SOURCE: Bannan, John. F. “Merleau-Ponty on God.” International Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (September 1966): 341-65.

[In the following essay, Bannan discusses Merleau-Ponty's attempts to reconcile religion with philosophy.]

“It is characteristic of man to think God, but this does not mean that God exists.”¹ Like Descartes, Merleau-Ponty finds himself with the idea of God. He finds it when he takes an inventory of consciousness, where it stems in some way from the latter's objectivist behavior, always a central philosophical concern for him. He also finds it when he takes an inventory of his time, where it is part of the historical reality of religion. Though he does not give the question of God the lengthy and detailed treatment which he devotes to perception, language and history, Merleau-Ponty does touch upon it with surprising frequency during his career,² at one time emphasizing the philosophical issue, and at another the religious, while never completely divorcing them. The most complete and most valuable comments from the philosophical point of view are to be found in “La métaphysique dans l'homme” and Éloge de la philosophie. “Foi et bonne foi” attends chiefly to the historical and religious dimensions, examining Christianity as a humanism. Among the introductory sections which he wrote for the anthology Les philosophes célèbres there is a remarkably perceptive meditation on “Christianisme et philosophie,” which comments on the established positions regarding these institutions.

PERSONAL RELATION TO THE CHURCH

Christianity quite obviously meant Catholicism for Merleau-Ponty and he managed its theological concepts with an ease that is conspicuous even in European circles where familiarity with them is not at all uncommon. He spoke of his personal relationship with the Church at various times both in writings and discussion. “I have memories of a religion in which I was raised, and which I practiced beyond childhood. …”³ His withdrawal from the Church took place in the 1930's, gradually, one gathers, and apparently without outward drama. He tells us more about it in “Foi et bonne foi”:

Once there was a young Catholic whom exigencies of his faith led to the “left.” This was at the time when Dollfuss initiated the first Christian-Social government in Europe with a bombardment of the workers quarter in Vienna. A Christian periodical had addressed a protest to president Miklas. It was said that the most advanced of our great religious orders supported the protest. The young man was received at the table of several members of that order. During the meal he was surprised to hear that after all, the Dollfuss government was the established authority, that as regular government it was entitled to its recourse to police action and that, though they were free to blame him as citizens, Catholics as Catholics had nothing to protest about. As he grew older, the young man never forgot this moment. He turned to the priest who had just said this—a man who was both generous and bold, as later events proved—and told him simply that this justified the opinion which the workers held regarding Catholics: in the social question, they could not be counted on to the end.⁴

The Dollfuss action occurred in February, 1932. Three and four years later he published articles in the Catholic bi-monthly La vie intellectuelle,⁵ and in the first of these argued that the Church is not necessarily aloof from human affairs. One imagines him involved in an inner debate stretching beyond the time when these early articles were published. It is, however, impossible to date the break exactly and not important to do so. In the period following the publication of Phénoménologie de la perception,⁶ his attitude toward Christianity was quite critical and at times severe. In the discussion following his paper in “L'homme et l'adversité,” for example, he was pressed hard on the significance of the ambiguity theme in his philosophy by, among others, Fathers Daniélou and Maydieu (Catholics) and Pierre Thévenaz and Charles Westphal (Protestants). He reacted with irritation to Thévenaz's suggestion that the ambiguity of the human situation is an indication that this situation “opens out” on to Christianity: “To me this is the height of confusion. To speak of ambiguity means that you are a Christian. No! This only means that you think that there is ambiguity” (H.A. [“L'homme et l'adversité”], discussion, 251). At another point in the discussion he volunteers:

I do not spend my time saying that I am an atheist because that is not an occupation and because it would transform a quite positive effort of philosophical consciousness into a negation. But if after all I'm asked about it, I answer yes.

(H.A., discussion, 250)

This was in 1951. In 1953, in Éloge de la philosophie,⁷ he declares the charge of atheism irrelevant to the nature of philosophy as he understands it.⁸ In the years preceding his death, according to Sartre, he declined to be numbered among the atheists.⁹

We shall take up the question of God from that point in Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the nature of consciousness where it arose. The inevitable affinity of themes will lead us into its various dimensions, both philosophical and religious.

TEMPTATION OF PURE OBJECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

Merleau-Ponty finds it “characteristic” of man to think God just as he found it “natural” for him to think things in themselves.¹⁰ Each is a case of objectivist behavior on the part of consciousness, that is, the tendency of the latter

… to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject.

(P.P, [Phenomenology of Perception], 320)

Thus the subject who takes the cube as an independent figure with six equal sides is acting as if he saw the object from every side at once. He is forgetting his own locatedness and his previous experience with the object which took the form of a series of partial views, and is presuming upon a total synthesis of the thing's appearances which could be accomplished only at the end of an infinitely extended exploration. The phenomenological description which Merleau-Ponty carries out in P.P. and elsewhere reminds the subject that he is embodied, and of the links between the appearing object and himself. Then, in the process of fashioning a phenomenological theory of objectivity, one which can make sense of the evident independence of the appearing thing despite its links with the incarnate subject, he integrates the forgetting and the presumption into consciousness as “natural” and “characteristic” dimensions of its expression of objects. In his work on language—expression par excellence—he makes speech the locus of this action of forgetting and presuming: “… speech implants the idea of truth in us as the presumptive limit of its effort. It loses sight of itself as a contingent fact …” (P.P., 190).

Philosophy is also tempted to lose sight of itself as a contingent fact, and to install itself in pure consciousness. This is what Merleau-Ponty challenges when he rejects intellectualism, saying that:

A philosophy becomes transcendental, or radical, not by taking its place in absolute consciousness without mentioning the ways by which this is reached, but by considering itself as a problem: not by postulating a knowledge rendered totally explicit, but by recognizing as the fundamental philosophic problem this presumption on reason's part.

