The Sartre-Merleau-Ponty philosophical rift stemmed from temperamental differences

Evidence

Sartre once remarked — speaking of a disagreement they had about Husserl in 1941 — that ‘we discovered, astounded, that our conflicts had, at times, stemmed from our childhood, or went back to the elementary differences of our two organisms’. Merleau-Ponty also said in an interview that Sartre’s work seemed strange to him, not because of philosophical differences, but because of a certain ‘register of feeling’, especially in Nausea, that he could not share. Their difference was one of temperament and of the whole way the world presented itself to them. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 754

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the theme that intellectual disagreements often run deeper than stated positions — parallels biographies of other philosophical pairs. — connects to: Merleau-Ponty and Sartre’s philosophies differ fundamentally in temperament and relation to anxiety — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 753; Merleau-Ponty held dogmatic political stances that contradicted his temperament — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 722; Merleau-Ponty and Sartre clashed over whether philosophy requires instant commentary on world events — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 801

Broader Connections

• Merleau-Ponty and Sartre clashed over whether philosophy requires instant commentary on world events #complicates (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 801