The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 57, Issue 1

March 2019

FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION: NATALITY AND

THE TEMPORALITY OF ACTION IN MERLEAU-
PONTY AND ARENDT

Laura McMahon

abstract: This paper draws on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and

Hannah Arendt in order to explore the nature of free action. Part one outlines
three familiar ways in which we often understand the nature of freedom. Part two
argues that these common understandings of freedom are rooted in impoverished
conceptions of time and subjectivity. Part three engages with Arendt’s conception
of natality alongside Merleau-Ponty’s conception of expression in order to argue
that the freely acting self draws in improvisational manners on the resources of a
shared past in order to open unprecedented spaces of meaning for the future, and
in so doing at once discovers and institutes herself as the self that she is. Part four
draws on an example of anti-oppressive political action in order to argue that free
action not only has the power to inaugurate new spaces of shared meaning for the
future, but also to change the sens  of the shared past. By the same token, free
action is vulnerable in its ontological status and ethical meanings to the events and
judgments of the future. Part five argues with both Merleau-Ponty and Arendt
that ethical-political actors can do no better than to cultivate a political virtù  while
facing up to the inherently transgressive dimensions of free action in a shared
historical world.

Normally we think of the past as a settled matter; if we are free to influ-

ence the direction of things, we think, only the future can be in our hands.
Against this very sensible linear conception of time, this paper draws on
the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt to argue

Laura McMahon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Michigan University,

where she teaches Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Social and Political
Philosophy, and Feminist Philosophy. Her primary research interests are in Phenomenology
and Existentialism and Political Philosophy. She has published articles and book chapters
focusing predominantly on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Issue 1 (2019), 56–79.

ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12315

56
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 57
that free action opens up new spaces of meaning for the future and, in so
doing, changes both the meaning and the direction [sens ] of the past. On
the one hand, recognition of the open-ended nature of the past is liberat-
ing: far from being a settled matter, the meaning of the past is sensitive to
what we make of it in the present. On the other hand, this recognition is
ineluctably tragic, for to recognize the open-ended nature of the past is at
the same time to grapple with the fact that our own free action now —in
this living present that will one day be past—is open in its  meaning to
the events and judgments of the future. Our free actions—the words and
deeds by which we give voice to who we are—are definitively not in our
hands alone.
The argument of this paper proceeds in five parts. Part one briefly out-
lines three familiar conceptions of freedom. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s
chapter “Temporality” in Phenomenology of Perception  (1945), part two argues
that these familiar understandings of freedom are rooted in impoverished
and phenomenologically untenable conceptions of time and subjectivity.
Part three shows that Arendt’s conception of natality in The Human Condition
 (1958), together with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of expression, reveals that
the freely acting self creatively draws on the specific resources of a shared
past in order to institute new meaningful possibilities for the future; in so
doing, she at once discovers and institutes herself as the self that she is. Part
four draws on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of history in Humanism and Terror
 (1947), using as an example Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s controversial
1963 Birmingham campaign, in order to make the paper’s central argu-
ment: free action has the power not only to inaugurate new and unprece-
dented possibilities for the future, but to realize retroactively the sens  of the
past. Recognizing this temporal structure of action compels us to grapple
with the inherent risk of freedom: we must take responsibility for what we
do now  without ever being able to be definitively master of the meaning
of our deeds. Part five shows that for both Merleau-Ponty and Arendt, in
the last analysis ethical-political actors can do no better than to cultivate a
political virtù  while owning up to the inherently audacious and transgressive
dimensions of free action in a shared historical world.

1.  TRADITIONAL CONCEPTIONS OF FREEDOM

Three interrelated conceptions are often at play when we think about free-
dom. The first, which I will call “libertarian,” is negative: we think of
freedom as freedom from  external constraint. Nothing compels or even
motivates the free subject in one direction or another; unencumbered, the
58 LAURA MCMAHON

free subject is at each instance free to choose, and free to choose otherwise,
from the array of options laid out before her.1 
The libertarian conception of freedom dovetails with a second familiar
way of understanding freedom. In the Stoical conception, freedom is inte-
rior to individual consciousness, which cannot ultimately be touched or
controlled by forces in the external world. Even when external forces do in
fact impede a person—even when, for example, the Stoic subject is born in
chains—then it is still the case that what Victor Frankl calls “the last of the
human freedoms” cannot be taken away: “to choose one’s attitude in any
given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”2 
A third notion understands freedom positively. The free act is the act
that is within the actor’s sovereign control: I am free to the extent that I
can in fact  exercise my choices in the world. The Stoic power merely to
choose one’s private attitude is unsatisfying from this perspective; as
Merleau-Ponty writes in “Freedom,” the final chapter of Phenomenology of
Perception , “there is no freedom without some power,” and there is all the
difference in the world between merely wishing one could save a drowning
man but not having the actual capacity to do so, and actually having the
capacity to save the drowning man and successfully carrying out the deed.3 
There is something right about each of these familiar understandings of
freedom, as I hope to show throughout this paper. However, I would like
to suggest that each of these conceptions is on its own one-sided, and that
an important reason for this one-sidedness is that they each tacitly presume
impoverished conceptions of time and of subjectivity. Identifying these
impoverished conceptions of time and subjectivity will enable us to advance
richer, phenomenologically-grounded accounts of temporality and subjec-
tivity, and from there a richer, phenomenologically-grounded account of
the nature of free action.

1 
Henri Bergson nicely outlines this negative, “libertarian” conception of freedom in
chapter 3 of Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness , trans. F. L.
Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), summed up in John Stuart Mill’s statement:
“To be conscious of free will must mean to be conscious, before I have decided, that I am
able to decide either way,” in John Stuart Mill, Examination of Sir W. Hamilton’s Philosophy  (New
York: Cosimo Classics, 2008), 580; cited in Bergson, Time and Free Will , 174.
2 
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning  (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 66.
3 
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception  (Paris: Gallimard,1945), 519, 500;
Phenomenology  of Perception , trans. Donald Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 481. Further
references to Phenomenology of Perception  will be to PP , with the French pagination first and the
English second. The example of wishing to save versus  actually saving the drowning man is
attributed to Max Scheler.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 59
2.  TEMPORALITY AND SUBJECTIVITY

In the chapter of Phenomenolog y of Perception  entitled “Temporality,” Merleau-

Ponty identifies two modern ways of conceiving of time, which we can
broadly classify as empiricist (or objectivist) and rationalist (or idealist),
respectively. In outlining each of these conceptions, we shall see that while
they at first glance appear to be irreconcilable, they are both rooted in
a single dualistic ontology separating mind and body, consciousness and
nature, and are thus two sides of the same coin. We shall see further that
each of the three familiar conceptions of freedom in some ways presumes
a (confused) mixture of these empiricist and rationalist conceptions of time.
Broadly speaking, an empiricist view of time represents time as a series
of discrete “nows” arranged side-by-side, as the second-hands are arranged
contiguously on the face of a clock or as discrete events are arranged along
an historical timeline. As Bergson argues in chapter 2 of Time and Free
Will  (1889), this is an inherently spatialized conception of time, when space
is conceived in the Newtonian sense as an abstract, homogeneous medium.
Each “now” is thought to be discrete and only externally or mechanically
related to each other “now,” as we see in stop-motion photography tracing
the movement of an animal through space by putting side-by-side its frozen,
discrete positions as it moves through abstract space and time. The empir-
icist view takes an “objectivist” view outside space and time in order to
observe in a detached manner the series of cause and effect within a closed,
homogeneous universe. In this view, the (re)acting self is an in-itself object
“in” time—a sum of psychological events—in a universe of in-itself objects,
subject to the same laws of cause and effect as any other physical thing and
traversing already existing paths as a rat moves through a laboratory maze.4 
In adopting an external stance from which to view spatialized, mechanis-
tic time, the empiricist already has tacitly at play a rationalist conception of
time. Still understood as a spatialized series of “nows,” time is represented
in the mind of a thinking subject who is somehow beneath, above, or
beyond the time she represents.5  From a picture of a passive subject as
existing “in” time, we now have a picture of time as “in” an active, consti-
tuting subject. In tacitly adopting such a rationalist stance, the empiricist
reveals the incoherence of conceiving of the self as merely  an object among
others in a deterministic world of cause and effect, stimulus and reaction;

