"Behind Marxist statements confirmed of disconfirmed there is alway Marxism as a matrix of intellectual and historical experiences which can always be saved from total failure by means of some additional hypothesis, just as one can maintain on the other hand that it is not validated in toto by success."
"Marx's theses can remain true as the Pythagorean Theorem is true: no longer in the sense it was true for the one who invented it--as an immobile truth and a property of space itself--but as a property of a certain model of space among other possible spaces."
"The history of though does not summarily pronounce: This is true; that is false. Like all history, it has its veiled decisions. It dismantles or embalms certain doctrines, changing them into "messages" or museum pieces. There are others on the contrary, which it keeps active. These do not endure because there is some miraculous adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable "reality"--such exact and fleshless truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for the greatness of a doctrine--but because, as obligatory steps for those who want to go further, they retain an expressive power which exceeds their statements and propositions. These doctrines are the classics. They are recognizable by the fact that no one takes them literally, and yet new facts are never absolutely outside their province but call forth new echoes from them and reveal new lusters in them. We a saying that re-examination of Marx would be a meditation upon a classic, and that it could not possibly terminate in a nihil obstat or a listing on the Index. Are you or are you not a Cartesian? The question does not make much sense since those who reject this or that in Descartes do so only in terms of reasons which owe a lot to Descartes. We say Marx is in the process of becoming such a secondary truth."
"Marx's theses can remain true as the Pythagorean Theorem is true: no longer in the sense it was true for the one who invented it--as an immobile truth and a property of space itself--but as a property of a certain model of space among other possible spaces."
"The history of though does not summarily pronounce: This is true; that is false. Like all history, it has its veiled decisions. It dismantles or embalms certain doctrines, changing them into "messages" or museum pieces. There are others on the contrary, which it keeps active. These do not endure because there is some miraculous adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable "reality"--such exact and fleshless truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for the greatness of a doctrine--but because, as obligatory steps for those who want to go further, they retain an expressive power which exceeds their statements and propositions. These doctrines are the classics. They are recognizable by the fact that no one takes them literally, and yet new facts are never absolutely outside their province but call forth new echoes from them and reveal new lusters in them. We a saying that re-examination of Marx would be a meditation upon a classic, and that it could not possibly terminate in a nihil obstat or a listing on the Index. Are you or are you not a Cartesian? The question does not make much sense since those who reject this or that in Descartes do so only in terms of reasons which owe a lot to Descartes. We say Marx is in the process of becoming such a secondary truth."
(Marice Merleau-Ponty, From the Introduction to Signs)
