Temporal Registration

He arrives that if Koestler had limited himself to saying that there is a permanent risk of illusion and cowardice in any behaviour which is based on the exigencies of the objective situation instead of on the abstract imperatives of subjective morality, there would have been something in what he says.

Merleau-Ponty testifies and summarizes the Koestler‟s dilemmas as he unveils that “even in the closing pages of the book, Koestler therefore does not exactly reach a conclusion”²³. His personal conclusion is not stated in the book unless it is to be found elsewhere. Thus, Merleau-Ponty avers that Darkness at Noon limits itself to the description of dialectical situation from which Rubashov does not break free even by force of his deep feeling while the mistakes that Koestler makes in his formulation of the problems leads one to many questions as he ended up with series of philosophical questions.

the Soviet tribunal which he claims to have not got through the job of trying twenty-one accused persons just within eleven days. He explains the implication of unsuccessful attempt of Bukharin‟s trial as it was only once that the proceedings and cross-examination took place. The effect of this remains as he states in the above quotation that there would be no occasion for questioning if the Moscow trials followed in due process. In a trial of this kind, however, it implies that where in principle all documents are missing, one is left with the things that were said, and at no time does one has any feeling of reaching through the words to the facts themselves. Everything inevitably depends on the level of hearsay. In this case, guilt is no longer a matter of a clear relation between a definite act with specific motives and specific consequences. For him, “some of the anecdotes have an air of truth, but they only acquaint us with the accused‟s state of mind”, and thus he concludes: “There are only a few facts in a fog of shifting meanings²⁵”. This means, invariably, that the accusation has no option other than to depend on a few facts which could be interpreted (by the men in power) within the jurisdiction of the constitutional laws of the state.

The trials remain on a subjective level and never approach what is called “true” justice, objective and timeless, because they bear upon facts still open toward the future, which consequently are not yet univocal and only acquire a definitively criminal character when they are viewed from the perspective on the future held by the men in power²⁶.

Despite the pretense to a “classical” trial structure, he refers also the Moscow Trials as the kind that belong to the revolution. The revolutionary, he says, judges what exists in the name of what does not exist, and of which the revolutionary regards as more real. The act of revolution is thus seen as what creates history and of which the truth of history depends on its total meaning.

As such, the bourgeois justice adopts the past as its precedent while the revolutionary justice adopts the future. This is why the revolutionary does not care whether accused is honest or not but whether there is progress from its standpoint.

Merleau-Ponty demonstrates further that even though the Moscow Trials apply existing laws to the accused and as such claim not to create a new legality, it is also undeniable that they are revolutionary as far as in the process of evaluating the acts of the opposition, they regard absolutely the objective view of the future even when the future does not yet exist for us. And for the fact that the presupposition of a revolution (i.e. to those who make it) gives the assurance of understanding what they are living through, it applies explicitly that the revolutionaries dominate their present the same way the historians dominate the past. In effect, the Moscow Trials according to Merleau-Ponty are not exempted in the very act as he expatiates it thus:

The prosecutor and the accused speak in the name of universal history, as yet unfinished, because they believe they can reach it through the Marxist

sense between revolutionaries, that is to say between men who are convinced they are making history and who consequently already see the present as past and see those who hesitate as traitors²⁷.

He summarizes the assertion that the Moscow Trials are simply the revolutionary trials presented as if they were ordinary trials.

Although the trial does not have the view from above it pretends, recognizing this fact would undermine its authority and make explicit the tribunal‟s political action in creating history rather than judging in history‟s name. The meanings of one‟s actions are open to historical contingency, and successful political action is as difficult as any form of expression. Such a proposal leads Marxist humanism to a “harsh notion of responsibility, based not on what men intended but what they have achieved in the light of event”²⁸. The structure of historical responsibility gives a sense to the political actor who admits having performed a treasonous act while denying the label of “traitor”.

For Merleau-Ponty, “these things happen due to the absolute exigencies of political choice which the liberals ignore”²⁹. Besides, historical responsibility transcends the categories of liberal thought as it affects both intention and act, circumstances and will, objective and subjective. Bukharin‟s actual claims, moreover, on the stand reveal a subtle humanism becoming aware of the existential contingency of the meaning of the political action.

However, the interpretation that Merleau-Ponty gives of the Bukharin‟s political trials follows from his phenomenological understanding of political action as he contests the psychological, subjectivistic and solipstic explanation of the given trials speculated by Arthur Koestler. Merleau-Ponty replies that Bukharin‟s demise, the Moscow Trials, and revolutionary politics are all more complex and ambiguous than Koestler would like to admit. Advancing an idea originating with Machiavelli and later spelt out more explicitly by Hegel.

Merleau-Ponty insists that all political action is morally risky, that innocence and guilt are not functions of an individual‟s intentions, but also depend on accident and circumstance, and that moralistic condemnations of Soviet injustice are therefore too cheap and easy to be taken seriously in actual political debate. He observes furthermore that real-life politicians like Bukharin know all this and that Marxism is the theoretical realization of this insight into both the moral messiness of politics and the political exigencies of morality.

On Merleau-Ponty‟s alternative reading of the reports and transcripts of the 1938 trial, Bukharin did not simply fall on his sword out of slavish obedience to the party. Instead, he sincerely believed in his own (partial)

“objective guilt” and in the counter-revolutionary effect-hence the true historical meaning – of his actions, in spite of his good intentions and subjective loyalty to the state³⁰. Evidence of Bukharin‟s earnestness can be seen, Merleau-Ponty thinks, in the carefulness and precision of his confession. When pressed,

nature of his errors, hence his guilt. He pleads guilty to charges of treason, espionage, sabotage, knowing he will be condemned to death. “And yet he refuses to see himself as a spy, traitor, saboteur, and terrorist”³¹. Indeed, “On five occasions, Bukharin categorically denies the charge of espionage”³². Such fastidiousness seems at odds with Koestler‟s image of a man mindlessly sacrificing himself, and any sense of justice he might have had, to the smooth, machine-like functioning of the state. Merleau-Ponty thinks Bukharin was sincerely confessing what he considered his objective guilt: he confesses this, but denies that Merleau-Ponty asks, “Can one believe in the denials and refuse all credence to the confessions?”³³

Notwithstanding, Merleau-Ponty attributes Nikolai Bukharin‟s admitted guilt of treason to the contingent nature of history.

[His] collaboration is thereby transformed into voluntary betrayal. There is a sort of maleficence in history: it solicits men, tempts them so that they believe they are moving in its direction, and then suddenly it unmasks, and events change and prove that there was another possibility. [---] And they are unable to look for excuses or to excuse themselves from even a part of the responsibility³⁴.

This understanding of Bukharin‟s drama underscores the possibility of misreading the meaning of the common projects that constitute the basis of human action. It shows that history is not scientifically predictable.

Furthermore, this reading gives value to an objective judgment of political acts, attributing responsibility to the individual actors and to them a lone. In politics,

actions are judged according to their consequences rather than according to abstract values. This is why, in Merleau-Ponty‟s view, Bukharin has confessed his guilt of treason although he has denied other accusations that he deemed false. Even if, from a subjective point of view, his acts were not intended to betray socialism as such, the movement of history gave them this meaning. In addition, Bukharin‟s actual claims on the stand reveal a subtle humanism becoming aware of the existential contingency of the meaning of the political action. There are no “separate” individuals, and “no one can flatter himself that his hands are clean”³⁵. For Merleau-Ponty, the insight of the novel is that objective ethics and individual ethics can exist in the same person at the same time, an ambiguity that cannot be registered in classical ethics.