Few comprehensive books exist on
the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 
Most English-language books tend to focus upon his phenomenology and
“post”-phenomenology, and if his politics is mentioned, it usually is not even
within the same volume as his non-political writings. Hence, Eric Matthews’ small concise volume about Merleau-Ponty
provides a usual service to those interested in Merleau-Ponty.

Certainly the lack of secondary
source material that deals with Merleau-Ponty’s global thought is partially
because Merleau-Ponty is a philosopher of the 20^th century. Perhaps with time, more works will
appear. However, it is not altogether
just because of the progress of research that few tackle Merleau-Ponty’s work
globally. Merleau-Ponty is not a
systematic philosopher; his Marxist and non-Marxist philosophical writings have
very little to do with his phenomenological, psychological, and
post-phenomenological thought. In
addition, although similarities run between his non-political writings,
Merleau-Ponty does not offer theses that are either defended or rejected. In fact, more often than not, the point of
his work is to refuse to force a systematic, categorical perspective upon
experience, so naturally to reduce his thought to a summary is difficult, if
not impossible. Merleau-Ponty preferred
to view his philosophy as descriptive and not reductive. As he writes in the preface to the Phenomenology
of Perception:

..[P]hilosophy itself must not take
itself for granted, in so far as it may have managed to say something true;
that it is an ever-renewed experiment in making its own beginning; that it
consists wholly in the description of this beginning, and finally, that radical
reflection amounts to a consciousness of its own dependence on an unreflective
life which is its initial situation, unchanging, once and for all.” [Phenomenology
of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1996) pg. xiv.]

 
But how does one summarize an “ever-renewed experiment” and a continual
description of an “initial situation”? 
It seems there are two standard approaches to working through a
philosophers’ entire corpus: a historical approach where one traces the
development of thought chronologically, or a thematic approach where one takes
certain arguments and outlines them. One well-known book on Merleau-Ponty, M.C.
Dillon’s Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern U.P.,
1997) takes the former option and argues that Merleau-Ponty’s work (his
non-political work) has a logical development to his late ontological
writings. Matthews has opted for the
latter option (perhaps the only feasible option for a short book); he has
broken down Merleau-Ponty’s thought into different “themes” and written a
chapter about each.

The benefits of Matthews’ approach
is that he mustn’t force harmony between the different themes, and indeed,
chapter six on “Politics in Theory and Practice” can quite easily stand alone
from the rest of the chapters. 
Merleau-Ponty was, at first, a passionate defender of a French Marxist
thought (i.e. the humanistic early Marx, not the later scientific Marx). It was Merleau-Ponty, and not Sartre, who
was the first political editor of the influential magazine Les Temps
modernes. However, Merleau-Ponty
was worried about the both the accuracy of Soviet adherence to Marxist thought,
and the morality, of Stalin’s regime and was unable to, like Sartre, see it as
a historical necessity. His first
political book—Humanism and Terror 
[trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)]—supports the Soviet
Union’s policy, whereas his last political book—Adventures of the Dialectic
[trans. Joseph J. Bien and Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
U.P., 1973)]—radically opposes Sartre’s political thought and turns toward a
kind of liberalism.

Matthews’ does an admirable job of
briefly summarizing the main relevant philosophical points in Merleau-Ponty’s
non-political writings in the other seven chapters. Except for chapter eight which will be discussed below, the other
six chapters demonstrate why Merleau-Ponty thought his approach was the
important one to make and why one might today still read Merleau-Ponty’s
work. Merleau-Ponty was one of the
strongest interdisciplinary philosophical writers of the 20^th
century. Similar to contemporary
cognitive science, but armed with an impressive command of the history of
philosophy, Merleau-Ponty did not shy away from engaging with psychological,
anthropological, and artistic works to better clarify his description of our
lived-experience. For Merleau-Ponty,
philosophy did not hold a privileged place that cannot be threatened by any
empirical discovery. However,
Merleau-Ponty did remain cautious about any kind of unreflective belief in
science and thus, to the end, never collapsed the importance of
philosophy. Matthews’ clearly outlines
this approach and how it impacts Merleau-Ponty’s considerations of others, our
own self-knowledge, our experience of the world, and our capacity to create and
appreciate art.

Thus, Matthews’ first seven
chapters provide a quality summary of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The last chapter, on Merleau-Ponty’s “late”
thought, is more problematic. It is hard
to understand why Matthews’ takes a largely thematic approach, except for this
last chapter. Why didn’t he take them
up within his discussion of “Embodiment and Human Action” (chapter four) or
“Self and Other” (chapter five)? Such
an organization would have made it clearer to understand Matthews’ thesis about
the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s famous posthumous text The Visible and the
Invisible. Matthews writes:

What is new, in my view at least, is not so much the
detailed content of what Merleau-Ponty had to say—that, as I have tried to
show, had not significantly changed—but rather the way in which that content is
presented, but this is not a mere trivial difference of style, since the way in
which a philosophy is presented makes a significant difference to the
philosophy itself. What Merleau-Ponty
was dissatisfied with in his earlier works was that the framework in which the
doctrine was presented in his view reduced the radicalism of the doctrine
itself, and even in some ways distorted that doctrine. (pg. 169)

Such a claim is an interesting one, but would be so much
more so, if Matthews’ had juxtaposed Merleau-Ponty’s early “style” with his
late writings instead of just declaring the “real” intentions of the later work
two pages prior to the end of the book. 
Merleau-Ponty’s late work edges the closest to post-modern thought. Despite this search for a greater
radicalism, few commentators have been able to show how this late work succeeds
where his early work doesn’t. Instead
the secondary material on the late work has even greater obscurantist prose
than Merleau-Ponty’s own. It would have
been worthwhile to see if one could show clearly just how the early work fails
and how the late work succeeds in not distorting Merleau-Ponty’s
intentions.

©
2002 Talia Welsh

Talia Welsh,
Ph.D., Department of Philosophy and Religion, The University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga.

Categories: Philosophical