Darian Evan Meacham
Faith is in things not seen: Merleau-Ponty on faith, virtue and the perception of style
Meacham, Darian Evan
Authors
Contributors
Kascha Semonovitch
Editor
Neal DeRoo
Editor
Abstract
The rather truncated paraphrasing of Hebrews 11.1 which forms the title of this contribution can also be found in Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ where the French phenomenologist writes, ‘[M]an cannot be sincere, since sincerity supposes a de- nite nature which one can assess without ambiguity. It is not a matter of contemplating oneself but of constructing and going beyond oneself. “Faith is in things unseen”’ (Merleau- Ponty, 1964b, p. 176, my italics). In the midst of a critique of the idea of ‘sincerity,’ and the need for ‘certainty’ in politics,1 Merleau-Ponty thoroughly endorses this articulation of the idea of ‘faith’ as ‘an adherence that goes beyond the guarantees which one is given and therefore excludes an ever-present sincerity’ (Ibid., p. 176). Hence, this idea of faith as a sort of commitment to the world and to others plays an important role in the normative sketch of political action that Merleau-Ponty provides at the end of ‘Faith and Good Faith,’ and in the equally preliminary conception of heroism in the essay ‘Man, the Hero,’ which follows in Sense and Non-Sense.
Although this notion of faith comes up in the context of a critique of the Catholic Church’s politics, Merleau-Ponty does not intend a religious, but rather a political faith and commitment. It is this notion of political faith that I will try to address in this chapter.
Citation
Meacham, D. E. (2011). Faith is in things not seen: Merleau-Ponty on faith, virtue and the perception of style. In K. Semonovitch, & N. DeRoo (Eds.), Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception (185-207). London: Continuum
Publication Date | Oct 27, 2011 |
---|---|
Publicly Available Date | Jun 8, 2019 |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Pages | 185-207 |
Book Title | Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception |
ISBN | 9781441119766 |
Keywords | Merleau-Ponty, faith, politics, perception, virtue |
Public URL | https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/958281 |
Publisher URL | http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/merleau-ponty-at-the-limits-of-art-religion-and-perception-9781441110466/ |
Files
Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, Continuum 2010 - Meacham [PROOF].pdf
(124 Kb)
PDF
Downloadable Citations
About UWE Bristol Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@uwe.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search