SOURCE: Glenn, John D., Jr. “Merleau-Ponty's Existential Dialectic.” Tulane Studies in Philosophy 29 (December 1980): 81-93.

[In the following essay, Glenn discusses Merleau-Ponty's existential dialectic in terms of “mind and body, of temporality, and of human freedom.”]

There are many respects in which the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty can be described as dialectical.¹ His first two major works, The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, often proceed dialectically, posing and then undercutting traditional views on the nature of and relation between man and world. More significant, of course, is the positive philosophical standpoint which emerges: a conception of human existence or “being-in-the-world” which goes beyond the traditional oppositions of realism and idealism, mind and body, determinism and radical freedom. In this essay, I will offer an exposition and interpretation of a theme which is crucial to Merleau-Ponty's development of this conception, and which is dialectical in the sense that he ascribes to “dialectic”: “the tending of an existence towards another existence which denies it, and yet without which it is not sustained.”² This theme is the interdependence of “acquisition” and “spontaneity,” of the relatively stable and implicit “background” and the relatively spontaneous and explicit “foreground” of our existence. I will consider it specifically as it is involved in his accounts of the relation between mind and body, of temporality, and of human freedom, which will emerge as closely related instances of this existential dialectic. Finally, I want to discuss the manner in which the figure-background relation serves as a kind of “root metaphor” in Merleau-Ponty's understanding of human existence.³

Merleau-Ponty's treatment of the mind-body relation is extensive, complex, detailed, and subtle, but its general direction can be stated fairly easily. On the one hand, he argues that the human body is not adequately understood as simply a physical object, in the sense of an entity which “exists partes extra partes,” and consequently “acknowledges between its parts, or between itself and other objects only external and mechanical relationships. …”⁴ He shows how such a view of the body must be abandoned in order to comprehend specific scientific findings about human behavior and perception,⁵ and he attempts to recall his readers to the concrete experience of embodied existence. The body as “lived” is no mere thing, he argues, but is a fundamental dimension of our intentional being-in-the-world, our relation to a significant natural and cultural environment. Its interrelated perceptual and motor capacities provide us with a primordial grasp on and orientation within the world, and its capacity for gesture and voice is the basis of speech and other modes of human expression, and ultimately of the whole cultural world.

This account of the body already clearly implies that mind, consciousness, or “soul” cannot be what much of our tradition has taken it to be—a pure “for itself,” wholly transparent to itself, whose relation to the world is fundamentally that of an uninvolved spectator. Rather, Merleau-Ponty argues, our explicitly conscious relation to the world is possible only on the basis of our bodily intentionality, of what might be called a pre-personal participation in the world. Our self-knowledge is not a matter of immediate clarity, but is steeped in ambiguity; it requires expression and action in the world in order to achieve determinacy.⁶

Merleau-Ponty's analyses thus involve a denial of the clarity and distinctness which Descartes claimed for the concepts of both body and mind. Res extensa and res cogitans are replaced by “lived body” and embodied mind, and a dualism of substance is replaced by a recognition of multiple levels of functioning. There are, Merleau-Ponty says, “several ways for the body to be a body, several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.”⁷ For these reasons, he does not claim to offer a simple formulation of the relationship between mind and body. They are not precisely-definable realities, but are characterized more as two poles of a dialectic. “Man taken as a concrete being is not a psyche joined to an organism,” he says, “but the movement to and fro of existence which at one time allows itself to take corporeal form and at others moves toward personal acts.”⁸

This dialectic is clarified by Merleau-Ponty's references to the “generality” of the body. This term means not only that we share the fundamental characteristics of our bodily existence with other human subjects, but also that the body's inborn and acquired capacities, habits, and orientation provide the general basis for the enactment of our more individualized, self-conscious acts. Merleau-Ponty says:

it is by giving up part of his spontaneity, by becoming involved in the world through stable organs and pre-established circuits that man can acquire the mental and practical space which will theoretically free him from his environment and allow him to see it. … [I]t is an inner necessity for the most integrated existence to provide itself with an habitual body. What allows us to link to each other the ‘physiological’ and the ‘psychic’, is the fact that, when reintegrated into existence, they are no longer distinguishable respectively as the order of the in-itself, and that of the for-itself, and that they are both directed towards an intentional pole or towards a world.⁹

