Abstract
This paper examines the influence of Simone de Beauvoir on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on ethics. Scholars have often pointed out that Beauvoir incorporated the Merleau-Pontian notion of embodiment into her ethics. It is much less known how Merleau-Pont was affected by her ethics. In order to clarify the significance of Beauvoir for Merleau-Ponty’s ethics, we analyze how he interpreted She Came to Stay (1943) and Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944) in “Metaphysics and the Novel” (1945) and “Hegel’s Existentialism” (1945).
This paper is an attempt to make it clear that Merleau-Ponty valued Beauvoir’s idea of temporality as a strong objection to the “absolute immoralism,” which he sees in Albert Camus. Merleau-Ponty finds the basis for responsible action in Beauvoir’s description of subjectivity as traversing time by projecting herself. Our analysis will also attempt to demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty cited Pyrrhus and Cineas to think of authenticity in a different way than Being and Time (1927). Beauvoir’s arguments on temporality and freedom serve for Merleau-Ponty as counterarguments against the Heideggerian concept of authenticity as anticipation of death. Finally, we shall attempt to demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir were opposed to Camus regarding the issue of the moral evaluation of commitment to history.
