SOURCE: Dolgov, K. M. “The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” Soviet Studies in Philosophy 14, no. 3 (winter 1975): 67-92.

[In the following essay, Dolgov presents an overview of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological and aesthetic system of thought.]

Maurice Merleau-Ponty enjoys a special place among contemporary French bourgeois philosophers and aestheticians. Statements by Sartre, Camus, Hyppolite, Dufrenne, Ricoeur, Geroux, Lévi-Strauss, and others show that they experienced (and some continue to this day to experience) in one way or another the influence of this philosopher. For example, all French phenomenologists and existentialists recognize that Merleau-Ponty was the first to take up and pursue, on French soil, the elaboration of the ideas of Husserlian phenomenology and German existentialism.¹ One cannot fail to note that various kinds of antidialectical and metaphysical notions have come into being under the direct and powerful influence of Merleau-Ponty.

As far as the philosopher's political views are concerned, their obvious one-sidedness, linearity, and anti-Marxist and anticommunist bias testify not only to the narrowness of his political horizons but to the fact that his philosophical creativity in the strict sense was certainly limited. Analysis of it confirms that reactionary political views inevitably place their destructive impress even on a realm of activity that at first glance appears to be remote from political life as such.

The views held by Merleau-Ponty have been subjected to cogent criticism by French Marxists. A special role in this regard was played by the volume Mésaventures de l'anti-marxisme², a critical response to Merleau-Ponty's book Les aventures de la dialectique³, in which he attempted to “refute” and “destroy” dialectics and the dialectical method of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In articles by Georges Cogniot, Jean Canappe, Victor Leduc, and others, and also in Georg Lukács's “Letter to the Editors of Cahiers du communisme,” the complete untenability of Merleau-Ponty's efforts to refute dialectics, the scientific untenability of his antidialectical and anti-Marxist philosophy, and the reactionary character of his views were demonstrated.

Regrettably, the Soviet philosophical literature thus far contains no works in which there is a thorough critical analysis of the views of Merleau-Ponty. The present article does not claim to be a comprehensive examination of the philosophy of this influential bourgeois thinker. We wish to present to the reader's attention an analysis only of a few particularly significant factors in the philosophy and aesthetics of Merleau-Ponty, in particular his attempt to construct a new and all-embracing metaphysics which he erected with the aid of the phenomenological method not so much out of past philosophical or sociological conceptions as out of the “material” of modern art. This is why we shall intimately associate analysis of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with analysis of his aesthetic views.

After publication of his Phenomenology of Perception⁴, Merleau-Ponty became one of the leading French bourgeois philosophers and psychologists. This study attempted to create a new world-view that would correspond not only to the principal ideas of Husserl's phenomenology (at that time an accepted world-view) but also to the achievements of the modern natural and social sciences. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty tried to base himself on the entire philosophical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel, inclusive. Analysis of the phenomenology of Husserl and his followers, of writings by representatives of Lebensphilosophie, of existentialism and structuralism, held a special place in his work.

The essence of Merleau-Ponty's idea lay in creating a philosophy (sometimes he called it psychology) that would be the natural result of the development of all prior philosophy and, consequently, would be genuinely contemporary thought, satisfying the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural requirements of man, a philosophy that would help man find himself and his place in this world, to establish appropriate contact with other people and with the world.

How could this intention be realized? Where to begin? Usually philosophers begin from afar—with analysis of the rise of philosophy itself and the history of philosophy. To a certain degree this approach is comprehensible and justified. However, investigation of the history of the development of thought obviously presumes that a quite definite method of analysis already exists, a specific position from which the investigation has to be conducted.

Merleau-Ponty, though shaped by the influence of Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophy of existentialism, could not but feel the seriousness of the problem of finding a position from which to begin interpretation of the philosophical tradition and the development of a world-view that, in his opinion, would correspond most completely to his treasured objective. The point is that the state of phenomenology by the 1940s was by no means comforting: Husserl's phenomenology was being interpreted variously by his pupils, in accordance with their tastes, objectives, tasks, and needs. There was no unitary phenomenological conception, and none that did not deviate from significant factors and principles of his philosophy, which did not “revise” them in some measure. And it is natural that among Husserl's followers there was no unity even in their understanding of what phenomenology was.

Therefore, Merleau-Ponty began with a clarification of the very notion of phenomenology.

Examining its characteristics, he takes the view that phenomenology is the study of essences, that the entire problem resolves to defining essences: for example, the essence of perception, the essence of consciousness. Phenomenology is a philosophy that places essence within existence and does not conceive of any understanding of man and the world other than the understanding that takes as its point of departure their facticité. This is a transcendental philosophy which proposes a thought situation in which the world is always “already there” (déjà là) prior to reflection, as an irremovable presence, all the power of which lies in finding once again that naïve contact with the world which will finally give it philosophical status. This is the “ambition” of philosophy, which would like to be an “exact science” but at the same time has to consider space, time, and the “experienced” (vécu) world. It is an attempt to describe our experience as it is, without taking into consideration its psychological genesis nor the causal explanations that a scientist, historian, or sociologist might provide. Nevertheless, in his last writings Husserl refers to “genetic phenomenology” and even “constructive phenomenology.”

