Adventures of the Dialectic Book

"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 the concept of revolution as absolute action." (pg. 232)

Throughout my reading of this book, I have been thinking about what one should take away from it. Whenever I would look up this book before, it would always be attached to Merleau-Ponty's other book Humanism and Terror and that these books were what divided Merleau-Ponty from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, for it was presented to those that had not read it that Merleau-Ponty had given up the Communist project. Yes, this can be seen from Merleau-Ponty speaking for a non-communist left, the most important part of the book is trying to follow how he gets to this point. It is important to state that we need to follow what he is saying for this book is very philosophical, but, importantly in the critical aspect of Marxism, it is also historical. Besides this book and Humanism and Terror, this book is seen as a direct critique of Sartre and how he wrote about the Soviet Union the Communist Party. However, while this does take up over half of the book, the first half of the book looks into the historical philosophy of the 1917 revolution and its actors Lenin, Trotsky, and Lukács starting with Lukács and his influence of Max Weber. Needless to say, this book covers a lot in 233 pages.

So for a book that covers Weber, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács, Sartre, Marx, and Hegel why did I start this with a quote from the second to last page that features Kant as being the main problem? Well, while this book is hard to categorize, that is to say, who should read this and to whom should one recommend this. For, it is not a good introduction to any of the ideas presented inside and, to those it is being critical towards, whether they will accept it or if it is a necessary critique any more. So, it presents a challenge of how to present it and talk about it. For this reason, I find it good to start with a quote from the second to last page that includes a philosopher that is mentioned a total of 3 times within this book.

For this book, it seems that the best reason to still read it and bring it up to other people is, besides it's historical importance, for it is one of the books that shaped Sartre for his later work the Critique of Dialectical Reason, that this book presents its ideas which are very philosophical in an interesting way. Merleau-Ponty is interesting in this manner for while he is known for his main work Phenomenology of Perception his own philosophical thought is very original and well thought out. The popular philosophy of the time was definitely Phenomenology, which he study at great lengths in Husserl's Archives (see Sarah Bakewell's book At the Existentialist Café), but he shows a command of Hegelian, Cartesian, and Marxist philosophy. And, it is in this way that Merleau-Ponty shows the problems that he has with the philosophical underpinning and support for the Soviet Regime. Not only the support of Sartre, but the support that came from Les Temps Modernes, he specifically calls out them on page 166.

What are some of the important ideas then? In a sense, the ideas that are the most interesting in this is that of the identity of the Proletariat, whether they exist, how they know what they should be doing, their relation to the Community Party, their relation to the Soviet Society, and more. On the existence of the Proletariat, it is for this reason that the connection to Kant is so intriguing, for one of Merleau-Ponty's main claims is that Sartre in his ultrabolshevism loses the Marxist Dialectic and replaces the analysis of Dialectical Philosophy for a philosophical intuitionism. Thus we have the connection back to Kant for the claim is that Sartre's analysis and support of the happening of Soviet Union is where one must go with the party for Sartre needs the Communist Party to be in constant Revolution which means that Freedom for the Communist Party relies in it being in a state of pure action. This then ties back to the Intuitionism for, instead of the process of becoming of the dialectic, the pure action asks for the immediacy of the action in the intuition. To me, this seems to be the main points of this book. For in this, in asking for the pure action of the revolution which should be seen as a qualitative change, like Hegel's famous example of the bud to the blossom to the fruit, which would be instantaneous from a historical perspective.

However, it is also for all these reasons that I will most likely in the future return and read this book again, for it seems that it was not until the last pages that I started to understand what Merleau-Ponty was attempting to do in this book. He uses Lukács as a student of Marx and Weber, Lenin, and Trotsky as Party leaders that lead to the 1917 revolution and used them to frame what their philosophical shortcomings were when it came to be Stalin's Russia, with a specific sympathy for Trotsky. And in doing this, he shows the dialectic in its "adventure" it had taken from the 1917 revolution to his time (1953-5). Thus, when he is critiquing Sartre, he is using the dialectic to critique the Sartre's non-Dialectical Marxism/Socialism/Communism, which when stated as such, shows Sartre's support to be contradictory. By Sartre doing this, making his support for the Soviet Union and the Communist Party and Intuitionistic and not Dialectic philosophy, he loses the history and social relations present and limits the scope of his understanding to the persons and things. This being said, this has come into light as the book finished, so with this in mind a second reading should be enlightening.