4 
For Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of an empiricist conception of time, see PP
 472-75/433-35.
5 
For Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of this rationalist conception of time, see PP
 476–77/437–38.
60 LAURA MCMAHON

even to picture such a psychological assemblage is already to adopt a uni-

fied, intelligent, external perspective on  a mechanistic universe.
It is here that many of our traditional conceptions of freedom enter the
picture. In the libertarian conception of freedom, freedom is defined as
being unconstrained by external forces or by one’s own past: one is at each
moment  free to choose and to choose otherwise. Thus, the freely acting self
is pictured as (mysteriously) outside of the natural order of cause and effect.
In the Stoical conception of freedom, freedom is understood as identical
with a consciousness free to choose its own attitude no matter the external
circumstances, and thus maintains itself as a for-itself immune to the causal
pressures of the in-itself world. In the conception of freedom as the power
to realize one’s will in the material world, the free will is introduced as an
uncaused cause, mysteriously capable of descending into nature and by its
own powers effecting changes therein. Conceived as an “invulnerable sub-
ject … beyond being and time,” as Merleau-Ponty writes, the rationalist
subject in its unadulterated freedom does not, anymore than in the empir-
icist conception, properly inhabit  time.6 
Time as it is actually lived, however, is the unfolding movement of
embodied retentions and protensions, of memories and anticipations—an
unfolding movement that is the very form of coherent, meaningful experi-
ence.7  One discrete, positive “now” does not pass away in order to be
replaced by the next discrete, positive “now,” with no intrinsic relationship
between the two moments. Rather, my present experience is always haunted
by the near absence of a past that “weighs upon me” and a future already
“trace[d] out in advance” in my perceptual engagements.8  The experience
of listening to a melody illustrates the nature of the temporal present as an
intertwining of memory and anticipation.9  A melody is not a static collec-
tion of identical, interchangeable, impenetrable notes within a homoge-
neous spatial container, as posited by the conception of time as a series of
discrete and interchangeable “nows.” Rather, a melody is the unfolding of

6 
PP  10/ixxiii, PP  430/390. For Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the manner in which the
rationalist cogito  is interpreted in terms of eternity, see PP  427–30/387–90.
7 
PP  478/439.
8 
PP  478/439.
9 
On the “melodic” nature of temporal wholes, see Merleau-Ponty, La structure du compor-
tement  (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1942), 148; The Structure of Behavior , trans. Alden
L. Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963), 137; and PP  107/81, 218/255,
437/397, and 469/430. See also Bergson’s use of the figure of a melody to illustrate the
nature of real duration in Time and Free Will , 100, 106, 111, and 127.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 61
a series of notes that are qualitatively different, deliberately ordered, and
mutually interpenetrative, such that the later notes are ineluctably colored
by the notes that come before and the earlier notes anticipate the later
notes.10  The melody is an identity that can only be what it is in its unfolding
in time , and as John Russon writes, it can only meaningfully exist for the
kind of being that can tell  time.11 
The temporality of lived experience in general is something like the tem-
poral experience of listening to a melody: it never takes the form of a series
of punctual, discrete moments contiguous to one another, but carries for-
ward its past in and through its anticipations of the future. Even the most
monotonous experience—the evenly-spaced, discrete “tick-tock” of a clock,
for example—has a qualitative and developmental, rather than a quantita-
tive and static, nature. Such repetition is a repetition with a difference, as
Gilles Deleuze says, in that monotony builds or swells over time, having a
hypnotic or soporific effect, and in that so-called identical, interchangeable
units tend to group themselves into nonhomogenous rhythms.12  What is
true even of so-called monotonous repetition is more poignantly apparent
in emotional life; for example, to fall in love a second or a third time is not
a mere repetition of an earlier emotion, but, like the notes in the melody,
the later experiences have something of their hopes and their anxieties
informed by the earlier ones, and the memory of the earlier experiences are
invariably colored by the later ones.
If temporal, melodic experience cannot be grasped as a series of “nows”
that have only an exterior relationship to one another, then neither can the
temporal unity of an experience be the work primarily of a reflecting cogito .
The unity of time is not most originally found in intellectual reflection, but
rather in our prereflective, intentional engagements with things in the
world. Intentionality  names the manner in which experience, rather than
unfolding in the interior mind of a solipsistic subject “beyond being and
time,” is always already involved with things in the world in a manner that

10 
Bergson, Time and Free Will , 100–1.
11 
John Russon, Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life 
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 12.
12 
On the manner in which the “same” experience is in fact different simply by virtue of
being a repetition, see Bergson, Time and Free Will , 200; and Gilles Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition , trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), Introduction and
esp. p. 24. On the qualitative—in this case, the hypnotic or soporific—effect of the monoto-
nous oscillations of the pendulum of a clock, see Bergson, Time and Free Will , 104–05. On the
manner in which we tend to synthesize the “same” repeated sounds (“tick tick”) into qualita-
tive rhythms (“tick-tock”), see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition , 72.
62 LAURA MCMAHON

discloses  things—that lets things show themselves—in some meaningful

manner or another. Before being an active, intellectual procedure, inten-
tionality is a perceptual and affective one: we are moved by things in the
world—we respond to their solicitations—before we can take an active,
intellectual stand on their meanings.13  Bergson’s description of the experi-
ence of becoming gradually familiar with a new town captures the inher-
ently intentional, and originally passive and ecstatic, nature of lived time.
He writes:
When … I take my first walk in a town in which I am going to live, my envi-
ronment produces in me two impressions at the same time, one of which is des-
tined to last while the other will constantly change. Every day I perceive the
same houses, and as I know that they are the same objects, I always call them
by the same name and I also fancy that they always look the same to me. But if
I recur, at the end of a sufficiently long period, to the impression which I expe-
rienced during the first few years, I am surprised at the remarkable, inexplicable,
and indeed inexpressible change which has taken place. It seems to me that these
objects, continually perceived by me … have ended by borrowing from me some-
thing of my own conscious existence; like myself they have lived, and like myself
they have grown old.14 

