Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

Philosopher of the Self

James Marshall

The University of Auckland - New Zealand

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) had been almost totally excluded from the philosophical canon until the 1980's, when a revival and reinterpretation of her work by mainly feminist philosophers began. For example, she is not mentioned in Walter Kaufmann's Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956) (nor is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, though Albert Camus^*is mentioned). In Paul Edwards' comprehensive philosophical encyclopaedia, The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (1967), the only mention is of her Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), which is said to be important in its own right but in relation to Jean Paul Sartre. Yet there is no further amplification or discussion in that source of what is said to be an important work and how it was related to Sartre – a crucial issue. In general her putative philosophical works are subsumed under or said to be derivative from those of Sartre, or they are recorded as "a kind of footnote to Sartre" (Kruks, 1990:84). In Christina Howells' (1995) The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, she is mentioned once only and that for providing biographical material on Sartre's reading of Husserl. Hazel Barnes, however, is a major and early exception: "De Beauvoir is more than Sartre's interpreter" (1959:4). She is also more than a novelist. For biographical details see Claude Francis and Simone Gontier (1989) and Deidre Bair (1990).

It would seem that until her death in 1986 Beauvoir aided and abetted in this general interpretation, and in a number of sources. Some feminists maintain that she created a myth about her own philosophical contributions to existentialism (for papers on this see the edited collection of Simons, 1995). But this received position on the interpretation of her philosophical work was not reopened until the publication posthumously, by her adopted daughter Sylvie le Bon de Beauvoir in 1990, of her Letters to Sartre. Possibly it needed the publication of these letters to question the received position.

The issue as to whether or not she was an original philosopher seems to hinge upon whether she had identified and articulated certain key ideas which Sartre was later to present as his, especially in the opening pages of Being and Nothingness (1943), or whether she merely contributed to Sartre's ideas and work. Arguably this is the case on the notion of the self. This issue can be pursued initially by a careful reading of her letters to Sartre, and their war diaries during the period between October 1939 and January 1941, when she was writing L'Inviteé (translated as She Came to Stay). This, her first published novel, was completed in 1941 but not published until 1943. What must also be considered is the philosophical import of the first three chapters, especially the first eight pages of She Came to Stay. Her second novel Le Sang des Autres (The Blood of Others) is also important here. She should be considered in her own right, not as an appendage to Sartre. We will look therefore look at some of the philosophical ideas in her early novels – particularly the notions of self and Other and freedom - and her approach to doing philosophy.

Beauvoir did not write academic philosophy. She had passed her aggrégation and commenced teaching in lycées in 1929 (Latin initially, then literature, but philosophy by 1932 [Bair 1990:180]) but as early as age 18 she had began to write fiction. Some of this early fiction was to be published later (Beauvoir 1968;1982). Unlike Sartre, whose philosophical works (though not his philosophical novels and plays) were written abstractly, and who was seeking a grand totalising philosophical system, Beauvoir did not want to write so as to present philosophical ideas in either an abstract manner or as divorced from actual or possible human experience. For her, literature presented and provided a way of relating philosophical ideas to experience (cf. Camus), particularly as it presented a way of expressing her own experiences as part of a general philosophical framework. Her novels can be seen as metaphysical novels, as presenting a fictional narrative in which her own experience is drawn heavily upon, but through a philosophical or metaphysical grill (see further, Pilardi, 1999).

There can be little doubt that she did not abandon her philosophical background and grounding, for she even extended it - for example, she notes her "discovery" and extended reading of Hegel in 1940 in her letters to Sartre (eg, 13,14,16,19,24, 29 July; 29 October) to whom she would explain Hegel in return for him reminding her of Husserl (13 July). The frontispiece of She Came to Stay features a quotation from Hegel (`Each consciousness pursues the death of the other'.) and she uses some of his ideas in The Second Sex, first published in 1949 ( eg, part I). However she expresses early doubts on Hegel for by 8 January 1941, he "no longer consoles me", though she begins to teach his ideas (23 January). But without Sartre to talk to on such issues as Hegel, she says (ibid): "If I were condemned for long never to talk, I'd end up writing philosophy, from the need to express myself". So doing philosophy was still important at a time when She Came to Stay was completed; philosophy in an oral dialogue was acceptable but writing it - as academic philosophy - was for her a last resort. Writing it in some other form, however, was far from being a last resort. For Beauvoir this meant insight into her own life. As Hazel Barnes says of She Came to Stay (1959:122):

Beauvoir believed then that human experience and problems of personal life should be presented to exemplify, or to show, philosophical ideas. Although she features or appears at points in her own novels, as do her close friends, confidants and lovers, her narrative is not presented from one personal viewpoint. The experiences and personal views of the major characters are seen also from each of their viewpoints. In She Came to Stay whilst her personal experiences form part of the viewpoint of Françoise (Beauvoir) she is not necessarily writing the novel from one personal viewpoint, for the viewpoint of each of the main characters is presented in the first person. In The Blood of Others however whilst all of the viewpoints of the main characters are presented, only the viewpoint of the main character, Jean Blomart, is presented in the first person, and this was probably for stylistic reasons. Nevertheless in both novels the viewpoints of the Others are necessary for each character to be a self or subject. The philosophical point is that the Other is necessary for the constitution of the self or subject.

