciplinary standards” for its
constituent groups were instituted. It is noteworthy that he was still at this point a
co-director of the Esprit research group on psychology, since this was the main vector
of his divergent intellectual trajectory. But he did not wish to be seen as collaborating
with the organization (Geraets 1971, 26 n111). Some of same reasons that had turned
him away from the Communist left now occasioned his exit from the personalist
milieu. “Transformation of [Esprit] from a free and open laboratory of ideas into an
organ of a disciplined, ideologically coherent movement soon brought the dissent of
several important young intellectuals” (Hellman 1981, 129), and it would seem safe to
conjecture that this included Merleau-Ponty.
At some point not long after this congress, Merleau-Ponty broke off contact with
Mounier (Geraets 1971, 26; but cf. Le Baut 2009, 136ff), and it was “probably during
 Embodiment and Incarnation 51

the months that followed” that Merleau-Ponty “definitively renounced his religious
beliefs” (Geraets 1971, 26). The latter point is hard to verify one way or the other. But
in any case, consider the recollection of Jean Lacroix:

Without a doubt it was in returning from Jouy-en-Josas . . . that I had the most

intimate conversation with [Merleau-Ponty], the kind that happens between
youths who just met and reveal themselves to each other less in what they are as
in what they are tending to be. He told me about his doubts, his investigations.
A sort of atheistic humanism was already coming through in his remarks, and
one sensed that for him phenomenology was going to become the whole of
philosophy.24

The final line of this statement presents a mixed message. As a recollection from a
quarter-century later, it confidently reads back into the encounter in question what
obviously became the case (i.e., Merleau-Ponty’s turn to phenomenology). But it is clearly
implied that that had not happened yet, while what was already present in Merleau-
Ponty’s thinking was what Lacroix called an “atheistic humanism”—this was “already
coming through,” while phenomenology was what “was going to become the whole of
philosophy.” And in this context, “atheistic humanism” would refer unambiguously to
Marxism—in some sort of revisioned way, of course, but to Marxism nonetheless.

Recapitulation
Let me briefly recapitulate. I began by considering the references to Saint Exupéry
that appear in Merleau-Ponty’s initial discussion of embodiment in Phenomenology
of Perception—and to those I shall return. But I noted that in that discussion
Merleau-Ponty made a significant point about the organism in history—although its
significance may not be apparent quite yet. In order to disclose that significance, it is
necessary to consider the work of Lukács—and it is to this that we shall turn next. But
because the main claim that I want to make is that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological
approach to embodiment in Phenomenology of Perception is to be understood
within a methodological framework inspired by Lukácsian Marxism, and especially
because this claim is quite unusual and may initially strike many readers as highly
implausible, I offered (a) some contextual considerations that would account for the
virtual absence of any explicit discussion of Lukács in Merleau-Ponty’s work from
the time, and (b) some extended sociobiographical conjectures that would locate the
“origins” of Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism in the Catholic discovery of Marx during the
period of the Popular Front in France, set within the larger context of intellectual
engagement. The point of these considerations is to set the stage for what now follows,
by showing, contrary to standard assumptions, that it is at least eminently plausible
that Merleau-Ponty’s adoption of a recognizably Marxist philosophical outlook has
temporal priority over his embrace of phenomenology—a fact, if it is one, that would
lend considerable support, albeit indirect, to the claim that certain ideas based in
what I shall call an “incarnational Marxism” also have a logical priority over the
phenomenological approach to embodiment that is central to Phenomenology of
52 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Perception. In other words, the foregoing considerations express in historical terms

an analogous claim about the relative priority for Merleau-Ponty of Marxism and
phenomenology. None of this can be demonstrated with absolute certainty, and the
larger claims that I shall make do not strictly depend on this account being true.
But the next chapter, and the remainder of the book, will benefit significantly from
having it as a backdrop.
 3

Totality and Embodiment

In the last chapter, we deviated from the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s account of

embodiment in the chapter of Phenomenology of Perception entitled “The Body as
an Object and Mechanistic Physiology” by noting that the significance of Merleau-
Ponty’s denial of any human bodily movement that would be wholly independent
of personal or existential meaning lies in the fact that it derives from his claim that
human existence as a whole, inclusive of its natural organismic dimension, falls
within the overall movement of human ­history: “the organism and its monotonous
dialectics are . . . not extraneous to history as though inassimilable to it” (PhP 104,
emphasis added). And I suggested that  in making this claim, Merleau-Ponty had
certain ideas from Lukács in mind. We can now consider these ideas directly, and
then return to the initial discussion.

Lukács on Totality
The main idea in question was made in the context of the opening essay in History
and Class Consciousness, entitled “What is Orthodox Marxism?” The central thesis
for which Lukács argued in this essay was that what is essentially distinctive about
Marxism properly understood—and Marxism properly (as opposed to typically)
understood is what he meant by orthodox Marxism—has to do fundamentally with
its method as opposed to any substantive claims or doctrinal tenets. “Orthodox
Marxism,” he wrote, “does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of
Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief ’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a
‘sacred’ book. Rather, concerning Marxism, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method”
(HCC 13/1). And for Lukács, what properly defines the method of Marxism is that
it is based on and accords methodological primacy to a dialectical conception of
“concrete totality” [konkrete Totalität] as “the true category of reality” [die eigentliche
Wirklichkeitskategorie] (HCC 23/10). This method takes as its point of departure
Marx’s claim, made in The Poverty of Philosophy but reiterated elsewhere, that “the
production relations of every society form a whole” (Marx 1976, 166; cf. HCC 22/9),
and it reasons on this basis that it is only by construing all seemingly discrete facts
of social life as moments of historical becoming, and integrating them dialectically
into a totality, that “knowledge of the facts can become knowledge of reality”
(HCC 21/8).
54 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Such is the first aspect of the main idea in question. But there is more to it. For as
Lukács also claimed, “only the dialectical conception of totality is able to comprehend
reality as a social process” [Wirklichkeit als gesellschaftliches Geschehen] (HCC 27/13).
A crucial aspect of Lukács’ account of Marxist method concerns the scope of its concept
of totality as encompassing human sociohistorical reality but excluding nature. Lukács
made this point primarily as a critique of Friedrich Engels’ efforts (in his popular 1878
work Anti-Dühring)1 to articulate a dialectical account of nature which, following the
model of Hegelian monism, would provide a materialist metaphysical grounding for
Marxism’s dialectical understanding of human history. As Lukács put it:

This limitation of the method to sociohistorical reality is very important. The

misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account of dialectics are based mainly
on the fact that Engels, following Hegel’s mistaken lead, extended the dialectical
method to the knowledge of nature as well. However, the crucial determinants
of dialectics – interaction of subject and object, unity of theory and practice,
historical change in the reality underlying the categories as the basis of their
change in thought, etc. – are absent from our knowledge of nature. (HCC 17 n1/24
n6, translation modified)

Without getting into an overly extended discussion of Lukács, we should note

that what is at issue here is the assimilability of nature to Marxist historical analysis.
In Lukács’ view, the dominant theoretical tendency during the period of the Second
International (roughly from the 1880s until World War I), strongly informed by
Engels’ philosophical contributions, sought to “naturalize” (or at least had the effect of
“naturalizing”) Marxism’s account of human history by embedding it within an account
of the objective dialectical laws of nature. The main problem with this tendency is
that it occludes “the dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical
process,” with the result that the theory would amount to just another metaphysical
interpretation of the world, whereas “for the dialectical method,” in accordance with
Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, “the central problem is to change reality” (HCC
15f/3). In opposition to that prevailing tendency, then, Lukács, deeply informed by the
neo-Kantian distinction between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften, affirmed the need
to maintain a methodological duality vis-à-vis the natural and the sociohistorical.
This claim is elaborated in some of the other essays that comprise History and Class
Consciousness, but not uniformly and consistently. For, at some points, Lukács claimed
that the standard methods of natural science were all well and good within their proper
domain, and that problems arise only when they are misapplied to human society and
history (HCC 23/10), thus suggesting an ontological dualism. At other times, though,
he implied that the standard methods of natural science are themselves actually skewed
ideologically and are consequently unable to yield scientific truth even with regard
to nature (HCC 226f/207). The precise status of Lukács’ methodological separation
of history from nature is thus not altogether clear. In fact, in a well-known remark,
Lukács even seemed to go so far as to reduce the natural to the sociohistorical:

Nature is a social category [eine gesellschaftliche Kategorie]. That is, whatever is

held to be natural [was . . . als Natur gilt] at any given stage of social development,
 Totality and Embodiment 55

its relation to man and the form in which his confrontation [Auseinandersetzung]
with it occurs, and thus what nature means in terms of form, content, range
and objectivity, this is always socially conditioned. (HCC 240/234, translation
modified)

This claim is certainly open to different interpretations, including those that would
claim that it betrays, beyond ontological dualism, an underlying idealism. But in
fairness to Lukács, he rejected both ontological dualism and any sort of idealism
with regard to nature or our knowledge of it. His basic intention was simply to deny
“that there is a socially unmediated, i.e., an immediate relationship of humans to
nature in the present stage of social development” (TD 106), and to affirm conversely
that our “metabolic interchange with nature”—which Lukács glossed regularly as
an uninterrupted “exchange of matter between society and nature”—“[is] mediated
socially” (TD 96), such that “[o]ur consciousness of nature, in other words, our
knowledge of nature, is determined by our social being” (TD 100).
Lukács’ considered view in History and Class Consciousness can thus be understood,
first, as a claim to the effect that while nature undoubtedly does really exist in its
own right, and that it may function according to objective dialectical laws, both of
these claims are fully consistent with there being qualitatively distinct dialectical laws
operating in the sociohistorical world, and with these laws being implicated in human
knowledge of nature.

Self-evidently nature and its laws existed before society (that is to say before
humans). Self-evidently the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective
principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of
development of nature before society, if it did not already objectively exist. From
that, however, follows neither that social development could produce no new,
equally objective forms of movement, dialectical moments, nor that the dialectical
moments in the development of nature would be knowable without the mediation
of these new social dialectical forms. (TD 102)

And it is crucial for Lukács to approach these issues—the epistemic status of nature and
the dialectical character of society—within the dynamic perspective of “the present as
becoming” [die Gegenwart als Werden] (HCC 223/204).

The dialectical conception of knowledge as a process does not only include the
possibility that in the course of history we get to know new contents, new objects,
that we have not known until now. It also means that new contents can emerge,
which can be understood only with the aid of principles of knowledge that are just
as newly available. (TD 102f)

This relates to Lukács’ bold claim that “it is true that reality [Wirklichkeit] is the criterion
for the correctness [Richtigkeit] of thought. But reality is not, it becomes—and not
without the assistance of thought.” (HCC 223/204). So while maintaining that all
knowledge is conditioned by the historical development of society and its “metabolic
interchange” with nature, he can nonetheless deny dualism and idealism by affirming
56 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

an ontological discontinuity between nature and society and a corresponding epistemic

distinction.

The knowledge [of nature] achieved at any one time is relative only in as far as it
can be modified, indeed can be proven false, through a higher development of the
economic structure of society (and a corresponding expansion, greater intensity,
etc., of the exchange of matter between society and nature). However – in as far as
it pertains to the objective reality of social being and the nature mediated through
this – it is objective truth, absolute truth, which only changes its position, its
theoretical explanation, etc., because of the knowledge that “overcomes” it, and
which is more comprehensive and more correct. (TD 105)

In sum, Lukács did not reject the idea that nature is dialectical. But given the active
involvement of human subjectivity in the historical development of society, that is, the
dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical process, he did want to
insist that nature was not dialectical in the same way as human history, and that as a
consequence, differentiated methodological approaches were required.
Now, it may seem that there is nothing particularly remarkable about these ideas.
In a certain sense, this appearance is true, inasmuch as Lukács took himself (and we
can take him in this way too) as aiming to recover methodological ideas that were
already tacit or operative in Marx’s own work, but which were in need of explicit
reaffirmation and clarification in the face of the sort of objectively deterministic
revisionism that, in his view, regrettably held sway within Marxist theory at the
time. And indeed, it can be difficult to appreciate fully the sense and force of
Lukács’ claims outside of the theoretical and political context in which he made
them, and without regard to their underlying rationale, which was (Zinoviev et al.
notwithstanding) in effect to provide a theoretical understanding and philosophical
justification for the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia—that is, reconcile Marx and
Lenin philosophically. For the Revolution of October 1917 was, as Antonio Gramsci
had put it at the time, “a revolution against Capital” (Grasmci 1990, 34–7), in that
it defied those who prognosticated on the basis of the objective laws of historical
development as found, at least supposedly, in Marx’s mature works (recall that the
philosophical works of the young Marx had not yet been published). In order to
integrate the Russian experience into a Marxist understanding of history, then, it
was necessary to thematize the subjective (in addition to the objective) conditions of
revolutionary change, and to this end, to conceptualize and articulate the irreducibly
active and efficacious role that human consciousness—and, in particular, proletarian
class consciousness as consciousness of the historical totality—can play in the
historical process. This focus on the subjective conditions of revolution was in no
way meant to accord them priority over the objective conditions, the primacy of
which Lukács repeatedly affirmed in line with the materialism of classical Marxism.
But whereas the latter tended to underrate consciousness by construing it in
epiphenomenal terms, Lukács insisted on construing consciousness as involving an
irreducible materiality of its own that can be decisive in certain objective historical
circumstances.
 Totality and Embodiment 57

Lukács and Merleau-Ponty

The foregoing remarks convey the fundamental sense of what Lukács undertook in
History and Class Consciousness, and it is a view that shares important philosophical
affinities with Merleau-Ponty. Consider the notion of totality. Jay’s broad claims that
“Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, indeed his entire outlook on the world, was deeply
holistic from the beginning” (1984, 361), and more specifically, that “the concept
of totality was at the center of his concerns” in the postwar period (1984, 367), are
certainly accurate. As discussed above, the Gestalt-theoretic account of nature that
Merleau-Ponty developed in The Structure of Behavior is consistent with a materialist
approach that reserves a relative autonomy for consciousness, and which emphasizes
the interaction of subject and object and the role of this interaction in creating new
conditions of existence. All of this is shared with Lukács—indeed, Merleau-Ponty
tended to blur any conceptual distinction between “structure” and “totality” (SNS
223/126)—and what is undertaken in Phenomenology of Perception is positioned within
this framework.2 (Recall that Fink had shown totality to be the key methodological
issue facing phenomenology.) In this way, then, Merleau-Ponty was very much on the
same page as Lukács in terms of trying to update Marxism with “a new conception of
consciousness” that would be appropriate to this dialectical-holistic perspective (SNS
143/82).3
Given this perspective, however, along with his phenomenological tendencies and
with the benefit of hindsight with regard to Lukács, Merleau-Ponty examined this
problem more closely. For in claiming that “it is in lived perception that the dialectical
synthesis of the subject and object takes place” (Low 1987, 174, italics added), he
approached consciousness—and a fortiori proletarian class consciousness—as a
matter of perceptual consciousness in its distinction from and relation to intellectual or
reflective consciousness. This can be seen as the main way in which he tried to update
and redeem the Lukácsian framework. More on that shortly.
Concerning that framework, though, what is most important is that Merleau-Ponty
posited a methodological distinction between history and nature that followed Lukács’
account. For he agreed with Lukács that, pace Engels, it would be idealistic to claim
a direct connection between the dialecticity of the human historical world and any
sort of dialectics in nature, maintaining to the contrary that inasmuch as “nature is
nature, that is, exterior to us and to itself, then we can find in it neither the relations
nor the quality that are necessary to sustain a dialectic” (SNS 224/126). In this way, he
concurred with Lukács’ dismissal of nature as not amenable to philosophical analysis
except as socially mediated. “If [nature] is dialectical, then it is a matter of that nature
that is perceived by man and which is inseparable from the human action that Marx
talks about in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology. ‘This activity, this
perceptible and continuous action and work, this production are . . . the foundation of
the entire perceptible world such as it currently exists’” (SNS 224/126, citing L’idéologie
allemande, in Marx 1927–37, vol. 6 [1937], 163). In effect, this is the basis of Merleau-
Ponty’s claim that Marxism is “a philosophy of history” (SNS 130/231, italics added; cf.
HT 165/153)—that is, it is a philosophy of the historically unfolding human world in
its dialectical distinction from nature as such.4
58 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Light can be cast on this by considering Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a “logic of history,”

by which he meant the following: (a) that history is an integral whole, “a single drama”
in which all events, however contingent, have a human significance; and (b) that the
phases of this drama do not follow an arbitrary order, “but move toward a completion
and conclusion” (SNS 212/121; cf. NI 15 [3]). In other words, that history is intelligible
and has a direction—that “there is in the instant and in their succession a totality
moving toward a privileged state which gives the meaning of the whole” (HT 166/153).
Combined with the idea that the “privileged state” in question represents a genuine
“reconciliation of man with man” in fully universal terms (HT 139/129f), this is, for
Merleau-Ponty, the essential content of Marxism.
This conception of history corresponds to the need on the part of phenomenology
to be able to come to terms with the outermost horizons of intentional experience.
As discussed in the Preface, the most important methodological problem facing
phenomenology stems from the fact that if all intentional experience is horizonal,
in that objects of experience are necessarily conditioned by the backgrounds against
which they appear, then the claims of phenomenology to achieve critical philosophical
insight are fundamentally jeopardized by the possibility of a vicious regress. Fink, as
we saw, offered a bold solution in the form of a “meontic philosophy of absolute spirit.”
Although this approach would redeem the philosophical pretensions of phenomenology
in the strongest sense, it deviates sharply from some of the project’s guiding ideas,
and in these respects, it also tends to be highly dubious from an existential point of
view. Merleau-Ponty’s solution was rather different. The idea here was to show that
the domain of phenomenology coincided with the human historical world as a well-
defined totality, but also therefore to show that the horizons of this totality could be
experienced as such—that there could in fact be certain experiences—specifically, self-
experiences—characterized by an indistinction between object and its external horizons.
For such an absolute experience of the concrete totality of history as such would be a
necessary condition of the philosophical viability of an essentially incomplete (because
situated) phenomenological reduction.
But how would this experience be possible? How could “totality” be anything
more than empty rhetorical or polemical gesture? How would it be able to do real
philosophical work? As Karl Jaspers asked in a critique of the notion of totality and
the use to which it was put, especially by Marxists like Lukács: “In general, is man
capable of grasping, knowing, wanting, or planning the whole? Is totality an object
of thought and a goal of action for man? In my view, this is impossible” (EE 250).
According to Jaspers, although this view was and is widely held, this impossibility
would stem from the fact that, living in the world, we can only relate to “partial
elements and aspects” which, as discussed above, are always conditioned by certain
horizons. And Jaspers insisted that these horizons always retreat when approached,
that there is always a more encompassing horizon. In principle, then, “no totality can
ever be achieved” (EE 251)—“one never knows the whole because one is [always] in
the whole” (EE 199).
This may certainly be true at the level of reflective or intellectual consciousness—
Merleau-Ponty would agree that we do not have this kind of relation to totality. There
is some ambiguity, however, as to Lukács’ view of the matter. On the one hand, a key
 Totality and Embodiment 59

theoretical construct in History and Class Consciousness was the idea of “imputed”
[zugerechnet] class consciousness, which applied primarily to Lukács’ concern with the
possibility of the proletariat attaining true knowledge of society as a totality.

Relating consciousness to the whole of society discloses the thoughts, feelings,

etc. that people in a determinate life-situation would have, were they completely
capable of grasping that situation and the interests arising from it, both in relation
to immediate action as well to the construction of society as a whole in accordance
with those interests. (HCC 62/50, translation modified)

In other words, Lukács’ notion of “imputed consciousness” is a counterfactual matter

of the “thoughts and feelings” that would befit a certain objective situation, and as
such it relies heavily on the Weberian idea of “objective possibility.” To be sure, at least
typically, there is a significant distance between the class consciousness imputed to the
proletariat—which amounts to “a correct knowledge of the historical process”—and the
actual or empirical consciousness of any individual proletarian. But given the unique
social position of the proletariat, bridging this gap is a real possibility. “By ‘imputed’
class consciousness,” Lukács wrote, “I mean the consciousness that corresponds to the
objective economic position of the proletariat at any one time, and that can be attained
by the proletariat” (TD 66).
Lukács thus affirmed that while the imputed class consciousness of the proletariat
may  have “no psychological reality” [keine psychologische Wirklichkeit] (HC, 88, cf.
86/75, cf. 73), it is no mere fiction. It takes some concrete form prior to its explicit
realization. Thus, on the other hand, Lukács also approached proletarian class
consciousness in terms of its latent or implicit existence, claiming that “the relation to
totality does not need to become fully explicit, the full extent of its content does not
need to be consciously integrated into the motives and objects of action. What ultimately
matters is the intention towards totality [die Intention auf Totalität]” (HCC 217/198,
italics added), or equivalently, what Lukács called the “intention toward what is right”
[Intention auf das Richtige] (HCC 84/72), that is in some sense immanent within the
life of the proletariat. Owing to the special (but not unique) relation that it has to the
social standpoint of the proletariat, the category of totality operates and has effects
prior to contributing to any specific cognitive achievements, and Lukács claimed that
it does so by ensuring that even actions that seem to concern only particular objects
nevertheless derive their objective sense from a practical, transformative intention with
regard to society as a historical totality (HCC 192/175). The “intention towards totality”
is thus in effect also the “intention towards the realization of the dialectical tendencies of
[historical] development” [Intention auf die Verwirklichung der dialektischen Tendenzen
der Entwicklung] (HCC 196/179). In short, in the case of the proletariat, the “intention
towards totality” is involved in the overcoming of immediacy “regardless of whether it
is already conscious or remains initially unconscious” (HCC 190/174), and proletarian
class consciousness can be understood as “the sense [Sinn] . . . of the historical situation
[Lage] of the class” (HCC 86/73, italics altered).
How this “sense” becomes conscious is, of course, the key question. But it is not
answered simply by positing imputed class consciousness in an unconscious form—
for example, in terms of the feelings and tendencies of “correct instincts” [richtige
60 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Instinkten] (HCC 88/75). This just repackages the problem as to how the proletariat
as a class existing in-itself becomes a class existing for-itself. Although in History and
Class Consciousness, Lukács had much to say about this problem in terms of political
organization, the philosophical basis of the advent of the self-consciousness with which
he was concerned remained unclear.
While in general terms Merleau-Ponty followed Lukács’ conception of totality, the
main innovation that he introduced was to reconceive the latent intentionalities posited
by Lukács—in particular, the “intention toward totality”—in prereflective terms. This
is, at least to some extent, implicit in Lukács. But it is not worked out. Merleau-Ponty’s
contribution was thus to rethink explicitly the relationship between consciousness and
the historical totality that was implied in Lukács’ account on the basis of perceptual
consciousness. Rather than simply claim with Lukács that “Marxist thought only raises
to a higher level of thought the totality that we are forced to live with in daily life,
whether we like it or not, and whether we are aware of it or not” (EE 252), Merleau-
Ponty sought to show that history as a totality is something of which we are (or at
least can be) aware at the prereflective level of lived perception—in other words, that
historical totality is a lived percept. As he put it to Jaspers by way of defending the
Lukácsian conception of totality against the worries alluded to above:

a certain postulate of the rationality of history is something that we cannot avoid,

for it belongs to [se confond avec] the necessities of our life. Anyone, from the
moment he takes a political position, has a certain conception of the whole of
historical life, and even if he does not formulate it in words, he nonetheless
expresses it in action. (EE 253)

In other words, humans, at least in certain historical conjunctures, have an operative-

intentional relation to the totality of history as the outermost horizons of experience.
This is the “perception of history” (HT 105/98), or of its logic, that Merleau-Ponty saw as
lying at the core of Marxism. I shall have more to say about this later. For now, we just
need to note that this perception—which lies at the basis of the “operative knowledge”
[connaissance opérante] of which Marxism supplies the “general formula” [la formule
générale] (HT 100/94)—is primordial in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, in that all
other perceptual experience is situated horizonally within it and has its epistemic status
conditioned accordingly.
For this reason, Merleau-Ponty saw this “perception of history” as the basis for
phenomenological truth. For it is the rationality and sense [sens] at the level of history
as a whole that underwrites the rationality and sense that may be perceived at any
subordinate level. As he put it, “where history has no structure and no dominant
trends it is no longer possible to say anything, since there are no periods nor lasting
constellations, and a thesis is only valid for a moment” (HT 156/144f). Whereas on
the contrary, “the simple fact that someone perceives an historical situation as invested
with a meaning that he believes to be true introduces a phenomenon of truth” (HT
102/95f)—that is, a presumptive rationality emerges in the course of historical
development that “testifies to our rootedness in the truth” (HT 103/96). And this
presumption is inescapable. Echoing the comments he made to Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty
claimed that “the contingency of history is only a shadow at the margins of a view
 Totality and Embodiment 61

of the future from which we can no more abstain than we can from breathing” (HT
102/96). Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, the very experience of historical contingency is itself
sufficient evidence of the historical logic outlined above, that is, of a “common history.”
In other words, the consciousness of historical contingency invalidates itself (cf. HT
206/188)—“we are condemned, whether we like it or not, to the philosophy of history”
(SNS 297/167f).
It is thus the case for Merleau-Ponty that human être-au-monde is indistinguishable
from “being-in-the-truth” [« être-à-la-vérité »] (PhP 452)—that is, that “we are in the
truth” (PhP xi), that “we are true through and through” (PhP 520)—just in virtue of
what we might call his existential-communist philosophy of history. But the latter is
also a necessary condition. As Merleau-Ponty put it in a well-known passage:

Marxism is not just any hypothesis that might be replaced tomorrow by some
other. It is the simple statement of those conditions without which there would
be neither any humanism, in the sense of a mutual relation between men, nor any
rationality in history. In this sense Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the
philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history.
(HT 165/153)

The sense of this rather audacious claim is that “any philosophy of history will postulate
something like what is called historical materialism,” inasmuch as any philosophical
position that takes history seriously as the locus of human existence could not fail to
see it as a Gestalt totality that maintains the identity of subjective and objective factors,
while still remaining oriented to truth in a universal sense.

Embodiment and repression

Although Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to perception may correct for
the problem of consciousness with regard to the Lukácsian notion of totality, there is
another issue that must be addressed: if, following Lukács, Merleau-Ponty sees history
as a totality to which nature as such is inassimilable, then what is to be said about
human embodiment? The problem is not that the notion of concrete totality must be
all-inclusive—Merleau-Ponty is in effect dealing with the human order in its dialectical
distinction from the vital and physical orders as outlined in The Structure of Behavior.
But if human beings are natural creatures as well as historical beings, then any sort of
methodological duality would, so to speak, slice right through us.
It is because he claims that in lived perception, we experience history as such as
a unity, and because he takes the fact of our naturalness to rule out methodological
duality, that Merleau-Ponty affirms that “the organism and its monotonous dialectics
are . . . not extraneous to history as though inassimilable to it” (PhP 104). The significance
of this claim lies initially in the fact that, as we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty, nature in
general is extraneous and inassimilable to history. But there is something exceptional
in the case of human embodiment understood in natural organismic—or biological or
physiological—terms. Merleau-Ponty’s accounting for this is based upon his notion of
62 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

the habitual body in contradistinction to the “actual” body. Recall that, for Merleau-
Ponty, there is an “inner necessity” for human existence “to provide itself with a habitual
body” (PhP 103). For owing precisely to its impersonal (or prepersonal) character, the
habitual body is an essential dimension of the historicity that enables a human being
to transcend the immediate actuality of her environing world. It is only in virtue of
having an impersonal corporeal anchorage that one can develop a genuinely personal
existence in the world. A key point, however, is that this anchorage, and hence the
historical assimilability of the organism, is achieved through the repression of the
“actual” body. Repression [refoulement], which translates Freud’s term Verdrängung,
is thus a key concept in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the habitual body. But there are
some ambiguities that need to be sorted out.
To begin with, the main idea concerning Merleau-Ponty’s view of repression in this
context has to do, as just mentioned, with the repression, from the side of personal
existence, of the “actual” body. In this sense, the “actual” body has a kind of “first-person
existence”—a kind of corporeal Jemeinigkeit—and what transpires in its repression is
its impersonalization, something that could be described equally as its deactualization.
But this seems to represent the intertwining of two different processes that may be
disentangled analytically.
First, it seems that in Merleau-Ponty’s view, the habitual body effectively subsumes
or incorporates within itself the “actual” body itself qua biological organism. The latter
does have a certain independent being—it has, as we know, its own dialectic. But in the
course of a human life in this or that historical context, the organism and its dialectical
tendencies are sublimated and transfigured to such an extent that they typically comprise
a virtually indistinct aspect of the habitual body as the impersonal dimension of human
existence or être-au-monde—we might just call this the “habituated organism.” The key
idea behind this view was expressed most boldly in Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that
“man is an historical idea, not a natural species” (PhP 199).
This sublimation of the organism and its vital dialectic could be seen as a matter
of what Merleau-Ponty—citing the work of Schilder (1923), as well as of Menninger-
Lerchenthal (1934) and Lhermitte (1939)—referred to at one point as “organic
repression” [« refoulement organique »] (PhP 92). The general thought behind
this (originally Freudian) notion is that in addition to psychological mechanisms
of repression pertaining to the level of representation, there also exist biological
mechanisms pertaining to the level of bodily affect. Something along these lines is key to
Merleau-Ponty’s account of the specific pathologies that characterize cases of phantom
limb syndrome and anosognosia. But still, Merleau-Ponty did not seem to place too
much stock in this distinction between different modalities of repression. Repression
is, he claimed, “a universal phenomenon,” and “all repression is the passage from first-
person existence to a sort of pedantic abstraction [scolastique] of this existence”—in
this way, he described it as “the advent of the impersonal” (PhP 99, italics added).
Rather than in terms of “organic repression,” then, we can get a better handle on
the sublimation of the organism in terms of this idea of “the advent of the impersonal.”
What is supposed to occur in this sublimation is the absorption or transposition of the
vital dialectical tendencies and exigencies of the biological organism as such into the
historically specific operative intentionalities and affects of the subject “engaged in a
 Totality and Embodiment 63

certain physical and interhuman world” (PhP 97). There is a “natural movement” that
becomes an interwoven part of the impersonal worldly inherence of individuals. If we
construe biological embodiment in “first-person” terms of some kind, then it is in this
sense that its sublimation can be seen as part of “the advent of the impersonal.” Here it
is important to keep in mind that “the impersonal” does not denote a general negation
of “the personal,” but rather a specific kind of anonymity that is the presupposed
counterpart to “the personal” in the context of être-au-monde.
Second, the habitual body is also—and perhaps principally—the product of the
repression of actual embodied experience. Although still perhaps within the ambit of
“organic repression,” this aspect tracks more closely the more common understanding
of repression as a psychopathological condition, according to which, in Merleau-
Ponty’s gloss, “the subject commits to a certain path  .  . ., encounters on this path a
barrier and, having the strength neither to surmount the obstacle nor to abandon
the undertaking, he remains trapped in this attempt and endlessly uses his strength
repeating it in his mind” (PhP 98). What is to be especially noted about this view of
repression is that it is concerned directly with temporality and historicity: “the subject
always remains open to the same impossible future, if not in his explicit thoughts, then
at least in his actual [effectif] being. One present among all presents thus acquires an
exceptional value, displacing the others and divesting them of their value as authentic
presents. . . . Impersonal time continues to flow, but personal time is knotted up [noué]”
(PhP 98).5
Viewed as “the advent of the impersonal” from this angle, the habitual body is the
repository of the general form or structure of past experience. It is primarily in this way
that, as a universal phenomenon, repression “clarifies our condition as incarnate beings
by connecting it to the temporal structure of être au monde” (PhP 99). As noted above,
though, an impersonal habitual body is an essential aspect of human existence. Thus,
even if it is in some sense always a “pedantic abstraction,” the repression involved in the
formation of the habitual body is not necessarily pathological at all. On the contrary,
it is, at least to a certain degree, a positively healthy mechanism that is indispensable
for human self-realization—historicity requires repression. It becomes pathological
only when it goes too far and becomes existentially preponderant, when the balance is
skewed in the sense that what should provide anchorage for personal existence actually
smothers it and arrests its development.
As a product of this dual form of repression—the sedimentation of the general
form of experience, infused with and animated by sublimated biological tendencies,
the habituated organism—which, in the discussion in question, Merleau-Ponty often
refers to as “the physiological” or even simply as “the organism”—has an intentional
orientation just as the personal or “psychical” dimension of existence does. This
orientation is typically not the same at the two levels, and in terms of intentionality,
the former has a prereflective character while the latter is reflective. Each thus has its
own history or temporal rhythm that, in typical cases, does not overlap entirely with
the other—Merleau-Ponty describes that of the habituated organism as “banal and
cyclical,” that is, “monotonous,” while that of the psychical “may be open and singular”
(PhP 103). But what is important is that the banality of the habituated organism is a
source of meaning in history. Indeed, it is a very important source of historical meaning.
64 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

For this is the concrete locus of historical apriority. It is in virtue of literally embodying
certain generic or stereotypical dispositions that “the subject of history does not create
his role completely,” but rather tends to act in certain predelineated ways (PhP 103).
And in a characteristic move, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion, which had been concerned
with cases of phantom limb syndrome and anosognosia, makes sudden reference to
Louis XVI and Nicholas II as subjects of history constrained a priori by the roles they
embodied—strictly speaking, they are “repressed” in essentially the same way, in that
their behavior likewise stemmed from their habituated organism understood as an
“inborn complex” [complexe inné]. In this light, Merleau-Ponty affirms that “history is
neither a perpetual novelty nor a perpetual repetition, but a single [unique] movement
which creates stable forms and breaks them” (PhP 104). This is an elaboration of the
fundamental perception of history, on account of which, as noted above, Merleau-
Ponty is able to include the organism in history—as he put it immediately following
this last point, “the organism and its monotonous dialectics are therefore not extraneous
to history as though inassimilable to it” (PhP 104, italics added).
It is thus the univocal logic that Merleau-Ponty claimed is characteristic of human
history perceived as a meaningful dialectical totality, in connection with the claim
that the organismic and personal dimensions of human existence do not generate
two distinct histories, that enables him to include the organism within the historical
totality, and specifically as pertaining to the dimension of its apriority.
Two further consequences follow from this. First, it follows that human existence
at the individual level, which unfolds within the Gestalt totality of history, is likewise
to be considered an existential totality and to be approached holistically. As indicated
earlier, the existential unity of human être-au-monde cannot be affirmed legitimately
at the level of individual existence itself, and Merleau-Ponty’s justification for it turns
on the transcendental necessity of unity at a higher level. Analogously to how one
first comes to see one’s environing world as such from the higher standpoint of the
world, individual human embodied existence can be glimpsed as a totality only from
the perspective of the larger encompassing totality of human history. Second, it is
on this basis alone that Merleau-Ponty could affirm the otherwise unprovable claim
(noted earlier) that “there is not a single movement in a living body that is completely
accidental with regard to psychic intentions, nor a single psychic act that has not found
at least its germ or its general outline in physiological dispositions” (PhP 104). That is,
it is only as a deduction from his transcendental claim that human être-au-monde is an
existential totality—which itself is a deduction from his transcendental claims about
history—that he can posit a quasi-isomorphism of this sort—the most important
aspect of which is the implication that every bodily movement or gesture bears some
connection to higher-order intentionalities, that any such movement or gesture has
historical significance because it is enacted inescapably on the basis of the currently
operative a priori structures of history.
■
The main consequence of the transcendental claims in question here is that Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenological approach to embodiment must be situated within both
the methodological as well as the normative horizons of the historical totality as
he perceived it. Before bringing this to bear upon the discussion of Saint Exupéry,
 Totality and Embodiment 65

it may be helpful to emphasize clearly that, contrary to standard interpretations,

Merleau-Ponty’s approach to and account of history is not based upon an attempt, as
Taylor Carman (for one) recently expressed it, “to extend some of the basic insights
of his phenomenology [of perception] into the political sphere” (Carman 2008, 24; cf.
Roland Caillois 1947; Miller 1979, 207f; Whiteside 1988, 155). Merleau-Ponty would
fully agree that there is no legitimate Gestalt-theoretic basis for any such analogical
move from body to world. But he would vigorously disagree with the claim that this
is because “[t]here is no totalizing perspective for an entire society as there is for a
single perceptual subject” (Carman 2008, 163). On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty,
it is only at the level of the historical world that we can begin with totality—and
indeed, as he put it to Jaspers, this “belongs to the necessities of our life.” It thus
follows that the order of logical priority is precisely the reverse from what is typically
assumed. That is, methodologically speaking, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology
begins with a holistic view of the world in its historical becoming—what he once
called “the Idea in the Hegelian sense” (PhP xiii)—which is then extended down to
the level of perceptual experience. As noted, it is only because he is already working
on the basis of the perceptual givenness of history as a totality that Merleau-Ponty
can approach the phenomena of our embodied existence in holistic terms. This is a
transcendental claim that derives from the deeper intuition regarding history. Absent
the encompassing unity of its external historical horizon, there is simply no legitimate
phenomenological justification for adopting a totalizing perspective on the perceptual
subject. This is particularly crucial with regard to all the results that Merleau-Ponty
draws from considerations of pathological phenomena—in particular, his important
discussions of the case of “patient Schn.” would have no definite philosophical
import whatsoever without his philosophy of history. Approaching être-au-monde
holistically may, of course, ultimately prove to be phenomenologically valid. But
such validity would derive its epistemic status from the place of the phenomena
within the horizons of the historical world as an open-ended process of becoming. It
is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, including his
approach to embodiment, cannot be properly understood in abstraction from his
philosophy of history and the normative commitments underpinning it.

Earlier references to Saint Exupéry (Part 2)

Such is the context for Merleau-Ponty’s initial references to Saint Exupéry. How does
the foregoing discussion bear upon them?
Let us first recall the passage in question, which reads as follows, with the footnoted
references inserted and italicized:

Just as we speak of a repression [refoulement] in the restricted sense when

I maintain through time one of the momentary worlds through which I have
passed and which I make into the form of my entire life, – in the same way we
can say that my organism, as a pre-personal adherence to the general form of
the world, as an anonymous and general existence, plays, beneath the level of my
66 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

personal life, the role of an inborn complex [complexe inné]. It is not like an inert
thing, [for] it too delineates [ébauche] the movement of existence. It can even
happen in cases of danger that my human situation effaces [efface] my biological
one, that my body enters into action unreservedly [que mon corps se joigne sans
réserve à l’action].
Thus, Saint-Exupéry, over Arras, surrounded by [enemy] fire, no longer feels
as something distinct from himself this body which, just moments before, was
recoiling: “It is as if my life were given to me every second, as if with every
second my life were becoming more palpable. I live. I am living. I am still
living. I am always living. I am nothing but a source of life.”
But these moments can be no more than moments,
“To be sure, though, in the course of my life, when not directed by anything
urgent, when my meaning is not at stake, I see no problems more serious than
those of my body.”
and most of the time personal existence represses the organism without being able
to disregard it nor to give itself up, – that is, without being able to reduce the
organism to itself nor to reduce itself to the organism.

Merleau-Ponty’s basic claims here seem to run like this: personal existence represses
“actual” corporeality and embodied experience, thereby generating the habituated
organism as an “inborn complex.” Biological tendencies are sublimated and personal
experience is sedimented in an anonymized and generalized form, with the result
that human corporeal existence has a dual temporal structure and a corresponding
intentional duality—for the organism does have an existential impetus of its own,
something that is made visible in those limit cases, like that of Saint Exupéry, when
“my body enters into action unreservedly.” For Merleau-Ponty, repression along these
lines is normal, but also normally incomplete, such that normal human corporeal
existence is characterized by historical movement aimed at achieving an equilibrium
at as high a level of integration as possible.
Normal existence would thus be delimited by two different limit cases: at one
extreme, the reduction of the habituated organism to personal existence (bodily
disregard), and at the other extreme, the reduction of personal existence to the
habituated organism (self-renunciation). One of these limit cases is illustrated in the
reference to Saint Exupéry—but which is it?
On the one hand, the idea of “effacing” my “biological situation” might suggest
that what is involved is primarily a matter of bodily disregard—or more specifically, a
matter of the complete instrumentalization of my body for the purposes of an action
determined by my personal existence. In other words, it might seem that the illustration
from Saint Exupéry is meant to describe how, in extreme situations of mortal danger,
I can use my body in the service of my personal existential choices in ways that are
both radically inhabitual as well as contrary to the vital tendencies of the organism as
such. This would imply that what is going on with Saint Exupéry, at least in Merleau-
Ponty’s view, is a temporary moment of the complete repression—or perhaps more
accurately, the complete suppression [Unterdrückung] (cf. Ayouch 2008, 341)—of the
habituated organism. This would be a moment of complete bodily disregard that would
 Totality and Embodiment 67

correspond to a moment of the complete (and likewise temporary) un-repression of

personal existence—an exceptional moment in which individual spontaneity triumphs
over the exigencies of biology and the inauthenticity of habitual anonymity.
Although it may be initially tempting to adopt such a view, it is, I believe, mistaken.
For on the other hand, and quite to the contrary, it would be much more plausible
to claim that Merleau-Ponty’s point was to illustrate the complete—though again,
temporary—repression of “actual” corporeality as a way of bringing the habituated
organism to phenomenological givenness and thereby showing that it has its own
existential dynamic. For as he said, it is not inert, as “it too delineates the movement
of existence”—and my “body entering into action unreservedly” was clearly meant
to illustrate this. The action in question thus stems from the habituated organism—
that is, the body that “enters into action unreservedly” is the habituated organism. The
“effacement of my biological situation” thus refers to the complete repression of my
“actual” body. It is, after all, to my “human” situation, not my “personal” one, that
Merleau-Ponty attributes this “effacement”—and surely, he did not mean to imply
that biological exigencies could be wholly suspended, even temporarily. It is in
complete repression that one coincides with one’s embodiment in the way Merleau-
Ponty describes of Saint Exupéry—and the embodiment with which one coincides
is the habituated organism. Contrary to the first view, the emphasis is clearly
meant to be on the autonomous activity, not the passive instrumentalization, of the
habituated organism. Entirely consistent with Saint Exupéry’s view of the matter,
it would seem that for Merleau-Ponty, existential abandon (the term is felicitous)
in the face of mortal danger is a personally selfless act—or we should perhaps say
that mortal danger exists only in the perception of an individual, while existential
abandon in the face of it stems from the “anonymous and general” level of existence.
It is a matter, to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, of the dialectics of the habituated
organism “demanding their own due” and directing the agency of my—or rather,
this—body accordingly. And if so, then this would imply that the illustration from
Saint Exupéry is primarily a matter of complete personal self-renunciation, the
momentary reduction of “actual” corporeality and first-personal existence to the
habituated organism—a moment of consummate repression whereby one comes to
coincide temporarily with one’s “inborn complex.”
The second citation from Saint Exupéry might seem to offer better support for the
view that I am rejecting, since it seems to imply that what characterizes the exceptional
moment is the absence of the sort of bodily issues that typically predominate, suggesting
that it is outside of those moments that the body exists in its own right, rather than,
as I have claimed, that it is precisely in such moments that the body, as the habituated
organism, manifests itself most clearly on its own terms.
Yet this contrasting view clearly equivocates with regard to the body in its “actual”
and habitual dimensions. More importantly, such a reading of the second citation does
not fit particularly well with Merleau-Ponty’s main point, namely, that the “actual” body
is normally (albeit incompletely) repressed. The exceptional moment that he described
with the help of Saint Exupéry is supposed to illuminate this repression by showing
what it leads to, namely, the anonymous habituated organism and its selfless tendency
toward universal life. That, for Merleau-Ponty, is the organism on its own terms, not what
68 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

the contrary reading of the second citation would suggest, to wit, that the organism per
se is to be discerned in a bunch of bodily “problems”—it is highly implausible that that
would be Merleau-Ponty’s view here. That may well describe the typical experience of
the organism, but that is because it situates it within human existence as a whole, which
is to say, it situates the organism in its tension-filled relation with personal existence—
that alone is the context in which the organism can be construed as raising problems,
but that is clearly not where it exists on its own terms. In other words, although the
second citation from Saint Exupéry might seem to describe the organism when it has
returned to itself, at least for Merleau-Ponty in the discussion in question, it actually
describes the organism in its typical state of significant but not total repression, as in
his claim that “most of the time personal existence represses the organism without
being able to disregard it,” that is, it still raises problems vis-à-vis personal existence.
But when it is wholly and problemlessly engaged in action, that can only be because all
contrary personal or individual motives have been repressed.
In sum, although Merleau-Ponty’s discussion contains numerous terminological
ambiguities that will prevent any reading of it from being absolutely watertight, the
soundest analysis of it shows that Merleau-Ponty meant for the references to Saint
Exupéry to disclose the operative intentionality of the habituated organism on its
own terms by glimpsing its activity in a moment of the total repression of “actual”
corporeality and embodied experience. To be sure, in existential terms, this complete
repression or de-actualization is abnormal, even pathological. But there is nothing at
all unusual in Merleau-Ponty using pathological cases to arrive at phenomenological
insights. It is just that the fact that this case is pathological, and is being dealt with as
such, is not as obvious as it may be in other cases.

Consequences
What does all of this mean, then, given that the episode in question—Saint Exupéry’s
perilous flight over Arras—is the same as that which is invoked at the very end of
Phenomenology of Perception? In other words, what is implied by the fact that, for
Merleau-Ponty, “heroism” is a pathological matter of complete self-repression?
I shall develop this further in subsequent chapters. But what we have seen in this
chapter strongly confirms the earlier claim that, taken literally, the invocation of
Exupérian heroism at the end of Phenomenology of Perception represents a moment of
radical disincarnation. And it also coheres strongly with Saint Exupéry’s own account
as far as rejecting any construal of the action in question in terms of individual agency.
Merleau-Ponty is not interested in heroism per se, however, but in the fact that it is
phenomenologically disclosive of something of the utmost importance for his view,
namely, the latent existence within habituated organismicity, at least in the current
historical context, of an operative intentionality toward universal life, and the fact that
this intentionality represents the historical apriority governing all action in that context.
In other words, with regard to heroism, it is the evidence afforded by actions that
are effected in a pathological state of total repression, yet which nonetheless remain
generative of historical sense and significance, that enabled Merleau-Ponty to claim
 Totality and Embodiment 69

that the logic of history forming the core of his understanding of Marxism was more
than just some dogmatic partisan assumption.
In particular, this conception of heroism is what enabled Merleau-Ponty to say,
in line with classical Marxism, that the historical movement toward a postcapitalist
society is already immanent and underway (HT 135f/126), but that as a consequence—
and here he deviated from classical Marxism on account of his conceiving the social
in corporeal terms—revolutionary change is not to be pursued through historical
action aimed at effecting a radical structural break with the present, but rather,
through forms of action that are geared toward the concrete realization of the latent
universal content of existing structures. In other words, it supports what we might
call an “incarnational Marxism,” in the sense that the fundamental structures of
universal reconciliation are already embodied collectively and impersonally, and
that the revolutionary task is therefore not to impose radically new social structures,
but to realize those already tacitly embodied at the level of the habituated organism
more fully at the level of “actual” embodied existence. As shall be discussed further in
Chapters 4 and 5, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of heroism, especially inasmuch as it involves
total repression, was intended as part of an effort to rethink the Marxist category of
the proletariat in existential terms. The central idea is that the lack of an existentially
“healthy” equilibrium between “actual” and habitual corporeality—and hence the
lack of freedom—within individual human existence is effectively identical with the
lack of “harmony between the individual [in general] and history,” which Merleau-
Ponty regarded as an existential “postulate of human existence” in the sense of being
a necessary condition of the realization of humanity.6 Inasmuch as the latter can be
viewed in terms of freedom construed socially, it follows that for Merleau-Ponty, there
is a mutually implicatory relation between the realization of humanity and freedom at
the individual level.
And broadly speaking, it is this political perspective that enabled Merleau-Ponty to
complete and thus save phenomenology methodologically, that is, from the speculative
construction of Fink. What is needed is a concrete apprehension of the outermost
horizons of experience, and Merleau-Ponty supplied this with a prereflective existential
interpretation of Lukács’ idea of an “intention toward totality”—which, as he noted in
reply to Jaspers, arises “the moment [one] takes a political position” (EE 252, italics
added). This is fundamentally why, for Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology—and a fortiori
his phenomenology of embodiment—is “profoundly and intrinsically political” (Coole
2007, 123). It is not from any philosophically arbitrary desire that it be so, any desire
to “politicize” philosophy, or from any kind of extraneous connection at all. Rather,
it stems from the fact that what phenomenology requires intrinsically to achieve
methodological closure can only come from the practical realm of political engagement.
This solution is, of course, not unique—different political perspectives on history can
be adopted, and these would frame different interpretations of phenomenology. For
his part, Merleau-Ponty believed that in existential and normative terms, the most
defensible historical perspective was one broadly in line with classical Marxism—and
as we have seen, this has significant implications for the methodological structure of
his phenomenology, which in turn has ramifications with regard to his basic approach
to embodiment. And this is how heroism fits in. By bringing to phenomenological
70 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

givenness the latent tendency toward universal life in the contemporary world
understood as a historical period of generalized repression and unfreedom, heroic
action—or rather, the third-person experience of it—forms a connection between
embodied inherence in that world and the concomitant possibilities of philosophy
and revolutionary politics. I shall explore this in more detail in the next two chapters.
What will be important to bear in mind, though, is that in providing indispensable
experiential evidence that contributes crucially to justifying this overall perspective,
and precisely because it does so, for Merleau-Ponty heroism itself necessarily remains
external to the philosophical and political projects in question, in the sense that its
involvement occurs indirectly through its dialectical sublimation.
 4

Elements of an Incarnational Marxism

We have seen that, for Merleau-Ponty, the heroic action of Saint Exupéry referred
to at the end of Phenomenology of Perception is a matter of total repression of his
“actual” body, and that precisely for this reason, it discloses an operative intentionality
toward universal life which, residing in the anonymity of the habituated organism,
is a structure of historical apriority in the contemporary world. This was a key part
of Merleau-Ponty’s response to Fink as it enabled him to obviate the need for what
the latter had termed “secondary enworlding,” which was central to his proposal for
a “constructive” phenomenology (see Preface). This will be further elaborated in the
Conclusion.
To that end, however, we need first to relate the climax of Phenomenology of
Perception  to Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism in more detail. We have already seen how,
in general, Merleau-Ponty’s thought, at least since The Structure of Behavior, was
situated within a philosophical framework consistent with Marxism, and that in
the postwar period, he specifically tried to take up and redeem Lukács’ account of
“orthodox Marxism.” It is ultimately in terms of this redemption that Merleau-Ponty’s
notion of heroism needs to be located and understood—this is intertwined with his
reinterpretation of phenomenology, but in methodological terms priority goes to the
political dimension.
In order to address further the philosophical role and significance of Exupérian
heroism in Merleau-Ponty’s project, then, this chapter will explore certain themes in
his thought, some of which have tended to receive short shrift in the literature, but
all of which turn out to be quite relevant to the question at hand, inasmuch as they
have to do with Merleau-Ponty’s elaboration of what I earlier called an “incarnational
Marxism,” which provides the basic sense of his attempted redemption of Lukács. I
will first consider the themes of sacrifice and death in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and
then discuss how Merleau-Ponty understood his existential phenomenology as a
project of political hermeneutics. I then consider this with respect to Merleau-Ponty’s
effort to rethink the Marxist category of the proletariat qua “universal class,” and the
idea of its world-historical revolutionary role, in existential terms. In particular, I
examine Merleau-Ponty’s account of the tacit cogito as the basic phenomenon of class
consciousness. Finally, I draw these ideas together in terms of what Merleau-Ponty
called “human productivity” and the conception of rationality that results from all of
this. Although there are, to be sure, many points in this thematic survey that invite
deeper analysis, it shall nonetheless emerge clearly that the cumulative import of these
72 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

considerations pertains to Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to reinterpret Marxism in a way

that would be both militant and philosophically coherent. This reinterpretation has to
do primarily with the philosophy of history, and it hinges on a certain conception of
“heroism” that will be considered in more detail in Chapter 5.

Merleau-Ponty on sacrifice and death

Although the themes of sacrifice and death are not treated at length by Merleau-Ponty,
and scarcely at all in the literature devoted to his work, in the context of his appeal to
Exupérian heroism, they turn out to be quite significant. For Merleau-Ponty’s views
concerning sacrifice are strongly contrary to those stated by Saint Exupéry, and these
are connected to an attitude vis-à-vis death that bears directly upon the political
dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology.

Sacrifice
There are two texts prior to Phenomenology of Perception that need to be considered
with respect to the theme of sacrifice. As we shall see, despite certain important
differences, in each case, Merleau-Ponty makes a philosophical argument against
the cogency of the notion of sacrifice, and this in a way that gestures toward his later
construal of Marxism in incarnational terms.
First, there is Merleau-Ponty’s review of Max Scheler’s Ressentiment [1912], written
a decade before Phenomenology of Perception.1 Here, Merleau-Ponty expressed, in
Christian terms, a defense of ascetic self-denial that was not altogether dissimilar
from Exupérian heroism. Siding with Scheler’s defense of Christianity—at least
in its “true” form—against the Nietzschean accusation that its aspiration toward
the “Kingdom of God” is based on a resentful “devaluation of the earth,” Merleau-
Ponty argued that the sacrifice of “natural movement” is not opposed to life, but
rather signifies merely a certain “spontaneous indifference” to its own biological
circumstances. Such spontaneity occurs immediately in non-human life: “in its
naïve force, the life of plants and animals does not obsess over its vital welfare.” With
regard to humanity, then, what Christianity seeks, according to Merleau-Ponty, is to
impart “a confidence and a spontaneity” that would be “supernatural” [surnaturelles],
and “what [it] proscribes is precisely, and in the strongest sense of the word, a ‘vital
debility’ [« débilité vitale »]” (CR 14/88, citing Scheler). Here, rather than as a system
of self-preservation, Merleau-Ponty regarded life as a kind of self-overcoming, as “an
expansion or a prodigality,” indifference to the particular details of which can indeed
have a “vital value” (CR 13/87f).
But this is equivocal—for “the assurance of the Christian is only analogous to
the vital confidence of natural beings” (CR 16/89, emphasis added). It is thus not
philosophically clear how Christianity can “back both horses” and simultaneously lay
evaluative claim to both natural and supernatural life (CR 16/89). Merleau-Ponty’s
suggestion was that the separation of these can only be maintained on the problematic
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 73

basis of unfounded philosophical prejudice—in Nietzsche’s case, “biological monism.”

If, however, quoting Scheler, “ ‘a logic of the heart reveals, beyond vital needs, an
objective structure of spiritual and religious value, [then] Christianity can no longer
be accused of depreciating terrestrial life through the sole fact that it aspires to
something else: transcendence can no longer be the sublimation of a vital weakening’
[la sublimation d’un affaiblissement vital]” (CR 23f/93f, emphasis added).
■
The second text to consider with regard to the theme of sacrifice is The Structure
of Behavior, which, as noted earlier, Merleau-Ponty completed in  1938. Here, he
no longer upheld a Christian perspective, and his thinking was disencumbered of
certain unwarranted claims—in particular, the existence of “an objective structure of
spiritual and religious value” and the metaphysical assurance that that would afford.
Merleau-Ponty now linked such assurance with critical philosophy’s misguided
dream of achieving complete individual integration—the absolute self-consciousness
of the pure subject whose history “is subordinated to its eternity” (SC 222/206),
and for whom death would be rendered meaningless (SC 220/204). It is ultimately
the impossibility of precisely this consummate individuation that Merleau-Ponty
sought to demonstrate in The Structure of Behavior. He maintained instead that
genuine lucidity can only come from facing up to our finite historical situation,
not by projecting our preferred idealizations onto it. There is no absolute: “the
contingency of the lived perpetually threatens the eternal significations in which it
is believed to be completely expressed” (SC 240/223). Death therefore has a meaning
that is crucial to the meaningfulness of life. Merleau-Ponty thus insisted on the need
“to assure oneself that the experience of eternity is not the unconsciousness of death”
(SC 240/223). This is no less important than the distinction, which he upheld more
firmly than before, between “the love of life” [l’amour de la vie] and biological self-
preservation (SC 240/224). In fact, following Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty held that
human self-preservation is a “phenomenon of disease,” that it is just a pathologically
limited manner of self-actualization (SC 190n1/245n97; cf. Goldstein  1934, 162;
1995, 337). The real essence of human life is to project itself beyond situations—
not just biological, but also humanly created ones (SC 189/175). It is fundamentally
an orientation to the possible (SC 190/176). “The healthy man proposes to live, to
attain certain objects in the world or beyond [au delà] the world, and not to preserve
himself.” This is not to set healthiness in opposition to self-preservation. It is merely to
assert that the norms of healthiness are existential and thus ultimately independent of
biological existence. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty noted, some suicides can be understood
as manifesting the primacy of existential over biological norms by showing that “man
is capable of situating his proper being, not in biological existence, but at the level of
properly human relations” (SC 190 n1/246 n97, emphasis added). It is noteworthy
in this regard that Merleau-Ponty drew close links between acts of suicide and acts
of revolution: “both presuppose the capacity of rejecting the given milieu and of
searching for equilibrium beyond any milieu” (SC 190/175, 245 n97).
Although the conclusion of The Structure of Behavior can be summed up in
terms of the pithy methodological desideratum, expressed in the final paragraph, “to
74 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

define transcendental philosophy anew in such a way as to integrate with it the very
phenomenon of the real” (SC 241/224), what this portends is, in certain ways, more
clearly revealed in the claim made in the penultimate paragraph to the effect that,
given the fulfillment of that desideratum, “the sacrifice of life will be philosophically
impossible; it will be a question only of ‘staking’ [« mettre en jeu »] one’s life, which is
a deeper way of living” [une manière plus profonde de vivre] (SC 240/224, emphasis
added). The philosophical impossibility of sacrifice announced here would not render
indefensible the self-denial of which Merleau-Ponty had earlier defended the vital
possibility. Nor does it necessarily render revolutionary martyrdom indefensible. It just
rules out understanding it as self-sacrifice on the grounds that there is no overarching,
authoritative framework within which a sacrificial gesture involving one’s biological
being could be meaningfully made. It is the metaphysical impossibility of giving or
exchanging one’s life for some future state of affairs. For there is no eternal Absolute
that could serve as the guarantor—the clearinghouse, as it were—of any such economy.
This by no means rules out the possibility of giving one’s life, nor of holding false
beliefs concerning the possibility of doing so sacrificially.2 But it does aim to render
philosophically indefensible any attempt to disburden oneself of responsibility for one’s
life (and ultimately death), or to misunderstand the life (and/or death) of another, by
trying to derive its meaning from the future. Meaning is immanent in the present. If life
is, in fact, a matter of venturesome self-actualization in the absence of eternal truths,
then recognition of the metaphysical impossibility of sacrificing it should encourage
that non-biological “love of life” that can push the bounds of personal, communal,
and historical integration. As we shall see, it was along these lines that Merleau-Ponty
sought to interpret Saint Exupéry’s glorification of self-sacrifice in immanent (and thus
incarnational) terms.
The metaphysical impossibility of sacrifice claimed by Merleau-Ponty in The
Structure of Behavior also has a specific philosophical significance, to wit, the
methodological claim that transcendental insight concerning the a priori conditions
of lived experience cannot be obtained from a standpoint that would be situated
outside of or beyond human life, but can only be achieved from within. It must be
the case, then, that transcendental philosophy is a function of human existence—this
is in effect what Merleau-Ponty meant in saying that it would have to be “integrated
with the very phenomenon of the real.” But given the contingency and finitude of “the
real,” transcendental philosophy cannot be underwritten by any sort of metaphysical
guarantee. Lest it illicitly take for granted what it seeks to achieve, transcendental
philosophy cannot avoid hazarding commitment to some normative standpoint
concerning the meaningfulness of reality, such that it too, like any act of genuine
transcendence, will be a matter of “staking one’s life.”
Merleau-Ponty thereby claimed that, from the perspective of transcendental
philosophy, engagement is not simply something commendable or even imperative in
a distinct ethical sense, but rather that it is epistemically necessary. This was closely in
line with the personalist views of Landsberg:

At the same time as being a necessity of moral life, engagement for a historical
cause that incarnates certain values is an indispensable means of knowledge
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 75

itself. This kind of engagement alone makes a profound knowledge possible, . . .

knowledge of the historicity that we live, . . . a genuine comprehension of history
that happens solely in the act of solidarizing and identifying with a cause.
(Landsberg 1937, 187)

For Landsberg as for Merleau-Ponty, just as engagement calls for a transcendental-

philosophical justification, transcendental philosophy implies a stance of engagement.
But whereas Landsberg drew a distinction between my experience of historical
inherence and the choice or decision I make to align with one “cause” over others,
Merleau-Ponty, aiming to work out the standpoint of philosophy and philosophical
truth itself, inclined to Marxism in part as a way of providing a more univocal view of
history that would integrate what Landsberg held distinct. Always averse to any sort
of potentially arbitrary or irrational decisionism, Merleau-Ponty thus deviated from
Landsberg’s conception of engagement in that for him, it was not premised on the idea
of realizing something in the future (Landsberg 1937, 1980)—an orientation that leaves
open the possibility of sacrifice. Rather, working within the limits of immanence as
described above, Merleau-Ponty’s basic claim here is that the project of transcendental
philosophy itself ultimately just is a kind of engagement.

Death
In “L’existentialisme chez Hegel” (SNS 109–121/63–70), a short but dense discussion
that was ostensibly a critical review of a lecture given by Jean Hyppolite on Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit,3 Merleau-Ponty articulated a view concerning death that is of
considerable significance for understanding his existential phenomenology.
In his lecture, Hyppolite had more or less concurred with the Kierkegaardian
critique of Hegelianism in general as an abstract systematization of the world that
excludes or suppresses existence. With respect to Phenomenology of Spirit, however,
Hyppolite claimed that although it did ultimately subordinate individual existence to
abstract universality, Hegel had actually dealt therein with real human existence, “the
full scope of human experience” (Hyppolite 1971, 94). He described Hegel’s account
of the emergence of self-consciousness through the acquisition of an internalized
awareness of the negativity of personal death as the irruption of a new modality of
distinctly human being—namely, existence. “The taking consciousness of life is thus
something other than life pure and simple, and human existence, like the knowledge of
life, is a new way of being which we can well call existence” (Hyppolite 1971, 95).
Merleau-Ponty was by and large in agreement with Hyppolite, except in one
important respect. Whereas Hyppolite limited the protoexistentialism of Hegel
to certain parts of Phenomenology of Spirit, on the grounds that Hegel’s account of
“absolute knowledge” ultimately sewed up the dialectical movement of existence in
such a way that the meaning of history would subsume that of individual death (thus
legitimating sacrifice), Merleau-Ponty sought to separate the whole of Phenomenology
of Spirit from Hegel’s later “orthodox” idealism as his contribution to existential
philosophy. That is, Merleau-Ponty offered a qualified defense of Hegelian absolute
knowledge circa 1807 against the sort of Kierkegaardian critique of its systematization
76 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

circa 1827—that is, when Hegel had written his Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right—
that Hyppolite allowed.
Thus, not unlike Hyppolite, Merleau-Ponty argued that Hegel’s thought is
existentialist “in the sense that it views man not as being from the start a consciousness
in full possession of its own clear thoughts, but as a life which is given to itself [donnée
à elle-même] and which tries to understand itself.” But he adds, “all of Phenomenology
of Spirit describes man’s efforts to recover [ressaisir] himself ” (SNS 113/65, emphasis
added). Merleau-Ponty thus interpreted “absolute knowledge” as “the final stage of the
evolution of spirit as phenomenon [l’esprit-phénomène] wherein consciousness at last
becomes equal to its spontaneous life and regains its self-possession.” Crucially, he
suggested that this was not so much a philosophy as “a way of living [une manière de
vivre].” Or, as he also put it, it was a “militant” philosophy (SNS 112/64; cf. 237/134).
Concerning the theological trichotomy between “the Church triumphant,” “the Church
suffering,” and “the Church militant” (see Chapter 2, note 22), Merleau-Ponty explicitly
attributed the first view to the “orthodox” Hegel, and the third to the reading of Hegel
that he himself was defending as his own view. It would seem that he implicitly meant
to associate Hyppolite’s position—presumably along with many other formulations of
existentialism—with some sense of purgatorial suffering.
In contrast to both the undue pessimism of the purgatorial view and the undue
optimism of the triumphant view, Merleau-Ponty construed the movement of human
existence in “militant” terms as contingently directed toward a “genuine reconciliation
between men” (SNS 112/65). He argued that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit offered
a richer—because thoroughly intersubjective—view of human existence than that
found in it by Hyppolite, and he thought that this was precisely in virtue of the link
between absolute knowledge and death that Hyppolite found objectionable. Merleau-
Ponty thus defended the “deathliness” of Hegelian absolute knowledge as a key facet
of a living understanding of intersubjectivity. In his view, Hegel’s main philosophical
achievement as far as existentialism was concerned was to unmask the role played by the
consciousness of death in realizing rationality and achieving mutual understanding.
The key point for Merleau-Ponty is that “consciousness of life is, in a radical
sense, consciousness of death” (SNS 115/66). That is, the awareness we have of life
is ultimately rooted in our awareness of death, which enjoys a certain priority. The
gist of the argument that stands behind this claim is that consciousness, as a kind of
nothingness [néant] or negation of being, represents a “rupture” with life, where the
latter is understood as an anonymous preconscious force that spontaneously expends
itself in its action, and which is in itself devoid of self-awareness. And this rupture with
life shares some of the essential features of death. This holds even if, in accordance with
Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre, consciousness is understood nondichotomously as
only obtaining in a “hollow” [creux] as opposed to a “hole” [trou] in being.4 “Life is
only thinkable as presented to a consciousness of life which denies it” (SNS 116/67).
This rupture cannot be completely like death, though. At least not normally. It is
important to recognize that there are two senses of “life” here that Merleau-Ponty does
not distinguish explicitly: on the one hand, there is the sense of life as an anonymous,
spontaneous force subsisting below the level of consciousness. This sense has universal
import, and I shall refer to it as life-as-such. It was with this that Merleau-Ponty was
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 77

principally concerned—in particular, this is the object of what he calls “the love of life.”
On the other hand, there is the sense of life that refers to the particular manifestations
of life-as-such—I will refer to these simply as lives. Lives are founded on and thus
imply life-as-such, but the converse does not hold: life-as-such does not imply any
particular lives.
To construe consciousness-of-life as ultimately rooted in consciousness-of-death
is thus to say three things: first, that the proper object of consciousness-of-life is life-
as-such; second, that as a universal awareness, this consciousness involves a virtually
complete death-like rupture with particular lives, including one’s own; and third, that
this rupture is self-conscious, and hence consciousness of something essentially like
death, because, following Hegel, the experience of death stands at the very origin of
self-consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty thus effectively rendered death and life-as-such epistemically
indistinguishable. Although there is a certain truth in the idea that death individualizes,
it is evident that Merleau-Ponty was here distancing himself drastically from
Heidegger’s notion of Sein-zum-Tod (cf. Landsberg 1936, 41f). For Merleau-Ponty,
what alone is thinkable is on the contrary that death communalizes. When we seek
to think the totality of our existence in terms of death, as Heidegger, for example,
asks us to do, what we are really doing is thinking it in terms of life taken universally.
Hence Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “my consciousness of myself as death and
nothingness is deceitful [menteuse] and contains an affirmation of my being and my
life” (SNS 118/68). He turned to Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus et Cinéas for a forthright statement
concerning the alternative to Heidegger supposedly offered by French existentialism:
“Death does not exist for me while I am alive” (SNS 121/70, citing Beauvoir 1947, 61).
For Merleau-Ponty, this is supposed to mean that (normal) human existence is situated
within the universality of life-as-such, and that it is consequently directed toward self-
realization within historical horizons that transcend the life of the individual.
Such is the view that Merleau-Ponty wanted to defend against the deceitfulness
shared by purgatorial and triumphant views of existence. Accordingly, he claimed that
there are, broadly speaking, two ways of thinking about death (SNS 116f/67). The first
way, which Merleau-Ponty rejected, resentfully sees death as just an incomprehensible
and impenetrable end to existence. This view is thus “pathetic and complacent,” and
this is because it is deceived. Blind to the vital significance of death, it is blind to the
vital significance of its own life. The underlying problem with this way of approaching
death is that it is not self-consciously historical.
In contrast, the second way of thinking about death, which Merleau-Ponty
accepts, is self-consciously historical. Specifically, it is militant. This means—and
here Merleau-Ponty was contrasting himself to other readings of Hegel, notably
that of Hyppolite, but Sartre’s as well—that it recognizes both the abstractness of the
universality of life, and that this abstractness is the reason for the above deception.
“The abstract universal which starts out opposed to life must be made concrete.”
This approach—characterized by Merleau-Ponty as “dry and resolute” —thus “takes
up [assume] death and turns it into a more acute awareness of life.” It “interiorizes”
or “transmutes”—that is, sublimates—death into (particular) lives. In this way,
consciousness of death “goes beyond itself.” The negativity of death is deployed in
78 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

such a way as to promote the concrete realization of the underlying universality of

human coexistence, the incarnation of life-as-such.
The point of this is most clearly seen in Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the only
experience which brings me close to an authentic awareness of death is the experience
of contact with another” (SNS 117/68). Here, Merleau-Ponty offers his interpretation
of the struggle of consciousnesses as originally described by Hegel. Contrary to the
views of Kojève and Sartre, for example, the idea is that scrutiny of the encounter and
the ensuing conflict reveals that there must be an underlying common ground. “We
cannot be aware of the conflict unless we are aware of our reciprocal relationship and
our common humanity. We do not deny each other except by mutual recognition of
our consciousness” (SNS 118/68; cf. PhP 408). The experience of objectification, of the
death-like stripping away of all particularity, lays bare that “my consciousness of an
other as an enemy comprises an affirmation of him as an equal,” that is, as an equal
participant in life-as-such. Just as I find consciousness-of-life in consciousness-of-
death, so too do “I find myself in the other.” Otherness is thinkable only on the basis of
this sameness—recognition of which further revivifies my deathly self-awareness. “If I
am negation, then by following the implication of this universal negation to its ultimate
conclusion, I will see its self-denial and its transformation into coexistence” (SNS 118/68,
italics added).
Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, death is integral, not simply to historical life, but
to historical progress. At root, this is because history is made through transcendence,
the creative capacity of human existence to detach from the repetitiveness of life, to
step beyond ourselves, beyond our lives, such as to alter the conditions of life—I shall
further discuss this below in terms of “human productivity.” Although necessarily
underwritten by life-as-such, transcendence is a matter of the negativity of death, as
understood by Merleau-Ponty. Death is a vital part of life-as-such, for it is precisely
through it that life-as-such gains self-consciousness. The experience of vulnerability
and dependence—whether in the face of death or in the face of the other—decenters
my life, dislocates it temporally, drawing me out of myself in a way that elicits
productive involvement. The power that is revealed in such an experience is one that
“makes us wait with our own being somewhat in abeyance and in this way is a creative
power which is not of ourselves but which invites and makes possible our own creative
response” (Pax 1982, 198).
Such a temporal dislocation is central to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the
interiorization of death by the Hegelian slave [Knecht]. Recall that in the story told
by Hegel, what defines a slave is that he chooses life over death. What Merleau-
Ponty emphasizes in his interpretation is that the life chosen is life-as-such. The slave
“consents to live only for others,” according to Merleau-Ponty, “but it is still he who
wants to maintain his life at this price” (SNS 119/68f, emphasis added). The point in
putting it this way is to insist that there is—or at least there was in the past—vital
meaning and value even in servitude. To be sure, slavish living is unjust. But there
is always something that exceeds it, and it is this that accounts for the “love of life”
that puts the slave in contact with the “vital foundations” [assises vitales] of humanity,
giving the slave “the most exact awareness of the human situation” (SNS 118f/68f).
Familiarity with life-as-such is slavery’s hidden strength. This is why it is the slave who
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 79

makes history and why humanist egalitarianism will ultimately prevail: “it is he who
will finally have the only possible mastery—not at the expense of others, but at the
expense of nature” (SNS 119/69).
This is another way of expressing the historical process as the negation of the
negation of abstract individuality that culminates in universal reconciliation. The lives
of history’s slaves attest to the following general point, which is the most important
lesson that Merleau-Ponty draws from his reading of Hegel: “Death is the negation of all
particular given being, and consciousness of death is synonymous with consciousness
of the universal. . . . To be aware of death and to think or reason amount to the same
thing, since one thinks only by taking leave of the particularities of life [en quittant les
particularités de la vie] and thus by conceiving death” (SNS 115ff/67).
For Merleau-Ponty, this is tied to the realization of philosophy, inasmuch as it is a
matter of bringing rationality into being—overcoming, that is, the mutual separation
of particular consciousnesses in such a way that “perspectives meet up, perceptions
confirm each other, [and] a meaning emerges” (PhP xv). In other words, overcoming
what we might call the structural non-sense or even madness of a world of alienation
by “taking leave” of its particularities, and instead bringing forth the underlying
commonality and making that concrete. To realize philosophy is thus to redeem what
Merleau-Ponty called “the promise of humanity” [la promesse d’humanité] through a
process that grapples with death. “Learning the truth about death and struggle is the
long maturation process by which history overcomes its contradictions and fulfils the
promise of humanity—present in the consciousness of death and in the struggle with
the other—in the living relationship among men” (SNS 119/69). And this is why, at the
end of his discussion of Hegel and death, Merleau-Ponty suggested that existentialism
might be most completely defined

by the idea of a universality which men affirm or imply by the mere fact of their
being and at the very moment of their opposition to each other, in the idea of
a reason immanent in madness [déraison], of a freedom which becomes what it
is by giving itself bonds [liens], and to which the least perception, the slightest
movement of the heart, the smallest action, bear incontestable witness [sont les
témoignages incontestables]. (SNS 121/70)

Key here is that understanding human existence in terms of these paradoxical views of
universality, reason, and freedom, and in a way that implies the literal ubiquitousness
of corroborating experiential evidence, is possible only in virtue of the idea of a militant
intersubjective sublimation of death—as is encountered, for instance, at the very end of
Phenomenology of Perception.

Thinking the political

Inasmuch as the foregoing view of death bears upon the realization of authentic
intersubjectivity, it has consequences for the sort of engagement of which Merleau-
Ponty intended his existential phenomenology to be a part. And as we shall see, it
is ultimately in connection with his effort to rethink the Marxist understanding of
80 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

revolution—against tendencies that would approach it, at least in effect, as some sort of
mortal adventure—that the relevance of his view of heroism comes to light.
In “La Guerre a eu lieu,” published in  1945, Merleau-Ponty argued that French
philosophy, traditionally practiced from the isolated standpoint of the Cartesian
“meditating ego” (a perspective that Merleau-Ponty tended to assimilate as much to
Kantianism as to Cartesianism) (cf. SNS 257/145; cf. 180, 298/103, 168; NI 2 [23]),
had received from the experience of the war an incontrovertible “wake-up call,” so
to speak, such that its principal task now was to come to terms with what had been
“unthinkable” [impensable] from the traditional perspective—viz., politics (SNS
255/145). “Politics,” he wrote, “is impossible from the perspective of consciousness”
(SNS 256/145). This is because it has no grasp of the objective consequences of actions,
nor of the concrete interconnectivity of the human world. As Merleau-Ponty put it,
the abstract subjectivism of “this solitary Cartesian” means that “he does not see his
shadow behind him projected onto history as onto a wall, that meaning, that shape
which his actions assume on the outside, that Objective Spirit which is him” (SNS
257/146).5
The result of this was that in the interwar period, French philosophers (among
others) tended to inhabit an idealized political reality, upholding universal humanistic
values with an attitude of naïve pacifism. Phenomena that were inconsistent with
this universalism—in particular, those based on ascriptions of nationality and
“race”—were effectively dismissed as irrational and ultimately illusory. This is why,
according to Merleau-Ponty, the real significance and portent of epochal events in the
development of European fascism in the 1930s—such as the Anschluß, Guernica, and
Kristallnacht—were lost on so many French intellectuals (cf. NI 22 [2], 27 [8], 32 [13]).
And this was not a blameless ignorance. “No one’s hands are clean” (SNS 259/147), he
thought, because freedom is always ultimately complicit with worldly power.
For Merleau-Ponty, what the defeat of France in 1940 and the war as a whole taught
was, above all else, history (SNS 265/150).6 It was primarily in this way that his examen
de conscience and its critique of Cartesian rationalism avoided both conclusions of
a traditional religious nature, as well as the irrational conclusions to which certain
other, superficially similar analyses were led—for example, the reactionary perspective
of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle: “France was destroyed by the rationalism to which its spirit
had been reduced. Today, rationalism is dead. We can only rejoice in this collapse of
rationalism” (1941, 171). For Merleau-Ponty did not reject the old values. The problem
did not lie in those as such, but rather in the fact that they were not concrete. The
lesson was that “values remain nominal and indeed have no value without an economic
and political infrastructure that brings them into existence.  .  .  .  It is a question not
of giving up our values of 1939, but of realizing them [les accomplir]” (SNS 268/152,
emphasis added). To this end, philosophy needed to reorient itself so as to render
human coexistence, in all its contingency and complexity, thinkable as a historically
dynamic confluence of subjectivity and objectivity, of freedom and necessity. It needed
to reorient itself to the living present. That is, it needed to form its ideas “in contact
with the present” in order to be able to “accomodate all truths and to take a stand in
reality” (SNS 273/154, emphasis added). The solution rested on a certain conception
of totality—as discussed above, what was crucial in Merleau-Ponty’s view was to grasp
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 81

“the total intention” of society, “the Idea in the Hegelian sense” in which “everything
signifies everything” (PhP xiii; SNS 268/152). As Merleau-Ponty put it—wrapping
up “La Guerre a eu lieu” with a direct statement of the sort of gloss conventionally
applied (or rather misapplied) by commentators to Saint Exupéry’s words at the end
of Phenomenology of Perception—“there is nothing outside this unique fulguration of
existence” (SNS 269/152, italics added).7
It is interesting to note that Merleau-Ponty recognized that the totalistic character
of his political outlook had certain superficial affinities with fascist thought.8 This
is evident from a short document entitled “La Résistance: la France et le monde de
demain, par un philosophe” [“The Resistance: France and the World of Tomorrow,
by a philosopher”].9 Following discussions with Sartre and Jean-Toussaint Desanti,
Merleau-Ponty drafted this document toward the end of 1941.10 In it, he offered
a fairly pessimistic description of the French Resistance at the time as suffering a
profound spiritual crisis. Aside from its communist and conservative members, “the
majority of patriots have an ideology that is confused, hesitant, purely negative, or
else concerned solely with individual morality” (in Sartre 1970, 110), a situation that
manifested itself in “a kind of laziness and fatalism” (cited in Michel 1962, 421). In
this work, Merleau-Ponty attempted to account for this crisis in philosophical terms.
He linked the infirmities of the French to their “analytical spirit,” and contrasted this
with the “synthetic thinking” that elsewhere gave rise to totalitarianism, in particular
National Socialism. Merleau-Ponty cautiously commended this kind of thinking, “for
it alone permits one to give an account of the diversity and the interaction of situations,
whether particular or collective” (in Sartre 1970, 110). That is, it enables one to cease
treating individuals in isolation, and instead, as organic parts of the whole. Merleau-
Ponty thus thought that to be successful, the defeat of fascist totalitarianism would also
have to assimilate something of it. Aspects of totalitarian ideology could be used in
support of a genuine democracy. To some extent, according to Merleau-Ponty, the war
had actually occasioned a spontaneous turn toward a more collectivistic outlook, but
this was in deep conflict with the old individualistic ideals. This was the underlying
reason for the hesitation: a straightforward communist solution was just as untenable
as a simple return to status quo ante. The only solution could be a socialism that takes
as its goal to overcome liberalism by concretizing its ideals. This is what Merleau-Ponty
recommended as a viable strategy for securing French unity.

Were a government in exile to take stock of the difficult situation in which we

are struggling, and to choose for its slogan the realization of concrete freedom
through the collectivization of the means of production, it would bring together
around itself the majority of the French. It would give to the Resistance a positive
faith; a France provided with such a message would regain a politics and a dignity;
it would make a new place for itself in the world. (in Sartre 1970, 100f)

Although nuanced in important ways in light of the outcome of the war, this essentially
remained Merleau-Ponty’s position circa 1945. The key idea concerns the material
conditions of liberal values. It is from this standpoint that he issued his critique of the
impassive idealism and apolitical neutrality of prewar thinking. Although it is unclear
to what extent he meant it to apply to himself as well, this critique clearly had a special
82 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

pertinence to the particular social sector to which he himself had belonged, to wit,
progressively-minded but largely contemplative intellectuals, especially normaliens.
There were exceptions to this, of course: Nizan is a case in point—there is no sense
whatsoever in which Communist activists like him were guilty of the leisurely
philosophical illusions later censured by Merleau-Ponty.
Nevertheless, they may have been guilty of other theoretical errors, and Merleau-
Ponty’s analysis did have something to say about Marxism as well. For at least in its
official forms, Marxist theory was at a deeper level surprisingly similar to the detached
Cartesianism that it claimed to repudiate in practice. For it, too, ultimately made
politics—and the war in particular, which it saw as ultimately only an internecine
conflict between capitalist factions—into a matter of mere appearance, in this case,
of the class struggle: “what remained real beneath that appearance was the common
fate of proletariats of all nations and the profound solidarity of all forms of capitalism
through the internal contradictions of the regime” (SNS 261/148). So whereas the
naïve Cartesian humanist thought that there were only “men” and thus could not
understand anti-Semitism, for example, because there is no such thing as a “Jew,”
the Marxist thought that there were only “classes”—“no proletarian in uniform can
feel anything but proletarian” (SNS 262/148)—and thus reduced anti-Semitism to a
moronic “capitalistic episode,” a social contradiction that was in truth but a node on
the path to a classless society. But Merleau-Ponty insisted that historical truth cannot
be understood to lie behind the phenomena of events. “There are not two histories, one
true and the other empirical; there is only one, in which everything that happens plays
a part, if only one knows how to interpret it” (SNS 263/149, emphasis added).
Merleau-Ponty believed that existentialism, understood as a holistic, pheno­
menological Marxism, offered the hermeneutical framework that progressive
left-wing politics in general required. It was primarily for this reason that Merleau-
Ponty was, as Whiteside aptly put it, an “indefatigable proponent” of existentialism
in the postwar period (Whiteside 1988, 36, italics added). That is, he actively strove
to promote his project as a political-philosophical common ground, especially for
Marxism and social Catholicism. In his own work, and in his representations of the
work of others,11 Merleau-Ponty aimed to portray his existentialism as an approach
uniquely suited to theorize political phenomena adequately, that is, to render them
“thinkable” in all their concrete complexity, and to do so in an ideologically (but not
normatively) neutral way.

The proletariat question

The themes of sacrifice, death, and politics come together in the problem that lay at
the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s political thinking, to wit, the status of the proletariat
qua universal class of history. Merleau-Ponty wanted to save the latter notion, that
is, universal class, from Hegel but also from Marx by approaching it otherwise than
by way of the contrast between its being-in-itself and being-for-itself—a dualistic
approach that was still present even in Lukács’ work. In particular, his aim was to
conceptualize class anew in terms of intercorporeal coexistence, rather than in terms
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 83

of objective economic structure, in order to be able to approach the political problem

of proletarian class consciousness in terms of “the social,” that is, that “dimension of
existence . . . with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we
carry about inseparably with us prior to any objectification” (PhP 415).
Following Marx, Merleau-Ponty regarded Hegel’s account of history and the
liberation it realizes as incomplete, inasmuch as it merely ushered in a higher stage
of exploitation, one in which “slaves” are so dehumanized, so de-particularized, as to
be effectively reduced to life-as-such. Merleau-Ponty thus took up Marx’s account of
the proletariat as the class whose historical task is to do away with servitude once
and for all. Although he had some misgivings, Merleau-Ponty recognized as the core
of Marxism a theory of the proletariat as the latent existence of universal concrete
intersubjectivity. “In the name of the proletariat, Marx describes a situation such that
those in it, and they alone, have the full experience of the freedom and universality
which Marx considered the defining characteristics of man” (HT 122/113). In other
words, “the proletariat as Marx conceived it embodied simultaneously the experience
of individuality and universality” (HT 155/144). Proletarians thus embody the truth of
the species, and Merleau-Ponty makes this out to be a matter of their lived experience.
“The very exercise of life” in their objective situation leads them “to the point of
detachment and freedom at which it is possible to be conscious of dependency” (HT
123f/115), that is, the interpersonal dependency to which rational idealism is blind.
Hence the “inseparability of objective necessity and the spontaneous movement of
the masses” (HT 17/15). As the “moving force” [moteur] of history, workers have
“instincts” for it (HT 121/113), such that their collective praxis transforms the world
“as a spontaneous development in their own lives” (HT 39/36). For the proletarian,
“individuality or self-consciousness and consciousness are absolutely identical” (HT
124/115). In short, the working class is universality incarnate:

the condition of the proletarian is such that he can detach himself from
particularities not just in thought and through a process of abstraction, but in
reality and through the very movement of his life. He alone is the universality that
he thinks, he alone realizes the self-consciousness that philosophers have sketched
out in reflection. (HT 124f/116)

All of this is very much in line with Lukács’ understanding of the proletariat as the
“subject-object of history.” But whereas Lukács had emphasized more directly the
political consequences of this conception, Merleau-Ponty was primarily concerned
with using it to show that the philosophical standpoint that he wished to endorse was
possible—or rather, that it was “possible” precisely because it was already actual (cf.
PhP xv). Although nowadays, few philosophers take the idea of the proletariat very
seriously, what is significant, as we shall see, is that this idea is implicated directly at the
very heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work (which is taken very seriously).
But given Merleau-Ponty’s view of death, the classical conception of the proletariat
did raise a serious problem. For unlike the Hegelian “slave,” who chooses a life of
subservience, the revolutionary task of the proletariat is to reject servitude altogether.
An honorable idea, to be sure. But this task is, by definition, to be performed from the
standpoint of absolute knowledge. And what the task involves is precisely overcoming
84 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

that standpoint—overcoming, that is, the manière de vivre definitive of the proletariat.
This is meant to imply what Lukács called its “self-abolition” [Selbstaufhebung] qua
exploited class (HCC 82, 84/70, 71; cf. AD 65/47, where Merleau-Ponty cites HCC
93/80). But since that way of living, thus conceived, includes all living particularity, the
revolutionary moment would thus imply, as Merleau-Ponty’s then-close colleague Trân
Dúc Tháo later put it, “an ultimate form of sacrifice” (1951, 318; cf. 1949, 321f, 327).
As we have seen, for Merleau-Ponty, this was metaphysically indefensible. He thus
thought that the formulations of classical Marxism concerning the proletariat had to
be rethought. But this was not because the objective composition of the proletariat—
that is, its being-in-itself—had changed since Marx’s time through some degree of
bourgeoisification of the working class and proletarianization of the petit bourgeoisie,
such that the “intellectual needs” of the “objectively revolutionary class” could no
longer be satisfied by Marxism in its orthodox form. Such was Trân’s view (Trân 1946,
173; 1949, 328f). But while there may have been some truth to this, it did not challenge
the sacrificial view of revolutionary change. Trân expressed this in the following
illuminating way: “if, in accordance with Heidegger’s magnificent line, ‘Dasein [la
réalité humaine] chooses its heroes’ [das Dasein wählt sich seinen Helden], its choice is
the act of a real [effective] freedom only if it bears precisely upon the destiny prefigured
in its objective situation, if its project is not just any project, but the very project of its
own dereliction” (Trân 1946, 173, citing SZ 385; cf. Trân 1949, 320).
For Merleau-Ponty, the basic problem with Marxist theory as it stood at the time was
that it was fundamentally morbid. This is not because it thematized death, but rather
because it did so in the wrong way. Although Merleau-Ponty thought that Marx had
correctly denied the possibility of thinking the future (HT 136f; EP 41/50f), this denial
was effectively lost on Marxism such as it actually existed. Its overly futural orientation
was thus a kind of “triumphant” thinking that invoked an “experience of eternity” that
led to a certain “unconsciousness of death” in the present (cf. SC 240/223). Its call for
revolution thus worked at cross-purposes, inasmuch as the life of the new humanity
for which it militated could not be brought into vital connection with the lives of those
who would comprise the collective agency of its realization. There was a profound
split between end and means (and hence between theory and practice) in that the
communist ideal implied an impossible hiatus from life’s “vital foundations.” The
problem for Merleau-Ponty was how to tell the Marxist story of humanity “smashing
the given structures of society and acceding through praxis to [what Marx, in the
third volume of Capital, called] ‘the reign of freedom’ ” (SNS 226/128), and to do so
in terms of living experience, but without invoking any philosophically indefensible
sacrificial imperative. In a nutshell, this is the idea of an incarnational Marxism—that
the structures of human universality that represent the ideals of communism already
exist in latent form, and that revolution is thus not a matter of inventing them, but of
realizing them—a process that can be described as “working out the consequences
of the Incarnation” through forms of praxis that are ultimately based not upon
autonomous decisions and detachment but passive prepersonal inherence and the
historical necessity of those structures themselves. As Merleau-Ponty put it, being a
Marxist in this way “is indeed to reach the universal, but without ceasing to be what
we are” (SNS 265/150).
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 85

The tacit cogito

In line with the thrust of “Western Marxism,” as well as with the Catholic interest
in Marx in France in the 1930s, Merleau-Ponty held that the classical formulations
of Marxism were due for a theoretical overhaul in the light of twentieth-century
conditions. The point of this overhaul would be to express the fact that with respect
to the realization of universal proletarian class consciousness, “ideological” issues are
no less politically real than economic issues. Merleau-Ponty rejected the idea—and
claimed that most Marxists did likewise—of any simplistic materialist construal of
consciousness in epiphenomenal terms (SNS 135/78). Marxist analysis is credible only
when it does not “suppress the subjective factors of history in favour of objective ones,
but rather tie[s] them together” (SNS 263/149). No account of class consciousness as
the coming to awareness of an intersubjective situation can do away with individual
consciousness, which is to say, Marxism cannot avoid giving an account of the cogito.
“Every man, even a Marxist, is obliged to agree with Descartes that if we know some
external reality, then it is only on condition of grasping within ourselves this process
of knowing, that no in-itself would be accessible to us if it were not at the same time
for-us, and that the meaning we find in it ultimately depends on our assent” (SNS
138/79).
Clearly, though, agreement with this claim—which, in any case, may go well
beyond what can be legitimately attributed to Descartes—is consistent with divergent
interpretations of the cogito. In particular, it is consistent with the rejection of the
traditional Cartesian interpretation. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, this interpretation is
“false” because it one-sidedly emphasizes the autonomy of consciousness; “it removes
itself and shatters our inherence in the world” (SNS 235/133). It sets up the cogito
as a merely contemplative escape, and thus remains a conceptual expression of “that
phase of history where man’s essence and existence are still separated” (SNS 136/78).
What was required is “a new conception of consciousness,” one that would “found
both its autonomy and its dependence” (SNS 143/82, emphasis added). To attain this
would require surpassing the Cartesian cogito in a way metonymical to the dialectical
realization of philosophy as a whole through the destruction of its separateness. “The
only way to do away with [the Cartesian cogito] is to realize it, that is, to show that it is
eminently contained in interpersonal relations” (SNS 235f/133, emphasis added).
Merleau-Ponty thought that Marxism, in its discovery of “social existence as the
most ‘interior’ dimension of our life” (SNS 142f/82), implicitly contained an account of
the cogito that satisfied this desideratum, that is, an account of “the process of knowing”
that situates it squarely in the context of intersubjective relations. But it had yet to
furnish this with a sound theoretical formulation. This is, I would argue, the principal
theoretical task that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the cogito (PhP 423–68) in terms of
the “tacit cogito,” or the “true [véritable] cogito,” was designed to fulfill. The point was
to specify the site of contact between thought and being that would be the conditio sine
qua non of human existence and coexistence.
A complete review of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the cogito is unnecessary here,
and would take the present analysis far afield. I shall therefore just focus on those
aspects that are directly relevant to the purposes of this chapter.
86 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Noting the paradoxical nature of interpersonal relations, that is, the dialectical
mixture of autonomy and dependence that they exhibit, Merleau-Ponty expressed
their possibility in terms of situated corporeality: they are possible only because Ego
and Other are “defined by their situation and are not freed from all inherence.” That is,
they are only possible

provided that at the very moment when I experience [éprouve] my existence, even
at the extreme limit of reflection, I lack the absolute density which would place
me outside time, and that I discover within myself a kind of internal weakness
standing in the way of my being totally individualized, which exposes me to the
gaze of others as a man among men. (PhP vii, emphasis added)

As Merleau-Ponty pointed out, this is at odds with the traditional understanding

of the cogito, which identified egoic existence with self-awareness, thus occluding
being-for-others. The “true cogito” is the result of a “radical reflection” that is able to
account for being-for-others. It does this by discovering in me “not only my presence
to myself, but also the possibility of an ‘outside spectator’ [« spectateur étranger »]” (PhP
vii, emphasis added). Radically pursued, reflection attains “an affirmation of myself by
myself [une épreuve de moi par moi]” that reveals me in a social and historical situation
(PhP 462; cf. vii). “The certitude I have of myself here is a real [véritable] perception:
I grasp myself . . . as a particular thought, as a thought engaged with certain objects,
as a thought in act [une pensée en acte]” (PrP 61/22). Rather than identifying my
existence with my thoughts thereof, radical reflection “recognizes my thought itself
as an inalienable fact, and eliminates any kind of idealism in discovering me as ‘being
toward the world’ [« être au monde »]” (PhP viii).
By focusing on “the presence of oneself to oneself ” (PhP 462) in this way, this
approach to the self-experience of the thinking subject follows an alternative path that
is supposed to cut between, on the one hand, the wholly constituted private psyche
of objectivism, and, on the other hand, subjectivism’s wholly constituting universal
thinker. This is the sense in which Merleau-Ponty claimed that “the tacit cogito . . . is
anterior to all philosophy” (PhP 462). It is also the case, however, that, paradoxically,
“the tacit cogito is a cogito only when it has found expression for itself ” (PhP 463). It
is a matter of reflection “recapturing itself ” and acquiring an “awareness of its own
dependence on an unreflective life which is its initial, constant, and final situation”
(PhP ix). This unreflective life is life-as-such, and so, in a manner of speaking, the
true cogito concerns its self-experience—an experience that comes to “know itself [se
connaît],” that is, to gain self-consciousness, only by becoming my thought, a shift that
occurs “only in those extreme situations in which it is threatened” (PhP 462).
Given what we have seen of Merleau-Ponty’s view of death and its connection to
alterity, it not surprising that the examples he gives of such threatening situations are
“the dread of death or of another’s gaze upon me” (PhP 462). Merleau-Ponty argued
that there is a fundamental link between “the reflective recapture [reprise] of the
unreflective,” that is, the openness of my reflection to life-as-such as the unreflective
basis of my existence, and “the tension of my experience towards another” (PhP 413).
Both involve the same apparent paradox. In each case, “it is a matter of knowing
how I can break outside myself [faire une pointe hors de moi-même] and have a lived
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 87

experience of the unreflective as such [vivre l’irréfléchi comme tel]” (PhP 413). The
underlying idea that serves to resolve the seeming paradoxicality is that because life-
as-such is universal, the experience of self-givenness can be achieved—in fact, can only
be achieved—within the intersubjective dynamics of social and historical situations.
This is why for Merleau-Ponty, the archetypical instance of the tacit cogito lies in
the “tacit commitment” with which one comports oneself un-self-consciously with
respect to the sociohistorical background of a given situation, and which can—in the
event that that background becomes foregrounded, that is, focal—be transformed into
a more explicit and possibly collective self-consciousness. As Merleau-Ponty expressed
it: “during periods of calm, nation and class are there as stimuli to which I respond
only absent-mindedly or confusedly; they are merely latent. A revolutionary situation,
or one of national danger, transforms those preconscious relationships with class and
nation, which were merely lived, into the definite taking of a stand.” Just as with Saint
Exupéry’s Barcelonan bookkeeper-turned-soldier, “the tacit commitment becomes
explicit” (PhP 417, emphasis altered).
It is in this context that Merleau-Ponty presented the clearest phenomenological
formulation of the problem that gives the tacit cogito its meaning, to wit, “how the
presence to myself (Urpräsenz) which defines me and which conditions every alien
presence, is at the same time de-presentation (Entgegenwärtigung) and throws me
outside myself ” (PhP 417, italics removed). As to the significance of this problem,
Merleau-Ponty was clear: “this double sense of the cogito is the basic fact of metaphysics”
(SNS 164/93). This is why, as he put it—with clear import for the question concerning
the deference to Saint Exupéry at the end of Phenomenology of Perception—“philosophy
does not culminate in a return to the self ” (PhP vi). And what is crucial is that for
Merleau-Ponty, this double sense of the cogito—which Merleau-Ponty related to
the “double anonymity” of our être-au-monde—is best captured through a Marxist-
inspired approach to historicity.
In general, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the tacit cogito would thus provide the
outstanding theoretical grounds for the analysis of “the moment when the subjective
and objective conditions of history become interwoven, the mode in which class exists
before becoming aware of itself—in short, the status of the social and the phenomenon
of coexistence” (SNS 140/81). Specifically, this would enable a viable approach to
the intersubjective nature of class consciousness as “a fact-value” [fait-valeur] or
“incarnated value” [valeur incarnée] (SNS 140/80), by approaching it in the context
of “absolute history”—that milieu wherein “man no longer appears as a product of his
environment nor an absolute legislator but [rather] emerges as a product-producer, the
locus where necessity can turn into concrete liberty” (SNS 226, 237/128, 134).
In this way, the tacit cogito is the fulcrum of history, and a fortiori of the realization
of philosophy. For both philosophy as well as for Marxism, inasmuch as they accept
the need to apprehend “the process of knowing,” the upshot is clear: “we must not only
adopt a reflective attitude, in an irrefutable cogito, but also reflect on this reflection,
understand the natural situation which it is conscious of succeeding and which is
therefore part of its definition.” We must “not merely practise philosophy, but also
become aware [nous rendre compte] of the transformation which it brings with it in
the spectacle of the world and in our existence. Only on this condition can philosophical
88 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

knowledge cease to be a specialization or a technique [i.e., cease to be ‘separate’] and

become absolute knowledge” (PhP 75, emphasis added), that is, “integrated with the
very phenomenon of the real.”

