Dialectics in Merleau-Ponty and Previous Thinkers
By Shea Stevens
Last edited Nov 29, 2025
This post originated with my curiosity about the lineage of the term dialectic in order for me to better understand Merleau-Ponty’s usage of the term. I soon found that the term dialectic not only spanned back to Lukacs, Marx and Engels, then to Hegel, and further back to the Scholastics… but also way back to the ancient Greeks. I hope this timeline offers a helpful overview for you.
Ancient Greeks
Dialectics is a term and a movement that is strongly associated with Hegel. We will get to him and his Logic in detail later in this post. Hegel was strongly influenced by the ancient Greeks like Aristotle. Hegel’s Logic explores Kant’s categories—Being, Quality, Relation, etc, which ultimately hearken back to Aristotle’s own Categories. Will Durant tells us that of these Hegelian concepts, “[t]he most pervasive of them all is Relation; every idea is a group of relations; we can think of something only by relating it to something else, and perceiving its similarities and its differences.”
“Of all relations, the most universal is that of contrast or opposition. Every condition of thought or of things—every idea and every situation in the world—leads irresistibly to its opposite, and then unites with it to form a higher or more complex whole. This ‘dialectical movement’ runs through everything that Hegel wrote. It is… foreshadowed by Empedocles, and embodied in the ‘golden mean’ of Aristotle, who wrote that ‘the knowledge of opposites is one.'” (Durant)
Anthony Skews provides additional background on dialectics in the ancient Greeks, specifically the work of Heraclitus which encapsulates the tension of dialectics:
“For Heraclitus, all things ‘came into being through strife [the conflict of opposites]’; stability arose dynamically from conflict and tension, and without conflict, the world would cease to move. Heraclitus wrote that the ‘way up is also the way down’, emphasizing that the properties of an object were a matter of perspective, and that an object was necessarily both A and not A simultaneously.”
Many Greek philosophers used the term dialectics more specifically to indicate a kind of logic, a “method of reasoning-- think of a Socratic dialogue in which two imagined speakers approach the truth by offering each other propositions and counter-propositions” (Skews). This is a usage of the term “dialectic” that would persist for many centuries through the age of the Scholastics.
G.W.F. Hegel
Will Durant, in his chapter on Hegel in The Story of Philosophy, was the first person who provided for me an easy to digest overview of Hegel’s notion of dialectics. Andy Blunden then provided for me an excellent and very in-depth overview of Hegel’s Logic.
Ideas and things evolving in a dialectical movement
Will Durant says that for Hegel, “[t]he movement of evolution is a continuous development of oppositions, and their merging and reconciliation.” Once a lower stage has reached its next stage through a qualitative change, “that higher stage too will divide into a productive contradiction, and rise to still loftier levels of organization, complexity, and unity.” And so on it goes.
Durant says that it is not only ideas that develop and evolve according to this dialectical movement, but “things do equally; every condition of affairs contains a contradiction which evolution must resolve by a reconciling unity.” Hegel may be defined as an idealist and a panpsychist, yet he was interested in concrete, lived situations, and in material circumstances that determine human lives. His more ultimate concepts are defined by “spirit”, by the “idea,” but his dialectics encompass ‘things’ within them, there is no dichotomy here that ignores the existence of matter. We will see shortly that Hegel’s Logic frames matter and form as a dialectical polarity, as well as recognizing the polarity of the subjective and the objective, rather than separating them in an irreconcilable dichotomy.
The reconciliation of the subjective and the objective was, I believe, a factor in Merleau-Ponty’s attraction to Hegelian dialectics. Blunden tells us that for Hegel, “unlike with Kant, the thing-in-itself is not existent in some yonder, beyond the limits of knowledge, but rather is something which is not yet self-conscious. There is no hard line between appearance and the thing-in-itself. What is in-itself today, may make its appearance tomorrow.”
Coming back to the point about Hegel’s dialectics as a movement of both thought and a movement of things: Durant says that for Hegel, “[t]he movement of thought… is the same as the movement of things; in each there is a dialectical progression from unity through diversity to diversity-in-unity. Thought and being follow the same law; and logic and metaphysics are one.” Hegel did not see a clear division between logic and metaphysics.
“In the days when Hegel became a professor, professors of philosophy were required to present a Logic, a Metaphysics [including ontology] and a Philosophy of Nature. The series of lectures that Hegel developed for his Ontology became what we now know as his ‘Doctrine of Being’, the first part of the Logic. This illustrates the observation that Hegel replaced Ontology with Logic.” (Blunden)
A brief breakdown of Hegel’s “Logic”
We will look at Hegel’s Logic to see what his dialectical metaphysics consists of. Will Durant thinks of Hegel’s dialectics as rooted in the view that “‘Reason is the substance of the universe… the design of the world is absolutely rational.’ Not that the strife and evil are mere negative imaginings; they are real enough; but they are, in wisdom’s perspective, stages to fulfillment and the good. Struggle is the law of growth.”