Beauvoir is to reject the notion of a solipsistic isolated self. Writing just prior to the outbreak of WW II she says:

In She Came to Stay the body is not a mere object or thing but is always experienced reality -"my heart is beating - I am here". Elsewhere and some years later she is to say explicitly^: "It is not the body-object described by biologists that actually exists but the body as lived in by the subject" (Beauvoir, 1989: 38). So a human being exists not merely in a body as an object, but as a body subject to human institutions and constraints so that the subject is both conscious of itself as a subject and obtains fulfilment^. For her one can never be a mere biological body as there is always a dimension of meaning. Thus^:

In a nightclub scene in She Came to Stay she explores various possibilities for "experiencing" the body^. First we can identify the notion of consciousness of the body as lived in by the subject when Xavière does things to her arm and, whilst touching her eyelashes, talks to herself. Then there is the body of a young women in feathers as perceived by her male companion who has pounced on her hand, ie, the body as an object for the other subject. Her body is perceived by the other, the man, but she rejects this "objectification" of her body as being part of her experience of her body because it becomes a thing. And a young woman talking about flirting is perceiving the body of the man - she is staring at him - but at the same time rejecting the notion of her body as potential object for the other subjectivity. This is again the body as object for a subject. Now the reality of the subject's lived experience must include both the experience of the lived body as part of one's own subjectivity, and the experience of the lived body as object of another subjectivity. To dissociate or to deny this dual aspect of experience was to be in bad faith for Beauvoir. (Sartre is later to use the girl in the feathers example as an illustration of bad faith, unacknowledged, in Being and Nothingnes).

The ideal coordination for the exemplification of good faith would take place when there was an identity between the two subjectivities - the body as lived in and as part of one's own subjectivity, and the body as an object belonging to another subjectivity. The young woman in feathers presents an example of a severe disjunction between the two subjectivities. For Beauvoir the self is a fusion of mind and body and consciousness is prereflective and intentional, directed to objects in the external world, including her body. But this consciousness does not require talk between subjects. The subject is aware of the other body as object and is aware from the look of the other that her or his body is an object of the other subject. The social Other sees both subjectivity and objectivity in the other as a reciprocal relationship.This is not the Other as alienated from the self as in the early Sartre.

In The Blood of Others Beauvoir develops similar themes on the self but the situation of this novel is heightened because of the involvement of the main characters in the resistance. Beauvoir was disappointed that this, her second published novel, was to be interpreted as a resistance novel. In other words, from my reading, the philosophical content on the self and the other was not seen as important. This is a metaphysical novel but one which progresses from her first novel because the notion of identity must now include some political commitment which is not merely intellectual and inert, for there must be some active participation in accordance with that intellectual commitment.

At the end of the novel Hélène, the lover of Jean Blomart is dying from wounds suffered in a resistance attack upon the German forces occupying Paris. As Jean sits with her in almost total silence as she is dying, he not only recognises his love for her but also recognises from her, and in her silence, that in order to establish his own identity he must commit himself to the next planned resistance operation, that is, that he must abandon forever his own intellectual but non-participatory stance towards political matters, held because of a fatal accident caused to a friend in an earlier demonstration. In realising that her approbation of him is so important for his own identity, and for her identity too, as he recognises both his love for her and what he has to become, Jean defines himself as both politically committed and actively involved in the resistance, even though the activities of the resistance will lead to pointless reprisals upon innocent French people. To a certain extent this represents existentialist angst, and to that extent the novel can be seen as both existentialist and philosophical. But any such restricted reading ignores the metaphysical aspects in this novel which impinge upon the definition of the self and the other.

Was it Beauvoir then who had laid out some of the crucial philosophical concepts of "Sartrean" existentialism by at least 1940, for it is in the first opening pages of her first novel that her own philosophical ideas are to be found and outlined? And these ideas are repeated and further developed in her second novel – The Blood of Others, and they continue into The Mandarins and All Men are Mortal. No doubt it can be countered that it was Sartre's ideas that were developed for they had collaborated for several years by then, and Sartre had read and commented upon the drafts her manuscript. And they were discussing Sartre's philosophical ideas (eg, The Prime of Life [Beauvoir, 1965:434). In any case it might be argued that what Beauvoir was later to develop in The Second Sex was a notion of the gendered self.

This issue needs further and fuller elaboration (but see, Fullbrook & Fullbrook, 1994; Simons, 1995).