Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Adventures of the Dialectic. Joseph Bien translation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty argues that political ideals commit politicians to the perpetual exercise of violence because real human life stubbornly refuses to be idealized; frustrated, political idealists attempt to force human beings to conform to supposed truths that exist nowhere other than in the heads of those who believe them. Marxism seemed to promise a solution to this dilemma, since it offered a way of radically improving real human relations, of ending the exploitation of one class of men by another, while remaining firmly in the real world. Admittedly, Marxist politicians would also need to deploy violence and its consequent terror upon their ‘class enemies,’ but this violence, and this violence alone, held out the prospect of a diminution and perhaps even an elimination of violence after socialist regimes equalized social and economic conditions and brought about the end of class conflict, the end of tyranny, with the ‘end,’ the achieved purpose, of history, namely communism.
By the mid-1950s, however, with Stalin dead, his reign of terror gone, and the bureaucratization of Soviet rule fully entrenched in Russia, Merleau-Ponty distanced himself still further from orthodox Marxism and in some respects from Marxism altogether. “We need a philosophy of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here.” Stalin’s Terror had failed to move Russia, much less the rest of the world, toward communism: “In the crucible of events we become aware of what is not acceptable to us.” At the same time, he opposed some of the radical revisions of Marxism proposed by his friend of university days, Jean-Paul Sartre, France’s most prominent celebrity ‘intellectual’ in the country that most esteemed such figures.
Merleau-Ponty begins with the pacifist philosopher Alain, the nom de plume of Émile-Auguste Chartier, who had died only a few years before, after a long and influential career of teaching and writing. “Alain spoke”—critically, as readers knew at the time—of “a politics of reason which totalizes history, ties all the problems together, orients itself on a future that is already written in the present and where all problems will be solved”; against this historicist optimism, Alain proposed “a politics of understanding,” something along the lines of a prudential politics, “which, unlike the other, does not flatter itself with having embraced all of history but rather takes man as he is, at work in an obscure world, resolves problems one at a time.” To Alain, “all our misfortunes come from a failure to practice the politics of understanding.” Raymond Aron, a man scarcely lacking in prudence, replied that understanding alone is insufficient, that “there is only one politics, that of understanding and reason” (emphasis added). Merleau-Ponty concurs but takes Aron’s remark in a decidedly non-Aronian direction, calling the politics of understanding and reason “an action in the process of self-invention.” That is, he adds an element of Nietzsche’s atheist version of ‘creationism.’
Contra Hegel, however, he rejects the notion of an “end of history,” which would require “an absolute purification of history,” “an inertialess regime without chance or risk,” a regime that would erase “our own anxiety and solitude,” founded on a false-revolutionary spirit “that is nothing more than a way of disguising the state of one’s soul.” This is little more than a sophisticated form of wishful thinking, misconceiving reality as “a landscape against which one develops one’s personal dreams,” “a masquerade for one’s personal inclinations.” Serious revolutionaries, “first of all Marx” as Merleau-Ponty interprets him, “are not revolutionaries in that sense,” understanding “that universal history is not to be contemplated but to be made.” The “true revolutionary…rediscovers what is to be done” (the phrase of Lenin); “he navigates without a map and with a limited view of the present,” “oscillat[ing] between values and facts.” We have learned in the first half of the twentieth century that “the false modesty of understanding does not get around the problem of the whole, nor does the self-confidence of reason avoid the problem of events,” as “each political act engages the whole of history, but this totality does not give us a rule on which we can rely, because it is nothing more than opinion.” Historicism (even Marxist historicism, as will become clear), insofar as it attempts to synthesize the dualities of subject and object, conscience and history, present and future, judgment and discipline—typically, at the expense of the subject, the conscience, the present, and judgment—only perpetuates the rule of terror that historicists expect to reduce or eliminate in the long run.
“This book is an attempt to stake out experience, not on the ground of politics, but on the ground of political philosophy”—that is, a philosophy mindful of political practice but neither transcending it in an imagined realm of ideals nor reduced to practice or “understanding.” This staking-out or mapping of twentieth-century political philosophy, this set of adventures of the dialectic, begins with Max Weber, moves to Georg Lukács, then to Leon Trotsky, and finally to Sartre.
Following the historicists of the nineteenth century, Weber rejects divine and natural right, both as claims to freedom and as bases for truth. On the contrary, freedom and truth are “acquired in a struggle,” a dialectic; they “cannot exist without strife.” Weber is a liberal, however, not a Hegelian monarchist or a Marxian socialist; that is, he is “faithful to knowledge and the spirit of investigation,” of liberalism’s “open-mindedness.” History is not “predestined,” nor will its violence someday cease. Ideals exist but not as “keys to history”; they are “only fixed guideposts for determining the difference between what we think and what has been and for making evident what has been left out by interpretation.” Historical knowledge is “never categorical,” never Kantian; “it is always open to revision.” When looking at the past, one must be willing to suspend one’s judgment in preparation for accepting newly discovered facts.
