Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

The Concept of the Dialectic in Hegel, Marx and

Merleau-Ponty
Hwa Yol Jung
To cite this article: Hwa Yol Jung (1977) The Concept of the Dialectic in Hegel, Marx
and Merleau-Ponty, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 8:1, 56-58, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.1977.11006482
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1977.11006482

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Date: 05 September 2016, At: 16:36

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 8 No. 1, January 1977

THE CONCEPT OF THE DIALECTIC IN HEGEL,

MARX AND MERLEAU-PONTY
HWA YOL jUNG
In her recent article "Merleau-Ponty, Hegel and the
Dialectic," JBSP, Vol. 7, No. 2 (May, 1976), pp. 96-110,
Sonia Kruks has produced what is to date the best and
most convincing commentary on Merleau-Ponty, Hegel
and Marx on the concept of the dialectic. It surpasses,
I think, the recent commentaries on the same or similar
subject by Dick Howard, James Miller, Mark Poster,
Barry Cooper and others. As I see it, Sonia Kruks'
paper is marked by the following three essential merits:
(l) it explicates the notion of the dialectic which has
its roots in Hegel and Marx in modern philosophy in
relation to the whole of Merleau-Ponty's existential
ontology; (2) it does not stop at giving the "simplest"
answer of the "two Hegels" thesis in Merleau-Ponty but
reconciles the "existential" Hegel and the "idealistic"
Hegel in favor of the former which requires the treatment of Merleau-Ponty as an "intepreter" rather than
a "dispassionate historian" of philosophical thought; (3)
by "existentialising the dialectic," it maintains that
Merleau-Ponty sides with Marx on the question of the
dialectic - the "Young Marx" who "unifies theory and
practice in the notion of 'praxis' " and who "does not
simply substitute matter for the 'Idea' as the driving
force of the dialectic but places man in the centre of the
socio-historical process." (p. 108.)1
In this brief commentary, I do not intend to embark
on a detailed analysis of the Marxian roots or connections of Merleau-Ponty's social phenomenology, which
must be postponed for another occasion.~ Nor must it
be taken as a criticism of Sonia Kruks' paper.
Indeed, she herself sets the stage for a detailed analysis
of the convergence between Marx and Merleau-Ponty as
anti-Hegelians. My commentary is an "expansion" of
and an "addition" to her analysis. It is confined to the
following four points.
I.

First, the continuity or convergence between Marx's

entire thought (from his early economic and philosophical manuscripts to his Grundrisse) and MerleauPonty's existential ontology ought to be explored in three
areas: (l) history as the concrete movement of men's
actions, (2) man as social being, and (3) embodiment in
which, on the basis of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty
extends Marx's notion of man as a natural, social and
sensuous being. Sonia Kruks is absolutely right, I
believe, in specifying Merleau-Ponty's anti-Hegelian
elements of the dialectic as (1) an order of being rather
than merely the "Idea," (2) "tensions" of that ord, and
(3) "non-teleological" and in relating them to the
thought of the early Marx. Despite the pockets of his
criticism of the "scientific socialism" of the later Marx,
however, Merleau-Ponty even in Adventures of the
Dialectic is dissatisfied primarily with the frozen institutionalization of Marxism - the Marxism that arrests
history as movement. To quote his celebrated passages in
length:
Revolution become institution is already decadent
if it believes itself to be accomplished. In other
words, in a concrete conception of history, where
ideas are nothing more than stages of the social
dynamic, all progress is ambiguous because,
acquired in a crisis situation, it creates a condition
from which emerge problems that go beyond it.
It is no accident that all known revolutions have
degenerated: it is because as established regimes
they can never be what they were as movements,
precisely because it succeeded and ended up as an
institution, the historical movement is no longer
itself: it "betrays" and "disfigures" itself in accomplishing itself. Revolutions are true as movements
and false as regimes. Thus the question arises
whether there is not more of a future in a regime
that does not intend to remake history from the
ground up but only to change it and whether this
is not the regime that one must look for, instead of
once again entering the circle of revolution.3

