Merleau-Ponty [I] (manuscript draft of "Merleau-Ponty Vivant")

Author(s): Jean-Paul Sartre Year: Manuscript dated July 1961 (referenced internally: "two months of absence" from MP's death on 3 May 1961); JBSP translation published 1984 Type: philosophical-biographical essay (eulogy / memoir)

The unpublished manuscript draft of Sartre's eulogy for Merleau-Ponty, written in July 1961 in the wake of MP's sudden death (3 May 1961). The published version of the essay — "Merleau-Ponty Vivant" — appeared in Les Temps Modernes 184–185 (October 1961, the special memorial issue) and as the lead piece of Situations, IV (Gallimard, 1964), pp. 189–287. The translation in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 15:2 (May 1984), pp. 128–154, prepared with editorial assistance from Michel Rybalka, renders the manuscript rather than the published essay; editorial footnotes systematically compare manuscript to published version where they diverge.

The manuscript stops abruptly mid-sentence after promising — but never delivering — a treatment of MP's post-1954 turn ("we will see how, starting in 1954, he conceived a new relationship between being and intersubjectivity," p. 150). The manuscript covers only the period from MP's birth (~1908) through ca. 1946, truncating before the watershed 1953 Les Temps Modernes break. The published version goes substantially further. Both versions truncate before reaching the most consequential MP-evolution they purport to discuss (the late ontology); the published continuation extends through the 1953 break and the Adventures of the Dialectic polemic but stops short of V&I.

Why the manuscript matters distinctly from the published version. Several philosophical claims that the manuscript states crisply are softened or removed in Situations IV. Most importantly, footnote 18 of the JBSP edition records that the published version "uses the word 'envelopment' several times in reference to Merleau-Ponty's thought without exploring its fundamental significance" — the manuscript explicitly thematizes envelopment as MP's foundational philosophical principle. The same applies to the spontaneity-vs-liberty formulation (preserved in both, but better-anchored in the manuscript), the "voluntarism" diagnosis (note 34: "more precise account…than occurs in the published version"), and the silent-Marxism claim (note 52: the published version supplies the Moscow Trials and Humanisme et terreur as the cause; the manuscript leaves it as private disappointment Sartre cannot explain). The manuscript is the bolder reading of MP; the published essay tones down some of the structural claims. For wiki purposes the manuscript is the primary text because it is the one that does the structural work.

Core Arguments

1. Claim: MP's philosophy of envelopment is genealogically rooted in his childhood — specifically in the prolonged maternal-filial intimacy after weaning. Because: MP's "cardinal principle: envelopment" — that consciousness is enveloped, that "Nature is right up in us," that we are "in being" which "envelops us, is in us, fundamental and contingent, and transcends itself towards gesture and speech" — is not a doctrinal choice but the philosophical articulation of his most originary experience. "Their love kept for a long time the form of a large body leaning over a small one and enveloping it, because understanding existence and life, for Merleau, are entirely conditioned by this cardinal principle: envelopment" (p. 131). Sartre's emphasis on because ties philosophical doctrine causally to childhood structure. Against: The classical philosophers (positivists, objectivists, intellectualists) "who do not suspect that they have a backside and are absorbed in looking at nature face to face without knowing that it is also behind them and mocks them"; equivalently, Sartre's own younger view in L'Être et le Néant.

2. Claim: The shared phenomenological starting point of MP and Sartre — Husserl's intentionality and situation — was differentially received by each in 1934 because of their differing childhoods. MP took intentionality as spontaneity (the invasion of consciousness by being and the transcendence of being by instituted meaning); Sartre took intentionality as liberty (consciousness as nothingness ceaselessly pursued by being and always escaping). See spontaneity-vs-liberty. Because: "Spontaneity and liberty, the difference between them is nothing and everything: these words connected the outcome of our thoughts to our two births, our two childhoods, and all our choices" (p. 139). This is a structural-genealogical claim: a single Husserlian concept gives rise to two distinct philosophical programs whose differences are explicable only by reference to pre-philosophical biographical orientation. Against: The view that MP and Sartre's later divergence is a 1947–55 political drift driven by responses to Stalinism. Sartre dates the divergence to 1934 and grounds it in pre-philosophical experience.

