The Human Object

Merleau-Ponty's term, attributed to Marx, for the cultural object as carrier of social meaning at the level of perception. The notion is given its concentrated statement in "Marxism and Philosophy" (Chapter 9 of Sense and Non-Sense, Revue internationale June-July 1946): streets, fields, houses, tools are not "complexes of colors merely endowed with human significance by a secondary judgment"; rather, "this significance adheres to the object as it presents itself in our experience" (p. 131). MP credits Marx (citing the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) with introducing the concept and "phenomenology" with taking it up. The concept is one of MP's most explicit identifications of Marx's project with phenomenology — and one of the structural underpinnings of his claim that Das Kapital is a "concrete Phenomenology of Mind" (see capital-as-phenomenology).

Key Points

  • The defining claim: "The introduction of the notion of the human object, which phenomenology has taken up and developed, was reserved for Marx" (p. 131).
  • The phenomenological mode: social significance is perceived, not inferred. We see a house, a street, a workshop — not "complex of colors plus social meaning judged onto it." The cultural object is a perceptual gestalt with social structure.
  • The concept extends Hegel's "objective spirit" by concretizing it: "this carries the Hegelian conception of a mind-phenomenon or an objective spirit... to its concrete conclusions" (paraphrase of pp. 130-131).
  • The cross-essay attestation: "the spirit of a society is realized, transmitted, and perceived through the cultural objects" (Marxism and Philosophy p. 131); compare The Metaphysical in Man p. 89 — sociology of the human bond as "the system of collective meanings through which its members communicate."
  • The concept underwrites MP's "practical materialism" reading of Marx: "matter as the support and body of praxis" (cf. principal-condition).

What the Concept Does

  1. It welds Marx's materialism to phenomenology's intentionality. Mechanistic materialism makes matter exterior to consciousness; idealism makes consciousness exterior to matter; the human object is the third term — matter that already has consciousness's structure embodied in it. Streets and houses are embodied praxis, perceptible as such.

  2. It explains why MP's Marxism is not reductionist. If economy carries social meaning at the perceptual level, then economic structure is not "underlying" cultural structure (with culture as "superstructure"); economy and culture are interpenetrating dimensions of one perceptual world. This is the phenomenological version of the principal-condition formula.

  3. It generalizes the figure of the painted canvas. Just as "the meaning of a picture or a poem cannot be separated from the materiality of the colors or the words," the meaning of a society "is already implied in its method of production." Painting and economy are formally analogous: meaning carried by material form.

  4. It supplies the perceptual ground for the cultural world. MP's 1948 cultural-world doctrine (developed across multiple essays) presupposes that the cultural world is perceptual, not interpretive. The human object is the unit of the cultural world.

What It Rejects

  • Mechanistic materialism: matter as exterior to consciousness, with social meaning added by judgment.
  • Idealism: meaning as prior to and separate from its material vehicle.
  • The base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxism, insofar as it implies that culture is separately layered on economy rather than perceptually interpenetrating with it.
  • Sense-data perception: the view that we first perceive bare colored shapes and then judge social meaning onto them.

Stakes

If accepted:

  • Marx becomes legible as a phenomenologist of the cultural world — not a metaphysical materialist, not a Hegelian idealist, but the philosopher who first saw that praxis embodies itself in perceivable objects.
  • The wiki's identification of Das Kapital with concrete Phenomenology of Mind (capital-as-phenomenology) gains its perceptual-philosophical foundation.
  • The cultural world is a perceptual phenomenon, not a theoretical reconstruction — which means the methodology of the human sciences is more like the phenomenology of perception than like natural-scientific generalization.

Problem-Space

The concept addresses the problem of the perceptual presence of social meaning — how social structure is given to perception, rather than to inference or interpretation alone. The classical alternatives are: (a) phenomenologists like early Husserl who treat the cultural object as a layered phenomenon (perceptual core + cultural noemata); (b) materialists who treat social meaning as epiphenomenal on natural-physical structure; (c) idealists who treat material objects as expressions of pre-existing spirit. The human-object concept refuses all three: social meaning is constitutive of how the object appears.

Connections

  • attributed to karl-marx — Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is MP's source.
  • taken up by phenomenology — explicitly named by MP as a phenomenological inheritance.
  • welds Marx to phenomenology in capital-as-phenomenology — the human object is the phenomenological unit; Das Kapital is the social-historical analysis.
  • underwrites principal-condition — economic conditions are perceptually-present in human objects.
  • constituent of cultural-world — the cultural world is the field of human objects.
  • contrasts with base/superstructure orthodox Marxism.

Open Questions

  • The relation between human object (1946) and the late-MP doctrine of flesh (V&I 1960) is suggestive: both refuse the matter / spirit split; both locate meaning at the level of perceivable structure. The genealogy is not yet developed.
  • The 1946 attribution-to-Marx is generous: whether Marx's Manuscripts really contain the phenomenologically-articulated doctrine MP credits him with is a textual question.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1948-sense-and-non-sense — Chapter 9 (Marxism and Philosophy) is the locus classicus, especially pp. 130-131; Chapter 7 (The Metaphysical in Man) gives the cognate "system of collective meanings through which its members communicate" at p. 89.