Healing Schneider: On Merleau-Ponty's Ethical System of Play

Author: Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University) Year: 2025 Type: paper (Philosophies 10:1, 3)

A reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty's practical philosophy that uses the recently published Inédits 1946–1949 (Mimesis, 2022) to argue that MP's ethics centers on a single negative diagnosis — agnosia — and a single positive virtue — play understood as higher seriousness. The clinical case of Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception is shown to be the paradigm whose pathology recurs across MP's political (Yogi/Commissar in Humanism and Terror), ontological (V&I), and existential writings; the ethical-political project that responds to this pathology Chouraqui calls "healing Schneider." The connecting tissue is hermeneutic: action that unifies recognition of the real with its institution. The paper's title figures play not as the absence of seriousness but as a higher seriousness that takes responsibility for the irreducible indeterminacy of action — what MP redeems in his Note on Machiavelli (1949) against Koestler's Yogi and the Commissar caricature.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: Agnosia is the unifying counter-ideal of MP's ethics across PhP, Humanism and Terror, Adventures of the Dialectic, the Inédits 1946–1949, and the Note on Machiavelli. Because: MP returns to Schneider repeatedly across his work; the same diagnostic structure appears in his political analyses (Sartre, Trotsky, Lenin, the Soviet Commissar, Descartes, Piaget); the recently published Inédits now make the continuity textually explicit, foreclosing the option of treating PhP's Schneider analysis as a self-standing descriptive case. Against: Standard readings that take the PhP Schneider analysis as descriptive rather than normative; readings that do not connect PhP to the political and ontological writings. Location: §1 (the three-claim roadmap), §2.1 (Schneider as axiological), §2.2 (agnosia in politics), recurs in §3 and §4.

  2. Claim: MP's account of pathology escapes ableism by being immanent — the privilege of the "normal" arises from inside the patient's own form of life, not from external comparison. Because: "One cannot deduce the normal from the pathological" (PhP p. 110). Illness is "a complete form of existence." What makes Schneider's case pathological is not deviation from a norm but internal contradiction — Schneider himself wishes to engage with the world of meaning while being impaired. The compensations (not the symptoms) reveal the structure the patient cannot abandon. Against: Ableism critiques (Mooney 2022, Reynolds 2017, Weiss 2015); objectivist accounts of pathology generally. Location: §2.1.

  3. Claim: The single function the patient cannot relinquish is the world as "I can" — sensorimotor enaction integrating cognitive, imaginative, and motor faculties. Because: Schneider's compensations testify to a privileged demand: "living as if the world was a set of facts and not of possibilities makes life itself difficult for any organism." This privilege is a feature of life and world together, not of any particular faculty. Against: Both pure motor-centric readings (Dreyfus, Kelly, Carman, Romdenh-Romluc) and pure imagination-centric readings (Matherne 2014). For MP, perception/action grounds the emergence of the subject; neither faculty is transcendentally prior. Location: §2.1 + footnote 3.

  4. Claim: Agnosia in politics is the inability to combine recognition of reality with agency — the Yogi (sovereign subjectivity) and the Commissar (sovereign objectivity) both take the subject/object divide for granted. Because: Soviet Communism fails to unify subjective and objective. The Yogi is "fetishistic about his subjectivity"; the Commissar reduces himself to "a force of nature, a cog in the machine." Both fall on opposite sides of a divide they refuse to cross. Against: Both Yogi-style detachment and Commissar-style objectivism. Location: §2.2; cites Inédits Vol. 2, pp. 305, 308, 340, 341.

  5. Claim: Seriousness is the opposite of freedom — except for the "higher seriousness" of engaged play. Because: Schneider is "meticulous and serious" (PhP p. 137); Stendhal: "true freedom is non-seriousness"; Beauvoir: "Being and Nothingness is largely a description of the serious man and his universe." But Sartre also calls for a higher seriousness of engagement — and MP picks up this distinction. Play is not the absence of seriousness; it is the form of seriousness that does not contradict freedom. Against: Koestler's reading of Machiavelli as committed to absolute objectivism; the binary opposition of play vs. seriousness. Location: §2.2 (Beauvoir/Stendhal in Inédits Vol. 1, pp. 287, 296) + §3.2 (Sartre, Hegel, Huizinga, Machiavelli).

