Key Arguments

• He anticipates a rationalist objection that 'there are no degrees of possibility, either the free act no longer exists or it is still there, in which case freedom is complete,' and that statements like 'It’s unlikely that Paul will renounce writing bad books' are meaningless because Paul might decide otherwise at any moment.
• This rationalism treats the 'likely' as a 'reified fiction that has merely a psychological existence' and 'not an ingredient of the world.'
• In reply, Merleau-Ponty recalls that he has 'already encountered it just a moment ago in the perceived world': a mountain is large or small 'insofar as it is situated as a perceived thing in the field of my virtual actions and in relation to a level that is not merely the level of my individual life, but rather the level of “every man.”'
• He generalizes: 'Generality and probability are not fictions, they are phenomena, and so we must find a phenomenological foundation for statistical thought. Statistical thought necessarily belongs to a being who is fixed, situated, and surrounded in the world.'
• The judgment '“It’s unlikely” that I would in this moment destroy an inferiority complex in which I have been complacent now for twenty years' means 'that I am committed to inferiority, that I have decided to dwell within it, that this past, if not a destiny, has at least a specific weight.'
• He concludes that 'Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears into it: so long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies both that it calls forth privileged modes of resolution and that it, by itself, lacks the power to procure any of them.'

Source Quotes

And yet, after having built my life upon an inferiority complex, continuously reinforced for twenty years, it is not likely that I would change. A cursory rationalism would obviously object to this illegitimate notion by saying: there are no degrees of possibility, either the free act no longer exists or it is still there, in which case freedom is complete. In short, they would argue that this “likely” is meaningless.

This notion belongs to statistical thinking, which is not thinking at all, since it has nothing to do with any particular thing actually existing, nor with any moment of time, nor with any concrete event. “It’s unlikely that Paul will renounce writing bad books”: this is meaningless since, at any moment, Paul might decide to stop writing such books. The “likely” is everywhere and nowhere, it is a reified fiction that has merely a psychological existence; the “likely” is not an ingredient of the world. – And yet, we have already encountered it just a moment ago in the perceived world: the mountain is large or small insofar as it is situated as a perceived thing in the field of my virtual actions and in relation to a level that is not merely the level of my individual life, but rather the level of “every man.”

The “likely” is everywhere and nowhere, it is a reified fiction that has merely a psychological existence; the “likely” is not an ingredient of the world. – And yet, we have already encountered it just a moment ago in the perceived world: the mountain is large or small insofar as it is situated as a perceived thing in the field of my virtual actions and in relation to a level that is not merely the level of my individual life, but rather the level of “every man.” Generality and probability are not fictions, they are phenomena, and so we must find a phenomenological foundation for statistical thought. Statistical thought necessarily belongs to a being who is fixed, situated, and surrounded in the world.

Generality and probability are not fictions, they are phenomena, and so we must find a phenomenological foundation for statistical thought. Statistical thought necessarily belongs to a being who is fixed, situated, and surrounded in the world. “It’s unlikely” that I would in this moment destroy an inferiority complex in which I have been complacent now for twenty years.

The rationalist alternative – either the free act is possible or not, either the event originates in me or is imposed from the outside – does not fit with our relations with the world and with our past. Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears into it: so long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies both that it calls forth privileged modes of resolution and that it, by itself, lacks the power to procure any of them. [f. Valuation of historical situations: class prior to class consciousness.] We would arrive at the same result by examining our relations with history.

Key Concepts

• A cursory rationalism would obviously object to this illegitimate notion by saying: there are no degrees of possibility, either the free act no longer exists or it is still there, in which case freedom is complete.
• “It’s unlikely that Paul will renounce writing bad books”: this is meaningless since, at any moment, Paul might decide to stop writing such books.
• Generality and probability are not fictions, they are phenomena, and so we must find a phenomenological foundation for statistical thought.
• Statistical thought necessarily belongs to a being who is fixed, situated, and surrounded in the world.
• Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears into it: so long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies both that it calls forth privileged modes of resolution and that it, by itself, lacks the power to procure any of them.

Context

Part Three, III - FREEDOM, end of subsection [e. Sedimentation of being in the world.] and heading [f. Valuation of historical situations: class prior to class consciousness.], where Merleau-Ponty thematizes 'likelihood' and probability as phenomenological, connecting them to situated freedom and sedimented past.