Browse — tag-history
Tag: history
Pages tagged with history.
45 pages
-
Action at a Distance
The governing figure of the Introduction to Signs (1960). Action at a distance names the relation that holds between philosophy and politics, philosophy and history, and between thought and its "outside" generally: neither subordination (H…
-
Adventures of the Dialectic
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Joseph Bien, Northwestern UP 1973) Year: 1955 (original French: Les Aventures de la dialectique, Gallimard) Type: book
-
Concrete Mediation
Inkpin's term for the mode by which individuals relate to a cultural world through particular works, events, and influences (touchstones) rather than through shared types or universal properties. The relation is piecemeal (mediated by indi…
-
Conditioned Freedom
Merleau-Ponty's doctrine of freedom in Part Three Ch III of Phenomenology of Perception — a doctrine positioned against Sartre's "total freedom" of Being and Nothingness (1943) without ever naming Sartre. The slogan MP extracts and rejects…
-
Daniel Guérin
French historian, anarchist-communist activist, and political writer (1904–1988); author of La Lutte des classes sous la Première République (2 vols., 1946), Fascisme et grand capital (1936), Où va le peuple américain? (1950), and many wor…
-
Does the retrograde movement of the true solve or deepen historical relativism?
It does both — and this is its point, not its failure. Merleau-Ponty's radicalization of Bergson's phrase is not a theorem that dissolves the relativism problem but a reframing that denies the problem's usual formulation. The standard rela…
-
Essential Prematureness of Revolution
Merleau-Ponty's claim in Chapter 4 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), against Marxist theories of revolution-as-maturation: revolutions are not "anticipations" of conditions that will one day be mature; they have an essential premature…
-
Eternal Recurrence
Nietzsche's thought that the same events will repeat, identically, an infinite number of times — first introduced in The Gay Science §341 (the "greatest weight") and developed through Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the notebooks, and Ecce Homo. N…
-
Healing Schneider
Chouraqui's 2025 name for the positive side of Merleau-Ponty's ethical project: opposing and undoing the agnosiastic tendencies that MP diagnoses across clinical, political, existential, and ontological registers. The project is not buildi…
-
How does MP's seinsgeschichte tension with Heidegger bear on the 1959→1961 reversal?
The two are the same problem seen from opposite sides. In 1959 Merleau-Ponty anchors ontology in the "thick, opaque present" and refuses the Hegel/Marx/Nietzsche detour; by 1960–61 he gives a whole course on exactly that detour. The revers…
-
Humanism in Extension / Humanism in Intension
Merleau-Ponty's 1947 political distinction between two senses of "humanism." Humanism in intension ("intensive") is the love of humanity as embodied in a few — the guardians of Western culture who preserve its "treasure" and whose status i…
-
Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo Year: 2002 (course delivered 1959–60; notes preserved at Bibliothèque Nationale) Type: Course notes + editorial apparatus
-
Institution
Merleau-Ponty's counter-concept to Husserlian constitution, developed in his 1954–55 Collège de France course "Institution in Personal and Public History." For a constituting subject, "there are only the objects which it has itself constit…
-
Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955)
Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Foreword by Claude Lefort; Text established by Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé Year: French edition 2003 (Belin); English translation 2010 (Northwestern) Translators: Leonard Lawlor…
-
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 cog…
-
Is Phenomenology of Perception already the break with Sartre?
Yes — philosophically, if not socially. Part Three Ch III of Phenomenology of Perception — the chapter on freedom that closes the book — is a chapter-length rejoinder to Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre is never named. Every c…
-
Karl Marx
German philosopher, economist, and political theorist (1818–1883); co-author with Friedrich Engels of The Communist Manifesto (1848); author of Capital (Vol. I 1867), the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (published 1932), The G…
-
Lateral Universal
Merleau-Ponty's alternative to the "overarching universal" of classical rationalism and of Husserl's early eidetic phenomenology. A lateral universal is acquired between cultures, philosophies, or perspectives rather than given above them;…
-
Lucien Febvre
French historian (1878–1956), co-founder of the Annales school of historiography with Marc Bloch. In the wiki's context, the positive model of historical method in Merleau-Ponty's 1954–55 Institution and Passivity course. MP reads Febvre's…
-
Merleau-Ponty on painting, sedimentation, and the cultural world
Author(s): Andrew Inkpin (University of Melbourne) Year: 2026 Type: paper (peer-reviewed journal article, European Journal of Philosophy e70063)
-
Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics
Author(s): Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.) Year: 2026 Type: edited volume (12 chapters + Introduction; 3 thematic Parts)
-
Metamorphosis (in art)
Malraux's central concept in The Voices of Silence: metamorphosis is a law governing the life of every work of art (p. 72). Works survive across time not by repeating their original meaning but by being recreated in each new vocabulary tha…
-
New Liberalism