3. Claim: MP is a philosopher of continuity; Sartre is a philosopher of rupture and discontinuity. This is not a stylistic difference but a structural one tied to method. Because: MP's truth of meditation requires silence and slow ripening; opposing notions impose their ambivalent unity rather than negate one another. Sartre's "Megarian ideology of discontinuity" was opposed to dialectic until "dialectic later saved me." The contrast tracks the temperaments: "Merleau-Ponty's own violence was not less than mine, but he did not like it: it exploded in the depths of himself, a submarine torpedo which shook him from top to bottom and tore him apart without its being visible" (p. 143). Against: An equivalence-reading of the two phenomenologists, or a temperamental rather than philosophical-structural reading of the divergence.

4. Claim: For MP, philosophy is the salvation of what is forever lost — childhood, the natal absolute. The philosophical vocation is therefore conditioned by exile from a primal envelopment that cannot be regained. Because: MP's atheism is genuine (Solesmes: "One believes that one believes, but one does not believe") but he refuses the term "atheist" ("Atheist, no. Do not put that"). This refusal of pre-defined oppositional identity is part of a deeper refusal of conceptual closure. MP is thus a thinker for whom philosophy replaces religion as a technique of saving what is lost: "the salvation of what is forever lost. If you have a soul to save, speak to a priest; if you have none, be a philosopher" (p. 137). Against: The view that MP's atheism is the standard non-belief of the post-1930s French intelligentsia, or that his philosophical vocation is independent of his religious trajectory.

5. Claim: MP underwent a silent Marxist temptation before WWII — was perhaps closer to Marxist doctrine than he ever was subsequently — and abandoned it in solitary disappointment, never publicly avowing the temptation or its retreat. Because: Sartre reports MP saying "more than once that no one was qualified to deal with morality 'because the proletariat could no longer be considered the bearer of human values'" and that on another day MP "pensively reproached me for believing in the mission of the proletariat when I was indeed incapable of forming my own opinion." Sartre's diagnosis: "everything began with a tender love, and that he was disappointed. But this adventure must have taken place in silence and the communist intellectuals were not even notified. Everything happened between him and himself. He followed the Marxist route and then, I do not know why, he abandoned it" (p. 150). Note 52 records that the published Situations IV version supplies the Moscow Trials and Humanisme et terreur as the cause; the manuscript leaves it as silent disappointment Sartre cannot explain. Against: The standard reading on which MP's Marxism was always an external engagement (Humanisme et terreur 1947 as cool sympathy, Adventures of the Dialectic 1955 as critique) without prior interior commitment.

6. Claim: MP refused Christianity and communism for the same structural reason — each demanded a transcendence that he met everywhere and refused everywhere. Because: "It was a constant trait of Merleau-Ponty that he would meet everywhere with transcendences, in general demanded by the very immanence of his milieu, and to everywhere refuse them" (p. 150). MP would have been Christian if God had become intimate evidence; would have entered the Communist Party if the proletariat's class-suppression had been guaranteed — but no guarantee. Both refusals follow from a single underlying disposition, which Sartre links to his promised but undelivered treatment of MP's 1954 turn ("starting in 1954, he conceived a new relationship between being and intersubjectivity… aimed at permitting him to put aside forever the problem of guarantees"). Against: A reading on which MP's position on Christianity is independent of his position on communism.

7. Claim: Sartre's early voluntarism (creation ex nihilo, free contract / tacit renewal at every instant, refusal of being-born) was MP's exact diagnostic of the early Sartre and is endorsed by Sartre in retrospect. Footnote 34 records that the manuscript's account of "voluntarism" is "more precise" than the published version. Because: "I attributed to all my behavior the pomp of a creation ex nihilo. Merleau made fun of me as much as, and more than, I did of him: he called this superb mood my 'voluntarism'" (p. 141). MP's term voluntarism is the precise philosophical complement of envelopment: each names what the other refuses. Against: A reading of the early Sartre as a quasi-Heideggerian thrown subject, or as already historically situated.

