Sense and Non-Sense

Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1948 (French original); 1964 (English translation) Type: book (collection of essays, 13 chapters + author's Preface + Translators' Introduction)

A collection of thirteen essays Merleau-Ponty published in Les Temps Modernes and other French periodicals between 1945 and 1947, when he was effectively the editor-in-chief and political director of Les Temps Modernes. Three sections — Arts, Ideas, Politics — display his "ontology of sense" applied across painting (Cézanne), the novel (Beauvoir), film (the IDHEC lecture on Gestalt psychology), Hegel, Marxism, Sartre's L'Être et le néant, the philosophy of the human sciences, the moral aftermath of the Occupation, and the existential ethics of "the contemporary hero." The volume is the public face of MP's 1945–47 thought: it runs parallel to Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and Humanism and Terror (1947) and is the published counterpart to the unpublished Inédits I (1946–47) lectures and Lyon courses. The title formula — sense arising against a background of non-sense, never guaranteed against it — gives the volume its programmatic unity.

Core Arguments

The volume's argumentative structure is set by MP's Preface and by the Translators' Introduction (Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 1964), which together frame the thirteen essays as a single project: applying the "ontology of sense" — perception's reading of meaning out of the world rather than into it — to art, ideas, and politics. The structure below preserves the volume's three Parts.

Preface (MP, 1948)

  1. Claim: We are born into reason as into language, but the experience of unreason "cannot simply be forgotten: we must form a new idea of reason." | Because: Since the start of the century, "many great books have expressed the revolt of life's immediacy against reason"; Marxism's failure, the rise of theatre of the absurd, the violence of the Occupation, all show that the prewar rationalist consciousness has collapsed; and yet sheer rebellion is insincere ("as soon as we desire something or call others to witness, that is, as soon as we live, we imply that the world is, in principle, in harmony with itself"). | Against: Both prewar rationalism and postwar irrationalism. The volume's three parts (art / morality / politics) are demonstrations of this thesis.

PART I — ARTS

Cézanne's Doubt (Fontaine No. 47, December 1945)

  1. Claim: Cézanne's pathological biography (schizoid traits, fits, mistrust) cannot ground or discredit the meaning of his work. | Because: The schizoid temperament reveals "a metaphysical sense of the disease" rather than the disease determining the painting; the work and life are connected by a single project, not by causation. | Against: Bernard's, Zola's, and Mauclair's biographical-pathological readings. | Location: pp. 39-41, 49-50.

  2. Claim: Cézanne's "famous distortions" — swollen ellipses, the warped Geoffrey table, the dislocated wallpaper border — reveal that lived perspective is not geometric perspective. | Because: When the eye runs over a large surface, "the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped." Lived perception "oscillates around the ellipse without being an ellipse"; what we'd see "if we were cameras" is not what we actually perceive. | Against: Bernard's "Cézanne's suicide" charge. | Location: pp. 43-44.

  3. Claim: Expression is a "step taken in the fog" — the artist launches strokes whose meaning does not yet exist anywhere, and the work itself is the proof that there was something rather than nothing to be said. | Because: "Conception cannot precede execution"; "there is nothing but a vague fever before the act of artistic expression." The artist "speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before." | Against: The view that art translates an interior idea. | Location: pp. 48-49.

  4. Claim: Freedom is creative repetition — psychoanalysis as motivational hermeneutic does not destroy freedom but shows how it dawns "without breaking our bonds with the world." | Because: Leonardo's "pure freedom" (in Valéry's portrait) is itself sustained by the vulture-fantasy of his childhood: "at the height of his freedom he was, in that very freedom, the child he had been." Psychoanalysis points to "motivational relationships which are in principle simply possible," not causes. | Against: Sartrean radical freedom; inductive critiques demanding causal rigor; Valéry's portrait. | Location: pp. 51-54.

Metaphysics and the Novel (Cahiers du Sud No. 270, March 1945)

  1. Claim: The novel and theater "will become thoroughly metaphysical, even if not a single word is used from the vocabulary of philosophy" — the convergence of philosophy and literature is not stylistic but ontological. | Because: Once phenomenology assigns itself "the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its 'conditions of possibility,' but rather of formulating an experience of the world... which precedes all thought about the world," philosophical and literary expression share the same opacity. "Man is metaphysical in his very being, in his loves, in his hates"; metaphysics is "in the heart's slightest movement" (Pascal). | Against: The classical separation of philosophy from literature. | Location: pp. 56-58.

  2. Claim: Beauvoir's L'Invitée stages a metaphysical drama, not a psychological one. | Because: The Pierre-Françoise dyad is built on the Kantian assumption that consciousnesses can harmonize through shared willing; Xavière's arrival reveals "the Hegelian self which seeks the death of the other." Coquetry, desire, and jealousy are local symptoms of this metaphysical fact, not its explanation. | Against: Reflexive psychologizing readings. | Location: pp. 61-62.

