JOSEP MARIA BECH

This paper studies five approaches on the future of alterity that awaits ideas and doctrines. According to these predictions, embedded in texts by Weber, Meinecke, Butterfield, Merleau-Ponty and Koselleck, the coming forms of thinking shall endure the same destiny affecting the ideas of the past because they will evolve without relying on historical sameness. The future of Western thought, in short, is bound to an unpredictable "destiny of otherness". These claims, taken together, outline a redirection of the genealogical untangling to the future. While they persist on linking present phenomena to realities deemed historically "other", they also foresee that this fate of alterity will prevail in future times, an enlargement of scope that results in a symmetrically expanded genealogy. This universalized "discourse of historical otherness" makes evident that genealogy, in addition to its involvement with past vicissitudes of ideas and beliefs, is also bound to explore their future emmeshing with alterity. Its "forward-looking inflection" will proscribe historiographic prolepsis, contending that the destiny of otherness awaiting ideas and doctrines excludes any surmise about the meaning they will be given in the future.

The aim of this paper is to find out whether Gadamer is entitled to hold together his finitist commitment to the heteronomy of art and thought, and his advocacy of an "endless conversation with itself" of humankind. We focus on three texts: Gadamer's dismissal of Carl Schmitt's outside-in account of the heteronomy implied by the "irruption of reality" in the play Hamlet and, as Archimedean point, Shakespeare's "excision of reality" according to Stephen Greenblatt, and its inside-out heteronomic consequences. The results: Schmitt's approach restricts Gadamer's argument on the "endless dialogue", Gadamer's rejoinder aggravates his own argumentative fragility, and Greenblatt's perspectivation discloses a non-sequitur. The inspection of these texts attests that heteronomy per se does not entail any openness to "creative" interpretations, that a universalized logos endiéthetos is a chimera, and that there cannot be any "infinite conversation" which would sustain the Gadamerian interplay of question and answer.

In the historiography of thought, meaning-directed internalism vies with socially oriented externalism. Philosophy and sociology resemble «two shells each of which might claim to frame the other». In this respect, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu set up an exemplary case. Merleau-Ponty aimed at philosophically accounting for the foundations of society, whereas Bourdieu attempted to sociologically reduce philosophy. This paper intends to understand in detail how these two reverse-mirrored approaches actually worked. Comparing them with each other brings to light that they are intricately related, since one of them both stems from and undermines its opponent. While Bourdieu's intellectual attitude was outwardly akin to Merleau-Ponty's, the mindsets of these two authors, on closer inspection, look startlingly dissimilar.

In the last third of the 20th century, the Bielefeld School of social history, headed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, rose to prominence. It had contrasting concerns: the focus on structures and processes of development sidelined intentional action and coexisted with a political rewriting of the past that indicted the interests and decisions of dominant elites in Germany from 1870 to 1933. History was viewed, oddly enough, as retrospective politics. This article analyses the main <em>aporiae</em> implied by both the School's programme and its scholarly output. How did a structuralist historiography contrive backward-looking political denunciations? Is our time entitled to judge and accuse the past? Notwithstanding the weight of structures and processes, were there real alternatives for the historical agents? Did systemic causality grant elbowroom to intentional action? What chances were then missed and why? Overall, the surmise that there were always choices ...

Bourdieu’s intermittent allusions to Spinoza’s conatus disclose the weaknesses of his concept of habitus. A thorough inspection of his involvement with the Spinozist legacy reveals a long-lasting inconsistency, for he expects that conatus will assist him in both 1) grounding the habitus and solving the uncertainties that surround this notion by endorsing a strong conatus, impervious to the resistances it will eventually encounter; and 2) re-instating agency in the structuralist mindset, a program retrospectively admitted by Bourdieu in 1987 and bound to a weak conatus, exposed to the interfering resistance of exterior forces and thus determined by the interaction with contingent events. Bourdieu noticed this incongruity around 1993. At that time, he renounced to buttressing the habitus by means of the dynamizing character of conatus. So began the later evolution of his thought, linked to the antithetical demand of both a weak and a strong conatus, a request commanded in its turn by ...