To inhabit time is not to pass through a homogeneous medium but to grow

and to change. This change takes place not so much in the self as in the
world of experience; as the experiencing self grows and changes, so too
does the qualitative color and sense of the world that she inhabits.15  From
the other side, it is in the contrast between the intimate, well-worn famil-
iarity of these buildings—with their layers of dormant memories of past
experiences that could at any moment be reawakened and explored—and
the freshness and superficiality of one’s earlier, younger impressions of the
same buildings, that one feels one’s own aging identity. As Merleau-Ponty
says, “time is not a line, but rather a network of intentionalities.”16 
Time and subjectivity are thus inherently intertwined. As Merleau-Ponty
says, the embodied self “accomplishes” the passage of time in that it “takes
up or lives time and merges with the cohesion of a life.”17  We might say,

13 
See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of “operative intentionality,” PP  479–81/440–42 and
“the intentional arc,” PP  169–72/137–39.
14 
Bergson, Time and Free Will , 130.
15 
Cf. PP  478/439: “‘protensions’ and ‘retentions’ … do not emanate from a central I,
but somehow from my perceptual field itself, which drags along behind itself its horizon of
retentions and eats into the future with its retentions.”
16 
PP  479/440.
17 
PP  483/444, 485/446.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 63
equally, that time “accomplishes” subjectivity. It is not only the case that a
temporal unity like a melody is enabled to emerge as a unity in the experi-
ence of a subject that can synthesize past, present, and future; it is also the
case that the experiencing subject discovers herself as  a self in and through
the temporal unities that reveal themselves to her and reflect her back to
herself as an ongoing, temporal unfolding. As Scott Marratto writes, “the
subject encounters its own  possibilities and history as  the meaning of [its]
situation; it encounters itself  in a situation’s horizons of futurity and past-
ness.”18  The weight of one’s personal and historical past as an individual is
carried forward in one’s habitual ways of engaging with things in the famil-
iar horizons of one’s situation—familiar horizons which point toward and
sketch out one’s future.
What richer, phenomenologically-grounded conception of free action
emerges from a richer, phenomenologically-grounded account of temporal-
ity and subjectivity? In part three, I will bring together Arendt’s conception
of natality and Merleau-Ponty’s conception of expression to argue that free
action opens new spaces of meaning in the shared world and simultaneously
discovers and institutes the self that does the deed.

3.  NATALITY AND EXPRESSION

We began to see in part two the manner in which the “now” of lived expe-
rience is always a “thick” present that is weighed upon by the past while
offering nascent sketches of possible shapes of the future.19  If this is so, then
human activity always takes place at this nexus between the facticity of a
past that tends toward a certain repetition or inertia and the transcendence
of a future that, thanks to the weight of the past, is already inclined in
certain directions, but that is not for this reason simply defined or closed.
At this “gap between past and future,” as Arendt says—or what we might
prefer to call, with Merleau-Ponty, a space of “divergence” [écart ] between
past and future—what kinds of experiences of time, and what kinds of
human activity, tend more towards repetition and inertia, and what kinds

18 
Scott Marratto, The Intercorporeal  Self: Merleau-Ponty  on Subjectivity  (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2012), 113. See also Diana Coole’s discussion of the manner in which
Merleau-Ponty “decenters the subject,” particularly in the context of the latter’s discussion of
temporality, in Merleau-Ponty  and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism  (Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2007), 182–85.
19 
On “the thickness of the pre-objective present,” see PP  496/457. On the “weight” of
the past, see Donald A. Landes,“Memory, Sedimentation, Self: The Weight of the Ideal in
Bergson and Merleau-Ponty,” in Time, Memory, Institution: Merleau-Ponty’s New Ontology of the Self ,
eds. Kym Maclaren and David Morris (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 130–45.
64 LAURA MCMAHON

more toward creativity and freedom?20  In The Human Condition,  A rendt

outlines three different temporal experiences, and three corresponding
types of human activity, which help us begin to answer this question.
A first temporality in human existence is the time of organic living. Now
and throughout my natural life, a host of processes sustain my bodily life
and enable the reproduction of the species, such as breathing, digestion,
circulation, and sexual cycles. The temporality of these processes is basically
cyclical, of a piece with the cycling of the seasons, the rotation of the earth
around the sun, and the ebb and flow of the tides.21  Certain kinds of human
activities serve to sustain these natural processes, such as the production of
food, cooking, and the disposal of waste—activities that are, like the biolog-
ical processes they sustain, necessarily cyclical and repetitive. Arendt calls
such life-sustaining activities labor .22  Though we can take up the demands
of labor with more or less creativity and pleasure, it is generally not these
life-sustaining and life-reproducing activities alone that make up what is
most remarkable and memorable about our lives, nor do these activities
constitute the distinctive domain of human freedom.
A second temporality operative in human existence is the time of produc-
tion.23  In the production of artifacts, the craftsperson produces her products
as instances of a model or type that she already has in mind.24  In the mod-
ern production of artifacts, multiple copies are created upon a model, blue-
print, or mold, as on the assembly line of an industrial factory. In contrast
to the cyclical time of organic life, the time of production is fundamentally
mechanical. Arendt calls the human activity that corresponds with the
mechanical temporality of production work . As the cyclical temporality of
labor resembles the cyclical temporality of organic life, the temporality of
work resembles the temporality of the production of artifacts. In modern
industry, interchangeable copies of a model are produced through the rou-
tine, repetitive motions of many workers operating in a highly articulated

20 
Hannah Arendt, “Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future,” in Between Past and
Future  (New York: Penguin Books, 1968b), 3–16. On divergence [écart ], see Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Le visible et  l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail  (Paris: Gallimard 1964e), 320; The Visible and
the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes  (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 272.
21 
On the cyclical time of zoe , or biological life, see Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of
History,” in Between Past and Future  (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 41–42.
22 
Hannah Arendt, The  Human Condition  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),
7–8, 79–135. Further references to The Human Condition  will be to HC. 
23 
On the manner in which the built world of work corresponds to our “unnatural” or
“artificial” condition, see HC  7–8 and chap. 4.
24 
See Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument that “essence precedes existence” in the case of the
manufacturing of artifacts in, Existentialism is  a Humanism  (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007), 20–21.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 65
division of labor, the performance of which is measured in minutes and
hours and compensated in the doling out of wages in precise monetary units
corresponding to the time of the clock. The monotonous experience of
work over time degrades the experience and identity of the worker, as Karl
Marx powerfully describes, just as the monotony of a ticking clock cannot
but have a qualitative rather than a merely quantitative effect on the one
listening.25  As we shall see, it is not in “work” thusly conceived that our
most distinctive experiences of freedom are to be found.
A third temporality at play in human existence is the time of narrative
and of history—of what Arendt calls natality . In contrast to the time of nat-
ural cycles and of mechanical reproduction, the temporality of natality is a
temporality of beginnings, middles, and ends—and of hopes, accomplish-
ments, and commemoration—in the intentional lives of those who live it.26 
Those who inhabit this kind of time are those whose own birth itself is the
inauguration of something singular and new in the world. The birth of a
new person is not only a biological event in which a particular instance of
a species comes into being, but also an existential event in which not a
particular “what” but a singular “who” comes into being.27  Defying all laws
of probability, the birth of each new individual can be seen as a “miracle,”
but one that is of the most commonplace variety: innumerable such mira-
cles form the very fabric of reality.28  Singular individuals who are born 
themselves possess the power of beginning and of beginning again, that is,
of inaugurating new processes in the world that, while not coming from
nowhere, can nevertheless be unpredictable, unprecedented, and surprising
in their creativity. Such new beginnings are the very stuff of biography and
25 
See Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 , trans.
Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988). On a different but related point, as
the ticking of the clock organizes itself into articulated perceptual units—tick-tock—the repet-
itive sounds of machinery start to shape themselves into rhythms and melodies. For an illus-
tration of the musicality to be found in the repetitive sounds of the factory, see the song and
dance sequence in the factory in Dancer in the Dark , directed by Lars Von Trier (Denmark:
Zentropa, 2000).
26 
On the dramatic nature of lived time in human experience, see David Ciavatta, “The
Event of Absolute Freedom: Hegel on the French Revolution and Its Calendar,” Philosophy
and Social Criticism  40, no. 6 (2014): 577–605, esp. sec. 1.
27 
On the “who” versus  the “what” in Arendt, see HC  10, 179, and 181. Arendt’s argu-
ment here can be seen as a nuanced way of interpreting Sartre’s famous statement in
Existentialism is a Humanism  that in human life—in contrast to manufactured objects—“exis-
tence precedes essence” (22).
28 
On the miraculous nature of every birth, and of the emergence of anything new, see
HC  178 and Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” Between Past and Future  (New York: Penguin
Books, 1968c), 168. Further references to “What is Freedom?” will be to WF.  See also Anne
O’Byrne, Natality  and Finitude  (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), chap. 4, on the
miraculous unlikelihood and unpredictability of birth and natal action.
66 LAURA MCMAHON