(P.P. 63)

This more generalized “presumption of reason” is something which he also seems to associate with language, particularly in his article “Sur la phénoménologie du langage,” where he speaks of a “vow to recover the world which was pronounced with the appearance of a language …” (P.L., [“Sur la phénoménologie du langage”], 119).¹¹ Just as a particular verbal expression is the locus of a particular presumption and forgetting which the one who speaks might imagine to be an idea summing up the object, language as a whole may be the locus of a generalized presumption and forgetting which the philosopher might take as summing up the world. By substituting a strong phenomenological position for the objectivist stand, that is, by centering on perception and language rather than reflection and idea, Merleau-Ponty certainly feels that he undoes the claims of absolute consciousness. Looking back on it from Éloge de la philosophie, he says that “… to attain … the fundamental sound of the world in the face of every naturalist explanation and to free it from all sovereign necessity is one and the same thing …” (Éloge, 63).¹² Perhaps it is a sufficient managing of the “fundamental philosophical problem” to recognize presumption as presumption and to constantly recall philosophy to the beginnings which it forgets and consciousness to the limits which it habitually ignores. “The meaning of philosophy is that of a genesis and it cannot be totalized outside of time …,”¹³ he remarks at one point, and earlier he said that metaphysics is “… not a knowledge which would complete the edifice of knowledges. It is the lucid knowing of what threatens them and the sharp awareness of their price.”¹⁴ What threatens them is God, conceived as absolute subject or absolute consciousness.

ABSOLUTE TRANSCENDENT SUBJECT AS THREAT TO MAN

The writings immediately after Phenomenology Perception devote considerable attention to the description of the threat. This gives them a rather negative cast which one does not expect Merleau-Ponty to continue. He does emerge from it eventually—and partially—but let us begin with these descriptions, since he does. In “Foi et bonne foi” he says that

There is always a Stoic component in the idea of God: if God exists, then perfection is already realized prior to the world. It cannot be augmented. There is literally nothing to do.

(F.B.F. [“Foi et bonne foi”], 356)

When there is nothing to do, human liberty—which for the existentialist is human reality—is smothered. P.P., incidentally, had made the same point, though with an emphasis on interhuman relations. With Spinoza frankly in mind, Merleau-Ponty says that the attempt to justify loving my neighbor as myself because each of us inheres equally in God will fail because in this case what might be claimed to be my love of the other is really

… the love which God has for himself through me. So that finally nowhere would there be love of others or indeed others, but one single self-love linked to itself beyond our lives, and nowise relevant, indeed inaccessible to us.

(P.P., 359)

In “La métaphysique dans l'homme” he generalizes this, and the absolute appears as a threat to all the relations of consciousness with consciousness. In a frequently quoted remark he says that “consciousness, both metaphysical and moral, perishes from contact with the absolute because it is itself … the living connection of self with self and of self with others” (M.M. [“La métaphysique dans l'homme”], 191).

I am not entitled, then, to assume that I am in contact with the absolute because “… whether there is or not an absolute thought … I can judge only by my own opinions which remain capable of error however severely I discuss them” (M.M., 189). The point in this complaint seems to be inability of the philosopher to be certain of the absolute. It serves as a reminder of Merleau-Ponty's conviction that philosophy operates in the realm of the probable. Should I attempt to transcend that realm, by invoking the absolute despite my limits, it disrupts my commerce with men: if I introduce it into my theorizing, I can dispense myself from justifying my positions before others and withdraw from the order of progressive experience where they have their meaning (cf. M.M., 190); and if I rest my practical behavior on an absolute, whatever I do is justified, even if I “piously slaughter my adversaries” (M.M., 190).

When he is more specific about the nature of this absolute which would make those who invoke it such a detriment to human community, we find that he has in mind some rather familiar philosophical versions of God: the creating God in the Leibnizian sense and the Kantian idea-limit. He takes these, incidentally, as the form in which religion also understands God, and not as simply belonging to philosophy (cf. M.M., 192-93). He rejects both versions abruptly and for the most venerable reasons: the notion of a creating God is irreconcilable with the presence of evil in the world, and the idea-limit substitutes what we wish the world was for what it actually is (cf. M.M., 192).

So far we face the conclusion that any absolute is quite foreign to all that is human, and foreign with that foreignness proper to ideas and things which Merleau-Ponty rejects when he rejects objectivism. But at the same time, and on another level, the issue is developing somewhat differently. When, in “La querelle de l'existentialisme,”¹⁵ he argues with Catholic critics of Sartre's opposition between consciousness and thing, he appeals to both Pascal and Malebranche in order to show the presence of such a distinction in the tradition of the critics themselves. With Malebranche, this distinction was reflected in his conception of God, for he insisted that the “glory of the architect” which God receives from things is quite different from the glory given by men who labor to reclaim the world for Him. “This is to distinguish in striking terms, between a God of things and a God of men. It was the assertion that the human order began with freedom” (Q.E. [“La querelle de l'existentialisme”], 149). At the beginning of P.P.C.P., he said that the primacy of perception would not destroy the absolute any more than it would destroy rationality, but would attempt to bring both down to earth (cf. P.P.C.P., 120). At the end of that paper he did admit that his position meant destruction for a “separate absolute” (P.P.C.P., 135), obviously one beyond the process of human history. Now the absolute which we have watched him reject up to this point has certainly been that separate absolute, the God of things. But what of the absolute brought down to earth, the God among men? The latter is of great importance both from philosophical and religious points of view. Merleau-Ponty usually discusses religion, incidentally, with allusions to the doctrines of the incarnation and death of Christ, and with a great that Christianity is not more attentive to their implications. We shall return to this.

PARADOX OF AN ABSOLUTE INCARNATE SUBJECT

“La métaphysique dans l'homme” attempts to indicate the status of this incarnate absolute.

Metaphysics can only seek a God that is for himself as well as for us behind consciousness, behind our ideas, like the anonymous force which sustains each of our thoughts and our experiences.

(M.M., 192)

When metaphysics does seek this God, however, its efforts merge with that of religion and become inarticulate, as he says religion inevitably is. The role of religion seems to be to mark the place in our culture for what is foreign and enigmatic,¹⁶ a role which religion carries out “not insofar as it is dogma nor even as belief, but as a cry” (M.M., 193). Any attempt to characterize this absolute would be contradictory (cf. M.M., 193). Now Merleau-Ponty is not normally ill at ease with contradiction. He has, in fact, taken it to be an essential of consciousness whose very being is to assume it. But now he distinguishes a fecund from a sterile or “inert” contradiction:

I have the right to consider as ultimate and true the contradictions of my life as thinking and incarnate subject because I experience it and because they are connected in the unchallengeable experience of a thing or in the experience of a truth. I cannot introduce behind me a ‘transcendence in immanence’ because I am not God and cannot verify in an unchallengeable experience the coexistence of these two attributes.