8. Claim: MP's mature post-1945 conception of historical agency turns on a double paradox of action: the event "can come on us like a thief" and "when it is over, it happens that you have done it." Responsibility is owed not to chosen acts in their actualized form but to the risks of acting. Because: Sartre cites MP's 1945 essay "La guerre a eu lieu": "we have been led to assume and to consider as our own not only our intentions, the meaning that our acts have for us, but also the consequences of these acts outside us, the meaning that they take on in a certain historical context" (p. 147). Sartre's analogy: a mother's responsibility for the child she desired and risked, "even where he is suffering from Down's Syndrome — because she wanted him attractive, happy, and lovable, but also if he is ugly, an idiot from birth and pitiful: she took the risk, and consequently he is hers and she is his." This is a key passage where Sartre acknowledges MP's correction of B&N's responsibility doctrine: "When I had written, a little earlier, that we are responsible for everything before everyone, which is what I still claim, such a general proposition could be true at a certain level of phenomenological description and of ontological research; but it was self-evident that it was not applicable as such to historical man" (p. 147). See conditioned-freedom for Sartre's 1961 partial-acknowledgment of MP's 1945 critique. Against: Sartre's earlier formulation in L'Être et le Néant that "we are responsible for everything before everyone."

Key Findings

• The manuscript dates the MP/Sartre divergence to 1934 — the moment of mutual encounter with Husserl's Ideen — and grounds the divergence in differential childhood orientation. This radically antedates the standard 1947–55 political-rupture narrative.
• Sartre's "envelopment" is a Sartrean structuring of MP, not MP's own thematization. MP uses enveloppement alongside empiètement, Ineinander, chiasme, réversibilité etc. without privileging one as cardinal. Sartre's manuscript reads envelopment as the cardinal name of what MP's many figures collectively address. The published Situations IV retreats from this strong claim (footnote 18).
• Sartre records a "silent Marxist temptation" by MP that the manuscript alone preserves as the cause of MP's later wait-and-see Marxism. The published version replaces "I do not know why" with the Moscow Trials.
• Sartre's manuscript partially recants B&N's responsibility doctrine. The acknowledgment that "we are responsible for everything before everyone" "was not applicable as such to historical man" is as close as Sartre comes in 1961 to conceding MP's 1945 PhP critique. The wiki should record this as Sartre-side acknowledgment of conditioned-freedom.
• The childhood-explains-disposition methodological assumption is asserted without argument. Sartre treats it as nearly axiomatic: differences in childhood produce differences in mature philosophy. This is the same assumption that structures Sartre's own Les Mots (1964, mostly written 1953 per footnote 15).
• MP's "wave" metaphor: "He liked to compare himself to a wave; it is a crest among others, and it is the whole sea drawn up which changes itself into a rim of foam" (p. 149). Sartre reports this as MP's self-figuration; it is structurally MP's mature alternative to Sartrean voluntarism.

Methodology

The essay interlocks personal memoir and philosophical reading. Each biographical episode (the École Normale, the Aron-gas-streetlamp anecdote, Solesmes, the 1941 Socialisme et Liberté group, the post-war Marxist temptation) is at the same time a philosophical reading of MP's developing thought. The methodological assumption — that childhood disposition is the source of philosophical disposition — is asserted but never argued. Sartre's prose performs MP's truth of meditation in some respects (it does not propose dialogical attack-and-reply but slow ripening and self-correction) and resists it in others (Sartre's own polemical moves remain present, e.g. the diagnostic of voluntarism, the silent-Marxism reading).

The manuscript is also a phenomenology of the ambiguous moment — Sartre is writing from within the bereavement, deliberately not untangling: "this ambiguous moment [in which one is familiar with someone dead (death) without completely feeling him (it)] brings with it an equivocal light" (p. 128). The methodological-formal effect is that the philosophical reading of MP cannot be detached from the personal mourning; the essay's form enacts MP's good ambiguity.