history.29  Arendt calls the human activity that corresponds to the time of
biography and history action .
In contrast to labor and work, it is in the domain of action that the most
distinctive reality of human freedom is found. As the expression of human
freedom, action accomplishes two things: first, it effects a material change
in the shared world; and second, it distinguishes the “who” that acts as the
singular individual that she is. These two features of action always work in
tandem: it is by effecting material changes in the world that one reveals
who one is.30  Free action addresses the situation in a fresh and personal
way that is not calculable in advance, thus bearing something of the mirac-
ulous nature of the birth of a new baby. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expres-
—and in particular of what he calls originary or authentic
sion 
expression—helps us to bring this point into sharper focus.
What is expression? There are two common ways in which we often
misunderstand the nature of expression, which reflect, respectively, the
empiricist and rationalist conceptions of time criticized above. The empiri-
cist pictures gesture and speech as so many positional instants in a chain of
stimuli and reactions on the part of a subject conceived as a collection of
psychic states; as Merleau-Ponty writes, from this point of view “there is no
one who speaks, there is but a flow of words that occurs without any inten-
tion to speak governing it … speech is not an action, for it does not mani-
fest the inner possibilities of the subject.”31  By contrast, the rationalist
conceives of expression as the worldly externalization of an inner thought
that exists for the cogito  fully formed prior to the act of expression, and that
is not fundamentally changed in or by this act of expression: expression is
the mere “clothing” of thought.32  By this rationalist account, there would
never be any difficulty in expressing oneself: one would already clearly

29 
Cf. HC  184, where Arendt argues that both individual life stories—life in the sense of
bios  rather than zoe —and human histories are the outcome of action, and that it is the capac-
ity for each individual life to be told as a story with beginning and end—as a biography—that
is the “prepolitical and prehistorical” condition of history.
30 
On actions as simultaneously disclosing the “who” of the actor and setting forth new
processes in the shared world, see Arendt, HC  175–81. See also Russon’s discussion of action
as “an event of the world that is an event of me” (Sites of Exposure: Art, Politics, and the Nature of
Experience.  [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017], 36).
31 
PP  214/180. Merleau-Ponty criticizes the empiricist view of expression at PP
 213–14/179–80.
32 
For Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of the rationalist misunderstanding of expression, see PP
 221–22/187. For a criticism of the manner in which scholars continue to misunderstand in
rationalist fashion what Merleau-Ponty means by expression, see Silvia Stoller, “Expressivity
and Performativity: Merleau-Ponty and Butler,” Continental Philosophy Review  43 (2010):
97–110.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 67
possess one’s meaning, and there would be no inherent difficulty in
­communicating this meaning to others.
These are both poor accounts of the lived experience of expressing, say,
one’s emotional reality or one’s artistic vision. It is my  meaning I wish to
express, but I do not already possess it in a positive, fully present fashion
any more than I possess myself as a speaker in a positive, fully present fash-
ion. Now, one can and often does take an easy route in one’s speaking,
voicing feelings and opinions that one finds already available in one’s cul-
tural landscape, as when one thoughtlessly relies on conventional cultural
scripts in forming one’s most intimate relationships, or as when one merely
parrots familiar cliches in matters of moral or political urgency. Merleau-
Ponty calls this secondary , inauthentic , or spoken  speech [parole parlée ], which
merely plays out “on the surface of being” and thus forfeits any responsibil-
ity to work at giving voice to one’s own feelings and thoughts.33  Arendt’s
analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann speaks to an extreme case of this
widespread tendency: the man responsible for scheduling the trains that
sent millions to concentration camps during the Second World War
defended himself by arguing that he was being a successful middle-class
family man by advancing in his career, and a good citizen by simply follow-
ing orders from his superiors.34 
However, there are two reasons why even when one expresses oneself
in this way, one can be neither the automaton of the empiricist nor the
cogito  of the rationalist. First, as we have seen, this is not what it is to be a
self who inhabits time. As Diana Coole writes, “consciousness remains
precarious and radically incomplete because it is constantly remade by its
spatiotemporal conditions of emergence.”35  In secondary speech, one
“remakes” oneself again and again, reenacting and habitually reinforcing
one’s character. For example, someone who evades critical thinking and

33 
PP   69/45. On the distinction between originary and secondary speech, see
PP  217–218n2/530n6, 218n1/530n7, 224/189, 236/200, and 449/409. See also Merleau-
Ponty, “Le doute de Cézanne,” in Sens et Non-sens  (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 24; Merleau-
Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense , trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen
Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 18–19. Further references to
“Cézanne’s Doubt” will be to CD , with the French pagination first and the English second.
See also Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence,” in Signes  (Paris: Gallimard,
1960), 74, 108, 122; Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs ,
trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 46, 67, 75.
Further references to “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” will be to ILVS , with the
French pagination first and the English second.
34 
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil  (New York: Penguin
Books, 1964).
35 
Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics , 184.
68 LAURA MCMAHON

personal responsibility cannot simply by wishing it forfeit existential and

ethical responsibility for her deeds and for her life.36  Second, language—
even the most superficial language—is neither a mere impersonal reaction
to a stimulus nor a stockpile of readymade phrases available for deploy-
ment. Even the most clichéd phrase must be deployed by an experiencing
subject in a meaningful context, and, as Donald Landes argues, even the
supposed clarity of spoken speech in fact draws its meaning from the
obscure power by which such expressions originally emerged in human
situations.37  In secondary speech, the miraculous power of enabling new
meaningful realities to emerge from the world of nature is forgotten, as
expressions which were once remarkable take on lives of their own—lives
that are reinscribed and reenacted again and again through innumerable
words and gestures.38 
We can witness this originary power in what Merleau-Ponty calls origi-
nary , authentic , or speaking  speech [parole parlante ].39  In contrast to secondary
speech, originary speech does  work to give voice to one’s own meaning in a
fresh and creative manner for which there are not readymade terms.
Marratto uses the example of a spontaneous dance of joy to illustrate what
Merleau-Ponty means by originary expression. He writes:
[The] movements [of ]…someone’s spontaneous “dancing for joy” … may be
quite ambiguous, or even may appear to lack any sense (even to the subject who
“initiates” them). They generate their own meaning in the course of their own
unfolding … These movements make sense precisely insofar as they make  sense.
But the point here is that such movements do not start off “knowing” what they
are aiming at. The dance for joy is “spontaneous” precisely to the extent that it
is the very enactment of joy, it is someone’s way of being joyful, or, if we could
also say, it is joy’s way of enacting itself in a body.40 

