Existentialism is an anti-humanism

Maurice Merleau-Ponty may have been a competent philosopher. Politically, he was - to put it mildly - very misguided indeed. While Martin Heidegger supported the Nazis, Merleau-Ponty became a Communist fellow traveller. Or rather, a very specifically Stalinist one. Maybe this was "understandable" in post-war France, since the French Communist Party had fought the Nazis and entered the democratic provisional government after liberation.

Maybe.

And then, maybe not.

The problem with Merleau-Ponty's book "Humanism and Terror" is that it goes far beyond any legitimate idea about an alliance of all Frenchmen (including Communists) against the Nazi occupation. It also goes further than a simple criticism of Western hypocrisy concerning "democracy" (at the time, France and other Western nations still had colonial empires). No, the comrade philosopher positively embraces and excuses Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union, including the Great Purges and Moscow show trials! He does it with a breathtaking cynicism as well, almost a caricature of the official Communist position.

At least I think that's what he does. "Humanism and Terror", first published in 1947, is written in that inimitable and impenetrable quasi-intellectual style which a certain kind of philosophers seems to love. It's not an easy read. Ostensibly, we are dealing with a series of essays criticizing Arthur Koestler's novel "Darkness at noon". The more "sophisticated" arguments revolving around existentialism and dialectics were lost on me. However, the other arguments sound familiar...

Merleau-Ponty defends the Moscow show trials, and claims that the defendants were guilty. But guilty of what? It's not clear whether he believes that Bukharin actually was a Nazi agent. Occasionally, it sounds that way. But on other pages, Merleau-Ponty seems to support a more sinister position: Bukharin was a good-intentioned critic of Stalin, but this in itself aided the Nazis "objectively" speaking. Since "nobody is wholly innocent" before the tribunal of history, Stalin did the right thing when he had Bukharin shot. Indeed, it seems as if the author criticizes Vyshinsky for wanting to prove that Bukharin was guilty of real acts of sabotage, rather than conducting a purely political trial based on the "objective" danger! Presumably, our philosopher really wants Bukharin to be executed for his *opinions* rather than some concrete acts.

Merleau-Ponty attempts to sugercoat his position by pointing out that there are situations when disinterested opinions are as dangerous as actual acts, that good intentions aren't an excuse if the consequences are bad, and that the Western democracies are hypocrites who base their system on violence. This, admittedly, is quite true. But how on earth does it justify Stalin's regime in Russia? Indeed, the very same arguments could be used to justify Hitler or Vichy! Here, Merleau-Ponty has very little to say, as long as he speaks as an existentialist. After all, the existentialist "ethic" sees life as a risk, where we never know the outcome of our choices, and thus the only thing to do is bravely embrace whatever course of action we deem best, and stand for it in both failure and success. A collaborator in Vichy France might have reasoned in exactly the same way.

To square the circle, Merleau-Ponty must adopt a Marxist perspective, which he does quite explicitly in the second part of his book. Marxism (which he treats as in effect unfalsifiable) has divined the meaning of History. The future belongs to the proletariat and the collective economy. Somehow, this justifies Stalinist violence in the present. Although the author constantly tells us that one cannot *really* divine the future, the whole thing nevertheless comes back to this: sacrificing the present in the name of the future. And since nobody is wholly innocent, what's so special about supporting Stalin anyway? Merleau-Ponty waxes especially ironic when discussing Trotsky, quoting liberally from Trotsky's "Terrorism and Communism" to show that The Old Man wasn't really that different from Stalin. So with what right does *he* complain? (This is the only fun part of the book.)

Naturally, Merleau-Ponty has to accept the Stalinist propaganda without question. The forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture was supposedly necessary to build up an industrial base, without which the Soviet Union would have been easy prey to Nazi Germany. Not a word about the fact that collectivization started before Hitler took power, nor about the sectarianism of the Communist Party in Germany, which may have contributed to Hitler's victory. Not a word about the extensive US aid to the Soviet Union during the war, which showed that Soviet industry left much to be asked for. The author also accepts the lie that the Great Purges rid the USSR of potential collaborators, thereby aiding Soviet victory in the future war. Not a word about Communist "collaboration" during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, or the enormous number of collaborators in the Ukraine, Belarus, Crimea and the Caucasus (Stalin seems to have shot all the wrong people!). I also tend to be a consequentialist in matters ethical, but its precisely the consequences which makes political support and apologias for Stalin's Russia out of the question. Was it right to form an alliance with the Soviet Union during the war? Undoubtedly yes. Was it a tragedy that the great powers couldn't co-operate after the war? Perhaps. But that is something else than Maurice Merleau-Ponty's sycophancy. I never read Koestler's novel, but apparently the main character Rubashov "voluntarily" sacrifices himself for the good of the Party. Somehow, Merleau-Ponty believes that Rubashov did the right thing!

Somebody might argue that our Frenchman simply didn't have access to all the relevant facts. The book, after all, was published in 1947. I disagree. The author seems well versed in the writings of Trotsky and the International Left Opposition, and must have had access to many other critical sources about the Soviet Union as well.

His pimping for Joe Stalin was a conscious one. Existentialism, it seems, is an anti-humanism.