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MERLEAU-PONTY DISAGREED WITH SARTRE about freedom, from the Phenomenology of Perception to his last manuscripts, published as The Visible and the Invisible. Even their more famous political dispute was, in Beauvoir's words, a "carbon copy" of this ontological dispute.1 Despite the visibility of this link between politics and metaphysics, discussions of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre rarely see another important link between their conflict over freedom and their conflict over fundamental ontology. This essay explains that link. At the risk of spoiling the suspense, let me state its thesis at the outset: the disagreement over freedom springs from a disagreement about the nature of temporality, and beneath that, about the proper place and understanding of ambiguity in human existence. In fact, these latter disagreements are the fundamental ones; the disagreement over freedom is only their consequence.
I. SARTREAN FREEDOM
Merleau-Ponty obviously never lived to see the changes Sartre's theories underwent in The Critique of Dialectical Reason, and although he discusses some of Sartre's political writings (most notably in Adventures of the Dialectic), from the Phenomenology to The Visible and the Invisible, his criticisms of freedom generally focus on the ontology of Being and Nothingness. This limits his critique, and Beauvoir rightly took Merleau-Ponty to task for ignoring Saint Genet and other texts Sartre wrote after Being and Nothingness.2 While Sartre's The Communists and Peace, a central target of Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, is not philosophical like Being and Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty does ignore its tendency to move in the direction of The Critique of Dialectical Reason and develop a more ambiguous concept of freedom. Merleau-Ponty thus interprets Sartre's attempts in the early 1950s to understand a complex social formation like the revolutionary proletariat through the ontological lens of Being and Nothingness. As a consequence, Merleau-Ponty rightly sees that such an ontology will not do the work Sartre requires of it in these later works, but wrongly assumes that Sartre is working with the same ontology.3 Beauvoir does not help the situation by largely defending The Communists and Peace with passages from Being and Nothingness. Nor does Sartre really aid his case by writing to Merleau-Ponty, in a letter dating from the time of the controversy, that despite changes necessary to the ideas of Being and Nothingness, "all...