Word: merleau
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...MAURICE MERLEAU- PONTY died in 1961- still in his early fifties. While he lived, most Americans seem to have known him- if at all- only as a shadowy third man of French intellectual life. occasionally glimpsed in the background of Sartre's brawl with Camus, and even more occasionally felt as a silent questioner, prodding Sartre into continuous revision. Only after he died, and his writings began to appear in translation, did it become widely known that we had lost in Merleau-Ponty one of the best minds of the age-and a man of matchless integrity...
...work Merleau-Ponty left us is a testament to the fruitfulness of an intelligence shaped by, among others, Hegel, Marx and the phenologist Edmund Husserl, and a sensibility tested at once by modern art and literature, and by the intricacy and terror of politics in the twentieth century. Whether we shall prove capable of claiming- and keeping -out inheritance remains to be seen. What we can begin to see now is the extremity of the position he found himself in, and the scope of the task he set himself...
Since the publication this fall of a translation of Humanisme et Terreur, a book scarcely available till now even in French, we are better able to locate the sharp edge of Merleau-Ponty's perception. The immediate object evoking his response was Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon . This account of the Moscow trials of the 1930's. presented as fiction, appeared in 1946. Along with his argumentation in The Yogi and the Commissar. Koestler's novel was taken as the expression, and for some, the justification of disillusion and inwardness, a mood then pervasive among Western intellectuals...
...October, 1946 and February, 1947, Merleau- Ponty published his response in Les Temp Modernes, a review started by himself and Sartre in order to provide a Left, united by memories of the Resistance, with "a reading of the present... as complete and as faithful as possible ... " (quoted by Sartre in Situations. p. 168). Humanism and Terror consists of these articles woven, with other material in pursuit of the same themes, into a study of what he called the Communist problem. Koestler raises such a problem for us. says Marleau-Ponty, but he did not understand it. Indeed, Koestler...
...persuaded by Levi-Strauss' arguments against Sartre. But I should say that he is, since the death of Merleau-Ponty, the most interesting and challenging critic of Sartrean existentialism and phenomenology...