Concepts Developed

Concepts on which this manuscript does original work:

• spontaneity-vs-liberty — the cardinal philosophical-genealogical pair distinguishing MP from Sartre, dated to 1934 (Husserl's Ideen) and grounded in differential childhood orientation. Sartre's formulation (p. 139): "Spontaneity and liberty, the difference between them is nothing and everything." This source is the primary attestation of the formulation.
• high-altitude-thinking — the manuscript shows the polemical-bidirectional traffic of the term: MP charges Sartre, the communist friends charge MP, Sartre charges himself in self-criticism (p. 138). The essay anchors the interpersonal-philosophical history of the term that runs through MP's Signes.
• The "envelopment" reading of MP (treated within jean-paul-sartre § "Sartre's 1961 Reading of Merleau-Ponty"): Sartre's structuring of MP's vocabulary around envelopment as cardinal principle. The manuscript is the one place the structuring is explicit; the published Situations IV uses the word descriptively without thematizing it (footnote 18).
• The "two ways of being young" diagnostic (treated within jean-paul-sartre): MP's Preface-to-Signs typology of philosophical disposition (childhood-fascinated vs. cast-out-from-childhood) is here used as Sartre's heuristic for the structural divergence. The reading is more precise than in the published version (the manuscript does not distance itself from the typology).
• The "philosophy of continuity" / "Megarian ideology of discontinuity" pairing (treated within jean-paul-sartre): Sartre's structural diagnosis of MP's vs his own method. Notable as a Sartrean self-naming.
• The truth of meditation gloss (treated within jean-paul-sartre): Sartre's reading of MP's preference for silence-over-dialogue; a structural critique of Sartrean polemic from within.

Concepts Referenced

Concepts the manuscript touches but does not develop:

• institution — used in the post-1945 sense ("the event making itself into an act and again going beyond the agent in becoming institution"); anticipates without theorizing MP's 1954–55 Institution course.
• advent — Sartre attributes to MP, footnote 24 specifies that MP borrows it from paul-ricoeur (Signes, p. 85). Used: "culture is advent."
• flesh (chair) — used once, attributed to MP: "in us, [being] makes itself flesh — the word is Merleau's himself." Sartre acknowledges the term as MP's but does not develop a Sartrean reading of chair.
• ambiguity — used in MP's general sense ("his first experience of ambiguity: the web of his days was very ambiguous. Life or Non-Life?", p. 134) but the good-ambiguity / bad-ambiguity technical distinction (1960–61) is not engaged.
• silence — present as register: silent-meditation, silent-decision. The manuscript adds a register (silence-as-mode-of-decision: silent Marxism, silent abandonment) that complements the existing wiki treatment of silence-as-method-of-meditation. See silence § "Sartre's 1961 Register: Silence as Mode of Decision".
• conditioned-freedom — implicit in Sartre's acknowledgment that B&N's "we are responsible for everything before everyone" "was not applicable as such to historical man" (p. 147). The 1961 manuscript is the earliest Sartre-side text to record this concession.
• chiasm, ineinander — neither term appears (Sartre had not seen V&I's working notes); but the structural object Sartre names as "envelopment" overlaps with what MP's late vocabulary calls Ineinander.
• MP and Freud — p. 132: MP was "industriously at work, searching for, and not sparing, himself" but the margin of choice is "reduced" and Freud's mechanism alone does not capture it. A passing register.

Terminology

This is a French-original work translated to English. Selected technical pairs:

