Maurice Merleau-Ponty Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was a French philosopher mostly known for his work in phenomenology and existential philosophy. He attempted to maintain a political position that was neither communist nor anticommunist, and he spoke for the necessity of a philosophy of history for political thought.

Born on March 14, 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer, MerleauPonty attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was a devout Catholic, and his interest in politics developed slowly. In the early 1930s he joined the Esprit groups, which gathered left-wing Christians with the aim of developing different aspects of French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier’s personalism. It was during his association with these groups that he first studied the work of German philosopher Karl Marx. Before earning his doctorate in 1945, Merleau-Ponty broke with his faith, read the works of Russian Marxist revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and made friends in nonorthodox Marxist circles. During the German occupation, he also took part in intellectual resistance groups, which led to a friendship with existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

Together with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, another French philosopher, in 1945 Merleau-Ponty founded the journal Les Temps Modernes, of which he was the de facto political editor. As such, he published a great number of articles, mostly by noncommunists, strongly criticizing French and liberal politics. He himself wrote political editorials, and in 1946 he published a series of texts that were eventually published as Humanism and Terror (1947). In this work, he defines a noncommunist and humanistic Marxism that recognizes the inevitability of violence in politics and seeks to reorient violence toward achieving the recognition of man by man. He concludes by saying that since there is no immediate hope for a proletarian revolution, everything must be done to maintain the chances of the working class to once again become an important political force. Most important, war must be avoided. As long as the Soviet Union maintains and shows that it does not want war, liberal regimes must strive to coexist peacefully with it. Merleau-Ponty thus positioned himself to be able to end his sympathy for the communists if they were to seek war with the West. More generally, he adopted a phenomenological attitude toward politics, seeking to understand the present as completely as possible without prejudging its meaning. Instead he sought to find this meaning in the events and actions where it manifested itself and opened new possibilities for action.

In 1952 Merleau-Ponty was given a chair at the Collège de France. In his courses he defined a philosophy of history based on the concept of institution and on a new understanding of the dialectic. The reasons for his break with Marxism were published in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). He defended then the idea of a new left-wing politics that would criticize capitalism as well as communism, abandoning the idea of revolution. He suggested an unending and progressive work against misery and exploitation, which would build on past political projects and make possible future radical critiques of capitalism. During this period he also grew closer to French politician Pierre Mendès France, with whom he collaborated.

In the preface to Signs (1960), Merleau-Ponty outlined the necessity of reading Marx as a philosopher and put forth the idea that philosophy and politics are interdependent insofar as through them, humans are in relation with others in the world. In manuscripts published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible (1964), he sought to discover a new ontology aimed at understanding the foundations of such relations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty died in Paris on May 3, 1961, before finishing work on this project.

Bibliography:

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Adventures of the Dialectic. 1955.Translated by Joseph Bien. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Translated and with notes by John O’Neill. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press. 1969.
Sense and Non-Sense. 1948.Translated and with a preface by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
1960. Translated and with an introduction by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, Ill:: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Whiteside, Kerry H. Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

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