SOURCE: Dauenhauer, Bernard P. “One Central Link between Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Language and His Political Thought.” Tulane Studies in Philosophy 29 (December 1980): 57-80.

[In the following essay, Dauenhauer examines the place of silence in both Merleau-Ponty's linguistic theories and his thoughts on political action.]

Through much of his career, Merleau-Ponty was concerned both with the topic of language and with the topic of politics. But he himself never explicitly connected these two strands of thought. Nonetheless, at least one central link binds these strands together and, in so doing, strengthens each of them. This link is provided by his recognition of the importance of the phenomenon of silence.

I will begin this essay by noting something of the range of the contexts in which Merleau-Ponty employs the term ‘silence’ and its cognates. From this survey it will be clear that Merleau-Ponty did not explicitly thematize the phenomenon of silence even though he obviously recognized it. Then I will argue that, when the phenomenon of silence is properly thematized, it provides evidence for some of Merleau-Ponty's principal claims concerning both discursive expression and political action.

I

The term ‘silence’ appears in many different contexts in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.¹ There are regions of silence in a body which has lost a limb (PP [Phenomenology of Perception], 364); there is the tacit or silent cogito which lies behind the spoken cogito (PP, 302ff); there is the silent language whereby perception communicates with us (PP, 48-49); there is the tacitly understood body image which is the background against which gesture, perception, and speech unfold (PP, 100-102); there is the primordial silence which lies beneath the chatter of words and which the action of speaking breaks (PP, 184); there is the silence of primary, ante-predicative consciousness in which appear both what words mean and what things mean (PP, xv).

Consider next his The Visible and the Invisible.² There is my body which silences the buzzing of appearances (VI [The Visible and the Invisible], 8); there is the silence of the world which must be made to say what it means to say (VI, 39); there is the silence from which language lives (VI, 126); there is the silence and speech which philosophy reconverts into one another (VI, 129).

These lists, and similar lists could be compiled from other works of Merleau-Ponty, show both that throughout his career Merleau-Ponty regularly resorted to the term ‘silence’ to point to key features of many phenomena and that the phenomenon of silence itself, though it played a large role in his thought, was not explicitly thematized by Merleau-Ponty. That is to say, Merleau-Ponty did not distinguish in any precise way between the muteness of that which is other than expressive and the silence which is fundamentally ingredient in all expression.

In fact, there are uses of the term ‘silence’ in Merleau-Ponty which point to that which is in principle beyond thematization. In his discussion of spatiality in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says:

Thus, since every conceivable being is related either directly or indirectly to the perceived world, and since the perceived world is grasped only in terms of direction, we cannot dissociate being from oriented being, and there is no occasion to ‘find a basis for’ space or to ask what is the level of all levels. The primordial level is on the horizon of all our perceptions, but it is a horizon which cannot in principle ever be reached and thematized in our express perception.

(PP 253, my emphasis)

In some cases, Merleau-Ponty uses the term ‘silence’ in just this same way, namely, to point to that which in principle cannot be dealt with thematically. In the same vein, he speaks in Phenomenology of Perception, of an “original past, a past which has never been a present” (PP, 242), of one's history which must be the continuation of a prehistory (PP, 254), and of a primary opinion which antedates all opinions (PP, 396).

But Jacques Taminiaux, in an excellent essay entitled “Experience et expression,”³ has called to attention an evolution of capital importance in Merleau-Ponty's thought about both perception and expression. One finds in Phenomenology of Perception the juxtaposition of two themes between which there is an insoluble tension. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a natal place of sense which resides in the silence of an originary, pre-predicative consciousness. With respect to this pre-predicative consciousness, expression is secondary and derivative. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a pure expressiveness without support in a primordial silence, an always new realization of meaning without guarantee in any fundamental locus of meaning.

The first theme, which Taminiaux calls the positivist theme, would have it that there is a primordial experience, namely perception, which precedes expression. The perceived precedes language “as an original text precedes its translation, which translation is of second rank in comparison with the original.” (RE, 103).

The second theme, which Taminiaux calls this theme of art, would have it that, in Merleau-Ponty's words, “The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, is the act of bringing truth into being.” (PP, xx).

