There is equal weakness in blaming ourselves alone and in believing only in external causes. In one way or another we will always miss the mark if we do. Evil is not created by us or by others; it is born in this web that we have spun between us—and that is suffocating us. What new men, and sufficiently tough, will be patient enough to remake it truly? The conclusion is not rebellion, it is “virtù” [la virtu]31 without any resignation. A disappointment for whoever believed in salvation, and in a single means of salvation in all realms. Our history, where space reappears, where China, Africa, Russia, and the West are not advancing at the same pace, is a decline for whoever believed that history, like a fan, is going to fold in upon itself. But if this philosophy of time was still a reverie born of the old distress, why then should we judge the present from such a height in its name? There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was. In world capitalism and in world Communismand between the two, more truth circulates today than twenty years ago. History never confesses, not even its lost illusions, but it does not begin them again.

February and September 1960

MERLEAU-PONTY, P R E F A C E T O S I G N S