Adventures of the Dialectic

by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Book Overview

"We need a philosophy of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here. Yet we would be unduly rigorous if we were to wait for perfectly elaborated principles before speaking philosophically of politics." Thus Merleau-Ponty introduces Adventures of the Dialectic, his study of Marxist philosophy and thought. In this study, containing chapters on Weber, Lukacs, Lenin, Sartre, and Marx himself, Merleau-Ponty investigates...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810104040
• ISBN13: 9780810104044
• Release Date: August 1973
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Dialectic without Dreams

Merleau-Ponty is generally read for his work in phenomenology, not his work on dialectics. This is both a pity and a mistake. While he certainly does deserve to be remembered as the third great phenomenologist of the past century, after Husserl & Heidegger, his being forgotten as a dialectical thinker is almost inexplicable. I say almost inexplicable because, I fear, the reason he is ignored as a dialectical thinker is because he advocated, and superbly demonstrated, a dialectic without myths, utopia or dreams. In the great chapter (2) on Lukacs he says, "[t]he dialectic is this continued intuition, a consistent reading of actual history, the re-establishment of the tormented relations, of the interminable exchanges, between subject and object. There is only one knowledge, which is the knowledge of our world in a state of becoming, and this becoming embraces knowledge itself." He speaks of interminable exchanges, implies the permanence of tormented relations, affirms that knowledge always becomes. This is a dialectic scraped clean of the utopianism of the Marxist classless society, contemptuous of some miraculous Kojevean 'End of History', sans any vain 'Hegelian' promise of some never-never land in which Science will precisely equal Wisdom. So then why dialectic, or, more precisely, why use the dialectical method if it offers no goal? Immediately after the sentences quoted above M-P says, "[b]ut it is knowledge that teaches us this." The dialectic, as M-P understands it, gives us, better - can give us, an understanding of history, and our present, but as to the future it promises exactly nothing. How could it promise more? If becoming, and the unknown, press on us forever, every totalization is always in danger of being threatened by some unanticipated contingency that changes this totalization into some unpredicted, and above all, unpredictable (until it occurs) Other. By way of contrast let me now mention that for Hegel, finally, one could say that Dialectic remained a retrospective method and not a predictive science - at least until the precise end of the dialectical process. "The Owl of Minerva takes flight only at night." But, for Hegel, I think it is correct to say that when Subject and Object become One, Forever, we will be able to say that the all-knowing owl is always flying because the Absolute (Spirit) is always dark. We now perhaps better understand the content of the Hegelian characterization of (and objection to) the early position of Schelling - as a 'night in which all cows are black' - this position wasn't wrong; it was merely premature. Thus at the extreme end of Hegelian theory, one is always in danger of seeing it toppling over into the Kojevean 'End of History' position, which M-P in the epilogue characterizes as an idealization of death. M-P holds, in this book, that this is not the position of Marx and Lukacs. "In Marx spirit becomes a thing, while things become saturated with spirit. History's course is a becomin