A Scandalous Author (Figaro littéraire, December 6, 1947)

  1. Claim: Sartre's "scandal" is not his choice of ugly subject matter but his refusal of the religion of art. | Because: The Henriot critics actually want "a religion of the beautiful" to substitute for religion proper. Sartre asserts an "undivided choice which is at one and the same time the choice of a life and of a certain kind of art" — "everything happens on the level of life because life is metaphysical." | Against: Gide's "no problems in art for which the work is not an adequate solution"; the "man of taste" critical apparatus. | Location: pp. 72-77.

The Film and the New Psychology (lecture at IDHEC March 13, 1945; Les Temps modernes No. 26, November 1947)

  1. Claim: Gestalt psychology — "the new psychology" — shows perception is the spontaneous organization of a field, not a deciphering of sensory atoms. | Because: Discolored retinal patches don't appear as discoloration in the field; melodies preserve identity across transposition; "analytical perception... is a belated and rare attitude." | Against: Classical psychology's sensation-mosaic. | Location: pp. 78-80.

  2. Claim: "Introspection gives me almost nothing." Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another's consciousness; they are types of behavior, styles of conduct visible from the outside. | Because: When MP looks inward at love, he finds "a few pangs, a few heart-throbs"; studying it as "a way of behaving... a modification of my relations with others" yields content. | Against: The classical introspection / outer-observation distinction; eliminative behaviourism. | Location: p. 82.

  3. Claim: A film is a temporal gestalt, not a sum of images; its meaning is "incorporated into its rhythm." | Because: The Pudovkin / Mosjoukin experiment: the same impassive close-up reads as pensive / sorrowful / smiling depending on what precedes it. Sound + image + dialogue + silence + music form successive metrical layers. Closing formula: "we must rediscover a commerce with the world and a presence to the world which is older than intelligence." | Against: The view that a movie is a photographed play. | Location: pp. 84-89.

PART II — IDEAS

Hegel's Existentialism (Les Temps modernes No. 7, April 1946)

  1. Claim: There are two Hegels — the Hegel of 1807 (Phänomenologie) and the Hegel of 1827 (Encyclopädie / Philosophy of Right). The existentialist correction does not refute Hegel; it chooses the early Hegel against the late. | Because: The 1807 Hegel describes consciousness's Unruhe without claiming the philosopher's vantage; the 1827 Hegel "has understood everything except his own historical situation." The real Marx-Hegel debate is not idea-vs-history but culminating (1827) vs. open (1807) history. | Against: Both system-builder readings of Hegel and Kierkegaardian wholesale rejection. | Location: pp. 64-65.

  2. Claim: Consciousness of life is consciousness of death; consciousness is unhappy by structure. | Because: For there to be consciousness of life, "an absence of being [must come] into the world." Even Nazi ideology can only function by borrowing from this consciousness of death. | Against: Vitalist or eudaimonist readings ("the myth of the sound man"); Heidegger insofar as he absolutizes being-toward-death. | Location: p. 66.

  3. Claim: The slave, not the master, has the most exact awareness of the human situation. | Because: The master "pretends ignorance" of the foundation of communication; he is "weak in his strength." The slave has been afraid, has chosen to live, "knows better than the master what death means." | Against: Aristocratic / Nietzschean glorifications of mastery. | Location: pp. 67-68.

  4. Claim: What Heidegger lacks is not historicity but the affirmation of the individual — the struggle of consciousnesses. | Because: "Without that struggle of consciousnesses and that opposition of freedoms... coexistence sinks into anonymity and everyday banality." | Against: The mid-1940s French reception that paired Heidegger and Sartre as joint-existentialists. | Location: p. 69.

The Battle over Existentialism (Les Temps modernes No. 2, November 1945)

  1. Claim: L'Être et le néant poses the central post-Cartesian, post-19th-century problem (consciousness vs. thing AND consciousness in a situation) at the same time and is to be defended on this point against both Catholic and Marxist critics. | Because: Both critics avoid the philosophical question; La Croix calls Sartre's book a danger "graver than 18th-century rationalism and 19th-century positivism." | Against: Catholic neo-Thomism (Marcel, Mercier); orthodox Marxism (Lefebvre). | Location: pp. 71-72.

  2. Claim (the internal critique): "L'Être et le néant remains too exclusively antithetic." | Because: Sartre presents the for-itself and the in-itself, "my view of myself and another's view of me," as alternatives rather than as "the living bond and communication between one term and the other." Sartre is putting off the description of action and morality "to a later time"; the book "highlights the question of passivity but does not develop a theory of passivity." | Against: Sartre's framing — offered here as friendly amendment, but the substantive point will become AdV-1955's break. | Location: pp. 72, 75.

  3. Claim: A philosophy that genuinely "renounces absolute Spirit as history's motive force" cannot affirm an inevitable synthesis — therefore "the date of the revolution is written on no wall and in no metaphysical heaven." | Because: In Hegel synthesis is de jure; without that guarantee, synthesis "can never be more than de facto in Marxism." Marxism without metaphysical guarantees is "necessarily Marxist unrest." | Against: Engels-via-Stalin necessitarianism. | Location: pp. 78-79. [The published locus classicus of the pente de l'histoire / contingency-of-the-future doctrine.]

