Merleau-Ponty rejected the ideal of forcing human life to fit ideology

Evidence

Merleau-Ponty went deeply into Communist ideology, then gave it up in favour of a conviction that human life could never be forced to fit the lineaments of an ideal. He had, as he put it, woken up. When Communist ‘nostalgia’ is exorcised, he said, ‘one leaves behind reveries and everything becomes interesting and new again’. In the Collège de France lecture, too, he spoke of philosophers as the people who are wakeful while others sleep. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 834

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running theme of the philosophical ‘X’ crossing — and to Plato’s cave imagery of awakening which recurs throughout existentialist thought. — connects to: Merleau-Ponty held dogmatic political stances that contradicted his temperament — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 722; Merleau-Ponty differs from Sartre and Heidegger by calmly accepting limitation as constitutive — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 725
• DEFINE: Illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s post-Communist conviction that human life resists being forced into ideological ideals — a defining position in his later philosophy.

Broader Connections

• Merleau-Ponty differs from Sartre and Heidegger by calmly accepting limitation as constitutive #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 725