Class consciousness
This account of the “tacit cogito” relates directly to the Marxist—and especially
Lukácsian—problematic of proletarian class consciousness. Readers of Phenomeno­
logy of Perception know that Merleau-Ponty included a somewhat lengthy discussion
of this problematic (PhP 505–12) in the middle of the final chapter of the book (PhP
496–520)—the chapter devoted, at least nominally, to freedom.12 But what is the
point of this discussion? Is it, for instance, an illustrative reiteration of the conceptual
analysis of freedom as situated freedom that is developed in the preceding parts of
the chapter as a critique of the Sartrean idea of absolute freedom? After all, the segue
with which Merleau-Ponty launched into the discussion of class consciousness stated
that “we would arrive at the same result by considering our relations with history”
(PhP 505, italics added). One may thus be tempted to regard this discussion as an
incidental supplement to the main argument, an example that may be illuminating
and perhaps even have some corroborative value, but one the specific content of
which  is inessential to the philosophical thrust of the work. Indeed, something
along these lines is probably the standard wisdom in contemporary philosophical
scholarship on Merleau-Ponty (inasmuch as it considers the question at all),
which—as discussed earlier—discounts all allusions to Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism
in a similar way.
But this view is unsatisfactory. Here, it must be noted that Merleau-Ponty’s statement
about reaching “the same result” can easily mislead. For while it is certainly true that
the discussion of class consciousness supports the account of situated freedom that
Merleau-Ponty had outlined contra Sartre in the initial part of the chapter, it is also the
case that this discussion goes well beyond that result. And it is on this basis alone that
Merleau-Ponty was able to claim that our être-au-monde is the “concrete bearer” of a
“double anonymity,” the fact that our existence unfolds between impersonal poles of
generality and idiosyncrasy—which is, as he immediately added, the transcendental
condition of there being “situations, a meaning [sens] of history, and a historical
truth—three ways of saying the same thing” (PhP 512). Moreover, it is from here
that he was able to go on to claim that “I am an intersubjective field” and pose the
question: “From this point of view, then, what becomes of the freedom we discussed
at the outset?” (PhP, 515, italics added). After a brief critique of the idea of freedom
as absolute choice, which does not repeat what had been developed earlier, Merleau-
Ponty finally asks: “What then is freedom?” (PhP 517), and takes this up in the final
few pages that follow.
A straightforward reading would thus show that the discussion of class conscious­
ness lies at the very heart of the chapter on freedom (corollary to which it could be
claimed that, if anything, it is the beginning of the chapter, i.e., the part explicitly
focused on Sartre, that is inessential to the chapter as a whole). For it is with regard
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 89

to class consciousness that the philosophical heavy-lifting, so to speak, in Merleau-

Ponty’s argument is accomplished. Again, that this is lost on most readers nowadays
can be attributed in large part to the widely-held assumption that, however strong his
proclivities may have been, for Merleau-Ponty, Marxism is theoretically secondary to
phenomenology. As discussed in the Preface, I believe that this assumption is false,
and that on the contrary, Marxism and phenomenology are equally important and
essentially interdependent aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar thought, but also
that, in certain respects, Marxism has priority. The interdependence of Marxism and
phenomenology has primarily to do with method, and it manifests itself at numerous
places within Merleau-Ponty’s work. But it is the discussion of class consciousness in
Phenomenology of Perception that provides perhaps the most insightful glimpse into
the methodological ground of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology.

The methodological significance of freedom

I suggested that the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception is “at least nominally”
about freedom. It is about freedom, but this qualification is appropriate because the
point of this chapter has not been well understood. (One will search the literature on
Merleau-Ponty in vain for a compelling account of the philosophical raison d’être of the
“freedom” chapter.) In particular, it is not simply about freedom per se, as if the point
were to give a phenomenological account of freedom as just another—even if the most
important—in a motley list of topics that Merleau-Ponty wished to address. Nor is it
the case, as suggested above, that Merleau-Ponty was principally concerned with the
view of freedom that Sartre had presented in Being and Nothingness, and which was
being widely discussed in France at the time. To be sure, that was a concern. But we
miss the true rationale for the chapter if we fail to locate it within a broader frame of
reference. We thus need to ask why Phenomenology of Perception ends with a discussion
of freedom at all.
We need to approach the chapter on freedom as belonging to the Third Part of
the book which, in structural terms, was methodological, offering a meta-level
“pheno­menology of phenomenology,” that is, a transcendental account of the pheno­
menological reduction (see above, Preface). The point of the last part of Pheno­
menology of Perception (which also includes the chapters on the cogito and temporality)
is thus to offer a methodological validation of the approach taken in the preceding
(two) parts of the book. It is crucial to recognize the location of the chapter on
freedom as the culmination of this metalevel exercise, and the implication that this
discussion represents the highest expression of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of
the phenomenological reduction—in other words, the deepest justification of the
pretensions of Phenomenology of Perception to convey genuine philosophical truth.
Rather than the Sartrean account of radical freedom, then, the primary point of
reference here is Husserl’s idea of the “perfect freedom” [vollkommenen Freiheit] that
stands behind the performance of the reduction, a view initially stated in the first book
of Ideas (Husserl 1982, 58), and his subsequent recognition of the inadequacy of this
idea. Merleau-Ponty picks up on this in his treatment of freedom, and in characteristic
fashion, he writes as if he were elaborating what was implicit in Husserl’s own thought.
90 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Notably, the only philosophical reference that Merleau-Ponty makes in the final part
of the chapter is indeed to Husserl, where he attributes to him an idea of “conditioned
freedom” [liberté condtionnée] (PhP 518). More notable, in fact, is that this reference
to Husserl is made indirectly by way of Fink—Merleau-Ponty cited Fink’s use of the
expression “bedingte Freiheit” (Fink 1930, 285). This is significant because, as we know,
a principal motivation behind Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to work out a “phenomenology
of phenomenology” was to respond to the claims that Fink himself had made in his
Sixth Cartesian Meditation. This work was instrumental for Merleau-Ponty in terms
of grasping the fundamental methodological question that phenomenology must be
able to answer: if all human experience—including “phenomenologically reduced”
experience—has horizons that condition it, then how can phenomenology ever attain
true philosophical insight? Is the project not doomed to uncritical dogmatism or else
vicious regress?
As discussed in the Preface, Fink’s response to this problem was premised on the
possibility of an ideal reduction as Husserl had originally conceived it. However,
recognizing that this involved an extramundaneness (or freedom from horizons) that
is, in fact, not humanly possible, Fink developed a highly speculative interpretation
of phenomenological methodology which, among other things, construed the active
subject of the reduction in suprahuman terms—the “non-participating transcendental
onlooker.”
For his part, Merleau-Ponty premised his response on the idea that phenomenology
is indeed a human activity, and that the outermost horizons of human experience are
those of the totality of history. Owing to what he took to be the metaphysical fact of
our corporeal situatedness, Merleau-Ponty agreed with Fink’s claim that an ideal (or
complete) reduction was not a human possibility—hence his well-known remark about
its necessary “incompleteness.” So whereas Fink assumed that a complete reduction
was possible in nonhuman terms and speculated about what must be the case if that
were so, the question for Merleau-Ponty is whether human situatedness nonetheless
affords sufficient freedom for the phenomenological reduction—or, more to the point,
whether a phenomenological reduction that is necessarily “incomplete” can nonetheless
provide an adequate methodological basis for genuine philosophical results.
On the face of it, the answer would be no. If there are only situated perspectives,
then there can be no bona fide truth. Something needs to be added to the picture. As
we saw above, Merleau-Ponty approached this problem by considering whether, after
all, there might not be certain experiences characterized by an indistinction between
object and its historical horizons—in particular, whether self-experience could have
this property. If so, then this would be an experience of “absolute knowing,” which is
the formal condition that would need to be met in order to uphold the philosophical
credentials of a situated reduction.
This is why Merleau-Ponty was drawn to the Lukácsian conception of the prole­
tariat as the “identical subject-object” of history, in the sense that it represented the
effective convergence of self-knowledge and knowledge of the historical totality. That
is, Merleau-Ponty was drawn to this conception because of his need to identify an
experiential moment in which human activity would be indistinct from its historical
horizons, something which could only be the case if that activity were a matter of
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 91

actively generating those horizons—in other words, a participatory experience of

making history.
Where Merleau-Ponty deviated from Lukács, however, albeit in an attempt to
redeem his account, was in making an explicit attempt to construe class consciousness
as primarily a matter of perception and feeling rather than of cognition or explicit
awareness. Employing what he called “a genuinely existential method” [une méthode
vraiment existentielle] (PhP 506), Merleau-Ponty thus regarded class consciousness
as emerging from class belonging understood in terms of a pre-reflective existential
project—a “mode of communication” with the social world that motivates my basic
political orientation and explicit judgments about class. In the case of the proletariat,
“j’existe ouvrier,” in the sense of existing a certain repressed style of être-au-monde
“within [the] institutional framework” of capitalist society (PhP 506)—which is to say,
in the sense of repressedly embodying these institutions as pre-reflective operative
intentionalities, carrying them in my habitual body and living them accordingly as a
kind of “obsessive presence” [présence obsédante] (PhP 509f)—the “inborn complex”
of the proletarian situation.
Merleau-Ponty offered a description of the molecular emergence of proletarian class
consciousness using the figures of a factory worker [ouvrier], day-laborer [journalier],
and a tenant farmer [tenancier]. Although quite different, all do comparable work in
similarly alienating conditions‌—they “coexist in the same situation” and thus feel alike,
not through any explicit comparison, but on the basis of their “tasks and gestures” (PhP
507). This common feeling does not imply any explicitly chosen judgment or objective
awareness of the alienating conditions, but in each case, there is a tacit normative
claim to the effect that this life is “difficult and constraining” (PhP 507)—that there is
some degree of dehumanization and that consequently “things must change” [« il faut
que ça change »] (PhP 508). The initial situation of the proletariat can be described
as a “multiple solipsism” [solipsisme à plusieurs], in that mutual detachment is partly
constitutive of (but not unique to) proletarian existence, and Merleau-Ponty sketched
out the passage to class consciousness that represents the overcoming of this separation.
The main point that he wanted to make was that this passage was not primarily a
theoretical or cognitive achievement, but rather was a matter of altered historical
perception. For example, in the case of the day-laborer vis-à-vis factory workers, if class
consciousness does emerge, then this is not due to a decision on his part to adopt a
revolutionary perspective, but rather because “he perceived concretely the synchronicity
[synchronisme] between his life and that of the workers, and their common destiny”
(PhP 507, italics added). This perception of historical synchronicity with some
groups—and by implication, historical asynchronicity with others—motivates a
perceptual “regrouping” [regroupement] or Umgestaltung that polarizes the perception
of social space in a way that brings to appearance “a region of the exploited” (PhP 508).
This is how, for example, the farmer can feel himself [se sent] to be on the same side
as the others, even though superficially, he may have nothing in common with them.
For Merleau-Ponty, this is how the proletariat as such comes into being [se réalise], and
this means that a revolutionary situation is one in which different exploited groups feel
themselves moving toward a common “crossroads,” that is, when the objective unity of
the exploited “is finally lived in the perception of a common obstacle to the existence
92 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

of each” (PhP 508). Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, “the revolutionary project is not the result
of a deliberate judgment, or the explicit positing of a goal” (PhP 508f). While in many
cases it does come to take such form, Merleau-Ponty viewed this as just the completion
or fruition of the deeper existential project that provides the fundamental orientation
for my existence, and which “merges [se confond] with my way of giving form to the
world [mettre en forme le monde] and coexisting with others” (PhP 511). This existential
project is anchored on the “tacit commitment”—« il faut que ça change »—discussed
above. Usually lived pre-reflectively, in “extreme situations,” this commitment can be
transformed into a “conscious taking of a stand.” What happens in the advent of a
revolutionary outlook, that is, an outlook in which historical horizons are engaged
transformatively, is—as we saw above—that “this tacit commitment becomes explicit”
(cf. PhP 417).
Thus it is that, in the case of proletarian class consciousness, “the horizon of a
particular life and revolutionary goals coincide” (PhP 510, italics added). In the case
of the proletariat, then, Merleau-Ponty identified prereflective class existence with the
object of the “tacit cogito” understood as immediate historically situated self-awareness,
and he similarly took class consciousness per se to represent the coming to expression
of the “tacit cogito.” What we have here, in other words, is the sort of experiential
indistinction between self and outer horizons that Merleau-Ponty needed—and in this
case, that of the proletariat, what results is not just some arbitrary perspective, but one
with universal import.
This is what is crucial. It is not simply that the discussion of class consciousness
does  the substantial work enabling Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of unconditioned
freedom. More importantly, it shows that and how the “incomplete” phenomenological
reduction can be a philosophically viable method. For it shows the possibility of
gaining universally valid insight without detaching from one’s particular historical
standpoint. What we need to appreciate, in other words, is that Merleau-Ponty’s
initial analysis of freedom (i.e., the critical discussion of Sartre) that supports the
claim about its situatedness is wholly inadequate with regard to the rationale of
the chapter, which has to do with warranting the claim that we are sufficiently free
to perform the phenomenological reduction successfully—how it could be that
situated freedom suffices for philosophy. For, indeed, far from showing that such is
the case, simply affirming the situatedness of human freedom actually points in the
opposite direction, that is, it would lend credence to the claim that the reduction is,
in fact, not philosophically viable, that its necessary incompleteness is a devastating
defect. What Merleau-Ponty needs is to show how our being corporeally situated
is nonetheless consistent with the possibility of a universal view, a view that would
not be compromised by the particularities of life. And this is precisely what he took
the historical situation and transformative praxis of the proletariat to represent,
the actuality of a (collective) form of human embodied subjectivity that is at once
empirically concrete and yet also capable of underwriting the tasks of transcendental
phenomenology. This is because the vital structures that necessarily remain horizonal
to—and therefore ineluctably presupposed by—phenomenological experience,
are one and the same as the structures of historical apriority that are effectively
thematized in the class consciousness of the proletariat, and which, through the
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 93

revolutionary praxis of the latter, are incorporated into the historical truth which
phenomenology aspires to articulate.
This is the methodological key to Merleau-Ponty’s view of the realization of
philosophy, and it was on this basis that he was able to obviate the need for what Fink
had called the “secondary enworlding” of phenomenology. I shall return to that in
the Conclusion. For now, we need to consider in more general terms what it is that
makes the historical situation of the proletariat so philosophically significant for
Merleau-Ponty. For while a class of people being in that situation may be essential for
the realization of philosophy, it is certainly not essential for them to be in it, and them
alone, and so, there must be some human feature that becomes particularly salient in
that situation.

Human productivity
The key idea here for Merleau-Ponty is what he called “human productivity” [la
productivité humaine] (SNS 229/129). This idea can be seen as an elaboration of the
notion of “transcendence” as a response to the need to spell out and elucidate the
creative capacity—ostensibly distinctive to human existence, if not the very principle
of anthropogenesis—in virtue of which human beings are able to overcome the
monotonous rhythms of their “natural” being: how one can, as Merleau-Ponty put it,
faire une pointe hors de soi-même and in this way “draw life”—life-as-such—“away from
its spontaneous direction [sens spontané]” (PhP 519).
We should be wary of Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “spontaneity” and its various
cognates, however, at least as he applies these to vital phenomena. For they tend to be
infected with the same ambiguity found in his usage of the notion of life, namely, that
between the generality of life-as-such and the particularity of lived lives. For the sake
of clarity, we should reserve the term “spontaneity” for the sense of passive momentum
that pertains to life-as-such, that is, to that which underlies the human body as a
“natural self, a current of given existence” (PhP 199). As for the sense of spontaneity
that pertains solely to individual particularity, Merleau-Ponty gave a clear expression
of this when he described it—in a way reminiscent of Sartrean mauvaise foi—as “a
sort of escape [échappement],” but one that involves “a process of mystification” or
“equivocation” (PhP 199, 201). For short of death, it is not really an escape, remaining
rooted in life-as-such. Inasmuch as someone presumes to escape the latter, to repress
her “actual” body, she is engaged in a kind of self-deceiving “metaphysical hypocrisy”
that works through “the medium of generality,” that is, the generality of the habituated
organism. But just like repression, as discussed above, this sort of “hypocrisy” is “part
of the human condition”—it is even, or perhaps especially, to be found “in the ‘sincere’
or ‘authentic’ man whenever he claims to be something unreservedly [sans réserves]”
(PhP 190).
Merleau-Ponty’s idea of productivity is related very closely to that of freedom,
and may be understood as the generative quality of historicity.13 For while historicity
may be an essential feature of human être-au-monde, its effective quality can vary
considerably. That is, the dialectical relation between the habitual and “actual”
94 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

dimensions of embodiment can unfold more or less dynamically depending on

the nature and degree of repression. At its core, the idea of productivity points to a
normative balance or harmonization between the two respective forms of activity:
on the one hand, the spontaneous vital force that propels life, albeit blindly, that is,
as a matter of subjective passivity; and on the other hand, the active decisiveness of
individual “escape,” the nihilating power of consciousness whereby “we tear ourselves
away from ourselves” (PhP 489). It is important for Merleau-Ponty that both aspects
are required—in particular, lacking substantial effectivity of its own, conscious
decision in isolation can only manifest itself negatively by turning that positive
vital force against itself sacrificially. Both aspects belong to the “human condition,”
and the idea of productivity is meant to encompass them in a way that captures the
meaning of “the living subject” [le sujet vivant] in terms of (a) the transcendence and
(b) the decentered relations to alterity that are implicit in the notion of historical
development (cf. PhP 200). In this way, it is meant as a generalization of the concept
of human production that would be able to provide the philosophical ground for
Marx’s theory of the self-realization of humanity. It would do so by showing that
“the living subject,” as “the real [réel] subject of history” (PhP 200)—that is, “the
vehicle [porteur] of history and the motor [moteur] of the dialectic” (SNS 228/129,
italics removed)—is “man as productivity” [l’homme en tant que productivité]
(PhP 200, emphasis added). This makes it clear that the historical subject cannot
be understood in individual terms, but rather that it is “man engaged in a certain
way of appropriating nature in which the mode of his relationship with others takes
shape.” In other words, “it is concrete human intersubjectivity, the successive and
simultaneous community of existences in the process of self-realization, each created
by and creating the other” (SNS 228/129, emphasis added).
Although this intersubjectivity is understood to be concrete, in that it is understood
on a corporeal basis, it is not taken in material terms in any reductive sense. As discussed
above, Merleau-Ponty was quite dubious with respect to the materialist basis of
historical materialism, in particular with respect to nature. It is important to recognize
that Merleau-Ponty thought that the basic reason for the morbidity of Marxist theory
was that what he later called Marx’s “ground-breaking intuition” [intuition si neuve]
(EP 43/53) had never been given a proper theoretical formulation, and this because it
had never been placed on a proper philosophical foundation. According to Merleau-
Ponty, this intuition amounts to Marx’s discovery of “a historical rationality immanent
in the life of men,” immanent in interhuman praxis, in “the meaning [sens] which
works itself out spontaneously in the inter-twining [entre-croisement] of those activities
by which man organizes his relations with nature and with other men” (EP 41/50). Or
more simply, Merleau-Ponty described “the principal thought” [la pensée principale] of
Marxism as the claim that “there is an incarnation of ideas and values” (SNS 190/108).
The problem was that this “put into question the usual categories of philosophy”
without furnishing the “intellectual reform” that the transcendence of these categories
required (EP 43/53). Merleau-Ponty intended his rethinking of Marxism based on the
idea of human productivity to furnish the outstanding philosophical foundation of
historical materialism and thereby to supply precisely the “intellectual reform” needed
to redeem Marx’s “ground-breaking intuition.”
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 95

As discussed above (Chapter 3), Merleau-Ponty followed Lukács in conceiving

the historical totality as exclusive of nature as such. Concerning materialism as
traditionally and “crudely” understood, then, Merleau-Ponty was blunt: “there is no
question of any pure [nue] matter, exterior to man and in terms of which his behavior
could be explained” (SNS 231/130). In fact, Merleau-Ponty argued—as did Sartre in
“Matérialisme et révolution” (1946), although to different effect—that the idea of a
dialectical materialism is ultimately self-contradictory, inasmuch as matter is self-
coincident, hence inert, and thus incapable of carrying “the principle of productivity
and novelty [nouveauté]” as exhibited in human history. But he also maintained that
Marx had already recognized that it would be “the height of subjectivism” to locate the
dialectic of praxis in things considered materialistically. According to Merleau-Ponty,
what Marx did was to “shift it into men” (EP 42/52) through the proto-phenomenological
“expedient” of “human matter” or “human objects” (EP 44/54; SNS 232/131). Merleau-
Ponty’s solution to the problem of materialism was to suggest that Marx had really only
seriously considered matter within “the system of human coexistence” (SNS 229/129),
where it becomes dialectically animated by “human productivity,” and that “all the
ideological formations of a given society are synonymous with or complementary to a
certain type of praxis” (SNS 231/130). “When Marx speaks of human objects, he means
that . . . significance adheres to the object as it presents itself in our experience. . . . The
spirit of a society is realized, transmitted, and perceived through the cultural objects
which it bestows upon itself and in the midst of which it lives” (SNS 232/131).
It is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty could say, citing Marx by way of defending
Lukács, that the milieu of history is neither natural nor supernatural, but rather
“transnatural” [transnaturel], where this means that within this environment, “man’s
natural behavior has become human . . . human being has become his natural being,
[and] his human nature has become his nature.” In short, that “history is the genuine
natural history of man” (SNS 230/130). And this makes it clear how the idea of
human productivity was intended to show that the theoretical development required
by Marxism calls for a philosophical union with Husserl’s phenomenology of the
Lebenswelt. For this, Merleau-Ponty suggested, had contributed more than anything
to “describing consciousness incarnate in an environment of human objects and in a
linguistic tradition” (SNS 239/135).
■
Given the general sense and significance of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of human productivity,
what exactly does it mean?
Human productivity is that whereby existential transcendence is achieved through
praxis. It is a matter of a dialectical relation—internal to the context of intersubjective
involvement in the world—whereby a certain harmonization of the impulses of vital
inherence with the intentions of symbolic thought is achieved. The former represent
the indeclinable bases of the living subject, the structures of the habituated organism
that comprise the historical apriority of a given context, but they are typically
dissembled by the latter. For most humans throughout history, this may actually have
been existentially favorable. But in the contemporary world, in Merleau-Ponty’s view,
transcendence no longer requires alienating repression, and the time is ripe finally to
overcome it. The salience of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of productivity thus shows itself
96 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

most clearly in the sense of therapeutic transformation at the individual as well as at

the social level.
Human productivity is thus not a matter of achieving an exact synchronization
between vital spontaneity and the negativity of consciousness—in general, that would
imply the death of historicity and the end of history. The harmonization in question
may have an intentional orientation toward such an impossible coincidence, but it is
primarily a dialectical coordination geared for vital flourishing and personal integration.
It is the means of individual and collective self-realization that proceeds by taking up
a meaning offered by the world and re-projecting it symbolically through a “series
of shifts [glissements]” (PhP 519). Through interaction and dialogue, the otherwise
blind evolution of vital spontaneity can be reoriented consciously and deliberately. At
the social level, this is history in the making, and Merleau-Ponty was content to leave
the mechanics of such moments of genuinely engaged participation in the realm of
mystery. With an immoderate rhetorical flourish even by his own standards, Merleau-
Ponty described such moments in fulgurant terms: “sometimes there is that blaze
of fire, that flash of lightening, that moment of victory,  .  .  .  that gloria that eclipses
everything else” (SNS 330/186; cf. SNS 171/98).
Nonetheless, some substantive points can still be made about human productivity.
The first relates to death. I argued above that transcendence depends upon “the
negativity of death.” In this way, death is an aspect of life-as-such. This can be related to
self-realization as a transformative matter of self-overcoming, that is, an overcoming of
one’s given or previously realized empirical self. The suspension of or detachment from
the latter that self-realization implies could be described as a quasi-suicide or self-
sacrifice—for example, what Emile Bernard called “Cézanne’s suicide” (SNS 21/12). This
is merely quasi, though, in that one remains vitally rooted in life-as-such.14 This would
express the gist of the incarnational alternative that Merleau-Ponty would propose to
the mistaken understanding of revolution in terms of the “self-annihilation” of the
proletariat. Given how Merleau-Ponty linked death with the universal in thought, the
idea is that inasmuch as the process of self-realization is taken as a matter of coinciding
with or reappropriating vital spontaneity, this can only occur through the death-like
denial of personal particularity.
More specifically, for Merleau-Ponty, this is a matter of “exchange.” We saw in
Chapter 1 that this notion was central to Saint Exupéry’s thinking, where it was
effectively synonymous with self-sacrifice. It thus represented an alternative to the
modern ideal of individual autonomy, which Saint Exupéry regarded as just an expres-
sion of flight from the world and from the possibility of authenticity (Geneste 1968).
For Saint Exupéry, “true freedom” is a fundamental mode of becoming that “is found
only in the creative process” (EG 182)—it obtains only in and through participation
with the world and with others. Saint Exupéry thus proposed “a freedom that resides
in acts rather than in rights or in ideas, and which is realized in concrete relationships
rather than in escapism or detachment from bonds [liens]” (Major 1968, 167). Through
these bonds, necessity is viewed positively with regard to self-realization, and there is
a richer sense of self-conscious, self-assured autonomy that Saint Exupéry valorized.
“If I look for the example of a genuine freedom,” he once wrote, “I will find it only
in a monastery, where men have a choice between different impulses in the richness
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 97

of their interior life” (EG 182). This is a telling example, in that Saint Exupéry’s cos-
mic worldview—especially in Pilote de guerre—amounts to a secularized Christianity,
with Man substituting for God—recall that “that the primacy of Man founds the only
meaningful Equality and Freedom” (PG 241). And indeed, it is only in an eschatological
context of this kind that freedom as the metabolic condition of human growth and creative
self-realization could possibly take the form of self-sacrificial exchange.
The Exupérian notion of freedom has much in common with Merleau-Ponty’s
view. Here, too, for example, freedom and necessity are two sides of a single coin—
recall Merleau-Ponty defining existentialism partly in terms of a freedom “which
becomes what it is by giving itself bonds [liens]” (SNS 121/70). In both views, one
can detect palpable misgivings with respect to the liberal idea of “negative” freedom,
understood in terms of deracination and alienability. Both opposed this as a kind of
inauthentic escapism, and did so in terms of a notion of freedom as “exchange.” In
particular, Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of freedom can be seen as based upon a sharp
critique of the Sartrean view, and Saint Exupéry’s account can likewise be approached
as offering “a conception of freedom exactly opposite to that of Sartre” (Simon 1950,
150f; Ouellet 1971, 106f; but cf. Major 1968, 169 n108).
But Merleau-Ponty’s view of freedom as exchange is ultimately quite different
from that of Saint Exupéry. In particular, it denies sacrifice by denying the sort of
eschatology that sacrifice implies. So from Merleau-Ponty’s view, while Saint Exupéry
may have moralized ad nauseam about creating bonds, his position failed to articulate
any means of achieving them. Turned away from the living present, he “[can]not offer
us so much as a single example of a pilot successfully reintegrated into one of those
villages over which he flies so patronizingly” (Harris 1999, 33). It remains a dream, and
unfulfilled aspiration to immanence. Occurring solely as a one-way relation between
the individual and the whole, exchange in the Exupérian scheme fails to be historically
creative, at least in a politically progressive sense.
Matters are otherwise with Merleau-Ponty (and with his interpretation of
Saint Exupéry), for whom exchange occurs fundamentally within the structure of
embodiment: “there is an exchange between generalized and individual existence
in which each receives and gives” (PhP 513, italics added; cf. 501, 517). The idea is
that concrete freedom as an event of human productivity occurs when a meaning
[sens] that was adumbrated in the realm of anonymous intersubjective generality
[l’On], “and which was nothing but an insubstantial possibility threatened by
the contingency of history, is taken up by an individual” (PhP 513). There is a
reciprocal exchange of real significance and concrete actuality that occurs through
an appropriative “shift” [glissement] (as opposed to an outright negation or rupture)
made in the living present. Consider, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the
act of the artist or philosopher is free.  .  .  .  Their freedom resides in the power of
equivocation . . . or in the process of escape. . . . It consists in taking up a factual
situation by giving it a figurative meaning [sens figuré] beyond its real meaning [sens
propre]” (PhP 201). In art as in philosophy—and Merleau-Ponty said something
similar about revolutionary politics—it is a matter of seeing differently by effecting
a perceptual Gestalt-switch. In each case, this implies “the power to suspend vital
communication” with the world, “or at least to limit it” (PhP 279). It is in conjunction
98 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

with the universal, and hence with some degree of self-denial, that such “shifts” can
transcend the given. This does not involve an eclectic mixture of determinism and
radical choice, but rather a motivated reconfiguration of tacit and focal existential
commitments.
However, as a kind of equivocating escape from the reality of alienating repression,
such a “shift” can be realized concretely only on condition that the new structure of
commitment is “worked out in interhuman relations” (PhP 509). As Merleau-Ponty
put it, “it is not enough for a painter like Cézanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create
and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea
take root in the consciousness of others. A successful work has the strange power to
teach its own lesson [s’enseigner elle-même]” (SNS 33/19). Ideally, then, the self-denial
of freedom as exchange will prove contagious. For thereby death would be, in a certain
sense, overcome by being transmuted into intersubjectivity, or communalized. “I thus
live not for death but forever [à jamais], and in the same way, not for myself alone but
with others” (SNS 121/70).
The commitments relevant to freedom are therefore not arbitrary. Contrary to
the Sartrean view of freedom as an essentially centrifugal process of signification,
Merleau-Ponty argued that freedom concretely understood is rooted in a pregiven
field of intersubjective meaning. This results in a view of freedom that emphasizes
centripetal appropriation over centrifugal nihilation—it is primarily a matter of
taking up the “autochthonous meaning [sens] of the world” and making agentive
decisions on that basis (PhP 503). It is a question for Merleau-Ponty of according
proper weight to the historical situation of the world as a field of possibilities for
meaningful action. Freedom needs to be enabled by existing structures, in the
sense of truly having something to do—in general, it obtains when we take up “open
situations calling for a certain completion” (PhP 500; cf. SNS 294/166). This does not
necessarily diminish the sense of autonomous commitment in freedom. Rather, the
idea is that we are always already committed, albeit in an ambiguous and prereflective
way, to a more basic project concerning the world and our être-au-monde. This is
the “tacit commitment” discussed above. To take up the “autochthonous meaning
of the world” is thus to take up “a spontaneous meaning [sens] of my life” (PhP 511,
emphasis added). “It is I who give a direction [sens] and a future to my life,” it is just
that this does not originate with me as a thinking subject. Rather, that direction and
future “spring from my present and past, and in particular from my present and past
mode of coexistence” (PhP 510). It is a matter of the existential style of my life, that is,
its orientation as an existential project toward a certain “determinate-indeterminate”
goal that is mine, but not mine alone (PhP 509). In this way, productivity through
freedom as exchange is ultimately an expression of the dialectical reciprocity within
the synergic system of self–others–world.

Rationality
This operation of human productivity represents the advent of rationality which is,
in a word, the solution to “the human problem,” the problem of “establishing human
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 99

relations among men” (HT xi/xv). Rationality is the “marvel [prodige] of the connection
of experiences” (PhP xvi). “To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives
intersect, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning [sens] emerges” (PhP xv). As
witness to the primordial emergence of sens from non-sens, perceptual consciousness
amounts to the “consciousness of rationality” itself. This awareness is lost when the
achievement of rationality is taken for granted, as it is by objective thinking. Merleau-
Ponty wanted us to rediscover it “by making it appear against the background of
inhuman [inhumaine] nature” (PrP 67f/25).
This is a Gestalt-switch that is exactly analogous to—or rather, that is the general
form of—that which Merleau-Ponty performed with respect to violence and political
order in Humanism and Terror. There, he tried to show that instead of judging violence
as aberrational against the background of political order, a better grip on matters is
attained if one approaches political order in general as emerging from a background of
violence. By establishing that all political order originates in violence, Merleau-Ponty
was concerned in particular with restructuring the moral optics of liberalism, in order
to make it at least possible to perceive violence as progressive with respect to advancing
the cause of human reconciliation. Merleau-Ponty thought that Marxist political
analysis of the present “deciphers events, discovers in them a common meaning and
thereby grasps a leading thread which, without dispensing us from fresh analysis at
every stage, allows us to orient ourselves toward events” (HT 105/98). He was prepared
to defend a “perception of history” supportive of judgments calling for violence to
realize the human universality that liberalism takes for granted (cf. HT 38 n1/35 n11).
This would be legitimate and defensible, he thought, to the extent that it could be
reasonably expected to help “bring reason out of madness [déraison]” (HT 105/98),
that is, help to realize a world of non-violence and thereby solve the human problem.
The key point, though, is that the human problem is not a “geometrical” problem in
the sense that the solution is simply a determinate unknown that is related to the givens
of the problem according to a rule of deduction or subsumption (HT 203/186). This
is what Merleau-Ponty meant when he emphasized that “rationality is not a problem”
(PhP xv). Because we are not spectators of a closed history, judgments concerning the
future historical development of rationality as the solution to the current state of the
human problem cannot be what Kant called “determining” [bestimmend] judgments,
which work through the subsumption of particulars under a fully adequate universal
concept. Rather, they must be what Kant described, in his Critique of the Power of
Judgment, as “reflecting” [reflectierend] judgments, that is, judgments that work
without an adequate concept, yet which are no less valid (KU 5:179).
Merleau-Ponty did not develop the application of this distinction very explicitly.
However, he did suggest that Kant’s account of aesthetic reflecting judgment in the
third Critique has epistemological priority over theoretical reason. He argued that
if there can be an awareness of “a harmony between the sensible and the concept,
between myself and others, which is itself without any concept,” and if the subject of
this awareness is not a universal thinker but an embodied perceiver, then “the hidden
art of the imagination must condition categorial activity. It is no longer merely aesthetic
judgment, but knowledge as well which rests upon this art, an art which forms the
basis of the unity of consciousness and of consciousnesses” (PhP xii). Merleau-Ponty
100 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

was making the same general point when he claimed that “the understanding . . . needs
to be redefined, since the general connective function ultimately attributed to it by
Kantianism [i.e., in the first Critique] is now spread over the whole intentional life and
no longer suffices to distinguish it” (PhP 65).
Merleau-Ponty approached this “art” hidden in the human soul in terms of “operative
intentionality” [fungierende Intentionalität], in order to take it up as the basis for an
expanded phenomenological reinterpretation of the transcendental aesthetic—“the
Logos of the aesthetic world” (PhP xii–xiii, 491). Like any art, however, this too is
“aware of itself [se connaît] only in its results.” As it is with Cézanne’s painting, for
example, “ ‘conception’ cannot precede ‘execution.’ ” There is no conceptual way to
determine in advance whether one will hit upon sense, whether one is in fact attuned
to the sense of history, or else is just caught up in a subjective dream: “only the work
itself, completed and understood, is proof that there was something rather than nothing
to be said” (SNS 32/19).
The upshot is that the establishment of rationality through praxis occurs “through
an initiative which has no guarantee in being, and whose justification rests entirely
on the actual power that it gives us for taking responsibility for our history” (PhP xv).
For Merleau-Ponty, militant philosophy involves a perception of history that launches
us into uncharted territory, into the “unfinished world of the revolutionary” (HT
104/97), or of phenomenology itself (cf. PhP xvi). As noted above, in Phenomenology
of Perception Merleau-Ponty put this quite dramatically: “we take our fate in our
hands, we become responsible for our history through reflection, as well as through a
decision whereby we commit our lives, and in both cases what is involved is a violent
act that proves itself in practice” (PhP xvi).
This “violence” is presumptive, in the sense that our perceptual grip on things is
always an imposition that claims more than it knows. But Merleau-Ponty was not
just speaking metaphorically about the violence we do to errors, say, by correcting
them. The issue is that, according to his account, to perceive is to be committed to
a certain perceptual background, that is, a view of the totality of history, and thus
to be committed, even if only tacitly, to the future realization of a certain world as
a system of rationality and truth. “To perceive is to engage all at once a whole future
of experiences in a present that never strictly guarantees it” (PhP 343f, italics added).
But on account of the “permanent givens” [données permanentes] (PrP 68/25; cf. HT
203f/186, 110/102) of the human problem, this is a site of conflict and contestation.
That we coexist against a backdrop of nature, and that the future is open beyond any
conceptual determination, all of this is conditioned by the subjectivity of perception.
“This is the price of there being things and ‘others’ for us, not through an illusion, but
through a violent act which is perception itself ” (PhP 415).
There are two important illustrations of the sort of militant praxis that Merleau-
Ponty had in mind here. The first concerns Lenin and Trotsky as leaders of the Russian
Revolution, an event that was still a major point of historical reference for Merleau-
Ponty. What is at issue here is political judgment in the absence of objective criteria.
Although his discussion of them was fairly selective, Merleau-Ponty saw Trotsky and
Lenin as gifted readers of historical situations. Contrary to portrayals of Marxism as
a kind of science that issues solely in determining judgments, Merleau-Ponty cited
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 101

Lenin to the effect that one must “put one’s own mind to work to find one’s bearing in
each particular case” (SNS 293/165). It is a matter of reading history, trying to decipher
its tendencies, and ultimately all that one has “to guide him is his own view of events”
(SNS 293f/166). Likewise with regard to Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian Revolution,
which he thought was based upon an apprehension of the “total intention” of society,
Merleau-Ponty affirmed that “the greatest objectivity is often the subjectivity of he who
lived it” (NI 18 [6]); cf. Whiteside 1988, 122). In both cases, rather than attempting to
deduce concrete political judgments from the outlines of Marxist theory, a perception
is attained of the “lines of force and vectors” in the present that takes into account the
complex “subjective” dimensions of the situation. “The problem is to recognize the
proletarian spirit in each of its momentary guises” (SNS 291/164). This can be done
well or poorly, and Merleau-Ponty commented that there is something “sublime” about
those who do indeed gain profound historical insight into the milieu they inhabit (HT
85/80). This is viewed in hindsight, of course, and it appears that way only to the extent
that the perception in question was borne out by later events. For Merleau-Ponty,
historical judgments admit of no other proof. A good appraisal of concrete political
situations “requires a certain Marxist flair or a Marxist perception of the local and
world situation which is on the level of talent or genius” (SNS 293/165). Merleau-Ponty
was under no illusions about the potential dangerousness of this. But he accepted the
general idea that “the ways of history are [ultimately] unfathomable” (SNS 290/164).
Lacking a demonstrable rational structure, all historical action is adventurous, and one
cannot avoid using a certain degree of cunning [ruser] (SNS 294f/166). But Merleau-
Ponty did not see any justification for giving up the attempt to understand history. He
thus looked to what he called Lenin’s “Marxist ‘perception’ of situations,” articulated
in numerous practically oriented writings, as implicitly containing “a theory of
contingency in history” that could be extended “onto the theoretical plane” (SNS 217
n1/123 n1).
The second illustration of militant praxis comes from Ludwig Binswanger. It is
highly instructive to read Phenomenology of Perception in the light of Binswanger’s 1935
article “Über Psychotherapie.” Based around a case of an ostensibly successful cure of
an aphonic hysteric, this article presents an account of existential psychotherapy that
emphasizes not only the importance of the “inner life history” of the patient, but also
and especially, the uniqueness and artistic creativity of the therapeutic intervention
itself, and the necessity of deep existential bonds between patient and therapist, in order
for the treatment to succeed. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty endorsed Binswanger’s
principal claim, expressing it as follows:

in psychological treatment of any kind, the coming to awareness would remain

purely cognitive, the patient would not accept the meaning of his disturbances
as revealed to him without the personal relationship formed with the doctor, or
without the confidence and friendship felt toward him, and the change of existence
resulting from this friendship. (PhP 190, italics added)

Here, we find a particularly important inspiration for Merleau-Ponty’s claim

that philosophy and even politics are “like art.” In a way that suggests its own sort
of Leninist practice, Binswanger described his therapeutic intervention not as a
102 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

theoretically derived procedure, but as an “artful response” based on an impulsive,

confident daring [Wagemut] (ÜP 209). He presented psychotherapy as a kind of art
that doctors performed according to their particular styles. He saw psychotherapeutic
cure as coming about through the establishment of an original existential relationship
between the doctor and patient, a relationship involving “an original communicative
novelty, a new linking of destiny—and this not only with regard to the patient-doctor
relationship, but also and above all with regard to the purely human relationship in the
sense of a genuine ‘with-another’ [Miteinander]” (ÜP 215).
According to Binswanger, successful therapy is a matter of establishing new
intersubjective bonds that overcome the patient’s “detachment from life,” thus freeing
her from captivation in and by her subjective realm. In this sense, the therapist is a
link between individual idiosyncrasy (non-sense) and the shared intelligibility of the
public world (sense). His task is thus to foster the “genuine communication” that will
free the patient

from blind isolation, from the idios cosmos, as Heraclitus says, thus from mere life
in his body, his dreams, his private inclinations, his pride and his exuberance, and
to illuminate and liberate him for the ability to participate in the koinos cosmos, in
the life of genuine fellowship [Koinonia] or community. (ÜP 215f; cf. TE 114f)

Binswanger’s account of the therapeutic encounter is significant for several reasons.

