4 - Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on ambiguity

Summary

Ambiguity is arguably the most important idea in Beauvoir's philosophy. This chapter argues that Beauvoir's idea of ambiguity has much more in common with Merleau-Ponty's idea of ambiguity than with Sartre's. Beauvoir's philosophy of ambiguity and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of ambiguity complement each other.

Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty were friends and knew each other’s work. In a 1945 commentary on Beauvoir’s L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), Merleau-Ponty says this novel portrays a genuine morality that does not seek to dispel our fundamental ambiguity. In a later prospectus of his own work, Merleau-Ponty declares that establishing a “good ambiguity” “would . . . give us the principle of an ethics,” but he never developed that ethics. Shortly after his review of L’Invitée, Beauvoir wrote a review of Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la Perception (Phenomenology of Perception) in Les Temps modernes, a journal that both had helped to found and on whose editorial board both served. There Beauvoir praises phenomenology for “abolishing the subject-object opposition” that education erects in wrenching the living, meaningful world away from children and substituting a universe of frozen, independent objects. Ethics teaches children to renounce their subjectivity in favor of universal laws, yet they retain a sense of personal uniqueness and intimacy with the world in the spontaneous movement of their life. Beauvoir says phenomenology addresses and abolishes this split.