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VII. Life-Death
- Ohio University Press
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c h apte r s e v e n ................................... life-death 1. The philosophers I admire are those who are humble enough to place themselves in service to their thoughts and arrogant enough to push those thoughts toward their limits. The philosopher has the thought and the thought has the philosopher. If the philosopher is true to the thought, it will lead him beyond himself to the thinker he wants to be. If the philosopher shrinks before the demands of the thought, he slips back into the paradigms and prejudices that confine him to what he has been and delimit his thinking to the unthought hidden beneath it. Such admirable philosophers are torn between these two faces of the unthought: the unthought that calls for recognition and expression , and the unthought whose power is its elusiveness, its propensity to evade the recognition that will expose its vulnerability to scrutiny. To study such a philosopher is to seek his unthought in both its guises. To be true to such a philosopher is not always to be stalwart in defense of what he said, although that must be given its due; it is rather more to be true to what he did not say, but which sought expression through him as a congenial vehicle for its self-manifestation. Thoughts that are uniquely one’s own are necessarily without value to others, but to have developed a unique perspective may provide an opening through which others can see things that eluded one’s own grasp. 2. So far as I know, Merleau-Ponty did not leave us with a sustained thematic on life-death, yet it would not be mistaken to take that theme as encompassing all he wrote. It would not be a mistake to classify him as an existential thinker. 180 the ethics of particularity Concluding his short essay “Man, the Hero,” Merleau-Ponty wrote: “It is not fascination with death, as in Nietzsche, which allows the hero to sacrifice himself, nor is it the certainty, as in Hegel, that he is carrying out the wishes of history; rather, it is loyalty to the natural movement [that] flings us toward things and toward others. It is not death that I love, said Saint-Exupéry, but life.”1 There are two mistakes in this passage that are both trivial and consequential . The first is a misinterpretation of Nietzsche, who was in service to the same thought that called Merleau-Ponty, and the second is in endorsing Saint-Exupéry’s opposition of life and death—as though one could affirm life without thereby affirming death. The “natural movement [that] flings us toward things and toward others ” is becoming. As with Nietzsche before him, Merleau-Ponty was a philosopher of becoming. To be a philosopher of becoming is to espouse the metaphysical principle that identifies the real with change.2 The philosophy of becoming is committed to the thesis of the transcendence of time. Time is not primarily an immanent form projected on things that are otherwise timeless (although immanent projections derived from natural time are possible variants, as, for example, in music and cinema); time is the transcendent modality of the being of everything. Heraclitus said it: Everything changes. To that must be added: including the logos (and his instantiation of it). Time is inseparable from things; it is the manner in which things are, not something separable from things. Parmenides and the Eleatic school got it exactly backward: coming into being and passing away are what is real; stasis, rest, permanence, atemporality, and the like all belong in the realm of wistful ideality , and that, too, ceaselessly changes. Merleau-Ponty earned a place in the history of philosophy by demonstrating the falsity of the ancient and abiding dogma that our bodies are impediments to thought and reason. He showed that intellection is not hampered by the body’s motility and desire, but rather dependent upon them. Socrates’s death had been the emblem of a mind that needed to free itself of its own body in order to become truly itself and fulfill its own highest destiny. After Merleau-Ponty, that emblem—and the Eleaticism it portended—had to be reconceived . Socrates was wrong: there can be no minds without bodies. How could such a palpably false idea have gained so much popularity in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary? Nietzsche gave us the answer, Freud articulated its psychopathology, and Merleau-Ponty developed its philosophical consequences. Nietzsche...