Action in the present is entirely different, since such a suspension of judgment “is here impossible.” In the present, one must decide, ‘make policy.’ Even the refusal to decide is itself a decision. “Knowledge and practice confront the same infinity of historical reality, but they respond to it in opposite ways: knowledge, by multiplying views, confronts it through conclusions that are provisional, open, and justifiable (that is to say, conditional), while practice confronts it through decisions which are absolute, partial, and not subject to justification.” In considering the past, the historian has, if not all of the facts at least many more of the facts in front of him; the past has happened, ‘over’ in the immediate sense, even if its effects continue into the present. The “man of action” has no such advantage. “History is a strange object, an object which is ourselves”; while “our irreplaceable life, our fierce freedom, find themselves already prefigured, already compromised, already played out in other freedoms, which today are past,” our lives in the present are still irreplaceable, our freedom still fierce because we are not yet past, not yet dead. Weber seeks to “go beyond the domain of the double truth, the dualism of the objectivity of understanding and of moral feeling, to look beyond it for the formula of this singular situation.”
In his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber thus describes “religious efficacy” and “economic efficacy” not as contraries but as “interwoven” phenomena, “exchanging positions so that now one, now the other, plays the role of tutor.” This being so, “history has meaning, but there is no pure development of ideas,” as “meaning arises in contact with contingency”—in the case of capitalism, the unpredictable interaction between two phenomena, both complex and variable, as “human initiative founds a system of life by taking up anew scattered givens.” “The historical understanding which reveals an interior to history still leaves us in the presence of empirical history, with its density and its haphazardness, and does not subordinate it to any hidden reason”; “such is the philosophy without dogmatism which one discerns all through Weber’s studies.” The overall tendency to ‘rationalize’ human life, seen in Protestant theology and in economic calculation, with their “elective affinity” (a phrase Weber borrows from Goethe), but even more in their interaction, can be discerned by the historian, “but only after the fact.” “History does not work according to a model; it is, in fact, the advent of meaning,” meaning something only after the historian sees what has happened.
Merleau-Ponty sees two problems here. If this is the way history works, how could anyone offer a critique of the past? It was what it was—a set of unpredictable configurations. Does his philosophy not lead to cultural relativism, “giv[ing] the same degree of reality and the same value to all civilizations”? Second, isn’t “the decision to investigate all civilizations” itself “the act of a civilization which is different from them, which transforms them,” as André Malraux’s character, A.D., urges in The Temptation of the West? Weber puts his readers in the position of needing “to choose between a history which judges, situates, and organizes—at the risk of finding in the past only a reflection of the troubles and problems of the present—and an indifferent, agnostic history which lines up civilizations one after another like individuals who cannot be compared.” Weber would extricate his thought from this dilemma by observing “our interest in the past: it is ours, and we are its,” each potentially clarifying the other. This being so, “we have just as much right to judge the past as the present.” As Weber himself puts it, “we are ‘cultural men,’ endowed with the capacity consciously to take a position with regard to the world and to give meaning to it” by “abstract[ing] certain phenomena of human existence” and “tak[ing] a position (positive or negative) with regard to their significance.” Defining man as the being capable of bestowing meaning and judging is of course the Nietzschean element in Weber, although it emphasizes the element of rationality in this process more emphatically than Nietzsche does. For Weber, reason, not impassioned creativity, is dispositive, but reason’s power is limited. Knowledge can never exhaust the richness of being, which always generates “unexpected consequences,” “surprises,” including capitalism. “Weber’s phenomenology is not systematic like Hegels’s. It does not lead to an absolute knowledge.” Like Alain, Weber offers a “politics of understanding,” but unlike Alain, in Weber “understanding has learned to doubt itself,” inclining to pessimism, not to optimism. He is no pacifist, admitting that “all politics is violence—even, in its own fashion, democratic politics.” He remains a liberal, like Alain, “reject[ing] nationalism, communism, and pacifism” but “not want[ing] to outlaw them.”
“If history does not have a direction, like a river, but has a meaning, if it teaches us, not a truth, but errors to avoid, if its practice is not deduced from a dogmatic philosophy of history, then it is not superficial to base a politics on the analysis of the political man.” This brings Weber to his famous notion of the “charismatic” man, the one who “animate[s] the political apparatus and makes [his] most personal acts everyone’s affair,” the man who exercising the “art of inventing what will later appear to have been required by the time.” What Merleau-Ponty affirms in Weber is that a genuine philosophy of history “does not break the circle of knowledge and reality but is rather a meditation upon that circle,” a meditation that show “under what conditions a historical dialectic is serious,” when revolutionaries might actually invent something new, make a real revolution. “There were Marxists who understood this, and they were the best.” One of them was Georg Lukács, the greatest thinker of “Western”—i.e., not-Russian—Marxism of his generation.