The Logic is connected to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Blunden says; “the Logic concerns the pure essentialities underlying the truth of the Gestalten which are the subject matter of the Phenomenology.” They are concepts which are logically critiqued, though not in a purely abstract or mathematical way, but in a way that is concerned with real situations.
Blunden says the Logic is a “logical critique of the concept of Being itself, and with a dialectical unfolding of the contents of the concept of Being.” Blunden also tells us that according to Hegel, essence is “a series of oppositions which persist, but as one moves into the limelight it pushes others to backstage. It is the genesis of a Notion… it is what is essential in the coming-and-going of Being, Being stripped of what is inessential.”
I will offer now a very condensed overview of the dialectical unfolding of Hegel’s Logic:
Reflection is the first main dialectic, and it is described as the dialectic of Matter and Form.
“At bottom, Form and Matter are the same thing. As a form of self-consciousness this is the dilemma as to whether you are just doing the same old thing in a new way, or whether this is a new thing showing itself in the shape of an old thing. The idea of a matter is a substrate that un-derlies different forms; wherever you propose a different kind of matter, it can be reduced to the same old matter in a different form. “Matter” is just an abstraction.” (Blunden)
Actuality is another key dialectic Hegel mentions, as paraphrased by Blunden:
“Actuality… is the dialectic of Cause and Effect. The entity arises as the effect of something, but then it is also in its turn, the cause of things. Each effect is also a cause, just as much as every cause is also an effect. As the cause-effect chain extends out everywhere in all directions until it feeds back on itself, this culminates in the notion of Reciprocity, that everything together forms a complex of mutually causing effects all inseparable from one another.” (Blunden)
Reciprocity is disorienting. Only once we arrive at the “Notion” can we regain a basis and an orientation after being lost in the complexity of reciprocity.
The third part of the Logic is about the Notion, which is the concept conscious of itself. Blunden tells us that for Hegel, a Notion also “strives to objectify itself” as an “End”. In Hegel’s words: “the End relation is more than judgment; it is the syllogism of the self-subsistent free Notion that unites itself with itself through objectivity” (Science of Logic §1599).
In Teleology (or Organism), which is the dialectic of Means and Ends, “the subject-object relation becomes a life process in which each is to the other both a means and an end” (Blunden).
The last grade of the Notion is the “Idea.” It is the unity of Subject and Object, and Blunden also describes it as the unified dialectic of Life and Cognition. He says the Idea is “a process in which the contradiction between sensation and reason is overcome through a long drawn-out process of differentiation and re-integration, objectification and internalisation, with a continual interchange between means and ends.”
That is a very brief overview of some of the main concepts of Hegel’s Logic. Now I want to bring attention to two other driving concepts of the Logic, development and sublation, which describe how Hegel’s dialectical movement of Being unfolds.
Development and sublation
Development is a word that is common to English speakers, one of the words most clearly related to the idea of something that changes or grows over time. I noticed the usage of the word ‘development’ in Merleau-Ponty’s work before seeing it used as a term by Hegel. Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible mentions development in connection to Hegelian dialectical ontology (see my blog post, “Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Sense and Non-Sense”). For me, returning to the Hegelian origins of Merleau-Ponty’s usage of the word ‘development’ has been illuminating.
Blunden says that “[in Hegel’s] Notion, the movement is development, with each new relation incorporated into the concept and all the former relations merged with it.”
The onward movement of the notion is no longer either a transition into, or a reflection on something else, but Development. For in the notion, the elements distinguished are without more ado at the same time declared to be identical with one another and with the whole, and the specific character of each is a free being of the whole notion.
Transition into something else is the dialectical process within the range of Being: reflection (bringing something else into light), in the range of Essence. The movement of the Notion is development: by which that only is explicit which is already implicitly present. (Hegel, Shorter Logic §161)
Development happens through the interplay of polarities:
“In each case the opposition between them is made relative, as the counterposing of the opposite determinations leads to a deeper conception which comprehends the opposition within its new terms. So the opposing determinations do not disappear, but continue and in specific circumstances may come to the fore again. But in the process of Essence, we see a succession of polar oppositions, and as each opposition is sublated, their opposition is relativized and pushed into the background by new axes of polarisation.” (Blunden)
This dialectical development necessarily connects to sublation (Aufhebung), the sort of negation which “terminat[es] that which is no longer tenable” (Blunden). “Aufhebung means taking something beyond its own limits and ‘negating’ it, that is to say, by maintaining what was necessary in the former relation,” preserving “its real meaning [which] is carried on in a new form” (Blunden).
