How do we pursue political goals successfully? In other words, "what is it to have good judgement in politics?" (Berlin 40) Taking the phenomenological conception of the political developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty as my point of departure and drawing on the work of other writers regarding the nature of political judgment, I would like to examine the particular challenges inherent in the phenomenon of specifically political action and the particular skills and talents the political actor must possess in order to negotiate these challenges ably. "Any complex activity, if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament" (Clausewitz 100); I will here elucidate the appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament of the political virtuoso.
Merleau-Ponty's conception of the political emerges from the quintessentially human and inextricably linked activities of perception and expression, the 'natural marvels' arising from our corporeal existence. Simple acts of "primordial expression" (Merleau-Ponty 67) - glances and gestures, looking and moving - are the germ of all our relations with the world, characteristic of every junction of the individual and the universal, the self and the other. Verbal expression, speech, is analogous to the physical expression of the gesture, both of which presuppose the perception of the other, or the object, the recipient of our expressive action. These processes of perception and expression are in continual interaction, and in a sense this constitutes our being in the world: expression is both the natural product of the perception of the 'other' as well as the means by which "the other to whom I address myself and I who express myself are incontestably linked together" (Merleau-Ponty 73), just as bodily motions (primordial expression) are produced by a simultaneous perception of and interaction with the physical environment. The moment of expression is thus "that turning or veering by which we merge with others and the world as the world and others merge with us" (Merleau-Ponty 72). For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomena of intersubjective expression, speech particularly, takes on an almost mystical quality. To express oneself is nothing less than
the obligation to understand situations other than my own and to create a path between my life and that of others... Through the action of culture, I take up my dwelling in lives which are not mine... Just as by the thick and living presence of my body, in one fell swoop I take up my dwelling in space... The words, lines, and colors which express me come out of me as gestures. They are torn from me by what I want to say as my gestures are by what I want to do (Merleau-Ponty 75).
This purposeful, expressive invasion of the other has a specifically political dimension, as the political actor, through the action of expression, causes his values to dwell in others, drawing the other towards values "in which they will only later recognize their [own]" (Merleau-Ponty 74). Once again, the expressive action of language is comparable to that of the body; just as surely as the grasping of my hand reaches across space to bring me the object I desire, my words pierce the distance bewteen you and I and draw you towards my meaning. Language is thus a particular way of intending certain objects, "as thought's body," the operation by which private thoughts come to exist in the world by acquiring intersubjective value and making aciton possible (Merleau-Ponty 84-5) - in other words, the process by which values become facts. In this moment of expression at which we are "incontestably linked" by this sharing of meaning, it becomes possible to act together on these values just as the grasping of the object makes interaction possible. As formulated later by Hannah Arendt in her roughly equivalent concept of action, "the political realm rises directly out of acting together, the 'sharing of words and deeds'" (Arendt 198). 'The political' is precisely this intersubjectivity which arises from our speaking to each other, this process by which we express ourselves to each other; my meaning comes to dwell in you and yours in mine and it becomes possible for us to act together. We are successful in politics when we succeed in making our values become facts (Merleau-Ponty 72) through the political process of expression and action.
[next: part 2]