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 au­diences. Professor Wild, in his foreword to the English translation, said that "it should be of interest not only to philosophers, but to anthro­pologists, 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 dis­ciplines to which Merleau-Ponty intended to speak: "Our goal is to under­stand 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 particu­lar 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 Merleau­Ponty, who was in regular attendance. See, however my "The Genesis of Merleau-

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provided the resolution necessary to account for the symmetrical reduc­tionist interpretations against which he argued, the one claiming that what is called consciousness can be explained causally, that is, by "na­ture," 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, Merleau­Ponty 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 reflex­ogenic, 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 indepen­dence 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 orga­nism 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 implica­tion 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 bi­ology 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 Struc­ture 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 th~ 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 at­tains or fails to attain, is never a thing, a mere part of given-Being; more­over man who understands animal behavior, while not a thing, either, is also not a pure knower of meanings that are independent of specific oc­casions.

Merleau-Ponty's argument rested upon and intended to justify two im­portant presuppositions. The first concerned the articulation from anony­mous, 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 struc­tural telos of autonomy from biological instincts and milieux; it is also, ac­cording 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 "sen­timent-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 dif­ferent sorts of forms invested with equal rights, between physical relations and relations implied in the description of behavior, there could be no ques­tion 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 charac­terized 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 En­zyklopiidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830) eds., F. Nicolin and O.

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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 mean­ingless 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 noth­ing 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 bio­logical nature is hidden from itself. It does not appear in the form of con­sciousness; 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 re­action 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, under­taking 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 in­correctly 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 con­scious, intellectual judgement but all experience, and specifically, all per­ceptual experience is not. This means that some conscious experience will approach the opacity of vital behavior; in Merleau-Ponty's words, this ex­perience is lived rather than known. l9

Such an enlarged notion of consciousness can be linked to action if ac­tion 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 slav­ery 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 cul­tural 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 Fi­nally, it is this same power of Aujhebung, of "negating and surpassing," that allows men to substitute a mediated knowledge of truth for an imme­diate 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 "ex­istential" 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 ac­tivity; 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.

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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 expla­nations are but amusing anecdotes. It is easy enough to understand the partial disintegration explored by Freudian psychology as the manifesta­tion 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, philo­sophically 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 (Selbst­gefilhl) 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 pre­cisely 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 descrip­tion of animal sensation.

26 Kojeve, Introduction, pp. 19 ff.

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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-ac­tualization 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, as­sociated 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 per­ceiving 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 transpar­ently "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 na­turizing 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 appear­ances, 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 re­turn 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 sig­nification 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 intellec­tual 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.

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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 al­ready 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 ob­vious that consciousness is the "condition of possibility and foundation" of the subordinate structures.29 But this is not necessarily to posit a univer­sal 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 pow­ers 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 contin­gencies 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 ac­cident of nature, infuses it with a meaning beyond a mere physical contin­gency, and assimilates it to the deeper meanings of life and human exist­ence,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 being­crippled, being-socially-despised. But what possibilities are there for a healthy person or a person in a socially respected position to become con­scious 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.

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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 con­sciousness 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 Kant­ianism The physical and somatic substrates of true or absolute knowl­edge 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 misun­derstanding 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 con­cerning 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 grad­ually 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.

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the external conditions are biographical as with self-mastery, personal in­tegration of existence and, in the end, the achievement of wisdom, or it can be universal, whence the meaning of the external conditions is histor­ical 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 ap­pear as a "spectacle" grasped transparently as mere preparation. There is "a reversal of perspective . . . produced with respect to adult con­sciousness: 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 bio­graphical 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 con­sciousness flowed according to an apTioTi scheme; that would be to ignore the contingencies of history, the accidents of nature and life, and the po­tential 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 con­sciousness 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 psy­chologism, 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 Merleau­Ponty claimed the truth of Kantianism to be the attainment of the "tran­scendental attitude" where all conceivable meaning is an object of con­sciousness. 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 transcendent~le, 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 re­ality and only reveal what is already there, then we must ask if the reve­lation 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 in­telligibility."42 Here he clarified his description of the Aujhebung of or­ganic matter achieved by the concept of Gestalt with a quote, which ap­peared 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 condi­tions 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 behav­ior. The difference with Kantian critical philosophy can then be made pre­cise: 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 con­sciousness 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 ap­pear 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.

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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 per­fect State is constituted by and through the inferior historical dialectics symbolized in the parable of Master and Slave.45 But there is an impor­tant 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 l­edge, 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 presup­poses 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 con­sciousness 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 con­sciousness 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 per­ception 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.

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become self-conscious. He rightly pointed out that the Concept qua Con­cept 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 percep­tual consciousness, which is not know ledge or acquired self-con­sciousness, as an idea or an ideal. This is why Merleau-Ponty's philo­sophical observations no less than his political and ethical opinions can be a blend of Hegelian ideas and sound, commonsense observation of empiri­cal 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 Phenom­enologie de la perception and are massively evident in his political writ­ings.

~9 La Structure, p. 227.