Merleau-Ponty's programmatic political stance, formulated in the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). A "sort of new liberalism" (AD 224) that (a) refuses the dictatorship of the proletariat, (b) accepts Communist action and rev…
-
Niccolò Machiavelli
Italian political theorist and diplomat (1469–1527), author of The Prince and the Discourses on Titus Livy. In Signs' "A Note on Machiavelli" (1949, originally given to a Rome-Florence conference on humanism and political science), Merleau…
-
Politics (Merleau-Ponty)
MP's political thought develops across Humanism and Terror (1947), the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), the inaugural lecture (1953), Signs (1960), and the late ontology of V&I and Eye and Mind (1959–61). T…
-
Principal Condition (Economic Determinism, MP's Reading)
Merleau-Ponty's exact formula for the relation between economy and history in his sympathetic-from-the-inside reading of Marx: economic conditions are the principal condition of historical progress, but principal-condition is not cause-of-…
-
Recognition and Institution
Chouraqui 2025's name for the structural form of agency in Merleau-Ponty's mature ethics: action is the simultaneous unity of recognition (taking the object as a standard, responding to what is) and institution (actively assigning meaning,…
-
Retrograde Movement of the True
Merleau-Ponty's term (borrowed from Bergson and radicalized) for the structure in which a new truth, once established, appears retrospectively to have been already present before its discovery — though it was not. "There is truly a retrogr…
-
Revolutions are True as Movements and False as Regimes
The slogan-formula of the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Merleau-Ponty's settled diagnosis of the revolutionary dialectic: revolutions enact a truth in their movement — the passage in which a fallen class no longer rules a…
-
Sedimentation
Husserl's term, taken over and reinterpreted by Merleau-Ponty: the process by which an initially creative expressive act becomes a stable "acquired" meaning available to further expression. Sedimentation is the structural condition of all…
-
Seinsgeschichte
Heidegger's concept of the "history of Being" — not a chronicle of philosophical doctrines but the successive ways in which Being itself "sends" (schickt) itself, concealing itself in the very act of disclosure. As read by Merleau-Ponty, t…
-
Signs
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1960 (French, Gallimard); 1964 (English, Northwestern UP, trans. Richard C. McCleary) Type: book (collection of essays + a new Introduction)
-
Stiftung
Husserl's word — "foundation," "establishment," "institution" — for the operation by which a singular event (the Urstiftung) opens a temporal dimension along which subsequent experiences acquire meaning, are handed down (the Nachstiftung)…
-
Sublime Point
A figure Merleau-Ponty borrows from Breton and deploys recurrently in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) for the dreamed-of moment in which "matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, pa…
-
Symbolic Matrix
Merleau-Ponty's term for the structured existential field that a past event leaves behind in the subject, organizing subsequent perceptions without being a "content" of consciousness. "The unconscious is the symbolic matrix left behind by…
-
Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1992 (English collection); pieces span 1933–1961 Type: book (anthology)
-
The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited and introduced by James M. Edie Year: 1964 (English); original pieces 1946–1961 Type: collection (book)
-
The Prose of the World
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited by Claude Lefort; translated by John O'Neill Year: Written ~1950-52; published posthumously 1969 (French) / 1973 (English) Type: book (unfinished)
-
Trotsky's Horse
A recurring image in Merleau-Ponty's writings on politics, drawn from Leon Trotsky and quoted at least four times in MP's Inédits 1946–1949 (Mimesis 2022; see Chouraqui 2025 §2.2 and footnotes 8–10): "one learns to ride a horse by mounting…
-
Two Historicities
Merleau-Ponty's distinction (in Signs, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence") between two modes of historicity: (1) the cumulative historicity of advent, in which works communicate across time by the reactivation of their expressiv…
-
Ultrabolshevism
Merleau-Ponty's coinage, in Chapter 5 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), for Sartre's position in Les Communistes et la paix (1952–54). Ultrabolshevism is Bolshevism without the dialectic: it keeps every Bolshevik demand (pure action,…
-
Umdrehung des Platonismus
Nietzsche's self-described project, recorded already in 1870/71: "Meine Philosophie umgedrehter Platonismus: je weiter ab vom wahrhaft Seienden, um so reiner schöner besser ist es. Das Leben im Schein als Ziel" (IX, 190). Heidegger reads t…
-
Verflechtung
Husserl's term (verflochten, "interwoven") from "The Origin of Geometry" (HUA 370), adopted by Merleau-Ponty in his 1959–60 course notes as naming the triadic interweaving of man, world, and language — "a thick identity which truly contain…
-
Virtu (Merleau-Ponty's Machiavelli)
Merleau-Ponty's redeemed reading of Machiavellian virtu in the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949, collected in Signs as "Note sur Machiavel") — not as the cynical political objectivism that Koestler diagnosed in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945)…
-
What changes if flesh is already Marxist (1844 Manuscripts) rather than invented in V&I?
The decisive fact, flagged on flesh-as-element: in Course 3 of The Possibility of Philosophy (lines 1858–1894), Merleau-Ponty reads Marx's 1844 Manuscripts and arrives at the formulation "history is, in this sense, the very flesh of humani…