From the standpoint of such an understanding of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty sees no contradictions between Husserl's phenomenology and its understanding and interpretation by Heidegger, inasmuch as his Being and Time developed Husserl's basic ideas and was the result of the explication of the naturlichen Weltbegriff, or Lebenswelt (living world), which Husserl, at the end of his life, regarded as the primary theme of phenomenology. In a word, the contradictions between the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger are contradictions inherent in the philosophy of Husserl himself.

What Husserl wanted first was to transform phenomenology into a descriptive psychology that would return to things themselves and mark an abandonment of science. Opposing the causal explanation of phenomena (materialist-Marxist and idealist-Hegelian), Merleau-Ponty simultaneously attempted to validate the features of the philosophical-psychological analysis of man, which might and must, unlike the methods of the natural and social sciences, provide an integral synthetic concept of the human ego. With this object he introduced the category of “experience of the world,” which, like Kant's transcendental apperception, underlies all human knowledge. Moreover, “the experience of the world” as experience lived by the subject is primary relative to all knowledge whatever, scientific knowledge included. And if everything I know about the world has been obtained by means of science, in that case I know everything, starting from my vision or experience of the world, without which it would have been impossible to say anything about the symbols of science. The ego is not a result of the intersection of numerous causes determining its body or psyche; the ego cannot think of itself as a part of the world, as a simple entity in biology, psychology, or sociology, and cannot encompass within itself the world of science. The entire universe of science is built on the experienced world, and if we want to conceive of science as such with all rigor and evaluate its sense and meaning precisely, then it is necessary at the outset to arouse that experience of the world of which it is a secondary expression. Science never has and never will possess being in the same sense that the perceived world does, for the simple reason that it is merely an explanation or definition.

Merleau-Ponty holds that the standpoint of science is uncritical and even hypocritical because it leaves out of consideration not only the meaning of being but also the standpoint of consciousness, thanks to which the world is concentrated around the subject and begins to exist for him. Husserl's requirement of a “return to things themselves,” although it means return to the world of preconsciousness, does not at all mean that consciousness can be ignored or left out of consideration, inasmuch as any scientific definition remains abstract with respect to it, as does geography with respect to a landscape. It is precisely for this reason that Merleau-Ponty insists that the comprehension and cognition of things is preceded by the act of perception, as the background or foundation thanks to which all other acts become possible: epistemological, psychological, etc.

Merleau-Ponty attempted to create a universal ontology—a philosophy that would rise above materialism and idealism, objectivism and subjectivism, rationalism and irrationalism, metaphysics and dialectics; that would eliminate the differences between subject and object, essence and phenomenon, being and nothingness, knowledge and faith, a thing and its image, and so forth. Having declared repeatedly that philosophy is not a science⁵, that “philosophy questions questioning faith”⁶, that “philosophy is questioning faith, questioning itself about itself”⁷, Merleau-Ponty conceived of the new ontology as questioning thought inquiring about the world, about man—thought that in the final analysis must lead to the birth of meaning.

But if philosophy is not a science, then, naturally, the process of questioning as the function of existential phenomenology is not a process that will produce knowledge; one cannot even speak of knowledge in its logical and epistemological meaning. In that case the criticism thrown by Merleau-Ponty at contemporary and earlier philosophy, that it poses the problem of cognition and prohibits its solution, is equally and wholly applicable to the “philosophy of questioning” as well. That being the case, is it possible for the “philosophy of questioning” to become an awareness of the attitude of man to the world, to himself, to others?

Having set himself the task of reinterpreting all previous and contemporary philosophical thought, Merleau-Ponty constructed an antimaterialist and antidialectical platform that was to be the foundation of this reinterpretation. The basic guideposts in this reinterpretation by Merleau-Ponty, particularly in the final period of his work, were the ideas of Husserl, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who had set the parameters of an uncompromising attitude toward materialism, dialectics, and humanism. Thus, for example, Kant's and Descartes's thoughts about the world receive a highly subjective interpretation in his hands: “Analysis of Kant or Descartes: the world is neither finite nor infinite but is indeterminate, i.e., it is conceived of as human experience—finite reason in the face of infinite Being.”⁸ Such analysis eliminates not only the elements of materialism and dialectics inherent in the view of the world held by these great philosophers; it eliminates the very posing of problems associated with the existence of a material world.

If one speaks of the connection between “the philosophy of questioning” and the philosophy of Husserl, it is manifested primarily in active utilization of the basic categories of Husserl's phenomenology, particularly the category of the living world (Lebenswelt). The principal goal of the new philosophy has to be ascent from being-in-itself, objective and infinite, to the being of the Lebenswelt.

This ascent or transition must show that no form of being could exist outside of subjectivity embodied in the human body. In this connection the problem of subject-object is reduced to the psychophysical level and resolved as the problem of the psychophysical subject. To all external appearances such an “ascent” seems quite natural: nature and reasoning about it anticipate logic, and the psychophysical subject and thinking about him anticipate concepts of reflection, consciousness, and understanding. In fact, however, this “ascent” is directed against the historical outlook and the discipline of history, particularly as Marxists understand it. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes: “It is necessary at basis to reveal ‘organic history,’ hidden beneath the historicity (Urhistorie, erste Geschichtlichkeit) of truth, which was established by Descartes as the infinite horizon of science. This historicity of truth is also that which inspires Marxism.”⁹

The concreteness of truth is in fact one of the fundamental principles of dialectical and historical materialism, of Marxism-Leninism as a whole. The concreteness of truth presumes ascent from the abstract to the concrete, a process of gaining knowledge of truth as the development of the unity within diversity.