The Metaphysical in Man (Revue de métaphysique et de morale Nos. 3-4, July 1947)

  1. Claim: The sciences of man are metaphysical or transnatural. | Because: Each (Gestalt psychology, Saussurean linguistics, post-Durkheim sociology, Febvre's history) is "oriented toward the revision of the subject-object relation." Linguistics finds the "sub-linguistic schema" (Guillaume); sociology finds "a totality where phenomena give mutual expression to each other" (the spirit of a society). | Against: Scientism; Durkheimian sociology; Seignobos-style historicism. | Location: pp. 88-93.

  2. Claim: The illusion of Absolute Knowledge is morally catastrophic, not merely epistemologically wrong: "the suffering I create turns into happiness, ruse becomes reason, and I piously cause my adversaries to perish." | Because: Absolute Knowledge claims allow "withdrawing my judgments from the control of others"; the political form is purges. | Against: Theological "absolute foundation"; Hegelo-Marxist Absolute Knowledge. | Location: p. 95. [Editor's footnote here — at p. 95 — projects forward to The Origin of Truth and names "the passage of perceptual faith into explicit truth"; earliest published foi perceptive attestation.]

Concerning Marxism (Fontaine Nos. 48-9, February 1946)

  1. Claim: Economic conditions are the principal condition of historical progress — but principal-condition is not cause-of-everything. | Because: "Nothing can be isolated in the total context of history... economic phenomena make a greater contribution to historical discourse — not that they explain everything that happens but that no progress can be made in the cultural order, no historical step can be taken unless the economy, which is like its schema and material symbol, is organized in a certain way." | Against: Reductionist economism and idealist anti-Marxism. | Location: pp. 107-108.

  2. Claim: Marxism is open-ended: history is both logical and contingent. The Russian Revolution's success was no accident and no necessity; the U.S.S.R. has accordingly returned to "the politics of cunning" — and "we are not even sure that it is the 'cunning of reason.'" | Because: The "law of unequal development" was discovered after the event; Soviet industrialization required "bourgeois motives." | Against: Both Trotskyist universalism and PCF Stalinist orthodoxy. | Location: pp. 113-116. [MP's 1945 framing is more sympathetic to "the politics of the Communist Party" as a problem to be wrestled with from inside than HT (1947) or AD (1955); the structural diagnosis is already present, the political distance is not yet there.]

Marxism and Philosophy (Revue internationale Vol. I, No. 6, June-July 1946)

  1. Claim: Marx is the philosopher of the human object — streets, fields, houses already carry social meaning at the level of perception. Marx's materialism is a practical materialism in which matter is "the support and body of praxis." | Because: "The meaning of a picture or a poem cannot be separated from the materiality of the colors or the words... Likewise, the 'spirit' of a society is already implied in its method of production." | Against: Mechanistic materialism; idealism. | Location: pp. 130-131.

  2. Claim: Das Kapital is a concrete Phenomenology of Mind — and "for the first time since Hegel, militant philosophy is reflecting not on subjectivity but on intersubjectivity." | Because: "Hegel's logic is, as has been said, 'the algebra of the revolution.' The fetishism of goods is the historical accomplishment of that alienation which Hegel enigmatically describes." Therefore "you cannot do away with philosophy without fulfilling it" (Marx). | Against: Both eliminative-Marxist (Naville) and system-Hegelian positions. | Location: pp. 132-134.

PART III — POLITICS

The War Has Taken Place (Les Temps modernes No. 1, October 1945)

  1. Claim: Pre-war French rationalist consciousness was the philosophy of a "barely victorious nation" — an unwitting historical situation mistaken for a metaphysical default. The Occupation, not reflection, revealed consciousness as situated. | Because: Before 1939 "we were consciousnesses naked before the world"; only when "we had to judge men by the clothes they wore" did the "general milieu" become visible. | Against: Brunschvicg / Alain neo-Kantianism. | Location: pp. 169-171.

  2. Claim: "No act is without complicity" — there is no neutral standpoint; "the wish to be free on the fringe of the world will end in our not being free at all." | Because: The Cartesian who refuses external consequences "does not see his shadow behind him projected onto history as onto a wall." | Against: Cartesian inwardness; pacifist purity. | Location: pp. 174-177.

  3. Claim: The lesson is not that prewar humanist values were wrong — but that values without an economic and political infrastructure are nominal. | Because: "Values are only another way of designating human relationships." Hence: not abandoning humanism but realizing it. | Against: Both anti-humanist political realism and abstract humanism. | Location: p. 182.

For the Sake of Truth (Les Temps modernes No. 4, January 1946)

  1. Claim: A historical skepticism that refuses any philosophy of history is not neutral — it is "always conservative" because it freezes the existing distribution. | Because: Such a skeptic calculates "France as a function of the British Empire... defining these once and for all by their geographical characteristics" — exactly the philosophical-historical claim he claimed to reject. | Against: Aron-style "no philosophy of history." | Location: pp. 197-198.

