Sartre and Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

Born in 1908, Merleau-Ponty was three years younger than Jean-Paul Sartre. For Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the dismissal of French "spiritualism," be it its idealist or realist version, makes way for E. Husserl's idea of intentionality. It was with the founding of Les Temps Modernes in 1945 that the friendship between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty became a true "common enterprise". Sartre only exposed himself to politics indirectly by writing The Devil and the Good Lord, which examines a revolutionary leader figure, and Saint Genet, which became a public scandal because of his views on homosexuality. Throughout his works from the 1930s to the year he died, Merleau-Ponty did not stop testing out his own theories in light of Sartre's, in an explicit dialogue, admiring and critical at once. Merleau-Ponty's defense of Sartre is also always a philosophical discussion, of Being and Nothingness in particular.