Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem Paperback – June 30, 1990

This is an amazing document to read in the 21st century. It amounts to a full-throated defense of the Moscow show trials used in the late 1930s by Stalin to purge all his potential rivals from the party and the government (usually by executing them). Specifically, Merleau-Ponty, who was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, is arguing here contra-Koestler and "Darkness at Noon." Merleau-Ponty is quite right in arguing that liberal societies hide the violence (and terror) that they use to enforce their own order - an argument that come critics of Globalization, such as the outstanding R. Radhakrishnan, have deployed to excellent and edifying effect. However, most of the time, "Humanism and Terror" reads like a document from the inquisition in which the ideological backdrop of demonic possession, witchcraft and satanic heresy are taken at face-value and completely seriously by the author. In other words, it belongs entirely to another era. And of course, Merleau-Ponty`s continuous reliance on the judgement of history would tend to suggest that he and his arguments were "objectively incorrect" while the defendants were "proven right" (assuming, of course, that they were in some sense disloyal to the Soviet state).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Humanism and Terror" was intended, in 1946, to be an answer from the intellectuals still associated with the 'official' Communists to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon: A Novel. Merleau-Ponty summarizes the book, addresses the challenge Koestler poses, and attempts to judge the USSR by the standards of "Marxist humanism" as he sees it. Nevertheless, the book is a very mixed bag.

The interesting thing about this book is that the preface, in which Merleau-Ponty does not address Koestler directly but instead deals with the trouble of Communism during the Stalinist period, the attempts to weigh means and ends, the desire for honesty vs the desire for pragmatism, the failure of people to face the dilemmas of history and the lack of seriousness on the part of liberal critics in this, and so on, is the most interesting part. This is all excellently written and clearly set out in unmistakable terms, at least for a Parisian philosopher.

The part of the book which discusses Koestler's thesis, however, is really poor. Merleau-Ponty ascribes to Koestler himself the views that Rubashov and his inquisitors share, namely a sort of Hegelian-mechanistic interpretation of History as the infallible guide of politics, and the risks and destructiveness this implies - but as is clear from an elementary reading of Koestler's book, he himself does not share this view at all, and precisely wrote the book to attack this viewpoint. It is really odd that someone with the philosophical and literary training of Merleau-Ponty does not see this.

In the subsequent discussion of Koestler's problematic itself, namely whether one can support communism but not communist policy, whether one can be a communist outside the Party, whether there can be such a thing as a democratic socialism, whether economic development is a prerequisite of such democratic socialism or not and what sacrifices are valid to achieve it, etc., Merleau-Ponty does not make this error as much. Yet here he makes a different error: especially in the discussion of the Moscow Trials, which take up the middle part of the book, he completely and uncritically adopts the Stalinist line. He believes every word in the 'confessions' of the accused to be actually intended and seriously meant by them (not writing a word about the torture applied before the Trials began), and he also uncritically adopts the Stalinist line that the suppression of all opposition was necessary to defend the USSR against foreign aggression. On the other hand, he clearly does not believe the actual charges themselves, for which there was blatantly no evidence whatever, as he freely admits. For Merleau-Ponty, the question is then reduced to why people like Bukharin and Trotsky would argue for the Party that 'had to' destroy them. An interesting dilemma, but an irrelevant one, since it is by no means necessary to adopt this assumption in the first place. Koestler's book is clearly superior to Merleau-Ponty's in this, since it makes no such assumption.

The last part of the book is the author's attempt to reconstitute the meaning of Marxism and its philosophy of history. Here, he does criticize the USSR quite strongly (for someone with sympathy for socialism in 1946), and his discussion of the merits and demerits of Trotsky's commentaries on this problem is quite good, if meanderingly written. There is still a lot of vague chatter about the dialectic and the proletariat in an abstract philosophical way, but it leads to several quite good points nonetheless, and advocates taking up a position that supports the Revolution of 1917 as well as communism in general, but without being uncritical towards the USSR or any specific form of Communist Parties and the like, and not binding oneself to having to defend it against better reason. He also engages the philosophical analysis undertaken by Koestler in The Yogi and the Commissar and Other Essays, and undertakes some effective and well-considered critiques of Koestler's metaphysical views in it, while admitting Koestler's own critiques as useful and valid, as it should be.

