ABSTRACT
Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) wrote in a social context that post-dated Nazism and the German occupation of France. With the discovery of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1964) the humanistic aspects of Marx were being stressed against a background of loss of faith in the Russian revolution, now increasingly characterized by totalitarianism. At last the split was being confronted whereby the need for a revolution in consciousness and the need for a revolution in social structure had been divided. In this separation, the false severance of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ had been allowed to infiltrate from the natural attitude to the extent that proponents of each of the above approaches to the call for change had often seen each other as enemies. The imbalance between objective and subjective factors following the Russian revolution created a new pressure towards the uniting of the two approaches. Humanism and Terror (1969b) and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) are those works of Merleau-Ponty most directly considering the new situation of Marxism. All his work is oriented towards the possibilities of a richer intersubjectivity and the barriers against this which arise through the structuring of perception. As he puts his task in The Primacy of Perception (1964a): ‘we must rediscover the structure of the perceived world through a process similar to that of an archaeologist. For the structure of the perceived is buried under the sedimentations of later knowledge.’ (p. 5)
The prejudice of the exterior In a major work Phenomenology of Perception (1962) Merleau-Ponty is concerned in a farreaching way with the mutilating of perception occasioned by empiricism. This mutilation has arisen by ‘taking for granted and passing over in silence the decisive moment in perception’. It has thus become vital ‘to picture consciousness in the process of perceiving, to revive the forgotten perceptual experience’ (p. 53). We must study, rather than presume, ‘the advent of being into consciousness’; and reflection must be recovered as ‘a concrete operation’ taken up not only within ‘an impregnable Cogito’ but able also to reflect upon the presumed impregnability of that state (pp. 61-2). Crucial to a ‘radical reflection’ is that ‘it is reflection, not only in operation, but conscious of itself in operation.’ Such an approach can reveal incipient mutilation in the process of its structuring since it ‘takes hold of me as I am in the act of forming and formulating the ideas of subject and object, and brings to light the source of these two ideas’ (p. 219).
