York Univ.

Hegelian Elements in Merleau-Ponty's

La Structure du Comportement
Barr.r Cooper
M
ERLEAU-PONTY'S earliest book, La Structure du comportement!
1 has recently received a good deal of attention.
2
As with so much of
his work, it can be read at many different levels and by many different au-
diences. Professor Wild, in his foreword to the English translation, said
that "it should be of interest not only to philosophers, but to anthro-
pologists, sociologists, clinical psychiatrists, and indeed, to anyone
seriously concerned with the foundations of the human disciplines."
Indeed, the opening words of La Structure suggest the wide range of dis-
ciplines to which Merleau-Ponty intended to speak: "Our goal is to under-
stand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological,
and even social." Critics and commentators on this work have often
pointed out the skill with which Merleau-Ponty integrated the data of
physiology and psychology into his own argument, but, apart from
echoing Merleau-Ponty's own words, that La Structure was a preparation
for the Phenomenologie de la perception,3 little attention has been
devoted to the philosophical structure integral to the book itself. In this
paper I shall argue that, to a much greater extent than has been acknow 1-
edged, the philosophy of La Structure, as distinct from the psychology or
physiology of the book, was influenced by his reading of Hegel, in particu-
lar Hegel interpreted through the lectures of Kojeve.
4
Hegel, I shall argue,
13rd ed. (Paris: P.U.F., 1953).
2 See, for example T. F. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale:
La genese de Ia philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu'a La Phenomenologie
de Ia perception (La Haye: Nijhoff, 1971); J. T. L. Hartley, The Philosophy of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Philosophy of Form (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Ph.D.
Thesis, 1970).
"Titres et traveaux: Projet d'enseignement (Paris: Centre de Documentation
Universitaire, 1951), p. 6.
4 These lectures, subsequently published along with some additional papers by
Kojeve under the title Introduction a Ia lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)
were given during the 1930's at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. We cannot
deal here with the details of Kojeve's presentation nor with its impact on Merleau-
Ponty, who was in regular attendance. See, however my "The Genesis of Merleau-
412 COOPER
provided the resolution necessary to account for the symmetrical reduc-
tionist interpretations against which he argued, the one claiming that
what is called consciousness can be explained causally, that is, by "na-
ture," and the other claiming that the alleged externality of meaning is in
fact nothing but a mental relation born and borne in consciousness.
Taking the first claim as expressed in classical reflexology, Merleau-
Ponty showed how a physiological explanation of observed behavioral
phenomena was unintelligible without the introduction of the external
category of form that, he said, was a natural organization or articulation.
3
Even less could the partes extra partes model of man be upheld in
Pavlovian reflexology. What is involved in psychological disorders is a
general or global disorganization that is not indifferent to the physical
substrate of nerve tissue but that cannot be reduced to it either. Thus, a
"mixed" view of cerebral functioning is required and can be established,
he said, by employing the concept of form. To be sure, stimuli are reflex-
ogenic, but only because they are seen to be so; that is, only because they
take their significance within a perceptual context that defines them that
way. Considered biologically and not as a physico-chemical laboratory
mechanism,6 the organism makes externally evident an internal meaning.
There is, moreover, a "natural" hierarchy of behavioral organizations that
allows us to understand the relative degree of autonomy and indepen-
dence of the organism from its biological milieu.
7
The world, or, to use an Hegelian term, given-Being,'; is "hollowed out,"
Merleau-Ponty said, at the place where behavior appears. There is no
question of anthropomorphism, however, for there is no imputation of
consciousness, that is, of "a being whose essence is to know," to animals:
"A consciousness is, according to Hegel, a 'hole in being' and we have
nothing here but a hollowing OUt."9 When von Uexkull said that an orga-
nism is a melody that sings itself, he did not imply that it had a tune in
mind; when Merleau-Ponty adopted the Hegelian metaphor, the implica-
tion was simply that an animal is not pure interiority but another exis-
Ponty's Atheism" Unless specific texts are cited, "Hegel" means the "received
Hegel," Hegel interpreted by Kojeve.
