Interworld

The interworld (l'intermonde) is Merleau-Ponty's name, in *Adventures of the Dialectic* (1955, Ch 5), for the middle order between men and things: "history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made" (AD 200). It is the order that Sartre's ontology of cogito-plus-things-plus-Other denies and that MP's philosophy affirms. The interworld is the 1955 name for what the 1954–55 course calls institution, what the late ontology will call the tissue of the flesh, and what the Signs Introduction will call action-at-a-distance. Across these names, one concept: the structured middle through which personal relations are mediated by human symbols, without which action becomes pure creation ex nihilo and history becomes melodrama.

Key Points

  • The governing passage: "The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only men and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made. If one sticks to the dichotomy, men, as the place where all meaning arises, are condemned to an incredible tension. Each man, in literature as well as in politics, must assume all that happens instant by instant to all others; he must be immediately universal. If, on the contrary, one acknowledges a mediation of personal relationships through the world of human symbols, it is true that one renounces being instantly justified in the eyes of everyone and holding oneself responsible for all that is done at each moment. But since consciousness cannot in practice maintain its pretension of being God, since it is inevitably led to delegate responsibility — it is one abdication for another, and we prefer the one which leaves consciousness the means of knowing what it is doing" (AD 200).
  • The three terms: (1) history — the cumulative form through which personal acts become lived significance; (2) symbolism — the structured media through which we relate to each other indirectly; (3) truth-to-be-made — a truth that is not pre-given and not ex nihilo created, but emerges through exchange in the symbolic medium.
  • Not Sartre's "third order": Sartre's philosophy admits "a third order, that of relationships between men inscribed in tools or social symbols" (quoted AD 62 from Lukács), but for Sartre these social symbols are only residues of consciousness — "statistical entities, 'permanent possibilities' of present thought" (AD 166). MP's interworld is not residual; it has its own efficacy, its own becoming, its own truth.
  • The interworld vs. pure action: "This is what Marx had in mind when he spoke of relations among persons mediated by things" (AD 164). The interworld is the reality of that mediation. Pure action denies it: "For Sartre... the social whole never starts moving by itself, never yields more movement than it has received from 'inassimilable' and 'irreducible' consciousnesses" (AD 164).
  • The interworld is also where action ignites: "Just as [the environment] vegetates and proliferates in false thoughts and pseudo-things, it can also escape from equivocalness when what happens here answers to what happens over there, when each event projects the process further in the very direction it was already moving, when an 'internal mechanism' leads the system beyond any immobile balance; this is what one calls revolution" (AD 164). The interworld is the site of both historical inertia and historical ignition.

Details

Why Sartre Cannot Admit the Interworld

In Ch 5 MP traces Sartre's denial of the interworld back to his ontology. "As soon as one reflects, there is nothing there. Intentions without consciousness are phantasms" (AD 165). For Sartre, a meaning is either posited by a consciousness (and then it is in consciousness) or is a residual tendency (and then it is a statistical echo of past consciousness acts). There is no third mode. The structure of reading, of the cultural object, of the "total meaning" of a Stendhal novel read across generations — "this universe of literature or of culture is an illusion: there is only the Julien Sorel of Stendhal, and that of Taine, and that of Léon Blum, and that of Paul Bourget; and they are so many incommensurable absolutes" (AD 166).

The philosophical source is the Cartesian cogito + the imagination's pure activity. Sartre's L'imaginaire rigidly distinguishes the certain (meanings of pure consciousness) from the probable (phenomenological appearance). Probability is degraded certainty. What is "between" a scribbling and a meaning given by consciousness — "the book taken according to the meaning ordinarily given to it, the changes of this reading which take place with time" (AD 165) — has no place in Sartre's ontology. Therefore in history, too, only the cogito of each instant and the things mutually annihilated in their gazes: no Julien Sorel as an enduring cultural figure, no "revolution" as an ongoing historical project, no Marxism as classic that survives its original context.

The Interworld and the Sparking of History

One of MP's subtler claims in Ch 5 is that the interworld is where history catches fire. Against Sartre's picture in which the social whole is inert except when lit by the pure action of consciousnesses, MP argues that the interworld has its own ignition conditions. "It can also escape from equivocalness when what happens here answers to what happens over there, when each event projects the process further in the very direction it was already moving, when an 'internal mechanism' leads the system beyond any immobile balance" (AD 164).

This is the 1955 version of what the 1954–55 course calls an institution in the "strong sense" ("the openness of a field, of a future according to certain dimensions") and what the later ontology will call the dimensional unfolding of the flesh. The interworld is the system in which historical resonance becomes possible. Revolution is not created ex nihilo by consciousness; it is the moment at which the interworld's "internal mechanism" ignites, when scattered events start to resonate.

The Interworld and Marx's "Relations Mediated by Things"

MP reads Marx's famous phrase — capital is "not a thing, but a social relationship between persons mediated by things" — as already naming the interworld. "Marx... thought there were relationships between persons 'mediated by things,' and for him revolution, like capitalism, like all the realities of history, belonged to this mixed order" (AD 149). The interworld is the philosophical elaboration of this Marxist insight: not a bridge between two pre-given orders (persons and things), but the medium whose reality is the structure of human exchange through things.