(M.M., 193)

I am not God. I cannot therefore be God, for this would be a sterile contradiction. I can not-be my world and at the same time be it.¹⁷ The same is true of my relation with my body, my past and the other dimensions of my being. This is all essential to that ambiguity which the description of experience prompts me to attribute to myself, that identity in difference which I can understand if I attach it to the paradox of time. But the paradox of time will not support the presence of the absolute. If, as my incarnate state seems to imply, I am implicated in the meaning of what I experience, and particularly if what I experience finds its phenomenal conditions in my consciousness—and Merleau-Ponty maintains that it does—then it would seem to follow that I could not experience or express a being whose meaning is that it owes me nothing.

Merleau-Ponty has not limited this conception of my lending phenomenal conditions only to things, but extends it to persons as well. Thus the experience of the other person involves one's finding in him “… a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions …” (P.P., 354). Later he says this even more sharply: “I lend myself to another person. I lend him my thoughts: this is not the defeat of the perception of the other person. It is the perception of the other person.”¹⁸ At another moment, as he describes the crucial experience of dialogue, he suggests that in a certain sense the other lends himself to me: “There is … an ability to think according to others which enriches our own thoughts” (P.P., 179; cf. also L.I. [“Le langage indirect et les voix du silence”], 91-92). The experience of the other person, then, is described (in part at least) when I speak of our crossing the gap which separates us, inhabiting each other so that, in a genuine sense, each is the other.

When he thinks on the question of the absolute, Merleau-Ponty quite evidently has the possibility of this sort of identity in mind. In “La métaphysique dans l'homme,” Leibniz is said to have “… claimed the point of view of a God without a world …” (M.M., 192) and those generally who referred to God in their thinking were held to be “… rejoining the absolute principle of all thought …” (M.M., 190) and withdrawing problems from discussion. Speaking of Lavelle in Éloge, he mentions the latter's admission that, in regard to the absolute, “… we cannot place ourselves in it to watch the derivation of the world …” (Éloge, 12). In Éloge, of course, he also insists that the great philosophers “… refused themselves the right to install themselves in an absolute knowledge …” (Éloge, 12). We shall see in a moment that Merleau-Ponty's critics will insist that a knowledge of the absolute is not necessarily an absolute knowledge, and reference to it is not an identity of the sort which would cause the death of consciousness.

But Merleau-Ponty is, not inconsistently, posing the question within that framework of identity and non-identity which is his, and his position does seem incompatible with the absolute. When I cross the gap which separates me from the other person and think according to him, the gap which I cross still remains. If it did not we would not be other than each other. I contribute to this gap and to his being other than me by the opacity of my consciousness which leaves him his privacy,¹⁹ and by my passivity, which allows me to experience him as active. In short, the other person which I “am” remains other thanks in part to those things in me which mark the failure of my strict identity with myself. It is this which Merleau-Ponty has related to the paradox of time, which accommodates so well the opacity of consciousness, past and present, and also the being-constituted which is part of every present. Here, then, in the description of the experience of self and of other persons, being and non-being co-habit with ease. They support rather than threaten each other and the contradiction is now in fact that dialectical opposition which, as far back as P.P., he made essential to metaphysics.²⁰ But the attempt to extend this metaphysics to God—and from his manner of posing the question of the absolute, this is what Merleau-Ponty feels is at stake—would be futile. God's total transcendence would, on the one hand, make the gap between us total, and his total immanence would make our identity with him complete. In addition, if I were certain of God, I would be fully identical with myself and no longer temporal. This would be sterile contradiction, irreconcilability rather than dialectical relationship.

PROBLEM OF GOD INERADICABLE

But serious questions persist, and arise from our experience: “… it is characteristic of man to think God …” (P.P.C.P., 151). If men did not think God, there would be no problem in the first place. If we recall that in the face of questions about the inadequacy of his conception of experience to allow for the other person and for reflection, he asserted that in fact the other person exists for me (cf. P.P, 358) and in fact there is reflection (cf. P.P., 359), and the conception of experience must and can accommodate them. Might not then its being characteristic of man to think God indicate that the absolute has in fact some role in our experience of things, a role which both demands and allows for some analogous accommodation? Consider, for example, the way in which, at one place, he describes the relation of words and ideas: he said that the former are “haunted at a distance” (L.I., 55) by the latter: and again that “the meaning of words are always ideas in the Kantian sense, poles of a certain number of convergent acts of expression which attract the discourse without being properly given for its own count” (P.L., 112). This certainly seems to be the integration of the idea into the experience of the thing expressed, where it seems to stand as the necessary goal of that transcendence of consciousness beyond any particular profile, the transcendence which gives the thing its relief as in-itself for me. As such it might be taken to be as “real” as the transcendence, and one might regard the “presumption” of reason as as “real” as reason. Perhaps the absolute is a pole attracting all philosophic discourse (or even all human endeavor) without being “properly given for its own count.” Perhaps it too is as “real” as the transcendence of consciousness, and as indispensable if I am to account for the being-for-me of all else.

Something of the sort is certainly the central theme of the reaction of Catholic critics, like De Waelhens and Jolivet. They attempt to associate God with the movement of transcendence itself, insisting that this movement and the human process of justification which it conditions are only comprehensible in relation to an absolute toward which consciousness tends without ever fully arriving. De Waelhens chides Merleau-Ponty for introducing into the discussion of the absolute the very interior-exterior distinction which he has himself done so much to render suspect. He then asserts that reference to the absolute is not identification with it and does not remove questions from the human process of justification:

To accept the notion that experience must be able in some fashion to be absolutely grounded is not to admit a truth which transcends every form of justification if, really, that admission only pushes to its extreme the very effort upon which every justification of which we are capable lives and constitutes the final meaning of such justification.²¹

Jolivet later states the matter even more sharply:

… if there is no ‘absolute knowing,’ it does not thereby follow that there is nothing absolute in knowing, for there is at least that drive toward the absolute (exigence de l'absolu) which alone gives knowing its meaning.²²

In order to dissociate absolute knowing from an absolute in knowing (which can be known), he and other Catholic thinkers point to a certain inevitably negative character in the knowledge of God, By this they mean that there is no exhausting the God that is known, and consequently no philosophical conception of God which is entirely satisfying and none which cannot be replaced with a better one. Merleau-Ponty is suspicious of such tendencies which are certainly common among Catholic thinkers, perhaps feeling that they are an attempt to ride the existentialist bandwagon.

