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Notes
In their The Promise of Phenomenology (2006: 269), Sugarman and Duncan mention that Wild “almost certainly” had given an undergraduate course on “Marxism and Existentialism” in the fall of 1966 when I began my post-doctoral fellowship in philosophy at Yale with the intention of studying phenomenology in earnest with Wild. I wonder if they tried to check with the Yale registrar’s office to make this fact certain. In the fall of 1966, I remember sitting only in his seminar on “Freedom and Responsibility” where I read Wild’s book Existence and the World of Freedom (1963) with utmost care.
Wild once recommended highly to read Edward A. Tiryakian’s essay “Existential Phenomenology and the Sociological Tradition,” American Sociological Review, 30 (Tiryakian 1965): 674–88, which is cited by Wild in note no. 6 in his present essay. Tiryakian also published Sociologism and Existentialism: Two Perspectives on the Individual and Society (1962). He makes so sharp a dualistic distinction between sociologism and individualism that he gives us the impression that the two positions are irreconcilable. In other words, there is no room for what Merleau-Ponty calls intermonde. If we go one step further in the context of Wild’s present essay, there would be no room to reconcile the existential individual and the Marxist collectivity.
I take Merleau-Ponty’s following passage (1963: 52–53) as the defense of Marx’s humanism against Hegel: “Philosophy is not an illusion. It is the algebra of history. Furthermore, the contingency of human events is no longer understood as a defect in the logic of history, but rather as its condition…. [T]he future is contingent. History has no meaning, if this meaning is understood as that of a river which, under the influence of all-powerful causes, flows towards an ocean in which it disappears. Every appeal to universal history cuts off the meaning of the specific event, renders effective history insignificant, and is a nihilism in disguise” (emphasis added). Cf. William James (1909: 100–1) who says: “Hegel was dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one, and certain, which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy” (emphasis original).
In the Far East, there was the consolidation of Maoism in China or what I call the Sinicization of Marxism. Soviet Marxists were highly critical of Maoism as pseudo-Marxism maintaining that the only true Marxism was Soviet Marxism. We all know that China became a cultural wasteland during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Sartre (1974: 58) observes this chaotic period: “…striking are the contradictions within the Cultural Revolution. There is a central discordance between the unleashing of mass initiatives and the cult of the leader. On the one side, there is the perpetual maintenance of the fused group with unlimited personal initiatives within it, with the possibility of writing anything in big-character posters, even ‘Chou Enlai to the gallows’—which did in fact happen in Peking; on the other side, there is the fetichization [sic] of the little red book, read aloud in waiting rooms, in airplanes, in railway stations, read before others who repeat it in chorus, read by taxi-drivers who stop their cab to read it to passengers—a hallucinating collective catechism which resounds from one end of China to the other” (emphasis added).
The Polish Marxist humanist Leszek Kolakowski who authored a comprehensive and critical three-volume history of Marxism (1978) wrote an imaginative essay “The Priest and the Jester” (1968: 9–37). The contrast between the “priest” and the “jester” is the “incurable” antagonism between “a philosophy that perpetuates the absolute and a philosophy that questions accepted absolutes” (ibid., p. 33). The distinction between the “priest” and the “jester” could be applied to the antagonism between the ruling orthodox Marxists and the newly emerging humanistic Marxists within the movement of Marxism itself.
Merleau-Ponty’s (1973: 207) following observation is profound: “There is no dialectic without opposition or freedom, and in a revolution opposition and freedom do not last for long. It is no accident that all known revolutions have degenerated: it is because as established regimes they can never be what they were as movements; precisely because it succeeded and ended up as an institution, the historical movement is no longer itself: it ‘betrays’ and ‘disfigures’ itself in accomplishing itself. Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes” (emphasis added).
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Jung, H.Y. Introduction to John Wild’s “Marxist humanism and existential philosophy”. Cont Philos Rev 44, 321–328 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9185-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-011-9185-6