Moreover, not only is mind, consciousness, the “psychic,” dependent on the body, but the relation is a reciprocal one, and thus truly dialectical. The body as the habitual pole of our being-in-the-world has been shaped by our past “psychic” acts, and is only effectively existent insofar as its acquisitions are drawn upon as the basis for such acts:

the specific past, which our body is, can be recaptured and taken up by an individual life only because that life has never transcended it, but secretly nourishes it, devoting thereto part of its strength … Thus … the ambiguity of being-in-the-world is translated by that of the body, and this is understood through that of time.¹⁰

The mind-body dialectic is, then, closely related to that of temporality, which I would like to consider next. Again, I will, of necessity, be abstracting from many significant aspects of a subtle and detailed discussion, in order to focus on certain dialectical structure of temporality, as Merleau-Ponty analyzes it. Merleau-Ponty initially approaches this topic through a dialectical method, criticizing two opposing conceptions of the relation between temporality and human consciousness. The first conception is an empiricistic or realistic one; to borrow Whitehead's phrase, it would “simply locate” the subject in time. The second conception is rationalistic or idealistic; it construes time as an object for a subject. Neither view, Merleau-Ponty argues, can account for temporal consciousness, our concrete awareness of time. The former would isolate the subject in a present, with no opening on past or future. Merleau-Ponty argues strongly that our awareness of the past cannot be explained in terms of present “traces,” or our anticipation of the future in terms of other “contents” of consciousness, whether physiological or psychological. But neither could time exist for a subject before whom it was explicitly arrayed, since in that case the differences between past, present, and future would disappear, along with the very phenomenon of passage. Thus “the subject, who cannot be a series of psychic events, nevertheless cannot be eternal either,” and we must “conceive the subject and time as communicating from within.”¹¹ Time is not an alien reality enclosing our existence, or a mere object of our knowledge, but “a dimension of our being.”¹²

Merleau-Ponty begins his more detailed explication of the phenomenon of temporality with this observation:

It is in my ‘field of presence’ in the widest sense—this moment that … I spend working, with, behind it, the horizon of the day that has elapsed, and, in front of it, the evening and night—that I make contact with time … It is here that we see a future sliding into the present and on into the past. Nor are these three dimensions given to us through discrete acts: I do not form a mental picture of my day, it weighs upon me … In the same way, I do not think of the evening to come …, and yet it ‘is there’, like the back of a house …, or the background beneath a figure.¹³

The central phenomenon of temporality is not, then, a purely immediate or immanent present, but a field with some degree of “thickness,” a present which “outruns itself in the direction of an immediate future and an immediate past …”¹⁴ Time is thus inseparable from a temporally-situated subject. Yet this subject cannot be related to time in a purely passive fashion, but must be conceived as an “explosion or thrust”¹⁵ toward a future in which it seeks to realize itself. Merleau-Ponty thus says:

Time is ‘the affecting of self by self’: what exerts the effect is time as a thrust and a passing towards a future; what is affected is time as an unfolded series of presents; the affecting agent and affected recipient are one, because the thrust of time is nothing but the transition from one present to another.¹⁶

From this point, Merleau-Ponty goes on to characterize time and subjectivity in terms of an acquired spontaneity, an “upsurge” which we are without having chosen to be, though we can shape it through personal acts.¹⁷