Theoretically inclined Marxists “found themselves confronted by a problem” at the beginning of the twentieth century, a problem “which had been hidden from Marx by the remnants of Hegelian dogmatism,” his confidence that “history” was moving toward a purpose, an end. Weber had seen that our ideas are “relative to our time,” having “an intrinsic truth that they will teach to us if we succeed in placing them in their proper context, in understanding them rather than merely suffering them.” That is, the study of history makes us “capable of self-criticism,” even if it does not point us to some supposedly inevitable rainbow’s end. But Weber “does not pursue the relativism of relativism to its limits.” he does not see the possibility of “recover[ing] an absolute in the relative, a criterion for critical judgment.
Lukács takes up that challenge, undertaking a quest not for “all possible and actual beings” but for a “coherent arrangement of all the known facts.” “When the subject recognizes himself in history and history in himself, he does not dominate the whole, as the Hegelian philosopher does, but at least he engages in a work of totalization,” an ever-continuing work, “the knowledge of our world in a state of becoming,” a state that “embraces knowledge itself.” History thus becomes “philosophy realized, as philosophy is history formalized, reduced to its internal articulations, to its intelligible structure.” This is what Marxism should be. To say, with Marx, that materialism would “deduce all culture from economics” means “that the relations among men are not the sum of personal acts or personal decisions, but pass through things, the anonymous roles, the common situations, and the institutions where men have projected so much of themselves that their fate is now played out outside them,” as in ‘the economy’ and ‘the state.’ In this, Lukács follows Marx himself, who writes that capital is “not a thing but a social relationship between persons mediated by things.” Under capitalism, things, objects, and the persons who own them dominate the subjects who manufacture them, the proletarians. If this movement is reversed, that “will be the basis for the reintegration of the world with man.” Where Lukács diverges from Marx is when Marx attempts to “claim the very authority of Hegel’s absolute knowledge for his own antidogmatic criticism,” describing his materialist history as immanently rational, reason unformed. In this, Lukács follows Weber: the rational meaning of history cannot be anticipated, only perceived retrospectively. “Rationality is necessary neither in the sense of physical causality, in which the antecedents determine the consequents, nor even in the sense of the necessity of a system, in which the whole precedes and brings to existence what happens.” “Marxism cannot hide the World Spirit in matter” but must “justify in another way the meaning of history,” namely, “by conceiving a historical selection which eliminates the antinomistic realities from the course of history but does not have, in itself and without men’s initiative, the power to create a coherent and homogeneous system.” This type of Marxism is truly revolutionary “precisely because it refuse[s] to be a dogmatic philosophy of history.”
Knowledge or consciousness is already present in man before it becomes consciousness of the social. It is only after human beings have invented certain kinds of social structures that those structures can become “the cradle of the knowledge of society,” as it finally does in Marx, quite apart from his dogmatism. “When one says that Marxism finds a meaning in history, it should not be understood by this that there is an irresistible orientation toward certain ends but rather that there is, immanent in history, a problem or a question in relation to which what happens at each moment can be classified, situated, understood as progress or regression, compared with what happens at other moments,” “accru[ing] with the other results of the past to form a single significant whole.” Each event can teach us something that helps us “bring further precision to the permanent problem of knowing what man and his society are,” through considering “the paradox of a society of exploitation that is nonetheless based on the recognition of man by man”—the dilemma seen not only by Marx but by Hegel. It is the man-to-man politics of recognition that constitutes the criterion for judging whether progress or regression has occurred. “Even in considering the whole of a civilization, its progress is secure only when followed by further progress”; this avoids cultural and/or historical relativism. And it means that “revolution become institution,” revolution that brings with it new socioeconomic and political institutions, “is already decadent if it believes itself to be accomplished,” if it denies the Heraclitean flow. Marx sees this in regard to capitalism, arguing that the new class, the bourgeoisie, by “accentuating the conflict between the demands immanent in production and the forms to which the bourgeois society subjects its production,” proves that the bourgeoisie is not the universal class; the proletariat is. That is, “the capitalist forms are soon regressive or decadent,” although they were progressive in contrast to the feudal aristocracy they replaced, “when compared to the productive forces which capitalism itself has created.” What began as “a projection of human freedom” ends in bourgeois class dictatorship. In keeping Marx’s dialectic in the forefront, Lukács attempts “to preserve the philosophical marrow of Marxism,” its revolutionary meaning, in “a Marxism which incorporates subjectivity,” human freedom, inventiveness, “into history without making it an epiphenomenon” of a materialist dialectic that deprecates such human agency in favor of the supposedly inevitable march of events.
This is why Lukács esteems literary production far more than Marx did. To Lukács, a literary work doesn’t amount to some sort of excretion from economic forces. “Even illusions have some sort of sense and call for deciphering because they always present themselves against the background of a lived relationship with the social whole” as “the expression of a lived world,” not the narrow expression of one economic class, because it shows that class’s “meeting and eventual collision with other classes”—the historical dialectic. The writer of fiction thus has a different task than that of the militant revolutionary activist. If the activist dictates the conduct of literary production, it will become propaganda. It will fail to be what it should be, “the reflection of the whole.” Such activists, once empowered in the regime of their invention, make that regime decadent, ossified, incapable of continuing the historical dialectic in a manner that does not distort dialectical thinking and practice because it mistakes a part for the whole. It no longer truly recognizes fellow human beings as human, as beings capable of dialectical thought and practice.
