References
- There is a play on words here which is difficult to bring out in English. The sentence begins, “Un mort tout neuf reste vif, à vif:”. The contrast between life and death is heightened by the addition of the last two words which comprise a common French expression used to describe a fresh wound that is still open and throbbing.
- This opening theme is prolonged in the published version of the essay and in fact makes up its last word: “There is nothing to conclude except that this long friendship—neither secured nor undone, abolished when it was going to be reborn or break apart, remains in me like an indefinitely irritated wound.” Situations, IV, p. 287.
- This reference both dates the manuscript to July 1961 and the beginning of Sartre's acquaintance with Merleau-Ponty to 1926.
- Sartre crossed out certain passages in the manuscript. These will be marked in the text by brackets without any further notation.
- Compare the less vague statement in the published version of the essay: “He had a chair at Beauvais, I think; I taught at Le Havre. Without knowing it, however, we were preparing to meet one another: each of us tried to understand the world as he could with the same means at hand. And we had the same means—who were called Husserl and Heidegger—because we were on the same side.” Situations, IV, p. 190.
- The title is an expression used by Nizan to describe “the function of humanist ideologues of the bourgeoisie.” Michel Contat et Michel Rybalka, eds., Jean-Paul Sartre: OEuvres romanesques, Paris: Gallimard, 1981), Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, n. 1 top. 105, cited at p. 1772.
- Apparently ascribing this statement to Brunschvicg, Sartre specifies the source which was left unstated in the published version of the essay. See Situations, IV, p. 191.
- Cf. Simone de Beauvoir's Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre which follows her La cérémonies des adieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), at p. 329. There Sartre indicates that his relationship with Merleau-Ponty was very bad, but that he had also once kept him from being beaten up by other students because he (Sartre) had “a vague friendship with him.”
- The prevalence of capital letters here indicates the influence of the Symbolist movement in literature which was popular in France during the early 1960s.
- Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l'âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 141–142: “Raymond Aron passed the year at the Institut Français in Berlin and, while preparing a thesis on history, he studied Husserl. When he came to Paris, he spoke about it to Sartre. We spent an evening together at the Bec de gaz [Gas Lamp Street], rue Montparnasse. We ordered the speciality of the house: apricot cocktails. Aron pointed out his glass: ‘You see, my little comrade, if you are a phenomenologist, you can speak of this cocktail and that is philosophy!’ Sartre went pale with emotion, or almost so. It was exactly what he wished for for years: to speak of things, such as he touched them, and this was philosophy. Aron convinced him that phenomenology exactly answered his preoccupations: to transcend the opposition of idealism and realism, to affirm at the same time the sovereignty of consciousness and the presence of the world, such that it gives itself to us. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel, he bought Lévinas' work on Husserl, and he was so much in a hurry to read it that, even while walking, he leafed through the book without even having cut the pages.”
- Read “Köhler” for “Kohl.”
- “That” (“que”) added by Michel Rybalka.
- This Preface was reprinted in Situations, IV, pp. 130–188, just before the published version of the present essay. The present paragraph makes it clear why this juxtaposition was probably not accidental.
- But see Merleau-Ponty's general sorts of remarks about the futility of introspection, the notions of the self which he rejects and that which he accepts. For example, Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1966) tells us that “If nothing constrains us from outside, it is because we are our whole exterior” (p. 36) and that “Psychologists today make us notice that introspection, in reality, does not give me hardly anything” (p. 93).
- Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 34–35.
- In terms of having a widowed mother and a bourgeois family, there is more than a passing resemblance between Merleau-Ponty's childhood and that of Sartre himself. What the latter says here about Merleau-Ponty's situation is described much more fully with respect to his own childhood. In his autobiography, Les Mots, (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), he credits the death of his father forgiving him his liberty (p. 11), for the fact that he had no super-ego (pp. 11, 17), no Oedipal feelings (p. 17), and for the closeness of the uncontested, exclusive possession of his mother (p. 17). And with respect to the bourgeois family, the resemblance ended in childhood. Sartre as a child could say what Merleau-Ponty perhaps could as well, namely, “It was paradise. Each morning I awoke in a stupor of joy, admiring the crazy luck which had me born into the most harmonious family in the most beautiful country on earth” (Les Mots, p. 24). But although Merleau-Ponty could persist in these feelings and constantly regret the loss of his childhood, Les Mots makes it clear that Sartre's itinerary of maturation was considerably different.
- Les Mots appeared two years after the present manuscript, but the reader may be interested to know that, according to Sartre in the film Sartre par lui-même produced by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, most of it was written in 1953. Thus it is clear that Sartre invested many years of reflection in these themes before writing both the present manuscript and completing his autobiography.
- “Signes, p. 104. This life which does not entirely belong to it is ours as well, we who are inhabitants of this body: ‘One can say that it does everything and that it does nothing, that it is us and that it is not us.’” [This is Sartre's own footnote.—Trans.]
- Compare Sartre's published remarks, at Situations, IV, pp. 262–263, on Merleau-Ponty's relationship with his mother: “He was stopped by misfortune: in 1953 Merleau lost his mother. He clung to her as to his own life; more exactly, she was his life….”
- Unlike the present text, the published version of the essay uses the word “envelopment” several times in reference to Merleau-Ponty's thought without exploring its fundamental significance.
- “Plus encore: que la Nature est jusqu'en nous…”
- Sartre is borrowing here Biblical imagery from the Genesis account of creation. The imagery is continued in the next paragraph (and beyond) in terms of the “Impressionable Nature” (“Nature Sensible”) which can be formed in various ways. See also Situations, IV, p. 269.
- Signes, p. 104.
- Compare here, and with the following paragraph, de Beavoir's Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 314, at which the former says to the latter: “However, you made distinctions between your comrades; you did not have at all the idea that in the end everyone is valuable; this attitude, a very open and hospitable one, which was that of a Merleau-Ponty, you did not have at all.” Sartre agrees: “Not at all. On the contrary, I distinguished between the good and the bad, with violence.”
- Signes, p. 104.
- This notion of advent Merleau-Ponty borrowed from Paul Ricoeur. See Signes, p. 85. This notion will appear again in this essay more than once, particularly in connection with politics, Marxism, and the understanding of an event. Also, see the published version of this essay at Situations, IV, pp. 266 and 273.
- For one of Sartre's most complete statements about his view of atheism, see de Beauvoir's Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, pp. 549–559.
- Cf. the description in Les Mots of the institution of infant baptism in bourgeois society. Baptism was taken to be an investment, an insurance policy against the uncertainties of adult free will: “‘Later on’, they said, ‘he will do what he wants.’ They thus judged it much more difficult to gain the faith than to lose it” (p. 80).
- Compare the published essay at Situations, IV, p. 284: “Through Merleau we find ourselves as singular through the contingency of our anchorage in Nature and History, that is to say, through the human adventure. Thus History makes us universal in the exact measure in which we make it particular. Such is the considerable gift that Merleau offers us by his relentlessness in always hollowing out the same spot: starting from the well-known universality of the singular, he arrives at the singularity of the universal.” See also p. 265: “Not that he (Merleau-Ponty) sought to understand, as did Stendhal, the individual that he was but rather, like Montaigne, the person, the incomparable mélange of the particular and the universal.”
- What Sartre lined out were the words “dans le,” and what he replaced them with was “au.”
- Signes, p. 86.
- The passage cited is actually on p. 86.
- It is not clear whether “these unhappy beings” (ces malheureux) refers to Merleau-Ponty and those he interrogated or to the phantom-limb and aphasic patients (or both). The reference is not decided by the context and either, or both, interpretations are consistent with the rest of what Sartre has said.
- The context does not make it clear whether “protagonist” refers to the army, the reference immediately following in the text, to the people as a whole, to some other person, and/or special group of people.
- In the manuscript, this word is illegible and is probably “possible” as it has been translated here.
- This is a more precise account of the use of this word than occurs in the published version of the essay. See Situations, IV, p. 257.
- Reading “soi” in the sentence, “Pour nous, rien n'allait de soi.” In the manuscript, “soi” looks like “se,” but that would not only be ungrammatical but also would conflict with the expectation of finding “soi” at the end of the usual wording for something's being self-evident—something “que va de soi.”
- Signes, p. 49.
- This passage is doubly puzzling: Sartre does not specify what the “one thing” is which escaped him and this beginning leads the reader to an expectation quickly contradicted by what follows. This is so because the passage is not at all about something which escaped him, but rather something which he very much possessed: his “one thought only, always the same…”
- Merleau-Ponty is indebted for this indirect logic of discovery or problem solving to Erwin Panofsky. That debt is not acknowledged in his treatment of it in either La Prose du Monde or the Résumés de Cours, but comes only much later in L'OEil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), at p. 90.