According to Taminiaux, the tension between these two themes is overcome in Merleau-Ponty's later work. In The Visible and the Invisible, neither expression nor the world of silent perception is independent of the other. Rather, they necessarily encroach upon one another. In Taminiaux' words:

The world of silence is the perceptual world, the Lebenswelt, which calls for an expression which in a sense it already contains but which is nonetheless a creation of it. Expression, then, produces meaning, creates meaning, and unveils an already-there of meaning. Expression so to speak precedes itself in such a way that there is no place for positing on the one side an originary domain of silent experience and on the other side expression itself as a second stratum. … The experience of Being, then, is not on the hither side of expression. It is thanks to expression that experience comes about. Experience is just as much a matter of expression as it is of perception. And likewise expression is just as much a matter of perception as it is of speech.

(RE, 107)

In this new conception of the chiasm, the intertwining of perception and expression, each of them is understood as a field of differences in which there can be no fully positive or simply present entity. Perception involves a latent invisibility in the visible. And expression involves a latent silence in the expression itself.

Though I have some reservations both about the completeness of Merleau-Ponty's eventual overcoming of the tension found in Phenomenology of Perception and, to a less significant extent, about some of Taminiaux' formulations of the problem and its solution, in the main I find in Taminiaux' essay some warrant for the basic legitimacy of the approach I wish to take in this essay. I find warrant for attempting to thematize the silence which is latent in expression. This thematizing of silence gives rise to the central theses I wish to defend here.

My primary thesis is: The phenomenon of silence, when properly thematized, both requires and provides evidence for some of Merleau-Ponty's principal claims concerning two major forms of expression, namely, discursive expression and political action. A preliminary thesis is that, though Merleau-Ponty himself did not present us with an explicit thematization of silence, his works do show that he did take note of several of the basic features of the silence which pervades and bounds the field of discursive expression.

II

Let me defend now this preliminary thesis. The intentional analysis of the phenomenon of silence, as I have shown elsewhere,⁴ reveals that silence has at least the four following characteristics. First, silence is an active intentional performance which is required for the concrete clarification of the sense of intersubjectivity. Second, in its pure occurrences, silence does not directly intend an already determinate object of any sort. Third, silence, motivated by finitude and awe, is a cut or suspension which interrupts an “et cetera” of some particular stream of intentional performances intending determinate objects of some already specified sort. Fourth, silence is not the correlative opposite of discourse, or expression, but rather establishes and maintains an oscillation or tension among the distinguishable levels of discursive expression and between the zone of discursive expression and the zones of non-discursive experience.

The phenomenon of silence with which I am concerned here, then, is that which appears in the creases between perception and desire on the one hand and discourse on the other, which pervades discourse, which becomes manifest at the termination of discourse whether that termination be a return to perception or a turn to action. Merleau-Ponty has recognized all of these dimensions of the phenomenon of silence.

Perhaps Merleau-Ponty's most concise articulation of the scope of the phenomenon of silence is to be found in The Prose of the World. He says:

Languages are so sensitive to the interventions of general history and to their own using only because they are secretly starved for changes that give them means of making themselves expressive once again. Thus there is indeed an interior of language, a signifying intention which animates linguistic events and, at each moment, makes language a system capable of its own self-recovery and self-confirmation. But this intention exhausts itself to the extent that it is fulfilled. For its aim to be realized, it must not be completely realized, and for something to be said, it must not be said absolutely.⁵

Merleau-Ponty goes on to say that this essential incompleteness in discursive expression is like the essential incompleteness of perception. But further, expression is revivified in and through its renewed contact with perception. Thus, between concrete perceptual performances and concrete discursive performances there is a gap which is required for the vivacity of both streams of performances. This gap had already been pointed to in Phenomenology of Perception when Merleau-Ponty wrote: “The real has to be described, not constructed or formed. Which means that I cannot put perception in the same category as the syntheses represented by judgments, acts, or predications (PP, x).” This gap, insofar as it is sustained and maintained in the interest of the vivacity of both perception and discursive expression is silence.

