Humanism and Terror Quotes

“Recently someone asked, for whom does one write? That is a profound question. One should always dedicate a book. Not that one alters one's thoughts with a change of interlocutor, but because every word, whether we know it or not, is always a word with someone, which presupposes a certain degree of esteem or friendship, the resolution of a certain number of misunderstandings, the transcendence of a certain latent content and, finally the appearance of a part of the truth in the encounters we live.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“In advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“To abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have in it more genuine humanity.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“Contemporary politics is truly an arena in which questions are badly put, or put in such a way that one cannot side with either of the two present contestants. We are called to choose between them. Our duty is to do no such thing.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“The human world is an open or unfinished system and the same radical contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevitability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it, providing only that one remembers its various machineries are actually men and tries to maintain and expand man's relations to man.

Such a philosophy cannot tell us that humanity will be realized as though it possessed some knowledge apart and were not itself embarked upon experience, being only a more acute consciousness of it. But it awakens us to the importance of daily events and action. For it is a philosophy which arouses in us a love for our times which are not the simple repetition of human eternity nor merely the conclusion to premises already postulated. It is a view which like the most fragile object of perception—a soap bubble, or a wave—or like the most simple dialogue, embraces indivisibly all the order and all the disorder of the world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“The decline of proletarian humanism is not a crucial experience which invalidates the whole of Marxism. It is still valid as a critique of the present world and alternative humanisms. In this respect, at least, it cannot be surpassed. Even if it is incapable of shaping world history, it remains powerful enough to discredit other solutions. On close consideration,
Marxism is not just any hypothesis that might be replaced tomorrow by some other. It is the simple statement of those conditions without which there would be neither any humanism, in the sense of a mutual relation between men, nor any rationality in history. In this sense Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history and to
renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there remain only dreams or adventures...

History has a meaning only if there is a logic of human coexistence which does not make any event impossible, butat least through a kind of natural selection eliminates in the long run those events which diverge from the permanent needs of men. Thus any philosophy of history will postulate
something like what is called historical materialism—namely, the idea that morals, concepts of law and reality, modes of production and work, are internally related and clarify each other. In a genuine philosophy of history all human activities form a system in which at any moment no problem is
separable from the rest, in which economic and other problems are part of a larger problem, where, finally, the productive forces of the economy are of cultural significance just as, inversely, ideologies are of economic significance...

It is possible to deny that the proletariat will ever be in a position to fulfill its historical mission, or that the condition of the proletariat as described by Marx is sufficient to set a proletarian revolution on the path to a concrete humanism. One may doubt that all history's violence stems from the capitalist
system. But it is difficult to deny that as long as the proletariat remains a proletariat, humanity, or the recognition of man by man, remains a dream or a mystification. Marxism perhaps does not have the power to convince us that one day, and in the way it expects, man will be the supreme being for man, but it still makes us understand that humanity is humanity only in name as long as most of mankind lives by selling itself, while some are masters and others slaves.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“The Revolution takes on and directs a violence
which bourgeois society tolerates in unemployment and in war and disguises with the name of misfortune. But successful revolutions taken altogether have not spilled as much blood as the empires. All we know is different kinds of violence and we ought to prefer revolutionary violence because it has a future of humanism.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less, or something else than we thought we were doing.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“Marxism, rather than an affirmation of a future that is necessary, is much more a judgment of the present as contradictory and intolerable.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“Marxism does not offer us a Utopia, a future known ahead of time, nor any philosophy of history. However, it deciphers events, discovers in them a common meaning and thereby grasps a leading thread which, without dispensing us from fresh analysis at every stage, allows us to orient ourselves toward events. Marxism is as foreign to a dogmatic
philosophy of history which seeks to impose by fire and sword a visionary future of mankind as it is to a terrorism lacking all perspective. It seeks, rather, to offer men a perception of history which would continuously clarify the lines of force and vectors of the present.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“The future is only probable but it is not any empty
zone in which we can construct gratuitous projects; it is sketched before us like the beginning of the day's end, and its outline is ourselves. The objects of perception are likewise only probable since we are far from having a complete analysis of them; that does not mean that in their very nature and existence they appear to be absolutely under our
control. For us the probability that characterizes objects is what is real and one can only devalue it with reference to the chimera of an apodictic certainty which has no grounds. What should be said is not that "everything is relative," but that "everything is absolute"; the simple fact that man perceives an historical situation as meaningful in a way he believes true introduces a phenomenon of truth of which skepticism has no account and which
challenges its conclusions. The contingency of history is only a shadow at the edge of a view of the future from which we can no more refrain than we can from breathing...Even if every historical choice is subjective, every subjectivity nevertheless reaches through its phantasms to things themselves and aims
at the truth. Any description of history as the confrontation of choices that cannot be justified omits the fact that every conscience experiences itself engaged with others in a common history, argues in order to convince them, weighs and
compares its own chances and those of others, and in seeing itself bound to others through external circumstances establishes the grounds of a presumptive rationality upon which their argument can take place and acquire a meaning.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“We are not spectators of a closed history; we are actors in an open history, our praxis introduces the element of construction rather than knowledge as an ingredient of the world, making the world not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed. What we cannot imagine is a consciousness without a future and a history with an end. Thus, as long as there are men, the future will be open and there will only be a probabilistic calculation and no absolute knowledge.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“History is not made in advance...It depends on the
will and audacity of men upon occasion, and...it contains an element of contingency and risk.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“The paradox of history...is that a contingent future, once it enters the present, appears real and even necessary.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“Those who resisted were neither madmen nor wise men; they were heroes—men in whom passion and reason were identical, who in the obscurity of desire did what history expected and what was later to appear as the truth of the moment. We cannot
remove the element of reason in their choice any more than the element of audacity and risk of failure.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“There is a sort of maleficence in history: it solicits men, tempts them so that they believe they are moving in its direction, and then suddenly it unmasks, and events change and prove that there was another possibility. The men whom history abandons in this way and who see themselves simply as accomplices suddenly find themselves the instigators of a crime to which history has inspired
them. And they are unable to look for excuses or to excuse themselves from even a part of the responsibility.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“We are not accusing liberalism of being a system of violence; we reproach it with not seeing its own face in violence, with veiling the pact upon which it rests while rejecting as barbarous that other source of freedom—revolutionary freedom which is the origin of all social pacts.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“Marxism rested on the profound idea that human perspetives, however relative, are absolute because there is nothing else and no destiny. We grasp the absolute through our total praxis, if not through our knowledge—or, rather, men's mutual praxis is the absolute.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem

“The contingency of the future, which accounts for the violent acts of those in power, by the same token deprives these acts of all legitimacy, or equally legitimates the violence of their opponents. The right of the opposition is exactly equal to the right of those in power.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem