Merleau-Ponty may not have had access to these unpublished notebooks.
His reading ofWLand other texts as reflections of the ontology ofBN
renders him blind to any evidence of development in Sartre’s social
ontology. This was the core of Beauvoir’s equally intemperate response.
Again, Sartre’s address to the French Philosophical Society puts
the lie to this account – at least in the Hegelian notion of praxis
and “becoming truth.” His distinction between the reflective and the
prereflective Cogito(already made inBN) allows him to speak of a
prereflective durationthat is not instantaneous consciousness, while
relegating “a static and dynamic temporality to the reflective description
of thecogito” (CSKS 114 ).
Still Merleau-Ponty has his finger on a basic ambiguity in Sartre’s
general epistemology, especially as he tries to fortify Hegelian dialectic
with Husserlian apodicticity. We shall encounter again this instance
of what Foucault would call an epistemology that is “one cog out of
alignment.”^10 Here the challenge is to synthesize or at least to coordinate
the elements oftwoepistemologies, one of Praxis and the other of
Vision, the former dialectical and the latter phenomenological. We shall
encounter this juxtaposition of the incongruous in “Search for a
Method,” but it occurs throughout Sartre’s post-war thought.^11
Thirdly, and finally: Merleau-Ponty claims, correctly, that Sartre’s
lack of the concept of aninterworldrenders him incapable of constructing
a social ontology properly speaking:
In Sartre, there is a plurality of subjects but no intersubjectivity. Looked at closely,
the absolute right that the I accords to the other is rather a duty. They are not joined
in action, in the relative and the probable, but only on principles and on the condi-
tion that the other stick rigorously to them...The world and history are no longer a
system with several points of entry but a sheaf of irreconcilable perspectives which
never coexist and which are held together only by the hopeless heroism of the I.
(Adventures of the Dialectic 205 )
I conclude with this lengthy remark because it is both a fair, critical
assessment of the inadequate social ontology ofBN, as we have observed
on several occasions, and an invitation to produce precisely the dialectical
ontology that Sartre is about to undertake with theCritique.
(^10) Michel Foucault,The Order of Things(New York: Random House, 1970 ), 30.
(^11) I have developed this thesis in “Praxis and Vision,” 21 – 43.
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and ultra-Bolshevism 321