Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual friendship decayed from public amicability into rivalry

Evidence

What Beauvoir says in the last part of this quotation is particularly notable. She points out herself that Sartre has evolved in his thinking and has come to put more emphasis on certain elements that might not have been compelling enough or even present in his early thought, that is, in the philosophy of Being and Nothingness. Beauvoir seems to be reproaching Merleau-Ponty for what looks like a too accurate reading of the ontological treatise and, more importantly, his disregard for Sartre’s later works that do make room for situation, facticity, and, according to her, embodiment. Th e tone of the essay is particularly striking for the reader who is familiar with the earlier essays written by Beauvoir in appreciation of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Penelope Deutscher explains that the public exchange between the two in the early 1940s was quite amiable. Beauvoir’s review of the Phenomenology of Perception was very favorable, and Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Beauvoir’s fi ction was in the same vein of mutual appreciation. Th ey praised each other’s work as being the pathway to a “true morality.” However, as Deutscher further explains, “the pair moved from that initial surplus of public amicability when Merleau and Beauvoir each declared in print that the other off ered the best or even the only exemplars of ethics, to the appropriative delirium fi ltered through an evanescent Sartre.” — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 93

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader historiographical debate on the Beauvoir-Sartre authorship question and to Deutscher’s scholarship on the pair, which the reader is already following. — connects to: The Korean War and Soviet camp revelations reversed Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’s relative Communist sympathies — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 802; Beauvoir resented Merleau-Ponty for not seeing Sartre moving toward her views and his — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 94
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what precisely drove the shift from mutual ‘true morality’ praise to ‘appropriative delirium’ — and when did it begin?

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir resented Merleau-Ponty for not seeing Sartre moving toward her views and his #responds-to (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 94