The importance of silence within the zone of discursive expression is manifested by the phenomenon of hearing or listening which is an essential ingredient in discourse. In a passage in Phenomenology of Perception which bristles with the tension singled out by Taminiaux, Merleau-Ponty says:

Just as the sense-giving intention which has set in motion the other person's speech is not an explicit thought, but a certain lack which is asking to be made good, so my taking up of this intention is not a process of thinking on my part, but a synchronizing change of my own existence, a transformation of my being.

(PP, 183-184)

The same point, in a less perplexing context, is made in “The Child's Relation to Others.” There he says:

There is a sort of indistinction between the act of speaking and the act of hearing. The word is not understood or even heard unless the subject is ready to pronounce it himself, and inversely, every subject who speaks carries himself toward the one who is listening. In a dialogue, the participants occupy both poles at once, and it is this that explains why the phenomenon of ‘speaking’ can pass into that of ‘hearing.’⁶

This same phenomenon, from another vantage point, is described in “The Philosopher and His Shadow.”

Just as the perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothing, but on the contrary mark out by themselves the fields of possible variation in the same thing and in the same world), so the works and thought of a philosopher are also made of certain articulations between things said.⁷

What holds true of philosophers and their discourse holds true for the discursive expressions of all men.

Finally, the phenomenon of silence in question here shows itself at the termination of discursive expression. Each man's discursive expression must be consigned to others for its own perdurance. As Merleau-Ponty concludes in his late “Introduction” to Signs:

Thus things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us. … All those we have loved, detested, known, or simply glimpsed speak through our voice. … Our traces mix and intermingle; they make a single wake of ‘public durations.’

(S [Signs], 19)

These references to many parts of Merleau-Ponty's work are sufficient to establish my preliminary thesis. That is, the phenomenon of silence, with the four characteristics I identified above, was recognized by Merleau-Ponty. What he said about silence, even if he did not develop the topic thematically, is consistent with the account of silence I have proposed. I can now turn to the development of my primary thesis, namely that the phenomenon of silence both requires and provides evidence for some of Merleau-Ponty's principal claims concerning two major forms of expression, namely, discursive expression and political action.

III

It is well known that from his earliest period Merleau-Ponty denied the sensefulness or possibility of perfect or complete expression.⁸ I will not, therefore, belabor this point. But it is useful to stress that this denial is not based on an experienced or inferred defect in expression. Rather, it is of the very being of expression to preclude completion or settled perfection. All expression must be permeable to interruption and renovation. This fundamental position of Merleau-Ponty's is both required by and supported by the experience of silence as an essential constituent in all interruption of a prior “et cetera.” And each expression finds its full sense only when held in tension both with other expressions and with non-expressive experience. It is silence which both interrupts expressions and joins them to other expressions and to non-expressive experience.

The denial of the possibility of perfect and complete expression has several facets which are worth recalling here. First, there can be no pure thought which expression only haltingly and defectively manifests. Already in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty denied that thought could be some internal thing which existed in independence from both words and the perceptual world. “‘Pure’ thought,” he says, “reduces itself to a certain void of consciousness, to a momentary desire.” (PP, 183). And in reflecting upon Husserl's inachievable attempt to develop universal rigorous science, Merleau-Ponty saw that in man's investigation both of things and of himself, there is no formal a priori which assures him of mastery in advance. The idea of philosophy as a rigorous science must always appear with a question mark.⁹

Just as there cannot be pure thought, so, secondly, there cannot be an ideal language. An ideal language would not only capture some pure and perfect thought but it would be completely at the disposal of the speaker. In fact, however, we always speak a language that transcends us. Even our own sayings defy our complete control. “To give expression … is to ensure, by the use of words already used, that the new intention carries on the heritage of the past, it is at a stroke to incorporate the past into the present, and weld that present to a future. …” (PP, 392) Analogously, since nothing is ever definitively acquired and thereafter permanently possessed, there can be no universal painting.¹⁰

Merleau-Ponty succinctly summarizes the sort of connection he finds between thought and language in The Prose of the World:

… Language is not the servant of meaning and does not govern meaning. There is no subordination or anything but a secondary distinction between them. … In speaking or writing, we do not refer to some thing to say which is before us distinct from any speech. What we have to say is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said.

