Perspectivism and Historical Objectivity: Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Covert Debate with Raymond Aron

Abstract

Consider the prospects for a of history as seen by two of France's most eminent philosophers of the mid-twentieth century. first opens Raymond Aron's work of 1938, Essai sur la theorie de l'histoire dans lmllemagne contemporaine. The traditional of history is completed in Hegel's system. Modern of history begins with the rejection of Hegelianism. idea is no longer to determine all at once the meaning of human historical development.' Aron studies the limits of objective historical knowledge in his a la philosophic de l'histoire. There he develops a modern philosophy that stresses the inherent subjectivity and historicity of any interpretation of the past.2 second view of a of history appeared seven years later, in the Introduction to Laphenomenologie de laperception by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: In each civilization, it is a question of rediscovering the idea in the Hegelian sense ... the formula of a unique behavior with respect to others, Nature, time and death, a certain way of giving form to the world which the historian should be able to take up and assume.3 Curiously, although such a position would seem to presuppose a critique of Aron's views, no such critique is apparent in MerleauPonty's works. It is well known that in the 1940s Merleau-Ponty was attempting to reconcile Marxism and existentialism, and that a certain interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind served as the mediator of disputes in the two theories.4 Also familiar is Aron's role as the most persistent and insightful critic of the marxisant tendencies in postwar existentialism.5 But hitherto entirely unknown has been