On this conception, temporality is characterized by an intricate dialectic of background and foreground, acquisition and spontaneity. Past and future only are insofar as they are the horizons for a living, surging present, but this present itself only is as it brings about a transition between future and past. It only carries forward the impetus acquired from its past by spontaneously and ceaselessly going beyond that past, and insofar as through it each future and present are fated to become past, to merge into the horizon of some new present. The central importance of temporality in Merleau-Ponty's thought is stressed when he concludes that we can find in it “the solution of all problems of transcendence” and “at the same time the basis of our freedom.”¹⁸

Merleau-Ponty's reflections on freedom, like those on temporality, are developed dialectically. We seem initially, he suggests, to be faced with the alternatives of a thorough determinism and a conception of radical freedom. Having criticized the objectivistic-mechanistic conception of man throughout the Phenomenology [Phenomenology of Perception,], he has little more to say about determinism in the chapter on “Freedom.” He is more concerned to correct the conception of man as radically free—a view which he finds to be most strongly stated in Sartre's work. On this conception, I am, as a transparent consciousness of the world, aware of bearing “no … qualifications of any sort”; these only pertain to me as I am an object for others, and thus cannot be part of what I am for myself. It is, moreover, “inconceivable that my liberty should be attenuated,” and my freedom must be thought of as beyond all motivation; for if motives are strong enough to determine my action, I am not free, and if they are not strong enough, “then freedom is complete.”¹⁹ Since the world cannot act causally on a subject so conceived, the relation between subject and world is one of a free Sinngebung; and so Sartre argues that obstacles are only obstacles for a subject whose projects make them be such, that values are only values for a subject who chooses them as such.

Having stated in some detail this abstract conception of man as radically free, Merleau-Ponty directs against it some of his subtlest and most eloquent reflections. Such a conception would, he argues, rule freedom out altogether. For on such a view,

it cannot be held that there is such a thing as free action, freedom being anterior to all actions. In any case it will not be possible to declare: ‘Here freedom makes its appearance’, since free action, in order to be discernible, has to stand out against a background of life from which it is entirely, or almost entirely, absent. … If freedom is doing, it is necessary that what it does should not be immediately undone by a new freedom. … [O]ne instant must be able to commit its successors and, a decision once taken and action once begun, I must have something acquired at my disposal, I must benefit from my impetus, I must be inclined to carry on … If freedom is to have room in which to move, if it is to be describable as freedom, there must be something to hold it away from its objectives, it must have a field, which means that there must be for it special possibilities or realities which tend to cling to being. … [T]his leads us to ask whether the perpetual severance in terms of which we initially defined freedom is not simply the negative aspect of our universal commitment to a world, and whether our indifference to each determinate thing does not express merely our involvement in all.²⁰

I might add that, in my judgment, Sartre's view of freedom as an inescapable and unqualified fact is inconsistent with his various attempts²¹ to establish freedom as a fundamental value—or, indeed, with the attempt to establish any sort of value. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, by recognizing that human freedom is always in various ways limited, can consistently regard the achievement of fuller freedom, for oneself and others, as a value, as well as acknowledge other values.

Merleau-Ponty elaborates this conception of finite freedom by indicating how our bodily being-in-the-world tends to pose certain things as obstacles or values for us prior to any explicit decision. Carrying these reflections into the historical sphere, he argues brilliantly that class consciousness, and particularly revolutionary commitment, does not arise out of sheer “objective” factors, nor from unmotivated choice, but through a dialectical interplay of a certain “lived” situation and personal decision. Even an attitude of refusal and negation involves some sort of commitment to the world, he argues, and solitary resistance some dependence on one's past and one's being-with-others. Here Merleau-Ponty's statement is particularly illustrative of his insight into the dialectic of freedom and our situation and motivation:

There is … never determinism and never absolute choice … Let us suppose that a man is tortured to make him talk. If he refuses [to betray his comrades], this does not arise from a solitary and unsupported decision: the man still feels himself to be with his comrades … Or … he wants to prove … what he has always thought and said about freedom. These motives do not cancel out freedom, but at least ensure that it does not go unbuttressed in being … [W]e can at no time set aside within our selves a redoubt to which being does not find its way through, without seeing this freedom, immediately and by the very fact of being a living experience, take on the appearance of being and become a motive and a buttress.²²

