Reviews for Adventures of the Dialectic

The average rating for Adventures of the Dialectic based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-05-31 00:00:00 Brian Jarrett Review: January 2005 A Dialectic without Dreams Merleau-Ponty is generally read for his work in phenomenology, not his work on dialectics. This is both a pity and a mistake. While he certainly does deserve to be remembered as the third great phenomenologist of the past century, after Husserl & Heidegger, his being forgotten as a dialectical thinker is almost inexplicable. I say almost inexplicable because, I fear, the reason he is ignored as a dialectical thinker is because he advocated, and superbly demonstrated, a dialectic without myths, utopia or dreams. In the great chapter (2) on Lukacs he says, "[t]he dialectic is this continued intuition, a consistent reading of actual history, the re-establishment of the tormented relations, of the interminable exchanges, between subject and object. There is only one knowledge, which is the knowledge of our world in a state of becoming, and this becoming embraces knowledge itself." He speaks of interminable exchanges, implies the permanence of tormented relations, affirms that knowledge always becomes. This is a dialectic scraped clean of the utopianism of the Marxist classless society, contemptuous of some miraculous Kojevean 'End of History', sans any vain 'Hegelian' promise of some never-never land in which Science will precisely equal Wisdom. So then why dialectic, or, more precisely, why use the dialectical method if it offers no goal? Immediately after the sentences quoted above M-P says, "[b]ut it is knowledge that teaches us this." The dialectic, as M-P understands it, gives us, better - can give us, an understanding of history, and our present, but as to the future it promises exactly nothing. How could it promise more? If becoming, and the unknown, press on us forever, every totalization is always in danger of being threatened by some unanticipated contingency that changes this totalization into some unpredicted, and above all, unpredictable (until it occurs) Other. By way of contrast let me now mention that for Hegel, finally, one could say that Dialectic remained a retrospective method and not a predictive science - at least until the precise end of the dialectical process. "The Owl of Minerva takes flight only at night." But, for Hegel, I think it is correct to say that when Subject and Object become One, Forever, we will be able to say that the all-knowing owl is always flying because the Absolute (Spirit) is always dark. We now perhaps better understand the content of the Hegelian characterization of (and objection to) the early position of Schelling - as a 'night in which all cows are black' - this position wasn't wrong; it was merely premature. Thus at the extreme end of Hegelian theory, one is always in danger of seeing it toppling over into the Kojevean 'End of History' position, which M-P in the epilogue characterizes as an idealization of death. M-P holds, in this book, that this is not the position of Marx and Lukacs. "In Marx spirit becomes a thing, while things become saturated with spirit. History's course is a becoming of meanings transformed into forces or institutions. This is why there is an inertia of history in Marx and also an appeal to human invention in order to complete the dialectic. Marx cannot therefore transfer to, and lay to the account of, matter the same rationality which Hegel ascribes to spirit." Hegel is pleased to be taken to mean that Spirit is an active helpful partner of humanity in dialectic; a materialist dialectic can make no such claims of matter. What Merleau-Ponty, btw, is here denying, for those who have ears, is that there can be an end to any genuine material dialectic. ...Matter itself is permanently, in every human sense, an irrational factor. In other words, being and reason can never be one. Whatever Rationality in things we find - we find it there because we put it there. "Marxism cannot hide the Welt-geist in matter." Dialectic in which a dialectical partner is permanently non-rational becomes a science of circumstances. Thus M-P maintains that for Lukacs (and, I think, himself) that only revolutionary creativity can `guarantee' "a coherent and homogenous system." ...But no system is permanent. "A dialectical conception demands only that, between capitalism, where it exists, and its antecedents, be one of an integrated society to a less integrated one." By more integrated M-P means a more `socialized' society, societies in which, since there is more common ground, "destinies can be compared." It is ultimately here in social interaction that, for M-P, dialectical knowledge arises. But, as indicated earlier, nothing is guaranteed. "The principle of the logic of history is not that all problems posed are solved in advance, that the solution precedes the problem, or that there would be no question if the answer did not pre-exist somewhere, as if history were built on exact ideas. One should rather formulate it negatively: there is no event which does not bring further precision to the permanent problem of knowing what man and his society are..." One is here tempted to say that M-P here answers two of the questions we asked at the beginning of the review. Why resort to the method of dialectic? - It brings (or exposes a) further precision to our knowledge of the problem of man. Why no certain Telos, no end to history, no grand finale that finds Science and Wisdom in permanent embrace? - The "problem of knowing what man and his society are" is permanent. For M-P the problems of society reside only in human history; neither spirit nor matter will save us. "The sense of history is then threatened at every step with going astray and constantly needs to be reinterpreted." "There is less a sense of history than an elimination of non-sense." Oh, and this indeed would be the 'reason' M-P, the dialectical thought of M-P, was forgotten. A dialectic, shorn of fairy tale, certainty or reward, would attract none of our scholarly saints, or even our Leninist `realists.' Over the last two centuries there have been only three reasons, often entwined, to turn to dialectic; the pursuit of Knowledge, the pursuit of utopia/revolution, or the pursuit of some always obscure inner `intuition' or joy. ...Apparently, given the way M-P is ignored by Hegelian and Marxist dialecticians, the only pursuit that was decisive was the last. This has only been a brief commentary on a small slice, a handful of pages, of this superb book, that, I hope, will make others interested enough to read it. The discussions of Weber, Lukacs, Trotsky and Sartre are all excellent. M-P is a political philosopher who deserves to be read along with the great and important political philosophers of the 20th century: Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. Ignore any of them and increase your ignorance.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-12-16 00:00:00 Damion Dunlap "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.