Lukács identifies what he calls the “historical mission of the proletariat” as “the absolute negation of class, the institution of a classless society” with a “philosophic mission of the advent of truth.” “For the proletariat,” he writes, “the truth is a weapon that brings victory; and the more ruthless, the greater the victory.” The proletarian’s class consciousness, his self-understanding of his condition as an industrial worker, is “not a state of mind, nor is it knowledge,” and “not a theoretician’s conception.” “It is a praxis,” by which he means an “objective possibility,” a perception of what he can do to realize his status as a social being, a being recognized as a man by other men. This “critico-practical revolutionary activity” may be seen in the earlier writings of Marx, particularly in his Theses on Feuerbach. “It is the inner principle of activity, the global project which sustains and animates the productions and actions of a class, which delineates for it both a picture of the world and its tasks in that world, and which, keeping in mind exterior conditions, assigns it a history”—a “cluster of relations of an ideology, a technique, and a movement of productive forces, each involving the others and receiving support from them,” together “producing a qualified phase of social development.” The proletarians are “men who explain themselves to one another,” one—the proletarian— reporting his “contact with the apparatuses of oppression,” another—the Marxist theoretician—bringing “information from another source on this same life and a view of the total struggle”—an exchange between workers who also think and speak and theoreticians who also live, therefore capable “of collecting in their theses what other men are in the process of living.” “The profound philosophical meaning of the notion of praxis is to place us in an order which is not that of knowledge but rather that of communication, exchange, and association”—the “life of the proletariat in the Party,” a life that “carries the working class beyond its immediate reality” while requiring the Party to make itself “accepted by the working class” by “prov[ing] that beyond capitalist history there is another history, wherein one does not have to choose between the role of subject and object,” that one can lead a political life, the life Lukács defines not as Aristotle defines it, as ruling and being ruled, but as an exchange “in which no one commands and no one obeys”—the maximization of freedom. In Lukác’s view, “such a conception of the Party is not a corollary of Marxism—it is its very center.” Lukács’s Marxism registers modern political philosophy’s valorization of freedom instead of its recurrence to ‘ancient’ fatalism in the form of historical determinism.
That recurrence, when committed by the Party, makes the Party “no longer the laboratory of history and the beginning of a true society” but a dictator not by the proletariat over the bourgeoisie but a dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat. The Party’s claims “must not be imposed on the proletarians against their will, because their rejection signifies that subjectively the proletariat is not ripe for them and , thus, that these theses are premature and, finally, false,” in need of being explaining them anew, “once the teaching of events will have made them convincing”; “the only valid politics, is the one which makes itself accepted by the workers,” who should be “led, but not maneuvered, into “bring[ing] the seal of truth to the politics of the Party.” Lukács is careful to insist that “the truth of Marxism is not the truth one attributes to the natural sciences, the similarity of an idea and its external ideatum,” but “rather nonfalsity, the maximum guarantee against error that men may demand and get,” thus revisable when new experiences make such revision plausible. “One can never be sure that” a given political idea “will not be challenged at some future date”; “truth itself is then conceived as a process of indefinite verification, and Marxism is, at one and the same time, a philosophy of violence and a philosophy without dogmatism.” It is a philosophy of violence inasmuch as politics requires that decisions be made, choices for one thing, against another, and that those choices must be enforced. But those decisions are themselves subject to revision by a self-critical Party. “The essential feature of Lukác’s thought was no longer to put the total meaning of history in a mythical ‘world spirit’ but on a level with the proletarians’ condition in a provable and verifiable process without an occult background.” If “the coming-to-be of truth” is “the core of history,” Marxism conceived this way has “the validity of a strict philosophy,” a genuinely dialectical exercise. Indeed, “he very concept of man must be rendered dialectical,” since to posit ‘Man’ as “a positive nature,” as a set of “attributes,” loses the flow of being, “the principle of universal strife” discovered by Heraclitus and refined by Marx and further refined by Lukács. “If one goes deeply enough into relativism,” if one pushes further than Weber did, “one finds there a transcendence of relativism.” One finds that reality does not exist in the Platonic sense of permanence; reality becomes, “and it does not become without the collaboration of thought.” Humanism ‘freezes’ man as an essence, but “our task, rather, is to make the abstract fluid, diffuse it in history, ‘understand’ it as process.” History is a “permanent interrogation,” and Marxism properly interpreted “intensifies our questioning” instead of providing ‘the answer.’
