The war made existentialists conclude that no private life was possible.

Evidence

Merleau-Ponty too, having been radicalised by the war, was still desperately trying to be less nice. Having mastered the art of being beastly to Germans, he now far outdid Beauvoir and Sartre in writing fervent arguments for an uncompromising Soviet-style Communism. In an essay of 1945, ‘The War Has Taken Place’, he wrote that the war had ruled out any possibility of living a merely private life. ‘We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it,’ he wrote. No one could rise above events; everyone had dirty hands. For a while, ‘dirty hands’ became a buzz term in the existentialist milieu. It went with a new imperative: get down to work, and do something! — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 526

Categorization

• XREF: Merleau-Ponty’s ‘dirty hands’ and being-in-the-world connects to Sartre’s later concept of bad faith as inescapable engagement — the same impossibility of neutrality explored throughout the book.