Lydia Goehr
Understanding the Engaged
Philosopher: On Politics,
Philosophy, and Art
It is true, as Marx says, that history does not walk on its
head, but it is also true that it does not think with its feet.
Merleau-Ponty
“One must be
able to withdraw and gain distance in order to become truly engaged,
which is, also, always an engagement with the truth” (EP
60–1/60).
fala sobre diferenciar Sartre e Merleau-Ponty
Sartre foi mais público e escandaloso filósofo
MP mais privado e independente
ficou nos confins da Academia Francesa, um contra-pensador
Merleau-Ponty articulates his views, as Sartre does far less, against views already
in place or against the extremes to which he fears certain views
can go. Correct views turned into incorrect views: situated freedom
turned into absolute freedom; existential projects turned into intellectual
projects; provisional and motivated commitments turned
into absolute commitments; humanistic Marxism turned into reified
Stalinism. Finding a space away from, or between, extremes is
how Merleau-Ponty avoids false “dilemmas” (HT 25–6/23–4).
mas esteve totalmente engajado e preocupado com sua contemporaneidade
seus escritos políticos com muita sinceridade e posicionamento
sabe-se que seus escritos políticos são um diálogo com Sartre
MP se retira dos escritos polêmicos de Sartre no pós-guerra
sem essa de ser ativista político
Sartre nem sabia o que era liberdade..rsrs
a ironia é por minha conta
, “I took care to
speak of Socrates in order to show that the philosopher is not someone
who simply produces books but who is in the world. I attacked
those who place philosophy outside of time.” MP
a história carece de significados fixos
The events of history – its
order and disorder – are better understood froma position of “suspension,”
from the “wait and see” attitude given by reflective distance
and “doubt.” “To become engaged on every event, as if it were a
test of morality, to make a politics into your own cause . . . [, this is
to] refuse without reflection a right of correction, which no serious
action renounces.”
Merleau-Ponty believes that hismethod is actually “closer to politics”
than Sartre’s own “method of constant engagement.”15 Why?
Because his commitment-at-a-distance puts him in a place where
he can see meanings clearly, but at not so great a distance that detaches
the subject from the world entirely.
This antagonistic separation, Merleau-Ponty thinks,
can only result in the impotence of nonaction. Genuine freedom, he
comments,
"is not to be confused with those abstract decisions of will at grips with
motives or passions, for the classical conception of deliberation is relevant
only to a freedom“in bad faith” which secretly harbors antagonisticmotives
without being prepared to act of them, and so itselfmanufactures the alleged
proofs of its impotence." (PP 500/438/509)
“Heroism [is] a thing not
of words but of deeds” (SNS 178/146).
,” he
accordingly writes to Sartre. “I look . . . into the present and leave it
undecided and open as it is . . .My relation to the times is constituted
above all by the present.”
“I . . . have no need to separate philosophy from the world in order to remain a philosopher
– . . . and I have in no way made an alibi of it.”
“the philosophic absolute is nowhere, it doesn’t ever take place anywhere,
it is therefore never elsewhere, itmust be defended in each particular
event.”
a reflective“gap” has to be maintained between event and judgment, a gap that
maintains “good ambiguity.” Certainly there are philosophers who
simply equivocate over the interpretation of events in such a way
as to produce “bad philosophy,” he explains, but “good philosophy
is a healthy ambiguity because it affirms the basic agreement and
disagreement de facto between the individual, others and the truth
and since it is patience whichmakes themall work together in some
way or another.”
“True irony is not an alibi; it is a task;
and the very detachment of the philosopher assigns to him a certain
kind of action among men” – the action of dissipating the myths (EP
61/61).
seu isolamento não é para fugir do ativismo político
mas de um engajamento filosófico bem maior
agora ela fala de arte, do engajamento que SArtre dizia
cita Adorno
mas eu não quero falar
para MP a obra de arte descreve
se traz política...é por extensão
se a pessoa atua de forma política isso será mostrado
“The function of the novelist is not to
state these [philosophical] ideas themetically but to make them exist
for us in the way that things exist” (SNS 34/26).
diferentes tempos históricos nos chamam para diferentes engajamentos
pessimista ou otimista
tá falando um monte de coisa que eu não tô afim de citar............
“Painting awakens and carries to its highest pitch a delirium which
is vision itself, for to see is to have at a distance; painting spreads
this strange possession to all aspects of Being, which must in some
fashion become visible in order to enter into the work of art” (OE
26–7/166/127).
That painting may render “vision itself” transparent does not
mean, however, that it thereby becomes philosophy, or even like the
metaphysical novel, for, recall, in a painting, the painter expresses no
opinion. Rather, Merleau-Ponty argues, the painter achieves something
metaphysical “just in that instant when his vision becomes
gesture, when in C´ezanne’s words, he ‘thinks in painting’” (OE
60/178/138–9).
His interest is only to show how
painting makes our visual relation to the world transparent.
iiiiiiiiiiii introduziu o Danto, depois do Adorno....
nada a ver
---------------------------------
Just as Cézanne wondered whether what came from his hands had any meaning
and would be understood, just as the man of good will comes to doubt
that lives are compatible with each other when he considers the conflicts
of his own particular life, so today’s citizen is not sure whether the human
world is possible. (SNS 9/5)
For Merleau-Ponty, the place of “good ambiguity” is the place of
“harnessing” the intellectual (Sartre) who would desire also to be a
hero, the intellectual who would act out of certainty (blind courage).
In Lilla’s terms, under one form of explanation, this “too certain”
knowledge contributes to keeping tyranny in place. In Merleau-
Ponty’s terms, it is precisely the difference between certainty and
doubt that can be used to save humanistic Marxism from Stalinist
tyranny. The analogy with C´ezanne as painter has shown how
this can be so. Failure, he writes, “is not absolute. C´ezanne won out
against chance, and men, too, can win provided they will measure
the dangers and the task” (SNS 9/5).
“the elucidation of a historical perception in which
all our understandings, all our experiences, and all our values simultaneously
come into play – and of which our theses are only the
schematic formulation.” He never relinquishes his optimismthat all
things will somehow work together, but now he stresses that these
things also “advance only obliquely. They do not go straight, without
hesitation, toward goals or concepts. That which one too deliberately
seeks,” he concludes, “one does not achieve” (PM 159/112).
It is Hegel’s and Marx’s lesson too, as it is later the lesson of the
critical theorists, which is to say that resorting to indirect techniques
of writing or into silence might more increase the risk than bring
our attention to it. What Merleau-Ponty realizes increasingly is that
a dialectics of form has always to interact dialectically with a dialectics
of content, and that content is what he calls history. Philosophy
might borrow its techniques from art as a way to avoid the
“frontal action” of the committed Communists, but philosophical
“engagement” always still has to be the continued interrogation of
history in its most concrete and most abstract determinations. A
revolutionary philosophy, he writes in his Adventures of the Dialectic,
perpetually displays a “spiral movement – a reading of history
which allows its philosophical meaning to appear, and a return to
the present which lets philosophy appear as history” (AD 53/35).
History might therefore lead Merleau-Ponty into a silent retreat,
but – and this is the point – the retreat is just the place in which
this philosopher puts himself at a certain time. What his late and
final silence is not, however, is a way out of history or engaged philosophy
altogether, even if in appearance (it tries to) look that way.
If, that is to say, Sartre’s challenge will never go away, then at least
Merleau-Ponty seems to think that his own silence might keep his
antagonistic companion silent, for a while. But this desire to put
a quarrel to rest for a while has little to do with Merleau-Ponty’s
lifelong engagement with history and truth as a philosopher of interrogation
and reflection.