5 La Structure, p. 45; consider also Plato, Statesman, 287c, and Phaedrus, 266e.
6 "One may not consider every reaction obtained in a laboratory by interrogating
a sick organism or under artificial condi tions as a biological reality. The object of bi-
ology is to grasp what makes a living being a living being .... " "Everything that
can happen to an organism in the laboratory is not a biological reality." La Struc-
ture pp. 48, 164. This seems obvious enough and perhaps beyond controversy until
we recall how many contemporary molecullar biologists think they are seeking an
explanation of life in chemistry.
7 Thus, the "higher" animals have more "personality" than the lower ones; a cat
or a dog becomes a pet t h ~ way a lobster or an earthworm cannot because it can, to
a degree, behave with some independence of its biological instincts.
8 Cf. Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 298 ff.
9 La Structure, pp. 136-37.
MERLEAU-PONTY AND HEGEL 413
tence. The behavior of animals, whatever the degree of "selfhood" it at-
tains or fails to attain, is never a thing, a mere part of given-Being; more-
over man who understands animal behavior, while not a thing, either, is
also not a pure knower of meanings that are independent of specific oc-
casions.
Merleau-Ponty's argument rested upon and intended to justify two im-
portant presuppositions. The first concerned the articulation from anony-
mous, biological, apriori, instinctive behavior to what he called individual
or integrated behavior. Quantity, order, and signification may be found
throughout the "universe of forms" but are nevertheless "dominant" in
matter, life and spirit respectively. "In other words, matter, life, and spirit
must participate unequally in the nature of form, must represent different
degrees of integration and must in the end constitute a hierarchy where
individuality is ever more realized."l0 Now, individuality is not just struc-
tural telos of autonomy from biological instincts and milieux; it is also, ac-
cording to Kojeve,ll a key Hegelian concept signifying the Aufhebung of
universality and particularity. Man as an "individual" in the full sense of
the word not only integrates the dialectics of his biological being or "sen-
timent-of-self' (Selbstgefiihl) as a member of the species homo sapiens
but, as we shall argue below, he also integrates certain social givens and
finally, he integrates history. The second presupposition, contained in the
quotation given above, is explicated directly a few lines later:
In a philosophy that truly renounced the notion of substance there would
only be one universe, which would be the universe of forms: between dif-
ferent sorts of forms invested with equal rights, between physical relations
and relations implied in the description of behavior, there could be no ques-
tion of derivation or causality, nor, therefore, of requiring physical models to
bring physiological or psychic forms into being.
12
Thus, in the end, reality must be understood within the universe of forms,
and this universe implies man. Merleau-Ponty then went on to present
the descriptive (phenomenological) evidence to support what turns out to
be a metaphysical thesis.
Physical forms are described as a field of forces that may be charac-
terized by a law, a mathematical equation, a probability function, etc.;
vital forms are linked to a capacity for activity that may be expressed as
an immanent or inherent meaning, not a vital force but a "clustering" of
physico-chemical activity in such a way that the environment is alteredJ3
10 La Structure, p. 143.
11 Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 113 ff; 146; 506 ff.
12 La Structure, p. 144.
13 La Structure, pp. 157 ff. The concept of "cluster" is taken, without reference,
from Hegel, p. 166. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty had in mind Hegel's remarks in the En-
zyklopiidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830) eds., F. Nicolin and O.