The phenomenology of perception, on the other hand, by elevating the immediately given, the sensory level of cognition, to an absolute, inclines to sensory perception of truth, to direct, self-evident comprehension. Philosophy begins to be regarded as an art. “My point of view: philosophy, as a work of art, is … something that retains its sense outside its historical context and even makes sense only outside that context.”¹⁰ According to Merleau-Ponty, philosophy must refrain from seeking to know laws of history, because it should be a free creation of the human spirit that has broken away, once and for all, from any material relationships, interests, or things whatsoever. From his point of view (true, here he is not original: recall Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno, and many others who saw something negative in scientific, logical cognition—is this not an adaptation of the Christian myth of original sin, the eating of the fruit of the tree of good and evil?) cognition has a negative character. From this standpoint psychology, logic, and ethnology are merely different forms of dogmatism enchaining thought and providing an excessively one-sided notion of being.

Merleau-Ponty regards topological space as an analogue of being, and atonal music as an analogue of the philosophy of being or the new ontology. In a word, Merleau-Ponty regards art as an analogue of genuine philosophy. Basing himself on Husserl, who was the first to introduce the notion of “the poetry of the history of philosophy” (Dichtung der Philosophiegeschichte)¹¹, and on Heidegger, who ascribed to poetry the role of source of a new metaphysics and generator of its ideas¹², Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of “history-poetry” (histoire-Dichtung), which is called upon to crush the rationalist understanding of history and philosophy and to replace it with an irrational conceptualization. The history of philosophy and philosophy itself should not be scientific disciplines or concern themselves with acquisition of knowledge of the laws of development of the objective world, of society, or of human thought. “The goal of philosophy is to narrate its beginnings. To demonstrate its circulation, this circular intentional implication, and at the same time the circulation of Histoire-philosophie. … Objective history is dogmatic rationalism; it is philosophy and not what it pretends to be: the history of what is. What may be criticized in my poetry-history (histoire-Dichtung) is not that it does not express me as a philosopher but specifically that it does not express me fully, that, further, it betrays me. The history of philosophy as a science is communis opinio.”¹³ Philosophy's switch from rationalist and scientific positions to the positions of irrationalist-artistic aestheticism, begun by Kierkegaard and taken up by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and subsequently by Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, and other irrationalists, found its logical culmination in Merleau-Ponty.

Traditional classical philosophy, beginning with the ancient Greeks and including Hegel, sought to grasp the essence of all that exists. Its problem area centered on the basic question of philosophy, particularly its second aspect—cognition of the relationship between essence and appearance, which characterized the greatest efforts of human reason to create a scientific philosophy (an organon of cognition) by means of which one might attain perception of the essence of being, might discover the essence behind the appearance. It is no accident that Marx emphasized that if essence and appearance coincided, we would not need science; it would be superfluous.

The socioeconomic and political development of capitalist society led rather rapidly to a general crisis of the capitalist socioeconomic system. An attack on science and human reason began, manifested not only in open abandonment of scientific knowledge, of logic and rationalism, and in recourse to mysticism, irrationalism, and obscurantism, but also in replacement of the perennial subject of philosophy by one that already assumed the rejection of scientific methods and, for that matter, of research itself: in place of essence—existence; in place of causality—absolute possibility and accident; in place of the dialectical method—contemplation; in place of cognition—emotion; in place of the quest for laws of development of nature, society, and thought—the search for meaning, etc., etc.

The replacement of philosophical subject matter, of the categorial system of philosophy and its methods of research, marked a further deepening and expansion of the crisis of bourgeois consciousness. Since all attempts of bourgeois thinkers to get out of this crisis by means of reason, logic, and science proved vain, reason, logic, and science very soon began to be subjected to the sharpest kind of criticism. The irrationalist tendency gradually became dominant, despite the tremendous achievements of the social (Marxism-Leninism) and natural sciences. The crisis of the bourgeois mind began to be presented as a crisis of human reason in general. “The great retreat” from reason, logic, and science began to appear in all their universality. The process of “destruction of reason” continues to this day.¹⁴

In his article “Einstein and the Crisis of Reason”¹⁵, Merleau-Ponty, telling of an encounter between Einstein and Bergson and their argument about relativity theory, comes to the conclusion that the irrationalist Bergson “met Einstein's classicism halfway”¹⁶, inasmuch as Bergson had voiced an allegedly profound idea—that rationality should be founded anew not on the divine right of dogmatic science but on prescientific intuition. Einstein's negative response to the question about the identity of physical and philosophical time “faces us with a crisis of reason,” in the opinion of Merleau-Ponty.¹⁷ In order to avoid this “crisis of reason,” Merleau-Ponty proposes to return to prescientific philosophy.¹⁸

Thus in Merleau-Ponty we see a reduction to myth, to the initial sources of perception, language, thought, wherein philosophy is replaced by art irrationalistically understood and aesthetics; in any case, it comes to approximate them quite closely. “Philosophy, specifically as ‘Being speaking in us,’ as the expression of dumb experience through itself, is creativity.”¹⁹ Moreover, being is regarded in itself as that which demands creativity of us. For example, the analysis of literature is understood as “the recording of Being.”²⁰

In this connection much attention is paid to the interrelation between literature and philosophy. This interest is entirely explainable if one takes into consideration the character of phenomenological philosophy in general and, in particular, the French version of phenomenology, to which Merleau-Ponty ascribed anthropological-axiological meaning, associated with a clearly marked interest in history, sociality, freedom, participation by the individual in the freedom of others, in politics and culture in general.