(PW, [The Prose of the World] 112)¹¹

Not only is there neither a pure thought nor an ideal language, but, thirdly, there is likewise no unequivocally privileged type of expression. (There are modes of expression, e.g., dance, speech, political action, etc. And there are multiple types of expression in each mode. Thus there is scientific discourse, familial discourse, moral discourse, philosophical discourse, etc., each of which is a type of expression belonging to the discursive mode.) It is true that there are passages in Merleau-Ponty's works where a preeminent status is apparently allotted to philosophical discourse. I think, though, that it is inconsistent with the main thrust of Merleau-Ponty's thought to assign an unequivocal primacy to any particular type of expression. Perhaps the passages in which Merleau-Ponty apparently accords such a primacy to philosophy are to be regarded as remnants of that early strand of Merleau-Ponty's thought which sought to anchor expression in something fundamental and irrecusable. But perhaps, as I think more likely, the difficulty is rooted in that basic oddity of philosophy, namely that its own task is an issue for itself.

However such passages are to be explained, there is substantial textual support for denying that there is any uniquely privileged type of expression. On the one hand, though there are distinct modes of expression, there is no unequivocal primacy that is to be assigned to any one of them. As Merleau-Ponty puts it in Phenomenology of Perception:

… There is no fundamental difference between the various modes of expression, and no privileged position can be accorded to any of them on the alleged ground that it expresses a truth in itself. Speech is as dumb as music, music as eloquent as speech.

(PP, 391)

Not only is there no privileged mode but, on the other hand, there is no unequivocally privileged type of expression within any particular mode. From the standpoint of form or structure, Merleau-Ponty's claim that there is no means of expression which, once mastered, can resolve the problems of painting or transform painting into a technique¹² can be generalized to cover all modes and types of expression.

Similarly, from the standpoint of topics and perspectives on topics, there is no uniquely privileged type of discursive expression. The special types of discourse proper to the special sciences and disciplines and that of philosophy are just so many parts, not pieces, of the complex articulation of that unitary relation obtaining among the world, others, and myself which makes all expression of any sort possible.

Further, this fundamental relation is thoroughly historical. Thus the truth we attain and express is achieved not in spite of but rather by virtue of our inherence in history. Our contact with others in history, finite as it is, is the point of origin of all truth, including philosophical and scientific truth.¹³ “Somehow politics and culture, anthropology and sociology, psychology and philosophy are all related, intertwined with one another, together disclosing the unity and meaning in the lives of men.”¹⁴ What holds here for discursive expression in its multiple types can be generalized to cover all modes of expression in all of their several types.

The phenomenon of silence, when properly thematized, requires, if not these very claims made by Merleau-Ponty, then at least claims very much like them. Since this is the case, then the phenomenon of silence provides substantial evidence in favor of these claims of his. Specifically, the fact that performances of silence both interrupt non-discursive experience to open the way for expression and interrupt expression to allow for an encounter with some dimension of non-discursive experience reveals that we are never involved either with pure thought or with ideal language. Whatever stream of performances we are engaged in is always experienced as being in need of supplementation drawn from performances of some other sort. This is the experience of finitude and awe which motivates the performance of silence. Further, the oscillation among levels of discursive expression and between the zone of discursive expression and those of nondiscursive experience which is maintained by silence undercuts the pretension of any mode or type of expression to unequivocally privileged status. Finally, since silence does not intend already determinate objects of any sort, it is not performed to open the way either for addressing any uniquely privileged topics, e.g., God, or for employing any uniquely privileged style, e.g., the epic poetic style.

There is, of course, a positive aspect to Merleau-Ponty's acknowledgment of human finitude and consequent rejection of pure thought, ideal language, and unequivocally privileged modes and types of discourse. Since, as I have mentioned above, Merleau-Ponty does not regard finitude as a defect to be endured but rather as the very condition for being and performing, silence does not defeat discourse by frustrating some aim for completeness. Rather, silence permits discourse to flourish by being differentiated. This view led Merleau-Ponty to two important, closely related insights. The first is that each lively particular expression, each expression of something genuinely new, whatever its mode, type, topic, or style, effects an opening for further expression rather than brings to conclusion a line of endeavor. Second, man's fundamental way of living and expressing the world is interrogatory. Taken together, these insights claim for irreducible openness and the finitude ingredient therein the accolade of achievement rather than the opprobrium of failure.