He adds that “I am free, not in spite of … these motivations, but by means of them,” that my situation “does not limit my access to the world, but on the contrary is my means of entering into communication with it.²³

Human existence thus involves a continually reenacted synthesis of the “for itself” and the “in itself,” a continual process in which the “acquired”—the body, the past, our finite situation and motivation—must be taken up and reshaped by the spontaneity of personal consciousness, the present's surge toward the future, freedom. I think it is clear that, for Merleau-Ponty, the dialectics of mind and body, of the present and its horizons, of freedom and finitude, are, if not strictly identical, inextricably intertwined. It seems impossible to establish any simple order of linear dependence among them. If there is any relative priority, it would seem to belong to the thrust of temporality. But I believe that Merleau-Ponty regards having a body, a past, and a finite situated existence as inseparable, if not indistinguishable, and that the same would hold of mind, as a general term for our personal acts, of the surging present, and of our freedom.²⁴ And it is clear, I hope, that he regards these opposed poles of human existence as dialectically interrelated.

Many of Merleau-Ponty's conceptions no doubt seem strange not only to thinkers in the “analytic” tradition, but also to many phenomenologists. Even Heidegger, whose influence on Merleau-Ponty is great, prefers to undercut the presuppositions of, rather than dealing directly with, the question of determinism and freedom, or of the relation between mind and body. While respecting Heidegger's thinking, I believe that Merleau-Ponty is right in holding that a regard for the concrete structures of our being necessitates seeking some account of these matters. At any rate, there is at least one major philosopher whose views on the topics we have been considering are similar to Merleau-Ponty's; that thinker is Sartre, his friend and co-worker for many years. So I believe that a brief consideration of Sartre is appropriate here, not only to illuminate what is common to their views, but, more important, to bring into relief what is distinctive to Merleau-Ponty's.

The statement in Being and Nothingness with which Sartre first characterizes human freedom is instructive: “Freedom is the human being putting his past out of play by secreting his own nothingness.”²⁵ Freedom is the negation of one's past projects, past situation, past being. As such, freedom is inseparable from temporality, which Sartre also explains in terms of the “nihilating” activity of the “for itself”:

It is as the nihilation of the In-itself that the For-itself arises in the world, and it is by this absolute event that the Past as such is constituted as the original, nihilating relation between the For-itself and the In-itself.²⁶

Sartre's account of the body distinguishes sharply—probably too sharply—between the body as an object for others, and the body as a dimension of the “for itself.” In its latter role, the body is the point of view and point of departure for my perceptual and practical dealings with the world. It is not grasped in itself, but only in our intentional relations with the world, by being “passed over” in favor of things, and Sartre says: “Thus the body, since it is surpassed, is the Past.”²⁷ So Sartre's thinking, too, tends toward an identification of the body, the past, and our “facticity,” and regards as essentially one the free self-conscious activity which transcends them.

Without attempting a fuller exegesis of Sartre's views, I would like to suggest that the basic differences between his views and Merleau-Ponty's can be comprehended—which is not to say “explained”—in terms of two different “root metaphors.” Sartre's basic theme in interpreting man and world is negation, denial, rejection; the image here is of a wrenching-away of the for-itself from the in-itself, of the free consciousness from every sort of determinateness. Merleau-Ponty's “root metaphor,” which runs through the analyses we have considered, although he does not state it as any sort of general principle, seems to be the figure-background relation, which serves as a model for conceiving the relation between the “acquired” and the “spontaneous” aspects of our existence.