  6. Claim: MP's hermeneutic ontology unifies subjective and objective without contradiction by identifying agency with the unity of recognition and institution. Because: Interpretation has two simultaneous moments: recognition (the object as standard for interpretation) and institution (the active assignment of meaning). The hermeneutic circle is precisely the milieu of agency. Trotsky's horse — "one learns to ride a horse by mounting a horse" — is the recurring image. "In politics, truth is perhaps only this art of inventing what will later appear to have been required by the time" (HT preface, xxxv). Against: Reductive ontologies that pose subjective and objective as alternatives; the weak hermeneutic view that pre-existing facts ground interpretation. Location: §3.1.

  7. Claim: MP holds a strong hermeneutic view: even pre-existing facts are sedimented products of prior hermeneutic decisions, all the way down. Because: "These so-called pre-existing facts are subject to the hermeneutic circle; they are themselves indeterminate and the result of previous hermeneutic decisions ('sedimentations')." Interpretation is not a partial response to facts because the facts are themselves not fixed. Against: The weak hermeneutic option in which facts determine the available interpretations. Location: §3.1 (introduces the strong/weak distinction).

  8. Claim: Sense (vs. respect) is the hermeneutic skill that perceives "I can"-affordances. Because: A surfer with a "sense" of balance is not responding to the sea as a brute object; the sense emerges in interaction with the sea. Sense picks up possibilities (later: affordances, à la Gibson). Respect, by contrast, "is ready to accept just about anything" — it is pure fatalism. Mauriac's conservatism confuses sens du réel with respect du réel. Against: Mauriac's fatalism; pure objectivism; conservative quietism that disguises itself as realism. Location: §3.1; cites "On Indochina" in Signs p. 520; Inédits Vol. 2 pp. 191, 205 on fatalism.

  9. Claim: Play is the political/ethical virtue that responds to adversity — the irreducibility of indeterminacy in action. Because: Schneider cannot play (PhP pp. 106, 136). Play is the structural opposite of agnosia: it embraces the gap between facts and the demand for action. Hegel (cited by MP, with MP's emphasis): "play belongs nonetheless to a higher seriousness for in it, nature is informed in spirit" (Inédits Vol. 2 p. 520). Against: The Romantic/casual view that opposes play to seriousness; quietism. Location: §3.2.

  10. Claim: Machiavelli, in MP's redeemed reading, embodies higher seriousness, not cynicism — and the Inédits show the Note on Machiavelli (1949) as a direct extension of MP's polemic with Koestler in HT. Because: For Machiavelli, power is of the order of meaning, not material force. Virtu is the seriousness of taking one's freedom seriously. Koestler had set Machiavelli on the side of the Commissar; MP redeems him as the agent who recognizes that they are "condemned to play, wager, and take responsibility for their freedom." Against: Koestler's Yogi and the Commissar reading; the popular "neo-Machiavellianism" caricature. Location: §3.2; cites Inédits Vol. 1, p. 198; footnote 17.

  11. Claim: MP's ethics is ontologically grounded in "the prospective activity of consciousness" — the unique primary phenomenon that is multiplicity itself. Because: PhP claims that some configurations of meaning lead to "the death of consciousness," others to life. The primary phenomenon must be unique (else there is irreducible difference between phenomena) but must avoid self-identity (else there is no historicity). The reduction's failure shows that the polarization of subjective/objective is necessary illusion. Therefore: "the act of hermeneutic must go on." Against: Univocal ontologies (theodicy problem); reductionism in either direction; Kantian idealism. Location: §4; cites PhP pp. 241, 246, 74.

