Dialectics and Contingency: Merleau-Ponty and the Historical Network

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to address a number of aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thought about history, taking into consideration two fundamental axes: contingency and dialectics. The phenomenological understanding of history as the advent of sense is taken up anew by Merleau-Ponty from a perspective whereby the event binds together both of these axes. For the French philosopher, history must be thought of in a dialectical manner; however, this does not imply the elimination of the contingent meaning of the events that constitute the historical network, but on the contrary, it is a matter of understanding the dialectic as a thought of openness to contingency. To understand the dialectic in this way does not mean an abandonment of the idea of rationality in history, but to reinterpret rationality from an always provisional perspective that assumes the impossibility of an absolute translucency associated with the very medium where human life transpires.