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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2022
I take my cue for the title of this paper from Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist, who wrote in 1948 that “the political experience of the past thirty years oblige us to evoke the background of non-sense against which every universal undertaking is silhouetted and by which it is threatened with failure.” Merleau-Ponty refers to the experience of that generation of intellectuals for whom Marxism was a “mistaken hope” because it lost “confidence in its own daring when it was successful in only one country.” But this criticism is equally relevant for a new generation of intellectuals in America for whom the ideals of liberalism have been emptied of reality and have become little more than a super-rational mystique for the Cold War, a counter-revolutionary reflex in the third world, and a narrow perspective of social welfare at home. Merleau-Ponty argues that Marxism “abandoned its own proletarian methods and resumed the classical ones of history: hierarchy, obedience, myth, inequality, diplomacy, and police. Today intellectuals in America are making the same critique with equal fervor about their own lost illusions.
As we search for new ways to comprehend the social realities of American life and new modes of social thought and political action to reconstruct “the American dream,” Merleau-Ponty's notion of sense and nonsense guides us to see the historical relationship between ideologies and practice, between thought and action, between man and the world he creates. It symbolizes that recurrent fact in history whereby reason parades as unreason, where even “the highest form of reason borders on unreason.” We must learn from recent history that “the experience of unreason cannot simply be forgotten;” that the most noble claims to universal truth, the most rational modes of philosophical or social inquiry, the most convincing declarations of political leaders are all contingent, and should be subject to revision and open to criticism and change.
To appear in The Caucus Papers: Essays in the New Political Science, edited by Alan Wolfe and Marvin Surkin, to be published by Basic Books in 1970.
I want to thank the Hwa Yol Jung for suggesting the title and also for making available to me his unpublishe' paper, “Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory.”
1 Sense and Nonsense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 4.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 5.
6 American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969).
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13 Though I agree, I am not at all sure how one goes about determining the point at which science begins and ideology leaves off.
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28 In a perceptive article, William Ryan criticizes The Moynihan Report for drawing inexact conclusions from weak and insufficient data; encouraging a new form of subtle racism which he calls “savage Discovery,” i.e., the belief that it is the weaknesses and defects of the Negro himself that account for the present status of inequality between Negro and white; and for interpreting statistical relationships in cause-and-effect terms. See “Savage Discovery: The Moynihan Report,” in ibid., p. 458.
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47 Ibid.
48 McDermott, op. cit.
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53 This formulation was suggested to me by Robin Blackburn.