36 
See PP  19/lxxii-iii: “There is not a single word or human gesture—not even those
habitual or distracted ones—that does not have a signification.” See also Heidegger’s discus-
sion of inauthenticity and the “they” in Being and Time , trans. Macquarrie and Robinson (New
York: Harper Perennial, 1962), §27 and §§34–38, and Simone de Beauvoir’s discussions of
“the sub-man” and “the serious man” in The Ethics of Ambiguity  (New York: Citadel Press,
1976), 45–56.
37 
Donald A. Landes, Merleau-Ponty  and the Paradoxes of Expression  (New York: Bloomsbury,
2013), 14–15.
38 
Landes, Merleau-Ponty  and the Paradoxes of Expression , 13 and 22–27.
39 
On the “miraculous” nature of originary speech, see Laura McMahon, “Phenomenology
as First-Order Perception: Speech, Vision, and Reflection in Merleau-Ponty,” in Perception and
Its Development in Merleau-Ponty’s  Phenomenology  , eds. Kirsten Jacobson and John Russon
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), esp. sec. 1.
40 
Marrato, The Intercorporeal  Self , 97.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 69
To give voice to one’s own  meaning is not arbitrarily to impose one’s will
on the situation, but to let what is already nascently at play speak through 
one’s own embodied gestures and words.41  As such, authentic expression is
a matter of inspiration: one finds oneself  in terms of something outside of 
oneself, something that will only be realized in and through one’s own
successful “reading” of the situation and successful effort of expression.42 
This adequate expression does not yet exist, and the singular and contin-
gent form it takes can thus be a matter of surprise as much to the speaker
(or dancer) as to the listener (or the one greeted by the dance).43 
The reality of the situation’s potential meaning can thus be said defini-
tively to exist only once it has actually been realized in an embodied expres-
sion; it is indeed sketched by the past, but in a manner that is concretely
visible only once the anticipated reality has come into being.44  Merleau-
Ponty’s description of the work of Paul Cézanne in his essay “Cézanne’s
Doubt” speaks to this contingent and vulnerable nature of authentic expres-
sion. Merleau-Ponty writes:
What he expresses cannot … be the translation of a clearly defined thought,
since such clear thoughts are those which have already been uttered by ourselves
or others. “Conception” cannot precede “execution.” There is nothing but a
vague fever before the act of artistic expression, and only the work itself, com-
pleted and understood, is proof that there was something  rather than nothing  to be
said.45 

Absent a successful expression, the potential meaning is but mere  poten-

tial, a pregnant silence that is never broken, a vague or haunting shadow
of reality. It is the successful expression that makes  this sense real, that gives
it a determinate and finite body in this  dance or this  painting.

41 
On the manner in which freedom does not impose its own sense on things but responds
to the “autochthonous sense of the world,” see PP  503–504/465–66. I am grateful to Drew
Leder for his thoughts on this point.
42 
See Landes’s discussion of “expressive reading” in Merleau-Ponty, in Merleau-Ponty  and
the Paradoxes of Expression , 37–40.
43 
See Waldenfels on the ambiguities of “translation” as one of Merleau-Ponty’s operative
concepts of expression, in Bernhard Waldenfels, “The Paradox of Expression,” in Chiasms:
Merleau-Ponty’s  Notion of Flesh , eds. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University
of New York Press 2000), 95.
44 
See Waldenfels on “après coup ” as one of Merleau-Ponty’s operative concepts of expres-
sion in “The Paradox of Expression,” 96. See also Russon’s discussion of potentiality in “The
Self as Resolution: Heidegger, Derrida, and the Intimacy of the Question of the Meaning of
Being,” Research in Phenomenology  38 (2008): 90–110, 95–97.
45 
CD  24–25/19.
70 LAURA MCMAHON

If secondary speech tends toward monotonous reinforcement of already

instituted meanings, then originary speech qua  free action emerges at the
divergence [écart ] between past and future. Within this divergence one may
creatively discover within one’s inherited language one’s own way of
answering to the truth and meaning of a shared situation. In authentic
expression one uses familiar tools and sedimented habits—limbs, torso, and
feet in the case of the dance of joy; paint, canvas, and light in the case of
Cézanne’s painting—in order to realize unprecedented expressive possibili-
ties of these bodily and material instruments.46  As Merleau-Ponty writes in
his essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” from out of the
wealth of available significations such “coherent deformations” are the
advent or institution of new spaces of meaning within the horizons of
the familiar world.47 
Once uttered, the expression has a temporal momentum of its own that
can potentially “establish … a new tradition.”48  Merleau-Ponty writes on
the concept of institution:
Thus what we understand by the concept of institution are those events in expe-
rience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole
series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series
or a history—or again those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as
survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a sequel, the necessity of a
future.49 

Authentic expression draws on the resources of the past so as to sketch

out a new future, changing the landscape of what can be—what calls to
be—thought, said, and done.

46 
See Russon on the manner in which art reveals the expressivity of material and bodily
life in Sites of Exposure , 131–52, esp. 134.
47 
On “coherent deformations,” see ILVS  88/54. See also Waldenfels on divergence as
one of Merleau-Ponty’s operative concepts of expression, in “The Paradox of Expression,”
95.
48 
PP  500–502/462–63. See also PP  219/185 on how the artwork “creates its own
public.”
49 
Merleau-Ponty, “Institution in Personal and Public History,” in In Praise of Philosophy and
Other Essays  , trans. John Wild, James Edie, and John O’Neill (Evantson: Northwestern
University Press, 1970), 108–9. For a helpful discussion of this passage and the relationship
between expression and institution, see Scott Marratto, “This Power to Which We are
Vowed: Subjectivity and Expression in Merleau-Ponty,” in Time, Memory, Institution: Merleau-
Ponty’s  New Ontology of Self , eds. Kym Maclaren and David Morris (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2015), 160–79. See also Don Beith’s discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of “in-
stitution” in The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy  (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2018), esp. Chapter 2.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 71
It is in such active expressions—in such expressive actions—that we find
the concrete embodiment of human freedom. In a nod to the libertarian
conception of freedom, we must recognize that we are not simply deter-
mined by the weight of the past: the écart  between past and future allows
new meanings to find a voice. With due respect to the Stoical conception
of freedom, we should notice the manner in which human intentionality lets
new meanings appear in the shared world and can continue to do so no
matter the external circumstances. And with deference to the conception of
freedom as the power to do —as the power to materially realize one’s will in
the world—we should recognize that freedom is not merely restricted to the
private sphere of personal consciousness but enables transformations to take
place in the shared world. However, recognition of these aspects of freedom
must occur within the context of a broader recognition of the manner in
which free, (self-) expressive action is as much passive as it is active, as much
about listening and answerability as it is about creativity and audacity.50 
Freedom is not the lot of a fully self-determining cogito , but of a self
always already encountering herself in and through a concrete, inherited
situation. Nowhere but in and through her expressions and deeds is the
“who” that acts born and reborn—instituted over time—as the self that she
is. It is only in one’s dance of joy at the appearance of someone dear that
one experiences and institutes oneself as a lover or a friend, only in painting
and repainting The Bathers  that Cézanne develops and concretizes his singu-
lar vision and thus becomes the recognizable painter that he is. As Merleau-
Ponty writes, “if we put the painter back in contact with his world … the
metamorphosis which through him transforms the world into painting,
changes him into himself from his beginnings to his maturity.”51  If free
action is bringing to voice the situation itself, so the self-actualization that
occurs through the free action is as much the work of the situation as it is
of individual choice. In the free action, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “it is
impossible to determine the ‘contribution of the situation’ and the ‘contri-
bution of freedom.’”52  This fundamental ambiguity leads to further, difficult
questions about both the nature of freedom and the nature of history.