To appreciate the first insight, one should recall that, for Merleau-Ponty, expression is action. So, for that matter, is perception.¹⁵ Diversified expression is diversified action. By reason of this diversification, the way is kept open for other expression, for other action, for other perception. Thus expression, in its diverse performances, manifests the historical character of all action, including that action which is expression.

The fact that each particular expression belongs to one among many types and modes of expression and that even within its own type and mode it is only one of several expressions in no way indicates weakness or deficiency in the particular expression. That it has not ‘said the final word’ about its topic is not a flaw, but rather is its glory. In Merleau-Ponty's words:

As for the history of art works, if they are great, the sense we give to them later on has issued from them. It is the work itself that has opened the field from which it appears in another light. It changes itself and becomes what follows; the interminable reinterpretations to which it is legitimately susceptible change it only in itself.

(EM [“Eye and Mind”], 254)

What holds good for art works, holds good for all expressive achievements which are lively or fresh. Here again Merleau-Ponty is explicit:

… If no work is ever completed and done with, still each creation changes, alters, enlightens, deepens, confirms, exalts, recreates, or creates in advance all the others. If creations are not a possession, it is not only that, like all things, they pass away; it is also that they have almost all their life still before them.

(EM, 286. See also 274)

The phenomenon of silence with its basic characteristics provides substantial corroboration for this insight of Merleau-Ponty's. By virtue of its interrupting the inertial “et ceteras” of particular streams of performances and its maintaining an oscillation and tension among the various kinds of performances, silence performs three related functions. First, it clears the way for genuinely new works to take their place within a history of works. Second, it is appropriately intercalated with expression to constitute a work as something sufficiently distinct to belong to some specific type and mode of expression. And third, by pervading the work silence preserves it from definitive fixation and so grants it the openness requisite for a life which is influential over an extended period of time.

Moreover, by reason of the clarification of the sense of intersubjectivity effected through variegated performances of silence, there is engendered the motivation for acknowledging and responding to the historical possibilities that arise from each genuine work. The work is not a definitive assertion. Rather it is a call for a response which is sufficiently reticent in itself to permit answers. Each answer, like the work itself, is not a private possession of its author but rather is a communal spring for continued endeavor.

Appreciation of the sense of intersubjectivity leads to Merleau-Ponty's capital insight that man's fundamental way of living and expressing the world is interrogatory. Men exist as so many interrogations addressed to a world which does not speak but which itself exists in the interrogative mode.¹⁶ Reflection, Merleau-Ponty says, “must question the world … must enter into the forest of references that our interrogation arouses in it … must make it say, finally, what in its silence it means to say. …” (VI, 39).

It is useful here to make explicit the constituents of the act of interrogation. First, interrogation presupposes that whatever discourse may have preceded it is somehow unfinished. Second, in its usual, routine occurrences, interrogation takes place through positing some distinct elements or entities. This feature of interrogation is at the root of the truism that the question already contains the answer within itself. Third, interrogation itself responds to something encountered as at least partially opaque to the interrogator. Thus the question itself, and not merely the answer, has the character of a response. Fourth, though interrogation involves initiative on the part of the interrogator, as responsive it also involves his dependence upon or belonging to that which elicits his response. Fifth, interrogation which initiates new or lively expression interrupts the inertial “et cetera” of some previously established stream of expression.

Reflection on these characteristics of interrogation reveals that the very sense of interrogation requires that it be constituted by both silence and expression. Given the pervasive intercalation of silence and expression in all of its modes and types, and given that man is the unitary totality whose essential moments are perception, thought, expression, and action, then there is substantial warrant for Merleau-Ponty's insistence that the interrogative is not a form of either negation or affirmation. It is in no way derived from the indicative. Rather, it is that basic way of aiming at something which cannot be exhaustively satisfied by any statement or answer. For Merleau-Ponty, man not only manifests this sort of interrogation in all of his expression. He is such an interrogation.