It is striking to observe that today one rarely proves God as did St. Thomas, St. Anselm and Descartes. The proofs ordinarily remain understood and one merely refutes the negation of God … in seeking in the new philosophies some fissure through which the idea of necessary being can reappear. …

(Éloge, 58)

As far as he is concerned, the limitless transcendence of human existence is not such a “fissure” in his own work. If description of the transcendence in the phenomenological position uncovers a negative side, this is not the inexhaustibility of a real being toward which consciousness tends but rather the forgetting by consciousness of its own origin, its situation, itself as event. Neither does the philosophical consciousness tend toward God as toward an ideal being: Merleau-Ponty has already challenged this as an unwarranted projection of human hope.

NO HUMAN TRUTH ABOUT GOD

But is the phenomenal basis of this thinking of the absolute nothing more than an illusion, a presumption which does not recognize itself? Merleau-Ponty does offer something more in “La métaphysique dans l'homme”: “My belief in the absolute, to the extent that it is solid, is nothing other than my experience of an accord with myself and others” (M.M., 190). Why this experience of accord should take this form is not indicated and the positive meaning of this thinking of the absolute eludes us still as he directs our attention toward the being of communication.

Éloge de la philosophie has more to say about the negative consciousness and also about the being of communication as a philosophical ultimate. This work will, incidentally, supersede “La métaphysique dans l'homme” as the locus classicus of Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the absolute. Six years later than the latter, its tone is sure, even serene, and the phenomenology which it advances is not set in contrast to but rather blends in with what it takes to be the best in the previous philosophies. They too are held to have seen philosophy as expression, which like every other expression presupposes someone who expresses himself, a truth expressed and others before whom it is expressed (cf. Éloge, 79). As the question of the absolute is taken up again, he speaks with warm approval of the philosophical greats who declined to situate themselves in an absolute knowing, saying rather that they taught “… not this knowledge but its becoming in us, not the absolute but at most, as Kierkegaard says, an absolute relation between it and us” (Éloge, 11). In both Lavelle and Bergson, upon whom he comments, he finds versions of the exterior God, irreconcilable with man, and the God among men, with a clear option for the latter. The following remark about “Bergsonian theology” applies also to Lavelle, to Socrates who is later discussed and, without doubt, to Merleau-Ponty himself: In this theology,

… there is a sort of fuzziness (bougé) as a result of which one never knows if it is God that sustains man in his being-human, or the reverse, because in order to recognize his [God's] existence, we must go through our own, and because this is not a detour.

(Éloge, 38)²³

The understanding of God, then, is irrevocably qualified by the fact that it is my understanding. Continuing to interpret Bergson along lines set down in “La métaphysique dans l'homme,” he points in the latter's work to a “God among men to whom will correspond a prospective history which is an experience seeking its own accomplishment” (Éloge, 38-39). This God “cannot be fixed, known or be apart from our duration and for himself …” (Éloge, 37). The progress of the experience with which he corresponds is defined “… not by an idea but by an orientational constant …” (Éloge, 39).

In the system self-self-others-truth, which, according to Éloge, is the fundamental dimension of philosophy,²⁴ the affirmation of God cannot occupy the position of truth. Merleau-Ponty underscores this by introducing a distinction between philosophy and theology which is such that this affirmation defines the latter and, the refusal to make it defines the former. The distinction emerges when, for instance, he refuses to consider the charge of atheism as relevant to a philosophy: “This is philosophy as seen by a Theologian” (Éloge, 63).²⁵ He turns then to remarks by Henri de Lubac in his work, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, to the effect that twentieth century atheism intended to “… suppress the very problem which brings God to mind” (Éloge, 62). Answering in the name of the philosophy he advances, Merleau-Ponty says that “… this problem is so little ignored by the philosopher that … he radicalizes it and places it beyond ‘solutions’ which smother it” (Éloge, 62). One might wonder, in connection with this important remark, whether the problem is being placed beyond all solutions or rather only beyond certain classic “solutions which smother it.” As Merleau-Ponty himself continues, he seems at first to have a particular solution in mind, but then he allows this one to subsume all the rest: turning to Maritain and to his claim that the saint is an “integral atheist” when it comes to rejecting such caricatures of God as an “emperor of the world,” Merleau-Ponty says that

The philosopher will wonder if the natural and rational concept of God as necessary Being is not inevitably that of Emperor of the world, if without this the Christian God would not cease to be author of the world. …

(Éloge, 65)

This was to be expected. When we consider that radicalizing for Merleau-Ponty is a turning back to the point at which meaning is generated, to the dynamic present, it is evident that any problem directly attached to this moving and self-constituting consciousness will stand beyond any definitive and certain solution.

It is important now to see the relation between the present and that equilibrium of self with self, other selves and truth which orients philosophy. This equilibrium is accomplished when developments in all three of its dimensions intersect to reinforce each other and to present philosophy with an optimum moment upon which it can henceforth take its bearings. Any such optimum moment is, of course, a present where presence is most intense and where meaning takes shape spontaneously and without a model (C.P. [“Christianisme et philosophie”], 53). As the present becomes the seminal moment, the rejection of the notion of God conceived as goal of human tendency or as creator is immediately indicated, because the former would establish the source of meaning in the future and the latter would place it in the past. But where the present is origin, as is clear in P.P., one goes toward one's antecedents and sustains them (cf. P.P., Pref., IX) and the future is opened by an ecstatic move of the present toward it (cf. P.P., 426). The priority of the present thus leads one directly to the rejection of the classic notions of God as an absolute standing at either the beginning or end of time.

