Word: merleau
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Koestler's repudiation of Marxism can thus be seen as part of his general denial that history and politics have any claim on his inner life. For Merleau-Ponty suggests that Koestler's principles, "applied without compromise ... make it impossible to define a political position in the world as it is" ( Ibid., 174); If this is true, then Koestler's allegiances are an expression more of temperament and mood than of reasoned conviction, or self-interest. It now seems necessary for reasonable men to come to a political stance, even if their motive is to defend their inner lives against...
...that in his untimely opposition to Stalin, he was no better than a traitor. At the same time, he tried to deny with all the irony and passion still left to him that he was in fact in the service of a foreign country. That this denial was in Merleau-Ponty's account, so difficult to make, is a measure of the desperation of the old Bolsheviks facing Stalin's attack. Their intentions, they believed, had joined them to the enemies of the Revolution, and it must have seemed that to say aloud that their intention was not that...
What disturbs Merleau- Ponty is not that Koestler found that History had failed him, but that many men- Koestler included- should have come to think that History might guarantee their success. Such a view makes of history an objective will, at once the source and justification of our actions, and in particular of our violence. Undoubtedly we will need to be violent- or at least forceful- but it is dangerous to forget that it will be our violence, not History's, and that no view of history guarantees either our success or our justification...
THERE is violence in history, and liberalism frequently masks it. but, for Merleau-Ponty...
...Merleau- Ponty the ultimate intentions of communism were beyond question, but his reading of Marx did not permit him to forgive "deplorable tactics." For one of Marx's central insights is that in adopting a tactic one is knowingly or not, committing one's self to a particular view of history. And if your view is partial, or if what you counted on betrays you, you are still responsible for the outcome. It is this drama of historical responsibility that Merleau-Ponty lays bare for us in Koestler's novel, in the trial of Bukharin, and in the exile...