  2. Claim: Therefore: "pursue what is, in effect, the policy of the Communist Party" — but as a wait-and-see policy "without illusions about the results to be hoped from it and without honoring it with the name of dialectic." | Because: Reformism is impossible; a non-Communist proletarian revolution would draw Anglo-Saxon intervention. | Against: Both the orthodox Communist who would call this dialectic and the liberal who would call it betrayal. | Location: pp. 200-201.

  3. (1947 added footnote): The U.S.S.R., having "returned to pessimism, pure authority, and ultimatums," makes it necessary for the non-Communist Left "to state clearly, under pain of mystification, why it was not Communist, and would not in any case put up a liberal front for the system." | Location: footnote 9, p. 201 (raw 1723). The visible textual seam between Temps Modernes MP and AdV-1955 MP.

Faith and Good Faith (Les Temps modernes No. 5, February 1946)

  1. Claim: The Incarnation, consistently followed out, would dissolve the religion of the Father into a religion of the Spirit which is socialized: "God is no longer in Heaven but in human society and communication, wherever men come together in His name." Catholicism arrests this development. | Because: Pentecost is the dialectical moment that should supersede both Father and Son; but Catholicism freezes the Trinity into co-eternity. | Against: Augustinian inwardness; Pascalian Hidden God; Thomism. | Location: pp. 205-207.

  2. Claim: Faith and good faith are not opposites; the solution is "an objective subjectivity, a vigilant trust." | Because: "Each of our perceptions is an act of faith"; "if commitment goes beyond reasons, it should never run contrary to reason itself." | Against: Gide's "simple faith exempts one from good faith"; sectarian fideism; intellectual neutrality. | Location: pp. 208-211.

Man, the Hero (written expressly for Sens et Non-Sens, 1948)

  1. Claim: The contemporary hero is "man" — alone with the contingency of the future, without metaphysical guarantees. Neither Hegelian (no World Spirit), nor Nietzschean (no pure power), nor Pascalian (no Wager), nor Greek (no shared communal values). | Because: Hegel's hero is "the steward of the World Spirit"; the Nietzschean superman is "interested only in power itself"; Hemingway's Robert Jordan: "Don't ever kid yourself with too much dialectics." | Against: Hegelian historicism; Nietzschean power-mysticism; Pascalian wager; Catholic providentialism. | Location: pp. 212-214.

  2. Claim: The hero recovers his being only by exposing it to chance; he acts out of "loyalty to the natural movement which flings us toward things and toward others." | Because: Saint-Exupéry over Arras "feels invulnerable because he is in things at last." Jordan, dying alone: "we live with other people; we are the image which they have of us." | Against: Mastery-of-death heroism; "artistic" withdrawal. | Location: pp. 214-216.

  3. Claim: The gloria — the moment of harmony when "events respond to their will" — "may be experienced as unquestionable" yet "may still turn out to be illusory." There is no guarantee; the hero must trust such a moment "and live by it as long as it seems significant." Faith, "stripped of its illusions," just is "that very movement which unites us with others, our present with our past, and by means of which we make everything have meaning." Therefore the contemporary hero "is not Lucifer; he is not even Prometheus; he is man." | Location: pp. 216-217.

Argumentative Movement

The volume's argumentative form is hybrid: each essay is a sustained interpretive engagement (with a painter, a novelist, a philosopher, a political conjuncture), not a premise-conclusion proof. The unity of the volume is provided by the Preface (which sets up art / morality / politics as three demonstrations of the title-thesis) and by the closing essay "Man, the Hero" (which gathers the existential-ethical conclusions). Within each essay, MP characteristically:

  1. Presents the standard reading (Bernard's biographical Cézanne; the psychological reading of L'Invitée; the late-Hegel-as-system-builder; the orthodox Marxist economic determinism; the Augustinian-interior God);
  2. Locates the phenomenon the standard reading misses (lived perspective; the Hegelian self that seeks the death of the other; the early Hegel of restless Unruhe; the principal-condition reading of economy; the Incarnation-as-social);
  3. Develops the alternative from within the tradition (not by external critique), pushing it toward what MP takes to be its own truth.

This is the Hegel-of-1807 method MP credits Marx with completing: criticism that inhabits its target rather than standing above it.

