Desarrollo de la tercera iteración del sistema

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.

While he consistently denies any purely economic causality, Merleau-Ponty also denies that economic factors are irrelevant to interpreting historical acts.

Economics simply does not comprise some independent realm of activity, apart from a wider historical context of human existence. Indeed, precisely because economic acts open onto a broader social horizon, and the individual, as existing in a social world, is already engaged in this realm economic institutions help articulate the subject‟s situation as surely as political, cultural, and personal institutions. “An existential conception of history does not deprive economic situations of their power of motivation”³⁰.

However, the Phenomenology of Perception elaborates the implications of “the existential modality of the social” for interpreting social relations.

What makes me a proletarian is not the economic system or society considered as systems of impersonal forces, but these institutions as I carry them within me and experience them; nor is it an intellectual operation devoid of motive, but my way of being in the world within this institutional framework ³¹.

Where classical Marxism has spoken of objective interests, Merleau-Ponty talks of a shared situation. An individual‟s social situation is not constituted through a series of more or less explicit choices; nor is it thrust upon the individual as an inexorable fate. Rather, from the outset, subjects coexist within a social setting, a coexistence traces out in cooperative tasks and familiar gestures as well as in shared concerns. The individual‟s existence “as a proletarian” is in the first

necessarily an explicit convergence of interests. Although the individual‟s existence is informed by tacit social projects, for the most part his social environment remains preconscious and unreflected. Yet on the day an individual declares himself “a worker”, this decision does not appear fortuitous, a radical upsurge of pure volition; on the contrary” “It is prepared by some molecular process, it matures in co-existence before bursting forth into words and being related to objective ends”³². An individual‟s social situation forms an ineluctable element in his meaningful comportment towards a world long before he explicitly assumes that situation. His free decision can affirm or repudiate his proletarian situation, but it can never annul it: the subject can never instantaneously become other. Similarly, to be a worker or a bourgeois is not only to be aware of being one of the other; more crucially, “it was to identify oneself as worker or bourgeois through an implicit or existential project which merges into our way of patterning the world and coexisting with other people”³³. The privileged status of revolutionary situations resided in their ability to compel men to articulate decisions that would otherwise remain unspoken. “A revolutionary situation, or one of national danger, transforms those preconscious relationships with class and nation, hitherto merely lived through, into the definite taking of a stand; the tacit commitment becomes explicit”³⁴. The proletariat here appears as a social collectivity bonded together through shared aspirations and fears as much as a common relation to the means

individuals from the same class; as a consequence, a social class appears generally as a quasiconscious, amorphous yet hardly arbitrary conjunction of subjects. Their common hopes, fears, desires, and interests only become fully realized when shared situations are articulated by an explicitly sociopolitical awareness and action.

However, Merleau-Ponty‟s socio-political thought does not just begin and end with his vision of an absolute end of history. For the human subject depicted in the Phenomenology of Perception always maintained an openness toward the world, always elaborated a range of meanings, drawing freely from a fund of available significations. His philosophy of the human subject is explicitly manifested in Humanism and Terror which is one of his great merits to have elaborated this vision of subjectivity.

Endnotes

1. Thomas Baldwin in Introduction to Merleau-Ponty‟s The World of Perception. New York: Routledge, 2008, P. 2.

2. Sartre‟s account of his childhood is set out in his autobiographical sketch Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964; trans. I. Clephane, Words, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). Camus tells his very different story in his posthumously phblished incomplete novel Le Premier Homme (Paris:

Gallimard, 1994; trans. D. Hapgood, The First Man, London: Penguin, 1996).

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith, (The new 2002 edition). London: Routledge, 1962, p. 403.

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, Translated by Alden

5. Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life. London: Heinemann, 1987, pp. 164ff.

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Translated by Hazel Barnes.

London: Methuen, 1958.

7. See especially the essay „The War has taken place‟ (1945) in Sense and Non-Sense.

8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Translated by H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus. Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Adventures of the Dialectic, Translated by Joseph Bien. Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Translated by Richard C. McCleary.

Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Claude Lefort (ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

12. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Translated by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hacket publishing Company 1983, p. 68.

13. Maurice Merleau-Ponth, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on t he Communist Problem, Translated by John O‟Neill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, P. X.

14. Martin C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty Vivant. Suny Press 1991, p. 195.

15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Op. cit., p. 17/11.

16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, Op. Cit, pp. 133-134/93.

17. See Merleau-Ponty, Resumes de Cours, Paris, 1968, p. 46.

18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Op. Cit., P XIX.

19. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Op. Cit., Pp. 107-108

21. Ibid, p. 151

22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Op. Cit, p. 363.

23. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, Translated by John Wild and James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963, pp.

55-56.

24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, Op. Cit, Pp. 64-65.

25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, Op. Cit, p. 55

26. James M. Edie The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, Northwestern University Press, 1964, P. 9.

27. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Op. Cit, P. 130.

28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, OP. Cit., P. 50.

29. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, Op. Cit., P. 11 30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Op. Cit., P. 172.

31. Ibid., p. 443 32. Ibid., p. 446 33. Ibid., p. 447.

CHAPTER FOUR

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY AND THE QUESTION OF REVOLUTION AND VIOLENCE