7 - Between existentialism and Marxism: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty

Summary

One of the most intriguing aspects of French postwar Hegelianism is the way various thinkers critically transformed important Hegelian themes. There are of course many examples one could mention here, such as Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the desiring subject. In what follows, however, I shall focus on three important moments in twentieth-century French philosophy: Sartre's critique of Hegel's account of the relation to the Other, de Beauvoir's appropriation of Hegelian themes in her ethics of ambiguity, and Merleau-Ponty's appraisal of the relationship between Hegel and existentialism, along with his attempt to transform Hegelian dialectics into a pluralistic “hyperdialectic”. The basic problem at issue for Sartre and de Beauvoir, I suggest, is to comprehend the relationship between individualism and intersubjectivity: how to reconcile the existentialist emphasis on the individual with the Hegelian emphasis on intersubjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, there is a distinctive Hegelian existentialism that Jean Hyppolite has revealed for contemporary thought; the point is not to rehearse the standard existentialist criticisms of Hegel (subsuming the individual under the universality of the Concept), but rather to rethink dialectic such that it no longer obliterates contingency, singularity and plurality. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty's interesting appropriation of Hegelian thought sets the stage, as I discuss in Chapter 8, for the complex engagement with Hegelian dialectics by poststructuralist philosophers of difference (Deleuze and Derrida).

Sartre's existential critique of Hegel

Jean-Paul Sartre is among the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century.