  12. Claim: MP's ontology of becoming/equivocity, not univocity, is what allows it to ground normativity without theodicy or fatalism. Because: The standard normative double-bind (justification + selectiveness) is "only problematic for univocal ontologies." MP's ontology is of becoming; reality includes possibilities; configurations of meaning can be assessed by how well they fulfill world-making. An open society sliding into book-burning totalitarianism is hermeneutically fertile collapsing into hermeneutically sterile — both meaningful, but in different degrees of fertility. Against: Univocal ontology; relativism; theodicy ("everything that is is justified"); the false alternative between Yogi and Commissar. Location: §4.

Key Findings

  • The case of Schneider is not a self-standing descriptive case study but the paradigm of MP's negative ethics — the pathology that recurs in Sartre, Trotsky, Lenin, the Commissar, Descartes, and Piaget under different vocabularies.
  • The recently published Inédits 1946–1949 (Mimesis 2022) supply textual continuity from PhP (1945) through HT (1947), the Sorbonne Lectures (1949–52), and the Note on Machiavelli (1949) — what was previously inferable is now textually explicit.
  • The hermeneutic circle as recognition + institution is MP's solution to the agnosia structure: action coincides with knowledge, neither follows nor precedes it.
  • Play is the political-ethical virtue: not absence of seriousness but a higher seriousness that takes responsibility for indeterminacy. Virtu in Machiavelli, on MP's reading, embodies it.
  • MP's ethics is meta-ethically defensible because his ontology is equivocal (of becoming) rather than univocal — escaping both theodicy ("all that is is justified") and the cynicism of the Commissar.

Methodology

Reconstruction of MP's practical philosophy by combining the published works (PhP, HT, AD, the Note on Machiavelli in Signs, V&I) with the recently published Inédits 1946–49. The methodological signature is philological-genealogical: Chouraqui treats the Inédits as the missing middle term between PhP's clinical analysis (1945) and HT's political philosophy (1947), arguing that the apparent diversity of MP's writings on agnosia, freedom, politics, and ontology is the unfolding of a single normative architecture. The paper closes with three meta-ethical tests (criterion / justification / selectiveness) which Chouraqui claims MP's reconstructed system passes.

Concepts Developed

Concepts on which Chouraqui 2025 does original work:

Concepts Referenced

Concepts the paper uses but does not develop (existing wiki coverage):

Key Passages

"consciousness is originarily not an 'I think that,' but rather an 'I can.'" (PhP, cited in §2.1)

"one cannot deduce the normal from the pathological." (PhP p. 110 / French p. 138)

"illness […] is a complete form of existence." (PhP p. 110)

"study the facts, not in order to verify a hypothesis that transcends them, but in order to give an interior sense of the facts themselves. Most important is the rigor with which we embrace the totality and detail of certain facts." (Sorbonne Lectures, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, Welsh trans., p. 7) — MP's methodological inheritance from Goldstein.

"Thus individuals who suffer from agnosia are incapable of improvising in conversation, and they lack any initiative, or freedom, in sexual conduct. They are incapable of structuring and handling a given element under different conditions, and of varying their point of view." (Sorbonne Lectures, p. 47)

"There is something meticulous and serious in all of his behavior." (PhP p. 137 / French p. 168)

"Being and Nothingness is largely a description of the serious man and his universe — Sartre: freedom without action = 'dried up branch'. Abstract independence and authentic freedom — Perception as mediation between the in-itself and the for-itself. Not to will but to exist — Existence as spontaneity — Independence and freedom." (Inédits Vol. 1, p. 296 — Beauvoir cited by MP)

"true freedom" [liberté vraie] is "non-seriousness." (Inédits Vol. 1, p. 287 — Stendhal cited by MP)

"All of this proves that communism fails in its intention to overcome the antithesis of the objective and the subjective […]. The problem bureaucracy-masses, = the problem spontaneous history-voluntary history, revolutionary freedom-revolutionary discipline, proletariat in fact-proletariat in right or in idea." (Inédits Vol. 2, p. 341)