Examining the history of literature, Merleau-Ponty observes that the work of any great novelist is associated with two or three philosophical ideas: freedom and the self in Stendhal; the secret of history as revealed by the meaning of social movement in Balzac; the grasping of the past within the present and the present of time past in Proust. However, Merleau-Ponty sees the function of a writer not in embodying and realizing philosophical ideas but in having ideas present themselves to a person in the same way as the external world appears before him.

In his opinion writers always interested themselves in philosophy, but the character of this interest varied and was often quite curious: Stendhal lavished praise on ideologists; Balzac compromised himself by formulating his views in the language of spiritualism; and Proust expressed his intuition about time in a relativist and skeptical philosophy ultimately arriving at immoralism; while Valery disavowed philosophers who wanted to attach themselves to the “Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci.”

A great deal of time passed before philosophy and literature came to display not only their purely technical differences, pertaining to mode of expression, but an awareness by each of its own special object. However, in the nineteenth century closer and closer relationships were established between literature, philosophy, and politics, the first sign of which was the “hybrid mode” of expression—the intimate diary, the philosophical treatise, and dialogue.

Since literature, philosophy, and politics are, according to Merleau-Ponty, different “expressions” of the world, any individual seeking to establish a definite position with respect to the world is compelled to turn to those realms one way or another. Where writers are concerned, they, by virtue of the expressive character of their reflection, do not conceive of their position with respect to the world as outside philosophical and political intentions. On this basis Merleau-Ponty assumes that the appearance of existentialist philosophy in France was necessary if only to “define all of life as hidden metaphysics and all of metaphysics as an explanation of human life.”²¹ Here he saw the historical necessity and importance of existentialist philosophy. “It is an awareness of a motion more ancient than that awareness whose meaning it uncovers and whose pace it accelerates.”²²

Classical metaphysics, in the opinion of the phenomenologist, was so specialized that there was nothing for literature to do here: metaphysics functioned against the background of unconditional rationalism and was convinced that it would be able to understand the world and human life thanks to its categorial (conceptual) system. Thus in classical metaphysics the issue was not so much that of establishing a particular relationship between man and the world as it was of interpreting life and reflections about it.

Upon close examination of philosophical systems of the past, Merleau-Ponty came to the conclusion that philosophers had always ended up by imagining their own existence either as something transcendental or as a moment of dialectics, or in concepts, or in the manner in which primitives conceive and project themselves in myths. “Metaphysics in man added to the power of his human nature.”²³

Metaphysics was seen by the philosopher's intellectual gaze not as an authorized conceptual construct but as a necessary and natural result of the development of man himself—an integral being in whom soul and body, feeling and thought, action and introspection are melted into one. As Merleau-Ponty understood it, metaphysics is not a philosophical system requiring constant burning of the midnight oil for its comprehension but a distinct and unique structure—the substance of man underlying his evolution and permeating his entire existence, his thoughts, deeds, and actions. This is an immanent anthropological metaphysics. Therefore, the objectives of this metaphysics differ from those of classical metaphysics.

The difference between phenomenological or existential philosophies and all prior metaphysics is seen by Merleau-Ponty above all in the fact that they pose as their task not to explain the world or discover “the conditions of possibility” in it, but to “formulate” the experience of the world, the contact with the world that precedes any thought about (sur) the world. “From that time on,” he writes, “the task of literature and that of philosophy were no longer separable. … The philosopher has recourse to the same ambiguities as does literature. … The forms of hybrid expression no longer appear, and the novel or theater becomes metaphysical through and through, even if they do not use a single word from the lexicon of philosophy. On the other hand, metaphysical literature necessarily becomes, in a certain sense, amoral literature. For there is no longer any human nature on which one may take one's stand. In each image of human action, the onslaught of metaphysics explodes what was only ‘an old custom.’ The development of literary metaphysics is the end of moral literature.”²⁴

However, metaphysics, as Merleau-Ponty understands it, and in contrast to the classical understanding, is “ambiguous” from the outset, as are reality and life itself. But if that is the case, then any human activity loses meaning, as do all human values: freedom, morality, beauty, and so forth. “It is true that we are free to accept or reject life; accepting it, we accept a situation of fact—our body, our face, our ways of being—we accept our responsibility; we sign a contract with the world and with people. But that freedom which is the condition for any morality at the same time lays the foundation of absolute immoralism, inasmuch as it remains complete in me, as in others, after each mistake; and in that it makes new beings of us every instant.”²⁵

The metaphysical approach is incapable of grasping the contradictions of development of any given phenomenon. In the case in question Merleau-Ponty is unable to reach the dialectics of freedom and necessity. If there is freedom, it is absolute, and only absolute freedom is the foundation of morality. But in that case any individual laying claim to absolute freedom (inasmuch as one cannot possess it) encounters an insurmountable difficulty: the absolute freedom of others. Moreover, absolute freedom as the foundation of morality leads to absolute free will, since each person is free to act as he desires. Thus a morality based on absolute freedom leads to immorality, immoralism. But if freedom leads to absolute immoralism, what is the good of such freedom? What kind of freedom is it if it is the basis of absolute immoralism?