Here Merleau-Ponty concludes with the famous statement: "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 and adventures."
That, at least, is and remains true.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher; he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53. He wrote many books such as The Visible and the Invisible,Signs,The Primacy of Perception,Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem,The Structure of Behavior,In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, etc.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1947 book, “Any serious discussion of communism must therefore pose the problem in communist terms, that is to say, not on the ground of principles but on the ground of human relations. It will not brandish liberal principles in order to topple communism; it will examine whether it is doing anything to resolve the problem rightly raised by communism, namely, to establish among men relations that are human. This is the spirit in which we have reopened the question of Communist violence which [Arthur] Koestler brought to light in Darkness at Noon.”

Later, he comments on this book, “It is the dialectic created by man’s inability to find outside himself what inwardly he senses himself to be, and yet not to keep from looking outside himself for that very thing. Once humanism attempts to fulfill itself with any consistency it becomes transformed into its opposite, namely, into violence.” (Pg. 13)

He observes, “It is well known that Trotsky acted according to his words and was no mere talker. At the individual level, such men are sublime. But we have to ask ourselves whether history is made by such men. They have such a tenacious belief in the rationality of history than when it ceases for a while to be rational, they throw themselves into the future they seek rather than have to deal with compromises and incoherence. But to live and die for a future projected by desire rather than think and act in the present is precisely what Marxists have always considered utopianism.” (Pg. 80)

He states, “The irony of fate drives us to do the opposite of what we think we will do; it forces us to doubt our senses, it impugns our proneness to mystification, and brings to light not just the terror which each man holds for every other man but, above all, that basic Terror in each of us which comes from the awareness of his historical responsibility.” (Pg. 93)

He argues, “We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot. There is no persuasion even without seduction, or in the last analysis, contempt. Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion and political choice only occur against a background of violence… He who condemns all violence puts himself outside the domain to which justice and injustice belong. He puts a curse upon the world and humanity---a hypocritical curse, since he who utters it has already accepted the rules of the game from the moment that he has begun to live. Between men considered as pure consciousnesses there would indeed be no reason to choose. But between men considered as the incumbents of situations which together compose a single common situation it is inevitable that one has to choose---it is allowable to sacrifice those who according to the logic of their situation are a threat and to promote those who offer a promise of humanity. This is what Marxism does when it creates its politics on the basis of an analysis of the situation of the proletariat.” (Pg. 110)

He points out, “Marxist Machiavellianism differs from pure Machiavellianism inasmuch as it transforms compromise through awareness of compromise, alters the ambiguity of history through awareness of ambiguity, and makes detours consciously---calling them detours. Marxism calls a retreat a retreat and it places the details of local politics and tactical paradoxes in the larger perspective.” (Pg. 120)

He notes, “Because it abstains from describing a heavenly future and from justifying its daily deeds in terms of it, Marxism must distinguish itself through a socialist style which it does as proletarian action, extrapolating, specifying, and redirecting the spontaneous PRAXIS of the proletariat along its proper path. In so doing it will not observe the formal and ‘universal’ rules of sincerity and objectivity because these are the rules of the capitalist game and to treat a person as an end who treats others as a means is likewise to treat them as means.” (Pg. 127)

He says, “In its essence Marxism is the idea that history has a meaning---in other words, that it is intelligible and has a direction---that it is moving toward the power of the proletariat, which as the essential factor of production is capable of resolving the contradictions of capitalism, or organizing a humane appropriation of nature, and, as the ‘universal class,’ able to transcend national and social conflicts as well as the struggle between man and man. To be a Marxist is to believe that economic problems and cultural or human problems are a single problem and that the proletariat as history has shaped it holds the solution to that problem… the classless society which cannot be achieved without individual effort and action, but which is outlined in the present crisis as their solution---the power of man over nature and the natural reconciliation of men.” (Pg. 129-130)

He states, “It is possible to deny that the proletariat will ever be in a position to fulfill its historic mission, or that the condition of the proletariat as described by Marx is sufficient to set a proletarian resolution 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.” (Pg. 155)

This is an excellent book of political philosophy, that will be of interest to those studying Merleau-Ponty.