"how far must one take discipline and how far free judgment." (Inédits Vol. 2, p. 308 — MP on Trotsky)

"one learns to ride a horse by mounting a horse." (Inédits Vol. 2, p. 305 — Trotsky cited by MP, recurring image)

"One follows the direction of history by taming history." (Inédits Vol. 2, p. 340)

"[The gravity of politics] obliges us, instead of simply forcing our will, to look hard among the facts for the shape they should take", and "in politics, truth is perhaps only this art of inventing what will later appear to have been required by the time." (HT preface, xxxv)

"A philosophy of history that is not a historical novel does not break the circle of knowledge and reality but is rather a meditation upon that circle." (AD, p. 29)

"art and philosophy together are precisely not arbitrary fabrications in the universe of the 'spiritual' (of 'culture'), but contact with Being precisely as creations. Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it." (V&I p. 197)

"[the normal subject] role-plays with his own body, he amuses himself by playing the soldier, he 'irrealizes' himself in the role of the soldier just as the actor slides his real body into the 'great phantom' of the character to be performed." (PhP p. 106)

"[t]here is something meticulous and serious in all of [Schneider's] behavior, which comes from the fact that he is incapable of playing. To play is to place oneself momentarily in an imaginary situation, to amuse oneself in changing one's 'milieu.'" (PhP p. 136)

"Cases of ambiguous perception, where we can choose our anchorage as we please, are cases in which our perception is artificially cut off from its context and its past, in which we do not perceive with our entire being, in which we play with our body and with that generality that allows it to break at any time with all historical engagement, and to function on its own account." (PhP p. 255)

"When I want to go from this interrogation to an affirmation and, a fortiori, when I want to express myself, I crystallize a collection of indefinite motives in an act of consciousness, I enter back into the implicit, that is, into the equivocal and the play of the world." (PhP p. 271)

"If we consider the internal character of these games [ces jeux] we observe first that play opposes seriousness, dependency and necessity. […] Labour is serious insofar as it is concerned with needs; be it myself or nature, we must perish; if one must remain, the other must yield. Or, compared to this kind of seriousness, play belongs nonetheless to a higher seriousness for in it, nature [is] informed in spirit." (Inédits Vol. 2, p. 520 — Hegel cited by MP, with MP's emphasis on "higher seriousness")

"the prospective activity of consciousness" (PhP p. 241; see also p. 246) — the primary phenomenon that grounds MP's ethics.

"death" / "the death of consciousness" (PhP p. 74) — name for both reductionism and dualism, the calcifications that interrupt the prospective activity.

What's Not Obvious

  1. The Inédits are doing philological work, not just cosmetic supplementation. Chouraqui's strongest evidence is not interpretive but textual: the Inédits (e.g., Vol. 2 p. 308 on Trotsky, Vol. 1 p. 296 on Beauvoir's reading of Sartre) supply MP's own gloss on the Sartrean serious man and on Trotsky's horse — claims that previously had to be inferred from PhP and HT. Future MP scholarship that does not cite the Inédits is now textually behind.

  2. The Note on Machiavelli (1949) is structurally continuous with HT (1947). A reader who has Yogi-and-the-Proletarian in mind tends to treat the Note on Machiavelli as a separate Renaissance excursion. Chouraqui shows — citing Inédits Vol. 1 p. 198 — that the Note is the direct extension of MP's polemic with Koestler in HT, redirecting Machiavelli from the Commissar's side (Koestler's reading) to the side of higher seriousness. This bears on how the wiki should connect humanism-in-extension with any treatment of MP's reading of Machiavelli.

  3. MP's "non-ableist" defense of pathology depends crucially on the term compensation, which appears few times but is load-bearing. It is not the patient's deviation from a norm that makes them pathological but their internal contradiction — visible only because their compensations testify to a structure they cannot abandon. Without compensation, the immanent-pathology argument collapses. This is a silent-key in the source-paper sense (see the extraction note's Pass 3 Part C); it should get explicit weight on the schneider-case page in any discussion of MP's response to ableism critiques.