Man as interrogator does not engender his interrogation ex nihilo. It springs from and responds to desire, especially, but not exclusively, the desire to share with other people. Once I see another seer, “movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression.” (VI, 144)¹⁷

To make fully explicit the motivated, responsive character of interrogation, I would like to propose here an amendment to Merleau-Ponty's account. Though his position can readily accommodate this amendment, it is non-trivial. I suggest that in those manifestations of interrogation which inaugurate new discourse, there is an essential constituent which can be called the exclamatory.¹⁸ The exclamatory springs from an encounter with the surprising, the intruding. The exclamatory as such neither posits nor achieves anything. Like interrogation, the exclamatory involves both expression and silence. In questioning, however, expression is mature. In exclamation, expression is primitive and fresh. In the exclamatory, man does not yet instigate an inquiry. Rather he hears a call to which it makes sense to respond. This hearing exclamation is indeed responsive but it has not yet forged its own response.

My amendment does not assert that the exclamatory is more fundamental than the interrogatory. Rather it understands the fundamental interrogative itself to be exclamatory. Merleau-Ponty comes close to saying precisely this in his essay “The Metaphysical in Man,” in Sense and Non-Sense:

From the moment I recognize that my experience, precisely insofar as it is my own, makes me accessible to what is not myself, that I am sensitive to the world and to others, all the beings which objective thought placed at a distance draw singularly nearer to me. Or, conversely, I recognize my affinity with them; I am nothing but an ability to echo them, to understand them, to respond to them.

(SNS [Sense and Non-Sense], 94)

But even if my amendment is left aside, Merleau-Ponty's claims concerning fundamental interrogation find corroboration from the pervasive intercalation between silence and discursive expression. As I noted above, silence, motivated by finitude and awe, interrupts “et ceteras.” It interrupts the non-expressive desire to open the way for expression. But expression is not all of a piece. The “et ceteras” of each kind of expression must also be interrupted for the exploration, the interrogation, to proceed. As my analysis of silence would imply, these interruptions are not performed in an effort to achieve a final, determinate object of any sort. Rather they serve to establish and maintain an oscillation among the zones of expression and those of non-expressive experience. Within and through the oscillation which characterizes the multiple facets of interrogation, the full sense of intersubjectivity, first encountered in desire, is elucidated.

What I have said thus far is sufficient to substantiate one part of my principle thesis, namely that the phenomenon of silence provides evidence for some of Merleau-Ponty's principal claims concerning discursive expression. I turn now to the second part of my principal thesis which claims that the same thing holds true for his principal claims concerning political action.

IV

Just as Merleau-Ponty denies the possibility of pure thought and complete discursive expression, so he explicitly denies the possibility of pure action, perfect moments, and permanent revolutions. These denials, found both in Humanism and Terror and in Adventures of the Dialectic¹⁹ form the basis of his positive insights concerning the structure of genuine political action. Much political conduct, of course, consists of discourse. And there is no political action which is radically divorced from discourse. Violence unmediated by discourse is not political action. But not all of political action is reducible to discourse, even though all political action is expressive. What I am concerned with here is this non-discursive expressivity ingredient in political action. This kind of expressivity, like discursive expressivity, cannot sensibly aspire to purity or perfection.

Action indeed involves initiative but it is always an initiative whose outcome is not completely determined by the initiator. In this sense there is no pure action. On the one hand, all political action both creates civilization and opportunities for the community and at the same time encroaches upon one's fellow men. There is an important sense in which law, the instrument of peace and order, is intrinsically violent.²⁰ On the other hand, courage and sacrifice are not radically separable from masochism and the death instinct.²¹ Merleau-Ponty concludes:

But what if our actions were neither necessary in the sense of natural necessity nor free in the sense of a decision ex nihilo? In particular, what if in the social order no one were innocent and no one absolutely guilty? What if it were the very essence of history to impute to us responsibilities which are never entirely ours? What if all freedom is a decision in a situation which is not chosen but assumed all the same? We would then be in the painful situation of never being able to condemn with good conscience, although it is inevitable that we exercise condemnation.

(HT [Humanism and Terror], 166-167)

All actions, even war, have a symbolic component and no action can claim as its own all that transpires after it. Pure action is, for the most part, a myth.²² Pure action is either suicide or murder. “Generally, it is an imaginary (and not, as Sartre believes, an ideal) action.” (AD [Adventures of the Dialectic], 118).

