Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

Proust himself who raises them. As far as he is concerned, theyare constitutive of this thing called love. So the modern heartis intermittent and does not even succeed in knowing itself. Inmodernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: theworld they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion.There is no knowing, moreover, whether a conclusion willever be added. Where human beings are concerned, ratherthan merely nature, the unfinished quality to knowledge, whichis born of the complexity of its objects, is redoubled by aprinciple of incompletion. For example, one philosopherdemonstrated ten years ago that absolutely objective historicalknowledge is inconceivable, because the act of interpretingthe past and placing it in perspective is conditioned by themoral and political choices which the historian has made in hisown life – and vice versa. Trapped in this circle, human existencecan never abstract from itself in order to gain access tothe naked truth; it merely has the capacity to progress towardsthe objective and does not possess objectivity in fullyfledgedform.Leaving the sphere of knowledge for that of life andaction, we find modern man coming to grips with ambiguitieswhich are perhaps more striking still. There is no longer asingle word in our political vocabulary that has not been usedto refer to the most different, even opposed, real situations:classical world, modern world