French (or original)	English translation	Attestation locations	Translation notes
enveloppement	envelopment	pp. 131, 137, 141, 146 (manuscript)	Translator preserves; the cardinal manuscript term per footnote 18; published Situations IV uses the same word but de-thematized
spontanéité / liberté	spontaneity / liberty	p. 139	Both terms preserved; the cardinal pair
voluntarisme	voluntarism	p. 141	MP's diagnostic of early Sartre; per footnote 34, manuscript "more precise" than published
pensée de survol	high-altitude thinking	pp. 136, 138, 149	Polemical term that travels MP↔Sartre↔communists
vérité de méditation	truth of meditation	p. 144	MP's self-described mode against dialogical philosophy
pensée de pli / philosophie de continuité	philosophy of continuity	p. 143	Sartre's structural characterization of MP
avènement	advent	p. 137; footnote 24	Borrowed by MP from paul-ricoeur (Signes p. 85)
chair (de ma chair)	flesh (of my flesh)	p. 131	Attributed to MP: "the word is Merleau's himself"
chiaroscuro / clair-obscur	chiaroscuro	p. 137	Used metaphorically for MP's perception-philosophy
ancrage	anchorage	p. 137; Situations IV p. 284 (footnote 27)	Individuating dimension of envelopment

Key Passages

"Their love kept for a long time the form of a large body leaning over a small one and enveloping it, because understanding existence and life, for Merleau, are entirely conditioned by this cardinal principle: envelopment." (p. 131)

"Even more: that Nature is right up in us, and, for us only to see the moon or a neon sign, what is required is a natural appropriation of external and internal being. We are in being: it envelops us, it is in us, fundamental and contingent, and it transcends itself towards gesture and speech. In us, it makes itself flesh — the word is Merleau's himself — and when we perceive the world through our body, we make it flesh and in turn we make ourselves its flesh. Flesh of my flesh: no one had taken literally and worked so hard to develop this idea of Nature as Mother which is today abstract indeed, but which is also inherited from the oldest religions." (p. 131)

"He concluded, some years later, that 'One believes that one believes, but one does not believe.' To my knowledge, the conclusion remained definitive: the new totality had burst like a soap bubble. I am not unaware, however, that he told a student who was doing some work on him and gave him the title of 'atheistic philosopher,' 'Atheist, no. Do not put that.' But I see there above all his repugnance at allowing himself to be enclosed in concepts, in allowing himself to be defined by the 'yes' or 'no.'" (p. 134)

"Spontaneity and liberty, the difference between them is nothing and everything: these words connected the outcome of our thoughts to our two births, our two childhoods, and all our choices. When we quarrelled, later, even if it was about an article written by a third party, it was always necessary to work back to the initial terms and redescend by stages to the subject of the dispute. I blamed him for his half-tones and continuities; he reproached me for my ruptures, voluntarism, and brutality." (p. 139)

"I attributed to all my behavior the pomp of a creation ex nihilo. Merleau made fun of me as much as, and more than, I did of him: he called this superb mood my 'voluntarism.'" (p. 141)

"Merleau, smiling, took care to break nothing and to set nothing loose; his light dandyism of precaution and morality of capacity were to end up in a philosophy of continuity. He did not see it through to the end, any more than I did with my intuitive explosions; he was held up by a certain pluralism which resembled tolerance, as I was by my monistic idea of Truth." (p. 143)

"Merleau, quite to the contrary, was not at all bothered by the multiplicity of points of view; he saw in them the facets of Being. In his eyes, pluralism and correspondences represented a fundamental structure of the True, and he kept this idea right up to the end." (p. 144)

"But, when thought descends into its own depths to clarify itself by using notions which oppose nothing because they impose their ambivalent unity on their elements — in brief when the philosopher seeks a truth of meditation, the other can join in, but only in silence; one does not exchange such heavy words." (p. 144)

"When I had written, a little earlier, that we are responsible for everything before everyone, which is what I still claim, such a general proposition could be true at a certain level of phenomenological description and of ontological research; but it was self-evident that it was not applicable as such to historical man." (p. 147)

"He liked to compare himself to a wave; it is a crest among others, and it is the whole sea drawn up which changes itself into a rim of foam." (p. 149)

"I believe that everything began with a tender love, and that he was disappointed. But this adventure must have taken place in silence and the communist intellectuals were not even notified. Everything happened between him and himself. He followed the Marxist route and then, I do not know why, he abandoned it." (p. 150)

"It was a constant trait of Merleau-Ponty that he would meet everywhere with transcendences, in general demanded by the very immanence of his milieu, and to everywhere refuse them. We will see how, starting in 1954, he conceived a new relationship between being and intersubjectivity and how the work outlined aimed at permitting him to put aside forever the problem of guarantees." (p. 150)

Footnote 18 (editorial): "Unlike the present text, the published version of the essay uses the word 'envelopment' several times in reference to Merleau-Ponty's thought without exploring its fundamental significance."