It follows from the denial of the possibility of pure action that there are neither perfect moments nor permanent revolutions. Though Merleau-Ponty does not expressly draw these conclusions in Humanism and Terror and though he does claim there that Marxism as a critique of the present world and alternative humanisms, cannot be surpassed, nonetheless, his recognition that history has sundered the Marxist synthesis of humanism and collective production and that there is no test moment for the claims of either the later Hegel or the young Marx²³ points in the direction of these conclusions. In Adventures of the Dialectic, however, these conclusion are explicitly acknowledged. There he points out the impossibility of the idea of permanent revolution. This idea, which Merleau-Ponty finds at work in Trotsky and Sartre among others, is, like pure action, a myth.²⁴ Revolutions which succeed must degenerate when they become regimes. They “are true as movements and false as regimes.” (AD, 207).

Perfect moments in political conduct would be those in which constraint is unnecessary. It may be that there are privileged moments in which constraint is minimal. But these moments can neither last nor be reproduced at will. And even in these moments the traces of constraint which remain herald the institutions of coercion which necessarily follow.²⁵ This is not to deny that there are indeed privileged moments. But it is to deny these moments are absolutely privileged.

Again, the denial of the possibility of pure action, perfect moments, and permanent revolutions is not the admission of a fatal flaw. Rather it is the acknowledgment of the actual conditions which make human political achievement possible. As Merleau-Ponty concludes in Humanism and Terror:

The human world is an open or unfinished system and the same radical contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevitability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it, providing only that one remembers its various machineries are actually men and tries to maintain and expand man's relations to man.

(HT, 188)

The ineluctable intercalation of silence and expression forestalls the possibility of pure action, perfect moments, or permanent revolutions. There can be no pure silence, no pure interruption. Nor can there be pure expression. The finitude and awe which motivate the interruptions effected by silence do not merely prevent the achievement of some ideal condition. They rather reveal that the ideals of purity and completeness are idols if they are taken to be immutable and absolute.

Again, Merleau-Ponty's denial of pure action, perfect moments, and permanent revolutions opens the way for substantial positive claims concerning political conduct. I wish to look at these and note their connection with silence.

The first claim concerns political freedom, a liberty which is inherently finite. Liberty, Merleau-Ponty says, has to be made in a world which is not predestined to it.²⁶ Liberty is to be made. But it is not made against the world. Rather the world is its necessary context. No politics simply accepts events. No politics “renounces the right of posing the problem in a different way than it is posed in the moment. … A politics which would lack any recourse against the factual situation and its dilemmas would not be a living politics. …” (AD, 103). But this does not imply detachment from situations. To the contrary, political conduct is effective and true only if the led ratify the deeds of the leader. And there is no one who is either exclusively leader or exclusively led.²⁷ What provides for the tension between the situation and the deed on the one hand and the tension between the leaders and the led on the other is the silence which establishes and maintains the oscillation within levels of discursive expression, between discursive expression and political conduct, and between the zones of expression and non-expressive experience. In and through the intercalation of silence and expression the complex sense of intersubjectivity can unfold. In fact, freedoms interfere with and require one another. No man “by himself is subject nor is he free.” (AD, 205).

The next claim of Merleau-Ponty's which I wish to mention here is closely tied to the one concerning political liberty. It has to do with political commitment. For genuine commitment, one commits himself to learn continually more about that to which he commits himself. The motto of this kind of conduct is Clarum per obscurius. (The clear through the more obscure.) If I am to go beyond the structured situation into which I have been born, “it is not by deciding to give my life this or that meaning; rather, it is by attempting simply to live what is offered me, without playing tricks with the logic of the enterprise, without enclosing it beforehand inside the limits of a premeditated meaning.” (AD, 197). Commitment, then, requires hearkening as well as initiating. It requires silence as well as positive expression.

