Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty

According to Emile Brehier, the distinguished philosopher and historian of philosophy, the major task faced by French thinkers of the early twentieth century was to re-situate man in what he aptly describes as “the circuit of reality.” The theories of which Bergson and Durkheim, for example, were heirs had isolated man in a limbo, in order that “reality,” or whatever was left when man was lifted aside, could be studied. Mechanism, determinism, sociologism: a variety of sometimes simple and sometimes ingenious keys kept unlocking doors that led further away from what philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre were later to call “lived”—as opposed to general, universal, abstract or theoretical—“life.” The discrediting of these “isms,” which began as a useful polemic, has, since the middle ’30s, become a sophisticated and frequently tangled strand of intricate philosophizing, not without its moments of fatuous elegance (at which the French are masters) but more frequently studded with works of enduring importance. Whether it calls itself Marxism, existentialism, or phenomenology, the thought of this period (from about 1936 onward) almost always concerns itself with concrete situations—a key phrase—rather than with abstractions, with precise methodology but not with universal principles. Somehow, it manages also to be highly adventurous and speculative and yet markedly anti-theoretical, a paradox that keeps occurring to the reader for whom antitheses of this sort are still novel and troubling. Moreover, even the Marxists (the best of them, that is) join in attacking the doctrine of simple causation, a doctrine that satisfies no one and often arouses ridicule because of its pallid rigidity. All in all, causation, abstract theory, and “unsituated” discussion are as irrelevant as possible to the generality of recent French thought. Their uselessness to this thought is best illustrated by the way in which Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise is invalidated by actual motion.

The fall of France in 1940 considerably strengthened the impulse to discredit mechanistic or reductive philosophy, and generated an impatience with a sort of ossified precision that seemed incapable of touching man. What had previously been a debate between professional philosophers turned into almost national reaction to a social, spiritual, moral, and even military posture that was simply not ready for the brutalities of history. In a sense, the mode of philosophy changed from inbred professionalism to humanistic amateurism. The war caught up and made overt what had been stirring beneath the surface of French life, the conflict between what M. Bréhier calls the stability of principles and the shifting variety of human experience. Like the Maginot Line, these fixed principles buckled as the waves of an onrushing and terrible experience assaulted them with catastrophic effect. It is ironic, of course, that German thought—that of Marx, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger in particular—played a considerable part in the intellectual turnabout. For what these philosophers brought to the attention of their French disciples was an awareness that the starting point of any philosophical enterprise is man’s own life, which can neither be left unexamined nor conveniently herded under some theoretical rubric. A corollary to this notion is one with which current Anglo-Saxon philosophy, normally hostile to the style of Continental philosophizing, concurs: the central importance of language to human experience. In a sense, philosophy has passed from the study of economic-behavioral-psychological man to the study of linguacentric man. Immanence—or the meaning embedded in human, lived reality—is now the central theme of French philosophy, and in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty it has received extraordinarily rich, passionate, and complex treatment.