The first has to do with the way in which, after taking it up earlier—Merleau-Ponty
referred to Binswanger’s article six times in the chapter “Le corps comme être sexué”—
and endorsing its principal claim, Merleau-Ponty implicitly (but unmistakably) alluded
to it at the end of Phenomenology of Perception in claiming that analysis succeeds by
“binding the subject to his doctor through new existential relationships,” so that the
complex can be dissolved, not by “a freedom without instruments,” but rather by “a
new pulsation of time with its own supports and motives” (PhP 519, emphasis added).
The effectiveness of this depends on the strength of the new existential commitment,
and Merleau-Ponty added—with class consciousness clearly in mind—that “the
same applies in  all cases of coming to awareness” [il en est de même dans toutes les
prises de conscience] (PhP 519). Merleau-Ponty thus saw Binswanger’s account of the
therapeutic encounter as providing important clues regarding the mechanics, so to
speak, of the advent of explicit class consciousness construed as a matter of overcoming
quasitherapeutically a repressed form of existence.
Binswanger’s account shed light on this from a different angle as well. He noted
that the patient manifested various symptoms, and that his treatment included a
variety of techniques. In particular, when the patient was suffering a violent attack
of hiccoughing, Binswanger reported the following intervention: “I remember now
how the idea, or if you will, the inspiration suddenly came to me, to quietly approach
the patient lying in bed, to lay the fingers of my right hand across her throat, and to
compress her trachea so firmly that she had difficulty breathing and tried to resist
the grasp, and as the pressure decreased for a moment, a strong act of swallowing
occurred” (ÜP 209f). Other such interventions were performed, although not all were
mentioned in Binswanger’s article (see Lanzoni 2004). Nonetheless, this treatment
figured relatively prominently in the account, as Binswanger used the contrast precisely
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 103

as a way to emphasize the importance of strong existential bonds.15 This was significant
for Merleau-Ponty, in that it showed a very concrete enactment of reflecting judgment,
while providing an example, however dubious and disconcerting, of emancipation
through violence.
In this way, Binswanger’s account sheds light on Merleau-Ponty’s understanding
of the “realization of philosophy.” This is supposed to occur dialectically through its
destruction insofar as it is “separate.” At root, this separateness has to do with the mutual
isolation of discrete theatres, so to speak, of subjective experience—in this regard, the
philosopher, the proletarian, and the psychopathological patient are essentially in the
same position of silent isolation. Significantly, Merleau-Ponty interpreted the loss of
speech in Binswanger’s patient as a “refusal of coexistence,” a withdrawal from the lived
situation, such that the task was to have her regain her voice (PhP 187)—for Merleau-
Ponty, the philosopher is likewise the one “who wakes up and speaks” (EP 51/63). What
Binswanger helps us to see is that, for Merleau-Ponty, the realization of philosophy,
and the realization of revolutionary class consciousness that it presupposes, are matters
of integrating, respectively, the philosopher’s and the proletarian’s silent “idios cosmos”
into the concrete intersubjective horizons of discursive experience—that it is a matter
of moving from the non-sens of a “multiple solipsism” to a self-consciously historical
intersubjective community.
Binswanger is significant here because existential encounter in the psychothera-
peutic context engages with the problem of alterity in the most general way, and this
because it engages with the problem of mutual senselessness in its most acute form.
It thus shows most clearly the intersubjective character of human productivity at
work in the emergence of sens through the exploration of the irrational and its inte-
gration into “expanded reason [raison élargie]” (SNS 109/63; cf. PrP 77/30). It thus
represents, in germinal form, the philosophical militancy advanced by Merleau-
Ponty. The shared and mutually transformative understanding that results through
such an encounter—whether in the clinical, quotidian, political, or philosophical
context—prefigures the objectivity and truth of which authentic intersubjectivity
would be the living embodiment.
In this way, Binswanger’s therapeutic encounter paradigmatized the molecular
structure of achieved universality over and against the structural madness of a world
of alienation. At the heart of this conception lies the idea of “a new pulsation of time.”
This refers to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that it is precisely in the context of productive
existential exchange, and in conjunction with the human communion that emerges,
that human embodied existence “secretes” [sécrète] time (PhP 277).16 That is, it refers
to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that it is in this context that existence “becomes the location
in nature where, for the first time, events, instead of pushing one another into being,
project around the present a double horizon of past and future and receive a historical
orientation” (PhP 277). It is by being polarized and oriented in this way that, for
Merleau-Ponty, “we are the upsurge [surgissement] of time” (PhP 489, italics added)—
hence the “synchrony” characteristic of class consciousness.
This “proto-temporalization,” like historicity, belongs to the core meaning of human
productivity as the ecstatically transgressive overcoming of nature that effectively
defines anthropogenesis. But as noted earlier, this can be compromised and degraded.
104 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

This points back to the dual temporal structure of embodiment, which quite literally for
Merleau-Ponty is the locus of both freedom and servitude. In situations of alienating
repression, there is a pathological dislocation and imbalance in which the habituated
organism holds sway as an “inborn complex”—for instance, the way the proletariat lives
class as an “obsessive presence.” In such ways as this, the body is problematic—for it is
the locus of unfreedom in that it de-dialecticizes the historicity of individuals, thereby
effectively removing them from the world and powerfully isolating them. It is certainly
not natural, nor historically typical, for humans to have what we might call “bodies of
freedom.” This can only be an historical achievement. And Merleau-Ponty did think
that it was on the agenda. For he followed Marx and Lukács in holding that the abject
de-humanization of the proletariat would, or at least could, be overturned dialectically
through a kind of “return of the repressed.” In other words, he did believe that as an
“inborn complex,” the habituated organismicity of the contemporary proletariat was
implicitly a matter of universality and thus a force for historical progress‌—if only the
appropriate subjective consciousness would take hold.
What Merleau-Ponty took Binswanger’s account to show is that the cure for
repression in general lies in regaining an “existentially healthy” form of historical being
through the dissolution of those impersonal sedimentations which, in disrupting
historicity, govern the style of our (alienated) behavior. This would serve to reinsert
the patient (or the proletarian or the philosopher) within a shared history or temporal
synchrony, thereby overcoming intersubjective separation while enhancing the scope
of effective action, increasing “tolerance of the corporeal and institutional givens” of
life (PhP 518), and enabling a surer grip on one’s own life-history (cf. TE 118). That this
occurs through “a new pulsation of time” means that it is based upon the projection
of a shifted perception of one’s historical being, and a joint existential commitment
to the temporalization that that perception implies. This is ultimately the sense in
which, for Merleau-Ponty, “true philosophy is a matter of learning to see the world
anew” (PhP xvi; cf. NI 139 [62])—it is a matter of a Gestalt-switch that refocuses our
perception of the world by setting it out against the background of “nature” in such a
way that it comes to appearance as the totality of history involving a “contingent logic”
of universality. This is a better, because more complete way of seeing. “Whether it is a
matter of things or of historical situations, philosophy has no other function than to
teach us again to see them well” (PhP 520, italics added).
This perceptual normativity accrues directly from the militantly engaged character
of Merleau-Ponty’s standpoint vis-à-vis the as-yet unrealized universality of life-as-
such. Indeed, his postwar project is normatively charged through and through. But
he did not see this as unproblematic—there are issues of justification that need to be
addressed. It was not despite but rather because he held that, as with life in general,
doing philosophy inevitably implies political commitment of some kind, whether this
is embraced self-consciously or not, that Merleau-Ponty was keenly mindful of the need
for justification. In other words, notwithstanding his sometimes fiery rhetoric regarding
engagement, he was particularly concerned to make his decision as un-“decisionistic”
as possible, that is, as broadly appealing as possible. And for him, this meant relying
on the perception of the meaning and direction of history as the progressive realization
of rationality. There is, of course, a certain circularity here, in that any perception will
 Elements of an Incarnational Marxism 105

always retain a degree of decision. But Merleau-Ponty wished his perception of history
to be as unambiguous as possible—he thus wanted this perception to impose itself as
forcefully as possible. So while much of what he wanted to say was redolent of Lukács’
work in History and Class Consciousness, there was a crucial difference, in that the latter
was developed in the immediate post-1917 context when class struggle was manifest
and revolutionary change was a palpable part of social reality. Merleau-Ponty was
acutely aware that his time was different, at least on the surface. Nothing fundamental
had been altered, but finding compelling phenomenological evidence attesting to the
veracity of the Marxist conception of history was not so straightforward. In the next
chapter, we will consider Merleau-Ponty’s conception of heroism in some detail, and
see how it was meant to play an evidentiary role of precisely this sort. This will then
bring us to the Conclusion where, drawing upon the overall discussion, I will relate
Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Marxism to his reinterpretation of phenomenology
in order to lay out a methodological explanation as to why Phenomenology of Perception
concludes on a note of deference to Saint Exupéry qua “hero.”
106
 5

Contemporary Heroism

Phenomenology of Perception is not unique among Merleau-Ponty’s works in terms of

ending with heroism. It is also the case that Merleau-Ponty crowned Sense and Non-
Sense—a collection of articles from 1945 to 1947, published in 1948—with “Man, the
Hero” [“Le Héros, l’Homme”], a short essay which took up this theme explicitly (SNS
323–31/182–7). Although this piece has an obvious potential to shed light on the
ending of Phenomenology of Perception, it has received negligible scholarly attention.
Of course, this is presumably because, as discussed above, no one has seriously
thought that this ending was in need of any critical illumination. As in the case of
Phenomenology of Perception, then, the invocation of heroism at the end of Sense and
Non-Sense is typically ignored or glossed over. Even the relatively detailed treatment
(nearly two paragraphs) recently given to it by Bernard Flynn (2007, 136f) still skirts
the basic question as to the philosophical significance of heroism for Merleau-Ponty
in the first place.
The first part of this chapter undertakes a close examination of “Man, the Hero” as
a source of insight into Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the immediate postwar period, and
particularly, into his deference to heroism at the end of Phenomenology of Perception.
The discussion is framed by the original intentions behind the essay, which had to do
with Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to rethink Marxist praxis on the basis of an existential
attitude vis-à-vis post-Hegelian philosophy of history. Unpacking the implicit contrasts
that Merleau-Ponty drew with respect to other positions—including those of Kojève,
Aron, Caillois, and Bataille—I analyze his rejection of traditional understandings of
heroism, and then examine his account of what he called “the contemporary hero” [le
héros contemporain, le héros des contemporains], which is the term he uses to denote
his own view. What emerges is that Merleau-Ponty intended this sense of “heroism”
to supply experiential evidence attesting to the latent presence of human universality.
It is ultimately a mythic device intended to encourage the militant faith needed for
the political project of a universal society, by showing that such a project is indeed
possible, and that the transformative political praxis required need not imply agonistic
sacrifice.
In the light of negative responses to “Man, the Hero,” in the second part of this
chapter, I discuss some comparative considerations between Merleau-Ponty and
Saint Exupéry as a way of ascertaining what difference there is, if any, between the
standpoint of engagement of the former and the sort of pensée de survol associated
with the latter.
108 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

The existential attitude

“Le Héros, l’Homme” was originally published under the title “Le Culte du héros”
[“Hero Worship”] in the pro-PCF (Communist Party of France) weekly action [sic] in
February 1946.1 Aside from a few words quoted in the frosty and dismissive editorial
preface, signed by Francis Ponge,2 that accompanied its publication in action,3 no
documentary evidence is available to explain exactly why Merleau-Ponty submitted
this piece to this particular publication.
However, it is reasonable to say that this submission was linked to Merleau-
Ponty’s active efforts to publicly promote the political credentials of existentialism.
For action was not a dogmatic organ of PCF policy—on the contrary, it was
“l’enfant terrible” of the Party (Desanti 1997, 260; cf. Leduc 2006, 85–114). In
particular, following the end of the European war, action was (along with Les temps
modernes) an important forum for debate between Marxism and existentialism.4
Of special interest to Merleau-Ponty with regard to his existentialist proselytizing
were relatively open-minded intellectuals within the PCF. Among these, Merleau-
Ponty’s “privileged interlocutor” was Pierre Hervé, a leading figure in the party who
was at the time “at the very centre of a liberalizing movement within the party”
(Whiteside 1988, 211),5 a movement that aimed, as did Merleau-Ponty, for a broad
unification of the Left in France, including left-wing Catholicism (see Poster 1975,
110f). Most importantly, Hervé was on the executive committee of action (along
with Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, Victor Leduc, Pierre Courtade, Alfred Malleret-
Joinville, and Marcel Degliame-Fouché). Thus, in the context of his active promotion
of existentialism, the key reason why Merleau-Ponty sent his essay on heroism to
action was because it formed a moment in his ongoing political dialogue with the
milieu of Marxist thinkers and activists who, centered around Hervé, were relatively
open to existentialism.
Broadly following the main claims of Lukács’ “What is Orthodox Marxism?,”
the general idea that Merleau-Ponty aimed to establish in this dialogue was that
as a practical project of proletarian self-emancipation, Marxism was less a body of
truth than a method for interpreting political phenomena, and that with respect to
subjectivity and consciousness, what its advancement required could be supplied by
existential phenomenology. “A living Marxism should ‘save’ and integrate existentialist
research instead,” as was its tendency, “of stifling it” (SNS 143/82). If Marxism is still
true, he wrote, “then we will rediscover it on the path of present-day truth [la vérité
actuelle] and in the analysis of our time” (SNS 303/171). For Merleau-Ponty, it was
always a matter of being attuned to historical actuality—“our time” [notre temps], and
he believed that in the postwar context, existential analysis had a better grip on this
than Marxist theory. Concerning the former, he wrote that “we don’t have the feeling
of doing sectarian work, but of taking up research at the point where it was carried
[portée] by our time” (NI 63 [153], italics added).
Existential research and analysis as such, however, are not what the essay on
heroism offered. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty stated in the cover letter that he sent to
action, its task was more specific: to define “the existential attitude (as a general
phenomenon of our time, and not as a school of thought),” and to do so “positively
 Contemporary Heroism 109

and on the basis of examples” (quoted in the editorial preface, see note 3). The aim of
the essay was to offer this “existential attitude” as a heuristic principle of orientation
in the neo-Marxist political hermeneutics called for by the postwar situation.

Heroism and history

Merleau-Ponty defined the “existential attitude” by personifying it in what he called
“the contemporary hero.” Because he did so by way of a critique of what I will call
traditional and ideological views of heroism, I will first examine Merleau-Ponty’s
treatment of these before turning in the next section to the account of “contemporary
heroism” itself.

Traditional heroism
Merleau-Ponty claimed that “hero worship” has “always existed,” but identified Hegel
as the key turning point in its history. Previously, the idea of the hero was essentially
that of an “agent of a Providence,” paradigmatically the (Christian) saint. Here heroic
action is understood as self-sacrifice in the name of certain transcendent, other-worldly
goals. This changed when Hegel brought heroism down to Earth by conceiving it in
terms of “the individuals of world history.”6 In this view, heroes are particular concrete
individuals who gain an awareness that their social world “has no future,” and who take
it upon themselves to intervene, in effect, on behalf of historical progress. They were
“the new race [la race nouvelle] that already existed within the old.”7 World-historical
individuals are the state-founding agents of the Weltgeist, inchoately grasping the
needs of History and acting accordingly. “They have a presentiment of the future, but
of course they have no science of it. . . . They forsake happiness and by their action and
their example create a new law [droit] and a morality [morale] in which their time will
later recognize its truth” (SNS 324/183).
The Hegelian hero is thus an historical individual who, based on a vague sense of
universal history, acts against her own time. Retrospectively, such action could be seen
as a matter of historical wisdom. But only retrospectively. Such heroes are in general
not heroes for their contemporaries. For the latter come too soon to benefit from the
world-historical actions in question. Hegelian heroism consists in “carrying out and
winning for others . . . what will afterwards seem the only possible future and the very
meaning of history” (SNS 324f/183, italics added).
In contrast to this Hegelian view, which dialectically embeds the hero in the
unfolding of universal history, Merleau-Ponty also extracts a view of heroism from
Nietzsche’s account of the Übermensch. The idea here is of being situated outside of
both providence and historical reason—there is no meaning or logic in history, no
nonarbitrary substantive goals to aspire toward. This Nietzschean idea of heroism
thus  involves a rejection of any overarching framework as a condition of historical
action. So whereas the Hegelian hero sacrifices happiness and personal well-being
for the sake of achieving historical order, the Nietzschean hero “is beyond everything
that has been or is to be done; he is interested only in power itself ” (SNS 325/183).
110 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

That is, this figure is situated beyond history, and is thus concerned solely with the
assertion of pure power against others. There can be no constructive exercise of power
here, for there is nothing to do: there are no historical tasks to fulfill, and there is
no dialectical framework within which the exercise of power could be sublimated as
sacrifice and deployed in a transformative way. Conquest alone remains meaningful,
and in particular, the conquest of death, “the most powerful opponent of all.” The
Nietzschean hero is thus ultimately caught up in the impossible quest for “a life which
truly integrates death into itself and whose free recognition by others is definitely
assured” (SNS 326/184).
Merleau-Ponty reverted to Hegelian terminology in this reading of Nietzsche. As he
described it, the Nietzschean hero, seeking unreciprocated recognition, finds himself
precisely in the existential impasse of the Hegelian “master.” The contrast is thus posed
in an unexpectedly simple way: the Nietzschean hero is the Hegelian “master” [Herr],
while the Hegelian hero is the Hegelian “slave” [Knecht], that is, the one who has
“chosen life and who works to transform the world in such a way that in the end there
is no longer a place for the master” (SNS 326/184; cf. SNS 118f/68f).
There is clearly little exegetical rigor in these interpretations of Hegel and
Nietzsche. Although they might prove defensible, were they to be developed more
carefully, that was not Merleau-Ponty’s purpose. Rather, as was his wont, he was
primarily interested in outlining certain philosophical tropes that would serve his
own argumentative purposes. It is in simultaneous contrast to both the so-called
Hegelian and Nietzschean figures of heroism that he presented his own account of
“the contemporary hero.”
But we would overlook the significance of what Merleau-Ponty was doing if we
fail to recognize that these tropes do represent opposed orientations with respect to
Hegelian philosophy of history among which Merleau-Ponty found himself at the
time compelled to stake out an interstitial position. “There are,” as he said elsewhere,
“several Hegels,” and “interpreting Hegel means taking a stand on all the philosophical,
political, and religious problems of our century” (SNS 110/63f).
First, the view he attributes to Hegel himself is the “triumphant” view that maintains
that there can no longer be heroes because all of the tasks of universal history have
been fulfilled (cf. Hegel 1967, 245). This “Hegel” is more accurately associated with
Alexandre Kojève, whose lectures on Hegel in the 1930s Merleau-Ponty had attended
(see Chapter 2, notes 13–15). According to this interpretation (Kojève 1947), the “end
of History” had been attained—that is, human consciousness had become the Concept,
thus concluding the movement by which it had sought to overcome the opposition
between thought and being. We need not enter into the details of this view here. It
suffices to point out that the linchpin of Kojève’s view is his assertion of the possibility
of what he termed the “Sage,” someone who is “fully and perfectly self-conscious”
(Kojève 1947, 271; see Preface, note 41). This is crucial because it is only on the basis
of the total historical knowledge thereby implied that one could legitimately claim
of historical heroes, not only that they did, in fact, attain a partial glimpse of the
universal truth, and thus did, in fact, engage in genuine heroic activity, but also that
as a whole, they have been rendered obsolete—that is, that History, the domain of the
hero, had ended.
 Contemporary Heroism 111

However, in The Structure of Behavior, completed in  1938, Merleau-Ponty had

demonstrated that Kojève’s Sage is not humanly possible, by showing that the
integration constitutive of acquired self-consciousness “is never absolute and it always
fails.” In fact, the impossibility of “complete integration”—that is, Sagely wisdom—is
precisely what Merleau-Ponty aimed to substantiate in that work, by showing that “all
integration presupposes the normal functioning of the subordinated forms, which
always demand their own due” (SC 227/210, emphasis added; see Chapter 2).
Second, with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s trope of Nietzschean heroism, one might
be tempted to think of Georges Bataille, with whom Merleau-Ponty was likewise
personally acquainted. Bataille was a major proponent of Nietzschean ideas in France.
Yet, this was primarily because he accepted Kojève’s thesis that human society was
entering a terminal stage of universal homogeneity in which human negativity had
nothing to do. In his terms, this gave rise to the problem of “unemployed negativity”
[la négativité sans emploi], and in particular, to the problem of securing recognition
for it as such.8
For Bataille, however, the end of History was rolled together with the death of God
in a way that at once opened up and radically undermined the possibility for genuine
subjectivity. This yielded the paradoxical or “impossible” situation of “sovereignty”
that was central to Bataille’s thinking. In this sense, he was not so much a follower
of Nietzsche as someone who aspired to imitate Nietzsche. He took up Nietzsche as
a sacred “hero” of nonconformism, but this precisely in his tragic, mad solitude—it
was a matter, so to speak, of an imitatio anti-Christi. This is why, in his works from the
war years, including Le coupable, Bataille stated that his aim is “to invent a new way
to crucify myself ” [un nouveau moyen de me crucifier] (Bataille 1973, 257). He made
of his existence a “combat” [bataille] that incarnated sacrifice by trying to mimic the
sacrifice of God.
This effort on the part of Bataille was the result of his having accepted—and having
tried to live out the consequences of—the basic premises of both the Hegelian and
Nietzschean tropes of heroism. This made Bataille himself the focal point of their
underlying conflict. Thus, while his uptake of Nietzsche was infused with the themes
of war and violence, it was primarily directed inward in a self-destructive way that
does not conform to the model of self-assertive mastery sketched by Merleau-Ponty.
So although Bataille was one of Merleau-Ponty’s more or less covert interlocutors (he
will resurface below), he does not, as we might be tempted to think, represent the trope
of Nietzschean heroism.
To capture the contrast that Merleau-Ponty wanted to establish with Kojève, our
attention should rather turn to Raymond Aron, someone who was sharply critical of
Kojève. Aiming to directly refute him (among others), Aron wrote in 1938 that “the
traditional philosophy of history is completed in Hegel’s system. Modern philosophy of
history begins with the rejection of Hegelianism” (Aron 1969, 15, emphasis added). He
went on to develop a decidedly skeptical position concerning the limits of historical
objectivity, which regarded historiography as inescapably based on subjective mises
en perspective. To be sure, this view shares a certain measure of common ground with
Merleau-Ponty’s own disagreement with Kojève. But Merleau-Ponty thought that Aron
went too far in the direction of perspectivism.9 At least in theory. Although he does not
112 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

name him directly, Merleau-Ponty was undoubtedly referring to Aron when he wrote
the following:

It has not been sufficiently noted that, after demonstrating the irrationality of
history, the skeptic will abruptly abandon his methodological scruples when it
comes to drawing practical conclusions. . . . A skeptical politics is obliged to treat,
at least implicitly, certain facts as more important than others and to that extent
it harbors an embarrassing [honteuse] philosophy of history—one which is lived
rather than thought, but which is no less effective. (SNS 297/168)

In case there is any doubt, we can consider Merleau-Ponty’s response to Jaspers in

Geneva in  1946 alluded to earlier (see Chapter 3). Immediately after defending the
Lukácsian conception of totality against Jaspers’ concerns by claiming that “anyone,
from the moment he takes a political position, has a certain conception of the whole of
historical life, and even if he does not formulate it in words, he nonetheless expresses it
in action” (EE 253), Merleau-Ponty referred explicitly to Aron:

I see, for example, in France, that a theorist like Raymond Aron, who has defended
this idea that history is not amenable to objective interpretation, is nonetheless
brought, when he personally takes a stand, to implicate therein an entire conception
of the future. (EE 253)

Merleau-Ponty was alluding to the increasingly Gaullist and pro-imperialist political

views that Aron defended after the war (Aron 1946; cf. Whiteside 1986, 147f).
Merleau-Ponty reasoned that Aron’s practical pragmatism stemmed from the fact
that his theoretical skepticism was based on an at least tacit acceptance of Kojève’s
overly strong criteria concerning what would count as historical objectivity (cf. NI
347f [103f]). Correctly rejecting the possibility of this sort of absolute knowledge, he
thus wrongly rejected historical objectivity as such, leaving his practical assessments
with no principled basis beyond sociological facts. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s claim that
“historical skepticism is always conservative, although it cannot, in  all strictness,
exclude anything from its expectations—not even a revolutionary phase of history.
Under the pretext of objectivity it freezes the future and eliminates change and the will
of men from history” (SNS 298/168).
Although Merleau-Ponty contrasts the Hegelian and Nietzschean tropes of
heroism, we can see that because they are rooted in the same absolute view of historical
objectivity—the one accepting it, the other rejecting it—the conceptions of subjectivity
they respectively embody actually share a fundamental infirmity: each is oblivious to
concrete historical praxis. What Merleau-Ponty noted of Aron’s skeptical position
applies equally well to Kojève’s posthistorical view: he sees “neither true subjectivity,
which is never without motives, nor true objectivity, which is never without evaluation,
nor the junction of the one with the other in Praxis” (NI 348 [104]). There is in neither
case any recognition of historical tasks to be performed, either on the grounds that
they have all been accomplished (Kojève), or else because there never were any to begin
with (Aron). For what goes unperceived in both cases is the present’s being oriented
toward and predelineating a future that is “à faire,” to be made. Both Kojève and
 Contemporary Heroism 113

Aron consequently exhibit a conservative acquiescence in events that is antithetical

to historical subjectivity and agency concretely understood. This is why neither offers
a suitable framework for a neo-Marxist hermeneutics—in this regard, Merleau-Ponty
was actually closer to Fessard!10
What is lacking in the positions of both Kojève and Aron (and this would apply
as well to Fessard), according to Merleau-Ponty, is living contact with the present as
the germinal origins of the future. “Our only recourse lies in a reading of the present
which is as full and as faithful as possible, which does not prejudge its meaning, which
even recognizes chaos and non-sense where they exist, but which does not refuse
to discern a direction and an idea where they manifest themselves [in the present]”
(SNS 299/169). This “reading of the present” is the central plank of Merleau-Ponty’s
proposed political hermeneutics. As we have seen, his was not so much a philosophy of
history, but a perception of historical phenomena that calls philosophies of history into
question (NI 352, 350 [107, 105]). The reform of Marxism that Merleau-Ponty had
in mind would thus extract it from all such frameworks. The course he tried to steer
between Kojève and Aron, between abstractly one-sided views of history in either
objective or subjective terms, was intended in part against the background of long-
standing disputes within Marxism between evolutionism and voluntarism, between
falling back on the inexorable movement of history, or else making it out to be simply
a matter of decision and will.
Although Merleau-Ponty associated his approach with Marx, he did so only
inasmuch as Marx could be read in conformity with Merleau-Ponty’s own (idiosyncratic)
reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. “There can be no definitive understanding
of the whole import of Marxist politics without going back to Hegel’s description of
the fundamental relations between men” (HT 110/101f). This reading rejected the
gnosiological understanding of absolute knowledge that forms the reference point
for both Kojève and Aron. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the “contemporary hero” will
aim to bring about an Aufhebung of the Hegelian and Nietzschean tropes in order to
account at once for what is held artificially separate in this distinction, namely, objective
historical progress as an agentive possibility and the subjective motivation to pursue it.
It is thus meant to flesh out an alternative view of absolute knowledge, understood as
a “way of living” [manière de vivre] wherein “consciousness at last becomes equal to its
spontaneous life and regains its self-possession” (SNS 112/64).
As traditionally understood, such would not be a moment of knowledge at all.
But that is the case only inasmuch as the tradition fails to recognize knowledge as
a normative practice of embodied perception. And this includes historical knowledge.
Merleau-Ponty thus made historical objectivity relative to practical participation in
the project of realizing human universality. Such participation consequently possesses
a certain epistemic privilege. As noted in the previous chapter, citing the perspicacity
of Trotsky’s analysis of the Russian Revolution, for example, Merleau-Ponty affirmed
that “the greatest objectivity is often the subjectivity of he who lived it” (NI 18 [6]);
cf. Whiteside 1988, 122). The point is not that all lived experience carries equal
epistemological weight. It is rather that, even if it cannot be captured discursively, the
object of individual lived experience can be the “the total intention” of society, “the
Idea in the Hegelian sense” (PhP xiii, emphases added).
114 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty’s broader point was that this possibility could underwrite a common
framework within which all those engaged in history as the process of fulfilling “the
promise of humanity”—Marxists and militant Christians in particular—could be
reconciled. The idea is that substantive ideological disagreement is superficial and
that it stems from a prior epistemological agreement—exemplified by Kojève and
Aron—concerning objectivity which stipulates what would count as substantive
agreement in a way that actually renders it impossible. In occluding the living
present, this common theoretical prejudice prevents people from seeing that what
motivates genuine historical engagement is ultimately not a matter of ideological
profession.

Ideological heroism
Concerning historical action, Merleau-Ponty was gripped by the phenomenon of
uncompromising engagement, especially on the part of Communists (like Nizan), where
there was little or no expectation that the goals pursued would be realized during the
agent’s own lifetime. Let’s call this “ideological heroism.” In contrast to the traditional
Hegelian hero, whose vision of human universality is inchoate and whose projects
contribute to it only inadvertently, the ideological hero clearly imagines the universal
and sees that there is an unfulfilled historical objectivity, on behalf of which she acts
self-consciously. But Merleau-Ponty did not think that this offered a viable model for
political agency. In “Man, the Hero,” where he hinges his discussion on selected literary
examples of communist political action, his strategy is to parlay a critique of the roman
à thèse as a “self-defeating genre” (Tane 1998, 11) into a broader critique of political
ideology as a motivating force. The problem with the roman à thèse is that its political
didacticism necessarily involves a closed teleology—heroes are modeled on pregiven
prototypes, with the result either that the political message is delivered ventriloquially
or else that it is actually overshadowed by characters’ subjective deviations from
orthodoxy (Tane 1998, 453). Either way, ideologically motivated heroic action remains
an abstract idea that is not brought into living connection with particular individuals.
For instance, Merleau-Ponty considers Hemingway’s Robert Jordan (For Whom
the Bell Tolls), the idealistic American college professor who volunteers to fight for
the Loyalist cause against the fascists in Spain, and who ultimately gives his life in
doing so. Unlike Hemingway’s earlier protagonists, who tended to be detached and
individualistic, Jordan is strongly socially-oriented and concerned with communion
and fraternity (Smetana 1965, 124ff). Nonetheless, as Merleau-Ponty notes, in risking
his life for the “interests of humanity” (Hemingway 1940, 11), “Jordan cannot manage
to make the society of the future the sole motive for his sacrifice.” Rather, such sacrifice
is tied to the living present such that “the society of the future” “is desirable to [Jordan]
only as the probable guarantee, for himself and for others, of the freedom he is
exercising at that very moment” (SNS 327/184).
Turning to Malraux’s Kyo Gisors (La condition humaine), a leader of a failed
socialist insurrection in Shanghai, Merleau-Ponty notes that here the same question is
confronted “at the very core of Marxism.” The problem is that with respect to political
 Contemporary Heroism 115

action, in principle there cannot be any a priori determination of when to cede to the
objective momentum of history and when to subjectively “force its hand,” as it were.
Either way, it seems to be an inescapably subjective decision. Merleau-Ponty draws
the same conclusion concerning the “paradoxes of liberty” from Roger Vailland’s 1945
work Drôle de jeu (cf. Lloyd 2003, 165f). The idea is that communist discipline results
from a free choice to limit free choice for the sake of effective collective action, but that
this basic choice itself cannot be objectively determined.
Merleau-Ponty wanted to show that this basic “choice” should not be understood
as an intellectual decision, but rather in terms of existential style. Merleau-Ponty used
the example of Hemingway’s Jordan to illustrate this. Wounded behind enemy lines,
and having urged his comrades to go on, Jordan remains with them in spirit, prepared
until the very end to do what he could to protect them. As he says, “there is something
to do yet” (Hemingway 1940, 470, italics added). But does Jordan truly believe the
ideological rationale he gives himself for his actions, and is this what actually motivates
him? Is it the case that “right up to the end [jusqu’au bout], he will satisfy the highest
demand: ‘uphold through action the honor of being a man, and do something useful
for the others’ ” (Smetana 1965, 126, citing Astre 1959, 153, italics added)? Is heroism a
matter of service to the “interests of humanity”?
Merleau-Ponty answers firmly in the negative. According to his interpretation of
Hemingway’s Jordan, “the man who is still living has no other resource – but this is
sovereign – than to keep on acting like a living man [un homme vivant]” (SNS 329/186,
emphasis added). In continuing to act, in particular, by not taking his own life, Jordan
was just living out his existential style—just being himself. He was wounded, but alive,
and so, however short it might be, there was still a future to be made to which he would
belong. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, this evinces sovereignty, not service. This is why it is
not the society of the future that is the key to understanding Jordan, but rather “the
freedom he is exercising at that very moment.” And this is why it is immaterial whether
he was actually able to do anything useful for the others.
Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, heroic action is not a self-sacrificial matter of one’s
reflective ideological commitments tragically piloting one’s body into a lethal
situation. That is to say, in the terms drawn from Part I of Phenomenology of
Perception, it is not a matter of a temporal dislocation in which the “actual” body
fatally detaches itself from the habituated organism. For Merleau-Ponty, to say that
heroic action is a matter of existential style is to affirm that the locus of heroic action
is the habituated organism. Hence, inasmuch as ideology informs heroism, it does so
only as a kind of corporeal sedimentation. But again, this does not mean that heroic
action is a matter of sedimented ideological commitment fatally compromising
the “actual” body. Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s view is that heroic action precisely
instances the coincidence—or the contemporaneousness—of the “actual” body and
the habituated organism. This is the condition of absolute knowledge, “the point at
which consciousness finally becomes equal to its spontaneous life and regains its
self-possession” (SNS 64/112).
To clarify this, Merleau-Ponty turns to Saint Exupéry, who, significantly, was a real
person, not a fictional character (even if his stories are highly stylized).
116 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

The contemporary hero

The idea behind the contemporary hero is that “our time,” as Merleau-Ponty very
frequently put it, appears as a time neither of faith nor of reason, but rather of a
world out of joint. Events exhibit no clear overarching pattern, and in particular, the
schemata of Marxism are unable to account for them (SNS 288/162f; cf. 216f/123). It
is thus a time when “duties and tasks are unclear,” for there are no absolute reference
points for historical action. Not even utility. Merleau-Ponty seizes on the fact that
the flight described in Pilote de guerre was, as Saint Exupéry’s account of it likewise
emphasized, objectively useless. As noted above (Chapter 1), not only was the mission
extremely perilous, but it was understood that due to the state of the French forces
at the time, no reconnaissance information could be put to use anyway. “What
sense did it make” to fly that mission? “How is [Saint Exupéry] to serve if service is
useless?” (SNS 328/185).
The answer, of course, is that he was not serving anything. Not unlike Jordan, Saint
Exupéry was “sovereign” because his action was useless, because it made no sense,
that is, because it was not intelligible according to existing parameters of rationality.11
But Merleau-Ponty added that this was not a demonstration of a morbid fascination
with death or a cavalier contempt for it in the manner, for example, of Montherlant’s
Service inutile (1935). “It is not death that I love, said Saint-Exupéry, but life” (SNS
330/186).12 Merleau-Ponty thus interpreted Saint Exupéry’s action in 1940 in this way
(SNS 328/185):

Saint-Exupéry throws himself into his mission because it is an intimate part of

himself, the consequences of his thoughts, wishes and decisions, because he would
be nothing if he were to back out. He recovers his own being to the extent to
which he runs into danger. Over Arras, in the fire of anti-aircraft guns, when every
second of continuing life is as miraculous as birth, he feels invulnerable because he
is in things at last; he has left his inner nothingness behind, and death, if it comes,
will reach him right in the thick of the world.

And without question, Merleau-Ponty meant to imply that what was true of Saint
Exupéry’s flight in 1940 also applied to his final flight in 1944. Incarnating pure human
productivity and eschewing all circumstantial compromise, Saint-Exupéry melded with
the world, thereby achieving the organically complete agentive integrity characteristic
of absolute knowledge.
For Merleau-Ponty, heroes are those who “really were outwardly what they inwardly
wished to be” and thus “became one with history at the moment when it claimed their
lives” (SNS 258/146). Equivalently, the hero is someone who “lives to the limit [jusqu’au
bout] his relation to men and the world” by enacting an affirmative response to the
question: “Shall I give my freedom to save freedom?” (PhP 520). Subjectively, the hero is
fully invested in the realization of freedom, understood in universal terms. Owing to her
tacit acceptance that true freedom knows no singularity, the hero gives the appearance
of a wholehearted readiness for personal sacrifice. This just means that heroic living
embodies an uncompromising commitment to life considered universally—the hero
is an individual who lives out her own vital particularity as human universality. The
 Contemporary Heroism 117

hero is thus an exemplary vivant, or living person (SNS 328f/185f; cf. HT xli/xlv),
whose thinking and acting are fully saturated with that “love of life” that is irreducible
to biological existence. This fulfills Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “man is capable of
situating his proper being, not in biological existence, but at the level of properly
human relations” (SC 190 n1/246 n97). It would kill us, but we can do it.
In a paradoxical way, then, the hero is pathologically alive. Merleau-Ponty endorsed
Hegel’s idea that human beings are “sick animals” (SNS 116/67). That is, normal human
existence is constitutively “sick” on account of the schizoidal duality of being-in-itself
and being-for-itself to which anthropogenetic reflective self-consciousness leads.
Through his complete internalization of the negativity of death, the hero effectively
heals this split by achieving a self-coincidence that amounts to a condition of
pathological health. Subjectively, this parallels the Marxist account of the proletarian
that Merleau-Ponty presented in Humanism and Terror. The contemporary hero is
likewise a de-humanized—which is to say, de-particularized—agent of the species, but
without the objective social conditions.
The case of Saint Exupéry thus addressed the motivational problem of how human
universality can be concretely realized without sacrifice. This is because, as Merleau-
Ponty put it, his self-giving resulted, not from pursuing this or that ideological goal,
but rather from living out the “loyalty to the natural movement that throws us toward
things and toward others” (SNS 330/186, emphasis added), something Merleau-Ponty
implied is equivalent in the hero’s case to remaining “poised in the direction of his
chosen ends” (SNS 330/185, emphasis added).
What were those ends? Simply to leave “his inner nothingness behind” and to
“recover his own being.” Whatever his real military contribution may have been,
what he was doing was living out his subjectivity, “recovering his being” by personally
incorporating the centrifugal thrust of natural spontaneity. Attaining the condition of
sovereignty, the hero becomes a kind of natural purposiveness, a living embodiment of
humanity’s being its own highest end.
Unlike the Hegelian hero, who, in working against her time, suffered a pronounced
dislocation between habituated organism and “actual” body, the contemporary hero
simply lives her time—this is the deeper sense of her “contemporaneity.” The heroic
achievement is to subjectively exist one’s own corporeality as a prototype of one’s
sociohistorical milieu. For Merleau-Ponty, this means that the hero lives out explicitly
the universality that world-historical heroism in the Hegelian sense realized only to
the point of latency. He thus argued that it is “by living my time,” “by plunging into [en
m’enfonçant] the present and the world . . . that I am able to understand other times”
(PhP 520)—that is, accede to the universal.
Merleau-Ponty held that the disordered and contingent appearance of “our time”
harbored a “logic of history” that could be taken up and realized. As we saw earlier,
by a “logic of history,” Merleau-Ponty meant (a) that history is an integral whole, “a
single drama” in which all events have a human significance; and (b) that the phases
of this drama do not follow an arbitrary order, “but move toward a completion and
conclusion” (SNS 212/121). The distinctive feature of a Marxist view, according to
Merleau-Ponty, is that it makes the completion of history dependent upon contingent
acts of revolutionary agency—it “admit[s] that history is both logical and contingent,
118 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

that nothing is absolutely fortuitous but also that nothing is absolutely necessary” (SNS
211f/120). In other words, for Marxism, the logic of history is just one possibility among
others (SNS 213/121). But this would seem to reduce it, when the class struggle wanes,
as in “our time,” to the conjured product of revolutionary ideology. In a disordered
world, can there be any evidential basis for upholding the Marxist hypothesis?
For Merleau-Ponty, the hero provides such evidence. Although the hero incarnates
a historical period that is, to all appearances, one of disorder, the hero himself, his
manière de vivre, is not at all disordered. “Today’s hero is not skeptical, dilettantish,
or decadent.” Rather, “it is simply the case that he has experienced chance, disorder,
and failure.  .  .  .  He [thus] has a better experience than anyone has ever had of the
contingency of the future and the freedom of man” (SNS 330/186). The hero thus
surpasses the theoretical failure of abstract discourses of history. Committed to
universality and accepting that freedom knows no singularity, the practical lesson
that he draws from this experience is to detach from freedom in its given forms and
to ground his commitment within a deeper, transhistorical level of being. The hero
thus withdraws to the sovereignty of “absolute knowledge”—a move which, through
a transgression of existing rationality, places the hero in the extrahistorical realm
of non-sense. While this makes of the contemporary hero, not unlike the Hegelian
hero, a “junction of madness [déraison] and reason [raison]” (SNS 324f/183; cf. 9/4),
it is precisely in virtue of this departure from history that the hero is able to play an
evidentiary role with respect to its logic.
By incarnating human productivity, and despite being paradoxically lethal, heroic
self-realization evidences history’s being a dramatic, teleological whole driven by
contingent human agency. It thus presents a mise en abyme of the possible self-
realization of humanity. If we accept the account of Saint Exupéry’s death that
Merleau-Ponty offers, then we have grounds for positing a natural spontaneity
that is in harmony with our aspirations to the realization of concrete universal
reconciliation. This rationalizes the need Merleau-Ponty felt to rank this possibility
as more than just one among many. The heroic spectacle legitimizes the privileging
of fulgurant moments of transgressive communication by seeing them as based in
and expressive of “that very movement which unites us with others, our present
with  our past, and by means of which we make everything have meaning” (SNS
330/186). This movement is what Merleau-Ponty later described as the “spontaneity
which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature
and culture into a single whole,” and which thus “accomplishes what appeared to be
impossible when we observed only the separate elements” (Pros. 47f/10). To be clear,
being a matter of extrahistorical non-sense, the action of the contemporary hero
does not itself accomplish such results. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Rather, its
significance lies solely in its bringing to phenomenological self-givenness the natural
teleological purposiveness that (possibly) stands behind those achievements. In this
way, the contemporary hero motivates and rationally substantiates the militant faith
of a neo-Marxist historical praxis.
This militant faith is what Merleau-Ponty meant by “the existential attitude.” To
renew Marxism, which, he thought, is weakest “when faced with concrete events taken
moment by moment” (SNS 217/123), Merleau-Ponty wanted to trace the molecular
 Contemporary Heroism 119

emergence of transformative political consciousness from the “living present” up.

This presupposes the heroic manifestation of humanity’s intrinsic purposiveness.
The evidentiary value of heroism is thus perceptual, not theoretical. By providing
an appropriate new perceptual background, it supports a Gestalt shift that discloses
historical significance in the seemingly insignificant phenomena of everyday life. It
is what enables us to see, in other words, that even “the least perception, the slightest
movement of the heart, the smallest action, bear incontestable witness” to human
universality (cf. SNS 121/70).

Saint Exupéry and Schn.

It would be appropriate at this point briefly to relate Merleau-Ponty’s view of the
contemporary hero to his existential interpretation of Adhémar Gelb and Kurt
Goldstein’s analyses of their patient “Schn.” (Johann Schneider). As is well known,
Schn. suffered a serious occipital injury during World War I that resulted in his being
diagnosed by Gelb and Goldstein with a manifold of psychosomatic disorders, central
to which, however, was apperceptive visual agnosia.13 And this case played a major role
in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of embodiment.
Merleau-Ponty portrayed Schn. as having lost the ability to use his body freely
to project around himself a situation into which he could proceed. While his
intellectual capacities were sound, he had lost the power of imagination, and so,
he lived in a world without possibility—he was tied to actuality and all but totally
absorbed in the present. His experience appears to him as self-evident and self-
sufficient. Unable to project himself into imaginary situations, Schn. lacks “living
thought” (PhP 149). He is incapable of any act of authentic expression (including
political opinion)—he cannot create an “opening” in being because his own being is
so thoroughly closed. Based on his inability to put himself into a situation, he lacks
freedom (PhP 158). This is primarily because he lacks the power of apprehending
simultaneous wholes and of cognitively shifting from wholes to parts—that is, as
Merleau-Ponty put it, what Schn. cannot do is survoler the objects of his experience
(PhP 147, 157f). In an important sense, Schn.’s core problem is a total lack of “high-
altitude thinking.”
According to Merleau-Ponty, we could say that Schn. was a model of immanence,
in that his habituated organism had virtually collapsed onto his “actual” body, such
that his subjective existence was entirely inscribed by his objective being. He thus has
a kind of agentive integrity. But it is inverted in such a way as to imprison him in the
actuality of a drastically contracted lived world. Merleau-Ponty portrayed Schn. as a
kind of “perfect” Cartesian—what we would all be like were Cartesian principles true.
As living negative proof that the capacity to project and competently communicate
meaning is not just an intellectual exercise, but rather depends upon corporeal
processes of signification and intentionality, Schn. offers powerful evidence to refute
the Cartesian dualist account of human existence, and all forms of objective thinking
that are based upon that.
The subjective transcendence of Merleau-Ponty’s hero and the universal scope of
his world stand at the opposite end of the existential spectrum from the objective
120 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

immanence of Gelb and Goldstein’s patient. Virtually, the one is all “actual,” the other
all habitual. Saint Exupéry and Schn. thus provide Merleau-Ponty with the limiting
cases of human être-au-monde. In them, we have the two extremes of dualistic
existential style—deanimated body and disembodied spirit—two pathological poles
of uncommunicative, disengaged, and ahistorical solitude between which unfolds that
“third kind of existence,” which characterizes the intercorporeal coexistence of the
overwhelming majority of human beings. This may have been what Merleau-Ponty
had in mind in saying that “to be completely a man, it is necessary to be a little more
and a little less than man” (EP 51/63f).

Merleau-Ponty’s myth of man

Without question, Merleau-Ponty’s is an unusual conception of heroism, one that
verges on antiheroism. Indeed, he began “Man, the Hero” by echoing Marcel’s distrust
of heroism. And he is absolutely clear that heroism does not offer a viable model for
historical agency. His intervention is intended effectively to dissolve the discourse of
heroism by rendering what is crucial to it a quotidian phenomenon, and raising its
exceptionality to the level of humanist myth. He thus concluded “Man, the Hero” by
identifying the contemporary hero with “man” qua universality incarnate. But he did
so by way of contrast with two other mythic figures: “the contemporary hero is not
Lucifer; he is not even Prometheus; he is man” (SNS 331/187). Untangling the meaning
of this dual contrast that is found at the very end of Sense and Non-Sense will shed
further light on Merleau-Ponty’s humanist myth.
Prometheus and Lucifer have, at least in modernity, often been seen as closely
allied, the latter (often as Satan) being portrayed as a kind of Christianized version of
the former. This is prevalent in Romantic literature, but it is also the case in German
Idealism (von Balthasar 1947). The general sense shared by these Promethean and
Luciferian figures is that of a spirit who liberates humanity from ignorance, one that
seeks to enlighten humanity against the wishes of the prevailing powers to maintain
humanity in a state of servile enthrallment.
But Merleau-Ponty evidently discerned a noteworthy difference between Lucifer
and Prometheus, one that was relevant to his account of heroism. Although he offered
few clues as to what exactly he had in mind, a sound account can be pieced together.