The point is that despite certain modifications undergone by German existentialism in France, separate and isolated existence remains the theme central to its attention. The postulate about the participation of the individual in the freedom of others does not change much. Existence in isolation, as the point of departure of phenomenological existential metaphysics, determines not only its subjectivism but the loss of the meaning of existence. Merleau-Ponty had the following to say about this: “In the hands of French writers, existentialism is always threatened by the danger of falling into that ‘isolating’ analysis that splits time into discrete instants and reduces life to a set of states of consciousness.”²⁶ To that one may only add that this danger is by no means potential but real: examination of life and reality as a set of states of consciousness of the isolated existence is one of the most important methodological factors in the existentialist conception.

The unsuccessful attempts to interpret reality and provide some kind of solution to theoretical and practical problems deepened the pessimism and despair of the existentialists and phenomenologists: “Certainly there is no solution to human problems. … The entire human project is contradictory because it simultaneously calls for and backs away from its realization.”²⁷ Lonely, isolated, extrahistorical existence, as the base from which phenomenological-existentialist conceptions depart, closes the path to a real solution of human problems. It is no accident that the subjectivism of this philosophy leads to absolutely immoral arbitrariness and adventurism. And although Merleau-Ponty does not agree that “absolute immoralism is the last word of ‘existential’ philosophy”²⁸, nevertheless, it was precisely he who demonstrated that existentialist literature is a literature that is amoral in all respects and that its development is the end of “moral” literature.

In examining the problem of the contemporary hero, Merleau-Ponty holds that there is evident, in literary life, a return to the world, to reality; that the “heroic hero” is already departing; and that protests are being raised against “heroic” morality. What is this new hero of our times like?

In the opinion of Merleau-Ponty, “… the hero of our contemporaries is neither the hero of Hegel nor the hero of Nietzsche.”²⁹ And it is true that the contemporary hero cannot be such. For in Hegel the subject was the bearer, implement, and means of transcendent forces dominating him. Necessity limited the freedom of the individual despite the constant emphasis by Hegel on their dialectical interrelationship. Neitzsche's conception, which is a special opposite of Hegelian philosophy, postulated, on the contrary, completely arbitrary behavior on the part of a subject, “the superman,” who would transform the world not in accordance with objective laws of historical development but by his own desire and wishes, in accordance with his “artistic” views, which were a negation of the laws of reality and the laws of logic. It is clear that the contemporary hero experiencing major historical events can be neither the one nor the other. “The hero of our contemporaries is neither a skeptic nor a dilettante nor a decadent.”³⁰ Historical experience has taught him to count more on himself than on the play of transcendent forces or the will of a “superman.” “The hero of our contemporaries is not Lucifer nor even Prometheus: it is man”³¹, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes. Man is not a negative force, nor a world echo, nor something positive and good, but simply ordinary man with all his merits and shortcomings. The philosopher, justly rejecting “superman” and various kinds of counterproductive heroes, makes the ordinary man his hero. One might think: What is wrong in that? However, it is precisely this “hero,” deprived of historical basis, who rapidly became the starting point for various bourgeois concepts of “deheroization.”

In his quest for the meaning and basis of human existence, Merleau-Ponty turns to “preworld historicity,” to “primitive existence,” or to “space in its primitive sense,” which acquires its most adequate expression in art, particularly painting. It is precisely in painting that Merleau-Ponty sees the distinctive and, perhaps, deepest metaphysics of our times. He seeks “the secret science,” which Van Gogh had sought, in order to go “a great deal farther.”

Merleau-Ponty holds that art, and particularly painting, is fed by a deep and inexhaustible source: “space in the primitive sense.” And the painter is the only man who has the right to a free way of looking at things: “One can say that for him words of a cognitive order and effect lose their virtue.”³² The point is that a painter has the right to deal freely with things, and everything that pertains to the sphere of cognition, i.e., concepts, categories, functions, and the like, loses meaning for him. Consequently, the painter interests himself not at all in epistemological problems but in something else, which should, in the opinion of Merleau-Ponty, be what is specific to painting. Since painting is most intimately associated with “space in the primitive sense,” it seems to Merleau-Ponty to be the most important realm of human reflection, out of which modern metaphysics arises and is constructed.

Painting, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, is not a reflection of reality. On the contrary, it exists of itself, independent of any reality whatever. The sarcastic dilemma of Malebranche—the soul exits through the eyes in order to wander among things with which it does not wish to be seen—appealed greatly to Merleau-Ponty.

The artist questions, but his questioning is addressed not to actual reality but to himself. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty agrees with Max Ernst that the artist has to outline and project that which he sees within himself. The artist is deaf, dumb, and blind with respect to actual reality: “The artist lives in blindness.”³³

Merleau-Ponty equates the painter's vision with continuation of birth: a person is born in the instant when what was virtual in the essence of a material body becomes simultaneously visible to us and to him.

