1001Philosophers

Jean-Paul Sartre vs Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were close philosophical collaborators, co-editors of Les Temps Modernes, and the two most important French phenomenologists of the postwar period. Their break in 1953 was political (over the Korean War and Sartre's commitment to communism) but reflected long-running philosophical differences.

At a glance

Jean-Paul SartreMaurice Merleau-Ponty
Dates1905 – 19801908 – 1961
NationalityFrenchFrench
EraContemporaryContemporary
Movements Existentialism, Continental Philosophy, Marxism Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy, Existentialism
Profile Jean-Paul Sartre → Maurice Merleau-Ponty →

Where they agree

Both inherited and developed Heideggerian phenomenology in distinctively French directions, both held that human existence is fundamentally engaged with the world rather than detached from it, and both took the analysis of perception, embodiment, and the other as central existential phenomena.

Where they disagree

Sartre's Being and Nothingness articulates a sharp dualism: consciousness is the for-itself, a nothingness that confronts the in-itself of brute being, and human freedom is absolute. Merleau-Ponty rejected the dualism: consciousness is essentially embodied, and the lived body is neither a transparent for-itself nor an opaque in-itself but a third kind of thing that resists Sartre's framework. Where Sartre's philosophy of freedom emphasizes choice against situation, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of embodiment emphasizes how situation, body, and world are continuous with the agent's freedom rather than its limit.

Representative quotes

Jean-Paul Sartre

  • “Hell is other people.”

    Alors, c'est ça l'enfer. Je n'aurais jamais cru... vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril... ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les autres.

  • “Existence precedes essence.”

    L'existence précède et commande l'essence.

  • “Man is condemned to be free.”

    Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1946

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  • “Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”

    Signs , trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: 1964), p. 203

  • “Signs , trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: 1964), p. 203”

    Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

  • “[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis”

    The Visible and the Invisible , trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: 1968), p. 135

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