Merleau-Ponty held dogmatic political stances that contradicted his temperament

Evidence

Merleau-Ponty had spent the war working himself into uncompromising attitudes that went against his grain. He adopted a dogmatic pro-Soviet position, which he maintained for several years after the war before dramatically abandoning it. He often changed his views in this way when his thinking took him in a new direction. But he always remained a phenomenologist at heart, dedicated to the task of describing experience as closely and precisely as he could. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 722

Categorization

• QUESTION: What exactly shifted Merleau-Ponty from his pro-Soviet position, and how did this contrast with his phenomenologist impulse to describe experience faithfully?
• XREF: Connects to the broader postwar intellectual history of French philosophers’ relation to Soviet communism, also tracked in other accounts of the era. — connects to: Merleau-Ponty rejected the ideal of forcing human life to fit ideology — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 834; The Sartre-Merleau-Ponty philosophical rift stemmed from temperamental differences — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 754; Opposed imperialist temperaments produced identical toxic political effects — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 546

Broader Connections

• The Sartre-Merleau-Ponty philosophical rift stemmed from temperamental differences #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 754
• Merleau-Ponty rejected the ideal of forcing human life to fit ideology #contradicts (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 834
• Opposed imperialist temperaments produced identical toxic political effects #qualifies (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 546