Key Findings

  • The publication of these essays predates Phenomenology of Perception (May 1945, except "Cézanne's Doubt" December 1945) by months and parallels its public reception. The volume is not a popularization of PoP; it is a parallel public extension of the same project to art, morality, and politics.
  • "The date of the revolution is written on no wall and in no metaphysical heaven" (Battle over Existentialism, p. 78, November 1945) is the first published occurrence of the doctrine MP names pente de l'histoire at his Brussels conference of 14 March 1946.
  • The 1947 editor's footnote in "The Metaphysical in Man" (p. 95) is the first published occurrence of "perceptual faith" (foi perceptive) — predating The Visible and the Invisible by 13+ years. The 1946 generalization "each of our perceptions is an act of faith" (Faith and Good Faith p. 209) gives the doctrine its political-religious register.
  • "Battle over Existentialism" (November 1945) is the published origin of MP's diagnosis of L'Être et le néant as "remaining too exclusively antithetic" and as needing "a theory of passivity" — the same diagnosis that becomes, in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), the basis for the political break with Sartre.
  • Concerning Marxism (Fontaine February 1946) and Marxism and Philosophy (Revue internationale June-July 1946) together present MP's most sympathetic-from-the-inside published Marxism: economic conditions as "principal condition" (not guarantee) of history, Das Kapital as "concrete Phenomenology of Mind", "the human object" as Marx's contribution to phenomenology, and "for the first time since Hegel, militant philosophy is reflecting not on subjectivity but on intersubjectivity."
  • The 1947 added footnote to "For the Sake of Truth" is the visible textual seam between Temps Modernes MP and AdV-1955 MP: the U.S.S.R. has "returned to pessimism, pure authority, and ultimatums" and the non-Communist Left must now state "why it was not Communist."
  • The volume contains MP's only sustained early treatment of film as phenomenological art form ("The Film and the New Psychology," IDHEC lecture March 1945).
  • "Man, the Hero" — written expressly for the 1948 collection — is MP's most concentrated published statement of the existential ethics that frames Humanism and Terror and the political essays of the 1950s.

Methodology

Phenomenological. Each essay begins with a phenomenon (Cézanne's distortions, Beauvoir's trio, the Pudovkin/Mosjoukin sequence, the Hegelian master-slave struggle, the Occupation, the Incarnation) and reads its argumentative work out of the phenomenon rather than into it. The method assumes (without re-arguing) the central results of Phenomenology of Perception (1945): that perception is not a deciphering of sense-data, that meaning is figure-on-ground, that consciousness is "always already" embodied and intersubjective.

Concepts Developed

These are concepts on which Sense and Non-Sense does original work — either coining the term, giving its locus classicus, or substantially developing what was implicit elsewhere.

  • lived-perspective — Cézanne's Doubt is the canonical source for MP's account of perception's geometric-vs-lived distinction (apple has several outlines in blue; lived form oscillates around the geometric ellipse).
  • metaphysical-novel — Metaphysics and the Novel coins the form: "the novel and the theater will become thoroughly metaphysical, even if not a single word is used from the vocabulary of philosophy."
  • metaphysical-in-man — The Metaphysical in Man essay is the locus classicus; the doctrine of "transnatural" sciences of man.
  • man-the-hero-mp / the contemporary hero — Man, the Hero coins the figure: condemned to follow fragile meanings without absolute or despair.
  • gloria-mp — Man, the Hero takes Hemingway's "gloria" as the moment of harmony that "may be experienced as unquestionable yet may still turn out to be illusory."
  • condemned-to-meaning — implicit in the title formula and Preface; enacted across the volume.
  • two-hegels-1807-1827 — Hegel's Existentialism gives the structural distinction.
  • antithetic-critique-of-sartre — Battle over Existentialism is the published origin of "remains too exclusively antithetic" and "Sartre lacks a theory of passivity."
  • human-object — Marxism and Philosophy credits Marx with the concept and develops it phenomenologically.
  • principal-condition — Concerning Marxism gives MP's exact "schema and material symbol" formula.
  • absolute-as-moral-catastrophe — Metaphysical in Man: "the suffering I create turns into happiness, ruse becomes reason, and I piously cause my adversaries to perish."
  • faith-good-faith-mp — Faith and Good Faith resolves Gide's opposition into "objective subjectivity, a vigilant trust."
  • interior-exterior-god-mp — Faith and Good Faith reads Catholicism's ambiguity as a structural alternation between Augustinian interior God and Incarnated exterior God.
  • consciousness-of-life-as-consciousness-of-death — Hegel's Existentialism: "consciousness of life, taken radically, is consciousness of death."