414 COOPER
But such meanings no less than mathematical formulae make sense only
for an observer who can apprehend the meaning that the organism simply
is. Thus, both the physical world and merely biological life are mean-
ingless without man. Merleau-Ponty explained why by a direct reference
to Hegel: "The Spirit of Nature is a hidden Spirit. It is not produced in the
form of Spirit itself: it is only Spirit for the Spirit that knows it: it is Spirit
in-itself but not for-itself."14
If Spirit is "hidden" it may still be Spirit but it will not know itself to be
Spirit; indeed it will be meaning-full only for the Spirit that knows it,
namely man. Contrarily, it will be meaning-less in-itself.15 There is noth-
ing mysterious in Merleau-Ponty's formulation; he is simply re-afirrming
his presuppositions. More specifically, the universe of forms is a universe
of meaning, but meaning is a category that implies a consciousness that
knows, or at least experiences meaning. Physical form is only in so far as
it appears to a perceiver (whether animal or human). The meaning that
the form has for an animal, however, is never divorced from its actual,
concrete existence (which is precisely what Merleau-Ponty meant by
syncretic and amovable forms) while for a man, the appearance is simply
the contingent occasion of its meaning. In the same way, while an animal
may behave meaningfully, the meaning of the act for the animal remains
opaque because animals lack the ability to distance themselves from their
(meaningful) activity in order to see what they are doing. The Hegelian
formula may be translated as follows: "The meaning of physical and bio-
logical nature is hidden from itself. It does not appear in the form of con-
sciousness; it is only meaningful for a consciousness that knows it: it is
meaning in-itself but it is not conscious of itself as meaning."
Finally, the human order can be distinguished from the vital order in
virtue of the dialectic initiated by human labor and perception. "Just as it
seemed impossible for us to reduce the pair vital situation-instinctive re-
action to the pair stimulus-reflex, so it is no doubt necessary to recognize
the originality of the pair perceived situation-Iabor."16 The use of the
Hegelian concept, labor or work, was deliberate because it corresponded
to the original meaning of action, namely, starting something new, under-
taking a real, creative transformation of physical and living natureY But
just as the creations of labor are not "pure" creations, that is, they are not
dreams, neither is perception a "pure" creation but carries with it as a
kind of mortgage the lived reality expressed in the subordinate forms of
physics and biology. There are, he said, "sectors of experience that are ir-
Poggler (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1959), para. 248, Remark, p. 201 or para.
336, p. 283.
14 La Structure, p. 175. The quotation is from the Jenenser Logik Metaphysik und
Naturphilosophie ed., G. Lasson (Hamburg: F. Meiner Verlag, 1967), p. 193; it is in-
correctly identified in La Structure as at p. 113.
15 Compare Kojeve, Introduction, p. 198.
16 La Structure, pp. 175-76.
17 La Structure, p. 176.
MERLEAU-PONTY AND HEGEL 415
reducible one to another."l!! To be sure, some experiences are those of con-
scious, intellectual judgement but all experience, and specifically, all per-
ceptual experience is not. This means that some conscious experience will
approach the opacity of vital behavior; in Merleau-Ponty's words, this ex-
perience is lived rather than known.
l9
Such an enlarged notion of consciousness can be linked to action if ac-
tion is considered not as the means by which an infinitely subtle instinct,
peculiar only to man, achieves certain biologically defined goals but
rather as the manifestation of a practical intention whose significance is
variable. Clothing is biologically an artificial skin, but also a presentation
of self; language is not only the code of a porpoise but the expression of
the specifically human ability to elevate one's immediate milieu to the
status of a spectacle and to possess it mentally by means of veritable
knowledge. But even language that expresses the meaning of a perceived
spectacle is not a transparent intellection, and noetic control is never
complete. Merleau-Ponty explained by citing the Hegelian parable of
Master and Slave: "Language is for thought at once the prinCiple of slav-
ery because it is interposed between it and things and the principle of
freedom because it rids one of a prejudice by giving it its name."20 Speech
too, in other words, is a kind of action if naming a prejudice is the first
step in getting rid of it; moreover, the knowledge that one obtains after it
has been truly named must have already been tacitly present in the
prejudiced life formerly led. The fact that one can take the step, that one
can truly change, that human existence is not forever prescribed and
linked directly to specified apriori biological meanings is "what defines
man." Speech, suicide, and revolutionary action, he said, equally signify
the capacity to reject a given milieu and given-Being. The ambiguity of
language and of "naming" corresponds to the ambiguity of human action
and to its artifacts, whether utilitarian or cultural: "Use-objects and cul-
tural objects would not be what they are if the activity that made them
appear did not also have as its meaning to negate and surpass them."21 Fi-
nally, it is this same power of Aujhebung, of "negating and surpassing,"
that allows men to substitute a mediated knowledge of truth for an imme-
diate experience of reality.
