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Tag: history
Pages tagged with history.
51 pages
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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…
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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
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Blind vs. Manifested Necessity (Hegel)
The distinction between blind and manifested necessity is Hegel's signature account of the necessity-passes-into-freedom doctrine, located in the closing pages of the Dritter Abschnitt of the Doctrine of Essence (GW 11 raw 6131–6168, with…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Effective History (Wirkungsgeschichte)
Effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte, "history of effect") is Gadamer's name for the way history is already at work in all understanding, prior to and beneath any reflective awareness of it: "the power of effective history does not depend…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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
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Ideal Objectivity (The Origin of Geometry)
The concept worked out in "The Origin of Geometry" (Crisis Appendix VI — the text Derrida famously introduced): an ideal objectivity is a spiritual product, such as the Pythagorean theorem, that "exists only once," is omnitemporally the sa…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Is Ineinander the late ontology's replacement for institution, or its ontological ground?
This is the standing Open Question recorded at institution line 271: "How does institution relate to the later concept of ineinander? The 1954–55 course develops institution; Course 10 (1958–59) first introduces Ineinander. The symbolic-ma…
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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…
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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…
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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;…
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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…
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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)
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Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics
Author(s): Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.) Year: 2026 Type: edited volume (12 chapters + Introduction; 3 thematic Parts)
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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-…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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)
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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)…
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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…
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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…
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Teleological-Historical Reflection
The distinctive method of the Crisis, announced in the 1936 Preface: "by way of a teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation, to establish the unavoidable necessity of a trans…
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Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1992 (English collection); pieces span 1933–1961 Type: book (anthology)
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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)
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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)
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Tradition (Gadamer)
For Gadamer, tradition (Überlieferung) is not the inert, given antithesis of reason but a living mode of preservation (Bewahrung) that is itself "an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one." We do not stand outside tradition and choose…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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)…
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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…