Desarrollo de la segunda iteración del sistema

In what way does the individual participate in common tasks and relations, and how does the particular take shape through shared meanings and behavior? How does social structures inform individual behaviour? What actually is the being of the social world? The above questions are the concern of Merleau-Ponty as he approaches the social world from an ontological standpoint, just like Sartre. He feels that the problem of the specific “existential modality” of the social world is “at one” with all other problems of transcendence: whether discussing the impingement of the natural world on

question remains: “How can I be open to phenomena which transcend me and which nevertheless exist only to the extent that I take them up and live them?²²

Merleau-Ponty finds his original social philosophy on an interpretation of man as a “being in the world”. This being is a creature of significant structures;

the world man inhabited is meaningfully formed, not only by language and symbols, but also by perception and behaviour. He uses this image of man, in accordance with Heidegger, to criticize rationalist accounts of consciousness as

“constituting”. More than a perpetually renewed constitutive act, the “me” of personhood has to be viewed as a relatively durable institution, “the field of my becoming” with a history of its own.

Merleau-Ponty‟s work, though, lards with metaphors, remains characteristically oblique on the point that his thought is often more suggestive than substantial. He vividly hopes that his notion of the institution will surmount the difficulties surrounding the idealist concept of the constituting ego, particularly in its application to the social realm. Where the constituted objectivity of idealism, as a pure reflection of the ego‟s acts, render the existence of other transcendental egos suspect, “instituted objectivity”, claims Merleau-Ponty, arose precisely as a “hinge” between self and others, since its being qua institution resided in a mutuality of recognition. This notion of

“institution” has applications beyond the description of consciousness. In Merleau-Ponty‟s hands, the concept of the institution becomes a pivot for

Each institution is a symbolic system that the subject takes over and incorporates as a style of functioning, as a global configuration, without having any need to conceive it at all --- One understands here by institution those events of an experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a sequence of other experiences will have meaning, forming a comprehensible connection or history-in other words, those events which deposit a meaning in me, not by an appeal to survival and residue, but as an appeal to coherence, the requirement of a future²³.

Institutions, in effect, provide contexts for coherent action. As meaningful structures, they prompt behaviour not internal determination, by embodying norms and rules, by proffering roles. Neither thing nor ego, the institution represents a mixed milieu. While the norms of an institution afford more or less compelling grounds for behaviour, they in most cases do not necessitate behaviour.

Merleau-Ponty takes this notion of the institution to be central to a phenomenologically clarified social theory. It also points the way to a defensible interpretation of Marxism. Both the Marxism of the young Marx and

“Western Marxism” in 1923 lacks the means of expressing the inertia of the infrastructure.--- In order to understand simultaneously the logic of history and its detours, its meaning and what opposes it, they have to understand its specific domain: the institution. The institution develops, not according to causal laws like those governing nature, but always in relation to what it signifies, not

fortuitous events and letting itself be changed by what they suggest. Torn by all these contingencies, repaired by the involuntary acts of men who are caught up in its but must live, this web can be called neither spirit nor matter, but only history. This order of “things” indicating “relations among persons”, susceptible to all those weighty conditions that link it to the order of nature, yet open to all that personal life can invent, is, in modern language, the domain of symbolism.

Marx‟s thought should have found its way out in it²⁴.

By implication, Merleau-Ponty here posits a sense of necessity tied to mutable norms rather than nature. While norms apply to an agent conventionally, and thus in a sense contingently, institutional norms nonetheless represented de facto compulsions, and thus embodied a certain necessity, a necessity effectuated by the continued observance of convention. If history always remain open to transformation, if institutions can be modified, it is equally true that history carries the conventional weight of custom and habit – the inertia of institutions., it is this inertia that finds the social domain Marx called “second nature”.

Language assumes a paradigmatic position in Merleau-Ponty‟s account.

In contrast to Sartre, who approaches the phenomenon of sociability through the alienating gaze of other people, Merleau-Ponty portrays language as the social institution per excellence; language comprises an open field of communication which accommodates self-expression., equipped with its own rules and

speaking subject of necessity submits to; yet language also exists as individual speech, speech which can be spoken as though yet unspoken, speech that can sustain, re-create, and, in the case of poetry, overturn conventions as well as conform to them. He draws a parallel between language and other social institutions. He even hints that such parallels are relevant to Marxism: “The reciprocal relations between the will to express and the means of expression correspond to those between the productive forces and the forms of production”²⁵. But usually he contends himself with remarking that “history is no more external to us than language”²⁶. Like language, history comprises a more or less confining field of possibilities for expression, a field nevertheless open, within limits, to creative intervention. A picture of society as a network of meaningful, rule-governed institutions emerged from Merleau-Ponty‟s account.

The proper task of sociology and economics lay in disclosing the rules informing social and economic action and in tracing the implications and consequences of these rules.

This portrayal of society and the tasks of a science augment his view on human behavior. As social action, the individual‟s behaviour proceeds in reference to institutionalized rules, norms, and principles; such rules supply reasons for, and warranted interpretations of behaviour. But the institutional grounds of social action can not be treated mechanistically as natural causes of action: the individual‟s assumption (whether coerced or voluntary) of an

person‟s life. Although such social inquiries as sociology and economics may have as their object rule-governed social action, they do not face an object distinguishable by inherent regularities. The regularities of social action are instead bound to time and place: institutional phenomena are never necessary in the sense of Newtonian physics or analytic logic.

In addition, Merleau-Ponty uses his concept of the institution to argue against the idealist view of consciousness as purifiable or somehow extractable from its contingent relationships. If existence can be described as a “permanent act” by which a person assumes empirical conditions for his own ends, then an individual‟s thoughts and actions always remain implicated in circumstances, both institutional and natural. Merleau-Ponty calls this perpetual involvement in a world the individual‟s “situation”. A field of contact between agent and objects, a person‟s situation is articulated via a constant interchange of motives and decisions. “Motives”, as Merleau-Ponty defines the term, denotes the

“situation as fact”, circumstances as they constrain and shape action; “the situation as undertaken”, circumstances as mastered and transformed by action.

As situated, the individual‟s free acts arise within the context of a unitary world.

Neither a juxtaposed assortment of things, nor the intrusion of materiality on an ineffable spirit, a person‟s situation has to be interpreted as a coherent whole, encompassing social institutions and a personal history as well as nature. Such a view approximates Marx‟s 1844 description of man as a sentient, suffering

situation, but one who is also open, active and able to establish his autonomy on the very ground of his dependence”²⁷. The concepts of situation, motive, and decision thus complement Merleau-Ponty‟s social philosophy of the institution:

through such notions, he attempts to comprehend the individual‟s open-ended dependency, the hallmark of man‟s finitude, and the meaning of being in a world.