The power of acceding to truth is not simply an intellectual power and
the truth achieved is not simply an intellectual truth but is as well an "ex-
istential" power and an "existential" truth. Merleau-Ponty illustrated
what he meant by reference to Freud. Truly integrated behavior occurs
when infantile attitudes are no longer expressed as the meaning of an ac-
tivity; repressed behavior occurs when the meaning is only apparently
non-infantile. Thus there are those whose behavior is truly understand-
18 La Structure, p. 186.
19 La Structure, pp. 179, 182, 187.
20 La Structure, p. 188, note 1.
21 La Structure, p. 190. The original is in italics. Cf. Kojeve, Introduction p. 14.
416 COOPER
able in terms of maternal protection, a typical biological or vital attitude,
although it takes place through the human world and they say they are
being married. That is, a "complex" is simply a distraction from a lower
dialectic and not a transcendence, integration, or Aufhebung of it.
On the other hand, however, there are lovers for whom Freudian expla-
nations are but amusing anecdotes. It is easy enough to understand the
partial disintegration explored by Freudian psychology as the manifesta-
tion of partial structures gifted with autonomy. Thus, Freud's emphasis
upon childhood experience and dreams was intended to bring to light the
simple structures of infantile existence. What precisely is "simple" about
infantile structures is that the subject lives as an infant, "guided by the
immediate sentiment of what is permitted and what is forbidden without
looking for the meaning of the prohibitions."22 When the patient sees that
his attitude is infantile he is able, as an adult, to integrate the primitive
structure into the complex experience of adult existence. But what, philo-
sophically speaking, is "adult existence?" What is complete integration?
What, in Merleau-Ponty's argument, corresponds to the Hegelian telos,
complete and perfect speech or wisdom, the Aufhebung of the principles
of mastery and slavery?23 And how does he relate consciousness as the
milieu of meanings to consciousness as the integration of existence-that
is, how does he formulate positively as a metaphysical thesis, the two
presuppositions he asserted above?
We may begin by taking stock of some metaphysical argument that has
already crept in, in the guise of phenomenological description. We have
seen that Merleau-Ponty made occasional references to Hegel and at one
point reformulated the problem of perception in explicitly Hegelian
terms,24 but it is also true that many of the ancillary Hegelian concepts,
required to render the account intelligible, are absent. First of all
Merleau-Ponty found in child psychology and in Freudian psychology a
way of presenting the Aufhebung of animal sentiment-of-self (Selbst-
gefilhl) to human consciousness-of-self (Selbstbewusstsein) that Hegel
presented in the parable of Master and Slave.
25
The notion of truth as
mediated by language that reveals the immediately experienced reality as
an object before a knowing consciousness is intelligible only in terms of
an Hegelian anthropology and epistemology. On the one hand the
Hegelian epistemological conception of truth as revealed reality26 is pre-
cisely Merleau-Ponty's conception of the naming power of language. And
this specifically human ability only makes sense if man is conceived as a
22 La Structure, p. 193.
23 Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 271 ff.
24 La Structure, p. 191.
25 Linguistic evidence is found as well by Merleau-Ponty's use of terms such as
"immediate sentiment" to describe infantile understanding as well as in the descrip-
tion of animal sensation.
26 Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 19 ff.
MERLEAU-PONTY AND HEGEL 417
power of negation of given-Being, a potential for going beyond what is
already-there and creating something new. More generally, this power is
what makes man an historical, self-actualizing existence whose self-ac-
tualization appears as the result of his action, namely in use-objects and
cultural objects, and whose "essence" is the power of negating. These
Hegelian themes, as we said, are all implicit in Merleau-Ponty's critical
argument to the end of Chapter Three of La Structure; in the final chapter
he explicated them and turned to dispute the second reductionism, as-
sociated with the philosophies of Descartes and especially of Kant.