Hegel “uses the term ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) throughout the Logic… [to mean] the relation in which one determination passes into another in the sphere of Being, the relation in which one opposition is overtaken by another in the sphere of Essence” (Blunden).
Friedrich Engels
Engels developed materialist dialectics in his 1883 (incomplete) work Dialectics of Nature. He said that the dialectical laws are the laws of development of nature:
“It is… from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:
-The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; [“qualitative changes can only occur by the quantitative addition or subtraction of matter or motion (so-called energy).”]
-The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
-The law of the negation of the negation.” (All quotes from Engels, Dialectics of Nature)
The most interesting quotes on dialectics to me are found in the section, “Basic forms of motion.” This section not only is illustrative of Engels’ dialectics but also is resonant to me of certain passages found in Merleau-Ponty’s work exploring stimuli, agency/action/reaction, and motion as it relates to dialectics. Some of these passages in Merleau-Ponty relating to motion are mentioned in my blog post, “Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Sense and Non-Sense.”
“Motion in the most general sense, conceived as the mode of existence, the inherent attribute of matter, comprehends all changes and processes occurring in the universe, from mere change of place right up to thinking.”
“The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existence extending from stars to atoms… In the fact that these bodies are interconnected is already included that they react on one another, and it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion.”
“Dialectics has proved from the results of our experience of nature so far that all polar opposites in general are determined by the mutual action of the two opposite poles on one another, that the separation and opposition of these poles exists only within their unity and inter-connection, and, conversely, that their inter-connection exists only in their separation and their unity only in their opposition.”
“All natural processes are two-sided, they rest on the relation of at least two effective parts, action and reaction. The notion of force, however, owing to its origin from the action of the human organism on the external world, and further because of terrestrial mechanics, implies that only one part is active, effective, the other part being passive, receptive”
Karl Marx
“Marx turned Hegel’s dialectic ‘upside down’ by stripping it of its Idealist trappings” -Skews
“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of 'the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of 'the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” (Marx, Capital)
György Lukács
His work, History and Class Consciousness was cited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Adventures of the Dialectic. My exposure to Lukacs is only mediated through Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, which he acknowledges focuses only on certain points of Lukacs’ work, select points which he describes through his own biased lens.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(The first half of this section on MP is an excerpt from my blog post, “Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Sense and Non-Sense.”)
“Merleau-Ponty connects the concept of gestalt and its dynamics of figure/ground with his notion of Hegelian dialectic in The Structure of Behavior: “the notion of Gestalt led us back to its Hegelian meaning” (210). But the gestalt’s Hegelian nature is not demonstrated or explained in great detail by Merleau-Ponty in SB, aside from that passage and his usage of “dialectic” in that work. It will be developed further in The Visible and the Invisible.
In SB, Merleau-Ponty defines a phenomenon as having qualities both “for me” and “in itself,” (186, 199). In order to hold this balance in his theory of the phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty uses the concept of the gestalt which appears in one’s perception while retaining an inner rhythm of its own. He says, “[p]erceptual behavior… [can be understood] only as a dialectic, the moments of which are not stimuli and movements but phenomenal objects and actions” (205). Phenomena do not come into being through sheerly isolable, objective stimuli and a corresponding separate movement in response from an observer, rather he speaks of “perceptual behavior.” A dialectic exists between perception and activity. A perceived object and the perceiver’s action are mutually intertwined.
In The Visible and the Invisible, dialectic is still at the forefront of Merleau-Ponty’s mind, and this passage from VI helps us understand what Hegel’s dialectic meant to him:
“dialectical thought is that which admits that each term is itself only by proceeding toward the opposed term, becomes what it is through the movement, that it is one and the same thing for each to pass into the other or to become itself, to leave itself and to retire into itself, that the centripetal movement and the centrifugal movement are one sole movement” (90-91)
Hegelian dialectic also includes negation. A negation in Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic is like a figure and ground, or a film’s negatives, a metaphor I will explore later in this paper. The Aristotelian idea of form was conceptualized in relationship to a substrate. Similarly, every whole is in relation to parts, and as Merleau-Ponty explores in The Visible and the Invisible, a ‘no’ is always in relation to a ‘yes.’
In SB, Merleau-Ponty connects his notion of form to the figural structure of a figure/ground:
“A ‘form,’ such as the structure of ‘figure and ground,’ for example, is a whole which has a meaning… The alleged bodily, social and psychological ‘causalities’ are reducible to this contingency of lived perspectives which limit our access to eternal significations” (224).