Concepts Referenced

  • perceptual-faith — earliest published foi perceptive attestation: 1947 footnote in Metaphysical in Man (p. 95); 1946 generalization in Faith and Good Faith (p. 209).
  • pente-de-l-histoire — earliest published version: "the date of the revolution is written on no wall and in no metaphysical heaven" (Battle p. 78, Nov 1945).
  • contingency-of-the-future — earliest published version: "Marxism invites us to make the logic of history triumph over its contingency without offering any metaphysical guarantees" (Battle p. 78).
  • capital-as-phenomenology — locus classicus in Marxism and Philosophy ("Das Kapital... is a concrete Phenomenology of Mind").
  • individu-de-classe — earliest published "fact-value or incarnate value, for which the theory remains to be worked out" (Battle p. 77).
  • true-humanism — anchored at "values remain nominal... without an economic and political infrastructure" (The War p. 182) and at the Marx quotation "consistent naturalism or humanism differs from both idealism and materialism" (Marxism and Philosophy p. 129).
  • primordial-expression — first-word formula in Cézanne's Doubt pp. 48-49.
  • freud-without-demonology — psychoanalysis-as-motivational-hermeneutic in Cézanne's Doubt pp. 51-54.
  • conditioned-freedom — "freedom as creative repetition" formula in Cézanne's Doubt p. 54; "freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it" (The War p. 178).
  • behavior-as-form — "introspection gives me almost nothing" (Film p. 82).
  • philosophy-cinema — IDHEC lecture is foundational.
  • primacy-of-perception — "we must rediscover a commerce with the world... older than intelligence" (Film p. 81).
  • gestalt-principles-of-unification / figure-ground-relationship — textbook exposition pp. 78-79.
  • historical-responsibility — "no act is without complicity" (The War p. 174); "we find culprits nowhere but accomplices everywhere" (p. 170).
  • politics-mp — Part III essays as a unit.
  • propaedeutic-dialectic / hyper-dialectic — open-vs-closed dialectic distinction in Hegel's Existentialism.
  • cultural-world — sub-linguistic schema and spirit-of-society in Metaphysical in Man.

Terminology

French (or original) English translation Attestation locations Translation notes
foi perceptive perceptual faith Metaphysical in Man p. 95 (footnote); Faith and Good Faith p. 209 ("each of our perceptions is an act of faith") Earliest published occurrences in MP's corpus
transnatural transnatural Metaphysical in Man p. 92; Marxism and Philosophy p. 130 (raw 1067, 1397) Translator preserves the term verbatim; technical neologism characterizing what is neither natural nor supernatural
réalisation realization Cézanne's Doubt passim; Marxism and Philosophy p. 130 ("still be a chimerical realization of the human essence") Used in painterly, novelistic, philosophical, and political registers within the same volume
pente de l'histoire (not used verbatim in S&NS — but the doctrine is named "no metaphysical guarantee" / "history is both logical and contingent") Battle p. 78; Concerning Marxism pp. 113-115 The phrase itself first appears in MP's Brussels conference of 14 March 1946 (per Inédits I extraction note)
Sens et non-sens Sense and Non-Sense Title The volume's title compresses the central thesis: sense arises against a background of non-sense, never guaranteed against it
Wir alle sind Juden "We are all Jews" Hegel's Existentialism p. 67 Hyppolite's wartime line, repeated by MP — "we are all Jews to the extent that we care about the universal"
l'individu se fait dans l'histoire et l'histoire se fait par l'individu "the individual makes himself in history and history makes itself through the individual" Not in S&NS but in concurrent Inédits I (Brussels, 14 March 1946); see merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-i-1946-1947 The unpublished private-lecture parallel to S&NS Part II/III

Key Passages

"The lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one." (Cézanne's Doubt, p. 43)

"We see a form which oscillates around the ellipse without being an ellipse." (Cézanne's Doubt, p. 43)

"The artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout." (Cézanne's Doubt, p. 49)

"Conception cannot precede execution. There is nothing but a vague fever before the act of artistic expression." (Cézanne's Doubt, p. 49)

"Psychoanalysis... teaches us to think of this freedom concretely, as a creative repetition of ourselves, always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves." (Cézanne's Doubt, p. 54)

"At the height of his freedom he was, in that very freedom, the child he had been." (Cézanne's Doubt, p. 53)

"The novel and the theater will become thoroughly metaphysical, even if not a single word is used from the vocabulary of philosophy." (Metaphysics and the Novel, p. 58)

"Metaphysics is no longer the occupation of a few hours per month, as Descartes said; it is present, as Pascal thought, in the heart's slightest movement." (Metaphysics and the Novel, p. 57)

"What the characters in this book discover is inherent individuality, the Hegelian self which seeks the death of the other." (Metaphysics and the Novel, p. 62)

"Introspection gives me almost nothing." (Film and the New Psychology, p. 82)

"Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another's consciousness." (Film and the New Psychology, p. 82)

"We must rediscover a commerce with the world and a presence to the world which is older than intelligence." (Film and the New Psychology, p. 81)

"A film is not a sum total of images but a temporal gestalt." (Film and the New Psychology, p. 84)

"Consciousness of life, taken radically, is consciousness of death." (Hegel's Existentialism, p. 66)

"The man with the most exact awareness of the human situation is not the master... but the slave." (Hegel's Existentialism, p. 68)

"We are all Jews to the extent that we care about the universal." (Hegel's Existentialism, p. 67)

"The book remains too exclusively antithetic... often seem to be alternatives instead of being described as the living bond and communication between one term and the other." (Battle over Existentialism, p. 72)

"The date of the revolution is written on no wall nor in any metaphysical heaven." (Battle over Existentialism, p. 78)

"Marxism is unique in that it invites us to make the logic of history triumph over its contingency without offering any metaphysical guarantees." (Battle over Existentialism, p. 78)

"Class... is more in the nature of a fact-value or an incarnate value, for which the theory remains to be worked out." (Battle over Existentialism, p. 77)

