Philosophy and Locality, Pt. 3: Merleau-Ponty on Adversity and Atheism
“The Difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing. At the foundation/ground of well-grounded belief lies belief that is not grounded.”
— Wittgenstein, On Certainty
“For me, philosophy consists in giving another name to what has long been crystalized under the name of God.”
— Merleau-Ponty, “Man and Adversity”
“It is precisely in this that we reveal our base material origins. Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or, even if we have looked at it, without recognizing it.”
— Sinbad the Sailor, The Count of Monte Cristo
In the previous parts of this series, I contrasted Hegel’s (Pt. 1)and Plato’s (Pt. 2) framings of philosophy in terms of the latter’s famous Allegory of the Cave. For Hegel, the philosopher transcends the merely local and particular (how things stand for us or to me, in this time and this place) by grasping The Absolute (how things are in-themselves, for every possible rational being). This transcendence, for Hegel, must likewise be immanent, as existence is the vehicle of the ideal. Thus, the philosopher demonstrates The Absolute explicitly in the philosophical Idea only by showing its implicit presence in all prior forms of local existence. The local is a moment of The Absolute. The Allegory of the Cave is then, in according to a Hegelian rendering, a comedic drama; it has a happy ending, whatever the follies that bring its climax. Philosophy redeems the world of ordinary Dasein, as the philosopher returns to the cave after seeing The Good (The Absolute) and demonstrates the internal connection between the local and the universal. The images on the cave wall are necessary to the realization of The Good, despite the appearance of contingency to the unphilosophically tutored eye. As Hegel famously puts it in his introduction to The Philosophy of History, “To him who looks at the world rationally, the world looks rational in return.” Philosophy is a sort of unveiling of the implicit rationality of existence, the internal relation between earthly being and the transcendental Ideal, that has always been there to be seen. The philosopher has simply gained the eyes necessary for this vision, and thereby overcomes the dichotomy between the the local (subjective) and the universal (objective). In fact, philosophy is the overcoming of all dichotomies. In Hegel’s favorite motto, “The real is the rational, and the rational is the real.” For Hegel, philosophy is a sort of theodicy, a tale vindicating existence in terms of its necessity for the ultimate realization of Reason in history:
“The insight to which philosophy ought to lead, therefore. . . is that the real world is as it ought to be, that the truly good, the universal divine Reason is also the power capable of actualizing itself. This good, this Reason — in its most concrete representation — is God.” (“Introduction,” The Philosophy of History)
Of course, Hegel’s notion of God is not that of a deity standing outside of nature acting as a creator of an utterly external creation, but an immanent principe of nature and history progressively realizing itself in the teleological unfolding of the world. The philosopher realizes that God’s history is the world’s history, so existence is the the Ideal coming to recognize itself. Thus, the philosopher demonstrates that
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“in the pure light of this divine idea (which is no mere ideal) the illusion that the world is a mad or foolish happening disappears. Philosophy seeks to know the content, the actuality of the divine Idea, and to justify the despised reality.” (“Introduction” to The Philosophy of History)
In other words, philosophy for Hegel is a justification of existence in all its blood and folly in terms of a the unfailing rationality of a sort of divine providence. God is the implicit rationality of the world that has been working through the processes of natural and cultural evolution, and the philosopher brings this Idea to light.
Plato’s version of the allegory is a tragic drama. Philosophical enlightenment is to turn away from the images on the walls of the cave, toward The Good. The return to the cave is inevitably going to end badly for the philosopher. The images are not necessary stages of The Good, for Plato, but at best hints and at worst perversions of the ultimate. The local is irredeemable; the “world is a mad or foolish happening” and there is no way “to justify the despised reality.” The universal perspective of the philosopher does not synthesize with the localities of ordinary existence, but overcomes or replaces them. There is, for Plato, no sense to be made of our Dasein. On this view, the real is not the rational and the rational is not the real. There is an Ideal, The Good, but it is not here, wherever “here” is, but somewhere else - always elsewhere. For this reason, the philosopher is as if dead when viewed from the ordinary perspective of local existence. For Plato, at least in his version of the Allegory of the Cave, there is a divine possibility, but it is irreversibly transcendent. The Good does not realize itself in the images on the cave wall; they are not moments in its development. The images simply fall short of the target.