Why has Pierre Bourdieu's thought come to matter so much in our time? This paper intends to prove that the answer lies in the (partly concealed) presence of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical tenets in many aspects of Bourdieu's manifold oeuvre. They steer it decisively and, though formerly undetected, give access to their deeper meaning. Besides, most obscurities in Bourdieu's output become dispelled only if we scrutinize its roots in Merleau-Ponty's thought. Accordingly, the thorny Bourdieuan notions of habitus, field, diacritical standpoint, structure of position-takings, cultural capital, scholastic fallacy, or reflexive sociology are to be elucidated with the aid of intellectual tools supplied by Merleau-Ponty, like operant intentionality, embodied significance, the invisible, the pensée de survol or hyperdialectics. We conclude that, at odds with most social theories, Bourdieu's account preserves the existential inscrutability of human demeanour thanks to its Merleau-Pontian ingredients.

Bourdieu's intermittent allusions to Spinoza's conatus disclose the weaknesses of his concept of habitus. A thorough inspection of his involvement with the Spinozist legacy reveals a long-lasting inconsistency, for he expects that conatus will assist him in both 1) grounding the habitus and solving the uncertainties that surround this notion by endorsing a strong conatus, impervious to the resistances it will eventually encounter; and 2) reinstating agency in the structuralist mindset, a program retrospectively admitted by Bourdieu in 1987 and bound to a weak conatus, exposed to the interfering resistance of exterior forces and thus determined by the interaction with contingent events. Bourdieu noticed this incongruity around 1993. At that time, he renounced to buttressing the habitus by means of the dynamizing character of conatus. So began the later evolution of his thought, linked to the antithetical demand of both a weak and a strong conatus, a request commanded in its turn by an overarching habitus. One outcome of this conflict is that agency can hardly be summoned if Bourdieu's conception of a "strong" conatus prevails and the dispositions making up the habitus are irreversible. In contrast, both Bourdieu's appeal to controlled improvisation, and the ensuing concept of strategy, demand a "weak" conatus. Overall, the notion of habitus has been dubbed "a Trojan Horse for determinism" and endorses in fact what might be called the "mythology of permanence," that is, the historically long-held belief in an all-embracing everlastingness. Bourdieu's use of Spinoza's conatus, in sum, besides highlighting the immutable social reproduction entailed by the habitus, acts as a litmus test for the ambiguities and shortcomings of this notion.

In the historiography of thought, meaning-directed internalism vies with socially oriented externalism, which echoes the much wider, scholarly circumstance that philosophy and sociology often resemble two entities each of which might claim to frame the other. In this respect, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu set up an exemplary case. Merleau-Ponty aimed at philosophically accounting for the foundations of society, while Bourdieu attempted a sociological approach to philosophy. This paper intends to understand how these two reverse-mirrored approaches actually worked. Comparing them with each other brings to light that they are intricately related, since one of them both stems from and undermines its opponent. While Bourdieu's intellectual attitude was outwardly akin to Merleau-Ponty's, the mindsets of these two authors, on closer inspection, look startlingly dissimilar.