50 
For a discussion of the inherently passive dimensions of freedom, see John Russon,
“Freedom and Passivity: Attention, Work, and Language,” in Perception and Its Development in
Merleau-Ponty’s  Phenomenology , eds. Kirsten Jacobson and John Russon (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2017), 25–39.
51 
ILVS  93/57.
52 
PP  518/480.
72 LAURA MCMAHON

4.  THE TEMPORALITY OF ACTION

As ambiguously passive and active, as the work of both the situation and
the self, free action can be the site of our most fulfilling experiences of
self-expression and, at the same time, the site of our most poignant frustra-
tions. In chapter five of The Human Condition , Arendt identifies three “frus-
trations” of action: first, the trajectories inaugurated by action are
irreversible; second, they are unpredictable and boundless; and third, they
are ultimately anonymous in their authorship, insofar as they take on a life
of their own beyond the initial scene of their inauguration.53  These three
frustrations point us to three recognitions about the temporal nature of
action. With regard to the present, action cuts into time in such a way that,
irreversibly, nothing can ever be the same as a result of its performance.
With regard to the future, action projectively opens up a new domain of
interpersonal or historical meaning in ways it cannot predict or control,
and in so doing is boundless in its interpersonal and historical impact.
Finally, with regard to the past, action has a retrospective  power, casting its
light on what we notice and care about in the past, and retroactive  power,
allowing past events to count as  antecedents, anticipations, and sketches of
the present situation.54  However, as I shall argue in what follows, if action
has the power to retrospectively and retroactively transform the sens  of the
past, then it is in turn vulnerable in its meaning to events and judgments
of the future. Because of this, action is at once a matter of grave personal
responsibility, and ultimately authorless in its meanings.
An illuminating example of anti-oppressive political action can be seen in
the collective acts of civil disobedience during the Civil Rights movement
in the United States, notably the Birmingham campaign of 1963 organized
by Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel, and others in the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference. My argument in what follows closely
mirrors Merleau-Ponty’s argument in Humanism and Terror  (1947) concern-
ing “the Communist problem,” specifically the problem of the ethical and
political status of the use of violence in the (supposed) pursuit of humanistic

53 
On the threefold frustration of action, see HC  220 and chap. 5, passim. 
54 
For a complementary account of “the retrospective realization of potential” in other
domains of human life—intellectual learning, sensory-motor development, and emotional and
linguistic development—see Kym Maclaren, “Merleau-Ponty on Human Development and
the Retrospective Realization of Potential,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences  16 (2017):
609–21. See also Don Beith’s discussion of “the future anterior” in The Birth of Sense , 75–86.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 73
ends.55  In taking up Merleau-Ponty’s argument with regard to what was at
the time a controversial action in the American Civil Rights movement, my
task is considerably easier than was Merleau-Ponty’s—a difference that
itself contributes to our understanding of the temporality of historical action.
Whereas Merleau-Ponty was discussing the worth of the Soviet project and
the morality of its strategies for achieving its ends in 1947, when it was still
very much unclear what would be the fate of this project, I am looking back
on a Civil Rights movement that ultimately enjoyed great success and is
now widely admired.
Part of the campaign to desegregate Birmingham through nonviolent
direct action, such as lunch counter sit-ins and marches, was the recruit-
ment of young students—children and teenagers—to train in nonviolent
direct action, to “skip” school, and to march to City Hall in what was called
the “Children’s Crusade.” As anticipated, the demonstrating children were
arrested by the thousands and attacked by police dogs and water hoses.
Images of these events were published in newspapers around the country.
The use of children proved to be controversial but strategically effective: the
images of these attacks in newspapers around the country massively swayed
public sentiment against segregation in the American South and in support
of the cause of Civil Rights.
Two common sense assumptions undergird many of our everyday con-
ceptions of history, corresponding to empiricist and rationalist concep-
tions of time and expression criticized above. Sonia Kruks describes these
two assumptions as follows. The empiricist sees history as “essentially
random and unpredictable, as the outcome of diverse actions, contingent
events and circumstances, as exemplified in the claim that the assassina-
tion of Archduke Ferdinand ‘caused’ the First World War.”56  The empir-
icist pictures history as a natural sequence of cause and effect, stimuli and
reaction, with no overall governing order. The rationalist, by contrast,
conceives of history as “having a cumulative, or pregiven, trajectory that
unfolds over time—as the necessary ‘progress’ of freedom, or reason, or

55 
Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et  terreur, essaie sur la problème communiste  (Paris: Gallimard,
1947), 45; Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem , trans. John
O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), xviii: “Is communism still equal to its humanist inten-
tions? That is the real question.” Further references to Humanism and Terror  will be to HT,  with
the French pagination first and the English second.
56 
Sonia Kruks, “Philosophy of History,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts  , eds. Rosalyn
Diprose and Jack Reynolds (Stocksfield: Acumen Publishing, 2008), 70.
74 LAURA MCMAHON

human well-being, for example.”57  The rationalist envisions a providen-

tial history governed by ideals held in the mind of—and guaranteed
by—an all-witnessing, rationalist god. Neither of these assumptions cap-
ture the lived sense of history on the ground, in which, like the painter
seeking to capture a new vision for which there are not yet readymade
terms, a provisional, open-ended sense seeks to emerge from non-sense in
order to institute a new trajectory of meaning in the shared world.58  The
emergence of “nonviolent” direct action such as the one in Birmingham
was neither random nor determined by a pregiven historical trajectory.
Rather, as Merleau-Ponty writes, it was “prepared by a molecular pro-
cess,” in which it is likely  that a minority suffering generations of racial
oppression might rebel, but in which the specific form this rebellion will
take remains a matter of contingency.59  Nonviolent direct action arose in
the form that it did through the particular judgments and choices of act-
ing individuals, from Bevel and King, to the thousands of students who
participated, to the reporters who documented the direct action and the
brutal police response, to the spectators who cheered on the demonstra-
tors. Furthermore, this action was not carried out in a context of unani-
mous support. It was opposed by, among others, white Christian moderates
who urged peaceful negotiations with those in political power in Alabama,
and voices in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements who opposed
putting children in harm’s way.60  The actions in Birmingham drew on the
possibilities of an oppressive past in a dramatic attempt to alter the tra-
jectory of history and open new spaces of freedom for the future. But
their success was not assured, because history, like lived time, is not a line
but an interpersonal and intergenerational network of intentionalities. As
Coole writes, though historical progress is not guaranteed it is