Lucifer
Although the theme surfaces in other relevant ways,14 concerning Lucifer, I submit
that we are dealing with an allusion to Roger Caillois. For Caillois was the proponent
of Luciferian thinking at the time, and he also had an important and closely related
interest in Saint Exupéry.
We might approach this first by stepping back to consider Caillois’ views on
“militant” thinking, in particular, as expressed in a short essay entitled “Pour une
orthodoxie militante: les tâches immédiates de la pensée moderne” [“For a Militant
Orthodoxy: The Immediate Tasks of Modern Thought”] (Caillois 1936).15 This essay
 Contemporary Heroism 121

is useful to consider for how it can help to contextualize Caillois’ view on Lucifer,
and thereby to cast contrastive light on Merleau-Ponty’s own position vis-à-vis Saint
Exupéry.
In the piece in question, Caillois sketched out a vision of a radicalized rationalism
as a kind of nonconformist intellectual reform that would yield a “a scientific
heterodox ‘orthodoxy’ ” (ES 130). This was to be a rigorous yet imaginative science
which, as a contemporary counterpart to myth, would integrate lucidity and affect so
as to compel intellect and emotion equally, and in this way contribute to revivifying
society against its decadent decline and the threat of fascism. It was thus by no means
anti-Enlightenment. The point was to recover the radical challenge to social order
enunciated by nineteenth-century maudit poets like Baudelaire and Balzac—but
with a twist. For now the problem was the oppressiveness of social disorder. This is
why Caillois called for a militant orthodoxy. On the one hand, this was militant: the
proposed intellectual reform had a fundamentally “activist” character, in the sense of
being radically opposed to determinism—it aimed to produce phenomena, not predict
them. Caillois sought “a form of revolutionary thought that would not be restricted to
the intellectual sphere, but would open out onto real life,”16 “a mode of thought that
would impress itself upon the real and trigger a whole series of phenomena in the real”
(cited in ES 131).
On the other hand, though, this was to be an orthodoxy. For “the adversary must
be defeated with its own weapons: through a more rigorous coherence and a tighter
systematization – through a construction that both implicates and explicates it, rather
than itself being reduced and decomposed by it” (MH 215). This implied an endlessly
open-ended process of integration and generalization (MH 215f). The authority of this
approach would derive, not only from “the solidity of its principles [and] the rigor of
their application,” but also from “the appeal of its demands” (MH 217). A militantly
orthodox system of knowledge would, at once and in a reciprocal way, be “immune
to all methodological criticism” and appear to human sensitivity “directly in the form
of an imperative attraction that is capable of mobilizing it instantly” (MH 220). For
Caillois, militant systematicity would ultimately rest on a myth of organic human
unity. That is, militant orthodoxy is premised on “the presumption that there exists an
ideal unitary undertaking, that would take as its task to set the whole of man’s being to
work, in such a way as to make its different functions converge in a continuous process
of living creation” (MH 221). The aim and orientation of the project is to verify this
myth in the sense of making it true. There is thus a dialectical logic in Caillois’ notion
of militant orthodoxy that would account for its difference from both archaic myth and
modern science.
Caillois presented Lucifer as a mythic prototype of this sort of militant knowing,
“the incarnation of a new epistemological spirit,” the figure of an “aggressive” and
“conquering” vision of knowledge (Massonet  1998, 74). As the “demon or angel of
lucidity,” Caillois “viewed Lucifer as the truly effective rebel” (ES 166, 144). In this
way, Lucifer superseded nineteenth-century Romantic Satanism—here, Caillois made
an important distinction. For Satanism was ultimately ineffectual with respect to
dealing with the sources of the alienation to which it was opposed. “Satanic rebels
emanating from Romanticism foresee no recourse other than ongoing profanation or
122 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

an inevitable identification with other marginal or disenfranchised groups” (Richman

2003, 36). In contrast, the figure of Lucifer represented a more transgressive, albeit
elitist, individualism which, based on scientific and Nietzschean self-mastery, is able to
maintain the critical demands of Romantic Satanism, but with an intensified lucidity
and practical consequence.

Calculating and conquering, [Lucifer] did not believe that revolt was sufficient in
and of itself, nor that bursts of instinct always led to victory. His lucidity, which he
viewed as his primary and most powerful weapon, gave him a coolly detached and
sometimes cynical indifference, which made him an accurate accountant of reality.
(Caillois (1937), cited in ES 171)

In this way, “Lucifer is entirely focused on what is possible and undertakes it without
delay. He is Satan in action; an intelligent Satan; and, in a certain sense, a courageous
Satan” (Caillois (1937), cited in ES 171).
This movement from the Satanic to the Luciferian “supposes a certain education
of our sense of rebellion, that would take it from riotousness to a broadly imperialist
attitude and would persuade it to subordinate its impulsive, unruly reactions to the
necessity for discipline, calculation, and patience” (cited in Hollier 1988, 36). Caillois
asserted that “the Luciferian spirit” corresponds “to the moment in which rebellion
turns into a will for power and, losing none of its passionate and subversive character,
attributes to intelligence, to the cynical and lucid vision of reality, a role of prime
importance for the realization of its plans. It is the passage from agitation to action”
(MH 199).
Key to this “passage” is the move from empty profanation to founding acts of
sacralization. The latter were a preoccupation of much post-Durkheimian sociology in
France, in particular for Caillois, whose main concern was with the oppressiveness and
alienation wrought by social disorder. Thus, notwithstanding the Nietzschean themes,
Caillois’ Luciferian hero also bears similarities to Hegelian world-historical individuals.
In each case, it is a matter of establishing order in the world. A crucial difference from
the Hegelian view, however, is that what Caillois describes is ultimately arbitrary—
there is no sense in which the civilization to which Luciferian praxis leads is in any
way part of a larger rational scheme. That is, it cannot be justified transcendentally.
At any rate, such is how Caillois saw Exupérian heroism. As a literary man of action,
Saint Exupéry represented the post-Satanic, mythic hero who “conquers and brings
order to a domain of nascent and still ailing civilization” [conquiert [et] aménage un
domaine de civilisation naissante, encore chétive] (Roger Caillois 1953, xii). As Saint
Exupéry himself stated of Aéropostale: “I do not admire men for serving the postal
line, but I uphold the myth of the postal line because it forms such men” (Carnets, 69).
In this way, “Saint-Exupéry, as writer and aviator, best conveyed Caillois’ new cult of
individual heroism” (Frank 2003, 37; cf. Roger Caillois 1946; 1947).
Merleau-Ponty clearly saw Exupérian heroism otherwise. Although in specific
contexts he could valorize the Luciferian traits of cool aplomb, cerebral lucidity, and
calculated practical intervention, what interested Merleau-Ponty in Saint Exupéry was
the complete absence of these traits. Specifically, the fact that Saint Exupéry was so
un-Luciferian that with an absolutely naïve idiosyncrasy he directly manifested the
 Contemporary Heroism 123

universality in terms of which political situations can be perceived as such in the first
place. This is the sense in which Merleau-Ponty placed the heroic act outside politics
and history. To be sure, Merleau-Ponty shared with Caillois a militant concern for
bringing order out of disorder, and their projects are both normatively driven,
practical, creative undertakings that ultimately rest on humanistic myth. But in
Merleau-Ponty’s view, politics and history cannot be objectively manipulated from
above. Rather, they concern intersubjective phenomena of human relationality and
communication, to which historical productivity is internal. There is no disjunction
between ends and means—sociality is not separate from its founding moments. In
this way, Merleau-Ponty took more seriously Caillois’ own militant postulate of “an
ideal unitary undertaking, that would take as its task to set the whole of man’s being to
work, in such a way as to make its different functions converge in a continuous process
of living creation” (MH 221, italics altered).

Prometheus
Caillois’ “La naissance de Lucifer” was published alongside Bataille’s “Van Gogh
Prométhée” (1937; cf. 1930), and the contrast between Lucifer and Satan in terms
of a constructiveness that goes beyond disruptive insubordination—a view to which
Merleau-Ponty was sympathetic—reflects important disagreements between Caillois
and Bataille. Because of the importance of the issue of sacrifice, consideration of
Bataille’s view of Van Gogh will, oddly enough, help shed light on Merleau-Ponty’s
view of Prometheus—and hence on his view of “man.”
Bataille related contemporary cases of self-mutilation, in particular that of Van
Gogh, to human-divine relationships in archaic religion, which he took to be mediated
by sacrificial mutilation. Such acts, he thought, represented “the desire to resemble
perfectly an ideal term, generally characterized in mythology as a solar god who
tears and rips out his own organs” (Bataille 1985, 66). Citing the work of Mauss and
Hubert (1964), Bataille noted that unlike many acts of sacrifice performed by humans,
which make use of animal avatars, “the god who sacrifices himself gives himself
irrevocably. . . . The god, who is at the same time the sacrifier [sic], is one with the
victim and sometimes even with the sacrificer. All the differing elements that enter
into ordinary sacrifice here enter into each other and become mixed together” (Bataille
1985, 69f).
Bataille argued, however, that Mauss and Hubert wrongly assumed that this was
“only possible for mythical, that is ideal, beings.” In his view, in cases of human self-
mutilation there remain vestiges of this divine phenomenon. “There is . . . no reason
to separate Van Gogh’s ear . . . from Prometheus’ famous liver” (Bataille 1985, 70). “If
one accepts the interpretation that identifies the purveying eagle [aetos Prometheus]
with the god who stole fire from the wheel of the sun, then the tearing out of the liver
presents a theme in conformity with the various legends of the ‘sacrifice of the god’ ”
(Bataille 1985, 70). For Bataille, Prometheus and the eagle form a single system of self-
mutilation, and in this way manifest the deepest significance of the spirit of sacrifice, to
wit, “throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself.” This is not fundamentally
a matter of expiation or propitiation, but simply of the “radical alteration” of the
124 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

person—self-mutilation epitomizes personal transformation that disrupts the social

context. The claim is that this has “the power to liberate heterogeneous elements and
to break the habitual homogeneity of the individual” (Bataille 1985, 70).
Thus, for Bataille, Van Gogh is an instance of the sovereign Promethean gesture
of self-transcendence, the unity of sacrificer and sacrificed. His self-mutilation is
interpreted by Bataille as an expression of the sacrificial impulse at the root of human
religiosity in general, the aim of which is to overcome individuality by mimicking
divine self-immolation. In particular, it exemplifies the “absolute dismemberment”—
déchirement absolu, absolute Zerrissenheit—around which Bataille’s reading of Hegel
pivots: “Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment” (see
Bataille 1955).
Bataille thus rejected the Durkheimian view of sacrificial ritual as primarily
reasonable and useful with respect to social order and unity, emphasizing instead
its irrational, purposeless, and unassimilably destructive qualities. Whereas for
Durkheim, sacrifice forged bonds of social integration, for Bataille, it was primarily a
matter of disintegration through insubordination, refusal, revolt. It was a subversive,
self-divinizing act whereby a disenchanted individual amputated himself from the
established social order and its values (cf. Bataille 1970, 275f).
However, Bataille did think that sacrifice thus understood could also have a com-
munally unifying function. Through this violent rupture of her empirical wholeness,
the self-mutilator can also experience an ecstatic union with the whole. She can, that
is, “come to embody and reflect the larger community, just as Durkheim’s person does
when [she] engages in sacrificial ritual” (Stoekl 1992, 51f). For Bataille, sacrifice can
generate an affective power that achieves a sort of interpenetration between self and
other, such that “the different separate beings communicate, come to life by losing
themselves in communication with one another” (Bataille 1973, 263; cf. 37).
Notwithstanding such gestures, Bataille’s account of sacrifice remained, for Caillois,
precisely the kind of Romantic Satanism which he thought should be superseded by
the Luciferian spirit (see Frank 2003, 27, 31, 167). Fundamentally, this was because
Bataille had an overly deathly view of the sacred, to which Lucifer offered a more
vivacious alternative. Caillois’ position “does not call for crime, transgression, or
sacrifice; as the basis of sacred community, he highlights not death but a reason to
live” (Frank 2003, 27). In this way, “the cerebral Luciferian self-mastery” championed
by Caillois offered a radical antithesis to the “ecstatic self-sacrifice of Van Gogh’s
life and work” that Bataille held up as a paradigm of Promethean self-overcoming
(Frank 2003, 168).
Bataille’s view of self-mutilation clearly shows the link between Prometheanism
and self-sacrifice. As from the latter, Merleau-Ponty also always disinclined from the
Promethean myth,17 and thus, he did not accept Bataille’s view, the upshot of which
would be to analogize the proletariat and Van Gogh in terms of the need for self-
directed violence. Yet it remains the case that Bataille’s account of communication does
have affinities with Merleau-Ponty’s own view. It is just that whereas Bataille invoked
death simpliciter, Merleau-Ponty spoke of vital universality. This put Merleau-Ponty
closer to Caillois, who also sought a more affirmative approach. But Merleau-Ponty
rejected the arbitrariness of the Luciferian solution. For Merleau-Ponty, Caillois was
 Contemporary Heroism 125

not so fundamentally different from Bataille—he just deployed impersonally at the

level of historical apriority the arbitrary violence that the latter directed internally
against the habituated organism of the individual.
For Merleau-Ponty, what Caillois and Bataille had in common—and what
distinguished them from the historical apraxia (so to speak) shared by Kojève and
Aron—is a genuine orientation toward transformative action. But in their respective
admixtures of Hegelian and Nietzschean ideas, what they powerfully illustrate are the
impasses to which historical agency is led in the absence of an alternative philosophical
interpretation of absolute knowledge. Merleau-Ponty’s construal of absolute knowledge
as a possible “way of living” is his crucial (albeit mythic) gambit. For it supports his
postulates of latent human universality and purposiveness. Whereas both Caillois
and Bataille invoke a violent rupture, the one directing it outward, the other inward,
Merleau-Ponty’s founding gesture is one of perceptual violence (cf. PhP xvi, 415). It
amounts to the motivated decision to see heroism as an extrahistorical manifestation
of human productivity, and to make this the background of historical perception,
against which vital communication can become the means and end of historical
agency.

Marxism
Bataille was neither a principal interlocutor of Merleau-Ponty, nor a key player in the
political debates in which Merleau-Ponty was engaged. But he did give the clearest
expression of the existential implications of the valorization of the Promethean myth.
The significance of this lies in the fact that Merleau-Ponty’s reference to Prometheus
was surely also—and, indeed, primarily—an allusion to classical Marxism. It is
well-known that Marx himself admired Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, and that he
regarded Prometheus as a revolutionary figure of Greek mythology, appealing to
him as a symbol of human divinity and self-emancipation: “Prometheus is the most
eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar” (Marx 1975a, 31). And this
sentiment was reflected by many Marxists in the postwar French context, including
Hervé (1948, 37).
It is often raised as a criticism of Marxism that it indulges in an overly strong motif
of Promethean self-divinization in ways which could, in principle, be avoided (e.g.
Kolakowski 1978, 412ff). As Wessell argued, however, beyond being a “mythopoetic
symbol in Marx’s thinking,” the “salvational archetype” of Prometheus actually provides
the “mythico-ontological root metaphor” for historical materialism. “The ‘myth’ of the
fall, suffering, and ultimate self-redemption of Prometheus constitutes the dramatic
model underlying and informing Marx’s Marxism” (Wessell 1984, 62ff; cf. 22, 38f, 189).
That is, this myth plays a crucial transcendental role by structuring the antepredicative
background of Marxism’s historical perception. In particular, owing to its dual role in
the soteriological myth as Prometheus both bound and unbound, the proletariat in
this view comes to embody “an absolute agonal tension”—the “ontological form of the
proletariat is to be a self-abolishing tension” (Wessell 1984, 187).
For Merleau-Ponty, such sacrificial implications represented the main problem
with classical Marxism—not that it was based on myth, but that it was based on
126 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

the wrong myth. Promethean assumptions are what stand behind the problem
discussed earlier, that of seeing the revolutionary moment as the self-annihilation of
the proletariat. It was precisely to avoid this sort of lethal rupture that Merleau-Ponty
sought to ground a commitment to Marxism in the incarnational myth attested to
by the universal purposiveness evinced by the contemporary hero. Presupposing
the agonistic drama of the proletariat would not only lead to distorted practical
strategies, but it would also impose an ideological structure that conceals rather
than reveals genuine political phenomena—most crucially, those of the possible
emergence of genuine agencies of universality, and other concrete manifestations of
the proletariat.
For Merleau-Ponty, the aim of a neo-Marxist hermeneutics would be to “decipher
facts, discover in them a common meaning, and thereby grasp a leading thread
which, without obviating the need to analyze each period on its own terms, allows
us to discern an orientation of events.” Far from any utopianism or dogmatic
philosophy of history, it would aim “to provide a perception of history which would
continuously bring to appearance the lines of force and vectors of the present” (HT
104f/98). Merleau-Ponty’s incarnational humanist myth was meant to provide the
transcendental horizons for this perception. What is needed is to learn to see the
world anew. Generalizing from production to productivity, Merleau-Ponty thus
sought to reform Marxism by reconfiguring the perceptual field as the human world
that is to be made, that is in the process of being made, knowing full well that this
means taking a new perceptual background on faith. “To perceive is to engage in a
single stroke a whole future of experiences in a present that never strictly guarantees
it—it is to believe in a world” (PhP 343f). The singular human world as an unfinished
historical project is the object of this militant Weltglaube—faith in the possibility of
the complete realization of which is no arbitrary dream to the exact extent to which
Exupérian heroism is accepted as a limit form of être-au-monde that evinces the
living presence of a universal purposiveness.

Response to Merleau-Ponty’s “Hero”

Merleau-Ponty’s essay on heroism, “Man, the Hero,” and particularly, the central
significance he accorded in that essay to Saint Exupéry in preference to recognizably
communist heroes, met with a hostile reaction from the readership of action (Blanc-
Dufour et  al. 1946).18 Indeed, this reaction was all but prefigured in the editorial
preface that preceded the essay itself (see note 3). It is difficult to know the extent
to which (if at all) this surprised Merleau-Ponty. In any event, his attempt to define
“the existential attitude” specifically failed to draw Hervé any closer to existentialism.
A fortnight later, Hervé responded quite harshly to the claims Merleau-Ponty had
made in “Pour la vérité” (SNS 271–303/153–71), originally published in the previous
issue of Les temps modernes (January 1946), to the effect that classical Marxism—
and in particular, the politics of action—“no longer has a grip on the facts” (SNS
299/169). Significantly, in a way reminiscent of Maritain’s criticism of Saint Exupéry,
Hervé accused Merleau-Ponty of being disengaged and noncommittal, a “solitary
 Contemporary Heroism 127

spectator” [spectateur solitaire] hovering indecisively “above the fray” [au-dessus de

la mêlée] (Hervé 1946, 3).
And Hervé did not do so without grounds. Consider how Merleau-Ponty expressed
his approach to political phenomena at the time: “It is up to us to observe the world
during these years when it begins to breathe again. . . . If the class struggle once again
becomes the motivating force of history and, definitely, if the alternative of socialism
or chaos becomes clearer, then it is up to us to choose a proletarian socialism” (SNS
218/124, emphasis added). And even more tellingly, Merleau-Ponty admitted that “to
speak of humanism without being on the side of ‘humanist socialism’ in the Anglo-
American way, to ‘understand’ the Communists without being a Communist, is to
set oneself very high [se placer bien haut], at any rate, above the fray [au-dessus de la
mêlée]” (HT 203/185f).
Is this not plainly inconsistent with the stance of militant engagement to which
Merleau-Ponty was ostensibly committed? Does Phenomenology of Perception end on
a note of Exupérian high-altitude thinking because such was in fact Merleau-Ponty’s
own true standpoint? It can certainly appear that way. Thus, expressing what many
Communist critics thought of Merleau-Ponty’s “policy of waiting [politique d’attente],
without illusion” (SNS 303/171), or attentisme, Hervé argued that “the attitude of a
solitary, spectative consciousness that would consist in placing itself outside the
struggle [se mettre hors du jeu], in order to avoid any concession to tactics, is a pathetic
utopia.” Contrary to Merleau-Ponty’s own express aim, Hervé regarded his position
as “less a matter of political thinking than of a fascination exerted by the gestures and
language of a bygone era” (Hervé 1946, 3).
In theoretical terms, then, Hervé’s criticism effectively placed Merleau-Ponty in
the same boat as Saint Exupéry. Politically and philosophically, this is a damning
indictment—but is it sound? In order to assess it, let us briefly take stock of the relation
between Merleau-Ponty and Saint Exupéry in terms of some of the key points of
convergence and divergence between them. As we shall see, although the latter plays
an important role in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, it is not the case that
this is based in any substantive concordance.

Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty

Saint Exupéry was at best a philosophical dilettante. As Beauvoir put it, he “talks
drivel when he’s thinking abstractly and in general” (Beauvoir 1992, 175). Even Colin
Smith, who dedicated the final chapter of his 1964 book on contemporary French
philosophy to him, admitted that Saint Exupéry’s reputation was not based on the
philosophical value of his work, and that in this regard, he did have “a tendency to
say things of incredible inanity” (C. Smith 1964, 243). Nonetheless, there are some
significant common themes that join the Weltanschauungen of Saint Exupéry and
Merleau-Ponty (although many of these themes are by no means unique to either
of them). It is against this background that their differences can be most clearly
understood.
128 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

An inventory of the key commonalities between Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty

would include the following considerations:
1. Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty were both critical of the cultural condition of
capitalist society in the interwar period, in particular of secular humanism as an
outgrowth of abstract rationalism and liberal individualism. Although Merleau-
Ponty did not directly resort to the more disparaging metaphors—“termites,” “cattle,”
“robots” —through which Saint Exupéry expressed himself, he did speak in like terms
of a degenerate form of human animality that would signify the (not irrevocable) loss
of the living capacity of historical agency. This would be a pathological reversion to
an ahistorical unconsciousness of death consequent to the stabilization—through the
imposition of tyrannical oppression or traumatic repression—of the restless negativity,
the Unruhe, definitive of human existence (SNS 114/66).19 To the extent that he
thought people needed to be reawakened to their own historicity, and to perceive the
world accordingly, Merleau-Ponty’s view tended in the same direction as that of Saint
Exupéry.
In the context of Cartesianism, animals and robots are not so far apart. Specifically,
it was to the general the idea of mechanism—the hegemony of the “machine-man”
and the alienated and alienating “machine-society” based upon it (see Harrington
1996, xvi–xvii, 19ff)—that Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty were opposed.20 Against
this, they both envisioned an organically holistic sort of sociality as a way to recover
universality and therewith intersubjective relations that would be more “authentic.”21
Although Saint Exupéry tended to put this in terms of “love,” whereas Merleau-Ponty
preferred idioms such as that of “communication” and “reconciliation,” their views do
not differ fundamentally. At root, both are concerned with the realization of human
bonds [liens] between persons. As Barral put it in a discussion of Merleau-Ponty,
“[l]ove is the growth of two consciousnesses building together a new reality, a new
world” (1993, 165).22
2. Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty both advocated a new humanism that aimed to
spiritualize—or re-enchant—human coexistence on the basis of a post-Christian myth
of “man” (or “Man”). Although both purported to go beyond Christianity, in each case,
the project was informed in a profound way by the Christian idea of the God-man, the
Word become Flesh. Prioritizing active engagement, both held that universality was
to be attained through humanity’s self-creation or autonomous self-realization. And,
construing it against the backdrop of nature’s cosmic indifference, both saw this self-
realization as a matter of self-overcoming that entailed a certain staking of one’s life, a
mortal suspension of the particularities of one’s given empirical individuality. Although
this is more spectacular in the case of Saint Exupéry, in each case, there is a crucial,
if paradoxical, disengagement implied at the heart of this sort of self-transformative
engagement. Exupérian aerial takeoff [envol] is in this way nontrivially analogous to
the general idea of a phenomenological reduction, “the universal meditation which
cuts the philosopher off from his nation, his friendships, his prejudices, his empirical
being, in short, from the world, and which seems to leave him in complete isolation”
(PhP 414). Either way, such separation and departure from the sens of rational intellect
is to be redeemed through reintegration into the context of an “expanded reason” (SNS
 Contemporary Heroism 129

109/63; cf. PhP xiii).23 As one of the first reviewers of Terre des hommes disapprovingly
recognized from a reactionary perspective: “this World of Men is a World of the Hero,
but of the Hero alone; despite the common dangers and the camaraderie, it is a World
of Solitude” (Brasillach 1971, 67f, italics removed; cf. EG 585).24 However, he also noted
that “this solitude has a slightly barbaric greatness [a sa grandeur un peu barbare] that
a healthy [saine] philosophy will endeavor to preserve intact [ne pas mutiler] and to
incorporate into a vaster and purer reason” (Brasillach 1971, 67f). (Needless to say,
Brasillach did not think that Pilote de guerre moved in this direction!)
3. Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty both linked this expanded reason with a new
vision, a new way of seeing the world—“a mode of perception that is at once more
intimate and broader” than analytical understanding, a new “attitude of consciousness
that reaches beings in their existential and affective context” (Major 1968, 63, 90). The
high-altitude view of the Exupérian pilot is analogous to that of the Merleau-Pontian
phenomenologist, and this precisely in terms of the practice of survoler. For Merleau-
Ponty, to perceive is fundamentally to perform a Gestalt operation of picking out a figure
against a given background. Inasmuch as perceptual acuity is a function of the breadth
and inclusiveness of the relevant background, this operation implies a certain distance
and leeway, which can be described as the power to survoler lacked by Schn. Humanity
mechanically reduced to a “machine for swinging a sledgehammer or a pickaxe” (TH
211), as Saint Exupéry put it, is in a certain way epitomized by the pathological Schn.
Or at least this is the case in Merleau-Ponty’s portrayal of Schn., where the patient’s
symptoms not only corroborate the mechanistic threat posited by the spiritual-holistic
critique,25 “but also the presumption that holistic insight into the essence of experience
is itself the highest mental faculty of man” (Goldenberg 2003, 298). On this basis, both
Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty keenly claimed to discern the germs of universality
in the smallest concrete phenomena—in “the least perception, the slightest movement
of the heart, the smallest action” [la moindre perception, le moindre mouvement du
cœur, la moindre action] (SNS 121/70) or “the simplest dialogue” (HT 206/189). Like
Saint Exupéry’s smiling over a bummed cigarette with Spanish anarchists, the riverside
drink, or the mere act of flying, such an awareness embraces the human world in its
contrast with nature—it “contains indivisibly all the order and disorder of the world”
(HT 206/189). “In a completely explicated human perception we would find all the
originalities of human life” (PrP 99/40).
4. Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty were both anti-ideologues, and were reticent
about taking sides in ideological disputes, which they tended to regard as superficial—
Humanism and Terror met a similar fate as Pilote de guerre, at least among French
émigrés, in that it was denounced from all sides (Campbell 1947, 49ff; Cooper 1979,
77ff; Poster 1975, 157). Both strove to surmount ideological disagreement, and the
phenomena of “multiple solipsism” in general, through the disclosure, in the present, of
a common universal terrain and a commitment to its realization. The self-decentering
occasioned by mortal risk that we saw emphasized by Merleau-Ponty is also for Saint
Exupéry a key means of this disclosure. “We make our way for years side by side, each
enclosed in his own silence, or else exchanging words that convey nothing. But at the
moment of danger, then we stand shoulder to shoulder. We discover that we belong to
130 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

the same community. We are broadened by the discovery of other consciousnesses. We

look at each other and smile” (TH 42; cf. PhP 417). However syrupy this may seem in
the context of Saint Exupéry’s prose, it is precisely in the self-evidence betokened by
such a “smile” that Merleau-Ponty located the fulgurant “glory” of successful dialogue
and communication, that which can be taken as an indication of “the community
of fate [la communauté du sort] among men,” and of the “agreement” [accord] and
commonality that is more essential than even biology (SNS 171/98).
Ultimately, what the respective projects of both Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty
aimed to do was to participate in giving meaning and direction—sens—to human life
by disclosing its transcendental, universal basis. For both, there is a certain “love of
life” which alone can lead to a genuine “life of love”.
■
These convergences, however, by no means exhaust the relationship between Saint
Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty. If we examine the nature and practical consequences of
their respective humanisms more closely, then we discover the following countervailing
considerations:
1. While Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty can be seen as agreeing that modern, rational
humanism was problematic, and that this was tied to its vitiation of Christian themes
of egalitarian community and, more generally, its state of spiritual disenchantment,
their views of this situation differed significantly. We can pose this in terms of the
modern ideals of equality, freedom, and fraternity. At least as they are conventionally
understood, Saint Exupéry regarded these ideals as fundamentally incompossible.
“These words [liberté, egalité, fraternité] once comprised a fertile seed. The tree grew,
but it died. . . . We need a new seed” (EG 184). He saw freedom in its modern guise
of individual autonomy as the negation of communitarian equality, and posed the
fraternity symbolized in Man as the negation of that negation. Taking Aéropostale as
an organizational paradigm for the communal reconciliation of personal fulfillment
with societal needs, Saint Exupéry effectively promoted a conservative reprise of the
organically hierarchical social order of pastoral France as a way to recast freedom
and equality. “I believe,” he said in the Credo of Pilote de guerre, “that the primacy of
Man founds the only meaningful Equality and Freedom” (PG 241). This view implies
a secularization of traditional religious community that re-situates it cosmically,
thereby refounding it on its own dynamic activity. But this is hierarchical and thus
historically retrograde in the sense that it views modern individual autonomy as a
deviant development in need of retraction. “By assigning to each a well-defined place
in the order of human relations, the hierarchy confers on the individual a unique and
irreplaceable character that attributes an inestimable value to him” (Ouellet 1971, 97).
Even if it is entirely this-worldly, the Exupérian social ideal remains, if not an expression
of antimodern reaction, then at the very least an exceedingly illiberal attitude.
Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, regarded the apparent incompossibility of the
ideals of equality, freedom, and fraternity as an indication that at the social level,
they remained abstract. The task was to make them concrete by “realizing” them, in
particular, by further developing, not sacrificing, freedom. In this sense, Merleau-
Ponty did not think that modernity was fully unfolded, or at any rate that its anomies
 Contemporary Heroism 131

were irredeemable. Focusing on the intersubjective dynamics of historical becoming,

he held that the ostensible ideals of modern society, as lived out in interpersonal
relations, were not only not fundamentally incompatible, but that they themselves
portended the positive supersession of their apparent incompossibility. Merleau-Ponty
resisted the essentialization and historical stasis (or even unbecoming) entailed by
the encapsulation of the truth of humanity as “Man.” Whereas Saint Exupéry in effect
hypostatized the latter as a truth transcendent to human lived reality—“the Man of
my civilization is not defined on the basis of men. Rather, it is men that are defined
through it” (PG 219)—Merleau-Ponty let human existence speak for itself. This was a
leitmotif of his phenomenology that he drew from Husserl: “it is a matter of leading
experience that is still silent to the pure expression of its own meaning.”26 For Merleau-
Ponty, the fulguration of evidentiary “glory” is not simply a prefigurative glimpse of
the achieved universality of natural fraternity. More importantly, it is an indication
of human productivity in action—it is the effervescence, not of the transcendence of
contradictions, but of the creative confluence of them as contradictions. The difference
between Exupérian “Man” and Merleau-Pontian “man” is thus the difference between a
“top-down” approach to the phenomena of human coexistence, and one that proceeds
“from below” ’ (von unten, as Husserl would say). The latter is, at least in theory, more
amenable to concrete political analysis—in particular, to the task of discriminating
between the phenomena of the genuinely progressive movement of history and
those of chaos and repression. It can have this epistemic advantage because, as an
implementation of Lukácsian totality, its survolant perspective remains anchored to
the standpoint of the proletariat.
2. Notwithstanding the fact that both Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty strove to
surmount ideological disagreement, there is the patent difference that Saint Exupéry
did so by effectively eschewing altogether that which Merleau-Ponty explicitly sought
to cultivate, namely, political thinking. Saint Exupéry aspired to have “no political
agenda whatsoever” (Schiff 1994, 350). Although in the mid-1930s he travelled as a
correspondent for Paris-Soir in the USSR (see SV 35–79), before going to Spain, he
resisted taking sides on the basic political questions of the day.27 He “neither advocated
nor denounced” (Schiff 1994, 230), upholding instead the sovereignty of Man through
an equivocal mixture of aristocratic individualism and nostalgia for authority. This had
certain affinities with reactionary antimodernism. In fact, rather than for de Gaulle,
Saint Exupéry’s stated neutrality during the war did harbor much greater sympathies
for Pétain, whom he did not publicly criticize and whom he tended to defend from
disparagement. But as suggested by Maritain’s critique, even the neutrality of Pilote de
guerre could not be easily justified politically. Given the conditions of occupation in
terms of despoliation and persecution at the time of publication, “it hardly helps to be
told that ‘le culte de l’Universel exalte et noue les richesses particulières’ . . . or that the
‘primacy of Man’ is the only proper foundation for liberty and equality. . . . Confronted
with the cruel realities of 1942, these vague gestures in the direction of spirituality
strike one as the last remnants of an archaic and discredited rhetoric” (John 1985, 103f,
citing PG 241).
The apolitical “neutrality” of Saint Exupéry’s thought expresses his view that
within the context of modernism, all sides are in the wrong. “Saint-Exupéry rejects
132 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

fascism and communism, he rebuffs capitalism and socialism equally. He withdraws

from or is frightened by the modern world, its termite mounds, its crowds, its mass
production.  .  .  .  He dreads democracy, unable to find in it the source of legitimate
power” (d’Astier de la Vigerie 1971, 109). What ultimately underwrote his attempt to
rise above political divisions was his antipathy to what he constructed as a vaguely
defined, indiscriminate totalitarianism. “I hate this age, where, under a universal
totalitarianism, people become docile, polite, and placid cattle” (SV 229, emphasis
added). Saint-Exupéry turned to Man because, in short, he had “no faith in man”
(d’Astier de la Vigerie 1971, 109).
However vaguely defined that view might be, though, it clearly placed Saint
Exupéry quite far from Merleau-Ponty. For as we saw above, at around the same time
as Saint Exupéry was composing Pilote de guerre, Merleau-Ponty argued that certain
aspects of totalitarian thinking had to be appropriated for victory, both in the war and
more generally for democracy. His thought at the time was quite thoroughly imbued
with holism, and so his embrace of Marxism was antipodal to Saint Exupéry’s blunt
rejection of it: “what I hate about Marxism is the totalitarianism to which it leads” (EG
380; cf. SV 229).28
This statement may, however, be something of an exaggeration. For in another
posthumously published text (which, appearing in 1981, was not something to which
Merleau-Ponty could have had access), Saint Exupéry tempered his opposition to
Marxism somewhat. He did so by distinguishing between the method of Marxism
and its specific empirical claims, and by noting that the former can retain its value
even if the latter are mistaken or outdated. “The only mistake of the Marxists is to
rely on a fixed bible of truths set forth by Marx, the currency of which, like that of
all truths, is obviously momentary – instead of nourishing it by recreating these
truths in accordance with the evolution of this society using the method which itself
can always remain valid” (MAM 12). Such sentiments nearly paraphrase Lukács!
What Saint Exupéry objected to in general was any sort of social science that claimed
strong predictive power (cf. Carnets 173f). In Saint Exupéry’s view, as carried out by
most if not all of those who professed it, Marxism seemed to be especially guilty of
this sort of sophism, in that it painted a very specific picture of the future. Against
this, Saint Exupéry argued that “I can claim only one thing, and that is to think
the world of today. . . . It is absolutely vain to claim that [social-scientific thinking]
enables one to think the world of tomorrow” (MAM 19f). In methodological terms,
“Marxism itself is opposed to finalism” (Carnets 174), and so, in Saint Exupéry’s
estimation, “Marxism as it is understood by the Marxists is profoundly anti-Marxist”
(MAM 20).
As far as it goes, this is surprisingly consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s own view,
which as we have seen also emphasized the unthinkability of the future as a key tenet
of Marx’s thought (EP 41/50f). “One can only validly think what one has in some
way lived, the rest being nothing but imagination” (HT 136/127). Any pretension to
being able to think the future would subvert Marx’s central intuition that “historical
meaning is immanent in the interhuman event, and is no less fragile” (EP 42/51).
Marxism properly dwells in the present, without reliance upon representations of
a transcendent future. For “to live and die for a future projected by the will, rather
 Contemporary Heroism 133

than live and act in the present, is precisely what Marxists have always considered
utopianism” (HT 85f/80).
But the import of this particular concurrence does not go very far. It certainly
did not alter Saint Exupéry’s basic criticism of Marxism, a view which constituted,
for him, sufficient grounds to reject it, namely, that Marxism crudely reduced human
beings to producers and consumers. More importantly, though, there is at best only a
verbal agreement between Saint Exupéry and Merleau-Ponty concerning the need to
focus attention on the present. The reason why Saint Exupéry thought that Marxism
effected that illicit reduction, why he found it “absolutely impossible to understand
what the historical mission of the proletariat could mean” (MAM 18; cf. Carnets,
73, 103, 173ff), and more generally, why the present as he saw it was populated by
cattle, termites, robots, etc. is that he did not have a view of the present in its historical
depth—he did not see what Merleau-Ponty called the “living present” (PhP 384, 495).29
It is true to say that “there is in Saint-Exupéry an unshakeable refusal to go beyond
immediate existence” (Major 1968, 222). But Saint Exupéry uncritically accepted as
given the fragmentation that characterized the surface of modern social phenomena,
and contrasted this with the ideal of Man. Even granting that he could see bonds of
love when they emerged against this backdrop, he was blind to their emergence itself.
That is, his purview occluded the ambiguous “lines of force and vectors” (HT 104f/98)
which in the present make it such that the future, while nowise determined, “is not
any empty zone in which we can construct unmotivated projects,” but rather that “it
is sketched [il se dessine] before us like the end of the day underway—and this outline
[dessin] is ourselves” (HT 102/95, emphasis added). For Merleau-Ponty, the sense
in which the proletariat could be said to have an historical mission is that universal
human recognition is delineated by its spontaneous intercorporeal existence in the
given historical constellation of forces and vectors, such that the realization of that
recognition is achieved through the “prolongation and fulfillment” of that existence
(HT 120, 125f/111, 116f).
3. In this way, the Marxism proposed by Merleau-Ponty aimed to offer a “perception of
history” through which an individual could relearn to see the world in a truer way in
terms of its historical emergence (HT 117/98). It was thus that Merleau-Ponty sought
to help “give” meaning (sens) to human life. As at the level of intentional consciousness,
it is not a simple matter of Sinn-Gebung. Sens is already there—indeed, Merleau-
Ponty emphasizes that “we are present [assistons] at every moment” at its emergence
(PhP xvi)—it is just matter of rendering it visible and bringing it to expression. The
fundamental problem of modern capitalist society was systemic bodily repression
that resulted in a reified misperception of the world—a structurally endemic case of
“apperceptive historical agnosia,” if I may put it that way—the remedy for which lay in
a new transcendental aesthetic that would reaffirm the full dimensionality of the field
of human historical experience in its totality.
Whereas Merleau-Ponty wanted in this way to be something of a therapist who might
help others to see and grasp actual historical meaning, Saint Exupéry set himself up as
more of an inspiring preacher, a giver of meaning to those without. As Jean-Louis Major
contrasted Saint Exupéry to Merleau-Ponty, “it is less a matter of describing perception
than of proposing a more human mode of knowledge—his [Saint Exupéry’s] intention
134 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

is consequently of the ethical order” (Major 1968, 71 n23). However, inasmuch as

Merleau-Ponty did not simply describe perception, and since it is hardly the case that
his position was devoid of ethical significance, it would be more accurate to say that
Saint Exupéry’s position was strictly ethical, that is, a utopian moralism. Which is to
say that in an important sense, his account lacks motivation, and that its prescriptions
are, at root, arbitrary. In the context of senseless disorder, this can be a matter of the
instauration of an ethical order, the heroic imposition of normative bearings for action
where there are none—a kind of foundational Sinn-Gebung. As we saw above, such
was Caillois’ view, although he was not alone in regarding Saint Exupéry along the
Luciferian lines of “a creator, a builder, a maker of laws” [un réalisateur, un bâtisseur,
un faiseur des lois] (Simon 1950, 129). There is an element of secular messianism in
such heroism—precisely what Merleau-Ponty sought to avoid in arguing that it was
not for the introduction of new values that social transformation was necessary. As
he put it, it was just that the consequences of messianic incarnation still needed to
be fully worked out (cf. SNS 313/176), and that the completion of that incarnational
project is the historical mission of the proletariat. In contrast, instaurational acts of
signification are nowise predelineated, and there can be no discursive account of their
historical genesis, thus no rational justification. This is the sense in which “[t]he work
of Saint-Exupéry is not an argument. It is an example. It is made up of events which
are recounted to inspire, not to persuade” (Knight 1957, 181). This would be a kind of
pure action outside of truth. “Yesterday’s truth is dead, and that of tomorrow has yet
to be built” [La vérité d’hier est morte, celle de demain est encore à bâtir] (EG 341). The
problem is that this implies sacrificial rupture inexorably.
For Merleau-Ponty, however, even this position of sovereignty is regulated by the
primordial truth of the world and of our “participation” in it. “ ‘Being-in-the-truth’
[« être-à-la-vérité »] is indistinguishable from être-au-monde” (PhP 452). Provided we
are situated within the world in its historical totality, “we are in the truth” (PhP xi), “we
are true through and through [de part en part]” (PhP 520). Through exploration of the
“living present,” we can discover the irrepressible core of history’s existential meaning,
the existential project of which we are a part. And this—contrary to the eternalness
of Exupérian Man and to Saint Exupéry’s hatred of “this age”—can “make us love our
time” (HT 206/189).