Notice, however, the philosopher, despite his divine madness and union with The Good in the contemplative act, is still a human being, and human beings exist. In other words, the philosopher is a bodily, sensual being, thrown into a present framed by a past he did not choose, and worried over the future he must decide, the outcome of which is beyond his control. The philosopher cannot shake his commitments to his parentage within the cave. Even the philosopher exists. Thus, he will, just as the real Socrates did in his earthly existence, return on a tragic quest to redeem the images on the cave wall. In fact, in the Republic, Plato has Socrates argue that even the most aristocratic city (the analogue to the philosopher’s soul) will slide back into the lesser constitutional forms, because eventually people will succumb to eros and marry those whom they naturally desire, not necessarily those who make the best breeding pairs according to the rational ordering principles of the ideal city.
“It is hard for a city composed in this way to change, but everything that comes into being must decay. Not even a constitution such as this will last forever. . . . Now, the people you have educate to be leaders kn your city, even though they are wise, still won’t, through calculation together with sense perception, hit upon the fertility and barrenness of the human species, but it will escape them, and so they will at some time beget children when they ought not to do so.” (Republic, Book VIII, 546a-b)
Plato is apparently skeptical about how consistently even the leadership class of the ideal city would apply the principles of natural family planning to restrain themselves from desirous sexuality! Remember, that for Plato there is an analogy between the city and the soul. In short, locality, our human-all-too-human commitments, will always have a decisive vote in how things play out in the real world. The philosopher, whatever his transcendent achievements, is still a lover, a parent, a son, a friend, a member of a guild, etc. Thus, the philosopher’s life is tragic. He glimpses the vision of The Good, but the human commitments of sensuality and affection that ground his existence force him to look back into the cave; not unlike Lot’s wife turning back toward Sodom. A tragedy, indeed, because he cannot go home again. The real isn’t the rational, but the philosopher cannot shed the former however much he cherishes the latter. This is the profundity and romance of Plato’s dualism, not to be confused with the more metaphysically superficial Cartesian versions.
Consider now how Maurice Merleau-Ponty (the 20th century French phenomenologist) introduces his approach to phenomenological philosophy in the preface to his master work, The Phenomenology of Perception:
“Phenomenology is the study of essences . . . . But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’. . . . It is the search for a philosophy which shall be a ‘rigorous science,’ but it also offers an account of ‘lived’ space, ‘lived’ time, and the ‘lived’ world.”
So far, so Hegelian, one might say, but that is not what Merleau-Ponty is up to. The point of his approach is not that the philosopher transcends existence to find essences that can then be used as a justification for the “lived world.” For Merleau-Ponty, we do not come to see retrospectively that the world has implicitly been the Ideal all along. Rather, facticity can never be more than facticity. Reason does not vindicate existence, and his project is therefore not a theodicy in any Hegelian sense. His is not a Phenomenology of Spirit, but a phenomenology of perception, according to which all of our projects are inextricably tied to their grounding in the lived world of our local existence:
“The perceived world is the foundation that is always presupposed by all rationality, all value, and all existence. This kind of conception destroys neither rationality nor the absolute. It only brings them down to earth.” (“The Primacy of Perception”)
In other words, our reason is alway our reason. Philosophical rationality is a possibility, but it will only be plied by particular Dasein, i.e., in the facticity of a lived world. The “presupposition” of the lived world is not vindicated by the subsequent philosophical act, because philosophy never transcends this ground. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty agrees with Hegel that our reason is always reasoned through our local existence, while he disagrees with Hegel’s claim that the philosopher can show that our local existence (along with all local existences) are guaranteed as moments of The Absolute. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no such guarantee; as to adopt Hannah Arendt’s apt phrase, he philosophizes “without bannisters.” On the other hand, although Merleau-Ponty and Plato agree that the our Dasein (our lived world) cannot be transcendently redeemed, Merleau-Ponty does not share Plato’s insistence that rationality requires such an otherworldly guarantee. (Indeed, that is the great shared agreement between Plato and Hegel, though they don’t see eye-to-eye on whether it is a possibility for the lived world.)
Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, philosophical rationality is a possibility, even an actuality, for us, but it is always as something lived. The best explanation of this subtle stance comes in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of Paul Cézanne. The painter was plagued with doubts about the validity of his works, because he feared they were the product of his own idiosyncrasies and mental illnesses, not a visionary insight that transcends these limitations of his fallen existence. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “He was, in any case, oriented toward the idea or project of an infinite Logos,” though
“Cezanne’s difficulties are those of the first word. He thought himself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to paint the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible how it touches us” (“Cézanne’s Doubt”).
In other words, Cézanne shared the Platonic-Hegelian notion that rendering the Logos entails making a spectacle, something explicitly visible or graspable in full rational transparency, even though his own artwork was predicated on the idiosyncrasies of his personal history and foibles. No such God’s Eye View (The Good or The Absolute) was available for his expression. Cézanne realized that his point of view was constituted by the contingencies of his local existence (his body, his personal history, his illnesses), and he feared that this fact thereby undermined the standing of his work as something which can show the Logos, i.e., it robbed his painting of philosophical significance. Where Cézanne aspired to a transparent vision, he realized that all his works were embodied in the dark opacity of the contingencies that shaped his life.
Merleau-Ponty, however, denies that philosophical significance presupposes spectacle, a Logos grasped in full rational transparency:
“If I am a project form birth, it is impossible to distinguish in me the given and the created . . . .There is no difference between saying that our life is completely constructed or that it is completely given. If there is true freedom, it can come only in the course of our life, by going beyond our original situation and yet not ceasing to be the same. Such is the problem. Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become. It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously and how freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world.” (“Cézanne’s Doubt”)
Freedom, transcendence, rationality go beyond “our original situation” without “ceasing to be the same.” The point here is that the cost of connecting to a real world is being-connected-to-a-world. In other words, we can speak of (or paint) the world, only because we are embodied along with it. The dark opacity of existence is what gives our visions (philosophizing or painting) depth. Complete transparency would be literally invisible. Thus, Cézanne’s particular embodiment (his Dasein) is the only foundation he has to stand on in speaking of the world. The ambiguity and opacity of our sayings and doings are what give them significance and meaning. Ideal transparency would be trivial or inhuman. Cézanne’s locality is not a threat to his freedom and reason, but their only possible foundation. Our opacity is that which puts us in touch with the real world. If Cézanne is to paint something, then his painting must be an expression of the constituents of his existence, including the idiosyncrasies he shares with his world.
Notice, for Merleau-Ponty, the history that has transpired since Hegel leads us to believe that these contingent constituents of our existence, what he calls “adversity”, cannot be transcended or absolutely redeemed:
“What defines our time is perhaps to dissociate humanism from the idea of a humanity fully guaranteed by natural law, and not only to reconcile the consciousness of human values and the consciousness of the infrastructures which keep them in existence, but insist upon their inseparability” (“Man and Adversity”)
“Today humanism does not oppose religion with an explanation of the world. It begins by becoming aware of contingency. It is the continued confirmation of an astonishing junction between fact and meaning, between body and my self, my self and others, my thought and my speech, violence and truth. It is the methodical refusal of explanations, because they destroy the mixture we are made of and make us incomprehensible to ourselves.” (“Man and Adversity”)
Humans can only think as conditioned by the “infrastructures which keep them in existence,” i.e., the contingencies of our local Dasein. These adversities are constitutive of our being. Our locality enables us as much as it hampers us, for without it we as we are can do nothing, or even be anything. Certainly, the admission of the irrevocable opacity of our existence forces us to give up Hegelian/Platonic ambitions, but those attempts at transcendence render us incomprehensible to ourselves; we are the adversities they wish to overcome. Even the idea that we can begin in our adversity and move to The Absolute in a way that returns us in a vindication of our beginnings assumes that our beginnings were on the right track in the first place. That latter assumptions is, for Merleau-Ponty, a commitment we can make only in bad faith at this late moment of history. It is, indeed, difficult to trust that we have been thrown into the “right” locality, destined take the highroad to The Absolute, in the light of how things have actually gone. (In all fairness, Hegel is well aware of this fact! The problem is that his system hasn’t done much to inspire optimism about the human condition.) Thus, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “Because we are in the world, we are condemned to the sense, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history” (“Preface,” The Phenomenology of Perception). We are tied to the embodied, perceptual, and contingent as our beginning and our end. The real is all we get, and there is no guarantee that it is the rational.
