The Problem of Authenticity in Merleau-Ponty: Humanity and World Dissolved by the Imaginary?

The question of authenticity is an important theme in the early writings of Merleau-Ponty. It is inseparable from the problem of the modern crisis and from the invasion of the real by the imaginary. We shall see that it is also very closely linked with the unavoidable dialogue with Sartre, who initially laid great emphasis on the failings of man, that “useless passion,” and in Being and Nothingness considered him condemned to play his life like a comedy in a world of reflections. The quest for authenticity is a crucial guiding thread in the Sartrean oeuvre, but can it succeed? In The Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty was still criticizing Sartre for his flight into imaginary action. Yet Merleau-Ponty initially found himself in a similar difficulty: by conceiving the world on the model of the dream, he exposed himself to serious objections, which were in fact directed at him especially during the discussion that followed his lecture, “The Primacy of Perception,” as well in the debate following his talk, “Man and Adversity”: have humans lost all responsibility? Can we fully and seriously act, or are we condemned to flee from ourselves into a permanent irony? Can things never be anything more than mere phantoms? If life is a dream, can the dream be an authentic life? Merleau-Ponty will answer in the affirmative in Institution and Passivity, but this formulation—“the dream is a life”—clearly shows that the solution is not to be sought in a return to the real conceived in opposition to the imaginary, but along a much more perilous path that maintains the ambiguity of the real, and which will have the extremely difficult task of tracing the boundaries between a “good” and a “bad” ambiguity.