The greater whole is the condition for the localized phenomenon. So, rather than simplified and overly localized, objective notions of causality, Merleau-Ponty highlights in this work that ‘causalities’ are actually lived phenomenal perspectives which are fundamentally connected to “eternal significations,” a greater universal field which does not have entirely isolable causal parts. These eternal, ultimate meanings do not appear naked before us, they are hidden. In “Hegel’s Existentialism,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “There is no being without nothingness, but nothingness can exist only in the hollow of being” (67-68). This quote offers a neat precursor to the writings on the “hollow” seen in VI, where Merleau-Ponty more fully articulates a dialectic of the yes and no; being and negation. In “Hegel’s Existentialism,” Hegel is credited with the noble “attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason which remains the task of our century” (63-64). He also sees in Hegel an attempt “to reveal the immanent logic of human experience in all its sectors” (65). This integration of the irrational with the existence of immanent logic is Merleau-Ponty’s endeavor to address the polarity of sense and non-sense, of being and non-being.” (Stevens, “Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Sense and Non-Sense”)
Merleau-Ponty’s “Adventures of the Dialectic”
In this book I found an intersection of many philosophical principles that are found elsewhere throughout Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre. There are many quotes I found that I would like to include here, in their entirety, that relate directly to other thinkers found on this blog post like Hegel, Lukács, and Marx. Most quotes that stood out to me were from pages 24-73. These quotes touch on history, dialectics, materialism, object and subject, sense and non-sense:
“The intelligible wholes of history never break their ties with contingency… History includes dialectical facts and adumbrative significations; it is not a coherent system.” (p. 24)
“… [H]istory does not have a direction, like a river, but has a meaning… it teaches us, not a truth, but errors to avoid…” (p. 28)
“We are never able to refer to completed totality, to universal history, as if we were not within it, as if it were spread out in front of us… no historical fact will ever have its whole meaning for us unless it has been linked to all the facts we are able to know…” (p. 31)
“… [P]hilosophy is history formalized, reduced to its internal articulations, to its intelligible structure. For Lukacs, Marxism is, or should be, this integral philosophy without dogma. Weber understood materialism as an attempt to deduce all culture from economics. For Lukacs, it is a way of saying that the relations among men are not the sum of personal acts or personal decisions, but pass through things, the anonymous roles, the common situations, and the institutions where men have projected so much of themselves that their fate is now played out outside them.” (p. 32)
“Capital, says Marx in a famous passage, is ‘not a thing, but a social relationship between persons mediated by things’… Historical materialism is not the reduction of history to one of its sectors. It states a kinship between the person and the exterior, between the subject and the object, which is at the bottom of the alienation of the subject in the object and, if the movement is reversed, will be the basis for the reintegration of the world with man… Marx’s innovation is that he takes this fact as fundamental, whereas, for Hegel, alienation is still an operation of the spirit on itself and thus is already overcome when it manifests itself.” (p. 33)
“… [W]hat is a reason which does not yet have the form of reason?... Marxism dissociates the rationality of history from any idea of necessity. Rationality is necessary neither in the sense of physical causality, in which the antecedents determine the consequents, nor even in the sense of the necessity of a system, in which the whole precedes and brings to existence what happens.” (p. 34)
“The sense of history is then threatened at every step with going astray and constantly needs to be reinterpreted. The main current is never without countercurrents or whirlpools. It is never even given as a fact. It reveals itself only through asymmetries, vestiges, diversions, and regressions. It is comparable to the sense of perceived things, to those reliefs which take form only from a certain point of view and never absolutely exclude other modes of perception. There is less a sense of history than an elimination of non-sense.” (p. 39)
“The two relationships—consciousness as a product of history, history as a product of consciousness—must be maintained together.” (p. 40)
“Hegel was able to integrate falsity into the logic of history only as partial truth, that is to say, only after having subtracted precisely what makes it false.” (p. 41)
“[D]ialectical thought is always in the process of extracting from each phenomenon a truth which goes beyond it, waking at each moment our astonishment at the world and at history. This ‘philosophy of history’ does not so much give us the keys of history as it restores history to us as permanent interrogation… The dialectic is the very life of this contradiction. It is the series of progressions which it accomplishes. It is a history which makes itself and which nevertheless is to be made, a meaning which is never invalid but is always to be rectified.” (p. 56)
“[A]ll this is the dialectical method… this implies that the work of art is not a simple reflection of history and society. It expresses them not punctually but by its organic unity and its internal law.” (p. 68)
References:
Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy (2005). Simon and Schuster, pp. 223-224.
Engels, Friedrich. Dialectics of Nature (1883).
Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Logic (2013). Translated by William Wallace with a Foreword by Andy Blunden, Second edition published by the Marxists Internet Archive.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Adventures of the Dialectic.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non-Sense.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior.
Skews, Anthony. “Making Sense of Dialectical Materialism”. https://www.anthonyskewspolitics.com/blog/2022/2/23/making-sense-of-dialectical-materialism
Stevens, Shea. “Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of Sense and Non-Sense”. https://www.ontologyandsense.com/blog/merleau-pontys-ontology-of-sense-and-non-sense