Descartes, in fact, receives rather brief treatment, as a phenomenology
of "naive consciousness" suggests that there is no universe of meanings
distinct from the experience of that universe displayed before the per-
ceiving eye in variable profile. Of course, with blindness we learn that we
see with our eyes. From this experience causal analysis draws its strength
but the difficulties that follow are all predicated upon the attempt to
reduce the original naive perception, namely, the appearance of the thing
across a multitude of profiles, to a mechanism of nature that is transpar-
ently "true," or clear, or in any event without profile, a meaning within
the universe of thought. Yet Merleau-Ponty had already argued that
knowledge is not the only meaningful experience, that, in fact, knowledge
is a grasping of events, not an event itself.
Here the Kantian solution may be suggested: the knOWing subject and
the object known are inseparably correlated, and there is no question of
"things" operating on the mind except in so far as they offer it a meaning.
The analysis of the act of knowledge leads to the idea of a consti tuting or na-
turizing thought that subtends the characteristic structure of objects from
within. In order to indicate both the intimacy of objects to the subject and
the presence of solid structures in them that distinguish them from appear-
ances, they will be called 'phenomena' and philosophy in so far as it holds to
this theme becomes a phenomenology, that is an inventory of consciousness
as the milieu of the universeP
Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, Kantian philosophy begins with a re-
turn to the experience of naive consciousness where subject and object
are distinct only as meanings and not as beings; but perception reaches
the objects because objects are significations and the revelation of sig-
nification is called perception. This ingenious solution is flawed, however,
in a single way: it cannot conceive of the immediate relations between
given-Being and consciousness, between sensible consciousness and
knowing consciousness, and in the end all perception must be an intellec-
tual operation, a judgement. What we mean by sensible consciousness
turns out to be, for Kant's critical philosophy, a preliminary confusion
27 La Structure, p. 215.
418 COOPER
that is finally resolved by a reflection that shows meaning to be the result
of conscious imputation of meaning.
Even if critical philosophy cannot be accepted in its entirety, it has at
least achieved the insight that all reality is conceivable as an object of
consciousness.
28
This "transcendental attitude" implied by Kantianism
must be understood, Merleau-Ponty said, across the empirical results al-
ready achieved by the analysis of the structures of behavior. The different
orders of signification, of matter, life, and spirit correspond to different
sectors of lived experience, it is true, but without the specifically human
order, the inferior structures would not appear. In one sense then, it is ob-
vious that consciousness is the "condition of possibility and foundation" of
the subordinate structures.
29
But this is not necessarily to posit a univer-
sal constituting consciousness as in Kantian philosophy; indeed, what
Merleau-Ponty had in mind is the Hegelian notion whereby the meaning
of the subordinate structures simply is "internally" and "unrevealedly."
Since it is the negating power of consciousness that reveals the meanings
of given-Being,30 the fact that there is meaning revealed is the result of
the actuality of a revealing and negating consciousness.
If, as Merleau-Ponty said, Kantian perception is eventually reduced to
an intellectual operation, body and soul become separated and various
mechanical metaphors are illegitimately endowed with descriptive pow-
ers by an imaginary universal constituting consciousness. On the other
hand, phenomenologically, the separation of body and soul whereby the
one acts upon the other refers to the integration and disintegration of
properly human existence. As with Freudian complexes, the contin-
gencies of one's bodily appearance can serve to imprison the soul in a
morbid fascination with one's physical deformity. But then again, this
same infirmity can become an object whereby the self justifies an ac-
cident of nature, infuses it with a meaning beyond a mere physical contin-
gency, and assimilates it to the deeper meanings of life and human exist-
ence,ofindividuality.31
The second, positive example is more complex. It is evident that one can
know oneself to be crippled, to be socially despised and so on and thereby
be conscious of the possibility of transcending the "state" of being-
crippled, being-socially-despised. But what possibilities are there for a
healthy person or a person in a socially respected position to become con-
scious of his potential? The answer here is the same: all men have an
equal possibility of attaining self-consciousness:
For a being who has achieved self-consciousness and consciousness of his
28 La Structure, p. 217.
29 La Structure, p. 218.
30 Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 91 ff; 492 ff; 533.