All this notwithstanding, Merleau-Ponty cautions, “there was something justified in the opposition” Lukács’s Marxism encountered when the ‘Eastern’ Marxists, the Marxist-Leninists, took notice of it. Lenin had published Materialism and Empirio-criticism, very much to sustained applause among Party members, arguing that “thought is a product of the brain and through the brain and, through the brain, of the external reality.” Merleau-Ponty dismisses this as a slightly more sophisticated form of naive realism: “He forgot that an effect does not resemble its cause and that knowledge, being an effect of things, is located in principle outside its object and attains only its internal counterpart,” bringing Marxism back to “the pre-Hegelian” or pre-historicist “theory of knowledge.” Lenin “never asks himself by what miracle knowledge carries on a relationship with a suprahistorical object, a relationship which is itself removed from history.” This amounts to a “new dogmatism, which puts the knowing subject outside the fabric of history and gives it access to absolute being, releases it from the duty of self-criticism, exempts Marxism from applying its own principles to itself, and settles dialectical thought, which by its own movement rejected it, in a massive positivity.” More interestingly, Merleau-Ponty remarks that Marx’s thought exhibits “the same discordancy between naive realism and dialectical inspiration.” The record of Marx’s genuinely dialectical thought occurs in his pre-1850 writings,” and Friedrich Engels’ much later Dialectics of Nature reduces dialectics to a way of describing history, including a historicized nature. “Engels does not concede to philosophy even the right of putting the results of science into an original dialectic,” making philosophy into “a particular science which is concerned with the laws of thought,” only. So, “the conflict between ‘Western Marxism’ and Leninism is already found in Marx as a conflict between dialectical thought and naturalism.” Merleau-Ponty finds some truth in Leninism, nonetheless: “dialectical and philosophical Marxism is suited to soaring periods, when revolution appears close at hand, while scientism predominates in stagnant periods…when the weight of infrastructures makes itself felt,” as they did in 1908, when Lenin wrote his book in exile, with revolution seemingly far away. This is the flaw of Lukács’s Marxism; it “lack[s] the means of expressing the inertia of the infrastructures, the resistance of economic and even natural conditions, and the swallowing-up of ‘personal relationships’ in things.” For his part, Lenin “preserves the dialectic but embalms it, outside ourselves, in an external reality.” Theoretically/philosophically, this prevents the thinker from self-knowledge; practically/politically, “it means replacing total praxis by a technician-made action, replacing the proletariat by the professional revolutionary,” himself ensconced in a bureaucratic apparatus.
In Leninism, “the conflict between dialectic and realism is therefore not overcome, for, as we have said, if communism gives lip service to the dialectic, it cannot bring itself to renounce it.” In the Moscow Trials, we saw “the revolution which no longer wanted to be a revolution, or inversely an established regime which mimics the revolution.” This, Merleau-Ponty argues, is a problem not merely with Leninist Marxism but with the Marxism of Marx: “It could not maintain itself at that sublime point which it hoped it could find in the life of the Party, that point where matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, past and future, discipline and judgment.” It could not achieve the dialectical synthesis, the end of ‘history.’ “There is no revolution which is critical of itself,” and “yet it is through this program of continual criticism that revolution earns its good name.”
Moving to the problem of the revolution in action, not in thought, Merleau-Ponty considers Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s ill-ended rival. The “theoretical equivocalness of materialism and of dialectic” appears there, too. Trotsky hoped to overcome this, however. He understood that “revolutionary realism” aims not only at “external results” (technology can do that) but in the understanding of those results by human beings. “Action is the pedagogy of the masses, and explaining one’s actions to the masses is acting again.” There is “no other guarantee against non-sense” than “the increasing participation of the masses in revolutionary politics and in the increasing transparency of history.” Trotsky compares “historical reason” to natural selection,” the elimination of “false solutions” in the face of conditions that extinguish them. As in natural selection, “nowhere is there an already written future”; “the Party neither knows nor sees all.” At the same time, it must maintain its absolute authority, enforcing its decisions precisely in order to test them in the external, material world. “History will become manifest on the condition that all that is lived by the workers is clarified by the politics which is proposed to them by the Party and which they then adopt as their own.” The Party concentrates “the proletarian forces scattered throughout the world”; without the Party, “truth ‘in itself’ would never become manifest or fulfill itself as truth” because “it is nothing less than the universal,” the proletariat, “on the march.” Given this claim, Trotsky’s actions against Stalin contradicted Trotsky’s thought, as his minority faction “kept its right to defend its ideas but not the right to act as a party within the Party,” which must decide, enforce—rule. (Stalin, of course, denied both of those “rights.”) Trotsky “had “no other procedure at his disposal to substitute for the methods of the Party”; “he must allow himself to be eliminated rather than to lack discipline.” “He hesitated to situate truth outside the Party because Marxism had taught him that truth could not in principle reside anywhere but at the point where the proletariat and the organization which embodies it are joined.” “As a Marxist, he was not able to foresee a derailment of the dialectic in the country of the revolution,” never coming “to consider the bureaucracy as a class,” a ruling class, not capitalist but not above exploiting the proletariat, either. Marx himself “never conceived of a collective and planned economy which was not for the benefit of the proletariat because” his dialectic “postulates that the end of private property is the end of exploitation.” How wrong he was. Marxist collectivism turned out to be “the fetish of fetishes.” “Passivity toward the Party is the stance that discipline and centralism take when the Party ceases to be democratic.” (But was it ever?)
