Ontologie und Politik

Abstract “Everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy”: In his later work, Merleau-Ponty signalled the need for a reconfiguration of his philosophical vision, so it was no longer caught in Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness. This required a turn towards ontology through which he consolidated two key ideas: firstly, a pervasive interdependence articulated in his reversibility thesis and the ontology of ‘flesh’; secondly, a radical contingency at the heart of existence. This paper interrogates the political implications of these ideas, specifically regarding humanism and human progress. The overarching claim of this paper is that we need to rethink politics from the ground up beginning with ontology. Ontology is political, and the political is intrinsically ontologically informed; getting the ontology ‘right’ is a matter of discovery and not a matter of choosing between different theories.