31 Merleau-Ponty chose EI Greco, whose astigmatism was revealed in his paint-
ings, as an example. La Structure, p. 219.
MERLEAU-PONTY AND HEGEL 419
body, who has reached the dialectic of subject and object, the body is no
longer the cause of the structure of consciousness, it has become the object of
consciousness. . . .By acceding to true knowledge, by surpassing the
dialectic of the living or social being and its circumscribed milieu, by
becoming the pure subject who knows the world objectively, man realizes,
at the limit, the absolute consciousness with respect to which the body and
individual existence are no longer anything but objects, and death is
deprived of meaning.:J2
This sentence, which has puzzled a number of commentators, is, if not
clear, at least intelligible in an Hegelian context: true knowledge can
"surpass" the dialectics of biological life and social milieu only by
revealing them to be what they are. And if biological life, and social
milieu, and the inferior dialectics that they contain, exhaust given-Being,
the knowledge that reveals the dialectic of living and social being will
indeed, "at the limit" be absolute. "At the limit" there is only a con-
sciousness that knows "directly" the "true world." There is no problem of
the relations of body and soul because the body is the bearer of a dialectic
that is known; more broadly, the physical and organic worlds are not
fragments of matter but significations in the original realm of truth, "the
sole legitimate theme of philosophical reflection."33 That is to say, once
again, that the condition for meaning and truth as revealed reality is that
consciousness negates given-Being as knowledge; but on the other hand
the revelation is not the reality, and this is the difference with Kant-
ianism The physical and somatic substrates of true or absolute knowl-
edge constitute "the condition of existence of such and such a sensible
scene" but not its meaning.
34
Merleau-Ponty added an additional paragraph to dispose of the misun-
derstanding of his argument as a version of Kantianism: "In a general
way it seems that we are rejoining the critical idea."35 But, by implication,
really he was not, for in addition to the distinctions noted above con-
cerning the understanding to be made of the existential conditions for
meaning as implying both a reality and revealer of it, a given-Being and a
negation, Merleau-Ponty emphasized the importance of history.
Whatever the external conditions-bodily, psychological, or social-upon
which the development of consciousness depends, and even if it is only grad-
ually made in history, from the point of view of acquired self-consciousness
the very history from which it emerges is only a spectacle that is given to it.
The "history" involved can be either particular, whence the meaning of
~ 2 La Structure, p. 220.
33 La Structure, p. 220; Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 198; 410.
34 La Structure, p. 222.
35 La Structure, p. 222. Emphasis added.
420 COOPER
the external conditions are biographical as with self-mastery, personal in-
tegration of existence and, in the end, the achievement of wisdom, or it
can be universal, whence the meaning of the external conditions is histor-
ical in the full sense as with the activity that created given use-objects
and cultural objects and eventually "emerged" from the process of
making such objects into the universal and homogeneous State.
36
Both for
wisdom, the end of philosophy, and the universal and homogeneous State,
the end of "history," the "history" that prepared their advent would ap-
pear as a "spectacle" grasped transparently as mere preparation. There is
"a reversal of perspective . . . produced with respect to adult con-
sciousness: the historical becoming that prepared it was not before it but
only fOT it, the time during which it progressed is no longer the time of its
constitution, but the time that it constitutes and the series of events are
subordinated to its eternity."37
At one level, this may be a description of the integration of infantile bio-
graphical information, but the term "adult consciousness" does not simply
refer to the attitudes of a grown person: if the "adult consciousness," the
telos, is also an "absolute consciousness" the "reversal of perspective" is
much more profound. The historical becoming that was a necessary
preparation for "adult" or absolute consciousness was not an inherently
meaningful series laid out like a computer programme into which con-
sciousness flowed according to an apTioTi scheme; that would be to ignore
the contingencies of history, the accidents of nature and life, and the po-
tential of freely integrating these contingencies into a meaningful whole.
On the contrary, only at the end of history as preparation for wisdom, and
with the reversal of perspective, does the meaning for the knowing con-
sciousness appear. "The series of events are subordinated to its eternity,"
so that wisdom constitutes the meaning of history.38
Merleau-Ponty ended the paragraph we have been examining with the.
sentence: "Such is the perpetual reply of critical philosophy to psy-
chologism, to sociologism and to historicism."39 One may think that he
had therefore been providing an exegesis of Kantianism and not, as we
have suggested, of Hegelianism. A close reading of the following
paragraph however, is sufficient to clarify the relationship between the
Kantian reply and the Hegelian reply. First we note that again Merleau-
Ponty claimed the truth of Kantianism to be the attainment of the "tran-
scendental attitude" where all conceivable meaning is an object of con-
sciousness. But the authority cited is not a Kantian one but Eugen Fink,40
36 Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 145 ff; 304 f; 507 ff.
37 La Structure, p. 222.
38 Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 271 ff; 302.
39 La Structure, p. 222.
40 "Vergegenwartigung und Bild," Jahrbuch fUr Philosophie und phiinomenolo-
gische Forschung, 11 (1930), 239-309. Consider Geraets' remarks, Vers une nouvelle
Philosophie pp. 95 ff.
MERLEAU-PONTY AND HEGEL 421
a phenomenologist. Further, the conclusion, namely the acquisition of the
transcendental attitude, is the "flrst" but "it is not the sole one, and we
must even say that this flrst conclusion stands in a relation of simple
homonymy with a philosophy of critical inspiration."41 Thus, if critical
philosophy is in agreement with Merleau-Ponty, it is only per accidens.
Yet, we still have to discover what is the index of reality to be accorded
the telos of "acquired self-consciousness," for if the knowledge that
reveals the truth of an existing reality must leave it intact qua existing re-
ality and only reveal what is already there, then we must ask if the reve-
lation is also an existence.
Merleau-Ponty shed some light on this problem when he noted that the
basis of his argument was the concept of Gestalt whose most profound
feature was not signiflcation but structure, "the joining of an idea and an
existence that are both indiscernible, the contingent arrangement by
which materials being placed before us have a meaning, the birth of in-
telligibility."42 Here he clarified his description of the Aujhebung of or-
ganic matter achieved by the concept of Gestalt with a quote, which ap-
peared as well in the Phenomenologie de la perception, from Hegel:
For life as for spirit, there is no past that is absolutely past, 'the moments
that spirit appears to have behind it are also carried in its present depths.'
Higher behavior retains the subordinate dialectics in the present depths of
its existence, from that of the physical system and its topographical condi-
tions to that of the organism and its milieu.
43
The subordinate dialectics appear in their own right only as symptoms of
disintegration but are nevertheless present in the depths of normal behav-
ior. The difference with Kantian critical philosophy can then be made pre-
cise: critical philosophy repressed the autonomous signiflcation of quality
and existence and thus, in concreto, the formation of knowledge, whereas
Merleau-Ponty and Hegel emphasized the formation of meaning from the
existing materials and the Aujhebung of old meaning in new. Critical
thought rightly argued that a body is always a body for a consciousness;
Merleau-Ponty added that our own body is not the inherence of a con-
sciousness in material mechanisms but "of a presence to consciousness of
its own history and the dialectical stages it has overcome."44
If this analysis of Merleau-Ponty's Hegelianism was sound, it would ap-
pear that the body is a microcosm of history. Consciousness knows itself
41 La Structure, pp. 222-23: Merieau-Ponty indicated in a footnote, p. 223, that it
was Brunschvicg whom he had in mind.
42 La Structure, p. 223.
43 La Structure, p. 224. The quotation is from Hegel's Vorlesungen ilber die Philo-
sophie der Geschichte, ed. E. Gans (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1840) voL 9 of
Hegel's Werke; see also the Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard,
1945) p. 148.
44 La Structure, p. 225.
422 COOPER
not as pure interiority but as the perfection of subordinate dialectics
whose meaning it carries within its own, just as the final discourse of the
wise man carries within it the history of all prior discourse and the per-
fect State is constituted by and through the inferior historical dialectics
symbolized in the parable of Master and Slave.