It was Heidegger in Letter on Humanism who somewhat enigmatically reproached Husserl's "phenomeno-

logy" and Sartre's "existentialism" for their failure to come to grips with the question of historicality and
thus their inability to engage in a dialogue with Marx whose view of history, according to Heidegger, excels
all other history. "Letter on Humanism" (trans. Edgar Lohner), in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed.
William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1962), II, p. 287. This passage
seems to have triggered a dialogue between Marx and Heidegger in Europe in recent decades and contributed to the rise of the "Arguments group" one of whose main spok~men is Kostas Axelos. See Mark
Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 20963. This question, I think, has by no means been exhausted. It needs further exploration.
2. I have touched on the subject in "The Radical Humanization of Politics: Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Politics," Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, LIII (May, 1967), pp. 233-56 and, co-authored
with Petee Jung, "Two Revolutionary Adventurers of the Dialectic: Mao Tse-tung and Maurice MerleauPonty," Dialectical Anthropology (forthcoming).

56

Second, the notion of ambiguity is to Merleau-Ponty's

existential ontology as the notion of the dialectic is to
Marx's thought. To say that human existence is ambiguous is to say that everything in history has a set of
multiple meanings by acquiring a name for itself. Thus,
in the first place, the sense of life, history, and world
has no single meaning but a multiplicity of meanings.
Since a "world" is "an organized ensemble" which has
a multi-dimensionality, Merleau-Ponty is interested,
though programmatically, in replacing "the notions of
concept, idea, mind, representation with the notions of
dimensions, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, configuration . . ."f In the second place, human existence is
incomplete, unfinished, conditional and always tentative:
it is in sum a task to be accomplished. For the world
itself is "not what I think, but what I live through. I am
open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is
inexhaustible."5
Third, because the human condition is ambiguous and
dialectical, from The Structure of Behavior to The
Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty is opposed to
reductionism - the reduction of the whole to one of
its components, e.g., the human order to the "sexual"
or the "economic". Thus in The Structure of Behavior,
dialectical thinking is opposed to scientific causality
which is necessarily reductionistic because in explaining
the whole of the human order it reduces it to the single
factor without recognizing the complex complementarity
of two or more factors which make up a whole
(Gestalt). In Phenomenology of Perception, MerleauPonty declares that ''The dialectic is not a relationship
between contradictory and inseparable thoughts; it is the

tending of an existence towards another existence which

denies it, and yet without which it is not sustained."6 In
Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty speaks of "a
unity rich in final convergence and not a unity by
reduction to a single order of reality or a single genetic
schema.''l For Merleau-Ponty, what is true in Marxism
as dialectical thinking is the anti-Hegelian denial of
identifying the historical order with the "Idea" (i.e., the
idea of "Universal History") and history as social praxis
rather than matter.
Fourth and last, consistent with Merleau-Ponty's view
of the dialectic and ambiguity as belonging to the order
of being human is his notion of truth as lateral which
has so far been overlooked in the analysis of MerleauPonty's philosophy. The notion of truth as lateral opens
up a new perspective not only on the idea of philosophy
that has persisted in the West since Hegel and continued
in Husser! in a modified way but also on comparative
culture which in tum has a bearing on the conception
of truth. Sonia Kruks too draws our attention to
Merleau-Ponty's disclaimer to Hegel's "dubious" assertion for Universal History and the monopoly of truth
by Western thought. Merleau-Ponty's notion of truth as
lateral disclaims the "superiority" of Occidental "philosophy" to Oriental "non-philosophy" which divides
humanity into two separable ontological camps comparable to the mistaken division of the human order into
the "immature" childhood and the "mature" adulthood.
It is precisely for this reason that Merleau-Ponty respects
not only the anthropological and psychological findings
of Claude Levi-Strauss and Jean Piaget who pay homage
to the "savage mind" of the "primitives" (preliterate
people and children) but also the parallel developments

3.

Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp.
39 and 207.

4.

The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, III.: Northwestern
University Press, 1968), p. 224.

5.

Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), pp. xvi-xvii.

6.

Ibid., pp. 167-68.

7.

Adventures of the Dialectic, p. 69.

57

and intersections of phylogenesis and ontogenesis.B As

Merleau-Ponty puts it so decisively, "Simple rallying
and subordinating 'non-philosophy' to true philosophy
will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already
exists in each culture's lateral relationships to the
others, in the echoes one awakes in the other."9 This
echoes the philosophical spirit of Heidegger who says:
"Being speaks through every language; everywhere and
always."IQ
In the final analysis, Merleau-Ponty's view on truth
as lateral, that is, as "dialectical," runs counter to
Hegelianism and to the most Hegelian element of
Marxism which rejects the realization of the "future
society" in the "immature" societies of the non-Western
world. To be sure, for Merleau-Ponty truth pertains not

to epistemology but to the order of being. To existentialize the dialectic is to see the historical movement of
humanity without "final end" or ultimacy (i.e., the denial
of Hegel's vision of Universal History). In the laterality
of truth Merleau-Ponty finds, I believe, his leverage not
only to accept what is true in Hegel and Marx but also
phylogenetic and ontogenetic "primitivity" as integral to
the totalizing process of humanity's history. For truth
is not monopoligized in one philosophy, one discipline,
or one culture but is shared laterally by others as well.
As Merleau-Ponty evokes the celebrated phrase of the
twelfth century, "philosophy's center is everywhere and
its circumference nowhere".ll
Moravian College
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

8.

In 1959 Merleau-Ponty himself speaks well of "ethnological" findings from Marcel Mauss to Levi-Strauss
which, in contrast to "the overarching universal of a strictly objective method," open up "a sort of lateral
universal which we acquire through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the
other person and the other person through the self." Signs, trans. Richard C. McClearly (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 120 (Italics added). We may say that this lateral universal of
which Merleau-Ponty speaks is compatible with his dialectical method. What Levi-Strauss impresses us
deeply with is not his structuralist techniques but the homage he pays to the "savage mind" of the primitives whose "pupil" and "witness" he is to preserve the lateral continuity of humanity in the same spirit of
Merleau-Ponty. See Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, trans. Monique Layton (New York: Basic Books,
1976), p. 32. C/. Martin Heidegger who says that "To orient the analysis of Dasein towards the 'life of
primitive peoples' can have positive significance as a method because 'primitive phenomena' are often less
concealed and less complicated by extensive self-interpretation on the part of the Dasein in question. Primitive Dasein often speaks to us more directly in terms of a primordial absorption in 'phenomena' (taken
in a pre-phenomenological sense). A way of conceiving things which seems, perhaps, rather clumsy and
crude from our standpoint, can be positively helpful in bringing out the sociological structures of phenomena in a genuine way." Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward ..Robinson (New York:
Harper, 1962), p. 76. For the notion of primitivity in Heidegger's philosophy, see Mikel Dufrenne, Jalons
(La Haye: Nijhoff, 1966), "La Mentalite primitive et Heidegger," pp. 127-49. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty's
laterality of truth is reminiscent of the Vichian emphasis on the poetic "adjecency," "parallelism" and
"complementarity" of words, that is, the emphasis on "the lateral and the dispersed" rather than "the
linear and the sequential" upon which the "new science" can construct "a mental vocabulary" common to
all humanity in both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic sense. See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention
and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), Chap. 6, "Conclusion: Vico in His Work and in This," pp.
347-81.

9.

Signs, p. 139.

10.

Holzwege (Frankfurt, Germany: Klostermann, 1957), p. 338. Cited in Ja<:9ues Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husser/'s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Alhson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1973), p. 160.

11. Signs, p. 128.

58