- Compare with this paragraph the published version of the essay at pp. 194 and 206 of Situations, IV, as well as the following more detailed account why he (and others) founded Les Temps modernes: “(It was) to show at all levels the importance of the events of daily life, as well as of collective life: diplomatic, political, and economic. It was a matter of showing that any event had different strata, and that each of them was a meaning of the event, the same meaning, moreover, from stratum to stratum changed simply by what, at that particular stratum, was in play. The main idea was to indicate that everything in society appeared with multiple facets and that each of these facets expresses, in its own way, but completely, a meaning which is the meaning of the event. One encounters this meaning under completely different forms and more or less developed, at each level of strata, which constitute them in depth.” Simone de Beauvoir, Entretiens avec Jean-Paid Sartre, p. 458. This description strikes one as remarkably like the way that Merleau-Ponty described social life under the concept of the Gestalt. See particularly here the long, famous footnote at the end of the chapter, “The body as Sexual Being” in Phenomenology of Perception.
- Sartre is playing here on the numerical sense of ciphering and deciphering embedded in “indecipherable” (“indéchiffrable) saying that Merleau-Ponty sought to find his number (“chiffre”).
- This was the title of Sartre's resistance movement. See the published version of this essay at p. 193 of Situations, IV, and de Beauvoir, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 458.
- Starting from this point on, the order of pagination in the manuscript is not absolutely certain. It has been reconstituted by Michel Rybalka and a few pages appear to be missing. Thus perhaps the established order does not correspond to the sequence intended by Sartre.
- In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Ariel is the airy Spirit and Caliban the savage, deformed Slave. The latter personifies brutal force which must obey the higher power symbolized by Ariel, but which always struggles against it.
- Although only the word “l'investissement” appears at this point in the text, it is clear from previous uses of the word that what is meant is a historical investment of meaning. The same situation occurs once more below and will be handled in the same way without further reference.
- “La guerre a eu lieu,” reprinted in Sens et non-sens (Geneva: Nagel, 1966), p. 265.
- This long, complicated sentence—which has actually been broken up in the present translation—was profitably shortened in the published version of the essay. Its much clearer successor, along with an application of the thought expressed in the sentence to Merleau-Ponty's relationship with his mother, may be found in Situations, IV, p. 297.
- Merleau-Ponty: “La guerre a eu lieu”, Les Temps modernes, no. 1, octobre 1945. (This is Sartre's own footnote.—trans.) (Reprinted in Sens et non-sens, p. 256.—trans.)
- The paragraph ends here with a comma, and the next one begins in small letters, indicating some sort of break in the text. The first sentence of the new paragraph refers to certain Marxists with whom Merleau-Ponty associated at the time.
- The page ends here, with the following page beginning disconnectedly with “pas”, as the next paragraph shows.
- Cf. Sartre's remarks in de Beauvoir's Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, at p. 457: “At that moment, then, starting with the Liberation, the appearance of a very strong communist party began, much stronger than it had ever been in France before the war, which numbered one-third of all the French. At this moment it became necessary to take a position vis-à-vis the groups that governed us. Personally I remained outside them, as did Merleau-Ponty, but for other reasons; I had founded the journal Les Temps modernes; we were on the left, but non-communists.”
- Compare here the published version of the essay: “Merleau misunderstood his friends taking root. He came back to the question fifteen years later: in the preface of Signes. He insisted, on the contrary, on the status of the militant, enveloped, invested, and who, however, must contribute himself through his fidelities and through his acts to create the Party which creates him…. for all those young people of 1945 who debated between good faith and what was pledged, across actions daily taken up of which they saw the meaning change in their hands, the “high-altitude thinker,” on more than one occasion, was Merleau-Ponty.” Situations, IV, p. 204.
- In the published version of the essay, Sartre finds an answer for this abandonment in Merleau-Ponty's reactions to the Moscow Trials and in what the latter was to write later in Humanisme et terreur. See Situations, IV, p. 204.
- Unfortunately, the manuscript stops before this promise is kept. Nor does the published version of the essay speak directly to this point.
- Here, in the middle of the lined-out sentence, the manuscript stops.