Most fundamentally, for Merleau-Ponty, the standard against which political conduct is to be measured is whether it acknowledges and sustains the interrogative dialectic which alone allows history, if not to achieve truths, at least to slough off errors. Dialectical praxis, like dialectical thought, extracts from each situation and event a truth which goes beyond it. History is, then, a permanent, open interrogation.²⁸ Already in Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty recognizes the danger of the dialectic collapsing into a non-dialectical positivism.²⁹ His justification in Adventures of the Dialectic for a non-communist left is precisely that it would keep open dialectical interrogation, keep open self-criticism.³⁰ It is by virtue of the power of interrupting, the power of not doing, that both the sheer fiat and the representation of some ideal terminus or goal of action disappear.³¹ The living interrogatory dialectic is the manifestation of their absence.

The characteristics of the phenomenon of silence which I identified above clearly require and provide evidence for something like the interrogatory dialectical political action called for by Merleau-Ponty. Political action is always conduct with others. As such it requires and is made possible by the silence of yielding to others as well as by the initiating expression. This conduct is neither rootless nor directed to an already determinate goal. In its pursuits it is restrained and awaits confirmation from beyond itself. This conduct, as perpetually interrogatory and self-critical, interrupts any et cetera which would reduce the dialectic to a positivism or mechanism. It is silence, motivated as it is by finitude and awe, which requires and makes possible political action of this sort. And the oscillation which silence maintains among kinds of expression and between the expressive and the non-expressive makes possible the continued revitalization of this dialectical action. Thus, as the second part of my main thesis asserted, the phenomenon of silence, when properly thematized, both requires and provides evidence for some of Merleau-Ponty's principal insights into political action.

My argument in this paper has not tried to establish that the claims of Merleau-Ponty discussed here are precisely the unique claims which attention to the phenomenon of silence requires and substantiates. It is of the very sense of silence that it could not establish any such exhorbitant claim. But my argument has shown that Merleau-Ponty was alert to the phenomenon of silence and that, even though he did not treat it thematically, it infused and sustained some of his fundamental claims concerning both discursive expression and political action. Thus, the phenomenon of silence provides a central link between these two major strands of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy.

Notes

1. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). Hereafter PP.

2. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. by Claude Lefort, tr. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Hereafter VI.

3. See Jacques Taminiaux, Le regard et l' excedent (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977) pp. 90-115. Hereafter RE.

4. See my Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance, Chapter 3. Indiana University Press, 1980.

5. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, ed. by Claude Lefort, tr. by John O'Neill, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) p. 36. Hereafter PW.

6. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. by James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) p. 134. Hereafter POP.

7. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, tr. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Hereafter S.

8. “Now if we rid our minds of the ideal that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive—that is, if you wish, silence.” S, 43.

9. S. 138.

10. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” in POP. Hereafter EM.

11. See also Merleau-Ponty, “The War Has Taken Place,” in Sense and Non-Sense, tr. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) p. 147. Hereafter SNS.

12. EM, 269.

13. S, 109-110.

14. Albert Rabil, Jr., Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World, (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1967) p. 135.

15. PP, 106-132 and 182-190, PW, 78.

16. VI, 101-104.

17. Speaking of the painter, Merleau-Ponty says: “This unhearing historicity … does not imply that the painter does not know what he wants. It does imply that what he wants is beyond the means and goals at hand and commands from afar all our useful activity.” (EM, 285)

18. I owe this insight to Gabriel Marcel. See his The Mystery of Being, tr. by G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Gateway Books, 1960) Vol. I, p. 137. Merleau-Ponty himself speaks of a wild world (un monde sauvage) and a wild spirit (un esprit sauvage). See S, 180-181.

19. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, tr. by John O'Neill, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). Hereafter HT. And Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, tr. by Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Hereafter AD.

20. HT, XXXVI-XXXVIX: “… There is no line between good people and the rest, and … in war, the most honorable causes prove themselves by means that are not honorable.” HT, XXXIX, fn. 17.

21. HT, 164.

22. AD, 200-201.

23. HT, 150.

24. AD, 88-91, and 206-207.

25. AD, 90-91.

26. HT, XLII.

27. AD, 150-153. “But if there is neither an objective proof of the revolution nor a sufficient speculative criterion, there is a test of the revolution and a very clear practical criterion: the proletariat must have access to political life and to management.” AD, 153.

28. AD, 56-57, 204ff.

29. HT, 150.

30. AD, 203-233.

31. AD, 196-197.