This relation is truly “dialectical” in the sense indicated above. Each “pole” is what it is only in relation to the other, and the relation can as validly be construed as one of mutual sustaining as of mutual negation.²⁸ Moreover, that which is in one instance foreground may become part of the background for another foreground. Thus Merleau-Ponty conceives of the body, its acquired capacities and habits, its “generality,” as the existential background against which our spontaneous “personal acts” emerge; and the former are only effectively existent as they are extended through and reshaped by the latter, which are themselves fated to become part of the background for future acts. The present only is a present with its horizons of past and future, which sustain and are sustained by it as it moves beyond the past and transforms each future and present into a past. Finally, freedom only appears insofar as it comes to “stand out against a background” of relatively stable life. It emerges only against (or on) the background of motive, situation, finitude—which nevertheless require freedom to give them their full significance—and each free act will itself merge into the background of future acts.

The relation of figure and background—particularly as the latter notion is extended into that of “horizon”—was already, of course, a major theme in Husserl's explication of phenomena and our consciousness of them. What Merleau-Ponty has done, I think, is to extend this notion so that it serves as a symbol for basic structures of existence. As such, it contributes to the elaboration of a philosophical standpoint of great subtlety and depth. On Merleau-Ponty's view, man is neither reducible to or determined by his body, his past, his finite, motivated situation; but neither is he pure self-conscious mind, a completely self-possessed presence, a total freedom. Rather, his existence involves a continuing dialectical tension, or an interplay, between a relatively stable and implicit background and the relatively spontaneous emergence of conscious, personal, and free activity. Moreover, it is on the basis of this existential dialectic that Merleau-Ponty develops his accounts of some of the other dialectics of our existence—the dialectics of nature and culture, language and speech, self and other. In his thinking, the ésprit geometrique which has fostered our age's opposed abstractions of man as godlike mind, sovereign subject of scientific knowledge and technological domain over nature, and man as thing, object of scientific reductionism and technological manipulation, is replaced by an ésprit de finesse, and a subtler, more concrete, more human view of man. It is this which makes his a philosophy not so much of as for our time.

Notes

1. For an account of Merleau-Ponty's relation to Hegel, see Edward G. Ballard, “The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy, Vol. IX (1960—“Studies in Hegel”), pp. 165-187.

2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; Sixth impression 1974), pp. 167-168. This work will hereafter be cited as PP.

3. I will be focussing on the analyses presented in the Phenomenology of Perception, which builds on and extends the insights developed in The Structure of Behavior. I am unable to consider here the rather different position developed in Merleau-Ponty's last major work, The Visible and the Invisible, in which the dialectic treated here seems to be replaced by, or subsumed under, a dialectic of the visible and the invisible.

4. PP, p. 73.

5. See his discussion of “phantom limb” and related phenomena in PP, pp. 76-89.

6. For an exposition of Merleau-Ponty's account of the cogito, and a discussion of some of the tensions present in this account, see my “Merleau-Ponty and the Cogito,” Philosophy Today, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter, 1979), pp. 310-320.

7. PP, p. 124.

8. PP, p. 88.

9. PP, p. 87.

10. PP, p. 85. See also p. 130.

11. PP, p. 410.

12. PP, p. 415.

13. PP, pp. 415-416.

14. PP, p. 418.

15. PP, p. 422.

16. PP, pp. 425-426. The phrase that Merleau-Ponty quotes is from Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

17. See PP, pp. 427-428. Merleau-Ponty makes interesting critical comments about both Heidegger and Sartre in this context.

18. PP, p. 423.

19. PP, pp. 434-435.

20. PP, pp. 437-439.

21. See the concluding paragraphs of Being and Nothingness, and his “Existentialism is a Humanism.”

22. PP, pp. 453-454.

23. PP, p. 455.

24. See PP, pp. 239-240, where Merleau-Ponty states that the body “creates time”!

25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 28. This work will hereafter be cited as BN.

26. BN, p. 138. The specific reference is to the (ontologically) “shocking” fact of birth.

27. BN, p. 326.

28. As might be expected, Sartre gives an account of the figure-background relation which stresses the aspect of negation. See BN, pp. 9-10, 182.