Footnote 53 (editorial): "Unfortunately, the manuscript stops before this promise is kept. Nor does the published version of the essay speak directly to this point."

What's Not Obvious

Three things this manuscript shows that would not appear in a conventional summary of Sartre's eulogy:

1. The manuscript dates the MP/Sartre divergence to 1934, not 1953. The standard reception treats their break as a 1947–55 political drift over Stalinism, the Korean War, and the Adventures of the Dialectic polemic. Sartre's manuscript locates the divergence in the moment of common phenomenological-discovery: 1934, when both arrived at Husserl's Ideen. The differential reception of intentionality (as spontaneity for MP, as liberty for Sartre) is the cardinal divergence; the political disagreements are the surfacing of a structural rupture already in place. This means the standard reception underdates the divergence by about twenty years. See spontaneity-vs-liberty for the full structure.

2. Sartre treats MP's "envelopment" as cardinal, then the published Situations IV version retracts the structural framing. Footnote 18 of the JBSP edition — "the published version uses the word 'envelopment' several times in reference to Merleau-Ponty's thought without exploring its fundamental significance" — flags a substantive philosophical revision. The manuscript reads MP's whole vocabulary (flesh, chiasm, intersubjectivity, institution) through envelopment; the published essay deploys the term descriptively without making the structural claim. The manuscript-vs-published distinction is therefore not a textual curiosity but a record of Sartre's retreat from the strong reading. The wiki's jean-paul-sartre §"Sartre's 1961 Reading" treats the manuscript-version as primary because the published version is effectively a softening; readers consulting only Situations IV will miss the structural claim.

3. The Sartrean responsibility doctrine of L'Être et le Néant is partially recanted at p. 147. Sartre's acknowledgment that "we are responsible for everything before everyone, which is what I still claim, such a general proposition could be true at a certain level of phenomenological description and of ontological research; but it was self-evident that it was not applicable as such to historical man" is as close as Sartre comes in 1961 to conceding MP's 1945 conditioned-freedom critique. The recantation is partial (Sartre still claims the proposition at one level) and qualified (its inapplicability is to historical man specifically), but it is a recantation and the wiki should record it. This is the strongest Sartre-side acknowledgment of MP's 1945 freedom-doctrine critique anywhere in Sartre's published or unpublished corpus.

Critique / Limitations

• The childhood-explains-disposition assumption is not argued. Sartre treats it nearly as axiomatic: differences in childhood produce differences in mature philosophy, and MP's foundational concept (envelopment) is the philosophical articulation of his maternal-filial intimacy. There is no argument that philosophical disposition is downstream of childhood — only assertions and confirming examples. The methodological move parallels Sartre's own Les Mots (mostly written 1953) and is more confident than the textual evidence supports.
• The "envelopment as cardinal principle" reading is bold and rests on Sartre's own structuring. Sartre attributes to MP a foundational principle that MP himself does not explicitly thematize as foundational. The textual evidence Sartre offers comes from Signes (a late text) and from quoted passages that Sartre may be over-reading. The published Situations IV version retreats from this strong claim. A reader who follows MP's own corpus may find that enveloppement sits alongside many other terms (empiètement, Ineinander, chiasme, réversibilité) without being privileged.
• The "silent Marxist temptation" claim depends on Sartre's reportage of MP's pre-war remarks. The published Situations IV version supplies the Moscow Trials and Humanisme et terreur as causes, replacing the manuscript's "I do not know why." The two versions are mutually inconsistent at this point: either Sartre had a private theory in 1961 (the silent-disappointment reading) which he replaced with a more public-history-friendly account, or Sartre's 1964 published version represents fuller reflection. The wiki records both.
• The manuscript truncates before the most consequential MP-evolution: the 1954–55 Institution course, the 1956–60 Nature courses, V&I. Sartre's promise to treat the post-1954 turn (p. 150) is unfulfilled in both manuscript and published versions per footnote 53.
• The manuscript treats Sartre's reading of MP, not MP's self-account. The wiki must hold both: this source is the primary attestation of the Sartrean reception of MP, not of MP's self-understanding. Where the manuscript's claims diverge from MP's self-account (e.g., on whether MP's central principle is "envelopment"), the wiki tracks the disagreement rather than synthesizing.