One may seek the allegorical philosophy of vision and its iconography in pictures themselves. It is no accident that Merleau-Ponty says that in Dutch painting (and in other schools) an interior with no persons present is carefully digested (digéré) “by the round eye of the mirror” (l'oeil rond du miroir). “This prehuman (prèhumain) vision is the emblem of the painter's vision.”³⁴ However, the philosopher's understanding of the mirror is not something passively reflective but, on the contrary, something actively expressive: “Man is the mirror for man. As far as the mirror is concerned, it is an instrument of universal magic which changes things into spectacle, spectacle into things, me into someone else, and another into me.”³⁵

Merleau-Ponty ascribes to painting, or to be more exact, to the theory of painting, a metaphysical meaning: “Any theory of painting is metaphysics.”³⁶ It is no accident that he constantly related his analysis of painting to various metaphysical conceptions. In so doing he offered a rather sober evaluation of ontological conceptions present and past. Thus in considering the metaphysics of Descartes, Merleau-Ponty stated, paraphrasing Leibniz, that it was true in what it denied and false in what it asserted. Cartesian space is true against thought subordinate to the empirical. Altogether, according to Merleau-Ponty, the Cartesian model of vision is distinguished by the fact that it can be probed, felt, touched. However, vision is not the metamorphosis of things themselves into the vision thereof but a dual affiliation of things to the world at large and to one's small personal world. It is precisely thought that deciphers the signs presented by the body. Similarity is the result of perception and not its stimulating cause. In sum, vision presents to us what is lacking and is nothing but “an opening into the heart of Being.” Thereby Merleau-Ponty sought to overcome the dualism, the split between material and spiritual substance that is inherent in Cartesian philosophy and which, in his opinion, caused the cleavage between science and philosophy. As soon as this schism is overcome, the body will no longer be a means of seeing and touching but will be their keeper; the world will be spread not in front of man but around him; light will no longer be reduced to the action of contact but will be action at a distance. Then philosophy will inspire the painter and he will “think in painting.”³⁷

According to Merleau-Ponty, the entire history of modern painting is an attempt to liberate oneself from “illusionism” in order to acquire one's own measurements: this attempt will have a “metaphysical meaning.” He constantly emphasizes that painting is only expression and not depiction. “Art is neither imitation nor … a craft following the voices of instinct or good taste. It is an operation of expression. … Just as a word does not resemble what it denotes, so also painting is not depiction.”³⁸

Yes, art truly is not simply and only imitation or a craft, but in order to express it must before all else reflect and depict. A genuine work of art is always a certain unity of expression and depiction, and it is thanks to this that a work of art reflects reality. Indeed, it is impossible to find a single painting in the entire history of the art in which the function of expression existed by itself, without or external to the function of depiction. The paintings of Velasquez, Goya, Poussin, Surikov, Repin, etc., reflect the real world by depiction of various aspects, phenomena, and events in it, expressing progressive ideas, feelings, and strivings of their times.

Merleau-Ponty seeks to support the fundamental propositions of his conception by analysis of the work of Cézanne, Balzac, and other outstanding artists.

In his day Leonardo da Vinci proclaimed as his motto: work is difficult. The difficulties of Cézanne, like those of Balzac or Mallarmé, differ in nature. Balzac creates a painter (doubtless under the influence of Delacroix) who wants to express life itself through the medium of color relationships alone and keeps his chef d'oeuvre secret. When Frenhofer dies, his friends find only a chaos of color, indecipherable lines, a painting without form. Cézanne was moved to tears when he read The Unknown Masterpiece and declared that he himself was Frenhofer.

In The Hide of a Wild Ass Balzac wrote about “the notion of expressing” (pensée à exprimer), the “system of building” (système à bâtir), “the science of explaining” (science à expliquer). In this connection Merleau-Ponty holds that it is insufficient to say that Balzac proposed an understanding of the society of his time, that it was necessary to take into consideration his inquiry about where all this was going, what Europe wanted, and so forth. But the point is that all this is taken for granted in a concrete historical and dialectical approach to the reflection of actuality. It is no accident that Engels offered so high an evaluation of the work of that great writer: “Here the history of France from 1815 to 1848 is contained to a considerably greater degree than in all the Vaulabelles, Capfigues, Louis Blancs, and tutti quanti. And what boldness! What revolutionary dialectics there is in his poetic justice!”³⁹ Specifically “revolutionary dialectics in his poetic justice” about a writer distinguished for “deep understanding of real relationships.”⁴⁰ The most profound kind of meaning is contained in Engels's words: comprehension of history is indissolubly associated with “deep understanding of real relationships,” and understanding of relationships really existing presumes a deep penetration into the meaning of history. But in addition, the artist's reflection and comprehension of reality differs from the strictly scientific precisely by its “poeticity,” “poetic justice.” Consequently, artistic creativity may be called “poetic science” and “poetic justice,” making it possible to understand the laws of history, the logic of history, the laws of social development, “the revolutionary dialectics in poetic justice” just as deeply and comprehensively as in science and in philosophy.