"The sciences of man are metaphysical or transnatural." (The Metaphysical in Man, p. 92)

"The suffering I create turns into happiness, ruse becomes reason, and I piously cause my adversaries to perish." (The Metaphysical in Man, p. 95)

"No progress can be made in the cultural order, no historical step can be taken unless the economy, which is like its schema and material symbol, is organized in a certain way." (Concerning Marxism, p. 108)

"A non-proletarian socialism is a square circle." (Concerning Marxism, p. 112)

"We have returned to the politics of cunning... we are not even sure that it is the 'cunning of reason.'" (Concerning Marxism, p. 116)

"Das Kapital — again as has been said — is a concrete Phenomenology of Mind." (Marxism and Philosophy, p. 132)

"For the first time since Hegel, militant philosophy is reflecting not on subjectivity but on intersubjectivity." (Marxism and Philosophy, p. 133)

"We were no longer permitted to be neutral in this combat." (The War Has Taken Place, p. 174)

"We find culprits nowhere but accomplices everywhere." (The War Has Taken Place, p. 170)

"Values remain nominal... without an economic and political infrastructure." (The War Has Taken Place, p. 182)

"Pursue what is, in effect, the policy of the Communist Party... without honoring it with the name of dialectic." (For the Sake of Truth, pp. 200-201)

"Why it was not Communist, and would not in any case put up a liberal front for the system." (1947 footnote, For the Sake of Truth, p. 201)

"Historical skepticism is always conservative." (For the Sake of Truth, p. 198)

"God is no longer in Heaven but in human society and communication, wherever men come together in His name." (Faith and Good Faith, p. 207)

"Each of our perceptions is an act of faith." (Faith and Good Faith, p. 209)

"If commitment goes beyond reasons, it should never run contrary to reason itself." (Faith and Good Faith, p. 209)

"An objective subjectivity, a vigilant trust." (Faith and Good Faith, p. 210)

"Don't ever kid yourself with too much dialectics." (Hemingway, quoted in Man, the Hero, p. 213)

"He would be nothing if he were to back out." (Saint-Exupéry, quoted in Man, the Hero, p. 215)

"It is loyalty to the natural movement which flings us toward things and toward others." (Man, the Hero, p. 216)

"He is not Lucifer; he is not even Prometheus; he is man." (Man, the Hero, p. 217)

What's Not Obvious

Three things about Sense and Non-Sense that would not appear in a conventional summary:

  1. The 1947 added footnote to "For the Sake of Truth" (p. 201, raw line 1723) is a textual seam, not a side-note. The footnote — added when the essay was collected for the 1948 Sens et non-sens — explicitly retracts the wait-and-see policy of the body of the essay: "the U.S.S.R. — having returned to pessimism, pure authority, and ultimatums, made it necessary for the non-Communist left to state clearly, under pain of mystification, why it was not Communist." This footnote is the public textual marker between MP's Temps Modernes phase and the eventual break with Sartre and the PCF, and it sits internal to a 1945 essay — a rare instance of MP visibly editing his own published past. It is the precise textual location where the Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) project becomes prefigured. (Discussed in merleau-ponty-1947-humanism-and-terror only by implication; see merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-ii-1947-1949 for the unpublished parallel where MP works through the same shift in private notes.)

  2. The earliest published occurrence of "perceptual faith" (foi perceptive) in MP's corpus is the editor's footnote in "The Metaphysical in Man" (1947), p. 95 — projecting forward to The Origin of Truth (the planned book that became The Visible and the Invisible). The doctrine is named "the passage of perceptual faith into explicit truth as we encounter it on the level of language, concept, and the cultural world." The 1946 "Faith and Good Faith" then generalizes the doctrine in political-religious register: "each of our perceptions is an act of faith"; "if commitment goes beyond reasons, it should never run contrary to reason itself." This means that a doctrine the wiki currently anchors at PoP-1945 Urdoxa and at V&I-1960 has a 1946-47 published middle term — in S&NS — under the name "faith." Connects to perceptual-faith.

  3. MP's 1945 critique of L'Être et le néant — "remains too exclusively antithetic" and "Sartre lacks a theory of passivity" — is the same critique that AdV-1955's "Sartre and Ultrabolshevism" mobilizes for the political break with Sartre. What changes between 1945 and 1955 is not the philosophical objection but its political translation. In 1945 the diagnosis is offered as friendly amendment (MP defends Sartre's book against Catholic and Marxist critics in the same essay); in 1955 the same diagnosis is mobilized for the break. This temporal symmetry — that the AdV-1955 break is not a new objection but the political mobilization of an objection MP had stated in print since November 1945 — is invisible in any reading that takes 1955 as the first statement of MP's structural critique of Sartre. Connects to antithetic-critique-of-sartre and jean-paul-sartre.