Connections

• complements merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — Adventures' Ch 5 ("Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism") is MP's public political critique of Sartre; this 1961 manuscript is Sartre's posthumous-philosophical reading of MP. The two are complementary mirror documents — each thinker's reading of the other from his own side.
• complements merleau-ponty-1964-signs — MP's Introduction (1960) and "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" engage Sartre. Footnote 12 of this manuscript records that the Aden Arabie preface and "Merleau-Ponty Vivant" appear consecutively in Situations IV (pp. 130–188 then pp. 189–287), framing the dialogue: Sartre reads Nizan and recants his youth (1960) → MP reads Sartre's recantation (1960 Signs Introduction) → Sartre reads MP after MP's death (1961 manuscript / 1961 LTM / 1964 Situations IV).
• partially recants merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception's freedom critique — Sartre's p. 147 acknowledgment is the closest Sartre comes in 1961 to conceding the unnamed-target critique of B&N in PhP Part Three Ch III.
• anticipates without engaging merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — the post-1954 course Sartre promises to treat but never reaches. Sartre had not seen the courses (only their published résumés) at the time of writing.
• uses paul-ricoeur's advent — via MP's Signes (footnote 24).
• acknowledges Malraux-shaped MP-on-painting — the Matisse film comment (p. 135).
• is the primary attestation of spontaneity-vs-liberty (the formulation lives only in this source and its published successor in Situations IV).
• is one register of high-altitude-thinking — the manuscript shows the polemical-bidirectional traffic of MP's term.
• introduces silence § "Silence as Mode of Decision" (the new register the manuscript adds to the existing silence-as-method-of-meditation thread).
• grounds the jean-paul-sartre § "Sartre's 1961 Reading of Merleau-Ponty" — the entity-page section that aggregates Sartre's structuring claims about MP.

Sources

• Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 15:2 (May 1984), pp. 128–154. The translation includes editorial notes by (or with) Michel Rybalka comparing the manuscript to Situations, IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 189–287.
• The published version: Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty Vivant," Les Temps Modernes 184–185 (October 1961), the special memorial issue; reprinted as the lead piece of Situations, IV (Gallimard, 1964), pp. 189–287.
• Cited within the manuscript and notes:
  • Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Gallimard, 1960), pp. 34–35 (the "two ways of being young" passage at p. 130 of the manuscript), p. 49, p. 86, p. 87, p. 104.
  • Merleau-Ponty, "La guerre a eu lieu," Les Temps Modernes no. 1 (October 1945), reprinted in Sens et non-sens (Nagel, 1966), pp. 256, 265.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens (Nagel, 1966), p. 36, p. 93.
  • Merleau-Ponty, L'Œil et l'esprit (Gallimard, 1964), p. 90 (cited in editorial footnote 38 for the indirect-logic-of-discovery debt to Panofsky).
  • Sartre, Les Mots (Gallimard, 1964) — referenced in footnote 15 as the autobiographical complement; footnote indicates it was mostly written in 1953.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l'âge (Gallimard, 1960), pp. 141–142 (the apricot-cocktail / gas-streetlamp anecdote).
  • Simone de Beauvoir, La cérémonie des adieux / Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre (Gallimard, 1981), pp. 314, 329, 458, 549–559 (cited in editorial footnotes for cross-checks).
  • Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (eds.), Jean-Paul Sartre: Œuvres romanesques, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Gallimard, 1981), p. 1772 (footnote 5 on Les Chiens de Garde).