Word: merleau
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Finally, I think what disturbs Merleau-Ponty is that what we revere in Trotsky, the heroism of his life and mind, cannot be imitated. Without the particular circumstances of his life, our attempt to pursue his passion for the truth becomes merely our desire to be right. At the end of his life Merleau-Ponty asked himself
...Merleau-Ponty, it seems to me, was right many times in his life, often alone, facing the vituperation of Left and Right, and living with the misunderstandings of his friends. But to measure his life by the rightness of his beliefs must have seemed to him to be a last refusal to face the ambiguity of history. If we cling to such truths, we make them sterile, because we are forgetting how fragile and momentary our perception of them was, and remains...
...MEMORIAL essay, published some months after Merleau-Ponty died, Sartre wrote that "[Merleau-Ponty] showed me that I was making History in the same way that M. Jourdain was speaking prose." ( Situations, p. 176) But to know that we are making history all the time is not yet to know how we are making it, day by day, and how we are to live with such knowledge. When Merleau-Ponty reproached Trotsky for an incomplete attention to "the compromises of everyday history," he was in part recording our need to be awakened to "the importance of daily events and action...
What philosophy could do, what Merleau-Ponty devoted his work to doing, was to "arouse in us a love for our times ... [and] like the most fragile object of perception- a soap bubble or a wave- or like the simplest dialogue, embrace... indivisibly all the order and the disorder of the world...
...past because its quarrels remained unresolved, and its dreams unfulfilled, and we have inherited its disorder. If we respond to this disorder by deploring the weakness and blindness of those who left it to us, we will miss our chances for strength and insight. "History never confesses," wrote Merleau-Ponty, "not even her lost illusions, but neither does she dream of them again." ( Signs, p. 35) When we discover that we persist in those illusions, and when we stop asking the past to condemn itself and justify our present, then we may, if we are careful in our attention...