57 
Kruks, “Philosophy of History,” 70.
58 
Cf. Kruks, “Philosophy of History,” 76, on the manner in which Merleau-Ponty seeks
to develop an account of history sensitive both to its sens  and non-sens. 
59 
PP  510/471. On the phenomenological nature of probability, see PP  505–06/467. See
also Malcolm X’s argument that racial tensions in the United States constituted a “powder
keg” ready to explode in “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and
Statements , ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 23–44.
60 
Cf. King’s criticism of white moderates in “Letter From a Birmingham City Jail,” in
Why We Can’t Wait  (New York: Signet Classics, 1964). For Malcolm X’s criticism of Bevel and
King’s use of children in the Birmingham Campaign, see Andrew Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put
Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttleworth  (Tuscaloosa: The University of
Alabama Press, 1999), 370. For King’s retrospective view of the wisdom of using children at
the critical juncture that they did, see The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. , ed. Clayborne
Carson (New York: Warner Books, 1998), chap. 19.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 75
nevertheless possible to have “communication across differences and the
possibility of progress within contingency.”61 
Living in a world shaped by the spirit of these successful actions, however
imperfectly, it is easy to fail to recognize that in their historical present these
actions were inherently risky and carried out without guarantees: the actors
put their bodies and lives on the line, so to speak, over an abyss, taking a
stand on a future that did not yet and may have never have come to exist.62 
It is this or some other future that will come to justify or condemn these
deeds as deeds and these actors as actors. One and the same action can
mean very different things in light of the unpredictable consequences it
unleashes and the manners in which it is subsequently received.63 
Epistemologically, we can only know  the meaning of an action retrospec-
tively: Was the gamble with children’s lives a successful strategy in the Civil
Rights campaign, or a cruel and fruitless calculation with human lives?
Ontologically, the action only is what it is  retroactively, by virtue of the place
it comes to acquire as the inauguration of a larger narrative. Rather than
one event unequivocally and unidirectionally causing  another, the outcomes
of the action grant the antecedents their identities as  antecedents. The sway-
ing of public sentiment and the resultant changes in public policy retrospec-
tively and retroactively cast the past as  a history of racist oppression that
was destined to be repudiated and redressed by “more enlightened” future
generations; the establishment of King and others as nationally-honored

61 
Coole, Merleau-Ponty  and Modern Politics , 131. See also Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures  de la
dialectique  (Paris: Gallimard, 1955); Adventures of the Dialectic , trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Prsess, 1973), 16: “History has meaning, but there is no pure devel-
opment of ideas. Its meaning arises in contact with contingency, at the moment when human
initiative founds a system of life by taking up anew scattered givens.” See also Bernard Flynn’s
discussion of the relationship between universality and contingency in Merleau-Ponty’s polit-
ical philosophy in “The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty: Humanism and the Rejection
of Terror,” Continental Philosophy Review  40 (2007): 125–38, 131–32 and Landes’s discussion of
the manner in which “history is both  contingent and rational,” in Merleau-Ponty  and the Paradoxes
of Expression , 111.
62 
Cf. Russon’s discussion of the “madness” of conscientious action in Sites of Exposure ,
124–31.
63 
On the role that success plays in our sense of the ethical and political meaning of an
action, see HT   65–66/xxxv/xxxvi. Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck:
Philosophical Papers 1973–1980  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 20–39, and
Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979), 24–38, explore closely related themes in their discussions of the idea of moral luck.
Merleau-Ponty had already explored many of the issues pertinent to the idea of moral luck
in Humanism and Terror , as Nagel acknowledges, see “Moral Luck,” 30n5. See also HC  192,
where Arendt argues that the meaning of the action reveals itself less to the actor on the
ground than to “the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what
it was all about than the participants.”
76 LAURA MCMAHON

Civil Rights heroes cast the Children’s Crusade as a courageous, moral, and
political savvy deed that helped to inaugurate a new and better future.

5.  PLURALITY, TRAGEDY, AND VIRTUOSIC ACTION

The temporal structure of free action is such that the meaning and force
of events—present, future, and past—is inherently indeterminate and
open-ended: the configuration of their sense awaits how they will later
come to count in the experience and deeds of others. As Arendt argues, the
actor is not only a doer but a sufferer.64  Because we inhabit time and
because we share the world with others—because our condition is one not
only of natality but of plurality—the consequences and meanings of our
free acts, as well as our identities as actors, do not rest in our hands alone.65 
The consequences of our actions do not simply play out according to our
wills, and they touch others in profound ways that we may not have planned
or been able to anticipate. Even when we act in good faith, we must bear
responsibility for, and suffer the consequences of, our free acts, including
when these consequences are far from what we intended.66  And we must
bear responsibility for who we have become as the author of these deeds,
even if these identities are far from ones we would have endorsed.
There is, therefore, an inherently tragic dimension to free, (self-)expressive
action; as Arendt writes, “trespassing is an everyday occurrence,” and as
Merleau-Ponty writes, “it is a law of human action that the present encroaches
upon the future, the self upon other people.”67  We see this tragic dimension of
freedom played out in the myth of Oedipus, who unwittingly married his
mother and killed his father, yet took on the full weight of his responsibility for
these deeds once their true meaning was revealed.68  We trespass not only

64 
HC  190.
65 
Cf. Arendt’s discussion of the human condition of plurality at HC  7–8, and the “web”
of human relations at HC  181–88.
66 
Cf. HT  66/xxxvi: “an action can produce something else than it envisioned, but nev-
ertheless political man assumes its consequences.”
67 
Arendt, HC  244; Merleau-Ponty, HT  213/109. Merleau-Ponty frequently uses the
term empiétement —trespassing, encroachment—in his writings in the 1950s. The more aggres-
sive synonym enjambement  is used here in Humanism and Terror . Cf. Emmanuel De Saint
Aubert’s discussion of this passage in Du Lien des être aux éléments de l’être: Merleau-Ponty au tour-
nant des années 1945–1951  (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2004), 42, and his tracing of
the term empiétement  in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in chap. 1.
68 
See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the story of Oedipus at HT  68–69/xxxviii-ix and
ILVS  116/72, Arendt’s at HC  233, and Williams’s at 1981, 29–30, 30n2. See also Arendt’s
argument that human freedom is not absurd but tragic at HC  235, 235n74, 235n75, and
Merleau-Ponty on the tragedy of history at HT  62/xxxiii.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 77
because, like Oedipus, we know not what we do. There are two further senses
in which our actions encroach upon the freedom of others. First, to speak and
to act—to say and do things in this  contingent way rather than in some other—
is to render determinate or actual an indeterminate or potential future. Even
if the actor does her best to interpret the situation so as to allow its nascent
meanings to speak through her deeds, it is in the end still she who interprets
and acts. In acting one inevitably pushes an agenda, so to speak, without in
principle being able to know the consequences or the ultimate meaning of
what one does. In this sense, even loving another is a kind of trespass or
encroachment. Merleau-Ponty says in “The Child’s Relations With Others”:
Could one conceive of a love that would not be an encroachment on the freedom
of the other? … To consent to love or to be loved is to consent also to influence
someone else, to decide to a certain extent on behalf of the other. To love is in-
evitably to enter into an undivided situation with another.69 