But it is much less directly suggestive about the stubbornness of consciousness in presuming such absolutes. In fact, when Merleau-Ponty radicalizes the problem by placing it beyond the solutions which stifle it, he is indicating quite clearly that the question is not to be stifled, which is to say that it is to stay alive. However much it outstrips my capacity for expression, it will nonetheless continue to tempt and mobilize this capacity, and this too must be ultimately due to the nature of the originating present. This now from which meaning springs is my present and so marked by my finitude that an absolute outside of time altogether, an eternal God, cannot be justifiably maintained. Yet there is a dynamism in this present which so qualifies my finitude that Merleau-Ponty will say at one moment: “… I am the absolute Source …” (P.P., IX). At other and later moments, this dynamism seems to transcend the “I.” In “La métaphysique dans l'homme” he speaks of “… an anonymous force sustaining each thought and experience …” (M.M., 192-193)²⁶ and in Éloge he seems to be expanding the same notion, when he speaks (approvingly) of God for man in Bergson's thought and says that man “… encounters at the root of his constituted being a generosity which is not compromised by the adversity of the world and which works with him against it” (Éloge, 38).

How much can Merleau-Ponty concede to this dynamism (in order to make sense of the persistence of the issue) without violating his priority of the present? In “La métaphysique dans l'homme” he gave us a clue to his attitude when he said that the most solid thing in our acceptance of an absolute is our experience of accord with ourselves and others. He can also admit the extension of the present into every moment—an omnitemporality.²⁷ But he cannot divorce it from every moment; for the eternal God implied would be incompatible with the experience mentioned above. My present can as well extend into the present of other persons, into the social dimension, but again, it cannot go beyond this without, apparently, dissolving it. Thus does the transcendence of the present find its limit.

For the philosopher, the central way in which this limit seems to take hold is in its bearing on certitude. Recall that in “La métaphysique dans l'homme” he insisted that my maintaining the absolute was compromised by the fact that “I can judge only by my own opinions which remain capable of error …” (M.M., 189).²⁸ But of what is the philosopher certain? Given the mutual involvement of phenomena and the contextual character of the truth, complete certitude would demand a kind of presence to everything, and Merleau-Ponty seems to agree that it would: “There is the absolute certainty of the world in general, but not of any one thing in particular …” (P.P., 297). The present in which such certitude could be had would be total immediacy, lived at the perceptual source and ruptured by the transcending movement of consciousness as it institutes meaning. Once divorced from this level—and divorce occurs by any act of reflection or affirmation—then one leaves the possibility of absolute certitude and enters the field of the probable. Here, conclusions would not have the ultimate coercive power of the primitive engagement, but it is here that every work of reflection—philosophy included—dwells. Merleau-Ponty, differing from Sartre, has always demanded respect for the probable. This was evident in the last chapter of P.P. In Les aventures de la dialectique, he will say that: “… the probable is another name for the real. It is the modality of what exists” (A.D., 158).

Philosophical positions, then, are probable. Philosophical conviction is not and never can be absolute certitude. Whatever verification is to be had on the basis of our experience of thing or truth, it is not such as to be secure against eventual overthrow. It is doubtful that Merleau-Ponty believes that he has said the word which ends the need for further speaking when he announced, for example, that consciousness is intentional, or even that the subject is finite. Why should he demand more of the philosophical affirmation of the existence of God, as he certainly does when he poses the problem in terms of complete certitude and absolute knowing? It is true that, at various points in history, men have ruptured the human community in the name of the God of whom they had an “absolutized” conviction. But this is not the only form that conviction can take. Furthermore, the human community and its philosophical community can not only admit but can draw great profit from philosophical positions put forth with that tenacity and sense of appropriateness which is philosophical conviction. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a philosophical position taking hold without the impulse of such a conviction. Why, then, not allow the philosophical affirmation of the existence of God to stand as a philosophical position required to justify itself like any other and subject only to philosophical conviction rather than absolute certitude?

These questions can be taken to embody a theist protest against Merleau-Ponty's handling of the question of the absolute. Yet their theme can just as well be taken as his response to them, reminding them that philosophically, their position is simply one among others which have emerged in the historical process of philosophy and that his posing of the question in terms of absolute certitude and absolute knowing has the effect precisely of rejecting the attempt to make it something destructive of that process and community. Merleau-Ponty does not deny the greatness of a Descartes or Augustine, a Malebranche, a Hegel, nor their place in the philosophical community. He does not deny the significance of religion nor its interest for philosophy. He does insist, however, that the affirmation of the existence of God rides the momentum of a presumption on the part of consciousness and rides it out of the range of evidence.

For their part, theist critics will feel entitled to remind him that he too admits the existence of this drive—which he calls presumptive—and that he has yet to account effectively for it. They will find it unlikely, in this same line, that he will ever be able to propose an adequate notion of the ideal order, in which such presumption is so important. Under the circumstances, then, they will wonder and seriously, about the ability of philosophy to “comprehend” itself in any meaningful way, and certainly about its “comprehension” of religion, a task which Merleau-Ponty clearly assigns it: “… it is in the universe of the philosopher that one saves the gods and the laws, by comprehending them …” (Éloge, 53). Merleau-Ponty does not, in our opinion, leave himself in a good position for offering an eventual understanding of the ideal order.

As for that stubborn presumption of consciousness, with its forgetting of itself as an event, that presumption of the absolute which he said in P.P. was the “fundamental philosophical problem” (P.P., 63), we must recall that we have just heard him say that the very problem which gives rise to the thought of God has been placed beyond stifling solutions. The presumption is not to be explained, where “explain” means “solved.” Rather, it is apparently an ultimate, another face of temporality or of that fundamental generosity to which he has alluded. Such problems are not solved, though they are profitably meditated and even, in some sense or other, “comprehended.” This will, of course, be unsatisfactory to the theist who will wonder what “comprehend” can mean in this case. For Merleau-Ponty, it will not mean to absorb intellectually, but to enter into an effective dialogue with. Let us now turn to his attempts at comprehending religion.