The point of the interworld is that history is not made of pure persons acting on pure things; it is made of persons-acting-on-each-other-through-things. Consciousness can neither set the terms of this mediation nor fully control its trajectory. The interworld has its own logic — a logic that is neither causal (like a thing's) nor intentional (like a consciousness's) but symbolic, in the sense MP develops simultaneously in the 1954–55 courses.

The Interworld in Early and Late MP

  • 1945 (PhP): the interworld is not yet named, but its structure is at work in the "field of presence," the "intersubjective field," and the analysis of speech as "existence toward a world."
  • 1954–55 (Institution and Passivity): the interworld is explicated as institution — "the sphere proper to history" between nature and ideas — and as the symbolic-matrix at both personal and historical scales.
  • 1955 (Adventures of the Dialectic): the term interworld appears as the philosophical-political name for what the 1954–55 course calls institution. The wiki's institution page should register that the interworld is the public-political twin of institution.
  • 1960 (Signs Introduction): action-at-a-distance is the methodological development of the interworld thesis. Philosophy and politics are in promiscuity from the depths of their difference — the interworld is the medium of that promiscuity.
  • 1964 (V&I): the interworld is transposed into ontological vocabulary: the flesh as a generic "common residence," mutual inherence as the structure of that residence, the chiasm as its hinge.

The interworld is not a transitional concept that MP discards; it is the 1955 political-historical name for a structural insight that recurs under different names across the corpus.

Against the Dichotomy: What the Interworld Buys

MP explicitly says what the interworld commits us to: "we prefer the [abdication] which leaves consciousness the means of knowing what it is doing" (AD 200). The choice is structural. Either consciousness pretends to be God (immediate universality, responsible for everything instant by instant, imprisoned in words — ultrabolshevism's tendency) or consciousness accepts that "all actions, even war, are always symbolic actions and count as much upon the effect they will have as a meaningful gesture and as the mark of an intention as upon the direct results of the event" (AD 200).

The interworld buys us the capacity to know what we are doing because it restores distance, mediation, and the thick medium through which acts have their effects. The price is abdicating instant-universal responsibility. MP thinks the price is worth paying; Sartre thinks the price is the abandonment of freedom.

Positions

  • Sartre denies the interworld. "There are only men and things" (AD 164, summarizing Sartre); consciousnesses are immediately intersubjective through the gaze; the social is not a middle order but a magic of reciprocal seeings.
  • MP affirms the interworld as the real medium of history and politics. His slogan: "a mediation of personal relationships through the world of human symbols" (AD 200).
  • Hegelian-Marxism names the interworld implicitly as "social being," "infrastructures," "second nature." But the gnostic version (Lenin) treats it as a causal thing; the dialectical version (Lukács) tries to think it as praxis but falls back into naturalism. MP's interworld is the phenomenological re-articulation of what Marxism pointed at but never clearly formulated.
  • Georg Lukács (1923) came closest in his reading of Marx's "relations mediated by things" and in his "intensive" vs. "extensive" totality distinction. MP takes up this material but gives it a phenomenological rather than a Hegelian form.
  • The later ontology (V&I) will rename the interworld as the flesh and rework its structure through chiasm, ineinander, and écart. The 1955 interworld is continuous with the 1964 flesh, translated across registers.

Connections

  • is the 1955 political name for institution — the same middle order, named from the Marx side rather than the Husserl side
  • extends to the cultural/historical register symbolic-matrix — symbolic matrices are interworld structures at the scale of whole historical epochs (Weberian ideal types of Ch 1)
  • anticipates action-at-a-distance — Signs (1960) reformulates the interworld thesis as the methodological relation between philosophy and politics
  • is reformulated in the ontological register as the flesh and mutual inherence
  • is what ultrabolshevism denies — the dichotomy men/things, cogito/gaze, pure act/nothing
  • names the structure of two-historicities — advent (cumulative historicity) is interworld in its productive mode; event (derisory historicity) is interworld flattened
  • is what makes possible the movement of revolution — the "internal mechanism" that can ignite (AD 164) is the interworld's own mode of resonance
  • contrasts with Sartre's "statistical entities" and "permanent possibilities" — both reduce interworld structures to residues of consciousness
  • is already at work in the Weberian "elective affinity" (AD 17) — the interworld is where affinities are elective, where historical elements confirm each other without causation

Open Questions

  • Is the interworld identical with institution, or a subset? The 1955 passage (p. 89) already names institution as "the sphere proper to history"; the Ch 5 "interworld" passage names the same structure from the Sartre-critique side. Are these two names for a single concept, or does "interworld" emphasize the between-men aspect while "institution" emphasizes the event-that-opens-a-field aspect?
  • How does the interworld relate to the later V&I "flesh"? MP never explicitly retires "interworld" in favor of "flesh"; the relation seems to be continuous translation rather than substitution.
  • Does the interworld have its own ontology, or does it require the late ontology of the flesh to make philosophical sense? The 1955 formulation is programmatic — MP asserts the interworld without fully explicating its mode of being. The 1954–55 course on institution, and the late ontology, can be read as successive attempts to specify what the interworld is.
  • The interworld is claimed to have an "internal mechanism" by which it ignites into revolution. What is this mechanism? MP sketches it through the figure of resonance ("what happens here answers to what happens over there") but never formalizes it.
  • Is the interworld a concept with explanatory power, or a principled refusal to explain — a way of marking where pure-consciousness and pure-thing explanations both fail?

Sources