MP's 1948 anthropomorphic claims (*L'homme et l'objet* / *Causeries*) are *cautious anthropomorphism avant la lettre*
ID: morin-cautious-anthropomorphism-mp-1948-strategy Title: MP's 1948 anthropomorphic claims (L'homme et l'objet / Causeries) are cautious anthropomorphism avant la lettre Status: live Confidence: medium Claim type: corrective / interpretive (introduces new concept-frame) Created: 2026-05-22 Updated: 2026-05-23 Sources: morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being, merleau-ponty-1948-sense-and-non-sense, merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible Wiki homes: cautious-anthropomorphism, empietement, flesh-as-element, anthropologisme
Claim
Morin Ch 5: MP's 1948 anthropomorphic claims about things — "clothed in human characteristics" (WP 49); "combination of mind and body" (WP 43); "the gaze clothes things with its own flesh" (VI 131) — are best read as cautious anthropomorphism in the Shaviro / Cohen / Bennett sense: a strategy of defamiliarisation in both directions. The strategy guarantees rather than dissolves the thing's irreducibility to mere intellectual ideas: only because we lend things our flesh (the "gift of the flesh," with Saint Aubert's reading of Leibhaftigkeit as "encounter between two resistances, two forces — that of adversity and desire") can things give themselves in the flesh (S 167) — with the graininess that interrupts and the depth that arouses desire. This is structurally distinct from (a) Sartre's reading-of-Ponge failure-mode ("he still ends up on the outside, staring at things, all alone," MT 450); (b) Meillassoux's misanthropic flight from the human centre; (c) Harman's flat-ontology reckless anthropomorphism ("sincerity of objects"); (d) Abram-style animism / panpsychism.
Evidence
- morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being Ch 5 (pp. 113–28) — the foundational deployment of the cautious anthropomorphism frame, applied to MP's 1948 corpus.
- MP, Causeries / World of Perception (WP 43, 47, 48, 49, 69): the 1948 anthropomorphic statements + things-as-complexes (Lacanian sense).
- MP, "Eye and Mind" (PoP 162–4): the inside-of-the-outside reading; "what painting is" formulated as flesh-engagement.
- MP, VI 131, 136, 139 (1960): "clothe [things] with its own flesh"; the late-ontology continuation of the 1948 strategy.
- Saint Aubert, "Au croisement du réel et de l'imaginaire" (in Dufourcq, ed., Est-ce réel?) 253: "Leibhaftigkeit is truly not a one-way donation but the encounter between two resistances, two forces — that of adversity and desire."
- Shaviro, The Universe of Things (61, 125): the contemporary articulation of cautious anthropomorphism; the defamiliarisation in both directions claim.
- Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (9, 14, 19, 20, 23, 25, 61, 63, 83, 85): trans-ontological affinity / geophilia; "the lithic in the living and the lively in the stone."
- Bennett, Vibrant Matter (99): "a touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations."
Counterpressure / Limits
- Sceptics (Abram, McWeeny) read MP's "lend your flesh" passages as licensing panpsychic / animist readings, which cautious anthropomorphism explicitly forecloses. The interpretation depends on reading against the panpsychic reception.
- Transposing Shaviro / Cohen / Bennett vocabulary (post-2009) onto MP's 1948 corpus risks anachronism. The 1948 texts pre-date the cautious-anthropomorphism literature by ~60 years; the retroactive application requires a substantive reconstruction of MP's intentions.
- The 1948 corpus is small (MO is a Dumas summary; WP is the Causeries radio talks); the interpretive density relative to textual mass is high. A reading less generous than Morin's might dismiss the 1948 statements as occasional / casual rather than systematic.
- The "marvelous precipitate of desire" / "marvelous precipitate of the human face" mis-citation (fn 10 of Morin's Ch 5) is itself an interpretive crux: if Dumas's summary mis-recorded MP, then a key textual anchor for the cautious-anthropomorphism reading is shakier than it appears.
- The cautious anthropomorphism resists the cartesian-sartrian-ontology-of-the-object (Sartrian projection-as-failure), but a critic could argue this resistance still operates within a recognisable phenomenological frame — Nancy's freedom-of-the-stone is more radical because it refuses any anthropomorphic intermediary.
Payoff
If accepted, the claim (i) introduces cautious anthropomorphism as a new concept-frame on the wiki (distinct from anthropologisme, which is the rejected negative humanism); (ii) provides a positive reading of MP's 1948 corpus that is currently under-attested; (iii) lets the wiki engage contemporary new-materialist / new-realist work (Shaviro, Cohen, Bennett) without flat-ontology commitments; (iv) clarifies the structural relation between MP's flesh-engagement and Nancy's freedom-of-the-stone — both are cautious anthropomorphism (per Morin's reading), but they apply the strategy in distinct ways (encroachment vs. unpassable-limit). Payoff: a Bridge between MP's 1948 corpus and contemporary speculative realism / new materialism that the wiki has not previously articulated.
Status History
- 2026-05-22 — created at candidate (Morin 2022 ingest, extraction-note Pass 3 Part D Claim 3). 3-test gate status: T1 contestable (animist / panpsychic readings of MP contest the foreclosure; anachronism worry); T2 anchored (Morin's Ch 5 deployment; WP 43, 47, 48, 49, 69; VI 131, 136, 139; Shaviro / Cohen / Bennett primary anchors); T3 counterpressure documented (animism / panpsychism reception; the Dumas mis-citation; the small 1948 corpus). The claim introduces a new concept-frame; promotion to live would warrant a stub or page on cautious-anthropomorphism (now created at ingest) and the disambiguation pointer at anthropologisme (now added at ingest).
- 2026-05-23 — promoted candidate → live (sixteenth Phase 8 run). 3-test gate satisfied: T1 the animist/panpsychic reading (Abram, McWeeny) actively contests the foreclosure and the anachronism worry is independently substantial; T2 anchored across Morin Ch 5 + MP WP §§43-69 + MP VI 131, 136, 139 + Saint Aubert + Shaviro + Cohen + Bennett; T3 four counterpressure registers (panpsychism reception, anachronism, small 1948 corpus, Dumas mis-citation). Multi-source check satisfied (Morin + MP SNS + MP V&I + 3 new-materialist anchors). Confidence remains medium — the concept of cautious anthropomorphism is itself defensible new-materialist scholarship; what is live is Morin's application of it to MP-1948, with the anachronism caveat preserved. Promotion supports the new cautious-anthropomorphism concept page added at ingest.