Strategic detachment
In turning back to consider Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with Hervé, we should note
that an important extension of what Merleau-Ponty meant by “exchange” was his
idealization of a Marxist political party. According to this view, the Party is the site
of intersubjective exchange in the form of “a vital communication between individual
judgment and historical reality” (SNS 320/180). Its democratic-centralist organization
would serve the epistemic function of generating optimal historical perceptions of
the present and the soundest political judgments of the reflecting kind. That is, its
intersubjective structure would compensate for the absence of absolute criteria, and
would allow individuals to participate collectively in history on the larger stage. In this
 Contemporary Heroism 135

way, the Party could be seen as playing a therapeutic role. Not that Merleau-Ponty saw
the PCF as instantiating this ideal.
Commenting on Hervé in Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty argued that his
Communist interlocutor was incapable of maintaining the dialectical tension between
the party and the class it claimed to represent, and that, granting priority to the former,
he effectively assumed “the standpoint of a God who comprehends Universal History”
(HT 155/143f). This is precisely one of the forms of non-political thinking that Merleau-
Ponty sought to overcome, for it is ultimately inconsistent with what it means to be a
living human being. As Merleau-Ponty insisted, a key tenet of Marxism is that history
is always open and that we cannot think the future. To pretend to do so would subvert
Marx’s central intuition concerning historical meaning, and thus deny “the human
meaning and raison d’être of communism,” which is for humanity democratically “to
take their history into their own hands” (HT 158/147).
This is why Merleau-Ponty took up the young Marx’s claim against Hegel about
the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy involving its dialectical transcendence
[Aufhebung] along with that of the proletariat (Marx 1975b, 187), and why he
interpreted this in terms of its ceasing to be “separate” (rather than being done away
with altogether). As Merleau-Ponty put it: if, unlike Hervé, for example, the philosopher
“forsakes the illusion of contemplating the totality of completed [italics added] history
and feels caught up in it like all other men and confronted by a future to be made,
then philosophy realizes itself by doing away with itself as separate philosophy.”
(Although it might appear that Merleau-Ponty is here stating a sufficient condition
of the realization of philosophy, it should actually be seen as a necessary condition.)
“This concrete thinking, which Marx calls ‘critique’ to distinguish it from speculative
philosophy, is what others”—namely, Merleau-Ponty—“propound under the name
existential philosophy” (SNS 236f/133). Although Marx had centered this “critique” on
the proletariat understood in terms of a certain relation to the means of production,
Merleau-Ponty saw that this view needed to be contemporized by means of existential
phenomenology. But he aimed to do this, if not on the same grounds, then certainly
in the same spirit—the idea is that rationality is no longer taken as deriving from “the
concept,” but rather from “the heart of interhuman praxis” (EP 42/51).
It is thus ironic that Hervé accused Merleau-Ponty of being enthralled by “the
gestures and language of a bygone era” (Hervé 1946, 3), for example, the notion of
“patrie,” or Stendhal’s idea of “sincerity” (cf. SNS 271/153). For it was precisely Merleau-
Ponty’s point that contemporary debates were “still using the political vocabulary of
the nineteenth century” (SNS 284/160), in particular, that Marxists still tended to
deny the apparent inactuality of the proletariat qua universal class and instead accept
uncritically the classical conception of it as an article of faith. Hence, they were the
utopians, even by their own standards. For “to live and die for a future projected by
desire rather than live and act in the present is precisely what Marxists have always
considered utopianism” (HT 85f/80). Not that Merleau-Ponty preferred some sort of
acquiescent Hegelianism. But true to the idea of Lukács, he did think that one could
follow the “orthodox” spirit of Marx without any specific doctrinal commitment.
Perhaps Hervé failed to see that Merleau-Ponty had not invoked the idea of
Stendhalian “sincerity” in order to resuscitate and endorse it. Rather, it was to cast
136 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

into relief the fact that such a standpoint was, as a matter of fact, no longer a real
possibility, and that Marxists themselves could not surreptitiously avail themselves
of anything analogous. Merleau-Ponty’s point was that “we are all knaves [coquins] in
Stendhal’s sense” (SNS 273/154, italics added). By this, he meant that “in the absence
of a political thinking that would be capable both of taking in all truths and of taking
a stand in the real,” all political forces in France at the time were playing a “double
game” that would run afoul of nineteenth-century republican sincerity. But his
argument was that the ubiquitous political duplicity and “knavery” was grounded in
the “vital situation” of the world (SNS 287/162). Our time was “an ambiguous moment
in history” (SNS 285/160), and this was not a salutary ambiguity. For it implied
that “we are not in the truth” (cf. PhP xi), thereby portending the unavoidability of
playing a double game. In such conditions, could there be an alternative? Merleau-
Ponty thought so, and this is why he placed himself au-dessus de la mêlée. “In reality,
it is simply a refusal to commit oneself [s’engager] within confusion and outside of the
truth” (HT 203/185f, italics added). In these conditions, he thought that the role of
intellectuals like himself was

to clarify the ideological situation, to underline, beyond the paradoxes and

contingencies of contemporary history, the true terms of the human problem, to
recall Marxists to their humanist inspiration, to remind the democracies of their
fundamental hypocrisy, and to keep intact against propaganda the chances that
history may still have of becoming clear once again. (HT 196/179)

We must preserve liberty while waiting for a fresh historical impulse which may
allow us to engage it in a popular movement without ambiguity. (HT xix/xxiii)

The philosophical task in this situation was “to define a practical attitude of com­
prehension,” a “political consciousness” that would be commensurate with the central
intuition of Marxism (HT 159f/148). For Merleau-Ponty, this was precisely the
“existential attitude” he sought to define in his essay on heroism. Although his original
intervention concerning heroism in action may not have had the immediate political
effects he wanted, it is clear, given the pride of place that he later accorded it in Sense
and Non-Sense (at a time when Saint Exupéry’s reputation was starting to decline),30 this
response did not diminish Merleau-Ponty’s own estimation of the views he expressed
therein concerning the “practical attitude of comprehension” that he made central to
his existential-phenomenological project.
■
We are potentially offered an intriguing elaboration of this “attitude” from an unex-
pected source, namely, English poet Stephen Spender. Merleau-Ponty and Spender
became friends at (if not before) the first Rencontres Internationales in Geneva in Sep-
tember 1946, largely on the basis of their broadly congruent political sympathies.31
They surely met again over the years,32 but there is little record of their relationship.
Interestingly, however, “One More New Botched Beginning,” one of Spender’s most
important poems (Leeming 1999, 210), which recalls the memory of various friends,
includes a touching recollection of Merleau-Ponty in its opening stanza.33
 Contemporary Heroism 137

The source of the elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s position au-dessus de la mêlée

comes from a piece of prose by Spender that appeared in translation in Les temps
modernes in October 1946 (Spender 1946b).34 As the managing and political editor of
Les temps modernes, Merleau-Ponty may have arranged for this piece at the Rencontres
Internationales, or possibly during an earlier visit by Spender to France (cf. Spender
1946a). Given what we have seen regarding the controversy, both philosophical and
political, over Merleau-Ponty’s use of Saint Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre, one cannot fail
to be struck by the extraordinary pertinence of this work by Spender, beginning with
its title: “Pensées dans un avion au-dessus de l’Europe” [“Thoughts in an Airplane over
Europe”]. It seems scarcely conceivable that there was not some sort of deliberate effort
on the part of Merleau-Ponty to have Spender’s piece make a critical, nondogmatic
leftist contribution to debates concerning “high-altitude” political thinking. There
is no basis on which to claim that Merleau-Ponty endorsed everything that Spender
had to say. But the main lines of his reasoning do have clear counterparts in Merleau-
Ponty’s own work, and so, Spender’s essay may be cautiously read as an elaboration of
certain basic elements of Merleau-Ponty’s own thought, at least by way of expressing a
divergence from Saint Exupéry.
Flying over France, Spender’s basic observation concerning contemporary society
echoed Merleau-Ponty’s claim about the situation of the world itself being one of
duplicity: “whatever you do is wrong . . . because you are either involved in the systems
of the modern societies, or you are not involved in them” (Spender 1946b, 66). Inside
or outside, one cannot do right. “Whatever you do, it is impossible for you, in the age
in which you live, to be either right or wrong. Nevertheless, you must now choose. It
is no longer possible to evade choice” (Spender 1946b, 76). What to do? What can one
do? The response Spender gave is meant to be connected with an aerial perspective.
“You can enlarge your consciousness to include humanity. . . . The world, aware of itself
as a single vibrating existence in which every part acts on every other part at the same
moment, is unable to integrate such an awareness into the idea of a single personality.”
How to achieve such an integration? “By enlarging your personality [in such a way
as] to understand the nature of all the different parts. By creating within yourself
the personality of this divided humanity. By humanizing this inhuman humanity”
(Spender 1946b, 77).
However vague this perspective may have been, it did express Merleau-Ponty’s idea
of “accepting all truths and taking a stand in reality.” What Spender was calling for was
the recognition of all political realities without overlooking the concrete effects. That
is, the gaining of as complete a view as possible of the present situation. What is needed
is “an internationalism of those who care for civilization, who believe in charity and
have a passion for humanity” (Spender 1946c, 998).
There are certainly shades of Saint Exupéry in this, at least inasmuch as it may be
“the distinctive trait of humanism to encompass all things from a certain altitude that
enlarges the field of its vision and expands its outlook” (Gascht 1947, 39). But there
is a critical difference. As Spender described it, the shadow of the airplane he was in,
which was separate throughout the flight, “merged into the substance of the airplane”
upon landing (Spender 1946b, 78). More than anything else, this is the crucial moment
that is missing from Saint Exupéry, who always held that “landing is disappointing”
138 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

[l’atterrissage est décevant] (SV 21). At least from a Merleau-Pontian perspective, the
view offered by Spender is that of the place of philosophy in historical praxis—an
initial moment of detachment in which the philosopher withdraws ascensionally in
order to gain a view of the totality, followed by a moment in which this separation
is overcome through the philosopher’s successful descent and re-integration. As
Merleau-Ponty himself later observed, “at the conclusion of a reflection which at first
isolates him, the philosopher, in order to experience more fully the ties of truth which
bind him to the world and history, finds neither the depth of himself nor absolute
knowledge, but a renewed image of the world and of himself placed within it among
others” (EP 51/63).
Merleau-Ponty’s Marxist commitment to the category of totality clearly implies
some positive sense of “la pensée de survol.”35 The idea is that precisely in order to
offer, instead of a “speculative solution,” a “more acute consciousness of on-going
experience” (NI 9 [21]), philosophy must premise itself on an apprehension of the
movement of history as a whole as the touchstone of truth. Interestingly, inasmuch as
it is geared to the proletariat, this perspective goes further—or, if you prefer, higher—
than Saint Exupéry, and yet, it is in virtue of this that Merleau-Ponty could—at least
in principle—reintegrate on the ground. It is on this basis that we might say of Saint
Exupéry that he did not truly perceive, that his perception was repressed, and hence
why he expressed such abhorrence at the world around him. His cosmic humanism
was not based on perceptual contact with the living present, and therefore remained
a solitary dream—recall how Pilote de guerre opens: “Sans doute je rêve.” Lacking
any perceptual grip on the world, Saint Exupéry’s experience was devoid of living
meaning. Over Arras, he may have achieved “absolute contact” with himself as he
dreamt of his childhood home and the security offered by his governess. But the
epistemic significance of his experience of human relationality was not for him.
Rather, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, it is for us [für uns]. Not that this
implies a cognitive achievement on our part. As in Hegel’s work,36 the climax of
Phenomenology of Perception takes the form of an image that serves to secure the
standpoint of cognition—in this case, that of a virtually “complete” phenomenological
reduction, the complete repressive coincidence of self with habituated organism, and
yet this in a way that merges with history. This is what is crucial. For if transcendental
philosophy is to be realized as Merleau-Ponty intended—namely, integrated with
“the very phenomenon of the real” (SC 241/224)—and if the phenomenon of the real
is historical, then it must be the case that the productivity operatively presupposed
by transcendental philosophy belongs essentially to historical truth. In other words,
if truth is historical and (contra Hegel) absolute self-consciousness impossible, then
the realization of philosophy will occur, if at all, through the practical generation
of rationality. The core meaning of “proletariat” for Merleau-Ponty is the collective
embodiment of this generative agency, which in this way is rationality incarnate. The
question of the realization of philosophy is thus tied to the existence of the proletariat
so understood, something which Merleau-Ponty did not take for granted. In the
postwar context, then, he held that “the question of our time is precisely to know
[savoir] if the world [of tomorrow] will be rational” (NI 31 [13]). Marxism collapses
without belief in a rational future. Strictly speaking, however, we could never
 Contemporary Heroism 139

have knowledge of this. But a basic goal of Merleau-Ponty’s project was to respond
affirmatively, yet without simply begging the question, by disclosing compelling
perceptual self-evidence of the rationality of human history—this is precisely what
the sublimative spectacle of the hero is meant to provide. Epistemically, the decisive
experience that results necessarily remains at the level of myth, but it provides the
basis for the sort of rational faith in its own realizability that philosophy requires.
140
 Conclusion: Heroic Sublimation

The aim of this book has been to problematize the Exupérian ending of Phenomenology
of Perception and to provide at least the outlines of a compelling answer to the question
as to why this work concludes with lines drawn from Pilote de guerre that express in
an unmistakable way Saint Exupéry’s self-sacrificial disdain of corporeality. The key
elements of this answer have already been discussed in the preceding chapters. In these
final pages, I will briefly recapitulate the relevant claims and draw them together in
terms of the basic meaning for Merleau-Ponty of “the contemporary hero,” the place and
role of this notion within his postwar political thought, and finally, its methodological
significance for his reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology.
Who or what is “the contemporary hero?” As he made clear in his essay in action,
Merleau-Ponty’s hero is, in a word, “man,” and more specifically, “man as [en tant que]
productivity” (cf. PhP 200). As a mythic expression of human universality, the notion
of the contemporary hero can thus be seen as a militant incarnational reinterpretation
of “Man” as understood and promoted by others (including Saint Exupéry) as a
transcendent ideal, for the sake of which, in their view, heroic deeds are sacrificially
enacted. The difference is crucial. That Merleau-Ponty’s hero is “man” means that the
existence of the individual in question is de-particularized in such a way as to embody
this universality subjectively. The hero thus instantiates the claim that “man is capable
of situating his proper being, not in biological existence, but at the level of properly
human relations” (SC 190 n1/246 n97). More specifically, the de-particularization of
the heroic individual is a matter of corporeal de-actualization‌—the contemporary hero
is the habituated organism, his “actual” existence is folded into this entirely. This is
the sense in which the individual who becomes “man” is wholly repressed. He is thus
someone who is neither running ahead of nor lagging behind her historical time, but
who is rather exactly synchronous with it, jusqu’au bout. He subjectively embodies
human universality by existing unfalteringly the natural purposiveness “that throws us
toward things and toward others” (SNS 330/186). In other words, the contemporary
hero is someone who, through acts of sovereign uselessness, that is, acts that are their
own ends, fully and consummately lives her time. It is for this reason that he “melds
with history” at the moment of death (SNS 258/146), which carries the implication
that the hero’s death is fully internalized in an authentic way—that heroic existence
“transforms the fatality of death into freedom” such that death becomes a kind of
existential fulfillment (cf. Landsberg 1936, 40f).
To a certain extent, this is not altogether dissimilar to the views of Saint Exupéry (cf.
L. Sullivan 1980, 80ff). But the crucial difference lies in Merleau-Ponty’s incarnational
approach‌—his conviction that the present stage of history already incarnates human
universality, and that consequently, repression can overcome itself dialectically
142 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

through the concrete realization of what is implicit in the status quo, rather than any
sort of discontinuous rupture with it. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, such an approach to
existential issues differs fundamentally from any that would be considered “heroic”
in the more standard sense, that is, any sense in which heroism is seen as involving
self-sacrifice. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Saint Exupéry diverged quite
sharply from typical views at the time, and quite possibly from Saint Exupéry’s own
self-understanding, by implying that the idea of sovereign uselessness—exhibited over
Arras circa 1940—applied to Saint Exupéry’s final flight in 1944 as well. It was on this
condition alone that Merleau-Ponty could use the case of Saint Exupéry to show that
human existence can be universal, that one can become “man” through the (existentially
pathological) denial of personal particularity in a way that is not ultimately a form of
self-denial.
How does the contemporary hero relate to Merleau-Ponty’s postwar political thought?
The notion of contemporary heroism as an interpretation of the death of Saint Exupéry
is firstly an element of Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. Its role there is to provide
evidence of the existence of the proletariat—not in the sense of the working class
understood in terms of social-structural relation to the means of production within
capitalism, but in the sense that truly matters historically, namely, the existence of the
proletariat qua universal class, the incarnation of human universality (however that
may play out in sociological terms). In other words, the contemporary hero is meant to
play an evidentiary role with regard to the basic premise of an incarnational Marxism.
This premise may have been self-evident at other times, but not for Merleau-Ponty in
immediate postwar France. And so, just as he could not credibly affirm the existence of
the proletariat on the basis of any biased ideological assumptions, Merleau-Ponty could
not use the example of any avowed Marxist who gave her or his life in the fight against
fascism. That would not prove anything. Merleau-Ponty had to use a non-Marxist.
Indeed, that Saint Exupéry had tried to eschew politics, and even that the political
views that he nevertheless held were quasi-reactionary, actually served Merleau-
Ponty’s purposes very well, in that his interpretation of Saint Exupéry presented his
actions and behavior as instantiating something altogether contrary, namely, that
notwithstanding such superficial differences, there is a deeper natural purposiveness
in human existence, an objective teleological thrust in virtue of which fascism could
be defeated and a common world could be realized through nonsacrificial historical
action.
Before considering this further, it is important to reemphasize Merleau-Ponty’s
long-standing repudiation of sacrifice, and that, given the emphasis he placed on
the embodied nature of human coexistence, actualizing the consequences of what is
already “incarnate” is the only manner of radical social transformation that he could
sanction. Contrary to what a cursory reading of his interest in heroism might suggest,
then, Merleau-Ponty did not celebrate or venerate it in any way. Although he did not
disparage individuals who perished through what was deemed to be heroic action,
he had no grounds for esteeming heroism as a political virtue, let  alone a political
tactic or strategy. Indeed, the opposite is the case. For if not just a matter of tragic
circumstances, then heroic death is based either in political injudiciousness or else the
existential pathology of contemporary heroism. So while the latter may have been very
 Conclusion: Heroic Sublimation 143

phenomenologically useful for his purposes, to say that Merleau-Ponty esteemed it as

an actual form of human behavior would be like saying he esteemed “patient Schn.,” or
that he celebrated severe cases of agnosia.
In providing evidence of the existence of the proletariat qua universal class, the larger
point of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the contemporary hero was to offer unequivocal
evidence of the universal sense of human history, and of how revolutionary change
is not a utopian dream but rather a concrete project grounded in the living present.
The idea is that accepting Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Saint Exupéry’s death, as
opposed to seeing it in sacrificial or even aleatory terms, would motivate an embrace
of the “existential attitude” and the implied manner of comporting oneself vis-à-vis the
horizons of the historical totality, or of operationalizing, so to speak, the methodological
primacy of totality in a prereflective way. But this entailment is not straightforward,
because this evidence is not simply given unequivocally. As the universal limit case
of human existence, the fatal disincarnation of the contemporary hero could be seen
as tantamount to a virtually complete phenomenological reduction. That is, it could
be seen as a moment of “absolute knowing” in the sense of attaining “the point at
which consciousness finally becomes equal to its spontaneous life and regains its
self-possession” (SNS 112/64). This is how Merleau-Ponty would have us see Saint
Exupéry’s death. But as it is not a living possibility, heroic experience is not directly
communicable (although with Saint Exupéry, Merleau-Ponty could avail himself of
the account of the near-death experience that transpired over Arras). We the living, of
course, can never experience absolute knowing. But nor can we ever simply experience
another’s experiencing of absolute knowing. What we can experience is just the
radically individuated appearance of death. But as with anything else, the experience
of death is not univocal. It therefore remains theoretically undecidable whether
the individual in question, in fact, attained the perfect existential self-coincidence
characteristic of contemporary heroism. This can only be settled on practical grounds.
Merleau-Ponty thus called for a certain practical faith in the possibility that someone
might indeed privately enjoy a final moment of “sovereign” absolute self-possession.
This affirmation—which, it must be emphasized, is entirely for us—is essential to the
“existential attitude.” For it is what ultimately serves to merge object and horizons
in the perception of the architectonic structure of history as an open-ended totality
with a contingently realizable logic. For Merleau-Ponty, engagement on the basis of
this perception of history is indispensable to the revolutionary perspective of Marxism
in terms of its dialectical unity of theory and practice, and its overall existential
coherence.
We saw above that Merleau-Ponty was attracted, at least in a general philosophical
way, to Kant’s third Critique. Much could be said about this. But in particular, we can
now see that he sought to reform Marxism partly on the basis of an idea drawn from
that work, to wit, that the power of judgment is able to provide palpable experiences
of purposiveness that can serve to confirm the reality of the abstract ideas of practical
reason:

the power of judgment provides the mediating concept between the concepts of
nature and the concept of freedom, which makes possible the transition from
144 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

the purely theoretical to the purely practical, from lawfulness in accordance

with the former to the final end in accordance with the latter, in the concept
of a purposiveness of nature; for thereby is the possibility of the final end,
which can become actual only in nature and in accord with its laws, cognized.
(KU 5: 195f)

In this way, Merleau-Ponty’s contemporary hero was meant to furnish sensory or

intuitional evidence attesting to the genuine possibility of a solution to the human
problem. In our time, as Merleau-Ponty understood this, that is, a period when the
logic of history is difficult to discern, such evidence is particularly important. Through
the interpretation of the pathological one-sidedness of the contemporary hero as an
instantiation of a natural purposiveness that is fully congruent with the sens of history,
we are able to “cognize”—Merleau-Ponty would prefer to say “see”—that the realization
of universal human reconciliation is fully consistent with the dialectics of the natural
world. In other words, if we believe Merleau-Ponty’s account of Saint Exupéry—
particularly the insinuation that the latter’s aim, even on 31 July 1944, was to “recover
his own being” and to “leave his inner nothingness behind,” and (most crucially) that
he succeeded—then the spectacle of heroic death motivates the specific kind of “rational
faith” (cf. Kant 1998, 10) that properly orients Marxism heuristically, namely, belief
in the latent incarnation of human universality and the possibility of its realization
through historical praxis—that is, the myth of “man.” One thus comes to adopt the
“existential attitude” vis-à-vis history through the sublimation of the disincarnation
of the contemporary hero. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Saint Exupéry is thus the
linchpin of his defense of Marxism as the political theory of the self-emancipation of
the proletariat, and of his effort to sharpen the capacity of Marxism to perceive political
phenomena, inasmuch as it is what justifies treating history as a totality based on the
idea that human intercorporeal praxis incarnates the communication and confluence
of freedom and necessity.
Here, I should reiterate that my aim in this work is simply to get clear about what
is going on in Merleau-Ponty’s project of existential phenomenology, and not to assess
its strengths and weaknesses. To anyone with a serious interest in Marxism, however,
it is all but self-evident that many features of Merleau-Ponty’s embrace of Marxism
in the immediate postwar period appear unduly simplistic and disconcertingly naïve.
But we need to be careful. For one could easily mistake the myth of “man” that is
operative in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and which serves to support the possibility of a
certain formal conception of the proletariat, for some kind of dogmatic affirmation of
the category of the proletariat as found in classical Marxist theory—that is, “the myth
of the proletariat.” This is a line of critique that can be found in the work of liberal
critics of Marxism in France from Raymond Aron (1955) to Tony Judt (1992), and
no doubt something like this can be applied legitimately to many French intellectuals.
But it seems quite inapplicable to Merleau-Ponty, whose main preoccupation was
with the horizons of political theory qua theory, the ineluctability of engagement,
and the resulting imperatives of normative justification. In other words, Merleau-
Ponty was lucidly aware of his appeal to myth and the reliance of his position on a
certain  kind of faith—there was no mindless dogmatism or willful self-deception.
 Conclusion: Heroic Sublimation 145

Given well-motivated views concerning the limits of theoretical cognition, myth and
faith are in and of themselves not necessarily objectionable. One can certainly disagree
with Merleau-Ponty’s militant incarnational orientation, but it would be inadequate
to do so simply by pointing out that it involves myth and faith, for example, without
also engaging with the distinct issue as to whether or not all political positions involve,
knowingly or not, analogous epistemic soft spots. For if that is the case, then it would
not be a dispute over the use of myth and faith as such, but over which myth and
which faith, and the nature of the reliance upon them. Much more would need to
be said about this. But granting what I just suggested, it would follow, I believe, that
while many aspects of it may be dated and problematic, and notwithstanding his own
subsequent gestures of self-criticism, a strong case can be made to the effect that the
basic sense of Merleau-Ponty’s postwar political project merits renewed attention (cf.
Coole 2003).
What is the significance of the contemporary hero for Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation
of Husserlian phenomenology? As suggested in the Preface, and throughout the
discussion, the philosophical significance of Merleau-Ponty’s use of Saint Exupéry
is fundamentally methodological. There is a close derivative link with the foregoing
discussion of the role of Saint Exupéry in Merleau-Ponty’s political thought, the central
claim of which is that a methodological commitment to totality implies certain practical
postulates that are only consistent with an incarnational formulation of Marxism. In
turning to Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology, the basic
idea, as intimated above in the Introduction, is that the contemporary hero plays a role
with regard to “the realization of philosophy.” More specifically, the Exupérian ending
of Phenomenology of Perception plays an evidentiary role with regard to the historically
transformative praxis that is, in an ultimate sense, the agency of philosophy’s realization.
This ending thus shows that Merleau-Ponty deployed his Marxist philosophy of
history and its concomitant incarnational conception of the proletariat to shore up
transcendental phenomenology methodologically.
It is crucial to approach this in terms of the internal critique of phenomenological
methodology and the resulting account of “constructive” phenomenology that Fink
presented in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation (as discussed above in the Preface), and
Merleau-Ponty’s existential response to this. The central point concerns Fink’s claims
concerning what he termed “enworlding” [Verweltlichung]. This has a “primary”
or “proper” sense that refers to the emergence of the objective world, and which is
the object of transcendental phenomenological investigation. But Fink also claimed
a “secondary” or “non-proper” sense of enworlding, which refers to the concrete
realization of transcendental phenomenology itself. Crucially, in Fink’s account, these
two forms of enworlding are sharply separate. And this is because, in taking for granted
the possibility of a complete phenomenological reduction, Fink construed the active
subject of phenomenologizing per se in suprahuman terms, that is, the wholly detached
“non-participating onlooker” [unbeteiligte Zuschauer], thereby introducing the
distinct problem of how to bring transcendental insights back into the empirical world.
In contrast to this, Merleau-Ponty, basing himself on the claim that transcendental
subjectivity is intersubjectivity, insisted on seeing transcendental phenomenology as
a human practice that never really leaves the empirical world. From this perspective,
146 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

Merleau-Ponty simply dismissed Fink’s problem of secondary enworlding. This is why

he repeatedly claimed that philosophy “realizes itself by destroying itself as separate
philosophy” (PhP 520, emphasis added), with the implication that the realization of
philosophy implies its integration with reality, or the realization of the world, through
transformative historical praxis.
Broadly taken, this may be an appealing view. But as discussed earlier, it is not clear
just how it could work methodologically. This is what Merleau-Ponty tried to clarify in
the “phenomenology of phenomenology” that comprises Part III of Phenomenology of
Perception. In general terms, this metalevel undertaking was intended to substantiate
the claim that phenomenology offers a coherent and exhaustive program of bona fide
philosophical investigation. And it was intended to do this by showing, as Merleau-
Ponty put it, that “if we rediscover time beneath the subject, and if we relate to the
paradox of time those of the body, of the world, of the thing, and of the other, then we will
understand that beyond these there is nothing to understand” (PhP 419, italics added). It
was meant to establish, in other words, that the nexus of concrete intercorporeal praxis
is itself the absolute (HT 20/18; cf. Zahavi 2002, 24), and that “there is nothing outside
this unique fulguration of existence” (SNS 269/152, italics added). These claims were
made in defense of phenomenology as an “intuitive science,” the concrete intentional
explications of which can in fact yield what Husserl deemed an “ultimate understanding
of the world,” that is, an understanding behind which “there is nothing more that can
be sensefully inquired for, nothing more to understand” (FTL 242, italics added).
Merleau-Ponty thus wanted to redeem phenomenology as a complete philosophy
by showing that the transcendental phenomenal field is coextensive with the totality
of meaningful reality. The chief methodological task is to articulate the corresponding
conception of the phenomenological reduction—its “performance structure,” to
borrow Fink’s term. Having rejected the human possibility of the unbeteiligte Zuschauer
on which Fink’s account of the performance structure of the reduction was centered,
the problem for Merleau-Ponty is clear: how to redeem phenomenology as a complete
philosophy while also admitting that the phenomenological reduction is necessarily
incomplete?
Recall that the grounds for claiming the impossibility of a complete reduction have
to do with the fact that phenomenology itself, like any other human practice, relies
inescapably upon certain productive capacities from which it cannot fully detach.
Phenomenology thus inevitably presupposes certain operative intentionalities that
reside in the habituated organism, making it impossible for it to thematize them
exhaustively. The kind of complete detachment from the habituated organism that a
complete reduction would require is not even a momentary existential possibility—as
a life without life-as-such, it implies an absolutely individuated or “de-habituated”
existence that not even “patient Schn.” comes close to instantiating. But Merleau-Ponty
needs to be able somehow to include those intentionalities within the purview of
phenomenology in order to prosecute successfully his existential alternative to Fink’s
speculative interpretation.
The key here is that those operative intentionalities residing in the habituated
organism are, for Merleau-Ponty, the a priori dimensions of history. In a move that is
frankly somewhat breathtaking, then, he was able to include them within the purview
 Conclusion: Heroic Sublimation 147

of phenomenology through the apprehension of history as a totality. This is why

Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the organism is not extraneous to history” is so vitally
important, and why it needed to be carefully unpacked. For as discussed earlier, it
shows that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to embodiment is premised
methodologically upon a prior perception of history—specifically, Merleau-Ponty’s
incarnational Marxist understanding of history which, as just discussed, draws its
intuitional warrant from the spectacle of contemporary heroic death. And we can
now see very clearly why that must be the case. For otherwise, phenomenology would
be methodologically incomplete and consequently, for all intents and purposes, a
philosophical charade.
It may strike some readers as dubious to claim that Merleau-Ponty’s rich pheno­
menological account of embodiment could possibly be logically posterior to—or even
have anything whatsoever to do with—any such considerations regarding history
as a whole. But is it really all that strange? Indeed, concerning embodiment, could
phenomenological claims with bona fide philosophical import actually be arrived at
in any other way? This is just a suggestion, but the idea would be that if one accepts a
generalized view of embodied cognition, say, then one’s own claims, which are likewise
embodied, will necessarily fall short of philosophical truth, unless one historicizes
corporeality in a way that inscribes some sort of normative teleological impetus
within it. In other words, if primacy is accorded to corporeality in a consistent and
thoroughgoing way, then philosophy is fundamentally jeopardized in the absence of
some account of a larger purposiveness that can plausibly underwrite the possibility
of intersubjective truth. Of course, one is free to reject a radical focus on corporeality
and/or a serious concern for philosophical truth. But if one does wish to retain both, as
Merleau-Ponty did, then it is not at all odd to claim that phenomenology requires some
sort of methodological supplementation drawn from the philosophy of history. This
is basically Merleau-Ponty’s point about Marxism being “the philosophy of history”
in the sense of doing nothing more than stipulating the transcendental conditions of
historical rationality which, given a scrupulous recognition of the embodiedness of
human existence, is arguably a condition of philosophy itself.
The supplementation that Merleau-Ponty relies upon is the historical mission of the
proletariat. As we saw earlier, ex hypothesi proletarians are in a position to achieve what
is in effect a standpoint of universal philosophical insight. For this reason, what Fink
had distinguished as primary and secondary enworlding are concretely unified within
the class-conscious historical praxis of the proletariat. Merleau-Ponty thought that
philosophy just needed to recognize this and accept it as the concrete basis of historical
truth. And it needed to accept that, even if truth is historical, it still has universal
import, and so on its own, the corporeally situated freedom of human être-au-monde
is insufficient to carry out the tasks of philosophy. In other words, the realization of
philosophy is possible only on condition of its being underwritten and carried by the
historical praxis of the proletariat. For this alone obviates the need, the impossibility of
which would otherwise undermine the pretensions of philosophy, to thematize directly
the full operative content of the habituated organism.
This is why Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of phenomenology culminates with a
discussion of freedom. For therein lies the crux of Merleau-Ponty’s position: a denial
148 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

that we are sufficiently free to perform the transcendental reduction as Husserl had
originally conceived it, coupled with an argument to the effect that transcendental
phenomenology in its full scope is nevertheless still a human possibility in virtue
of the necessity embodied (literally) in the historical praxis of the proletariat. Only
on this condition is situated freedom sufficient for doing philosophy. The upshot for
phenomenology is that the reduction cannot be seen simply as an act of freedom, a
kind of heroic detachment, but rather must be understood in incarnational terms as a
matter of “living my time . . . by plunging into the present and the world” (PhP 520),
and thus—in direct contrast to Fink, including with regard to his view of the passivity
of the Zuschauer—as a matter of intensified participation in the ongoing generative
process of history.
As in the political context, the manner of demonstration at the climax of Pheno­
menology of Perception is not straightforward. For Merleau-Ponty did not set up
Saint Exupéry as a positive exemplar of anything. Just as it is not a viable political
strategy, contemporary heroism does not instantiate an epistemic ideal, nor make
any cognitive contribution. In particular, as noted above, it does not achieve absolute
knowing in any communicable sense, but rather presents for us the phenomenon of
absolute knowing, as it were, that betokens the uncognizable outer limit of cognition.
This is the fundamental way in which philosophy places “our relationship with the
world . . . once more before our eyes and presents it for our affirmation [constatation]”
(PhP xiii). And Merleau-Ponty wanted to sublimate this liminal experience into the
structure of phenomenological reason. That is, he wanted his readers’ encounter with
the mortal failure of Saint Exupéry—whom they did overwhelmingly regard as a hero
of some kind—to be transmuted dialectically into the uptake of the militant faith of his
incarnational Marxism—in effect, a kind of sacrifice of sacrifice. And Merleau-Ponty
wanted this to occur, not simply for any directly political ends, but precisely in order to
convey accurately his methodological reinterpretation of phenomenology. In attesting to
the logic of history, the spectacle of the contemporary hero is what provides intuitional
grounds for affirming the theoretically undecidable claim that the productivity
presupposed by phenomenology is a naturally purposive spontaneity that coheres fully
with the project’s universal philosophical aspirations, and this by dovetailing with the
historical mission of the proletariat. By way of analogy with the political context, it
thus motivates a “rational faith” in the latent incarnation of human universality by
which phenomenology needs to orient itself at the limits of “regressive” (in the sense of
Rückfragen) intentional analysis.
Concerning the lines from Pilote de guerre that are cited at the end of
Phenomenology of Perception, then, it is clear that Merleau-Ponty had no truck with
their actual textual content. Strictly speaking, in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s work,
these lines are non-sense, and they do not properly say anything. But Merleau-Ponty
did want them to do something. That is, he wanted the apogogic invocation of the
disincarnate “nœud de relations” as intended by Saint Exupéry (cf. Milligan 1955, 251)
to prompt on the part of his readers the practical adoption of a transformed existential
stance and a correspondingly new way of seeing the world in terms of the coextensivity
of meaningful reality with the nexus of concrete intercorporeal involvement. It is in
this way that non-sense could, despite itself, contribute to making sense. Here too,
 Conclusion: Heroic Sublimation 149

one must be careful. For contrary to what is typically assumed, this perception is not
informed in any way by Saint Exupéry’s claim that “man is but a knot of relations,” but
rather is based upon the dialectical sublimation of the radical disincarnation that is
expressed therein. The resulting incarnational view may still be mythic in epistemic
terms (cf. Eliade 1947, 29–32), but it is based upon a myth with an entirely different
content and motivational structure in virtue of the fact that it concerns the possibility
of progressive historical agency rather than any sort of transcendent ideal.
The fact that Merleau-Ponty’s militant position does not dispense with myth and
practical faith is what decisively distinguishes it from Fink’s triumphant view, which is
oriented to the absolute as an attainable object of theoretical knowledge. In a certain
way, then, Fink and Merleau-Ponty can be taken as representing two basic forms of
post-Husserlian phenomenology. The main issue concerns how phenomenology is to
provide its own foundation (in the sense of Husserl’s maxim of “die Rückbeziehung
der Phänomenologie auf sich selbst”), and in particular, how it is to deal with the limits
of intuitional givenness, the outer horizons of experience which are themselves not
given to intuition. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to address this: either reject
the primacy of intuition by subordinating evidence to a principle of metaphysical
speculation; or else uphold the primacy of intuition by phenomenalizing the limits
of intuitional givenness noncognitively. What is at stake is the methodological status
of Husserl’s “principle of all principles” (see Preface, note 30). Fink pursued the first
alternative, which rejects this principle, while Merleau-Ponty took up the second, which
defends it. Merleau-Ponty’s own “phenomenology of phenomenology” culminated in
the spectacle of heroic death—which metaphorizes the existential failure of a complete
reduction—because this serves to substantiate his deflationary argument against Fink
to the effect that meaningful reality is coextensive with human intercorporeality,
and thus that the methodological resources adequate to the complete realization
(or enworlding) of transcendental phenomenology do not exceed human capacities.
It is just that these capacities are now taken to include the historical agency of the
proletariat—which is to be included within the performance structure of the reduction
accordingly.
It is instructive to consider the contrast between Fink and Merleau-Ponty as
reflecting two fundamentally different ways in which phenomenology can relate to
Kant’s “Copernican Revolution.” On the one hand, Fink tried to surpass this (see also
Fink 1976a). As we saw, whereas for Kant, there can be no canon of pure theoretical
reason, for Fink, the canon of phenomenological reason is expressly conceived for the
theoretical task of distinguishing appearance-truth from genuine transcendental truth.
As “absolute science” phenomenology would leave transcendental illusion behind. In
particular, any positive regulative function that it might have had would be superseded,
as there would no longer be a meaningful distinction between subjective and objective,
hence no conflation. Likewise, Fink did not recognize the primacy of practical reason,
nor the need for faith, regarding these as expressions of the limited and dogmatic nature
of critical philosophy. Ultimately, through the breakthrough to the phenomenological
onlooker, he aimed to go beyond the sort of ectypal knowledge to which Kant limited
human knowledge, to a kind of archetypal theoretical knowing that would be akin to
the intellectual intuition that Kant had, of course, strictly ruled out.
150 Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy

On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty tended more toward completing than

surpassing Kant. Regarding Fink’s proposal of a constructive phenomenology as still
transcendentally naïve (see Preface), Merleau-Ponty reinterpreted phenomenology on
a practical basis in a way that placed limits on theoretical claims. So whereas Fink
confronted Kant on the terrain of the first Critique, Merleau-Ponty, as we have seen,
turned to the third. Although he did not elaborate the implications of this in any detail,
his idea of method clearly involved granting reflecting judgment epistemic priority over
theoretical understanding (PhP 65; cf. Coole 1984). This is exemplified with perfect
clarity in the case of judging Saint Exupéry to instantiate contemporary heroism.
Agreeing with Kant that philosophical inquiry is not entirely oriented by principles
that are constitutive of objects, Merleau-Ponty thus likewise retained a positive role for
transcendental illusion. Whereas Fink did not see how any sort of subjective principle
could have objective validity, Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, agreed with Kant that it is
essential to reason to take certain subjective ideas that do not and, indeed, could not
arise from experience and to include them in the field of investigation (Grier 2001, 278).
Like Kant’s claims concerning the systematic unity of reason, Merleau-Ponty’s claims
regarding historical totality provide a regulative vision for doing philosophy. And as
in Kant’s case, the epistemic status of this vision is ultimately borne by transcendental
illusion, namely, that of heroic absolute knowing. Concerning this, Merleau-Ponty’s
position is consistent with Kant’s assertion that “this illusion (which we can, after
all, prevent from deceiving us) is indispensably necessary [if] we want to direct the
understanding beyond every given experience  .  .  .  and hence also to direct it to its
greatest possible and utmost expansion” (KrV A645/B673).
Recognition of this sort of affinity with Kant goes against the grain of prevailing
wisdom concerning Merleau-Ponty, where it is typically assumed that his radicalization
of Husserl’s own radicalization of Kant must have placed him at a further remove from
Kant. But when Fink’s methodological contribution is taken into account, it becomes
clear that in order to redeem transcendental phenomenology on an intuitional basis,
it was, in part, back to Kant that Merleau-Ponty turned. But still, this should not be
overstated. These points of affinity with Kant are in effect assimilated elements of the
militant incarnational perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s (Lukácsian) Marxism. Broadly
speaking, the idea is that it is within the terms of Marxism understood in this way that
Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” can be best completed. Likewise for transcendental
phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation of Husserl’s project ultimately
works by relying on intuitional experience beyond theoretical knowledge, and thus by
embracing a kind of faith, rather than, as with Fink, postulating theoretical experience
beyond what can be experienced intuitionally. It thus “provides its own foundation,”
not through theoretical speculation, but through practical participation in a historical
project of intersubjective self-realization wherein the world is not something to be
known, but something to be made. As discussed above, Merleau-Ponty was of the
view that this participation presupposes the “existential attitude,” and that in turn
this presupposes the sublimative recognition of Exupérian heroism. This is what is
supposed to happen at the end of Phenomenology of Perception, and that is why it ends
in the way that it does.
 Notes

Preface
1 For instance, Matthews (2002, 2006); Priest (2003); Carman and Hansen (2004);
Toadvine (2006); Hass (2008); Carman (2008); Marshall (2008); Diprose and
Reynolds (2008); Romdenh-Romluc (2010).
2 For instance, Hass and Olkowski (2001); Toadvine and Embree (2002); Baldwin
(2007); Semonovitch and DeRoo (2010); Flynn et al. (2010).
3 For instance, Davis (2001); Steeves (2004); Gordon and Tamari (2004); Olkowski
and Weiss (2006); Hatley et al. (2006); Coole (2007); Cataldi and Hamrick (2007);
Dillard-Wright (2009); Johnson (2009); Toadvine (2009); Park and Kopf (2010);
Kaushik (2011).
4 For instance, Low (2002); Carbone (2004); Barbaras (2004); Besmer (2008); Hamrick
and Van der Veken (2011).
5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard 1945).
The original English translation was by Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul 1962), which was reset with new pagination and published in the Routledge
Classics series (London: Routledge 2002). The new (and much improved) English
translation is by Don Landes (London; New York: Routledge, 2012). Given this
plurality of English editions, and the ready availability of page concordances
between them and the French original, page references will be made only to the
latter, hereafter cited as PhP. All translations will be my own, although I have
consulted those of both Smith and Landes.
6 The situation is similar in French-language scholarship, with the possible exception
of Saint Aubert (2004), the first volume of a trilogy of works on Merleau-Ponty
which make use of extensive unpublished materials.
7 But cf. Spiegelberg (1973, 1974), for example, on the question of the necessity of the
reduction in general, and Dillon’s claim (1988, 120) that Merleau-Ponty in particular
“was not committed to the methodology of the reduction.”
8 There is a considerable literature on Husserl and the reduction. Regarding some
of the basic issues, see Boehm (1965) and Kern (1977). For an excellent recent
discussion of Husserl’s view of the reduction, see Luft (2004). See also Husserl
(2002), which presents previously unpublished material on the reduction. For a
brief overview of the reduction in some post-Husserlian contexts, see Taminiaux
(2004).
9 Over the years, several commentators have made specific contributions toward an
understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s methodology, in particular with regard to the
phenomenological reduction, but there is no clear picture or substantive consensus.
See, for example, Murphy (1966); Herbenick (1973); Devettere (1973); Bender
(1983); Sheets-Johnstone (1999): 273–319; Heinämaa (1999, 2002); Seebohm (2002);
Depraz (2002); Smith (2005).
152 Notes

10 Here, étonnement is Merleau-Ponty’s rendering of Fink’s term Verwunderung.

Merleau-Ponty was citing Fink’s 1933 Kant-Studien article, but the pagination in
his reference is incorrect. He cited pp. 331ff of the original article (pp. 96ff. in Fink
(1966)), whereas the point in question was made on p. 350 (pp. 115f in Fink (1966)).
The allusion that Merleau-Ponty made to this idea of wonder later in Phenomenology
of Perception (PhP 341f) does provide the correct page reference.
11 But note that in Fink (1966d), this idea is developed in terms of “astonishment”
[das Staunen] (Fink 1966d, 182–5).
12 See Plato, Theaetetus 155d. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, A2 982b 12ff.
13 See, for example, Husserl (1970, 285). As Spiegelberg (1982, 81) put it:
“Phenomenology in general may be characterized as a philosophy which has learned
to wonder again and to respect wonders for what they are in themselves.” And
Welton (2000, 13): “What gives rise to phenomenological analysis is an unsettling
wonder in the presence of things, which themselves come to us through certain
modes or manners that are not themselves objects.” Of course, Husserl regarded “the
pure ego and pure subjectivity” as “the wonder of wonders” (1980, 71, 75; see Melle
1992). For a more general discussion of wonder and phenomenology, see Barnacle
(2001), and for a more critical discussion, see Kingwell (2000).
14 Concerning the problem of the beginning of phenomenology, see Lenkowski (1978);
on the natural attitude, see Luft (1998).
15 Merleau-Ponty suggested that from this stems “Husserl’s entire misunderstanding
with his interpreters, with the existential ‘dissidents’, and ultimately with himself ”
(PhP viii).
16 Statements to this effect are very common.
17 But cf. Madison’s claim (1981, 194)—made with reference to a working note
from February 1959 in which Merleau-Ponty wrote that “the incompleteness of
the reduction . . . is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself ”
(VI 232/178)—that “[i]t is precisely by thinking the impossibility of a total
reduction that phenomenology thinks a ‘Being in transcendence not reduced to
the ‘perspectives’ of ‘consciousness’ ’” (citing VI 292/243).
18 With regard to Fink, Bruzina (2002) is an exception; but cf. Smyth (2011). With
regard to Saint Exupéry, see Smyth (2010).
19 See the Introduction below, and the end of Chapter 1.
20 Reference will also be made to Fink’s 1933 Kant-Studien article, “Die
phänomenologische Philosophie Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik,” which
was based on the Sixth Cartesian Meditation and which Merleau-Ponty had
certainly read, but in which Fink had tempered the force of the internal critique of
phenomenology that the Sixth Cartesian Meditation had implied.
21 For a detailed history of the document, see Bruzina (1995, vii–xxxv).
22 Bruzina (1995, lxxxiii n121; see also lxxviii n74). Note that the copy lent to Berger
did not include the final section 12, “ ‘Phenomenology’ as Transcendental Idealism”
(Bruzina 1995, xxi).
23 Bruzina (1995, xxxiv; cf. lxxxiv n125), citing a letter from Fink to Gerhart Husserl
(25 October 1946).
24 Bruzina (1995, xxxiv), citing a letter from Fink to Van Breda (26 November 1946).
25 In a letter to Merleau-Ponty (17 December 1945), Van Breda wrote that the Sixth
Cartesian Meditation “is basically a critique of the very bases of Husserl’s thought,”
and in another letter of the same date to the publisher Aubier, Van Breda wrote that
“Fink did not like to have his draft widely known, because his critique is basically
quite severe” (cited in Bruzina 1995, lxxxiii n119).
 Notes 153

26 Fink’s text was first mentioned in Berger (1941, 115n1; cf. 106). Concerning
Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, see his letter (1 October
1942) to Hermann Van Breda, cited in Van Breda (1962, 421f).
27 See Van Breda’s letter to Merleau-Ponty (17 December 1945) where he suggested
that Phenomenology of Perception “is too strongly under the influence of the ‘Sixth
Meditation’ ” (cited in Bruzina 1995: lxxxiii).
28 Kersten (1995) expressed a similar idea, but misread Merleau-Ponty as having aimed
at the same goal as the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, which may be related to his
apparent unawareness (1995, 49) that Berger’s copy of Fink’s text excluded section 12
(cf. Bruzina 1995, xxi). Kersten’s account is alluded to positively in Crowell (2001,
263). A similar but more accurate view was expressed (but not developed) in
Waldenfels (1997, 71ff).
29 We must also set aside for present purposes the question as to whether and to what
extent this text accurately reflected Fink’s own views. On that, see Bruzina (2004),
which relies in part on the valuable material now available in Fink (2006, 2008).
30 As Husserl expressed it, this principle states “that every originary presentive
intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily . . . offered
to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but only
within the limits in which it is presented there. . . . Every statement which does no
more than confer expression on such [originary] data by simple explication and by
means of significations precisely conforming to them is . . . called upon to serve as a
foundation” (1982, §24).
31 Note that Merleau-Ponty did not strongly emphasize that the idea of constructive
phenomenology came from Fink, referring it in the text to “Husserl’s final works,”
while mentioning in the footnote that it was “composed [rédigée] by Eugen Fink”
(PhP i).
32 As we shall see, since it thus transcends the categories of ontology, Fink refers to this
account as “meontic.” See Bruzina (1995, lv–lvii; 2004, 366f).
33 Although at one point Fink suggests that the onlooker “produces itself ” (SCM
43/39), thereby emphasizing the onlooker’s radical difference from both the human
and transcendental-constituting subjects, his considered view is that it is merely the
“functional exponent” [funktionelle Exponent] of transcendental life (SCM 44/40; cf.
65, 73/58, 65).
34 But cf. SCM 37–41/34–7, as well as Fink (1966a, 45f), where Fink gives indications
to the contrary; see also Merleau-Ponty’s positive reference to the latter text (SC 222
n2/248 n40).
35 Even though, for Kant, it represents the determination of the formal conditions of
a complete system of pure reason, and as such is prefigured throughout the work as
the real conclusion (see Grondin 1990).
36 Kant: “By canon I mean the sum of a priori principles governing the correct use of
certain cognitive powers as such” (KrV A796/B824).
37 Although Fink largely avoids this more provocative terminology in the Sixth
Cartesian Meditation, it does express the salient idea more clearly (see SCM 147/134;
cf. 111/101).
38 See Husserl’s discussion of the “transcendental illusion” of solipsism, which
expresses the need to press ahead with the “systematic unfolding of the constitutive
problematic” (1969, §96.b, 241f).
39 As Fink put it: the onlooker “becomes passively participant in world-constitution
insofar as . . . it is encompassed by the self-enworlding of the constituting I”
(SCM 119/108). Transcendental life turns in upon itself and the constitutive
154 Notes

activities of primary enworlding “sweep the [onlooker] along” [reissen . . . mit] into

the world (SCM 119/109)—the onlooker is “carried off [fortgetragen] by it and made
mundane” (SCM 119/108; cf. 125/114).
40 “The concept of ‘intellectual intuition’ and above all that of (Hegel’s) ‘speculative
knowledge’ is a genuine presentiment of the productivity of phenomenologizing
‘theoretical experience’” (SCM 86/77).
41 Or equivalently, the impossibility of Fink’s onlooker—which Merleau-Ponty had
already effectively dismissed in The Structure of Behavior by demonstrating—contra
Kojève’s claim about the “Sage”—the impossibility of “complete integration” (SC
227/210). Cf. Kojève (1947, 271): “the Sage is the man who is capable of answering
in a comprehensible or satisfactory manner all questions that can be asked him
concerning his actions, and of answering in such a way that the whole of his answers
forms a coherent discourse. Or else, what amounts to the same thing: the Sage is the
fully and perfectly self-conscious man.”
42 Marx (1975b, 187, translation modified): “Philosophy cannot realize itself without
the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot
transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy” [Die
Philosophie kann sich nicht verwirklichen ohne die Aufhebung des Proletariats, das
Proletariat kann sich nicht aufheben ohne die Verwirklichung der Philosophie].
43 Cf. SNS 236f/133, where Merleau-Ponty wrote slightly differently that philosophy “se
réalise en se supprimant [by abolishing itself] comme philosophie séparée.” See also
SNS 136, 235/79, 133; NI 99, 108, 123, 174.
44 As he also insisted upon attributing it to Husserl (PhP xiii, 415; SNS 237/134; 1960,
97; 1964d, 107; 1973, 45). On this, see Zahavi (2002, 23–8).
45 A claim he also made explicitly (HT 20/18). See Zahavi (2002, 24), where a 1927
research manuscript of Husserl’s is cited to the effect that “the absolute reveals itself
as the intersubjective relation between subjects.”
46 It is “by living my time [mon temps],” “by plunging into [m’enfonçant] the present
and the world . . . that I am able to understand other times”—that is, approach the
universal (PhP 520).
47 Recall Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “the experience of absurdity and that of absolute
self-evidence are mutually implicatory, and even indistinguishable” (PhP 342).
48 This view also contradicts Aron Gurwitsch’s claim (1957, 142) that “Merleau-
Ponty did not develop a phenomenology of perception that would be considered
transcendental in the full sense of the term [because] the existential framework
of his investigations prevented him from radically pushing the phenomenological
reduction to its limit [jusqu’au bout].”
49 See above. Cf. also Fink’s later comment about phenomenology’s “methodische
‘Schizophrenie’ ” (1976, 192).
50 “The revolutionary movement, like the work of the artist, is an intention which itself
creates its instruments and its means of expression” (PhP 508, emphasis added; cf.
PhP 519). Cf. SNS 109/63.
51 “[O]nly the work itself, completed and understood, is proof that there was something
rather than nothing to be said” (SNS 32/19; cf. PhP 491). Similarly, a revolutionary
project “ceases to be the abstract decision of a thinker and becomes an historical
reality only if it is worked out [s’il s’élabore] in interhuman relations, and in the
relations of man with his work [métier]” (PhP 509).
52 Merleau-Ponty was presumably citing Fink (SCM 43/39): “In der universalen
Epoché, in der Ausschaltung aller Glaubenssetzungen, produziert sich der
phänomenologische Zuschauer selbst.”
 Notes 155

53 Cf. SC 240/224, where Merleau-Ponty hinted that an appropriately redefined

transcendental philosophy would involve “ ‘staking’ [« mettre en jeu »] one’s life.”
54 Robert Campbell once quoted Merleau-Ponty, albeit without reference, as saying
that philosophy “is not content to be subjected to its historical surroundings, but is
inserted in them, riveted, committed, militant” (1966, 274).

