Beauvoir pushes embodied consciousness further than Merleau-Ponty into gendered phenomenology

Evidence

As Vintges points out, “in his Being and Nothingness, Sartre states that human beings are always situated and that consciousness does not exist independently from their bodily position in the world. In fact, however, he strongly opposes all bodily incarnation as immanence, and thus bad faith, and advocates lucid, pure conscious existence (i.e., transcendence) as the only authentic human existence.” In contrast, Beauvoir takes the view that consciousness is embodied seriously and pushes it to its limits. She is closer to Merleau-Ponty’s views on the body-subject and yet goes further than he does in presenting a gendered phenomenology wherein the for-itself is indeed sexual and wherein sexual diff erence truly matters. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 108

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages the Beauvoir-Sartre authorship debate: shows Beauvoir diverging from Sartre toward Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, a key historiographical contention. — connects to: Phenomenology investigates direct experience of phenomena rather than questions of reality — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 11; Phenomenology appealed to early adopters as a synthesis of psychology’s method and philosophy’s ambition — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 149; Beauvoir’s fiction explored emotions through embodied physical sensation — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 357 (+7 more)
• QUESTION: What was Sartre’s actual position on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body, and did Beauvoir’s reading of him inform her divergence?

Broader Connections

• The Sartre-Merleau-Ponty break mirrored the earlier Husserl-Heidegger schism #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 836