Gloria

Merleau-Ponty's term — borrowed from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, where it is Maria's word for the moment of harmony in which "events respond to their will" — for the moment of victory in commitment under contingency. The gloria "may be experienced as unquestionable" yet "may still turn out to be illusory." There is no guarantee against later disillusionment; the hero must trust such a moment "and live by it as long as it seems significant" (Man, the Hero p. 216). The concept is single-occurrence in MP's published corpus but conceptually load-bearing for the existential-ethical figure of the contemporary hero.

Key Points

  • The gloria is real but provisional. It is a phenomenological fact (the experience of unquestionability) that does not entail a metaphysical fact (vindication).
  • The gloria is not the Hegelian satisfaction of the world-historical individual (whose victory is guaranteed by Spirit), nor the Christian saint's union with God, nor the Pascalian wager-hero's payoff. It is the humanly-finite moment of harmony that contingent history sometimes offers and sometimes withdraws.
  • MP's striking concession: "it would follow from his sense of the contingency of all that exists and all that has value that, even though a gloria may be experienced as unquestionable, it may still turn out to be illusory. There is no guaranty that we may not later be forced to repudiate the commitment and to view the sacrifices made for it as wasted effort. How then can we ever trust these 'moments of victory'?" (Translators' Introduction p. xxv)
  • MP's answer: "Preserving the validity of a moment of victory even after the excitement dies away depends in part upon us — on our ability to make sufficient sacrifices 'out of loyalty to what we have become'; the rest is out of our hands. Although we have no guaranty against disillusionment, we must trust such a moment and live by it as long as it seems significant to us" (Translators' Introduction p. xxv, paraphrasing the closing pages of Man, the Hero).

What the Concept Does

  1. It rescues the moment of moral-political victory from both certainty and skepticism. Certainty would say the gloria is guaranteed; skepticism would say no gloria is real. MP's gloria is real but provisional — it has the structure of perceptual faith applied to time-bound moral commitments.

  2. It gives the contemporary hero his only positive content. The contemporary hero is defined via negativa (not Hegelian, not Nietzschean, not Pascalian, not Greek). What remains positively is "loyalty to the natural movement which flings us toward things and toward others" — and the gloria is the rare moment when that loyalty is rewarded by the world's harmony with the act.

  3. It distinguishes existentialism-with-meaning from existential-nihilism. Sartre's reading of the absurd treats the hero's possible disillusionment as proof that the gloria was illusion. MP's reading: the possibility of later disillusionment does not abolish the genuine character of the moment; "the perpetual possibility of error does not exclude the 'miracle' of veridical perception; nor do the dangers of infatuation and enthusiasm exclude the 'miracle' of a commitment which is maintained" (Translators' Introduction p. xxv).

What It Rejects

  • Pascalian Wager (the gloria is not the eschatological payoff that vindicates all sacrifice).
  • Hegelian world-historical satisfaction (the gloria is not guaranteed by the Spirit's working through the individual).
  • Sartrean nihilist victory-is-vain (the gloria is not abolished by the possibility of later repudiation).
  • Christian providential reward (the gloria is in this world, in this time, not in the next).

Stakes

If accepted:

  • Moral-political action becomes possible without metaphysical refuge: one can fully commit, fully experience the harmony when it comes, and remain open to revision when the world turns.
  • The line between sincerity and self-deception is not the question of whether the gloria is "really" guaranteed but of whether the agent maintains "loyalty to what we have become" through the moment's aftermath.
  • The phenomenology of moral experience gains a category — gloria — that classical ethical theory (utilitarian, deontological, virtue) lacks.

Problem-Space

The concept addresses the problem of the experiential reality of moral commitment under contingency. Within ethical theory, this is the problem of how the agent's first-person experience of moral conviction relates to the third-person assessability of the action. MP's gloria names the first-person experience as real and provisional; it cannot be reduced either to subjective state (in which case it would be illusory) or to objective vindication (in which case it would require the metaphysical guarantee MP refuses).

Connections

  • contained in man-the-hero-mp — the contemporary hero's only positive content.
  • applies perceptual-faith to moral commitment — the gloria generalizes perceptual-faith to time-bound action.
  • contrasts with the Hegelian satisfaction of the world-historical individual.
  • coined by Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls); MP's appropriation is in Man, the Hero p. 216.

Open Questions

  • The gloria is single-occurrence in MP's published corpus. Whether it survives into Adventures of the Dialectic under another name (perhaps the "moments of truth" of revolutionary action) is not yet traced.
  • The relation between gloria and V&I's "moments of being" is provocative but not developed.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1948-sense-and-non-sense — Chapter 13 (Man, the Hero) p. 216 is the only published occurrence; Translators' Introduction (Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus) p. xxv glosses the doctrine.