Es notorio que el pensamiento de Merleau-Ponty contiene constantes referencias a temas de carácter histórico, social, y político. Para cultivar estos intereses construyó el filósofo las correspondientes “ontologías especiales”, pero lo cierto es que tales soportes conceptuales producen la impresión de anularse recíprocamente cuando se les observa con el debido detenimiento. En la reflexión merleau-pontiana, con todo, es posible entrever un virtual “punto de fuga” de índole cultural que sería capaz de conciliar estas divergentes ontologías. El interés de Merleau-Ponty por los temas históricos asegura un acceso privilegiado a la ontología anti-dualista que defendió en los últimos años de su vida y que contribuye a explicar su evolución filosófica. La permanente atracción que la historia ejerció sobre su pensamiento estuvo centrada en las ambigüedades de la experiencia concreta, por lo cual estuvo más armonizada con su compromiso filosófico que la percepción o el lenguaje, siempre expuestos a una intelectualización encubierta. En palabras de un estudioso de Merleau-Ponty, “la historia es precisamente el ‘milieu louche’ que desde luego no colabora con la psicología y la sociología en esclarecer la condición humana, pero que en cambio ahonda en las profundidades de nuestra existencia concreta, donde la inercia de las condiciones objetivas coincide con una autonomía constructora de mundos, razón por la cual debería ser el centro de todas las preocupaciones filosóficas”. Las ambigüedades de la historia abren un atajo en dirección a la ontología anticartesiana que Merleau-Ponty dejó inacabada: “su descripción del ser en el seno del ser mismo es también el descubrimiento de la historia en el seno de la propia historia”. Este ámbito inédito le obligó a abandonar la idea de una conciencia soberana y constituyente como fundamento doctrinal absoluto. Una filosofía que se interesa por la historia, según su postrera manera de pensar, no puede ser una filosofía de la conciencia.

El pensamiento de Merleau-Ponty se fundamenta de manera predominante en la categoría de la “no coincidencia”. Es decir que se basa (formulado en su propia terminología) en la “divergencia o écart”, la “no-transparencia” o la “no-adecuación”, puesto que tanto la percepción como el conocimiento, desde su punto de vista, están lejos de dar acceso a las cosas percibidas o conocidas. La realidad se manifiesta impregnada de transcendencia, y análogamente el pensamiento debe recorrer la “inquietante distancia” que separa al sujeto de sí mismo y que se interpone entre cada objeto y su identidad. Así aparecen sin fundamento algunas notorias afirmaciones sobre la “reversibilidad” presuntamente asignada por Merleau-Ponty al doblete “distancia vs. inmediatez”. Una aproximación crítica al pensamiento de Merleau-Ponty no puede dejar de advertir que sus múltiples aspectos están enlazados por una compartida característica: la persistente defensa del pensamiento de la no-coincidencia, al cual nuestro autor denominó también «de la divergencia o écart», «de la no-posesión-transparente», y «de la no-fusión». Por lo pronto entiende Merleau-Ponty esta crucial «no-coincidencia» en el sentido inespecífico de que ni la percepción ni el conocimiento coinciden consigo mismos, así como tampoco coinciden, a su vez, con las cosas percibidas o pensadas. O sea que en todos los casos sobreviene un flagrante déficit en la prevista «adecuación». Crudamente formulado, se trata de que un ingrediente de transcendencia se infiltra capilarmente en toda realidad, dando lugar a que la divergencia o écart se interponga entre sus componentes, cualesquiera que éstos sean y a todos los niveles imaginables. Con lo cual el tema prioritario para el pensamiento, según Merleau-Ponty, no puede ser más que la «extraña distancia»  que separa al sujeto de sí mismo y que aleja cada cosa de su posible identidad.

A pesar de las evidentes diferencias entre los temas y los objetivos de ambos pensadores, sin duda Merleau-Ponty comparte con Max Weber no solamente una característica bifocalidad metodológica sino, sobre todo, cierto número de cruciales disposiciones operativas. Entre ellas destacan la necesidad de imponer sentido a una realidad-trasfondo con la que media el “hiato irracional”, la minuciosa atención a los sutiles pero omnipresentes efectos de la cultura, o una disposición fundamental de carácter constructivista y no adecuacionista, y por esta razón irrevocablemente posibilista. A nadie se le escapa que el pensamiento de Merleau-Ponty difiere del de Max Weber, sobre todo, en que su interés predominante no estuvo dirigido a la cultura, la economía, la jurisprudencia, la sociedad o la historia. Al mismo tiempo es notorio que Merleau-Ponty se preocupó por fundamentar una ontología social y cultural, además de esbozar una filosofía de la historia, al tiempo que elaboraba su ontología general. Más allá de esta sintonía de orden subalterno, lo cierto es que el modo de pensar de Merleau-Ponty, o sea su ubicuo “estilo meditativo”, es en gran medida deudor de la lectura de Weber, cuyos resultados y conclusiones plasmó notoriamente en las Aventuras de la dialéctica. Esto no quiere decir que el “weberianismo” sea un talante obstinado y omnipresente en el pensamiento de Merleau-Ponty. Más bien se trata de un conjunto de rasgos operativos que deben ser detectados en la sorprendente evolución de su pensamiento, relegando a un segundo plano sus innegables fluctuaciones e indecisiones doctrinales.

