We speak as if judgment were simple, as if we could stand outside history and measure human action against timeless truths, but the moment we try to do so the footing gives way, and we are compelled to ask whether our standards are themselves part of the very history we seek to judge, formed within practices, institutions, and relations of power that determine in advance what can count as truth.

This problem is not merely theoretical but emerges wherever we attempt to judge human action in the world, especially under conditions of political crisis. Our struggle to step outside history reveals that we are always already within it, indicating we remain responsible for creating and answering for meaning within the conditions that shape us.

Can we judge history at all without smuggling in our own position?

Building directly from this tension, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty grapples with this problem in his response to Arthur Koestler’s gripping 1940 novel and literary expose, Darkness at Noon, where the question of how to judge history is unavoidable. Koestler’s indictment of the Stalinist Soviet Union, Merleau-Ponty argues, relies on moral projection, as if one were looking into a mirror and judging another society by standards treated as universally binding.

From here, Merleau-Ponty responds with Humanism and Terror, a major work of 20th century political philosophy, in which he wrestles with how moral judgment is possible within history, where standards and outcomes are never fully settled in advance. He resists the idea that the Soviet Union can be judged by fixed moral standards, arguing instead that judgment must take account of historical circumstance, uncertainty, and the unfolding logic of events, so that the Soviet experiment must first be understood on its own terms rather than be judged from without.

Yet, ironically, Merleau-Ponty’s position does not last long. He soon begins to reconsider it, resulting in a breakup with his close friend and philosophical co-hort, Jean-Paul Sartre. Their break unfolds around Les Temps modernes, the journal they co-founded with Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. By the time he publishes Adventures of the Dialectic in 1955, Merleau-Ponty has come to see Stalinism as morally indefensible, while Sartre, though not uncritical, remains reluctant to abandon the attempt to situate it within a broader historical struggle.

Sartre’s hesitation is not only political but philosophical. His claim that we are condemned to be free captures the burden of human life, that we cannot escape responsibility for our choices in the absence of any final ground or fixed moral foundations. If we are condemned to be free, then Merleau-Ponty pushes the insight further, explaining that we are also condemned to search for meaning without the shelter of timeless truths.

What does it mean to live inside history once judgment has no external ground?

Carrying this forward into a longer intellectual tradition, these insights are not new but belong to a broader arc in Western thought. In Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667), freedom binds human beings to consequences they cannot escape, as when Eve chooses to eat from the tree of knowledge and Adam follows, not in ignorance but in full awareness of what the choice entails. There is no return to the Garden of Eden and no vantage point outside the consequences of their choice. They must reckon with what they have done rather than undo it. The deeper question is not only that we are free but what that freedom means, how actions within history are to be judged, remembered, or redeemed.

At this point Merleau-Ponty’s insight presses to its limit, because if judgment itself is historical then meaning cannot be secured outside history but must be made within it. Extending this further into literary form, this condition is rendered with particular force in The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925), where Joseph K. is arrested, prosecuted without ever being told the charge against him, and where judgment unfolds without a final standard and meaning is never secured from beyond the world in which it must be lived. We are not only condemned to be free but condemned to seek meaning without guarantees, without permanent shelter.

How do we live and act when meaning is never guaranteed from outside history?

And yet this is not the end of the story, because this is not the recovery of meaning from beyond history, but the attempt to locate it entirely within what history still allows. Where Merleau-Ponty leaves us within the ambiguity of history, Viktor Frankl begins again from within its darkest depths. In Man’s Search for Meaning, written out of his experience in Nazi concentration camps, Frankl does not deny history’s brutality or its capacity to strip life of certainty but insists that even there meaning is not abolished. It is discovered in responsibility, in how one responds, in what one affirms, and in what one refuses to surrender.

We cannot stand outside history to secure judgment, because the standards by which we judge are themselves formed within it. And yet we cannot abandon judgment, because even within uncertainty we are still compelled to act and to answer for what our actions mean. Between the impossibility of an external standpoint and the impossibility of silence, we are left neither above history nor outside it, but fully within it, where meaning is not given but becomes in our response, and in that becoming, we shape what is given into a world we must answer for. If meaning cannot come from beyond history, then responsibility cannot be escaped within it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)