Volume 73, Issue 5

Opening with a quote by Kant on the subject of enmity, this paper discusses some central elements and properties of hostile relations. Hostility is defined as a social relationship between agents (individuals or collectives) intending to inflict the maximum possible damage on the other. Questions of decision, moral polarisation and the dynamic of aggressive sentiment are central to the paper. It concludes with an outline of typical steps and stages in the development of enmity.

This commentary on Christian Damböck’s article “Carnap and Heidegger” (DZPhil 2024; 72(5): 656–671) examines the validity of claims regarding the alleged antiscientific and antirational nature of Heidegger’s philosophy. By contrasting the predominantly negative reception of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks in Germany with their more varied international reception, this commentary argues that the Notebooks reveal the distinctive rationality of Heidegger’s thought, challenging entrenched biases about its supposed irrationality. It cautions against one-sided interpretations that perpetuate unsubstantiated assumptions about Heidegger’s philosophy, while recognising the value of Damböck’s and Carnap’s critical perspectives, provided they engage rigorously with his texts.

This essay examines the friendship and ‘rupture’ between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. By analysing the brief but philosophically rich correspondence from 1953, it shows that the rupture was by no means caused solely by personal sensitivities, but by profound political and philosophical differences. The correspondence and published texts from this period shed light on two fundamental ways of determining the relationship between philosophy and politics, two irreconcilable basic positions on how philosophical engagement can be understood and practised.

“Everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy”: In his later work, Merleau-Ponty signalled the need for a reconfiguration of his philosophical vision, so it was no longer caught in Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness. This required a turn towards ontology through which he consolidated two key ideas: firstly, a pervasive interdependence articulated in his reversibility thesis and the ontology of ‘flesh’; secondly, a radical contingency at the heart of existence. This paper interrogates the political implications of these ideas, specifically regarding humanism and human progress. The overarching claim of this paper is that we need to rethink politics from the ground up beginning with ontology. Ontology is political, and the political is intrinsically ontologically informed; getting the ontology ‘right’ is a matter of discovery and not a matter of choosing between different theories.

Given the state of the world in 1945, how could one not fall into despair? How could history be seen as anything other than the reflection of past responsibilities, complicities, or indifference? This central question is undoubtedly one of the philosophical and political starting points for Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Refusing to uphold the notion of an unconditional human freedom in the face of what could be conceived as the dramatic culmination of human history, refusing, that is, to think in spite of history – Merleau-Ponty takes history itself as the very material from which thought must begin anew. A mixed environment, shaped as a chiasm, traversed and formed by sedimented determinations yet also a site of human inventiveness, history appears for Merleau-Ponty as the ‘thickness’ – constantly re-founded and revisited – of a conditional freedom whose epistemological status and political fecundity are strikingly original. It is this alternative way of thinking history that we must now recover, for it opens up the possibility of another history altogether.

Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy has lately garnered renewed attention. While the kind of political tradition this philosophy belongs to remains a highly contested topic, the paper would like to make a twofold claim. Firstly, that Merleau-Ponty shares elementary assumptions with the tradition known as “postfoundationalism”. Secondly, that historically speaking, his thinking has influenced some of the figures associated with postfoundationalism today and should thus be acknowledged as an integral part of this tradition. In a sense, though, the awareness that all social and political orders are built upon contingency is not a rebuttal of institutions, but rather forces us to rethink their logic. As the paper argues, Merleau-Ponty sketches an alternative way to analyse democratic processes, by holding together both the ‘instituent’ and the ‘instituted’ moment of politics. In that respect, his writings contain what could be described a theory of ‘instituent practice’ inspired by Machiavelli and Marx, that overcomes the traditional dichotomy between force and form still present in contemporary theories of ‘constituent’ and of ‘destituent power’.