El principal objetivo del presente trabajo es indagar si las habituales tentativas por descifrar el pensamiento desde un punto de vista sociológico, a pesar de su vehemente compromiso antirreduccionista, podrían aceptar en último término la reducción de ideas, argumentos y doctrinas a sus presuntos determinantes sociales. En una primera etapa analizamos el “sociologismo anómalo” de Martin Kusch, señalamos algunas de

Merleau-Ponty es percibido como una especie de “pensador nómada” (o como diría Lévi-Strauss: provisto de una “mentalidad neolítica”) porque su trayectoria filosófica abarcó intereses y orientaciones extremadamente diversos. Este artículo pretende hacer inteligibles los (con frecuencia desconcertantes) reenfoques y rectificaciones merleau-pontianos, comenzando por su revisión de la herencia de Husserl (un legado que Merleau-Ponty creía haber transformado de raíz) y culminando en sus múltiples tentativas por allanar la diferencia fenoménica entre pensar y sentir.

In the last third of the 20th century, the Bielefeld School of social history, headed by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, rose to prominence. It had contrasting concerns: the focus on structures and processes of development sidelined intentional action and coexisted with a political rewriting of the past that indicted the interests and decisions of dominant elites in Germany from 1870 to 1933. History was viewed, oddly enough, as retrospective politics. This article analyses the main aporiae implied by both the School’s programme and its scholarly output. How did a structuralist historiography contrive backward-looking political denunciations? Is our time entitled to judge and accuse the past? Notwithstanding the weight of structures and processes, were here real alternatives for the historical agents? Did systemic causality grant elbowroom to intentional action? What chances were then missed and why? Overall, the surmise that there were always choices clashes with received narratives of inevitability.

Merleau-Ponty resisted viewing his own thought as Grundphilosophie, that is, a way of thinking that would refer reality, knowledge and meaning to an ultimate principle, able to ground everything while also grounding itself. He was also reluctant to appeal to a mere empirical foundation, inescapably compromised with contingency and facticity. He argued that all possibilities of meaning in history are the outcome of specific, immanent inter-human practices, and in consequence the future is neither a recurrence of the present nor an empty possibility that a subjective project might fulfill. With the notion of " institution " Merleau-Ponty seeks to account for these fundamental convictions, while avoiding the danger of " conscientialism " , that is, the view that not only is consciousness the unique purveyor of meaning, capable of unifying in a closed, homogeneous system the multiplicity of social articulations, but also that, as a result, history emerges from the reciprocal acknowledgment of all constitutive consciousness. In this regard the basic premise is that the meaning of events in history neither is imposed " from the inside " by the spontaneity of a projective or " constituting " consciousness, nor is granted " from the outside " by an all-encompassing destiny that would be causally grounded, for instance, in the development of economic forces. Besides, this notion reveals an underlying logic that embraces the entire cultural order: as we will see below, in an experience or in an artifact are lodged certain dimensions (understood in the Cartesian manner as systems of reference) in relation to which a whole succession of future experiences will possess meaning and thus will form a sequel or a history. Events that lay down a meaning as a demand of things to come The doctrine of " institution " was developed alongside the early evolution of Merleau-Ponty's thought. Some incipient references to issues that lately were brought together by this concept appear already in The Structure of Behavior. Among them stand out: the problem of historical time (" in physical as well as in mental life there is no past that is absolutely past, since 'the spirit holds in its actual depth the moments that it seems to have left behind' 1 "), the enigma of emergent meaning (" the higher level of behavior embraces all ancillary dialectics in the real depth of its existence "), or the difficulties of both holism and transcendentalism (" the presumed 'existence conditions' cannot be distinguished from the whole to which they contribute, and conversely the essence of the whole cannot be thought in its concreteness if we disregard them and its constitutive history "). The next step took place in Phenomenology of Perception, where the still embryonic meaning of " institution " appears related to the term Stiftung: act or process (not only relation, therefore) of grounding a concrete relationship (that is: not a causal, but an " essence " relationship) between form and content, thought and perception. And in the essay Around Marxism (" Autour du marxisme "), written in 1945 and included in Sens et non-sens, Merleau-Ponty stated his project of understanding the ambiguity of history beyond the usual polarity of causal mecanicism and finalism ruled by a rational or transcendent ground. While acknowledging the noticeable meaninglessness of the present time, he endeavored to identify the clusters of embryonic meaning that unify events in their making and which face the risk of falling back into insignificance. In short, he strived to decipher the process of historical becoming by the sole means of discerning its fragile, immanent trends.

