Childlike Peace in Merleau-Ponty and Levinas by Bahler Brock;

Author:Bahler, Brock;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Gaze as a Derivation of the Primordial Common Bond

For Sartre too, the subject feels an immense weight because “he is responsible for the world” (BN 707). In fairness to Sartre, the anguish the subject feels is not because I find myself responsible for others and wish I were not; rather, it is because I find myself responsible without any clear road map to tell me how to best satisfy my multiple and often competing responsibilities.[40] However, Sartre offers little evidence for the possibility that my responsibilities might be shared with others or that others might help me bear these burdens. Rather, the other is conceived as one who “decenters my freedom, and destroys me” (AD 107; cf. 193), and thus, Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity “tends toward violence” (161). To this, Merleau-Ponty replies that the Sartrean gaze and resulting objectification do not constitute the most primordial mode of contact with the other but is merely “an insincere modality of others” (PP 521 / PP 512). Rather than being alienated, I first encounter the other through mutual dialogue within the context of a meaningful world. I experience a common relation that establishes the possibility of discourse before I experience it severed (413, 420 / 407, 414).

Whereas in Sartre, self and other are “too exclusively antithetic” (SNS 72 / SNS 125) to one another and begin in “a position of rivalry” (AD 98), the parent-child relation suggests that the self-other relation is first a “living bond and communication” (SNS 72 / SNS 125; cf. 81 / 141; VI 81–82n14 / VI 113n1). If one begins with conflict as the basis of the encounter with the other as Sartre does, it is not clear how he can explain why we do or even should engage one another positively on the social level. Thus, like his emphasis of a primordial sympathy against Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, against Sartre’s “pessimistic propositions,” Merleau-Ponty speaks of “a reciprocal optimism” (SNS 74 / SNS 129).[41]

Using dialogue as the point of contact with the other, Merleau-Ponty makes several observations. First, dialogue reveals that the Sartrean subject-object bifurcation is too simplistic. I am neither a solipsistic monad that is absolutely free nor a subject whose possibilities have been drained by the other. I do not have to “choose between others and myself,” for in dialogue we must both be present or there would be no conversation at all (PP 420 / PP 414; cf. AD xxiii, xxv, 200).[42] Second, during a conversation, I do not find myself wondering whether the other is treating me as an object. The other is only “felt as a threat” later when I analyze the conversation in my interior self (PP 413 / PP 407). The “reflective operation” of the cogito is secondary to the “prereflective” activities that make up our communication with others (VI 69 / VI 98; cf. IP 134).

Third, when disappointment ensues—when I feel that I have not been heard or have been ignored by the other—it is precisely because of the prior expectation of communication (PP 420 / PP 414; AD 138).

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