Simultaneity and duration: time and history in Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

The present research aims to investigate the relations between time and history in the last philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Starting from the texts and courses of the first half of the 1950s, we believe that there is a first explicit thematization on the part of the phenomenologist of the problem of thinking, on the one hand, the philosophical status of a universal history and, on the other hand, a temporality that is properly historical. Such a thematization occurs, according to our hypothesis, when Merleau-Ponty begins to undertake a progressive "unsubjectivation" of the time and to question some ontological difficulties in which its philosophy was entangled. The central aspect of this change of perspective, it seems to us, is the multifaceted debate that our author is dealing with relativism in this period, since what is at stake in this debate is the possibility of rethinking the idea of universality without, however, make it outward to the singularity. It is in this context that a new conception of history and its temporality begins to be formulated, culminating in the meticulous elaboration of the notion of institution. From this, we find the first unfolding of this notion in the Merleau-Pontian question on dialectics, since an accurate understanding of the idea of mediation will make it possible to think internal relations between universality and singularity, as well as a historical and temporal movement of totalization. At the same time, such a question leads us directly to the project of refounding the ontological discourse undertaken by Merleau-Ponty in his later works, in which the problems of time and history, considered by the thread of the problem of relativism, may receive a proper philosophical treatment - for here the Being itself becomes thought in its temporality and historicity, as a movement of self-differentiation. (AU)