Critique / Limitations

  • The is–ought transition in §4 is brief. Chouraqui derives "the act of hermeneutic must go on" from the bare structure of the prospective activity of consciousness, but the move from "this structure is constitutive of consciousness" to "therefore valuing humanism is justified" risks the genetic fallacy. A critic could argue that the prospective activity is descriptive about what consciousness is, not normative about what we ought to value.
  • The Inédits are doing significant work that the wiki cannot yet check. The 2022 Mimesis publication is not yet on the wiki as a source page; quotations must be taken on Chouraqui's authority. This is artifact-conservatism territory: when the Inédits themselves are ingested, several of Chouraqui's specific attributions (Beauvoir gloss at Vol. 1 p. 296; Trotsky's horse at Vol. 2 p. 305; Hegel-on-play with MP's emphasis at Vol. 2 p. 520) should be re-checked.
  • Chouraqui's three-part meta-ethical defense (criterion, justification, selectiveness) is methodologically clean but defends the coherence of MP's view rather than its truth. A reader who rejects MP's ontology of becoming has no reason to accept the conclusions about hermeneutic fertility as a normative criterion.
  • The Matherne-Dreyfus dispute is dispatched in footnote 3 with an alternative ("perception/action grounds the emergence of the subject") that is asserted rather than defended. Readers who want a developed argument for the rejection of the motor-centric / imagination-centric dichotomy will need to supplement Chouraqui with chouraqui-2021-body-and-embodiment or other sources.

Connections

  • extends chouraqui-2014-ambiguity-and-absolute — Chouraqui's 2014 Nietzsche–MP work on truth becomes here a treatment of MP's ethics specifically; the structural moves are continuous (immanent-paradox, ontology of becoming, the ontology grounds normativity), but the application is new.
  • extends chouraqui-2021-body-and-embodiment — the 2021 book traces embodiment through Plato → MP → Gibson; this paper localizes that trajectory in MP's ethics specifically and uses the Gibsonian "affordance" as the secular descendant of MP's sens du réel.
  • builds on merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — the Schneider analysis of Part One Ch III is the foundational text; Chouraqui adds a normative-ethical layer that PhP itself only implicitly carries.
  • builds on merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — AD's "circle of knowledge and reality" is treated as a mature ontological version of the recognition+institution unity.
  • builds on merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — the November 1960 working note ("Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it") is read as the late-ontological version of the same hermeneutic-circle argument.
  • engages with merleau-ponty-1964-signs — "On Indochina" supplies the sens du réel / respect du réel contrast (p. 520); the Note on Machiavelli (in Signs as "Note sur Machiavel") is treated as the direct extension of HT's Koestler polemic.
  • supplies new material from the Inédits 1946–1949 (Mimesis 2022) — not yet a wiki source page; Chouraqui's primary new evidence base, especially Vol. 1 pp. 198, 287, 296 and Vol. 2 pp. 305, 308, 340, 341, 520.
  • engages with merleau-ponty-1964-primacy-of-perception — Ch 7 "The Yogi and the Proletarian" (= HT Ch 5) as the political register of the agnosia diagnosis.
  • contests the standard ableism critiques of schneider-case (Mooney 2022, Reynolds 2017, Weiss 2015) — argues that MP's account of pathology is immanent, not externally normative.
  • contrasts with Koestler's Yogi and the Commissar — Chouraqui retraces MP's polemic and uses the Inédits to show that MP's redeemed Machiavelli (1949) is the direct response to the 1947 Koestler engagement.
  • applies hermeneutic philosophy (Gadamer, Wittgenstein on language-games) to MP's ethics — a register the wiki has not explicitly tracked before.
  • connects to good-ambiguity / ambiguity-vs-ambivalence — §4's "equivocity of being" is the meta-ethical face of MP's ambiguity-doctrine.

Sources

This page has no sources frontmatter because it is itself a source page. The references it cites internally: