References for Theme: On Merleau-Ponty
- Dall’Alba, Gloria; Sandberg, Jörgen
- Deranty, Jean-Philippe
- Miller, James
- History and Human Existence From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (1982)
(p.208) Merleau-Ponty depicted history as a field of transindividual meanings, a symbolic system—a vast repository of frequently contradictory significations. These generalized meanings, which comprised traditions of discourse, defined our situation as human beings; although we conferred significance upon a personal history, our historical environment itself embodied a significance of its own. represented in customs, habits, and explicit moral prescriptions. The interplay of particular and general meanings marked the individual's engagement in a social world. Where Sartre had remarked that man was condemned to freedom, Merleau-Ponty argued that man was condemned to meaning.His emphasis on history as a symbolic system naturally aligned...
- History and Human Existence From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (1982)
(p.213) In the Phenomenology , he argued that "one phenomenon releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out."The proper avenue for approaching human behavior was therefore meaningful interpretation rather than causal explanation. But "in order to understand an action, its horizon must be restored—not merely the perspective of the actor, but the 'objective' context."While he consistently denied any purely economic causality, Merleau-Ponty also denied that economic factors were irrelevant to interpreting historical acts. Economics simply did not comprise some independent realm of activity, carried...
- History and Human Existence From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (1982)
(p.227) This image of (inter)subjectivity represented an historical result. For Merleau-Ponty as for Marx, "The history which produced capitalism symbolizes the emergence of subjectivity."Consciousness, while in no way the constitutive support of the social world, did on this view become an ineliminable vessel of meaning; in this capacity, its importance for any social theory could scarcely be belittled. Similarly, as Merleau-Ponty's sketch of belonging to a social class in his Phenomenology suggested, the human subject, in its passions as well as conscious disposition, comprised a critical element in any radical strategy. His social philosophy implied a practical focus on the individual...
- History and Human Existence From Marx to Merleau-Ponty (1982)
- de Beauvoir, Simone
- Political Writings (2012)
(p.231) [Extract from Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism, first published as: “Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme,” Les temps modernes, 114–15 (June-July 1955): 2072–22; in Privilèges (Paris: Gallimard, 1955): 201–72,]-We have already stated it, and it will be necessary to repeat it as often as Merleau-Ponty repeats the contrary: everything comes not from freedom but from the situation. The living conditions of the unskilled worker, his exhaustion, the debasement of knowledge correlative to the mechanization of the work, prevent him from being able to be at once a worker and a militant; coming from the masses, the militant—as Lenin himself said—must leave it: “The duo of technician...
- Political Writings (2012)
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