To Merleau-Ponty, who was inherently incapable of accepting dialectics, the meaning of art consists of something entirely different. From his comparison of Balzac and Cézanne he draws the following conclusion: “An artist is he who records and makes accessible to people a spectacle of which they are themselves a part, without seeing it.”⁴¹ Here there is truly only a hint at an understanding of what the work of Balzac and Cézanne constituted both for their contemporaries and for all subsequent generations. Merleau-Ponty skips the most important thing that marked Balzac's work—“the revolutionary dialectics in his poetic justice,” as a consequence of which the quoted expressions of the great writer about “the notion of expressing,” “the system of building,” “the science of explaining” are deprived of concrete historical sense and content. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the enthusiasm, depth, and significance of Balzac's work because he wants to prove that expression is not reflection and depiction. True, he relates to this his thought that there is no such thing as entertaining art. Of course, one can create things that bring satisfaction. As a rule they represent ideas already known and forms already seen, but such painting would be in some way secondary, that which is understood thanks to culture. “An artist, according to Balzac or Cézanne, does not content himself with being a domesticated animal. After making his début he takes culture upon himself and justifies it anew. He speaks as did the first human being and writes as though no one had written before him, ever. Expression may then be the translation of an idea that is already clear, inasmuch as clear ideas are clear when they already have been stated in us by ourselves or others. ‘Conception’ cannot anticipate ‘execution’”⁴², writes Merleau-Ponty. In essence this statement expresses one of the fundamental ideas of existentialism and phenomenology—the idea of the counterposing of nature and culture, of tradition and innovation, of history and theory, of “conception” and “execution.”

Merleau-Ponty himself observes that Cézanne's painting does not negate either science or tradition. In Paris Cézanne went each day to the Louvre to learn painting and drawing from the classics. It is also well known that each day he went looking for a “motif,” attentively studying nature, which he regarded as the best teacher and preceptor. Consequently, one can conclude that Cézanne did not ignore either culture or nature and did not contrast them to each other. On the contrary, one supplemented the other: intense study of the history of painting helped him to study nature, to grasp its mystery, and to reflect it most completely and comprehensively, just as study of nature helped him to understand the creativity of the classics of painting, to master the mystery of their creativity, the richness of their palette, their vision, and so forth. In such an instance, to counterpose culture and creativity as Merleau-Ponty does is untenable: the new is born from a mastering of the preceding culture and acquisition of knowledge of contemporary reality.

Any person, any artist, is the product of his age, the product of particular social relations, a particular culture, and so forth. Consequently, each is incorporated from the outset into a tradition, lives and is shaped by the influence of a particular culture. In this sense any artist is a “domesticated animal”; and no matter what his “début” was like, that “début” is always a certain result of the assimilation of prior culture, the result of mastery of tradition; and as such it is only as a consequence of this that a début can bear within itself the embryo of a new culture and new creative values. Even when an artist speaks and writes as though it seems that no one had ever spoken and written before him, even then his creativity is not something absolutely new and unseen before him. On the contrary, his creativity is the result of the kind of mastery of preceding culture that only permits him, as it were, to interrupt the usual course of evolution and make a qualitative leap—to create the kind of works, the kind of painting that is in essence equivalent to a revolution in art. And what was previously stated acquires in his work a different meaning, a different significance, another and incomparably higher level. And here it is necessary to speak, perhaps, not of the fact that “conception” cannot anticipate “execution” (“conception” can anticipate “execution” and vice versa) but of how cognition of life and an artist's thinking about the problems facilitate the elaboration of the corresponding means of expression; how work on “technique” gives rise to new ideas, new inventions; and in general, how the complicated process of creation occurs, how “realization” of the artist's ideas is implemented.

Life is the source from which the genuine creative artist takes off, and to it he constantly turns and returns. But in Merleau-Ponty the artist “in all cases returns to the idea or project of infinite Logos”⁴³ and appeals to “reason, which embraces its own principles.”⁴⁴

However, an artist's subjectivity only becomes genuine subjectivity when the artist rejects anarchy and free will and, having comprehended the objective laws of development of nature, society, and thought, expresses them through his vision of the world, his perception of the world, experience, and the like, through his personal attitude toward reality—then the subjective is the concentrated expression of the objective, its attainment, cognition of the laws of its development.

What was the end result of Merleau-Ponty's attempts to construct a new metaphysics?

The creation of a new metaphysics ended with the construction of a new ontology. The necessity for this was dictated by the radical crisis not only of philosophy and culture but of all existence in general. “Our state is nonphilosophical.—The crisis was never so radical—Dialectical ‘solutions’—or ‘bad dialectics,’ which identifies opposites, which is nonphilosophy or ‘sweet-smelling’ dialectics, which is not dialectics any more. The end of philosophy or its rebirth? The necessity of returning to ontology.—Ontological inquiry and its branches: the question of subject and object, the question of intersubjectivity, the question of Nature. A sketch of ontology conceived of as ontology of primitive Being—and of logos.”⁴⁵ From this fragment it is evident that Merleau-Ponty was dissatisfied not only with materialist dialectics but with dialectics altogether (such as the subjectivist dialectics of Sartre, school and scholastic dialectics, and so forth). He saw a way out in a return to “vertical” ontology, expressing the sense of things, the sense of being, and at that, primitive, wild, undomesticated being.

