The Metaphysical in Man

Merleau-Ponty's positive definition of metaphysics, developed primarily in the 1947 essay "The Metaphysical in Man" (Chapter 7 of Sense and Non-Sense, originally Revue de métaphysique et de morale July 1947). Metaphysics, for MP, is not metaphysica specialis (the discipline of God-soul-world) and not Heidegger's "destruction of metaphysics," but the deliberate intention to describe the paradox of consciousness and truth, exchange and communication, in which science lives. Three claims are inseparable: (1) the sciences of man are metaphysical or transnatural; (2) metaphysics is the opposite of system; (3) the political form of the alternative — Absolute Knowledge — is purges. The doctrine recurs across Sense and Non-Sense under the formula "metaphysics is in the heart's slightest movement" (Pascal, via Metaphysics and the Novel p. 57).

Key Points

  • Metaphysics is not a regional inquiry but the dimension of being that the sciences of man (Gestalt psychology, Saussurean linguistics, post-Durkheim sociology, history) discover in their successful work. Each of these sciences is "oriented in its own way toward the revision of the subject-object relation" (The Metaphysical in Man p. 89).
  • The category that does the metaphysical work in each science is structure / form / Gestalt — neither thing nor idea, accessible only by comprehension (in Dilthey's sense, but generalized).
  • In linguistics, this is Guillaume's "sub-linguistic schema"; in sociology and history, the "spirit of a society" (Mauss); in psychology, the gestalt's irreducibility.
  • Metaphysics is opposite to system: any system "suppresses metaphysical consciousness and, moreover, does away with morality at the same time" (p. 94).
  • The transnatural is the master-term: not supernatural (it inheres in cultural-historical practices) and not simply natural (because no natural-science reduction reaches it). The word appears in only two places in Sense and Non-Sense but does decisive work in both.

What the Concept Does

The concept performs four pieces of argumentative work:

  1. It rescues the human sciences from positivism. The "scientistic" reduction of psychology to stimulus-response, Durkheimian "treat-the-social-as-a-thing" sociology, and Seignobos-style pure-event historicism are each diagnosed as failed sciences of man — failed because they refuse the metaphysical dimension their successful instances always carry. Köhler's Mentality of Apes, Saussure on linguistic systems, Mauss on the spirit of civilization, Febvre on Rabelais all do metaphysics in their concrete work.

  2. It rescues metaphysics from system. Both Kantian metaphysics-as-system-of-principles and Hegelian metaphysics-as-Absolute-Knowledge are diagnosed as failed metaphysics. The genuine metaphysical operation is the recognition of "the double sense of the cogito: I am sure that there is being — on the condition that I do not seek another sort of being than being-for-me" (p. 93).

  3. It links epistemology to political ethics. The Absolute as moral catastrophe thesis follows: "if I believe that I can rejoin the absolute principle of all thought and all evaluation... my judgments take on a sacred character... the suffering I create turns into happiness, ruse becomes reason, and I piously cause my adversaries to perish" (p. 95). The illusion of Absolute Knowledge is not merely epistemic; its political form is purges.

  4. It re-grounds Christianity as anthropology. "The originality of Christianity as the religion of the death of God is its rejection of the God of the philosophers and its heralding of a God who takes on the human condition" (pp. 96-97). The Pascalian-Cartesian piety is preferred to Thomist-Aristotelian theology; the Incarnation, consistently followed out, gives an anthropology of intersubjectivity rather than a theology of the Absolute. (See interior-exterior-god-mp for the Faith and Good Faith development.)

What It Rejects

  • Metaphysica specialis as the discipline of God / soul / world.
  • Heideggerian "destruction of metaphysics" insofar as it would replace metaphysics with the question of being abstracted from the human sciences.
  • Bergsonian intuitionist metaphysics, insofar as it opposes itself to science (MP's footnote on Bergson at pp. 97-98 endorses the method but criticizes the slide back into the vital-impulse system).
  • Positivism / scientism in all forms, including the Marxist version that claims social laws are like physical laws.
  • Absolute Knowledge in both its theological and Hegelian-Marxist forms.

Stakes

If accepted:

  • The methodology of the human sciences is metaphysical, not protoscientific (this is the philosophical underpinning of cultural-world and prefigures MP's later work on Saussure).
  • The boundary between philosophy and the human sciences is porous — philosophy is "vigilant comprehension" of the meaning the human sciences pursue, science is the methodical exploration of the phenomena philosophy must respect.
  • Politics has a metaphysical structure: the temptation to political fanaticism is the temptation to Absolute Knowledge — the philosopher's recurring illusion in its political form.
  • Christianity, properly understood, issues in an anthropology of intersubjectivity rather than a theology of transcendence.

Problem-Space

The concept addresses the problem of the philosophical status of the human sciences. Are they merely empirical, or do they carry irreducible philosophical commitments? The positivist tradition (early Comte, Durkheim, Naville, Garaudy) says they are or should be merely empirical — and that "metaphysics" is the residue of pre-scientific thought. The Hegelian tradition says they are partial expressions of the Absolute. MP's "metaphysical in man" carves a third path: the human sciences cannot be merely empirical because their categories (form, structure, sub-linguistic schema, spirit of a society) are metaphysical-transnatural; but they cannot be Absolute either, because they describe a meaning that is always perspectival, contingent, unfinished.

Motif Weight & Corpus Recurrence

This concept's status as a corpus-level motif. The motif heading in motifs is §"the metaphysical in man / metaphysics in heart's slightest movement", weight HUB within Sense and Non-Sense. Cross-corpus, the concept connects to:

Connections

  • contains absolute-as-moral-catastrophe — the moral-political consequence of denying the metaphysical-in-man.
  • generalizes gestalt-principles-of-unification — the Gestalt insight is carried into linguistics, sociology, history.
  • is the methodological foundation of cultural-world — the cultural world is the transnatural environment.
  • is reformulated in The Visible and the Invisible — the late-MP doctrine of non-philosophy and indirect ontology develops the same anti-system commitment.
  • contrasts with high-altitude-thinking — high-altitude thinking is the failure-mode of system-philosophy that the metaphysical-in-man diagnoses.
  • is the condition of intelligibility of Humanism and Terror's political analysis — HT applies the absolute-as-moral-catastrophe diagnosis to Soviet political practice.

Open Questions

  • The relation between the 1947 transnatural and the late-MP flesh / element of being (V&I) is not yet fully traced; both refuse the supernatural / natural dichotomy, but the flesh doctrine adds an ontological register absent from the 1947 essay.
  • The 1947 essay's positive treatment of the human sciences (including Mauss and Febvre) is the seed of MP's 1949-52 Sorbonne courses on child psychology and pedagogy (merleau-ponty-2010-child-psychology-pedagogy); the genealogy is implicit.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1948-sense-and-non-sense — Chapter 7 (The Metaphysical in Man) is the locus classicus; the doctrine recurs across the volume under the formula "metaphysics in the heart's slightest movement."