CRITIQUE OF RELIGION

The attempt to comprehend religion includes a critique of Christianity's worth as a vehicle for the incarnation of value among men. In his very first article, he insisted that during the great epochs of faith the kingdom of God—though it was “not of this world”—was never an excuse for an indifference to injustice on earth (cf. “Christianisme et ressentiment,” 297-98). Whether it is because the post World War II period was not a great age of faith, or because he had changed his mind about the concrete significance of Christianity's “unworldliness” (it is almost certainly both) he says in “Foi et bonne foi” that the Church is a “reactionary institution” (F.B.F., 351). The article itself is a remarkable encounter of Catholic thought and spirituality with phenomenological existentialism. It tends more to block out in broad strokes an accommodation of the former with the latter than to draw the issues out to a highly refined point and it includes a confrontation of the existentialist version of faith with the Christian version, as well as existentialist readings of certain key Catholic dogmas. A fundamental equivocation, he feels, characterizes the Christian position in history: at times it is generous and progressive but more often conservative and indifferent to social need. From its spiritual life, the Church feeds both of these tendencies which can create such tensions within the individual believer: “Catholicism believes both in an interior God and an exterior God. Such is the religious formula for its contradictions” (F.B.F., 354).

A question immediately rises here about the relation of this distinction with the one already made between the God of things and the God among men. One would expect the exterior God to be the God of things and the interior God to be the God among men, but in fact the reverse is the case. The key to this particular handling of the distinction lies in Merleau-Ponty's focussing now on the individual and on the point at which the individual accomplishes his relation with God, rather than on the perceptive realm as a whole and on God's transcendence of it. Thus, the interior God is discovered when one turns away from the world and toward one's own soul. He communicates directly with this individual soul and in fact is really more myself than I am. Otherwise he answers the description of the God of things: perfection already accomplished, absolute and oppressive. For the individual, there is nothing to do really, save identify himself by knowledge and obedience with this being. This is accomplished by a movement away from the world which terminates in an identity with self because it is union with God. This accomplished self-identity is what existentialists regard as sincerity: the sincere person tries only to be himself. Sartre made much of this in Being and Nothingness. The achieving of this at a distance from the world presents the picture of an impregnable Christian rectitude which is at the same time quietism, for action among men is meaningless.

The development which makes the self-identity of sincerity the characteristic of the Christian stands in contrast with Christianity as the religion of the exterior God. The religion of the interior God is the religion of God the Father and that of the exterior God is the religion of Incarnation, of God the Son. The “exterior” character of the latter lies in the fact that its center of action is not within the soul but among men. The kingdom of God is not to be contemplated but constructed by the free action of men turned outward toward the world and each other. Such men are not capable of sincerity in the sense of confident and lucid being-themselves, because they are so involved in the world that they are not to be fulfilled before it is. Their rule is not sincerity but faith, considered as adhesion to what one does not clearly see and extending beyond specific guarantees, and responsibility (cf. F.B.F., 359). The God in whom they believe and who is for them a call to action is consistent, he feels, with the dogma of the Incarnation, but radically different from the interior God.

… the God-Man and the death of God transform the spirit and religion. It is as if the infinitely infinite God no longer sufficed; as if something stirred in him; as if man and the world, rather than being the useless degradation of an original perfection, became the necessary moments of a greater perfection. God can no longer be God and creation can only be accomplished if man freely recognizes him and renders him back the world in Faith … there is something to do.

(F.B.F., 358-59)

Catholicism attempts to honor at once both this tendency and that of the religion of God the Father. Merleau-Ponty censures, not their failure at this, but the attempt itself, measuring it against his existentialist reading of the significance of Pentecost.

Pentecost means that the religion of the Father and that of the Son should be fulfilled in the religion of the Spirit; that God is no longer in heaven but in society and in the communication among men … Catholicism stops and freezes this development.

(F.B.F., 361)²⁹

It nourishes that aloofness from the human situation which is part of the religion of the Father, and the effect of this upon the Church, the institution which regards itself as the prolongation of the Incarnation and as the contemporary actuality of God-among-men, is that it slips out to the periphery of human affairs. Undervaluing social action, it accepts existing evils too readily and too quickly seeks privileges for itself in the status quo. While the human situation demands the overturning of the status quo in the interest of a future where the great masses of men can share in the accomplishments of civilization, the Church sanctions revolt only when it is itself threatened and “The Catholic as Catholic has no sense of the future …” (F.B.F., 363).

There is a more tenable notion of sincerity in the existentialist conception of action, and a far more tenable equilibrium between the demands of personal integrity, orthodoxy and the human situation in the Marxist view of the individual, the party and history. For the existentialist, the identity with self occurs only in action, never reflection, as the theme of the interior God would have it. When the action is of historical significance it engages one's fellow men with whose positions one must reckon. Merleau-Ponty feels at this point that Lenin's notion of “democratic centralization” (cf. F.B.F., 369) allows in a uniquely adequate way for reconciling the demands of individual conviction and institutional demand for unity. Without going into detail about this conception, he says that it holds disagreement and tension between individual and party to be inevitable, but to be transcended by the life of the individual in the party which is his party (cf. F.B.F., 368).

Like Christianity it will raise for him the problem of the absolute. The Marxist absolute would be, of course, that of a classless society lying at the term of the development of history, and it was not unusual for those comparing positions to attempt to distinguish basic philosophical options by speaking of the need to choose either the absolute in the vertical dimension—the transcendent God of Christianity—or the one in the horizontal dimension—the shining future in Marxist thinking (L.I., 89). Commenting on this posing of the question in “Le language indirect et les voix du silence,” Merleau-Ponty says that:

No philosophy has ever consisted in choosing between transcendences—for example, between the transcendence of God and that of the future of man. Philosophies are all concerned with mediating them, with understanding, for example, how God becomes man or how man becomes God. …

(L.I., 89)

To the extent that this remark is indicative of its meaning, the term mediation is used to designate that return to the genetic instance which he has always made the task of philosophy. The attempt at such mediation can, he feels, be a work of great value for philosophy: “The confrontation with Christianity is one of the occasions in which philosophy best reveals its essence.”