Merleau-Ponty defines dialectics as “the conversion of subject to object and of object to subject” and as “the opening of a relationship of implication between dialectics and its object.” Externally this would appear to be entirely apt. But if one examines it more closely, one finds the following. In the first place, “the conversion of subject to object and of object to subject” means emasculation of the very essence of dialectics. The struggle of opposites as the source of development is replaced by a simple “conversion” of phenomena of cognition, for the categories of subject and object are here understood in the spirit of Husserl's phenomenology (“all consciousness is consciousness of something”), i.e., subject and object are reduced to phenomena of individual human consciousness. In the second place, the existence of the world is made dependent on individual consciousness, on the consciousness of the subject (the world exists for my consciousness and thanks to my consciousness), which fundamentally excludes the possibility of subjective (not subjectivist) dialectics, which, as Engels and Lenin emphasized, is a reflection of objective dialectics, the dialectics of things themselves. In the third place, despite the attempt to identify Husserl's subject with practice and the “constituting activity” of the subject with practical activity, practice as such is excluded not only from the process of cognition but also from the relationship between man and nature, man and society, etc. That is, it ceases to be a fundamental relation, the basis of cognition and criterion of truth.

Merleau-Ponty constantly emphasized that he sought to create a new type of intelligibility—“vertical” and not horizontal.⁴⁶ What was this “vertical” intelligibility supposed to be?

We have already stated that this philosopher takes as point of departure Husserl's teaching about the “living world,” which he interprets in an existentialist spirit. When, for example, he says that it is necessary to think in order to speak, but to think in the sense of being in the world or in vertical being⁴⁷, this also signifies an ontology of existence. And Merleau-Ponty himself recognizes this: “What I term vertical is what Sartre calls existence.”⁴⁸ Except that, unlike Sartre, Merleau-Ponty tries to avoid one-sidedness, negativeness: he attempts to establish a bilateral structure of being—positive and negative simultaneously. However, this effort remains merely a good intention, because such unification is possible only through a strictly dialectical approach to examination of the phenomena of the objective world.

Forthrightly rejecting classical variants in the construction of philosophical knowledge (Spinoza's famous differentiation into God, man, creation; Descartes's principle of reflection: cogito ergo sum; various scholastic constructs, specifically the understanding of Logos and truth in the sense of the Word; the logical, epistemological, and teleological interpretations of knowledge by the German idealistic philosophy of Kant and Hegel, etc.), Merleau-Ponty sought to present the visible, nature, and logos without any compromise whatever with humanism, materialism, and even teleology, not to speak of dialectics. He wanted to describe the visual as what is realized through man, on the condition that this description is not anthropology (here frankly counterposing his position to the views of Feuerbach and the Marx of 1844). He dreamed of presenting nature as “the other side” of man, and not at all as matter. Logos, however, he interpreted as what is realized in man, but without any connection whatever to objective reality, to practice, and consequently, to cognition and truth. In a word, he decided to create a universal metaphysics by means of the phenomenological-existential method as the opposite of materialist dialectics, logic, and epistemology. Was he successful in this? As we have seen, no.

One of the most significant undertakings in modern bourgeois philosophy—to construct a new, all-encompassing metaphysics, a new “vertical ontology” from the materials provided by literature and art—ended in failure. For that matter, Merleau-Ponty himself repeatedly granted that the ambiguity of life shows the impossibility of finding means for attaining the real meaning of what is happening, what people themselves are doing. Existential phenomenology proved helpless to show man a way to find himself and thereby to understand the meaning of his own existence.

Notes

1. On this, see M. Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l'expérience esthétique, Vol. 1, Paris, 1953, pp. 4-5.

2. Mésaventures de l'anti-marxisme. Les malheurs de M. Merleau-Ponty, Avec une lettre de Georg Lukács, Paris, Editions sociales, 1956.

3. M. Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique, Paris, 1955.

4. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard, 1945.

5. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 47.

6. Ibid., p. 139.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., pp. 238-39.

9. Ibid., p. 221.

10. Ibid., p. 253.

11. E. Husserl, Die Krise der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie Husserliana, Vol. VI, The Hague, 1954, p. 513.

12. M. Heidegger, Holzwege, Frankfurt on Main, 1957.

13. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, p. 231.

14. See on this G. Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. Der Weg des Irrationalismus von Schelling zu Hitler, Berlin, Aufbau-Verlag, 1955.

15. M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, pp. 242-49.

16. Ibid., p. 247.

17. Ibid., p. 248.

18. Ibid., p. 249.

19. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, pp. 250-51.

20. Ibid., p. 251.

21. M. Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, Paris, Nagel, 1948. See the section “Le roman et la métaphysique,” p. 47.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 48.

24. Ibid., p. 49.

25. Ibid., p. 67.

26. Ibid., p. 69.

27. Ibid., p. 70.

28. Ibid., p. 68.

29. Ibid., p. 326.

30. Ibid., p. 330.

31. Ibid., p. 331.

32. M. Merleau-Ponty, L'oeil et l'esprit, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 14.

33. Ibid., p. 31.

34. Ibid., p. 32.

35. Ibid., p. 34.

36. Ibid., p. 42.

37. Ibid., p. 60.

38. Ibid., p. 30.

39. K. Marks i F. Engel's ob iskusstve, Moscow, “Iskusstvo” Publishers, 1967, Vol. 1, p. 485.

40. Ibid., p. 483.

41. M. Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, p. 31.

42. Ibid., p. 32.

43. Ibid., p. 33.

44. Ibid., p. 32.

45. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible, p. 219.

46. Ibid., p. 322.

47. Ibid., p. 278.

48. Ibid., p. 325.