claims#faire-etre-vs-faire-exister-as-mp-sartre-axis

The Liberté/Leibniz course (Lyon 1946–47) identifies *faire-être* (MP) vs *faire-exister* (Sartre) as the philosophical axis of MP-Sartre divergence, predating the 1953 political rupture

ID: faire-etre-vs-faire-exister-as-mp-sartre-axis Title: The Liberté/Leibniz course (Lyon 1946–47) identifies faire-être (MP) vs faire-exister (Sartre) as the philosophical axis of MP-Sartre divergence, predating the 1953 political rupture Status: candidate Confidence: medium Claim type: structural / genealogical / corrective Created: 2026-05-04 Updated: 2026-05-04 Sources: merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-i-1946-1947 Wiki homes: conditioned-freedom, jean-paul-sartre, merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-i-1946-1947

Claim

The Lyon course Liberté – En particulier chez Leibniz (1946–47) identifies the precise philosophical axis on which MP and Sartre diverge before the 1953 political rupture: MP routes the third conception of Cartesian liberty through faire-être (the act of making the good be as good — bienfaisance); Sartre routes it through faire-exister-le-monde (humanism as production-of-world by negativity-without-God). The 1953 political rupture has its 1946–47 philosophical foundations in this Cartesian-liberty divergence. The claim is corrective: the standard narrative dates the MP-Sartre theoretical break to 1947 (PhP III.III's anti-total-freedom argument) and the political break to 1953 (over Korea); the Inédits I Liberté/Leibniz course shows that the third conception ground of Cartesian liberty was already a divergence point in 1946–47.

Evidence

• merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-i-1946-1947 — Liberté – En particulier chez Leibniz pp. 313–339; editor's commentary pp. 311–312 makes the faire-être / faire-exister axis explicit, citing both MP's 1946–47 manuscript and Sartre's "La liberté cartésienne" (May 1946).
• Sartre, La liberté cartésienne (May 1946) — the faire-exister characterization. (Not yet ingested into the wiki; available in Sartre's Situations IX anthology.)
• Inédits I p. 311 (editor's commentary): "il [MP] y met au cœur de la notion de liberté la question du faire-être, plus précisément la conception tenant à faire être le bien comme bien, d'une certaine manière celle de la bien-faisance"; Sartre, by contrast, "définissant l'existentialisme comme un humanisme... 'l'homme est l'être dont l'apparition fait qu'un monde existe'" (faire-exister).
• The lettre à Mesland (2 May 1644) becomes the textual pivot: where Sartre reads Cartesian liberty as failed pour-soi-style negativity, MP reads it as the temporal indifference that opens the third conception (Inédits I p. 316).
• The editorial reading also connects the 1946 faire-être to MP's later vocabulary: opérer / opération (V&I 1959–61), institution (1954–55), bonne ambiguïté (1951).

Counterpressure / Limits

The claim depends heavily on Dalissier's editorial framing of the Inédits I p. 311 commentary. The MP manuscript itself (pp. 313–339) does not state the faire-être / faire-exister opposition in those exact terms; the opposition is reconstructed by Dalissier from MP's third-conception argument and from cross-reference to Sartre's 1946 essay. A more conservative reading would say: MP and Sartre disagree about Cartesian liberty in 1946; whether this disagreement is the "philosophical axis" of their later political rupture requires further demonstration.

A second objection: PhP (1945) already breaks with Sartre on freedom (conditioned-freedom). The Liberté/Leibniz course of 1946–47 may merely continue that 1945 break, not introduce a new philosophical divergence. The claim's "before the 1953 rupture" framing may be insufficiently distinctive — PhP III.III is itself before 1953.

A third objection: the faire-être / faire-exister opposition may be a Dalissier-coined gloss rather than an MP-coined distinction. The text of the manuscript (pp. 313–339) does not explicitly use this opposition; it is the editorial reading that names it. If MP's actual manuscripts do not use the faire-être / faire-exister terminology, the claim's textual anchoring is weaker than it appears.

Payoff

If the claim is correct, then (i) the MP-Sartre theoretical relation has a 1946–47 Cartesian-liberty pivot in addition to the 1945 PhP III.III pivot; (ii) the institution-course's faire-être / opérer vocabulary descends from the 1946–47 reading of Cartesian liberty; (iii) Sartre's humanism and MP's moral existentialism are philosophically distinct in 1946–47, not just politically distinct in 1953; (iv) the MP-on-Descartes line (PhP, Eye and Mind, In Praise of Philosophy) gains a 1946–47 anchor.

If the claim is mistaken, the faire-être / faire-exister opposition is interesting Dalissier-philology but not MP-doctrinal claim.

Status History

• 2026-05-04 — created as candidate from the merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-i-1946-1947 ingest. Promotion to live requires (a) ingest of Sartre's La liberté cartésienne (1946) verifying the faire-exister characterization, and (b) re-reading of MP's manuscript pp. 313–339 for explicit faire-être deployment, distinguishing MP's own usage from Dalissier's editorial gloss.

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