Merleau-Ponty treated Beauvoir’s novel as original and pre-dating Sartre’s work.

Evidence

In 1945 he published an essay that interprets She Came to Stay as a philosophical text. Among the arguments that Merleau-Ponty identifi es in Beauvoir’s novel, and that are also central to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, are the theories of appearances, of temporality, and of embodiment, as well as the division of reality between immanence and transcendence. Merleau-Ponty also explains how fi ction is a natural medium for a phenomenological philosopher. But the most intriguing thing about Merleau-Ponty’s essay is that it makes no mention of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Nor does it suggest that the philosophical arguments identifi ed in She Came to Stay owe anything to Sartre. In other words, Merleau-Ponty treats Beauvoir’s novel not only as a philosophical text but as an original one. About that he could have had no doubt, not just because of his years of philosophical conversation with Beauvoir prior to her writing She Came to Stay, but also because he knew for certain that her book was written well before Being and Nothingness. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 311

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the historiography of authorship/influence in Continental philosophy — the Beauvoir-Sartre authorship debate parallels similar attribution debates elsewhere. — connects to: Beauvoir synthesized Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, exceeding both, to write the Second Sex — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 63; Linking Beauvoir to Merleau-Ponty became a scholarly way to erase Sartre — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 62
• SEED: An essay on Merleau-Ponty as the overlooked early witness to Beauvoir’s philosophical originality — how an immediate contemporary’s silent omission of Sartre undercuts the subservience myth.

Broader Connections

• Linking Beauvoir to Merleau-Ponty became a scholarly way to erase Sartre #complicates (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 62