At any rate, Marxian “scientific socialism” “grants itself the position of an absolute knowledge, and, at the same time, it authorizes itself to take from history by violence a meaning which is there but profoundly hidden.” To reveal that meaning, Lenin deems it necessary “to hit heads” in “an interminable effort…to form a classless society and to bring history by iron and fire to express its meaning.” That is, Marx’s dialectical materialism recapitulates the dilemma of idealism, and especially of Hegelian idealism, which conceives of history as a slaughterbench. “Bolshevik practice and Trotskyism are of the same lineage and are legitimate consequences of Marx.” In each of these cases, the possibility that “a Party born of the proletarian movement and brought to power by it might not only degenerate but might actually turn against the revolution,” since dialectical materialism supposed that “as soon as the barrier of private appropriation is done away with,” things will turn out well. In the Bolshevik organization and in any Marxist organization, “and perhaps…any revolutionary organization,” “revolution as continued self-criticism needs violence to establish itself and ceases to be self-critical to the extent that it practices violence.” Whether via Trotskyism or via some still newer Left, there isn’t “much sense in trying Marx all over again if his philosophy is involved in this failure,” if this failure is built into Marxism. What is needed is a conception of revolution as a “continued rupture with history,” never to be fully realized in a permanent regime change because permanence is impossible in the face of historical flux. To attempt to make the revolutionary regime permanent is only to return to the violence and terror of the revolution within the new regime, perpetuating exploitation, now exercised by a new ruling class, which turns out not to be the proletariat but the bureaucracy. In sum, “since the Marxist philosophy believes it possible to express the weight of social reality only by situating the dialectic wholly in the object”—in socioeconomic classes, not also within human beings themselves—the “dialectic in action responds to adversity”—to political and other setbacks, to victories by ‘reactionaries’—either “by means of terror exercised in the name of a hidden truth”—hidden, that is, from the consciousness of the ‘reactionaries,’ including proletarians who resist the Party line—or by “opportunism”—bureaucratic careerism, perhaps including corruption.
Sartre also offered a critique of Marxist orthodoxy and a substantially revised ‘Marxism’ decisively affected by his own democratized Nietzcheism and Heideggerianism, ‘Existentialism.’ Merleau-Ponty lauds the effort: “It was good that an independent philosopher attempted to analyze communist practice directly, without the mediation of ideology,” as Sartre had done in a series of essays published in 1952-53, later published as a collection under the title, The Communists and the Peace. [1]
“Sartre ‘understands’ communist politics, justifies it from the proletarian point of view” while “mak[ing] it his own for reasons quite different from those of the communists,” indeed “practically opposed to them” since “what Sartre contributes is a brief on the failure of the dialectic.” He replaces the ‘objectivism’ of the Marxists with “extreme subjectivism”; for him, revolutionary action is “the immediate result of our volitions,” regardless of external conditions. Marxist objectivism and existentialist subjectivism share one thing: both assume that radical change is possible, even if in Marxism society will be modified by “a sort of political engineer” while in Existentialism it can be modified by “pure creation” effected by individual wills acting together. Either way, “the Party’s action is not subject to the criteria of meaning”; “the philosophy of pure object and the philosophy of pure subject are equally terroristic,” agreeing “only about the consequences.”
Sartre is a “loner who incorporates communism into his universe and thinks of it with no regard for what it thinks of itself.” He is, however, an “ultrabolshevik” in the sense that he contends that “he who is not with the C.P. is against it and against the proletariat which surrounds it.” He wills this, rather than endorsing it on the ordinary grounds of the Marxian ‘scientific socialism’ guided by dialectical materialism. He wills Bolshevism because he negates capitalism. Proletarian violence may or may not bring revolution, but at least it isn’t capitalism. This negation is self-justifying, inasmuch as “the will believes only in itself, it is its own source”; it is pure freedom from what currently is. “If everything comes from freedom, if the workers are nothing, not even proletarians, before they create the Party, the Party rests on nothing that has been established, not even on their common history. Either the party of the proletarians never will exist, or, if it exists, it will be their continued creation and the emblem of their nonbeing, itself a pure act or relationship, like the categorical imperative from which it was born.” Without the Party, there would be no proletariat, since thinking of the proletariat ‘objectively,’ as a being ‘out there,’ compromises the will, as indeed does “everything that until now has been called nature and history.” Because in Sartre’s “intuitive philosophy” nothing must compromise the will, “any idea of controlling [Party] leaders is therefore out of the question.”