Critique / Limitations

  • The "principal condition" reading of Marx is asserted, not argued. MP attributes the monocausal economic determinism reading to "current accounts" of Marxism rather than to Marx himself; this is a "no true Scotsman" move that requires more textual argument than it gets. Marx's text underdetermines whether the "principal condition" reading or the monocausal reading is correct.
  • The leap from Cézanne's lived perspective to a phenomenology of all human meaning is rhetorical, not argumentative. The argumentative work was done in Phenomenology of Perception (1945); S&NS applies the result to art / morality / politics without re-arguing it. A reader who does not already accept PoP's programme will not be persuaded by S&NS's programmatic moves.
  • The two-Hegels distinction (1807 vs. 1827) is contested by Hegel scholars. Some hold that the Phänomenologie already contains the system-pretensions of the late Hegel; MP's "early Hegel of restless Unruhe" can be read as a Hegelian-existentialist artifact more than as a textual fact about Hegel.
  • The 1945-46 sympathetic-from-the-inside Marxism is partially retracted by the 1947 footnote and decisively retracted in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Reading S&NS as continuous with HT and AdV requires careful periodization — the volume contains positions MP himself later qualified.
  • The dating anomaly in "Hegel's Existentialism" footnote 1: the Northwestern translation has the Hyppolite lecture dated "Feb. 16, 1947," but the essay was published in Les Temps Modernes No. 7, April 1946 — chronologically impossible. Likely a typo for 1946 or a 1948 Sens et non-sens edition addition. Flag for any close-citation work.

Connections

  • parallel public extension of merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception — same period (1945-47) and same programme; S&NS applies PoP's analyses to art / morality / politics.
  • contemporaneous with merleau-ponty-1947-humanism-and-terror — Concerning Marxism (Feb 1946), Marxism and Philosophy (June 1946), and Part III political essays form the public-essay parallel to HT's monograph treatment of the same problems.
  • contemporaneous with merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-i-1946-1947 and merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-ii-1947-1949 — the unpublished private-lecture parallel; "L'individu et l'histoire" (Brussels, 14 March 1946), the Lyon course on Liberty, and the Stockholm Gide-Sartre lecture all develop in private the same vocabulary S&NS develops in public.
  • first published locus of pente-de-l-histoire — Battle over Existentialism, p. 78 (November 1945).
  • first published locus of perceptual-faith — Metaphysical in Man editor's footnote p. 95 (July 1947); generalized in Faith and Good Faith p. 209 (February 1946).
  • first published locus of antithetic-critique-of-sartre — Battle over Existentialism, pp. 72, 75 (November 1945).
  • prefigures merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — Battle over Existentialism's "remains too exclusively antithetic" critique becomes AdV's break with Sartre; the 1947 footnote to For the Sake of Truth marks the textual seam.
  • applies gestalt-principles-of-unification to philosophy-cinema — Film and the New Psychology extends Gestalt psychology to temporal cinematic structure.
  • engages g-w-f-hegel — Hegel's Existentialism develops the two-Hegels distinction; Marxism and Philosophy reads Das Kapital as concrete Phenomenology of Mind.
  • engages karl-marx — Concerning Marxism and Marxism and Philosophy develop the "principal condition" reading and the human object doctrine.
  • engages jean-paul-sartre — A Scandalous Author (defense), Battle over Existentialism (defense + internal critique), passim throughout the volume.
  • engages simone-de-beauvoir — Metaphysics and the Novel reads L'Invitée; the Preface frames it as the moral-political demonstration of the volume's thesis.
  • engages paul-cezanne — Cézanne's Doubt is the canonical early MP-on-Cezanne text, foundational for the later merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind.
  • engages jean-hyppolite — Hegel's Existentialism is structured around Hyppolite's lecture; MP follows the lecture "freely rather than textually" and deviates at the question of whether Hegel "stops being an existentialist" with the move to history.
  • engages edmund-husserl — Marxism and Philosophy defends late Husserl (Lebenswelt, intentional history) against PCF readings of early Husserl.
  • engages Søren Kierkegaard — Faith and Good Faith reads Kierkegaard as the foil for "perceptual faith" (Kierkegaard's leap is what MP refuses).
  • engages martin-heidegger — Hegel's Existentialism diagnoses Heidegger as lacking "the affirmation of the individual" (the struggle of consciousnesses).

Synthetic Claims

The synthetic interpretive layer (wiki/claims.md) names this page as a Wiki home for claim entries; new entries from the 2026-05-09 Phase 8 thirteenth run are listed below.

  • live claim, see claims#mp-1945-idhec-silently-polemical-against-bergson — Carbone (Philosophy-Screens ch. 2 pp. 14–20) argues MP's 1945 IDHEC lecture "Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie" (in Sense and Non-Sense) is a silently polemical response to Bergson's condemnation of cinema in Creative Evolution (1907) ch. 4. Bergson is never named, but the structure of the argument systematically inverts Bergson's "our knowledge is cinematographical" thesis. Counterpressure: targeted raw-source check #4 not verifiable within this audit (S&NS just ingested 2026-05-09); Pierre Rodrigo's competing reading rivals; lecture-genre objection. Promotion to supported should wait for full S&NS-anchored verification.