45
But there is an impor-
tant difference: for Hegel, the achievement of Wisdom owed nothing to
him and everything to Spirit.46 For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, the
achievement of integration was a personal achievement by an existing
man, and we still do not know what status to accord truly integral know l-
edge, knowledge "at the limit."
The dialectical integration of man and the Aujhebung of the material
and vital orders does not, as we noted earlier, destroy the substrates as
realities but reveals them in a new truth. Yet, it is possible for the "old
truth" to appear, and not just in pathology: "Every integration presup-
poses the normal functioning of the subordinate dialectics that always
claim their own due."47 Thus, the terms "body" and "soul" have more than
one level of meaning:
There is the body as a mass of chemical components in interaction, the
body as dialectic of the living thing and its biological milieu, the body as
dialectic social subject and group, and even all our habits are an impalpable
body for the I each instant. Each of these degrees [of integration] is soul
with respect to the preceding one, body with respect to the following one.
48
N ow, if as Merleau-Ponty said, the only way for a thing to be known is for
it to offer a meaning to consciousness, then we must learn for what con-
sciousness the social subject or the I of each instant is conceived as body.
According to Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel the answer is clear: only for
a consciousness that integrates the phenomenal body and the phenomenal
I as the expression of individuality in the full sense, and only for a con-
sciousness whose historical knowledge integrates the social subject and
the social group as the meaning of history-namely the self-consciousness
of the Wise Man, The Sage.
Here we encounter a problem that, in a different context, Geraets called
Merleau-Ponty's "hesitation." After all, he wrote a phenomenology of per-
ception not a phenomenology of spirit. For Hegel, the time was ripe for
the System because Spirit had exhausted its possibilities, the Concept had
achieved its Gestalt. Consider what Merleau-Ponty said of Hegel's term
"Concept": the formulation of the problem of body and soul, sketched
above, is the issue of "a natural development of the notion of Gestalt" that
"led back to its Hegelian meaning, that is, to the Concept before it has
45 Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 16 ff.
46 Hegel, Phunomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 58.
47 La Structure, pp. 226-7.
48 La Structure, p. 227.
MERLEAU-PONTY AND HEGEL 423
become self-conscious. He rightly pointed out that the Concept qua Con-
cept has no exterior, and is pure self-luminosity, while material nature is
the exterior of the Concept, and also that Gestalt is the unity of interior
and exterior, of meaning and given-Being, of idea and nature."49 For
Hegel, the existence of his Wisdom, or, as Kojeve said, the fact that Hegel
is a Sage, testifies to the suppression of the difference between man and
nature, and the System as the Gestalt of the Concept is a unique "unity of
interior and exterior, subject and object," and so on. For Merleau-Ponty,
however, the historical task of suppressing the difference between man
and nature was not finished, history had not ended, the Concept had not
achieved its Gestalt, because the Gestalt was still an object of perception
rather than an ethereal self-luminosity. This deflection of Hegel's System
has the consequence that the Concept qua Concept must appear to percep-
tual consciousness, which is not know ledge or acquired self-con-
sciousness, as an idea or an ideal. This is why Merleau-Ponty's philo-
sophical observations no less than his political and ethical opinions can be
a blend of Hegelian ideas and sound, commonsense observation of empiri-
cal reality.
What we have tried to show in this paper is not that Merleau-Ponty was
a disciple of Kojeve or that he was an "Hegelian." His own philosophical
interrogation was too personal to be categorized in such summary fashion.
Nevertheless, as he would have been the first to admit, philosophy is in
large measure a dialogue with other philosophers mediated by texts, and
in addition to his immediate teachers in the critical tradition, to Gabriel
Marcel and the Gestaltists, Merleau-Ponty's earliest book contained a
number of Hegelian themes that may be detected as well in the Phenom-
enologie de la perception and are massively evident in his political writ-
ings.
~ 9 La Structure, p. 227.