3
" My thoughts and the sense I give to my life are always caught in a swarm of meanings which have already established me in a certain position with regard to others and to events at the moment when I attempt to see clearly. And, of course, these infrastructures are not destiny; my life will transform them. But if I have a chance to go beyond them and become something other than this bundle of accidents, it is not by deciding to give my life this or
that meaning; rather, it is by attempting simply to live what is offered me, without playing tricks with the logic of the enterprise, without enclosing it beforehand inside the limits of a premeditated meaning. The word "choice" here barely has a meaning, not because our acts are written in our initial situation, but because freedom does not descend from a power of choice to specifications which would be only an exercise, because it is not a pure source of projects which open up time toward the future, and because throughout my present, deciphered and understood as well as it can be as it starts becoming what I will be, freedom is diffused. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Adventures of the Dialectic
4
" Choice, like judgment, is much less a principle than a consequence, a balance sheet, a formulation which intervenes at certain moments of the internal monologue and of action but whose meaning is formed day by day. Whether it is a question of action or even of thought, the fruitful modes of consciousness are those in which the object does not need to be posited, because consciousness inhabits it and is at work in it, because each response the outside gives to the initiatives of consciousness is immediately meaningful for it and gives rise to a
new intervention on its part, and because it is in fact what it does, not only in the eyes of others but for itself. When Marx said, ''I am not a Marxist," and Kierkegaard more or less said, ''I am not a Christian," they meant that action is too present to the person acting to admit the ostentation of a declared choice. The declared choice is nearly the proof that there has been no choice. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Adventures of the Dialectic
6
" The thought of thoughts, the cogito, the pure appearance of something to someone--and first of all of myself to myself--cannot be taken literally and as the testimony of a being whose whole essence is to
know itself, that is to say, of a consciousness. It is always through the thickness of a field of existence that my presentation to myself takes place. The mind is always thinking, not because it is always in the process of constituting ideas but because it is always directly or indirectly tuned in on the world and in cycle with history. Like perceived things, my tasks are presented to me, not as objects or ends, but as reliefs and configurations, that is to say, in the landscape of praxis. And just as, when I bring an
object closer or move it further away, when I turn it in my hands, I do not need to relate its appearances to a single scale to understand what I observe, in the same way action inhabits its field so fully that anything that appears there is immediately meaningful for it, without analysis or transposition, and calls for its response. If one takes into account a consciousness thus engaged, which is joined again with itself only across its historical and worldly field, which does not touch itself or coincide with itself
but rather is divined and glimpsed in the present experience, of which it is the invisible steward, the relationships between consciousnesses take on a completely new aspect. For if the subject is not the sun from which the world radiates or the demiurge of my pure objects, if its signifying activity is rather the perception of a difference between two or several meanings--inconceivable, then, without the dimensions, levels, and perspectives which the world and history establish around me--then its action and all actions are possible only as they follow the course of the world, just as I can change the spectacle of the perceived world only by taking as my observation post one of the places revealed to me by perception. There is perception only because I am part of this
world through my body, and I give a meaning to history only because I occupy a certain vantage point in it, because other possible vantage points have already been indicated to me by the historical landscape, and because all these perspectives already depend on a truth in which they would be integrated. At the very heart of my perspective, I realize that my private world is already being used, that there is ''behavior" that concerns it, and that the
other's place in it is already prepared, because I find other historical situations to be occupiable by me. A consciousness that is truly engaged in a world and a history on which it has a hold but which go beyond it is not insular. Already in the thickness of the
sensible and historical fabric it feels other presences moving, just as the group of men who dig a tunnel hear the work of another group coming toward them. Unlike the Sartrean consciousness, it is not visible only for the other: consciousness can see
him, at least out of the corner of its eye. Between its perspective and that of the other there is a link and an established way of crossing over, and this for the single reason that each perspective claims to envelop the others. Neither in private nor in public history is the formula of these relationships "either him or me,"
the alternative of solipsism or pure abnegation, because these relationships are no longer the encounter of two For-Itselfs but are the meshing of two experiences which, without ever coinciding,
belong to a single world. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Adventures of the Dialectic
10
" The idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat expresses in particular our desire to find ready made in history a resolution of history's horrors, to think of history as an Odyssey, to return to a solution already given in things, or at least to base our will on a movement of things. If one takes away this ideology, what remains? Only revolutionary movements which indeed avoid the alternatives of personal dictatorship and democratic consultation because they are a resistance, because they are not a recognized power, but which have no other reason
for existing than to create one, which therefore do something other than what they want to do. The abortion of the French Revolution, and of all the others, is thus not an accident which breaks a logical development, which is to be attributed to the particularities of the rising class, and which will not take place when the rising class is the proletariat: the failure of the revolution is the revolution itself. Revolution and its failure are one and the same thing. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Adventures of the Dialectic
13
" We thought, and we still think, that communism is ambiguous and anticommunism even more so. We thought, and we still think, that a politics founded
on anticommunism is in the long run a politics of war and in the short run a politics of regression, that there are many ways of not being communist, and that the problem has barely been taken up when one has said that one is not a communist...To say, as we
did, that Marxism remains true as a critique or negation without being true as an action or positively was to place ourselves outside history, and particularly outside Marxism, was to justify it
for reasons which are not its own, and, finally, was to organize equivocalness. In history, Marxist critique and Marxist action are a single movement. Not that the critique of the present derives as a corollary from perspectives of the future--Marxism is not a utopia--but because, on the contrary, communist action is in principle only the critique continued, carried to its final consequences, and because, finally, revolution is the critique in power. If one verifies that it does not keep the promises of the critique, one cannot conclude from that: let us keep the critique and forget the action. There must be something in the critique itself that germinates the defects in the action. We found this ferment in the Marxist idea of a critique historically embodied, of a class which is the suppression of itself, which, in its representatives, results in the conviction of being the universal in action, in the right to assert oneself without restriction, and in unverifiable violence...It is therefore quite impossible to cut communism in two, to say that it is right in what it negates and wrong in what it asserts: for its way of asserting is already concretely present in its way of negating; in its critique of capitalism there is already, as we have said, not a utopian representation of the future, but at least the absolute of a negation, or negation
realized, the classless society called for by history. However things may appear from this perspective, the defects of capitalism remain defects; but the critique which denounces them must be freed from any compromise with an absolute of the negation
which, in the long run, is germinating new oppressions...This Marxism which remains true whatever it does, which does without proofs and verifications, is not a philosophy of history--it is Kant in disguise, and it is Kant again that we ultimately find in the concept of revolution as absolute action...We would be happy if we could inspire a few--or many--to bear their freedom, not to exchange it at a loss; for it is not only their own thing, their secret, their pleasure, their salvation
--it involves everyone else. "
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Adventures of the Dialectic