Second, our actions encroach upon the freedom of others in that in push-
ing our agendas we sometimes make compromises that, as in the case of
the Children’s Crusade, wait on the successful realization of their ends in
order to be morally justified. Bevel’s and King’s action was transgressive or
violent in a Kantian moral sense in that it used the bodies of the children
and teenagers as means in a political struggle. The ethical dilemma is that
this political struggle ultimately aimed at a political situation in which
these very children and teenagers would ultimately be dignified legally and
in practice as ends in themselves.70 
If all action is transgression or encroachment, then what is it to act eth-
ically? I suggest that there are two distinctive features to ethical action.
First, for a free act to be ethical it is necessary that the action be guided by
imperatives and principles that are not merely idiosyncratic but that could
in principle hold for all.71  King’s actions, guided by the commitment to just

69 
Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” trans. William Cobb, in The
Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and
Politics , ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 154.
70 
See Immanuel Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative in Grounding for
a Metaphysics of Morals  in Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals , trans. James
W. Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company 1993), 36. It is in this Kantian
sense of ethics that we should understand Merleau-Ponty’s endorsement of the claim that
“politics is in essence unethical” (HT  72/xli). See also Saint Aubert on the manner in which
the purity of Kantian moralism, in condemning violence qua empiétement , at the same time
condemns the embodied humanity whose very condition is one of encroachment on the fu-
ture and on others in Du Lien des être aux éléments de l’être , 43–44.
71 
See Kant’s first formulation of the Categorical Imperative in Grounding for a Metaphysics
of Morals , 14.
78 LAURA MCMAHON

laws that uphold the dignity of every person, have this feature.72  However,
because the concrete manners in which such promises to act in accordance
with categorical imperatives will be carried out cannot be determined in
advance, a second feature of ethical action is that it not merely dwell in the
airy domain of principles but that it makes a strong and intelligent attempt,
as Merleau-Ponty says, to “translate values into the order of facts.”73  Since
we live in the realm of natality rather than production—of action rather
than work—action does not simply execute a well-formed plan, but rather
can only take a stand, and offer a vision of how things ought to be, in the
face of an open and contestable future. This requires not only good will, but
experience and intelligence. As Merleau-Ponty says of politics, genuine
action is at best the “art of the possible”:
Since we do not know  the future, we have only, after carefully weighing every-
thing, to push in our own direction. But that reminds us of the gravity of politics;
it obliges us, instead of forcing our will, to look hard among the facts for the
shape they should take.74 

On the basis of experience and practice, the actor can have more or less
of an insightful eye as to the likely outcomes of her actions, and more or
less skillful modes of response to the particular demands and opportunities
of her situation.
We might thus meaningfully seek a model of ethical action  in the figure of
the virtuous actor , who is skilled in her capacity to see what the situation
calls for and to seize upon opportunities to realize the good in concrete
situations. Against conventional wisdom, both Merleau-Ponty and Arendt
find a model for such action in Machiavelli’s conception of virtù,  which
Arendt defines as “the excellence with which man answers the opportunities
the world opens up before him in the guise of fortuna .”75  Arendt compares
the virtù  of the political actor to the virtuosity of the artistic performer. As
we began to see above regarding the nature of inspiration, a successful

72 
Cf. King’s distinction between just and unjust laws in “Letter From Birmingham Jail,”
93–97.
73 
HT  64/xxxv. See Arendt’s discussion of promising as setting up oceans of security in a
sea of unpredictability at HC  243–47. See also Kant on duties of wide obligation or imperfect
duties, in The Metaphysics of Morals , trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 152–56, and Russon’s discussion of resoluteness, ethics, and the ongoing need
for interpretation in determining in what ways to honor our commitments in concrete cir-
cumstances in “The Self as Resolution,” 103–5.
74 
HT  65/xxxv. See Arendt’s discussion of judgment as the capacity to reckon well with
particulars rather than universals—and thus as central to political life—in her Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy , ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
75 
WF  151–52.
 FREEDOM AS (SELF-)EXPRESSION 79
creative expression is informed by and answerable to principles that exceed
the work of art, and in light of which the work of art will be judged, as when
the principles of harmony show themselves through the specific arrange-
ment and interpretive performance of this  sonata. The principles embodied
in the artwork are not accomplished once and for all but are kept alive and
vital by being enacted by musicians again and again in diverse forms and
variations. Likewise, in ethical action the good is realized only through
being enacted again and again; indeed, as Merleau-Ponty argues, ethical
values in abstraction from their political realization in concrete human con-
texts “commit us to nothing,” and, indeed, may become “instruments of
oppression.”76  Actors might find precedents for their actions in other situa-
tions in the past, as King was inspired by Gandhi, but one’s action now  can
never be the straightforward application of a rule or the simple reproduc-
tion of anything that has occurred before; as an originary expression, it is a
coherent deformation of the terms of one’s inherited reality into the shape
of new, and hopefully more free, future. Ethical action thus also requires
attentiveness to particulars and insight into likely outcomes on the part of
those who seek to navigate the world as a site for the realization of the good.
Because free action is inherently transgressive, and thus never without
risk, gamble, and sometimes moral compromise, each of us, as free beings
in the ongoing process of becoming ourselves, will need at times to be for-
given for the unpredictable and irreversible ways in which our deeds have
encroached upon others. As Arendt argues, forgiveness has the power to
release the actor from what  she has done for the sake of who  she is: a begin-
ner with the power of beginning again.77  It is through forgiveness that she
may once again strike out into the future in a new attempt to realize the
good, perhaps redeeming who she is and realizing for the future alternative
potentials of the shared past.78 
76 
Merleau-Ponty, “Note sur Machiavel,” in Signes (Paris: Gallimard , 1960), 356–57;
Merleau-Ponty, “A Note on Machiavelli,” in Signs , trans. Richard C. McLeary (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 219–20. See Saint Aubert’s discussion of the pivotal
place this work holds in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of empiétement  and “flesh”
[chair ], in contrast to a Cartesian “pure vision,” in Du Lien des être aux éléments de l’être , 46–48.
77 
See Arendt’s discussion of forgiveness at HC  236–42.
78 
This paper’s initial inspiration grew out of a presentation I gave on Henri Bergson and
T. S. Eliot at An Afternoon With J. Alfred Prufrock  (Eastern Michigan University, Fall 2015). I
am grateful to Elisabeth Däumer for the invitation to participate in this event. I am also
grateful to the students of PHIL 470/570: Twentieth-Century European Philosophy (Eastern
Michigan University, Winter 2017) for their discussion of many of the themes and arguments
that appear in this paper, as well as to the audiences at the Canadian Society for Continental
Philosophy (Ryerson University, Fall 2017) and the Maine Philosophical Institute (The
University of Maine, Spring 2018) for their helpful questions and comments on an earlier
version of this paper.