Introduction
1 Saint Exupéry wrote Pilote de guerre while living in “exile” in New York City,
following the defeat of France in 1940, and that is where it was first published.
Parts of the English translation first appeared in three instalments in The
Atlantic Monthly at the beginning of 1942 (January, pp. 1–20; February,
pp. 184–205; and March, pp. 313–33), and the book was published simultaneously
(20 February 1942) in French (Saint Exupéry 1942a) and English, under the title
Flight to Arras (Saint Exupéry 1942b). Although substantially the same, there are
numerous minor differences between these texts, including the organization and
division of chapters. Gallimard published Pilote de guerre in the Occupied Zone
later that year (27 November 1942), after submitting it to the Propagandastaffel,
which passed it after censoring one line about Hitler (cf. Assouline 1988, 270f).
This line, which would have appeared on page 32, appeared on page 34 of the
Éditions de la Maison Française edition (Saint Exupéry 1942a) in the following
passage:

Ils sont tous des imbeciles. Celui qui ne sait pas trouver mes gants. {Hitler qui a
déclenché cette guerre démente.} Et l’autre, de l’État-Major, avec son idée fixe de
mission à basse altitude.

They are all idiots. The one who doesn’t know where my gloves are. {Hitler, who
unleashed this mad war.} And that fellow on the General Staff, and his obsession
with low-altitude sorties.

This line remained absent from subsequent printings of the Gallimard edition—it
was only reintroduced to the text of Pilote de guerre in the most recent edition of
Saint Exupéry’s complete works (1999, 125).
  Concerning the 1942 Gallimard edition, the limited print run of 2100 copies
sold well, but the book was subsequently (11 February 1943) banned and recalled
at the instigation of French anti-Semites, notably Pierre-Antoine Cousteau and
others associated with the collaborationist journal Je suis partout (Ragache and
Ragache 1988, 241ff; Bounin 1999, 1305). They were offended by Saint Exupéry’s
having extolled the bravery of a Jewish comrade named Jean Israël. The head of the
Propagandastaffel, Gerhard Heller, was reprimanded for this oversight (EG 299f;
cf. Heller 1981, 134). Gallimard was also not permitted to reprint Saint Exupéry’s
earlier works. Clandestine versions of Pilote de guerre subsequently appeared, first in
Lyon in December 1943 (Imprimerie Nouvelle Lyonnaise) and subsequently in Lille
in 1944 (S.I.L.I.C.) (see Rude 1978; Bounin 1999, 1320f). Owing to the scarcity of
paper, these clandestine editions reproduced the book with about half as many pages
(the Lille edition was about eight pages longer than the one produced in Lyon),
and both, but especially the Lille one, contained errors and minor omissions. The
Gallimard edition was first republished in 1947.
156 Notes

2 There are some minor textual discrepancies between Merleau-Ponty’s citation and
the Gallimard edition of Saint Exupéry’s text, where they appear as follows:

Ton fils est pris dans l’incendie? Tu le sauveras!. . . . Tu vendrais, s’il est un
obstacle, ton épaule pour le luxe d’un coup d’épaule! Tu loges dans ton acte
même. Ton acte, c’est toi. . . . Tu t’échanges. . . . Ta signification se montre
éblouissante. C’est ton devoir, c’est ta haine, c’est ton amour, c’est ta fidélité,
c’est ton invention. . . . L’homme n’est qu’un nœud de relations. Les relations
comptent seules pour l’homme.

It is unlikely that these differences were intentional, but nor is it the case that
Merleau-Ponty was working with a clandestine edition that contained typographical
inaccuracies. (Note that Merleau-Ponty did not list Pilote de guerre in the
bibliography of Phenomenology of Perception.) Consider the page references that
Merleau-Ponty gave. He cited pages 171 and 174, whereas in the Gallimard edition,
the lines appear on pages 168f and 171 (it is the final line that comes from a different
paragraph), while in the Éditions de la Maison Française edition, they are on pages
173f and 176. However, Merleau-Ponty had earlier referred (PhP 99 n) to a passage
on page 174 of Pilote de guerre that is, in fact, on page 174 in the Gallimard edition;
likewise for page 169 (see PhP 100 n). (The passages in question are on pages 180
and 174, respectively, in the Maison Française edition.) The pagination is thus
tightly correlated to the Gallimard edition, whereas, as noted above, the clandestine
editions differed considerably with respect to pagination. In all probability, then,
Merleau-Ponty was using the banned 1942 Gallimard edition, and the textual
differences simply stem from citational nonchalance, and the page references are
just an error.
3 But see Smyth (2010, 2011). Another exception to this tendency is Dorfman (2007),
on which I shall comment below (see note 14).
4 Plausible-sounding explanations that might be given for this neglect could be based
on the idea that the citation falls outside of the philosophical content of the book
proper. It might thus be seen, for example, as merely a reflection of the immediate
postwar context. Albeit in passing and in a work on Sartre, Hollier made this
claim quite crudely in saying that the ending of Phenomenology of Perception was
“imposed by the postwar agenda” (1986, 19). And while it goes against the grain of
his discussion otherwise, Dorfman said as much in claiming that Merleau-Ponty’s
view of Saint Exupéry “is certainly to be explained by the context of the immediate
post-war period and the influence of Sartre” (2007, 151 n3), although this allusion
to Sartre is puzzling. However, neglect of the reference to Saint Exupéry could
also be viewed more tactfully as simply reflecting Merleau-Ponty’s own political
outlook. Saint Aubert expressed such a view in claiming that “the very last page
[of Phenomenology of Perception] . . . betrays the displacement of the author’s
philosophical concerns, and his impassioned interest in the political events of
the day” (2004, 115). But while this view would attribute to Merleau-Ponty the
agency with regard to the composition of his own book that is effectively denied
by any sort of “contextual explanation,” it does remain fully consistent with a sharp
bifurcation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought into mutually exclusive philosophical
and political compartments, as if his political interests were in no way implicated
within the reinterpretation of phenomenology that he presents in Phenomenology
of Perception—as if, in other words, the liminal frontier between philosophy and
politics were only reached on the final page. As we shall see, however, such a view is
 Notes 157

fundamentally mistaken, as aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s “political” thought are woven

into his philosophical work at pivotal points.
5 Cooper (1979, 20) referred to the entire citation, but still gave it an uncritical
Merleau-Pontian reading. Dorfman (2007) considered the whole citation as well, but
focused his analysis on Saint Exupéry’s term “invention” (see below, note 14). Some
commentators have alluded to Saint Exupéry without actually making reference
to the ending of Phenomenology of Perception at all. For example, while making
indirect reference to Saint Exupéry, Laurie Spurling noted Merleau-Ponty’s many
“almost mystical” statements about human existence (1977, 133). And Gary Madison
pointed out some similarities between Phenomenology of Perception and Saint
Exupéry’s Terre des hommes (1981, 52, 316 n21).
6 Such a reading might appeal to the Preface of Phenomenology of Perception, where
Merleau-Ponty clearly alludes to Saint Exupéry in saying, in his own words, that “we
are this knot of relations” [nous sommes ce nœud de relations] (PhP xvi). However,
because Merleau-Ponty was predicating it of the plural “we,” this “knot of relations”
refers to a reality very different from that invoked at the end of the book, which
declares that the individual human being is a matter of pure relationality (“man is
but a knot of relations”). This is linked to the usual—though erroneous—translation
of Saint Exupéry’s use of the term “nœud” as “network” (cf. Langer 1989, 147)—a
translation which does work for Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term in the Preface. For
the latter takes the term “man” as the collective noun “humanity” and thus imparts
a much more unproblematic intersubjective meaning to the Exupérian lines than
they actually support. In other contexts, Saint Exupéry does refer to humanity as a
network [réseau], but in the passage in question, “man” refers unambiguously to the
human individual. Lewis Galantière, who produced the original English translation
of Pilote de guerre (under the title Flight to Arras) in close consultation with Saint
Exupéry, rendered the locution “nœud de relations” adjunctively as “a knot, a web, a
mesh”—and this not of but “into which relationships are tied” (Saint Exupéry 1942b,
183, emphasis added).
7 See Froman (2005) for a critical discussion of this silence from the perspective of
Merleau-Ponty’s later work.
8 It is thus immaterial here that “silence is still a modality of the world of sound” (PhP
516).
9 And this remained a recurrent theme for Merleau-Ponty—see, for example, EP
42/51, PNPH 275, 323, 333.
10 Although it is occasionally—albeit very seldom—mentioned, the theme of heroism
is never actually discussed in the literature on Merleau-Ponty—but see Smyth
(2010, 2011). Previously, the nearest thing to an exception is a now obscure article
by Robert Campbell (1966), but even this is largely expository, offering little in
the way of analysis, philosophical or otherwise. More recently, Flynn (2007, 136f)
devoted a couple of paragraphs to the theme of heroism, but to little consequence.
See also Dorfman (2007; cf. note 14 below).
11 Sartre attributed this expression to Merleau-Ponty in his tribute, “Merleau-Ponty
vivant” (Sartre 1964, 191), a piece that was originally published in Les Temps
modernes (October 1961). Merleau-Ponty used the expression frequently in The
Visible and the Invisible, (an unfinished manuscript not published until 1964),
but the idea is certainly already present in Phenomenology of Perception. But what
exactly it should be taken to mean will be greatly enriched by consideration of the
Exupérian ending of that text.
158 Notes

12 “Pour moi, voler ou écrire, c’est tout un. . . . L’aviateur et l’écrivain se confondent

dans une égale prise de conscience. . . . C’est encore mal dire que l’un prolonge ou
complète l’autre. Il s’agit d’une expérience totale.” Interview with Luc Estang, in
Le Figaro littéraire (27 May 1939), cited in Estang (1956, 167). See also Bernadie
(1989, 128, 132).
13 As we shall see below, though, far from being merely prima facie, this incongruity
actually runs quite deeply.
14 Eran Dorfman’s recent effort (2007) to address the meaning of the lines cited from
Pilote de guerre in terms of their connection with Merleau-Ponty’s views concerning
freedom and radical reflection is a potentially fruitful undertaking, and as such
merits attention. But because Dorfman neglects to consider the context from which
the lines were excerpted, and because he singles out, more or less arbitrarily, Saint
Exupéry’s term “invention” and focuses his discussion around it, Dorfman’s take on
the passage is skewed by the erroneous assumption that the Merleau-Pontian “hero”
is Saint Exupéry qua individual, as literally invoked by the passage, whereas in fact
it was Saint Exupéry qua “man” understood in universal terms. This assumption
implies a misleading analogical likeness between Merleau-Ponty and the “hero”
he invokes. For Dorfman regards the “hero” in question as someone “who invents
his or her own life” (150) and, for this reason, as someone who exemplifies the
freedom that Merleau-Ponty had discussed in the final chapter of Phenomenology
of Perception, and thus as instantiating the same sort of creativity that occurs when
radical reflection recovers its pre-reflective conditions. Yet, these claims sit badly
with the fact that the heroism in question represents an existential coincidence of
being and doing, since this would preclude the kind of reflective distance necessary
for adopting an “inventive” attitude vis-à-vis oneself. And indeed, Dorfman does
say that in the scenario depicted by Saint Exupéry there is no time for reflection
(140). Hence if, as he claims, such action does nevertheless involve the creation of
meaning, then heroism must be as much (or more) a matter of objective historical
tendency as of individual freedom, however construed. A necessary condition
of heroic action for Merleau-Ponty, after all, is that it contribute to the historical
realization of freedom—being and doing may coincide in exactly the same way in
the action and death of a fascist collaborator, for example, but he or she would not
be a hero.
  Moreover, though, there is in any case no sense in which Saint Exupéry is an
exemplar of freedom in this context. As Merleau-Ponty made clear, the hero does
not live but rather gives his or her freedom—this may be eminently laudable, but
living one’s relation to others and the world “to the limit” [jusqu’au bout] necessarily
implies death, and the citation would be meaningless if Saint Exupéry had survived
the war. (It is, in fact, surprisingly rare for a reference to the Exupérian ending
of Phenomenology of Perception actually to mention that the words are presented
as plainly being those of a dead man, someone recently and famously killed in
the service of his country.) This clearly implies that, as invoked at the end of
Phenomenology of Perception, Saint Exupéry could not possibly model the creativity
inherent in radical reflection. It is thus problematic to claim, as Dorfman does, that
Merleau-Ponty invoked Pilote de guerre as a work of fiction (140). It must not be
overlooked that, however stylized it may be, at its core Pilote de guerre is presented
as based on actual experiences that Saint Exupéry himself had as a reconnaissance
pilot. And this ostensibly non-fictional status was crucial for Merleau-Ponty. For he
invoked the lines from Pilote de guerre as a quasi-phenomenological description of
 Notes 159

what radical reflection would (per impossibile) disclose to the “hero.” And it is for
this reason alone that Pilote de guerre, or at least the relevant sections thereof, could
be considered a “story” [histoire racontée] whose telling “can give meaning to the
world with as much ‘depth’ as a philosophical treatise” (PhP xvi). It may certainly
be granted that there is something akin to fiction in the claims that Merleau-Ponty
would make on this basis. But that is not the business of the “hero” who, fully
immersed in his or her action, is in no position to fictionalize. Rather, the relevant
inventiveness pertains primarily to the rest of us, that is, the living—how we choose
our heroes, if at all, how we portray them, and what meaning we assign to them. The
hero qua hero has no hero.
15 And arguably, by extension, the entire subsequent development of Merleau-Ponty’s
œuvre. For this emerged largely on the basis of his self-critical attempt to resolve
certain outstanding problems raised by his postwar formulations of existential
phenomenology, fundamentally as concerns the spontaneity or productivity that
makes the realization of concrete universality possible (cf. Pros. 42, 48/7, 11). To
this extent, our understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s later work will necessarily remain
limited by any major lacunae in our understanding of his earlier work, and, as we
shall see, the role of heroism in Phenomenology of Perception is one such lacuna—
and arguably the single most significant one.

Chapter 1
1 This is not to deny that other implicit or explicit references in Phenomenology
of Perception may similarly require careful and focused interpretive attention
accurately to disclose their significance within the text, nor even that these may have
a substantial impact on how the text is understood. But excepting the references to
Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation discussed in the Preface (above), I would contend
that any other such reference would be incomparably less significant.
2 It may be worthwhile briefly to consider the reasons for the lack of critical scrutiny
of the ending of Phenomenology of Perception. A sufficient (but not necessary)
condition for this lack would be a failure to discern the ending’s outward incongruity
with the rest of the text in the first place. And this condition may have been met
variously over time. For instance, most early readers of Phenomenology of Perception
(especially but not only) in France would have been very familiar with Saint
Exupéry, and with Pilote de guerre in particular. In fact, in the immediate postwar
years, Saint Exupéry was the focus of a considerable amount of overwhelmingly
positive, even quasihagiographic, public attention (especially but not only) in
France. But this would have tended to make Merleau-Ponty’s invocation of him
appear all the less significant—just one more expression of homage among so many
others. At the same time, these contemporary readers would have been preoccupied
with coming to terms with Phenomenology of Perception as a complex and highly
original philosophical endeavor that drew upon and combined many sources that
were not widely known in France at the time. Most early commentary on this work
was thus largely expository—for example, Beauvoir (1945), Roland Caillois (1946),
Guillaume (1946), which was, admittedly, primarily psychologically oriented, and
Alquié (1947), which, although it was a critical discussion that did briefly touch on
the idea of heroism in the context of the moral implications of Merleau-Pontian
160 Notes

existentialism (68), did not relate this to Saint Exupéry. See also Gurwitsch (1950)
and De Waelhens (1951). The point here is that even if they were familiar with Saint
Exupéry, early commentators on Phenomenology of Perception would have failed
to notice the incongruity of its ending and thus passed over it without comment
primarily because they were still engaged in the work of digesting and coming
to terms with the philosophical content of Merleau-Ponty’s work itself (a process
which, it might be added, was initially slowed by the fact that in the late-1940s
far more attention was paid to Humanism and Terror, a work which interested a
much wider audience). Conversely, subsequent generations of commentators were
(and still are) by and large in the opposite situation: enjoying the advantages of a
more thorough and insightful perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology,
they typically had (and have) a greatly diminished familiarity with Saint Exupéry
(and more likely than not have not read Pilote de guerre). And inasmuch as he
came to be viewed as an amateurish philosophical lightweight, much philosophical
commentary probably preferred to disregard Saint Exupéry altogether in order to
avoid sullying Merleau-Ponty’s text with an embarrassing association which, anyway,
seemed to add nothing to the text. In general, then, it seems safe to say that while
recognition of the incongruity of the ending of Phenomenology of Perception requires
appropriate knowledge of both Merleau-Ponty and Saint Exupéry, historically,
there has tended to be an inverse relationship between these respective moments,
such that by the time the relevant scholarship on Phenomenology of Perception
had reached a mature stage, familiarity with Saint Exupéry had declined among
commentators below the threshold required to appreciate properly the original
significance of Merleau-Ponty’s deference to him. (The unavailability of Fink’s Sixth
Cartesian Meditation was also a factor in this neglect—see above, Preface) The
present book, of course, is intended as at least a partial remedy for this problematic
interpretive situation.
3 There is an ongoing dispute among scholars as to the proper orthography of Saint
Exupéry’s surname—specifically, whether it is hyphenated or not. For while he
himself did not hyphenate it, formally or informally, until residing in the United
States, supposedly to avoid being called “Mr. Exupéry” (Schiff 1994, xi), it has
become fairly conventional, even among scholars who are fully aware that this is
not its original form, to insert a hyphen. There seems to be no good reason for this
choice, and so, I will side with those who eschew the hyphen. In any quotation
that refers to Saint Exupéry by name, however, I will retain the spelling used by the
author in question.
4 On the early part of Saint Exupéry’s life, see Schiff (1994, 31–118).
5 The details of his disappearance remained a mystery until relatively recently.
Wreckage from his Lockheed P-38 Lightening was located in 2000 over a large area
under the Mediterranean near Marseille. Some of this was recovered in 2003 and,
in April 2004, it was officially confirmed to have come from Saint Exupéry’s plane.
The reasons for his fatal crash, however, remain unclear. Twice—in 1981 and then
more recently in 2008—former Luftwaffe pilots have claimed that they had shot
down a P-38 in that area on that date (31 July 1944). But these claims have proven
unverifiable and are open to much doubt. It is perhaps just as likely that Saint
Exupéry simply lost consciousness or that his aircraft suffered a mechanical failure
of some kind. In addition, virtually since the time of his death, the possibility that
he committed suicide has hovered in the background. On some of the aspects of this
mystery, see Pradel and Vanrell (2008).
 Notes 161

6 That is, with minimal instrumentation which, depending on the weather conditions,
was often of little use anyway. To fly safely, experienced pilots relied heavily on the
actual “feel” of the airplane as transmitted largely through the seat.
7 Mermoz fatally crashed in 1936, Guillaumet was shot down in 1940. To this day,
they continue to arouse considerable interest—recent biographies include Chadeau
(2000) and Migeo (1999), respectively. See also note 17.
8 “Le bonheur de l’homme n’est pas dans la liberté, mais dans l’acceptation d’un
devoir” (Saint Exupéry 1931, 11). Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s citation of this line in “Faith
and Good Faith” (SNS 317/178).
9 In this, Saint Exupéry’s work differed from that of other engagé writers from the
1930s with which it is often compared, as it structured his understanding of human
action at once as both collective and constructive (cf. Ouellet 1971, 195; Losic
1965, 27). For example, it contrasted with Hemingway’s usual portrayal of action
in individualistic terms (see Smetana 1965, 77–129, passim; DeRamus 1990, 37ff).
At the same time, it also differed from Malraux’s work, where action tended toward
adventure and rebellion (see Simon 1950, 127ff).
10 SV 179, originally in Paris-Soir (4 October 1938). Cf. SV 173: “the German finds
in Hitler the opportunity to care intensely and to offer himself completely, because
everything seems larger than life. We must understand that the power of any
movement rests on the man whom it liberates [délivre]” (italics added). While Saint
Exupéry thought the attractiveness of National Socialism lay in its offering a prima
facie way out of the spiritual crisis of the time, he did also think that it exacerbated
the problem. “When the Nazi respects only what resembles him, he respects nothing
but himself. He rejects the creative contradictions, ruins all hope for ascent, and
for the next thousand years replaces man with the robot of the termite mound”
(EG 341).
11 “Do not try to explain to a Mermoz who is plunging toward . . . the Andes with
victory in his heart that he’s mistaken, that no letter – a merchant’s perhaps – is
worth risking his life for. Mermoz will laugh at you. Truth is the man that is born in
him as he passes over the Andes” (SV 173, italics added).
12 SV 140, originally in Paris-Soir (3 July 1937).
13 Cf. McKeon (1974, 1087), who argues that Saint Exupéry gradually attenuated the
élite character of the pilot as his writing developed, such that by Pilote de guerre,
“the pilot, in spite of the plot, is present only as an intermediary to plead the cause of
mankind.”
14 The meharist whom Saint Exupéry had in mind was presumably a certain unnamed
French officer who had been in charge of a colonial outpost in southern Morocco
during the Rif War, and who, on the eve of being attacked by them, honorably repaid
ammunition owed to the local Berber forces for once having come to their rescue.
The idea is that even in waging war against one another, “we are all march toward
the same promised lands” (SV 170).
15 Exactly what this “spiritual breath” amounts to for Saint Exupéry is not altogether
clear; however, it is linked to freedom, which he appropriately described as being
“like a favorable wind” (PG 227f).
16 Saint Exupéry made similar analogies involving “the call of the wild” as experienced
by eels (SV 139f) and gazelles (TH 195f).
17 This episode was, incidentally, the basis for Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1995 movie
Wings of Courage (Guillaumet, les ailes du courage), which cinéastes know as the first
dramatic feature to be shot in IMAX 3D.
162 Notes

18 For example, Guillaumet was concerned that in the absence of his corpse, his wife
would be forced to wait several years before being able to collect his life insurance.
19 Sartre (1984, 54f): “I am reading Terre des hommes with a certain emotion. Yet I
do not like the style very much: somewhat vatic, and in the Barrès, Montherlant
tradition. . . . And above all,” referring to the passage about Guillaumet, “I don’t like
that new humanism” (27 November 1939).
20 Nizan (1971, 308); originally in Ce Soir (30 March 1939).
21 Beauvoir (1992, 175, 190), letters dated 20 November 1939 and 1 December 1939,
respectively. Sartre (1992, 370) did actually admit that it made him “feel homesick”
(28 November 1939).
22 The “geography lesson” Saint Exupéry received from Guillaumet at the start of
Terre des hommes (TH 16f) may be echoed in Merleau-Ponty’s observation that
geography is “abstract, signitive, and derivative . . . in relation to the countryside in
which we have learned beforehand what a forest, a prairie, or a river is” (PhP iii).
For a discussion of some of the possible social implications of this sort of aerial
perspective, in particular in terms of the influence that Saint Exupéry had on the
architect and urban planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), see Morshed
(2002) and Amad (2012).
23 Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain (1856–1951), a World War I hero, was Head of State
of Vichy France from 1940 to 1944; he was convicted and sentenced to death for
treason, which was commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle.
24 In a posthumously published letter, Saint Exupéry wrote: “France needs a common
denominator that would enable it to renew its genuine qualities and diverse theories
around a transcendental image”—also adding that “one can scarcely formulate this
problem without posing the conceptual distinction between Intelligence and Spirit”
(Le Monde, 29 July 1950, cited in Losic 1965, 86).
25 For example, in “The Fetish of Duty,” a review of Vol de nuit, Clifton Fadiman had
written: “This is no mere story of adventure – would that it were! – but a dangerous
book. It is dangerous because it celebrates a pernicious idea by disguising it as a
romantic emotion. . . . Saint Exupéry’s admittedly eloquent deification of mere
will and energy leads straight to Von Treischke and the megalomania of Il Duce”
(Fadiman 1932, 215f; cf. Fay 1947, 93). But in “Beyond Defeat,” a review of Pilote de
guerre, Fadiman described Saint Exupéry’s book, perhaps somewhat begrudgingly,
as of unquestionable value, “a truly noble attempt to think out his war experiences as
a philosopher would.” It was like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, but subtler
and more anguished. Pilote de guerre was “an important work composed at a pitch
of feeling to which, among those who have written about the war, few have attained.”
Fadiman claimed all this despite thinking that Pilote de guerre tended to be “lofty”
and “extravagant,” ultimately sermonistic and “even hysterical at times.” For, in a
sense, its lofty extravagance captured the conscience of the struggle against fascism
(Fadiman 1942, 67f).
26 To some extent, this may well have been due to the fact that, with the landing of
American troops in North Africa, Vichy had been dissolved shortly before, thus in
effect obviating a key axis of factional disagreement.
27 Shortly after the defeat, Saint Exupéry had been unknowingly named a member of
the National Council, an assembly of notables in Vichy. He vigorously repudiated
this, but the issue continued to dog him (see Schiff 1994, 350).
28 “D’abord la France” [“An Open Letter to Frenchmen Everywhere”]. Various versions
of this document exist. It was read as a radio appeal by Saint Exupéry at the end
 Notes 163

of November 1942; an English translation was published in the New York Times
Magazine (29 November 1942), and in French in Le Canada (30 November 1942),
which was reprinted in newspapers across North Africa. For a critical version, see
EG 264–70.
29 The narrative actually combines that sortie (23 May 1940) with another (uneventful)
one from 6 June 1940 (see EG 109 n1).
30 For example, Colin Smith (1980, 261) takes the liberty of assuming the existence of
a Saint Exupéry “who is the author of Pilote de guerre minus the tiresomely didactic
conclusion.”
31 There are unexpected but important affinities between this view and Marcel Mauss’
ethnological work on “potlatch,” which showed that the social and economic life of
certain human cultures was based on the preeminence of antiutilitarian sumptuary
value over exchange value (see Mauss 2000). In fact, Saint Exupéry’s notion of gift
may be closer to Georges Bataille’s more radical notion of “expenditure” [dépense]
(Bataille 1933), which also drew on Mauss (see Bataille 1988, 63–77).
32 “Even pure destruction of wealth does not signify that complete detachment that one
might believe to be found in it. Even these acts of greatness are not without egoism”
(Mauss 2000, 74).
33 “Il n’est qu’un luxe véritable, et c’est celui des relations humaines” (TH 40). Note
that Albert Camus all but quoted this in Le mythe de Sisyphe: “il n’y a qu’un seul
luxe . . . et c’est celui des relations humaines” (1942, 120).

Chapter 2
1 François died on 10 July 1917. Interestingly, Saint Exupéry wrongly claimed that he
was 15 at the time; rather, he was 17, while it was François who was 15.
2 Given that copies of the book—in either its original or clandestine forms—were
somewhat scarce, and that it was not republished until 1947, it could be that
some readers of Phenomenology of Perception shortly after its publication may
have lacked immediate access to Saint Exupéry’s text. But even if this is true, it
is inconsequential. For surely it did not apply to all readers. And the relevant
window for making the sort of observation in question was by no means closed
by 1947.
3 There are some minor differences in punctuation between Merleau-Ponty’s citation
and the Gallimard text.
4 In addition to some minor differences in punctuation between Merleau-Ponty’s
citation and the Gallimard text, Saint Exupéry had written “conceive” [conçois]
rather than “see” [vois].
5 It has been suggested that these references were added late, at the proofreading
stage, given that “nothing in the body of the text directly mentions Saint Exupéry”
(Saint Aubert 2004, 115 n2). But this is irrelevant. For even if it is true, it does not
imply that the references in question are therefore somehow of lesser interest or
philosophical significance. And as we shall see, when Merleau-Ponty’s discussion
is properly unpacked in terms of his claim that human history forms an existential
totality, and that this claim alone is what validates methodologically taking a holistic
approach to human être-au-monde, it becomes clear that the actual references to
Saint Exupéry are in any case inessential to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion. What
164 Notes

these references do do, though, is signal very clearly that and how this discussion is
connected directly to climax of the book.
6 To this might be added the somewhat ironic fact that one of the earliest detailed
discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s political thought was a polemical critique from none
other than Lukács himself (see Lukács 1948, 198–252).
7 In an address entitled “Fight Against ‘Ultra-Lefts’ and Theoretic Revisionism,” in
which he also named Antonio Graziadei and Karl Korsch, Zinoviev declared: “If we
got a few more of these professors spinning out their Marxist theories, we shall be
lost. We cannot tolerate such theoretical revisionism of this kind in our Communist
International” (cited in Lukács 1967, 720f). The full text of this part of Zinoviev’s
speech is contained in Lukács (1967, 719–26).
8 The discovery of an unpublished manuscript (entitled Chvostismus und Dialektik)
dating from 1925 or 1926, first published in 1996 and in English translation in
2000 (Lukács 2000), shows that at least privately, Lukács did not immediately
capitulate at all to his Party critics. On this document, see Rees (2000); cf. Löwy
(2011). I will draw from this text in discussing History and Class Consciousness
below (Chapter 3).
9 In their introduction to a 1934 collection of texts and excerpts from Marx’s
philosophical and economic writings (Marx 1934), for example, Lefebvre and
Guterman expressed views that had some substantial affinities with Lukács, even
effectively affirming, with regard to the progressive development of Marxism,
“method as the standard of orthodoxy” (Burkhard 2000, 208f; cf. Guterman and
Lefebvre 1934, 29). The theme of their next joint work (Guterman and Lefebvre
1936), “la conscience mystifiée,” has clear resonances with Lukács’ critique of
reification and “reified consciousness.” And Lefebvre’s very widely read introductory
text, Le matérialisme dialectique (Lefebvre 1949), first published in 1940, was based
explicitly on a notion of “concrete totality” (e.g. 77f, 120) and was oriented toward
the idea of “the total man” [l’homme total] understood as “the subject and object of
[historical] becoming” and the “disalienated’ [« désaliéné »] man” (147). These could
suggest a concealed influence on the part of Lukács, but it is also the case that the
thought of Lefebvre and of others in the Philosophies circle were heavily influenced
by Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, a work with which History and Class Consciousness had
a remarkable thematic overlap on a number of key points, for example, the Hegelian
framework and the central role of alienation. This overlap was remarkable inasmuch
as this early work from Marx was first published in 1932 and thus was not available
to Lukács in the early 1920s. The 1934 volume of writings from Marx included
translated excerpts from the Manuscripts (the philosophy portion of the book was
edited by Nizan), although Guterman had already translated a portion of the Third
Manuscript in 1928 (Burkhard 2000, 107), or possibly 1927 (Rabil 1967, 275 n110),
which was published on the pages of the short-lived journal Revue marxiste in 1929
(Burkhard 2000, 106f). Prior to the 1930s, the only works from Marx that were
available in French were Capital and The Communist Manifesto, along with some of
his historical writings (see Zévaès 1947, 185–90). Jules Molitor edited and translated
a multivolume edition of Marx’s philosophical works (Marx 1927–37), but the 1844
Manuscripts did not appear until 1937.
10 But we might note that he did intend to offer a course in early 1947 on Marxist
and non-Marxist philosophy, and that he intended “to devote several lectures
to Lukács”—the problem at the time was that the only text he had available was
History and Class Consciousness. (Letter to György Szekeres, Lukács’ literary
 Notes 165

agent in Paris, n.d. (summer 1946), Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Filozófiai

intézet, Lukács Archivum és Könyvtár (Philosophical Institute of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences, Lukács Archive and Library, Budapest), cited in Kadarkay
(1991, 394f)).
11 Cf. Sartre’s well-known claim to the effect that Merleau-Ponty was closest to
Marxism in the years before World War II (Sartre 1964, 204). In general, Sartre’s
recollections about Merleau-Ponty may not be wholly reliable, and we should be
cautious about putting too much stock in this claim, especially the implication that
Merleau-Ponty’s attachment to Marxism was less in the postwar than in the prewar
period. But insofar as it suggests that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Marxism began
earlier than is often thought, it is consistent with a number of suggestions that have
been made over the years by commentators interested in Merleau-Ponty’s political
thought.
12 Cf. Whiteside (1988, 34f) where, with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s statement,
made in a 1959 interview, that he read Lenin, Marx, and Trotsky during the war,
Whiteside claims that “[t]his is the only time [Merleau-Ponty] ever identified,
however vaguely, the timing and sources of his political education” (1988, 35 n82).
The point is not that this recollection on the part of Merleau-Ponty is accurate or
even precisely decipherable, but rather that he was as a matter of fact quite reticent
about discussing when and how he acquired his interest in and knowledge of
Marxism.
13 This refers to Alexandre Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel’s Phänomenologie des
Geistes at the École Practique des Hautes Études, which were held between 1933
and 1939. There has always been some confusion as to who actually attended
Kojève’s lectures, and when they did so. According to the official records at the École
Practique, Merleau-Ponty only attended in the 1937–38 academic year (Roth 1988,
225ff). Geraets suggested that his attendance began in 1935 when he returned to
Paris (1971, 26). In a letter (30 March 1967) to George L. Kline, with regard to the
latter’s “The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx” (Kline 1967), Kojève
stated that while neither Sartre nor Hyppolite had attended, contrary to what Kline
had written, Merleau-Ponty had indeed “attended regularly” (Lee and Mandelbaum
1967, vii). As there was no strict requirement to officially register at the École
Practique, it is entirely possible, and, I believe, probable, that Merleau-Ponty
attended on a regular basis for three years (i.e., from 1935–36 to 1937–38).
14 Cooper needed this conclusion in order to buttress his claim that Merleau-Ponty’s
postwar political views, in particular as presented in Humanism and Terror, “float
in a Hegelian ether” of Kojèvean extraction, and that they essentially express a
“theoretical commitment to humanism learned at the feet [!] of Kojève” (Cooper
1979, 25; cf. 16f, 72f, 44). These claims on the part of Cooper have contributed
significantly to legitimizing the widespread misconception among commentators
that Merleau-Ponty was strongly and positively influenced by Kojève. Cooper’s
arguments cannot be refuted in detail here. But the key point was stated above
(Preface, note 41), to wit, that in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty precisely
shows the human impossibility of the Kojèvean “Sage.” In his sole explicit written
reference to Kojève, Merleau-Ponty confirmed this in saying that his account of the
end of history “is an idealization of death and could not possibly convey Hegel’s
core thought” (AD 277/206). Numerous other implicit claims make the same point.
As to why Merleau-Ponty attended Kojève’s lectures regularly, part of the answer
may lie in the assiduous presence of Gaston Fessard, a Jesuit scholar who was no
166 Notes

less knowledgeable about Hegel than Kojève, but who countered the latter’s reading
with his own neo-Thomist interpretation. The contrast between the views presented
respectively by Kojève and Fessard would have been quite productive for Merleau-
Ponty in terms of working out his own position (see above).
15 It is worthwhile to note that Herbert Spiegelberg’s claim (1984, 548) that there
were “close personal contacts” between Merleau-Ponty and Kojève is essentially
groundless. Spiegelberg had based this claim solely on that made by Rudolf Meyer to
the effect that there were “close relations” [enge Beziehungen] between the two men
(Meyer 1955, 138; cf. Spiegelberg 1984, 582 n20). But Meyer himself had based this
on an earlier article by Iring Fetscher (1954). Spiegelberg evidently did not read this.
Had he done so, he would have seen that no claim of “personal contacts” is made,
beyond reporting Merleau-Ponty’s attendance at Kojève’s lectures (Meyer referred to
p. 183 in Fetscher’s article, but misidentified it as p. 181). But the point is that even
this seemingly mundane disclosure broke new ground at the time. For it had not
been previously known that Merleau-Ponty had attended Kojève’s lectures. That this
was the case is borne out by earlier reviews, which make no mention of it, even while
jointly discussing the postwar works of Merleau-Ponty and Kojève. See, for example,
Acton (1949), and Duhrssen (1953). Thus, in a footnote (138 n19), Meyer wrote:
“Es ist das große Verdienst Fetschers, auf die engen Beziehungen zwischen Kojève
und Merleau-Ponty erstmals hingewiesen zu haben” [It is Fetscher’s great merit to
have first pointed out the close relations between Kojève and Merleau-Ponty]. This
is what Spiegelberg must have read. But because he took Merleau-Ponty’s attendance
at Kojève’s lectures for granted, he inadvertently misinterpreted Meyer’s statement as
implying something much more significant. This does not mean that Merleau-Ponty
and Kojève had no interpersonal relationship whatsoever. Obviously, they knew one
another, and apparently Kojève even thought that Merleau-Ponty had Apollonian
good looks (Rosen 1987, 106). But there is no evidence of anything in this regard
that could serve legitimately to narrow the patent philosophical gap that separates
the two.
16 On the idea of “second nature” [zweite Natur] in Lukács, cf. HCC (33f, 97, 142,
247/19, 86, 128, 240).
17 With regard to The Structure of Behavior, which was published on 30 November
1942 (Noble 2011, 73), one cannot pass over reference to Pierre Naville’s robust
defense of Watsonian behaviorism (Naville 1942). Although in theoretical terms
quite opposed, one cannot but wonder whether the publication of Naville’s text on
10 July 1942, under the title La psychologie, science de la comportement, accelerated
in any way the publication—or even affected the title, which, until at least 1941
was Conscience et comportement (Noble 2011, 72)—of Merleau-Ponty’s thèse
complémentaire.
18 That is, the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army who
was wrongly convicted of espionage for Germany in 1894. After a long series of
retrials, amid considerable anti-Semitic hysteria and polarizing views, Dreyfus
was acquitted in 1906. Beginning in effect with Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse . . .!”
in 1898, the Dreyfus Affair was “the epic genesis” of the self-consciousness of
French intellectuals as a social category (Winock 1975, 9; cf. Schalk 1979, 5–17;
Drake 2005, 8–34).
19 There is a virtual consensus that Sartre’s recollection (1964, 205) suggesting
that Merleau-Ponty had lost his faith by 1928 is simply wrong. It is self-evident
that he maintained more than just a nominally Christian outlook well into the
 Notes 167

1930s. According to Maurice de Gandillac, though, Merleau-Ponty had lost his

faith temporarily sometime before 1926, but found it again when he visited the
Benedictine abbey at Solesnes with de Gandillac “around 1926” (see Whiteside
1988, 28 n53).
20 There has been some dispute over the identity of the “young Catholic” to whom
Merleau-Ponty refers in the first paragraph of “Foi et bonne foi” (SNS 305f/172),
first published in Les temps modernes in February 1946. Although Kwant (1963,
139) suggested that this referred to Pierre Hervé, it is all but certain that Merleau-
Ponty was simply referring to himself (although what he says may also happen to
apply to Hervé as well). This would have some implications regarding the timing
of his intellectual development. For the suppression in Austria to which he refers
occurred in February 1934, and the journal he refers to is, no doubt, Esprit, founded
by Emmanuel Mounier in 1932, which protested the Austrian government’s actions
(March 1934). Merleau-Ponty was interested in Esprit since its founding (Le Baut
2009, 136), but his association with it became much closer in 1934—perhaps
motivated by the negative experience he described in this passage. The other
religious order to which he refers is without a doubt the Dominicans, and the priest
(“the Father”) was Jean-Augustin Maydieu—Le Baut has claimed that Maydieu
wrote to Merleau-Ponty in March 1946, wondering about the identity of the figure,
and that in replying, Merleau-Ponty confirmed that it was indeed Maydieu (Le Baut
2009, 143f). As editor of La vie intellectuelle, Maydieu was responsible for soliciting
the review articles that Merleau-Ponty published there in 1935 (on Scheler) and
1936 (on Marcel), and who went on to be an important figure in the Resistance
(hence the claim: “a bold and generous man, as was seen later”). Of interest
here is that for Merleau-Ponty, the movement à gauche first occurred within the
context of social Catholicism, but also that in moving closer to Esprit around 1934,
Merleau-Ponty was entering the epicentre of the Catholic “discovery” of the young
Marx—this would surface on the pages of La vie intellectuelle, for example, a few
years later (Curtis 1991, 174f)—something which further promoted his leftward
movement. It is, however, also noteworthy that while Merleau-Ponty did publish
those two reviews on the pages of Maydieu’s journal, he did not publish anything
in Esprit.
21 It may be possible to trace this back to 1932, to Merleau-Ponty’s concluding
“Discours d’usage” (13 July 1932) to students at the Lycée Beauvais, published in
Bulletin de l’Association amicale des anciens élèves du collège et du lycée de Beauvais
(pp. 20–8). According to Saint Aubert (2005, 61), Merleau-Ponty’s speech at
least in part echoed Paul Nizan’s fiery Marxist polemic against the philosophical
establishment, Les chiens de garde, especially as personified by Léon Brunschvicg,
that dates from the same year. Compare this to Whiteside (1988, 20), who
interpreted Merleau-Ponty’s speech as expressing a sobering social conservatism
that was categorically opposed to any sort of revolutionary change. But these views
may be compatible. For while Whiteside thought that Merleau-Ponty expressed
some agreement with Brunschvicg concerning the meaning and value of French
civilization, he also admitted that the content of Merleau-Ponty’s views was in
tension with the philosophical education that he had received at the ENS. It thus
seems reasonable to speculate that the sort of radicalism that Merleau-Ponty was
most worried about had to do with the growing threat of Fascism in Europe, and in
Germany in particular, and that he was concerned about the ability of mainstream
French academic philosophy at the time to mount an effective defense of the
168 Notes

institutions and, especially, the universal values of liberal French society. In this way,
his remarks may have expressed a certain affinity with Benda (1927).
22 The term “militant” derives from the Catholic theological trichotomy between (a)
“the Church triumphant,” denoting Christians in heaven, (b) “the Church suffering,”
denoting Christians in purgatory, and (c) “the Church militant,” denoting Christians
living on Earth, working—or militating—to establish the kingdom of God. Concerning
the latter, see Merleau-Ponty’s review of Scheler, for example, where he wrote that
on account of the “substantial connivance of the ‘spiritual person’ and sensible
consciousness. . . . Christianity in all its purity ‘militates against’ sin, just as it militates
to wrest the poor from their misery” (CR 31/99, citing Scheler, italics altered).
23 It is noteworthy that, in comments made in a review of Honnert (1937), Nizan’s view
of Fessard’s argument and of his practical openness to dialogue was convivial and
respectful, despite noting the insuperable theoretical irreconcilability of Catholicism
and Marxism. For Nizan concurred with Fessard’s statement that “the faith or loyalty
inscribed in the heart of every man is the fundamental basis and cornerstone of
every union” (L’Humanité, 3 April 1937; reprinted Nizan (1971, 254–9)). Rather
differently, in a review of Fessard’s book (1937), along with an earlier one (Fessard
1936), that he wrote in 1937 (but which was unpublished at the time), Kojève was
critical of Fessard’s effort to rethink Catholic theology on a Hegelian basis, and
specifically, of his attempted rapprochement with Marxism, for being too indulgent
of these other traditions, suggesting that Fessard’s arguments could backfire in
the sense of promoting atheism at the expense of Christianity. “In general, it is
unwise when fixing something to make use of a tool that was made . . . expressly
for its destruction” (in Fessard and Marcel (1985, 510–16); reprinted in Jarczyk and
Labarrière (1996, 131–6)).
24 Le Monde (6 May 1961); cited in Geraets (1971, 26, italics added).