“This regime without secret ballot, without a minority, without an opposition, calls itself ‘real’ democracy—not because it extends the formal guarantees of a bourgeois regime to the realities of government and production” (it surely does not) “but because it creates out of nothing the power of the powerless, an enormous undertaking which cannot afford contestation.” The militant obeys orders, experiencing as he does “ecstasy in the Party,” the ecstasy of “pure action.” As Sartre writes, “the Party is his freedom.” No standing back, no thinking of the Party or one’s fellow Party members as objects, no doubt, no uncertainty; such things, Sartre writes, “can only paralyze action.” “‘Facts’ are always circumvented by decisions,” against which there should be “no means of appeal,” since they are themselves not the result of discussion but of the leaders’ willing. This radicalizes Marx’s famous dictum, that the point of his philosophy is not to understand the world but to change it. But whereas “for Sartre conscious awareness is an absolute” which “gives meaning,” for Marx, “conscious awareness, that of the leader like that of the militants, is itself a fact” which “either answers to what the period expects, or it does not.” It is “the power that it either does or does not have to carry the proletariat along, to increase consciousness and power in it—these are the criteria of truth.” Yes, “truth is to be made, but to be made according to what the proletariat and its adversaries are and do in the same moment.” Sartre replies that the deliberation required to make this work is uncertain, all-too-uncertain, that action must be founded upon certainty, upon resolution uncompromised by assessment of probabilities. “Political time is atomized for him into a series of decisions taken in the presence of death.” “The Party manufactures meaning.”
Merleau-Ponty, well, doubts. “In order to struggle, it is not enough to know that capitalism is the enemy”; one must know a thing or two about it, a thing or two about whether a given action against it—say, a strike—will bring the masses along. Such an examination “knocks the wind out of pure action, because several estimations are possible and because the best one is subject to discussion.” “There is no action worthy of the name which is ‘pure action'”; “ultimately, pure action is either suicide or murder.” Put in biological terms, “in an organism there is no action without a nervous system, but the nervous system endows an organism with a life which it is not adequate to explain”; put in political terms, the Party must function as the brain of the working class, the organ by which it “accomplishes real work.” “The Party gives the militant something to will beyond himself: a line, a perspective of action, both established after an examination, not only of the relations of force, but also of the way the proletariat lives and interprets the situation.” Sartre refuses to give this give-and-take, this plurality, this capacity for dialectic, to the Party either in its thoughts or its actions. “He never evokes the basic Marxist hope of resolution in true action, that is to say, actions fitted to internal relations of the historical situation, which await nothing but action to ‘take,’ to constitute a form in movement,” a real revolution. “For Marx there was, and for Sartre there is not, a coming-to-be of meaning in institutions.” Sartre eschews the material, even a material conceived as dialectical. Merleau-Ponty regards this as senseless, in both senses of the term.
True, Marxism-Leninism denied the existence of any criterion for action ‘above’ history defined as the course of events. No God, no nature. “But there was a practical criterion: whatever can be explained to and be accepted by the proletariat”—which, recall, is the one universal class—not “through pure obedience but in conscience, is proletarian.” “Revolution, then, is not made all at once; it comes at the end of an endless purification, it demands a party of iron.” “But the underground reality of socialism,” the rule of the universal class, “guarantees these violences and grounds them in truth.” And here Merleau-Ponty also doubts. “The assurance of being the carrier of truth is vertiginous,” not clarifying. “It is in itself violence,” “authoriz[ing] a state of frenzy belonging to the leader alone,” a leader confident that if “the workers do not understand” his actions today, “they will understand tomorrow,” with gratitude “for having preceded them toward truth.” This is a dialectic of dogmatism. “Those who will be shot would understand that they did not die in vain,” but “the only problem is that they will no longer be there to understand it”; “such are the poisoned fruits of willed truth“: “In itself it is madness.”; “we sink into the revolution a into a delirium.” And this is why the Bolshevik in power “has to collide with Stalin someday,” a collision “prepared by the idea of a materialistic dialectic.” What could be more dialectical and material, at the same time, than the Great Purge? (Perhaps mass murder, classicide or genocide, a possibility that Merleau-Ponty does not mention? And, less importantly, does he not more than suggest that Koestler was right?)
Returning to Sartre and his rigid distinction “between the ‘certain,’ the meanings of pure consciousness, and the ‘probable,’ that which emerges from the phenomenological experience,” this is “the same philosopher who, analyzing the act of reading, saw nothing between scribbling, a book in its physical existence, and the meaning attributed to it by the reader’s consciousness,” nothing in-between, no “meaning ordinarily given to it,” which changes over time. Or, it might be added (as Merleau-Ponty prefers not to do, although his whole enterprise depends upon its possibility), that a reader might interpret the book in the terms the author intended. Sartre’s willed meaning of texts and indeed of everything else leads him “to a sort of systematic mythology.” For him, “there is no deciphering or truth of a society, because no deciphering ever expresses anything but a personal, more or less ample, perspective and because degrees of truth are worth nothing when it comes to deciding, that is to say, to presuming everything.” In politics, this makes the Party leaders, if not gods then priests; “no matter what they do, they are consecrated.” “When men wish to create things ex nihilo, then the supernatural reappears.” “We are far from Marxism,” Merleau-Ponty drily observes.
And from reality, including the reality of the self-certifying will itself. What distinguishes Sartre from Marxism is “his philosophy of the cogito,” which “perseveres in its claim to be everything that we are.” “But in the end it is the cogito itself which demands its own disavowal and puts itself in question, first by the clarity of thought and then by the obscurity of devotion.” Willing cannot be pure, cannot avoid thought, since only autonomic responses are devoid of thought. Willing cannot be pure when it commands action, either, since by itself it does not know to whose orders it wills itself to obey. That is, pure willing, if it existed, would be random, revolutionary only by accident.