This remark is drawn from his short piece “Christianisme et philosophie”³⁰ which introduces a section of Les philosophes célèbres. This is in 1956, and though Merleau-Ponty has maintained his distance from Christianity, (something to which he will allude in this article) the tone in which he addresses the question has lost much of its impatience and the calmness which characterized his discussion of God and the absolute in Éloge continues to prevail. As he begins, he offers a concise but very perceptive comment on a classic discussion of the possibility of a distinctly Christian philosophy which took place in France in 1931 and in which virtually all of the major figures in the French philosophical community participated.³¹ He divines, beneath the divisions over whether there is or is not a Christian philosophy, a series of attitudes toward whether or not philosophy has an essence which can be considered in a pure state and he notes that positions on this do not correspond with positions on whether there is or is not a Christian philosophy. (Some who hold that there is an isolable essence of philosophy maintain that there is a Christian philosophy and some deny this.) Merleau-Ponty rejects the conception of a pure essence in favor of a relation with culture, and maintains that there is a Christian philosophy. He insists, in fact, that there are many and that they are Christian because they stem from Christianity as cultural matrix (cf. C.P., 179). Some pages earlier he said that Christianity is

… the recital and the meditation of an experience, of a group of enigmatic events which, themselves, invite several philosophical elaborations and have not ceased to elicit (susciter) philosophies. …

(Signes, 169)³²

The remark underscores the matrix character of instituted Christianity, and he moves then to address what he calls the central problem which is the relation between this matrix and “Christianity effectively lived and practiced in positive faith” (C.P., 179).

This sounds as if it might introduce a discussion of his own religious position, and in a sense it does. But the self which he considers is subsumed, so to speak, by his function of philosopher. The philosopher may view Christian culture with approval and may respect Christian philosophers, but “… because he comprehends them the philosopher is not one of them …” (C.P., 179). To comprehend is inevitably to set at a critical distance. For itself, he remarks, Christianity is “… not a symbol but the Truth …” (C.P., 179). This it cannot be for the philosopher for whom any truth can be overthrown. Yet he insists upon the reality and the intensity of the dialectical relation between such a philosopher and Christianity:

In a sense, the tension is greater (because the distance is less) between the philosopher who understands all on the basis of human interrogation and the strict and profound practice of the very religion that he “comprehends,” than between a rationalism which pretends to explain the world and a faith which is in its eyes only nonsense.

(C.P., 179-80)

The philosophy which Merleau-Ponty understands as interrogation does not maintain the sterile contrast with religion that rationalism does. This could be seen in what he has already said. In “Foi et bonne foi” he noted that faith, the distinctive note of religion, was to be understood as “… an adherence which goes beyond given guarantees …” (F.B.F., 359). But philosophy, with presumption built into every concept, also includes this note. It is no accident nor is it inappropriate that the primordial relation to the world, the perceptive engagement, is often called faith by Merleau-Ponty. With such an affinity between philosophy and religion in mind, it is not surprising that he feels that the way of comprehension lies in seeing both philosophy and Christianity, not as opposites, but as “… ridden with the same contradiction” (C.P., 180). Or again: “Philosophical and religious relations with God should be of the same type. Philosophy and religion must symbolize” (C.P., 181). This is to insist that religion must have a place in that system of symbolisms—exemplified in language, institutions, etc.—which is the ultimate logos, rather than standing beyond it. When he looks into the history of the question to find the position which best approximates what he hopes for, it is toward Malebranche again that he turns. Without being completely satisfactory, Malebranche had the immense merit of

… substituting a transverse clivage for the longitudinal division of a philosophical domain of pure understanding from the created existent world, domain of natural and supernatural experience. He apportioned to reason and religion the same typical structures of light and sentiment, of ideal and real.

(C.P., 182)

With such a view, we have the invasion of one domain by the other with, one supposed, some consequent possibility of transcribing the experiences of one into the terms of the other. His conception of other domains—perception, painting, history for example—hold forth the same possibility. As in these other cases, however, he insists upon the contrast as well as the affinity among the areas which penetrate each other. Thus his reservations on Malebranche for insisting on the ultimate identity of—say—the eternal Word and the incarnate word. Thus his rejection of Blondel's position that the relation between philosophy and theology is that of interrogation and response (cf. C.P., 183-84). Each area, he insists, has its own negative and positive characteristics, its own interrogations and its own responses. The relation between them must respect this if it is to be the exchange which is essential to comprehension. He sums this up cautiously and from the side of philosophy: a genuine exchange between philosophy and Christianity would be possible only

… if the Christian, with his reservations over the ultimate source of his inspiration which he alone can judge, accepted without restriction the task of mediation which philosophy cannot renounce without destroying itself.

(C.P., 184)

Philosophy, accepting the mediation, is apparently open to the exchange. Merleau-Ponty, accepting the validity and importance of Christian philosophy, embodies this position. What is left seems the task of the Christian: reconciling itself with philosophical mediation.

Notes

1. M. Merleau-Ponty, “Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, 41 (1947), 151.

2. It is touched upon in his first article “Christianisme et ressentiment” (1935), briefly viewed in Phénomenologie de la perception (1946) and also dealt with in various articles, papers and lectures: “Un auteur scandaleux” (1945); “La querelle de l'existentialisme” (1946); “Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques,” particularly the discussion which followed (delivered as lecture in 1946, published in 1947); “Foi et bonne foi” (1947); “La métaphysique dans l'homme” (1947); “L'homme et l'adversité,” particularly the discussion (1950); “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence” (1951); Éloge de la philosophie (1953); and Les Philosophes célèbres (1956).

3. “L'homme et l'adversité,” La connaissance de l'homme au XX^esiècle (Neuchatel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1952), pp. 51-74. This was originally a paper delivered on September 10, 1951 at a session of the annual Rencontres Internationales de Genève. The discussion which was devoted to it is published in the same volume, pp. 251-52. The paper without the discussion is also included in Signes, pp. 284-308. We shall cite it from the former source and as H.A.

4. “Foi et bonne foi,” Les temps modernes, No. 5 (1946), 769-82. This article is also included in the collection Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948) from which we quote it and in which the remark quoted is on p. 352. We shall refer to this article as F.B.F.

5. “Christianisme et ressentiment,” La vie intellectuelle, 36 (1935), 278-306; and “Être et avoir,” La vie intellectuelle, 45 (1936), 98-109.

6. Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Mr. Colin Smith has done a competent translation: Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) and we shall draw our quotations from it, referring to it as P.P.

7. Éloge de la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). We shall refer to this as Éloge.

8. Éloge pp. 63-64; Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 171. We do not ignore the fact that denying the relevance of atheism to a philosophy may not be the same as denying its relevance to a philosopher.

9. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty vivant,” Les temps modernes, No. 184-185 (1961), p. 360.

10. Cf. La structure du comportement, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942). Dr. Alden Fisher has published a highly satisfactory translation: The Structure of Behavior (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), where the point referred to above is made on p. 219.

11. “Sur la phénoménologie du langage” was delivered as a paper at the First International Phenomenological Colloquy which was held in Brussels in 1951, and then published with the other papers from that meeting under the title Problèmes actuels de la phénoménologie (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1952). It is included in Signes from which we shall quote it, referring to it as P.L.

12. Previously, rejecting the absolute consciousness under another of its attributes, he said that “… philosophy breathes only when it rejects the infinitely infinite thought to see the world in all its strangeness …” (H.A., discussion, 251).

13. “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence,” Les temps modernes, No. 80 (1952), 2113, and No. 81 (1952), 70. This is included in the collection Signes from which we shall quote it as L.I. and where the remark above is found on p. 103.

14. “La métaphysique dans l'homme,” Revue de métaphysique et morale, 52 (1947), 290-307. This is included in the anthology Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948) from which we shall quote it—as M.M.—and where the remark above appears on p. 192.

15. “La querelle de l'existentialisme,” Les temps modernes, No. 2 (1945), 193. This article is included in Sens et non-sens, from which we shall quote it as Q.E.

16. This is not quite as clearly stated in “La métaphysique dans l'homme” as it is in his “Lecture de Montaigne” which appeared at approximately the same time. In the latter he sees Montaigne holding what is obviously his (Merleau-Ponty's) own position on the matter: “The value of religion lies in this: that it reserves a place for what is foreign to us, and that it knows our fate to be enigmatic. All the solutions which it gives of the enigma are incompatible with our monstrous condition. As a questioning, religion is justified as long as it remains without answers.” “La Lecture de Montaigne,” Les temps modernes No. 27 (1947), 1044. The article is included in Signes where the remark just quoted appears on p. 257.

17. For example: “I am all that I see” (P.P., 452); “I am my body …” (P.P., 198).

18. “Le philosophe et son ombre,” Edmund Husserl, 1859-1859 (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959). The article is also included in Signes where the remark in question appears on p. 201.

19. Given our mutual implication, total clarity about myself would require total clarity about him.

20. “The dialectic is not a relationship between contradictory and inseparable thoughts; it is the tending of an existence towards another existence which denies it, and yet without which it is not sustained. Metaphysics—the coming to light of something beyond nature—is not localized at the level of knowledge: it begins with the opening out upon ‘another’ and is to be found everywhere, and already, in the specific development of sexuality” (P.P., 168).

21. De Waelhens, Une philosophie de l'ambiguité, 384 ff.; quotation from p. 394.

22. Regis Jolivet, “Le problème de l'absolu dans la philosophie de M. Merleau-Ponty,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 19 (1957), 53-100; quotation from p. 65.

23. A question can arise here over the legitimacy of regarding remarks by Merleau-Ponty about Bergson and others in Éloge as applicable to his own position. We have indeed done this on certain occasions, but consider it justified because (a) Éloge is quite evidently a comment on what he has in common with Lavelle, Leroy, Bergson and Socrates; and (b) the distinctions which he makes and develops here have been made elsewhere when he was obviously speaking of his own view. The distinction of exterior God and the God among men is a prime example of his prolongation of categories previously introduced.

    It has occurred to us that Merleau-Ponty has given some of the more striking statements of his own position in the process of commenting on the philosophy of others. Éloge is one example of this. The preface to P.P. is another and his comment on Husserl's work in “Le philosophe et son ombre” (Signes, pp. 201-28) yet another. The articles on Montaigne and Machiavelli (Signes, pp. 250-66 and 267-83) are also examples.

24. “… I think neither according to the true alone, nor according to myself alone nor according to others alone, because each of these three needs the other two and it would be nonsense to sacrifice it to them. A philosophical life always takes its bearings on these three cardinal points” (Éloge, 46).

25. He continues: “If we recall the history of the word atheism, and that it was even applied to Spinoza … we have to admit that any thought which … defines the sacred differently is called atheist, and that the philosophy which never places it here or there as a thing, but rather places it at the juncture of things or words will always be target for this reproach without the latter's ever being able to touch it” (Éloge, pp. 63-65).

26. He says that philosophy cannot express this, as we noted. He does not deny, however, that it can seek to express it, and so keeps the item alive as a problem, which is, in one sense, a way of expressing it.

27. This is Husserl's term. Merleau-Ponty endorses it and the notion that it expresses. Les sciences de l'homme (Paris: Tournier et Constans, no date) p. 8.

28. The same note is struck in Éloge: “The philosopher cannot be asked to go beyond what he himself sees, or to give precepts of which he is not sure” (Éloge, 46).

29. Four years later, in his L'homme et l'adversité he presses this dilemma even more sharply upon Catholicism. Speaking to the point that there was an acceptable atheism which only rejected the God of philosophers (cf. also references to Maritain in Éloge) he says that “Without an ideal God (Dieu en idée), without the thought which is infinite and which created the world, Christ is a man. His birth and passion cease to be acts of God to become symbols of the human condition” (H.A., 27).

30. “Christianisme et philosophie,” Les philosophes célèbres (Paris: Mazenod, 1956). This article is also found in Signes from which we will cite it as C.P. and where the remark above is to be found on p. 176.

31. Cf. “La notion de philosophie chrètienne,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, report of the Session of 21 March, 1931.

32. His meditation on Christianity and Philosophy closes with the remark “… Christianity has nourished more than one philosophy, whatever privilege one of them may have acquired. In principle it does not admit of a unique and exhaustive philosophical expression, and in this sense, whatever its acquisitions, Christian philosophy is never a completed work” (C.P., 185).