Chapter 3
1 Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, an incomplete manuscript written between 1873 and
1883, with some additions around 1885/86, was not published until 1925.
2 And as mentioned earlier, in methodological terms, Merleau-Ponty once effectively
identified the Lukácsian idea of “totality” with that of “incarnation” (EE 253).
3 Perhaps the most striking illustration of Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Lukács stems
from certain comments that he made at the inaugural Rencontres internationales
de Genève, held in September 1946, a set of meetings between representative
intellectuals originally intended to promote East-West dialogue. But this was not
because these comments were wholly positive. Rather, Merleau-Ponty was critical of
Lukács’ proposal that the “democratic renewal” of Europe required the recovery of
the 1941 anti-fascist alliance between Western democracies and the USSR. Although
in agreement with Lukács methodologically with regard to totality (which Merleau-
Ponty also glossed as “incarnation”), as well as with regard to his Marxist critique of
formal democracy, which Merleau-Ponty basically took as a given, Merleau-Ponty
claimed—or rather complained as politely as he could—that the conclusion Lukács
presented was methodologically inconsistent and hence un-Marxist:

Having offered a critique of formal democracy in the name of real democracy,

I expected [Lukács’] conclusion to elaborate the [“classical”] Marxist solution.
 Notes 169

This solution is to push liberalism from formal to real, . . . to realize . . . a

concrete universality and a new humanity. . . . But Lukács did not present this
solution. After his critique of formal democracy, he concluded that those formal
democracies that remain should simply ally themselves . . . as they had done
during the war, with the USSR, considered as at least a preliminary version of
real democracy. . . . But if the first part of his presentation is correct, then how is
this solution possible? If it is true that formal democracy has been withering for
a century and has reached the height of its decay, and if it is true that it must be
transformed into a real democracy, a proletarian democracy, then how can it be
instructed to live on historically, when it has been condemned by history? . . . If
Lukács believes that this persistence of formal democracy is possible, . . . and
if we take seriously what he said at the end of his presentation, then are we not
abandoning the classical Marxist perspective? (EE 253f)

Merleau-Ponty went on at some length and was clearly disappointed with Lukács—
for not being the same Lukács who wrote History and Class Consciousness. It is not
clear just how familiar Merleau-Ponty was with Lukács’ biography and intellectual
trajectory, although it may be the case that in terms of Lukács’ published works,
Merleau-Ponty was familiar only with History and Class Consciousness (see Chapter
2, note 10). In a letter to Lukács that was probably written after their encounter in
Geneva, he wrote: “You should clarify to the French public your position on the
Marxist method” (Merleau-Ponty to Lukács, n.d., Magyar Tudományos Akadémia
Filozófiai intézet, Lukács Archivum és Könyvtár (Philosophical Institute of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Lukács Archive and Library, Budapest), cited in
Kadarkay (1991, 394)).
4 And as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty anticipated later claims by Sartre when he wrote that
“Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history” (HT 165/153).
5 In Merleau-Ponty’s view, Marxism is not based on a futural projection of any
sort, but rather on “the recognition of an impossibility, that of the current world
understood as contradiction and decomposition” (HT 136/126). This would imply
that alienating repression is ubiquitous in capitalist society inasmuch as this social
form is taken as a privileged present, because its “impossible future,” its crisis-prone
unsustainability, is unrecognized.
6 “Harmony between the individual and history is a postulate of human existence. We
cannot live without it. That does not mean that it will be—we can simply say that if it
is not realized, then there will be no humanity” (NI 21 [9]).

Chapter 4
1 Given the importance of Scheler for the philosophy of personalism, and Merleau-
Ponty’s connection to Esprit, it is not insignificant that this review appeared in La vie
intellectuelle.
2 Cf. Goldstein (1940, 229): “Some sacrifices are rightly to be considered an expression
of an unusually high development of human nature. But self-sacrifice in itself is not
of value. It is of value only if it is important for the actualization of the individual;
it is of value only if the rescue of others is of such importance to the individual that
his own self-realization demands this sacrifice. This is a border situation similar
to one we have already discussed in which voluntary suicide is sometimes the last
170 Notes

way out in the attempt to preserve the personality. One has to be very careful in the
evaluation of self-sacrifice, because it is often nothing more than an escape from the
difficulties of normal self-actualization.”
3 Delivered on 16 February 1946, this lecture was entitled “L’existence dans la
‘Phénoménologie’ de Hegel.” It is reprinted in Hyppolite (1971, 92–103).
4 SNS 117/68; cf. SC 136/126; PhP 249. In the conclusion to Being and Nothingness,
Sartre had written that the for-itself “is nothing but the pure nihilation of the
in-itself; it is like a hole in being at the heart of Being” (EN 711/617). Cf. Beauvoir
(1945, 366f).
5 Merleau-Ponty may have been alluding to the character Katov in Malraux’s La
condition humaine, whose shadow cast on the wall as he proceeds to his execution
stands as a sombre reminder to his comrades of one’s ineluctable mortal involvement
in politics.
6 There may be a productive comparison to be made between Merleau-Ponty’s analysis
and that of historian Marc Bloch (1946); cf. King (1971, 199).
7 The metaphor of fulguration, to which Merleau-Ponty resorted at other key points
as well, involves a sense of blindness that is quite significant with regard to the limits
of his existential phenomenology. It is thus of central importance to his project, yet it
is unfortunately absent from Gill’s study (1991) of metaphor in Merleau-Ponty’s work.
8 This is not to imply that Merleau-Ponty had any sympathy for or even fascination
with fascism. Rather, it points to the larger cultural fact that there were more
than merely superficial similarities between the holism of Gestalt theory and
that of the propaganda of National Socialism (see Ash 1995, 342–61; Harrington
1995; 1996, 175–206). As one Nazi supporter put it: “Wholeness and Gestalt, the
ruling ideas of the German movement, have become central concepts of German
psychology. . . . Present-day German psychology and the National Socialistic
worldview are both oriented towards the same goal: the vanquishing of atomistic
and mechanistic forms of thought: vanquishing through organic thinking, in the
structure of völkisch life here, in the researching of psychological reality there”
(Sander 1937, cited in Harrington 1996, 178).
9 Referenced in Sartre (1970, 110f). The document (five large typewritten pages) was
originally thought to have been the work of Sartre. In Sartre (1970), however, the
editors—Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka—made it clear that after the book had
gone to press, new information and discussions with Sartre and Desanti convinced
them that the text was, in fact, drafted by Merleau-Ponty. Although this text is
seldom cited, its attribution to Merleau-Ponty is widely accepted (cf. Le Baut 2009,
142). It should be noted, though, that in a bibliographic discussion subsequent to
the publication of Sartre (1970), Whiteside disputed the attribution to Merleau-
Ponty, claiming that “[i]nquiries in Paris with the persons who had originally made
[it] revealed no direct evidence to this effect” (1983, 196). What exactly would
count as “direct evidence” with regard the authorship of an anonymous piece of
writing is unclear. But as recently as 2012, Michel Rybalka reaffirmed that it was
Sartre himself who indicated to Rybalka and Contat that Merleau-Ponty had
written the document (personal correspondence with the author). It may be that
Whiteside’s doubts, which probably continue to have some currency, and his desire
for “direct evidence,” stem as much from the following additional concern that he
expressed: “significant stylistic differences between this document and Merleau-
Ponty’s writings of this period argue against the hypothesis that he is its author.”
Regarding a text composed in 1941, it is unclear just what Whiteside could have
 Notes 171

meant by “this period,” and to which other of Merleau-Ponty’s writings he could

have been referring. If it is simply a claim that the sort of totalistic socialism that
is advocated in the document is without precedent in Merleau-Ponty’s published
writing up to that point, then that would be a very weak claim. Given what we have
discussed concerning the timing of Merleau-Ponty’s attachment to Marxism, as
well as the holism that characterized his prewar thought along with much of the
relevant context, it would not be difficult at all to imagine that Merleau-Ponty was
the author in question.
10 It was apparently slightly revised in 1944 before being sent to representatives of
the French provisional government in Algiers. Owing to the nature of resistance
activities, all of this was likely done without the original author’s knowledge.
11 Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s relation to other existentialists, Whiteside put it
well: “At the heart of [Merleau-Ponty’s] project is the belief that his theory is
superior particularly in accounting for the political dimension of existence. He
thinks that a wide range of ‘existentializing’ thinkers, including Marcel, Aron,
Sartre, Beauvoir, Mounier, Malraux, Scheler, and Heidegger, have gone wrong
when it comes to thinking politically. They misformulate their own existential
insights in ways that either deprive their theories of political relevance or lead to
tragically mistaken political commitments. He then modulates and reformulates
their positions to explain how a theory can be both existential and political”
(Whiteside 1988, 37).
12 In terms of the subheadings from the original table of contents, this discussion
would thus span three successive sections, those entitled “Valuation of historical
situations: class prior to class consciousness,” “Intellectual project and existential
project,” and “The For-Itself and the For-Others, intersubjectivity.”
13 I use this term—generative—to signal that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of productivity
may be instructively compared with Husserl’s notion of “generativity,” which
Merleau-Ponty noted in Husserl’s unpublished work (PhP 489), but which he did
not adopt. Steinbock (1995; see also 1998) has developed this theme extensively
and on the basis of much more unpublished material than that which was available
to Merleau-Ponty.
14 Such would be how Merleau-Ponty’s view differed from Kojève’s claim that “man
is not simply mortal; he is death incarnate; he is his own death,” such that human
existence is essentially “a suicide” (Kojève 1947, 569).
15 Lanzoni (2004) reports that archival records call into question quite forcefully
Binswanger’s view of just how much trust there really was on the part of the patient
in this relationship.
16 In choosing the term “secrete,” Merleau-Ponty no doubt had in mind to offset
Sartre’s rather different claim that “freedom is the human being putting his past out
of play by secreting his own nothingness” [la liberté, c’est l’être humain mettant son
passé hors de jeu en sécrétant son propre néant] (EN 65/28).

Chapter 5
1 Note that the bibliographic information given at the end of the English translation
of Sense and Non-Sense, which claims that “Man, the Hero” was “especially written”
for this volume, is false. Aside from the title, it was reprinted from action unchanged.
172 Notes

2 Ponge had become the literary editor of action after the Liberation, but resigned
later in 1946, and left the Party in the following year on account of its dogmatism,
in particular with respect to aesthetic issues. Interestingly enough, Ponge’s
“Notes premières de l’Homme,” a series of notes from 1943 to 1944 for a projected
(but never completed) work on “Man,” was published in the inaugural issue of
Les temps modernes (pp. 67–75), immediately after Merleau-Ponty’s “La Guerre
a eu lieu.”
3 The following is the text and translation of the editorial preface that preceded
Merleau-Ponty’s essay (the two notes have been added):

Maurice Merleau-Ponty est, avec Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir, l’un

des principaux représentants en France de la philosophie existentielle. Il a
voulu remettre à action l’article qu’on va lire, dans lequel—selon les termes de
sa lettre d’envoi—“l’attitude existentialiste (comme phénomène général de notre
temps, et non comme attitude d’école) se trouve définie positivement et sur des
exemples.”
  Nous apprécions cette marque d’estime, et comme nous n’avons pas l’habitude
de traiter dédaigneusement les problèmes qui intéressent authentiquement bon
nombre de jeunes Français certainement sincères et certainement estimables,
nous le publions aussitôt.
  Mais nous devons dire tout aussitôt que nous ne pouvons souscrire à
ses conclusions. Sans vouloir longuement préluder aux réponses qu’une
telle prise de position provoquera sans doute, affirmons déjà que beaucoup
parmi nos lecteurs apercevront immédiatement et jugeront inadmissible le
procédé (rhétorique) qui consiste à déclarer sans autre preuve—seulement
parce que plusieurs héros de romans récents sont ainsi faits—que le “héros
contemporain” “vit dans un tel chaos . . . qu’il ne peut apercevoir clairement
ses devoirs et ses tâches . . . ni . . . conserver la certitude d’accomplir ce que
l’histoire veut.”†
  Gabriel Péri,‡ à ce titre, et tous les héros marxistes ne devront-ils plus être
comptés parmi les héros contemporains, eux qui n’ont pas cessé d’y voir clair,
plus clair que jamais, dans le prétendu chaos de l’histoire contemporaine—et
qui ont pris parti, ont combattu, ont défié la mort avec la même allégresse,
sachant qu’ils agissaient dans le sens de l’histoire . . . et mouraient donc
(puisqu’il fallait mourir) en entonnant les chants de l’espérance, mouraient
certains, mouraient victorieux.
†
 As in the passage above signaled by Ponge, this text is presumably taken from
Merleau-Ponty’s letter, for it does not appear as such in the essay itself.
‡
 Gabriel Péri was a journalist and the Communist Deputy of Argenteuil in the French
National Assembly from 1932. In virtue of his strong antifascist convictions, Péri
was a leading figure in the PCF, especially among its militants. In 1941, he was
denounced, arrested, and ultimately shot by the Nazis. In part due to Aragon’s poetic
tribute in “La légende de Gabriel Péri,” at the time of the Liberation, he became a
mythological figure of resistance and martyrdom.

Along with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

is one of the principal representatives of existential philosophy in France.
He wanted the following article—in which, according to his cover letter, “the
 Notes 173

existential attitude (as a general phenomenon of our time, and not as a school
of thought) is defined positively and on the basis of examples”—to be published
in action.
  We value this sign of respect. And as we are not in the habit of treating with
contempt the problems that genuinely concern large numbers of young French
people whose honesty and worthiness are not in doubt, we are publishing it
immediately.
  But we must also make clear that we cannot subscribe to its conclusions.
Without wanting to give a lengthy anticipation of the responses that such a
position will no doubt provoke, let us just assert that many of our readers
will immediately notice and judge as unacceptable the (rhetorical) device
that consists in declaring without further proof—solely because many
heroes of recent novels are constructed in this way—that the “contemporary
hero” “lives in such a chaos . . . that he cannot see his duties and his tasks
clearly . . . nor . . . maintain the certainty of carrying out what history wants.”
  On this account, Gabriel Péri, and all Marxist heroes must no longer be
counted as contemporary heroes—for they did not cease to see clearly, more
clearly than ever, in the alleged chaos of contemporary history. They took a
stand, they fought, and they braved death with the same elation, knowing that
they were acting on the side of history. . . . They thus died (for they had to die)
singing the songs of hope; they died sure of themselves, they died victorious.

4 Owing to its originality and nonconformist stance, “the influence of action, which
militated very specifically for working class unity, [was] quite considerable for a long
time” (Bellanger et al. 1975, 293).
5 Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Foi et bonne Foi,” also published in February 1946,
refers positively to the relative openness and honesty of Hervé’s Marxism (SNS
318–21/179ff), although he had criticized Hervé the previous month in his editorial
article “Pour la vérité” (SNS 274f/155).
6 Without directly citing it, Merleau-Ponty paraphrases and quotes from the
introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (see Hegel 1956, 30f;
cf. NI 130 [64]).
7 Quoting Hegel: “die nächste Gattung, die im Innern bereits vorhanden war.” In
Sibree’s rendering: “the species next in order . . . which was already formed in the
womb of time” (Hegel 1956, 30).
8 This is expressed in “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel . . .,” an incomplete letter
(6 December 1937) addressed to Kojève (in Hollier 1988, 89–93). A revised version
was published as an appendix in Bataille (1944).
9 Although Merleau-Ponty does not name Aron in his published work at this time, he
did develop a direct critique of him, as Whiteside (1986) has convincingly shown.
10 The close triadic relation between the views of history held, respectively, by Kojève,
Fessard, and Aron, along with Merleau-Ponty’s relation to them, merits and would
repay closer attention.
11 Cf. Bataille (1976, 651n): “A sovereignty which serves no purpose is at once the
coming apart and the completion of the human being.”
12 Although he does not reference this, Merleau-Ponty may have been referring to
Saint Exupéry (TH 176): “It is not danger that I love. I know what I love. It is life.”
This line was also referenced by Gusdorf (1948, 247).
174 Notes

13 The classic article is Gelb and Goldstein (1918). However, it is noteworthy that
beginning shortly after 1945, when Phenomenology of Perception was published,
serious doubts began to be cast on this case. On the basis of a reexamination of the
patient, the diagnosis of visual agnosia was questioned (Bay et al. 1949; cf. Jung
1949). And in general, it has been contended that Goldstein and Gelb exaggerated
or simply misread the symptomatology of the case (Bay 1953; Tauber 1966).
Goldenberg (2003) has claimed that in their eagerness to substantiate their theories,
Goldstein and Gelb significantly embellished their findings, and that Schn. “learned
how to be an ideal case study.” Cf. Marotta and Behrmann (2004). This is significant
in that unlike other philosophical interpreters of the case—Gurwitsch and Cassirer,
for example—Merleau-Ponty never had direct contact with Schn.
14 For example, Lucifer was the original working title of Sartre’s Les chemins de la liberté
(see Sartre 1971, 27).
15 Reprinted as the conclusion to Le mythe et l’homme (Roger Caillois 1938), under the
title “Pour une fonction unitaire de l’esprit.”
16 Interview with Gilles Lapouge, June 1970 (cited in ES 142).
17 In his 1935 review of Scheler’s Ressentiment, Merleau-Ponty wrote that Promethean
humanism is based in hatred, “the hatred of the wisdom and goodness of God. . . .
Nature immediately loses in value since man has worth only inasmuch as he
separates himself from nature and distances himself from it” (CR 27f; cf. EP 36/43).
18 This was found in the first issue of Cahiers d’action, which was launched in part to
offset the rising influence of existentialism.
19 This is significant with respect to Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of Kojève’s views
concerning the end of History. Kojève had maintained that while the end of history
marks the disappearance of humanity qua “subject opposed to the object,” humans
would remain alive in a time of peace and consensus, filled with “art, love, play . . . in
short, everything that makes Man happy,” and he portrayed this as equivalent to the
“realm of freedom” envisioned by Marx at the end of the third volume of Capital
(Kojève 1947, 434f n1). Following Marx, Merleau-Ponty held the contrary view that
“human” history would begin with communism, that is, would follow the end of
diremptive pre-history, and—lest it amount to a reversion to animality—would be
a dynamic and open process admitting of no final synthesis. It is noteworthy that
the only addition Kojève made to the second edition of the published form of his
lectures on Hegel was to concede this point, which was clearly directed against him
(he wrote that he rethought this around 1948). Here, we read that “after the end of
History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their
nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion
of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals, and would indulge in love like
adult beasts” (1947, 436f n).
20 It is not a coincidence that the discussion of embodiment that first alludes to Saint
Exupéry in Phenomenology of Perception occurs in the first chapter of Part I, “The
Body as Object and Mechanistic Physiology,” in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s
critique of mechanism.
21 To be sure, this had certain limited affinities with fascist thinking. But it is hardly the
case that the discourses of holism and authenticity were intrinsically compromised
in this way. And it should not be overlooked that such affinities were fairly
widespread among those critical of bourgeois liberalism in France, applying as much
to surrealism, sacred sociology, and Christian personalism as movements seeking
spiritual-social renewal.
 Notes 175

22 This is entirely consistent with Binswanger’s Daseinsanalyse, which is centered

on an account of “encounter” [Begegnung] as based in “love” [Liebe]. Moreover,
it could be productively related to recent research that has brought to light the
significance of the notion of “love” in Husserl’s work, including Buckley (1996)
and Melle (2002).
23 See also Major (1968, 63–105, especially 92), where Saint Exupéry’s notion of
“Esprit” is explicitly linked to Merleau-Ponty’s invocation of the idea of “une raison
élargie.”
24 Robert Brasillach was a literary fascist who, on account of his editorship (until 1943)
of the rabidly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi Parisian newspaper Je suis partout, was tried
for collaboration after the war (a one-day trial on 19 January 1945 that Merleau-
Ponty, among others, attended) and executed on 6 February 1945. For a recent
examination of his case, see Kaplan (2000).
25 This is not to align Merleau-Ponty nor Saint Exupéry with the nefarious Nazi
rhetoric, especially of Karl Kötschau, of “machine-people” [Maschinenmenschen],
those who could not survive without medical technology and outside institutions.
But the broad affinities are noteworthy. For example, this statement from Kötschau:
“Our time does not need externally controlled machine-people, but rather self-
controlled people who have developed their own powers schooled in battles with a
healthy Nature. Our time needs the heroic man, the man who is up to the challenges
of the time, and who does not have to rely on the doubtful protection of an all too
artificial environment” (cited in Harrington 1996, 186).
26 “C’est l’expérience . . . muette encore qu’il s’agit d’amener à l’ expression pure de son
propre sens” (PhP x). In the Peiffer and Levinas translation, the complete sentence
reads: “Le début, c’est l’expérience pure et, pour ainsi dire muette encore, qu’il s’agit
d’amener à l’expression pure de son propre sens” (Husserl 1931, 33; cf. PhP 253f). In
Cairns’ translation of the Husserliana edition: “Its beginning is the pure—and, so to
speak, still dumb—psychological experience, which must now be made to utter its
own sense with no adulteration” (Husserl 1960, 38f).
27 In his dispatches from the USSR, he did not use the word “ ‘communism,” and
likewise with the word “ ‘fascism” in writing about Spain.
28 This is from Saint Exupéry’s “Lettre au Général ‘X’ ” [René Chambe] (July 1943),
published posthumously in Le Figaro littéraire (10 April 1948).
29 This notion is clearly similar to, but not to be conflated with, Husserl’s notion of die
lebendige Gegenwart—Merleau-Ponty’s notion is consequent to his intersubjective
reinterpretation of transcendental subjectivity.
30 Sense and Non-Sense appeared in the same year as Citadelle, a work which laid
bare Saint Exupéry’s conservative moralism of “exchange.” Reviewing the work
in Les temps modernes, Jean-H. Roy (1948) was critical, not only of the book’s
poor organization, but also of the hierarchical, repressive monarchist model of
society that it seemed to recommend. For Saint Exupéry’s sake, he regretted its
publication.
31 Although they did disagree somewhat about the successfulness of this event,
concerning which Merleau-Ponty (1947a) was much more favorable (cf. Spender
1946c).
32 Certainly in March 1956 at the Rencontre Est-Ouest in Venice. It was apparently
based on this that Spender, in his satirical novella Engaged in Writing (1958),
caricatured Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as the disputative French philosophers
“Sarret” and “Marteau” (cf. David 1992, 264).
176 Notes

33 This poem was originally published in the New Yorker magazine and was included
as the final poem in Spender (1964, 80f).
34 This actually preceded its publication in English (Spender 1947).
35 Cf. Bachelard (1943, 296): “The realism of psychic becoming needs ethereal
lessons. It even seems that, without aerial discipline, without apprenticeship
in lightness, the human psyche cannot evolve. . . . Establishing a future always
requires the values of flight.”
36 Recall that Hegel ended this text with the final lines (slightly modified) from
Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Die Freundschaft” (1782): “aus dem Kelche dieses
Geisterreiches/schäumt ihm seine Unendlichkeit” [from the chalice of this realm of
spirits/foams forth for Him his own infinitude] (Hegel 1988, 531; 1977, 493).
 Afterword

What I have discussed in this book, up to and including the Conclusion, seems to
provide, at least in outline, a compelling answer to the question at hand. Numerous
issues remain outstanding, and no doubt, the objections that might be posed are even
more numerous. I am obviously not going to deal with any of that here. But there
is one general implication of my overall argument that merits comment: the answer
that I have given to the question as to why Phenomenology of Perception ends with
Saint Exupéry does not remove the question mark that the initial problematization of
the ending placed over the work. That is, if this answer holds, then it is not the case
that a simple interpretive problem or anomaly has been ironed out such that we are
returned to situation normal, so to speak. Rather, if the answer that I have given holds,
then it would seem fair to say that Phenomenology of Perception is no longer quite the
same book. For now, we need to come to terms with a unexpected set of contentious
methodological issues.
This is important because inasmuch as the methodology of Phenomenology of
Perception has not received very much critical attention, it has been relatively easy
for scholars to mine the phenomenological descriptions and analyses that Merleau-
Ponty laid out in that work, to abstract this or that result from its context, without
worrying too much about the methodological commitments to which they are
attached. If the answer that I have given holds, however, then it may turn out that such
practices are unwarrantable. It belongs to another work to ascertain in detail how the
account I have given impacts specific phenomenological analyses in Phenomenology
of Perception. But based on the general approach to embodiment discussed earlier, it
seems incontrovertible that the results of Phenomenology of Perception, inasmuch as
they have philosophical validity, are firmly dependent upon and hence unabstractable
from the methodological assumptions contained in Merleau-Ponty’s view of history
and historical change. In particular, they are “non-naturalizable,” and this not because
they are transcendental in some ontologically contrastive sense, but because they are
bound up with the specific normativity of a dialectical logic of history that is, to borrow
a phrase from Coole, “profoundly and intrinsically political” (Coole 2007, 123). One
might attempt to recover the same results on a significantly different methodological
basis, but reasons were given above to suggest that such attempts are unlikely to
succeed.
What is especially important about coming to terms with Merleau-Ponty’s
conception of heroism, then, is that it serves to highlight the essential unity of his
philosophical and political thought in the immediate postwar period. In particular,
it brings to light the fact that his phenomenology has a deep internal need for the
sort of framework that Marxism has to offer. To reiterate the key claim, it was only by
conferring upon phenomenology a Marxist orientation that Merleau-Ponty was able
178 Afterword

to articulate a viable alternative to Fink. This implies that Merleau-Ponty’s Marxism,

however deficient or problematic it may appear today, is properly a concern of anyone
with a serious interest in his philosophical work, and not just those who might just
happen to an interest in his political thought. The point might be put as follows: in
a fundamentally important and irreducibly philosophical way, Phenomenology of
Perception—undeniably Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus, irrespective of his apparent
subsequent critique thereof—must be approached and understood within the
broad terms of Humanism and Terror, a text that many (if not most) philosophical
commentators today would freely acknowledge as scarcely even registering on their
Merleau-Pontian radar at all. The reason for saying this is not to defend Merleau-
Ponty’s Marxism (although as noted earlier, properly understood this may have greater
merit than is often thought), but first of all simply to bring to light what is actually
going on in his reinterpretation of phenomenology—how, existentially speaking, he
could possibly present transcendental philosophy as a kind of embodied cognition.
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198
 Index

absolute knowledge (also absolute Carman, Taylor  65

knowing)  37, 75–6, 83, 88, 90, Cartesianism  80, 82, 85, 119, 128
112–13, 115–16, 118, 125, 138, Cassirer, Ernst  174n. 13
143, 148, 150 Catholicism  4, 40–50, 82, 108, 167n. 20,
action (Communist weekly)  108, 126, 168nn. 22–3 see also Christianity;
136, 141, 171n. 1, 172nn. 2–3, militant thinking: in Catholic
173n. 4, 174n. 18 thought; personalism
“actual” body (corps actuel)  3, 30–1, 62, Catholic “discovery” of Marx  40,
66–9, 71, 93, 115, 117, 119–20, 141 43–7, 51, 85, 167n. 20 (see also
Aéropostale see Compagnie Générale humanism: Catholic critique
Aéropostale of Marxist; totality: in Catholic
Aeschylus  125 thought)
Annaud, Jean-Jacques  161n. 17 Cézanne, Paul  96, 98, 100
anosognosia  30, 62, 64 Christ  16, 20, 42, 45–6, 50, 111 see also
Anschluß (Nazi annexation of Christianity; Mystical Body of
Austria)  80 Christ
Aristotle  152n. 12 Christianity  16, 40–50, 72–3, 97, 109,
Aron, Raymond  34, 107, 111–14, 125, 114, 120, 128, 130, 166n. 19,
144, 171n. 11, 173nn. 9–10 168nn. 22–3, 174n. 21 see also
authenticity  11, 18, 45, 63, 67, 78–9, 93, Catholicism; Christ
96–7, 103, 119, 128, 141, 174n. 21 class consciousness  4, 56–7, 59–60, 71,
83, 85, 87–93, 102–3
Barbaras, Renaud  xxxii cogito  xxv–xxvi, 85–6 see also tacit cogito
Barral, Mary Rose  128 Collège de France  ix
Bataille, Georges  107, 111, 123–5, communism (also Communism)  9,
163n. 31, 173nn. 8, 11 33, 35, 43–4, 46, 49–50, 61,
de Beauvoir, Simone  12, 77, 127, 81–2, 84, 114–5, 127, 132, 135,
159n. 2, 162n. 21, 170n. 4, 174n. 19, 175n. 27 see also Parti
171n. 11, 172n. 3 communiste français
Benda, Julien  40–1, 168n. 21 Communist International  33, 164n. 7
Berger, Gaston  xv, 152n. 22, 153nn. 26, 28 Compagnie Générale Aéropostale  7, 9,
Binswanger, Ludwig  101–4, 171n. 15, 24, 122, 130
175n. 22 constructive phenomenology see Fink,
Bloch, Marc  170n. 6 Eugen
Blum, Léon  49–50 Contat, Michel  170n. 9
Brasillach, Robert  129, 175n. 24 Coole, Diana  xxxii, 69, 145, 150, 177
Brunschvicg, Léon  41, 167n. 21 Cooper, Barry  36–7, 157n. 5, 165n. 14
“Copernican Revolution” (Kant)  149–50
Caillois, Roger  107, 120–5, 134, 174n. 15 see also Kant, Immanuel
Caillois, Rolland  65, 159n. 2 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard
Camus, Albert  163n. 33 Jeanneret)  162n. 22
200 Index

Cornu, Auguste  37, 43–4 Fessard, Gaston  44, 46–8, 113, 165n. 14,
cosmic humanism see humanism: 168n. 23, 173n. 10
Exupérian Fetscher, Iring  166n. 15
Courtade, Pierre  108 Fink, Eugen  x–xi, xiv–xxxi, xxxiii, 5, 27,
Cuzin, François  49 57–8, 69, 71, 90, 93, 145–50,
152nn. 10–11, 18, 20, 23–5,
Daseinsanalyse  175n. 22 see also 153nn. 26, 28–9, 31–4, 37, 39,
Binswanger, Ludwig 154nn. 41, 49, 52
death  xxii, xxix, 4, 10–11, 18, 24, 27, 29, Merleau-Ponty’s response to  xiv,
71–9, 82–4, 86, 93, 96, 98, 110, xxiv–xxxi, 4, 5, 36, 69, 71, 90, 93,
116–18, 124, 128, 141–4, 147, 145–50, 177–8
149, 158n. 14, 165n. 14, 171n. 14 Sixth Cartesian Meditation  xiv–xxxi,
of Saint Exupéry  18–21, 25, 116–18, xxxiii, 90, 145–6, 152n. 20,
142–4, 158n. 14, 160n. 5 25, 153n. 26, 28, 37, 159n. 1,
Degliame-Fouché, Marcel  108 160n. 2
Desanti, Jean-Toussaint  81, 170n. 9 Fourth International  49
Descartes, René see Cartesianism freedom  2, 9, 11, 16, 18, 40, 47, 69–70,
determining judgment  99–101 see also 79–81, 83–4, 88–93, 96–8, 102,
Kant, Immanuel: Critique of the 104, 114–16, 118–19, 130, 141,
Power of Judgment; reflecting 143–4, 158n. 14, 161n. 15,
judgment 171n. 16, 174n. 19
dialectical materialism  33, 95 see also methodological significance of  89–93,
Marxism 147–8
Dillon, Martin C.  xxxii, 151n. 7 Friedmann, Georges  34
Dorfman, Eran  156n. 4, 157n. 5,
158n. 14 de Gandillac, Maurice  167n. 19
Dreyfus Affair  40, 166n. 18 de Gaulle, Charles  131, 162n. 23 see also
Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre  80 Gaullism
Durkheim, Émile  122, 124 Gaullism  13, 112 see also de Gaulle,
Charles
École normale supérieure  41, 167n. 21 Gelb, Adhémar  119–20, 174n. 13
Edman, Irwin  14 Gide, André  9
end of history  46–7, 96, 110–11, 165n. 14, Gisors, Kyo (La condition humaine)  114–15
174n. 19 see also history Goldmann, Lucien  34
engagement  5, 40–51, 74–5, 79, 104, 107, Goldstein, Kurt  73, 119–20, 169n. 2,
114, 127–8, 143–4 174n. 13
Engels, Friedrich  54, 57, 168n. 1 Gramsci, Antonio  56
ENS see École normale supérieure Graziadei, Antonio  164n. 7
Esprit (personalist review)  42–4, 48–50, Guernica (fascist bombing of,
167n. 20, 169n. 1 26 April 1937)  80
exchange  1, 18, 31, 55–6, 96–8, 103, 134, Guillaumet, Henri  8, 10–11, 24, 161nn. 7,
163n. 31, 175n. 30 17, 162nn. 18–19, 22
external horizons  xxii, 28, 58, 60, Gurwitsch, Aron  154n. 48, 174n. 13
64–5, 69, 77, 90–2, 126, 143, 149 Guterman, Norbert  34, 164n. 9
see also totality
habitual body  30, 62–3, 91 see also
Fadiman, Clifton  162n. 25 habituated organism
fascism  9, 20, 25, 49, 80, 121, 131–2, 142, habituated organism  62–4, 66–9, 71, 93,
162n. 25, 170n. 8, 175n. 27 see 95, 104, 115, 117, 119, 125, 138,
also National Socialism 141, 146–7 see also habitual body
 Index 201

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  xxiii–xxiv, Humanism and Terror (Merleau–

xxvi, 36–8, 47, 54, 65, 75–9, 82–3, Ponty)  25–6, 99, 117, 129, 135,
109–14, 117–18, 122, 124–5, 160n. 2, 165n. 14, 178
135, 138, 154n. 40, 164n. 9, human productivity  4, 71, 78, 93–8,
165nn. 13–14, 168n. 23, 170n. 3, 103, 116, 118, 125–6, 131, 138,
173nn. 6–8, 174n. 19, 176n. 36 141, 148, 171n. 13 see also
Phenomenology of Spirit  75–6, 113, productivity
138, 165n. 13, 176n. 36 Husserl, Edmund  x–xii, xiv–xix, xxii,
Heidegger, Martin  xviii, 77, 84, xxvii, xxxii, 27, 32, 35–6, 89–90,
171n. 11 95, 131, 146, 148–50, 151n. 8,
Hemingway, Ernest  114–15, 161n. 9, 152n. 13, 153nn. 30, 38,
162n. 25 154nn. 44–5, 171n. 13,
Heraclitus  102 175nn. 22, 26, 29
heroism  xxxi, 2–5, 19, 21, 24–5, 27 Cartesian Meditations  xiv–xix,
contemporary  68–70, 80, 107–10, 113, 175n. 26
116–20, 126–7, 141–50 “principle of all principles”  xvi, xxii,
Exupérian  xxxii–xxxiii, 4, 28, 68, 149
71–2, 105, 122, 126, 150 Husserl, Gerhart (son)  152n. 23
ideological  114–15 Hyppolite, Jean  75–7, 165n. 13, 170n. 3
traditional  109–14
Hervé, Pierre  108, 125–7, 134–6, incarnation  4, 40, 45–8, 78, 84, 94, 134,
167n. 20, 173n. 5 142, 144, 148, 168nn. 2–3
history  xxii, xxx, 3–4, 6, 15, 24, 28, 31–2, incarnational Marxism  4, 51, 69, 71, 84,
37, 45–7, 51, 53–8, 60–1, 63–5, 142, 148 see also incarnation;
69, 73, 75, 78–80, 82–3, 85–8, Marxism
90–1, 94–101, 104–5, 109–19, elements of  71–105
123, 127, 131, 133–9, 141–9, Institut für Sozialforschung
163n. 5, 169n. 6, 172n. 3, (Frankfurt)  34
174n. 19, 177 see also historical intersubjectivity  xxii, xxvii–xxviii, 1,
apriority; historicity 17–18, 76, 79, 83, 85, 87–8, 94–5,
end of  46–7, 96, 110–11, 165n. 14, 97–8, 102–4, 123, 128, 131, 134,
174n. 19 145, 147, 150, 154n. 45, 157n. 6,
logic of  58, 69, 117–18, 144, 171n. 12, 175n. 29
148, 177
philosophy of  xxxii, 4, 38, 57, 61, 65, Jaspers, Karl  58, 60, 65, 69, 112
72, 107, 110–13, 118, 126, 145, Jay, Martin  34, 57
147, 169n. 4 Jesus see Christ
historical apriority  3, 4, 64, 68, 71, 92, 95, Jordan, Robert (For Whom the Bell
125, 146–7 Tolls)  114–16
historicity  3, 30–2, 38, 62–3, 75, 87, 93, Judt, Tony  144
96, 103–4, 128
Hubert, Henri  123 Kant, Immanuel (also Kantianism)  xi,
humanism  5, 16–17, 51, 61, 79–80, 82, xix–xx, xxii, xxviii, 80, 99–100,
120, 123, 126–34, 136–7, 143–4, 149–50, 153nn. 35–6
165n. 14, 174n. 17 Critique of Pure Reason  xix, xxii, 100,
Catholic critique of Marxist  44–7 150
(see also Catholicism: Catholic Critique of the Power of
“discovery” of Marx) Judgment  99–100, 143, 150
Exupérian  8–12, 15, 17–18, 128–34, (see also determining judgment;
138, 162n. 19 reflecting judgment)
202 Index

Katov (La condition humaine)  170n. 5 Marxism  xxxii–xxxiii, 3–5, 27–8, 30,
Kojève (Kozhevnikov), Alexandre  36–7, 32–6, 51–8, 60–1, 69, 71–2, 107–9,
40, 47, 78, 107, 110–14, 125, 113–14, 116–19, 125–6, 132–6,
154n. 41, 165nn. 13–14, 138–9, 143–5, 147, 150, 164nn.
166n. 15, 168n. 23, 171n. 14, 7, 9, 165nn. 11–12, 168nn. 23,
173nn. 8, 10, 174n. 19 3 (chap. 3), 169nn. 4–5, 177–8
Korsch, Karl  164n. 7 see also dialectical materialism;
Kötschau, Karl  175n. 25 incarnational Marxism; Marx, Karl
Kriegel-Valrimont, Maurice  108 origins of Merleau–Ponty’s  36–51
Kristallnacht (anti-Semitic pogrom, 9–10 Mauss, Marcel  18, 123, 163nn. 31–2
November 1938)  80 Maydieu, Jean-Augustin  167n. 20
Mayer, Hans  33
Lacroix, Jean  51 Menninger-Lerchenthal, Erich  62
Landsberg, Paul-Louis  42–3, 74–5, Mermoz, Jean  8, 10, 16, 161nn. 7, 11
77, 141 Meyer, Rudolf  166n. 15
Langer, Monika  1 militant thinking  xxxiii, 4–6, 37, 72,
Lanzoni, Susan  102, 171n. 15 76–7, 79, 100–1, 104, 107,
Leduc, Victor  108 114, 118, 123, 126–7, 141, 145,
Lefebvre, Henri  34, 44, 164n. 9 148–50, 155n. 54
Lenin, Vladimir  56, 100–1, 165n. 12 in Catholic thought  45, 76, 114,
Lhermitte, Jean  62 168n. 22 (see also Catholicism:
logic of history  58, 69, 117–18, 144, 148, Catholic “discovery” of Marx)
177 see also history militant orthodoxy (Roger
Low, Douglas  37–9 Caillois)  120–3 (see also
Lucifer  120–4, 134, 174n. 14 Caillois, Roger)
Lukács, Georg (György)  3–4, 28, 30, Molitor, Jules  164n. 9
32–7, 39–40, 51, 53–61, 69, 71, de Montherlant, Henry  116, 162n. 19
82–4, 88, 90–1, 95, 104–5, Moré, Marcel  37, 43–8
108, 112, 131–2, 135, 150, Morhange, Pierre  34
164nn. 6–10, 166n. 16, Mounier, Emmanuel  41–4, 47–50,
168nn. 2–3 167n. 20, 171n. 11
History and Class Consciousness  3, Mystical Body of Christ  46 see also
32–7, 39, 53–7, 59–60, 105, incarnation
164nn. 8–10, 169n. 3 myth  4, 24, 107, 120–6, 128, 139, 141,
144–5, 149
Major, Jean-Louis  133, 175n. 23
Malleret-Joinville, Alfred  108 National Socialism  81, 161n. 10, 170n. 8
Malraux, André  50, 114, 161n. 9, 170n. 5, see also fascism; Nazism
171n. 11 Nazism  9, 13–14, 19, 161n. 10, 170n. 8,
Marcel, Gabriel  120, 167n. 20, 171n. 11 172n. 3, 175n. 24 see also fascism;
Maritain, Jacques  14–15, 44–5, 126, 131 National Socialism
Marx, Karl  xxvi, xxxii, 2, 36–41, 43–6, Nietzsche, Friedrich  72–3, 109–13, 122,
48, 53–4, 56–7, 82–4, 94–5, 104, 125
113, 132, 135, 154n. 42, 164n. 9, Nizan, Paul  12, 34, 41–2, 44, 49–50, 82,
165n. 12, 167n. 20, 174n. 19 114, 162n. 20, 164n. 9, 167n. 21,
see also Marxism 168n. 23
Catholic “discovery” of  40, 43–7, 51,
85, 167n. 20 (see also humanism: organic repression  62–3 see also
Catholic critique of Marxist; repression
totality: in Catholic thought) outer horizons see external horizons
 Index 203

Parti communiste français  41–4, 48–9, Russian Revolution (1917)  100–1, 113
108, 135, 172n. 3 Rybalka, Michel  170n. 9
PCF see Parti communiste français
pensée de survol  2–4, 15, 24, 107, 138 sacrifice  3–4, 8, 13, 16–18, 20–1, 71–5,
personalism  42–5, 47–51, 169n. 1, 82, 84, 94, 96–7, 107, 109–11,
174n. 21 see also Mounier, 114–17, 123–5, 134, 141–3, 148,
Emmanuel 169n. 2
Pétain, Henri Philippe  13, 131, 162n. 23 de Saint Aubert, Emmanuel  151n. 6,
phantom limb syndrome  30, 62, 64 156n. 4, 163n. 5, 167n. 21
phenomenological reduction  x–xiv, de Saint Exupéry, Antoine  xiv, xxxi,
xviii–xxiii, xxv, xxviii, xxx, 58, 1–4, 6–21, 23–6, 28–30, 40, 51,
89–90, 92, 128, 138, 143, 145–6, 64–8, 71–2, 74, 81, 87, 96–7,
148–9, 151nn. 7–9, 152n. 17, 105, 107, 115–22, 126–34,
154n. 48 136–8, 141–5, 148–50, 152n. 18,
Philosophies (Marxist philosophical 155n. 1, 156nn. 2, 4, 157nn. 5–6,
circle)  34, 41, 44, 164n. 9 158n. 14, 159n. 2, 160nn. 3–5,
philosophy of history  xxxii, 4, 38, 57, 61, 161nn. 8–10, 13–16, 162nn. 22,
65, 72, 107, 110–13, 118, 126, 24–5, 27–8, 163nn. 30–1, 1–2,
145, 147, 169n. 4 see also history 4–5 (chap. 2), 173n. 12, 174n. 20,
Pius XI (Pope)  43 175nn. 23, 25, 28, 30, 177
Plato  152n. 12 Pilote de guerre  xiv, xxxi, 1–3, 7–8,
Politzer, Georges  34, 40 12–19, 23–7, 29, 97, 116, 129,
Ponge, Francis  108, 172nn. 2–3 130–2, 137–8, 141, 148, 155n. 1,
Popular Front (France)  40–1, 43, 49–51 156n. 2, 157n. 6, 158n. 14,
potlatch  18, 163n. 31 159n. 2, 161n. 13, 162n. 25,
Pour la victoire  13 163n. 30
Prévot, André  24 Terre des hommes  7, 10–12, 18–19, 24,
productivity  xx–xxi, xxvi, xxix–xxx, 138, 129, 157n. 5, 162nn. 19, 22
148, 154n. 40, 159n. 15, 171n. 13 de Saint Exupéry, François (brother)  24
see also human productivity Sartre, Jean-Paul  12, 20–1, 41–2, 76–8,
Prometheus  120, 123–6, 174n. 17 81, 88–9, 92–3, 95, 97–8,
156n. 4, 157n. 11, 162nn. 19,
rationality  xxix–xxxi, 60–1, 76, 79, 94, 21, 165nn. 11, 13, 166n. 19,
98–105, 116, 118, 135, 138–9, 169n. 4, 170nn. 4, 9, 171nn. 11,
147 16, 172n. 3, 174n. 14, 175n. 32
reduction see phenomenological Satan (also Satanism)  120–4
reduction Scheler, Max  43, 72–3, 167n. 20, 168n. 22,
reflecting judgment  99–101, 103, 169n. 1, 171n. 11, 174n. 17
134, 150 see also determining Schilder, Paul  62
judgment; Kant, Immanuel: “Schn.” (Johann Schneider, patient of Gelb
Critique of the Power of Judgment and Goldstein)  65, 119–20,
Rencontres Internationales 129, 143, 146, 174n. 13
(Geneva 1946)  58, 60–1, 65, 69, self-sacrifice see sacrifice
112, 136, 168n. 3, 175n. 31 Smith, Colin  2, 29, 127, 151n. 5,
repression  3, 30, 61–3, 65–71, 93–5, 98, 163n. 30
104, 128, 131, 133, 141, 169n. 5 Spender, Stephen  136–8
Resistance (French)  13, 25, 41, 81, Spiegelberg, Herbert  151n. 7, 152n. 13,
167n. 20 166n. 15
Ricoeur, Paul  42 Steinbock, Anthony  171n. 13
Rousset, David  49 Stendhal (Henri Beyle)  135–6
204 Index

Structure of Behavior, The Trân Dúc Tháo  84

(Merleau-Ponty)  xxv, xxviii, transcendental illusion  xix–xxiv, 149–50,
xxx, 36–9, 48, 57, 61, 71, 153n. 38
73–4, 111, 154n. 41, 165n. 14, Trotsky, Leon  100–1, 113, 165n. 12
166n. 17
sublimation  5, 62–3, 70, 73, 79, 144, 149 Vailland, Roger  115
Van Breda, Hermann  xv, 152nn. 24–5,
tacit cogito  4, 71, 85–8, 92 see also cogito 153nn. 26–7
Les temps modernes  19, 108, 126, 137, Van Gogh, Vincent  123–4
157n. 11, 167n. 20, 172n. 2, Verdier, Jean (Cardinal)  50
175n. 30 Vichy (France)  12, 162nn. 23, 26–7
Todd, Olivier  42
totality  3, 28, 37, 53–61, 64–5, 69, 77, 80, Weber, Max  59
90, 95, 100, 104, 112, 131, 133–5, Weeks, Edward  13–14
138, 143–7, 150, 163n. 5, 164n. 9, Werth, Léon  19
168nn. 2–3 Wessell, Leonard  125
in Catholic thought  44–7 (see also “Western” Marxism  32, 85
Catholicism: Catholic “discovery” Whiteside, Kerry  xxxii
of Marx) wonder  x–xi, xxviii, 152nn. 10–11, 13
Lukács’ concept of  53–6
as phenomenological issue  xxii, 57 Zinoviev, Grigory  33, 56, 164n. 7
(see also external horizons) Zola, Émile  166n. 18