Merleau-Ponty quickly adds that this ‘Marxian’ critique of Sartre does not endorse Marxism itself. He has not turned away from his earlier critique. Sartre’s “antidialectic” well describes “existing communism,” the communism of the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. “If in fact, as we believe, communism is what Sartre says it is, what attitude can and should one have toward it, and how can one evaluate Sartre’s attitude?” Sartre’s position on communism makes sense for those who live in the capitalist world, not for someone who lives in the communist world. The Soviet Communists haven’t given up, and so when Sartre “transmutes” communism “into Sartre,” that simply won’t do. “A philosopher’s temptation is to believe that he has really joined others and has attained the concrete universal when he has given them a meaning in his universe, because for him his universe is being itself.” It might be more accurate to say this of a philosopher living in a democracy, inasmuch as few earlier philosophers were especially tempted to “join with others,” only with fellow philosophers and potential philosophers. Merleau-Ponty may see this, if a bit obscurely, when he observes that “literature and politics” are “distinct activities,” that to maintain this distinction is “perhaps finally the only way to be as faithful to action as to literature.” “To propose unity of action to a party when one is a writer is perhaps to testify that one remains in the writer’s world,” which remains in the realms of theory and imagination. Previous philosophers had spoken of philosophy itself, which becomes literature only when the philosopher chooses to write. Such philosophers took on the responsibility of choosing to write guided by prudential, not theoretical reason. Merleau-Ponty inclines to substitute ‘history’ for prudence, likening literature and politics to “two layers of a symbolic life or history.” But he does suggest that when “the conditions of the times are such that this symbolic life is torn apart and on cannot at the same time be both a free writer and a communist, or a communist and an oppositionist,” “one must then go back, attack obliquely what could not be changed frontally, and look for an action other than communist action.” Some sort of exotericism, then? No joining with many others, then.
Dialectic exists “at the junction of a subject, of being, and of other subjects: between those opposites, in that reciprocal action, in that relation between an inside and an outside, between the elements of that constellation, in that becoming, which not only becomes but becomes for itself, there is room, without contradiction and without magic, for relationships with double meanings, for reversals, for opposite and inseparable truths, for sublations, for a perpetual genesis, for the plurality of levels orders.” Neither Marxist dialectic nor Sartrian existentialism registers this, and “nothing is more foreign to it than the Kantian conception of an ideality of the world which is the same in everyone.” The dialectic remains, but not the dialectic that serves “the pretension” of its termination “in an end of history [Marx, Lenin], in a permanent revolution [Trotsky], or in a regime which, being the contestation of itself, would no longer need to be contested from the outside and, in fact, would no longer have anything outside it [Sartre].” It may rather be that there may be “more of a future in a regime that does not intend to remake history from the ground up but only to change it” without “once again entering the cycle of revolution.” A regime exists “in the realm of the probable,” not in the ‘absolute.’ The Soviet regime of 1955 “holds to the miracle that the dictatorship [of the proletariat] may use the bourgeoisie’s weapons without becoming something like a bourgeoisie,” but that is what it has done. “There would be something healthy in this disillusionment if it were lucid,” but it can’t afford to be lucid, as lucidity on that point would mean abandoning its claim to rule, its self-description as “the fatherland of the revolution,” its “fiction of proletarian power, of direct democracy, and of the withering-away of the State.” This might be described as a noble lie, if only it were noble. What remains in it of the noble, of “the revolutionary point of honor,” is its opposition to capitalism.
And so Merleau-Ponty calls for “the birth of a noncommunist Left,” a “new left” that dismisses the claims of legitimacy uttered by both communists and capitalists (Marxism, ‘free enterprise’)—the “philosophies they claim are clearly mere ornaments”—and works to avoid their collision, which “would be the greatest of catastrophes, since those who would die” in a Third World War “would not even know why they were dying.” This new Left will “not believe in the solution of the social problem through the power of the proletarian class or its representatives.” Not dictatorship but parliamentarism and “democratic action” should be the pathways taken, since they leave room for “self-criticism,” the avoidance and indeed the critique of “dogma.” “The defects of capitalism remain defects; but the critique which denounces them must be freed from any compromise with an absolute of the negation which, in the long run, is germinating new oppressions.” This sounds rather like some form of democratic socialism in the European sense of ‘social democracy.’
Merleau-Ponty’s version of ‘intersubjectivity’ ought to be preferred to the other stances taken by the Left. But to leave morality and politics on the level of intersubjectivity, denying not only a God ‘above’ the subjects recognizing one another but a nature, some sort of innate character in human beings that makes the subjects worth recognizing, one to another, may not make much sense in theory, however much better it would be in practice than the several ‘Leftisms’ he criticizes.
Note
- Originally published in 1964, translated into English and published in 1968 by George Braziller.
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