For Merleau-Ponty, this admission of finitude, what he concedes as a kind of atheism, is the beginning of philosophizing:
“The notion of being an atheist brings with it many historical connotations, which is why I do not talk about it. But all the same it must be said that philosophy, in my sense, can breathe only when it rejects the infinitely infinite perspective in order to see the world in its strangeness.” (“Man and Adversity”)
Merleau-Ponty’s point is not to take a side in the classical (and for my money tired) debates between atheists and theists, but to claim that all such views presume an infinite perspective, which he believes is exactly what is not available to us. Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, atheism or the Death of God “means everything except: there is no God” (Merleau-Ponty, “Philosophy and non-Philosophy Since Hegel”). Merleau-Ponty begins not with facts begging for explanations, but with a sense of strangeness or wonder. For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy preserves that ambiguity, by reminding us that all attempts to avoid it or hide from it (atheism, theism, Marxism, Hegelianism, Platonism, etc., etc.,) deny our foundation in contingent existence, which masks “a constantly experienced moment, the moment when an existence becomes aware of itself, grasps itself, and expresses its own sense” (Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty”). There is no assurance that we begin in the right place, so whatever conclusions we come to, we have to return to our beginning, and attempts to avoid this circle by presuming an ultimately unavailable infinite perspective occlude what is really there for us behind contrived spectacle. Thus, Merleau-Ponty is “atheist” in the sense that he does not believe an ultimate theodicy for existence is in the offing (nothing will erase the “mad and foolish” appearance of the world), nor does he believe that there is a final transcendent vision beyond existence. Rather, in our returning to our locality, though we do not redeem it with our philosophical findings, we pay due obeisance to the grounds on which all our projects stand. There is no grounding for our grounds, so we are left in a state of strangeness and wonder (as Wittgenstein too has reminded us). But, these humble acts of piety toward our existence can lead us to what Merleau-Ponty often calls “the logos of the sensible world,” which is a metaphysics cast in a humble key: “There is thus no destruction of the absolute or of rationality here, only the absolute and rationality separated from experience.” (“The Primacy of Perception”)
“But there is a good ambiguity in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only separate elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture, into a single whole. To establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us the principle of an ethics.” (“An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty”)
What exactly the metaphysics of the logos of the sensible world would be like is hard to say, especially for those of us reared in the promises of The Good and The Absolute. All he says is that the logos of the sensible world is more like a style than an Idea. The point, however, is that “Thinking is man’s business, if thinking always means coming back to ourselves and inserting between two distractions the thin empty space by which we see something” (“Man and Adversity”). By making peace with our finitude, our irredeemably local beginnings, we might actually open ourselves in wonder and strangeness to the place where we can authentically see the world in its undefinable unity, its incarnate Logos. It is as though the philosopher must make peace with her existence in the cave (admit that the limitations of our locality are what give our visions opacity, depth, and contact with Being), while also feeling there is something strange and uncanny abroad in this world. Only then might there be a moment when something like a Logos can show up for her. Such an incarnation of Being is the Logos available to beings like us. To deny this is to court the despair that comes with distraction by either the pessimism of Platonic transcendence or the optimism of Hegelian immanence. Merleau-Ponty’s “atheism” is not a totalizing metaphysics of negativity (There is NO god!), but a humility and a refusal to go in for empty promises of idolatry. That humility, the concession of our finitude, holds the possibility of truly humane transcendence — an encounter with divinity from within in existence:
“God is not above us but beneath us — meaning that we do not find him as a supersensible idea but as another ourself which dwells in and authenticates our darkness.” (Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”)
“Transcendence no longer hangs over man; he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer.” (Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”)
Divinity does not make our opacity transparent, because that would be to destroy our very selves and our contact with the world. Instead God, for Merleau-Ponty, “authenticates our darkness.” By admitting her fate as a cave dweller, i.e., a human being constituted by all the adversities of temporal existence, the philosopher might begin to build a place, a home, where divinity can show itself in the real world as the element of our Being: “the element of joy and love in the sense that water and fire are elements. Like sentient and human beings, he is a radiance, not an essence" (Merleau-Ponty, Signs).
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