Merleau-Ponty’s thought underwent circa 1957 a twofold change of orientation, which consisted in a shallow alteration embedded in a profound upheaval. While coincident with Merleau-Ponty’s involvement with Schelling’s philosophy of nature, only noticeable “externalist” determinants actually explain this two-faced transmutation. The primary aim of this paper is to explain the change that the multi-faceted conception of Nature in Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre went through when he dissected Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in the famed lectures on the concept of Nature held over a three-year period (1956-1958, 1959-1960) at the Collège de France. As it is well known, Merleau-Ponty’s own philosophy of Nature had been steadily evolving since his philosophical debut. A former classical or “naturalist” conception of nature as “nature-in-itself,” depicted as a “manifold of objective events bound by causal links,” had gradually unfolded into a specific “interrogation” of nature as a reality exceedingly diverse and loaded with inner diffractions. He eventually rejected naturalism because “the extraordinary confusion about the idea of Nature held by modern thinkers” ran parallel to “the misunderstandings brought by their ‘naturalism’” (RC, 127). Concurrently, the “per¬ceived world” or “monde perçu” could no longer be enclosed in a Nature dependent on objectivist ontology.

Helmut Schelsky coined the term “anti-sociology” in 1959, yet this episode was only the academic recognition of a persistent “anti-sociological discourse” that had been growing both within and outside sociology and is still effective in our days. During more than a century, this skeptical way of thinking has been seeping into social thought. The anti-sociological discourse developed within sociology (or, at least, its disciplinary margins) has been flowing steadily. By contrast, the part played by extra-sociological thinkers has endured dramatic adjustments. Its reactive beginnings (the incipient anti-sociology consisted chiefly in responses to earlier mistrust from sociology’s ranks) gave way to a gradual acquisition of autonomy. Its outcome has been a growing rejection of the aims, contentions and procedures of sociology. The intra- and extra-sociologically originated discourses display a momentous contrast. Whereas agency was for the former a concern among others, a great deal of the latter rejects agency as just another established untruth. In overview, the ever-increasing autonomy of this anti-sociological discourse and its mounting dismissal of agency have gone hand in hand. To scrutinize this twofold trend is one of our aims. Another goal is to prove that a branch of the anti-sociological discourse entails the downgraded type of agency that we will explore under the label “paradoxical agency”.

The universal aspirations placed by Merleau-Ponty’s on his “perceptivist” model for thought, and despite the confident diagnostic of the bulk of his followers, failed for the most part. In fact his operative innovations were only half-successful when confronting questions of historical agency or political performance and they floundered utterly when set to scrutinize the actual thought of some canonical authors.

