The Meontic and the Militant - University of Memphis

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Downloaded by [University of Memphis], [Bryan Smyth] at 07:39 14 December 2011 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES younger, more radical Hegel (again, freely conflated with Marx) thus representing the idea that universality – the realization of the world – is an outstanding historical task for humanity (cf. SNS, p. 313/176–7). In his critique of liberalism, Merleau-Ponty expressed the underlying distinction very clearly: whereas triumphant thinking ‘takes universality for granted’ – an assumption of which Merleau-Ponty thought Fink’s meontic account was guilty – ‘the problem is its [universality’s] realization through the dialectic of concrete intersubjectivity’ (HT, p. 38n1/ 35n11, emphasis added). This militant model whereby sense is achieved out of non-sense represents germinally Merleau-Ponty’s view of phenomenological productivity. And it shows how he thinks it possible for transcendental philosophy to ‘not culminate in a return to the self’ (PhP, vii/xii, emphasis added). In contrast to Fink’s Absolute identity, for Merleau-Ponty the movement of phenomenology unfolds through human existential transformation that is communicated and redeemed through commitments to new intersubjective relations. As a practical project aimed at the realization of the world, phenomenology goes outside of itself in realizing itself, yet without ceasing to be ‘its own foundation’. 34 Yet how can this phenomenological self-reference be demonstrated? This returns us to the problem of transcendental illusion. As we have seen, in his quest to overcome such illusion, Fink takes transcendental cognition as egological and strictly apodictic. He thus upholds the cognitive intentions of phenomenology by de-centering it as a practice based on human experience. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty interprets phenomenology in human existential terms – hence intersubjectively and practically. He thus de-centers phenomenology not only as an egological but also as a theoretical practice. He consequently holds that while all phenomenological cognition is intuitional, not all phenomenological intuition is cognitive. In this way Merleau-Ponty shows that phenomenology’s transcendental intentions can be humanly achieved. The catch, however, is that these intentions can no longer include the complete overcoming of transcendental illusion. 2.3. The Illusion of the Hero To show that the militant reinterpretation of phenomenology presented in Phenomenology of Perception is not just some arbitrary methodological eclecticism, Merleau-Ponty deploys a phenomenology of phenomenology purporting to show that the transcendental field is exhausted by intercorporeal involvement in the living present. To avoid a vicious regress, however, he also needs to bring to phenomenological self-givenness the anonymous productivity that underlies phenomenology. That is, he has to show intuitionally ‘man as productivity’ in order to make his phenomenology self-referential and demonstrate that it does indeed 688
Downloaded by [University of Memphis], [Bryan Smyth] at 07:39 14 December 2011 THE MEONTIC AND THE MILITANT leave no ‘uncomprehended residue’. Owing to the existential commitments that have guided him, though, Merleau-Ponty cannot make this a matter of theoretical cognition – in that sense there can be no ‘complete’ reduction (PhP, xiv/viii). The intuition in question must therefore be a kind of transcendental illusion that is taken on faith. This happens at the very end of Phenomenology of Perception – surely the most prominent location in the work. Here Merleau-Ponty qua philosopher falls silent, yielding to the (non-philosophical) ‘hero’ – understood as someone ‘lives to the limit [jusqu’au bout] his relation to men and the world’ – by quoting several lines from Antoine de Saint- Exupéry’s 1942 novel Pilote de guerre (PhP, p. 520/456). The very last of these is the most well known: ‘Man is but a knot of relations; these alone matter to man’. The lines in question are drawn from Saint-Exupéry’s recounting of a near-fatal aerial reconnaissance sortie that he flew in 1940. (Recall that Saint-Exupéry did fatally crash at the end of July 1944.) This account reads like a homily to self-sacrifice in the name of ‘Man’ [l’Homme], the essential and universal truth of human existence. As Saint-Exupéry put it, ‘the individual is only a path. What matters is Man, who takes that path’ (PG: p. 214). One must become Man, see as Man, as Saint-Exupéry claimed happened to him during that flight, when Man ‘took the place’ of his self-concerned individuality (PG: p. 217). Whence the lines with which Phenomenology of Perception concludes. Merleau-Ponty follows Saint-Exupéry in identifying the hero as ‘man’. 35 Yet close scrutiny of the Exupérian text reveals a profound hostility to embodiment that appears to confound the thrust of Merleau- Ponty’s work. Most notably, Saint-Exupéry meant it literally when he said that a human being is nothing but a knot of relations. As he wrote (from which Merleau-Ponty quotes selectively): ‘what is essential appears when the body comes undone. Man is but a knot of relations; these alone matter to man. The body is an old crock that gets left behind’. 36 On the face of it, then, it is quite perplexing that Phenomenology of Perception ends as it does. Clarity is gained only when we recognize that this ending has methodological import in relation to the ‘realization of philosophy’ – that it is the linchpin of the militant idea of method that Merleau-Ponty was working out in response to Fink. I have discussed this in detail elsewhere. 37 For present purposes, it is sufficient to note that in identifying the hero as ‘man’, what Merleau-Ponty has in mind is ‘man as productivity’, and that as the subjective embodiment of this universality heroism results from living out the ‘loyalty to the natural movement that throws us toward things and toward others’ (SNS, p. 330/186, emphasis added). Heroism, in Merleau-Ponty’s usage, thus manifests a natural purposiveness that is 689
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The Meontic and the Militant - University of Memphis

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