Le but majeur de cet article est prouver que le modèle perceptif agencé par Merleau-Ponty comporte des effets dépolitisants qui désavouent à son insu sa propre compréhension du fait politique. Au même temps nous voulons montrer que les conséquences distinctement antipolitiques amenées par le programme merleau-pontien de perceptivisation de la pensée mettent en relief les difficultés internes de son parti-pris l'anti-intellectualiste. Contrastant avec la portée inchoative qu'ont la plupart de ses doctrines, il y eut trois domaines où Merleau-Ponty, quoique avec un succès inégal, appliqua à fond son modèle perceptif : la présentation de sa propre pensée, où son programme de picturalisation obtint un triomphe éclatant, l'éclaircissement du processus historique, où son modèle visualisateur ne fut efficace qu'à demi, et l'accès à la pensée d'autrui, où ses vues perceptivistes essuyèrent un indéniable échec. Sur cette dernière démarche on établira, en effet, que les successives approches de Merleau-Ponty à la pensée d'autrui attestent un imprévu déficit politique selon deux voies distinctes et par delà ses propres intentions. En premier lieu, le modèle perceptif devisé par Merleau-Ponty, dont les insuffisances apparaissent nettement quand il est appliqué en profondeur, s'avère incompatible avec ses idées politiques et desservit en conséquence la cohésion de sa pensée. En second lieu, et dans une perspective plus large, il gêne les approches réflexives à la politique puisqu'il en dégrade les assisses conceptuelles. À grands traits, donc, il s'agit de montrer successivement que Merleau-Ponty à agencé un modèle perceptif de portée universelle ; qu'il l'à appliqué à plusieurs domaines, la politique parmi eux ; que ce modèle s'avère politiquement déficitaire quand il sert à prélever des sources autochtones de sens ; que ces effets dépolitisants s'aiguisent quand Merleau-Ponty emploie le modèle perceptif pour élucider la pensée d'autrui ; et que, en conclusion, sa déconvenue dans ce domaine non seulement déprécie ses réflexions politiques, mais signale aussi que le modèle perceptif empêche une « pensée du politique » tout court. LA CONDITION VISUELLE DE LA PENSÉE : DU « MODÈLE PERCEPTIF » AU « PROGRAMME DE PICTURALISATION » Un trait persistent du procédé merleau-pontien consista à envisager la pensée du point de vue de la perception. Il ne démordit jamais, en effet, de la conviction que « le mouvement de la pensée [est] du même ordre » que « l'éclatement du monde sensible entre nous : partout il y a sens, dimensions, figures par delà ce que chaque 'conscience' aurait pu produire ».

By affirming the “originary” and “unmotivated” character of nature and through the related attempt to refer science back to the natural world, pre-theoretical and ante-predicative, Merleau-Ponty fostered a new discipline of thought which could be named “science of the pre-science”. The main aim of this paradoxical “proto-science” is to indict “normal science’s” blindness towards primordial reality. The depth of our perceptual life, in brief, would have remained unheeded without Merleau-Ponty’s intrepid plunging.

The age-old controversy pitting explanation against understanding has amazingly mutated in our time because nowadays each of these procedures attempts to replicate and even occasionally mimetizes the features traditionally ascribed to the competing practice.

This paper claims that Merleau-Ponty relationship with holism was ambivalent and intricate. It has not been fully apprehended by the decades-long controversy on the holistic slant of his later output. Merleau-Ponty did not merely depart from holism in Adventures of dialectics, as upheld by Claude Lefort, nor did he simply expand his holistic allegiance thereafter and advocated wider totalities, as Martin Jay maintains. His thought belies crude ascriptions or denials of holism. Merleau-Ponty’s holistic commitment after Adventures of dialectics (anti-subjectivist, anti-originist, externalist) reveals a strong attachment to holism, which co-existed throughout with an anti-holistic cast of mind.

The difficulties of Bourdieu's thought require that we distinguish its affirmative, thetic or engaged features (constructivist, critical, competitive or agonistic, relational or anti-substantialist) from those derived from his anti-Manichean, anti-dualist or anti-dichotomist concerns, bent to a combination or conciliation of opposites. Bourdieu pursues compromises, blends disparate viewpoints, and steers a middle course between contrary forces. An urge to counterpoint characterizes his work, and he tries to get around the conceptual dichotomies that have set down fault-lines in the social sciences (above all, historical specificity against rationalist universalism, and objectivist " structuralism " against subjectivist " phenomenology "). Yet some affirmative aspects of Bourdieu's thought interfere with his anti-Manichean resolve, which results in a theoretical diplopia or " double vision " .