Simone de Beauvoir

Introduction

Simone de Beauvoir is the French philosopher, novelist, and political activist whose work across multiple genres shaped mid-twentieth-century thought in ways that have only been fully recognized by anglophone philosophy in the past three decades. Her major work The Second Sex (1949) is one of the foundational texts of modern feminist philosophy; her ethical writings, especially The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), develop the existentialist framework of situated freedom in directions distinct from Sartre's; her memoirs, novels, and political interventions constituted a sustained public engagement that paralleled Sartre's over four decades.

The recovery of Beauvoir as a major philosopher in her own right — rather than as Sartre's intellectual companion who happened also to write fiction and feminism — has been one of the more striking developments in contemporary philosophical historiography. The earlier reception had tended to read her ethical and political work as derivative from Sartre's; the contemporary scholarly consensus is that the relationship was substantially more reciprocal and that Beauvoir's distinctive contributions include core philosophical innovations the Sartrean framework lacks.

Life

Beauvoir was born in 1908 in Paris to a Catholic family of declining bourgeois fortunes. She attended the Cours Désir, a Catholic school for girls, and then the Sorbonne, where she studied mathematics and philosophy. At the prestigious agrégation in philosophy in 1929 — the most competitive examination in the French academic system — she placed second; Sartre placed first. At twenty-one she became the youngest person ever to pass the philosophy agrégation. The relationship with Sartre that would last fifty-one years began in this period.

Beauvoir taught philosophy at lycées in Marseille (1931–1932), Rouen (1932–1936), and Paris (1936–1943) before being dismissed in 1943 over a controversy involving a former student; she did not return to teaching but devoted herself to writing. The pre-war and war years saw the composition of her first novels and the philosophical work that would emerge in She Came to Stay (1943), Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944), and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947).

The post-war years saw Beauvoir become one of the most prominent intellectuals in France. The Mandarins (1954) won the Prix Goncourt; the four-volume memoir sequence (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and successors, 1958–1972) became major literary events; The Second Sex (1949) provoked enormous controversy and eventually international recognition as a foundational work of modern feminist thought. Beauvoir was also extensively engaged in political causes — the journal Les Temps Modernes (co-edited with Sartre); the campaigns against French policy in Algeria; the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s; the abortion rights struggle that culminated in the Veil Law of 1975.

The relationship with Sartre continued until his death in 1980 — a partnership of intellectual collaboration that included other significant relationships on both sides (Beauvoir's relationships with Nelson Algren and Claude Lanzmann were particularly important to her). After Sartre's death, Beauvoir published Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981), an extended documentation of Sartre's final years. She died in Paris in 1986 and was buried beside Sartre at Montparnasse Cemetery.

The problem she worked on

Beauvoir's philosophical project, especially in The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, was the development of an existentialist ethics adequate to the actual conditions of situated human freedom. Being and Nothingness had analyzed freedom in largely ontological terms, sometimes leaving the impression that the structural freedom Sartre describes is equally available regardless of circumstance. Beauvoir argued that situated freedom is more complex: the conditions of facticity (gender, class, race, embodiment, historical situation) substantially shape what freedoms are actually available and what taking them up requires.

The specific organizing problem of The Second Sex is the situation of women: why have women, throughout history, been treated as the Other — the secondary, derivative, non-essential sex — rather than as full subjects of their own existence? The famous opening of the second volume — One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman — articulates the structural thesis: the feminine is not a biological essence but a social construction, the result of specific historical, economic, religious, and psychological processes that have positioned women as derivative beings.

The broader philosophical project unifying The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex is the demonstration that genuine human freedom requires both individual taking-up of one's projects and the social conditions that make such taking-up possible. Freedom is not merely ontological but situated; ethics is not merely a matter of authenticity but of the structural conditions that authenticity presupposes.

Contributions

The Second Sex and the situation of women

Beauvoir's most influential work and one of the foundational texts of modern feminist philosophy. Across two volumes and approximately 800 pages, The Second Sex (1949) systematically analyzes the historical, biological, psychoanalytic, economic, mythical, and lived dimensions of women's situation. The central thesis: women have throughout history been positioned as the Other of the male subject — defined in relation to men rather than in their own right — and this positioning is the result of specific social and historical processes that can be analyzed and (in principle) changed.

The famous formulation: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman (Volume II, opening). The femininity that has been treated as natural and given is in fact a social construction; the apparent natural differences between men and women are substantially the products of differential socialization, education, opportunity, and treatment. The recognition is meant to open the possibility of women's full subjectivity rather than to deny the reality of biological sex or of the genuine differences sex makes.

The analytical framework draws on existentialist ethics, Marxist social analysis, Freudian psychoanalysis (critically engaged), historical research, and extensive literary and personal sources. The result is a book that exceeds the conventions of any single discipline and that has been continuously engaged across philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, history, and political theory.

Situated freedom and ambiguity

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) is Beauvoir's most systematic ethical work. The central concept of ambiguity names the structural feature of human existence: we are simultaneously free subjects (consciousness, transcendence) and embodied objects (facticity, immanence), and the ethical task is to live this ambiguity authentically rather than to flee it into one of its poles.

The book develops a typology of ways one can flee ambiguity — the sub-man (who refuses freedom altogether), the serious man (who treats inherited values as absolute), the nihilist (who recognizes the absence of given values but draws despairing conclusions), the adventurer (who acts without regard for the effects on others' freedom), the passionate man (who absolutizes their own project) — and contrasts these with the genuinely free person who recognizes the ambiguity and takes it up.

The distinctive ethical claim: my freedom is bound up with the freedom of others. To will my own freedom genuinely is to will the conditions in which others can also be free. The ethics of ambiguity is therefore not individualistic in the simple sense; it requires sustained engagement with the structural conditions of others' freedom.

The lived body

Beauvoir's phenomenology of embodied existence, developed especially in The Second Sex, is one of the most influential single contributions of twentieth-century phenomenology. The body is not a thing one has; it is a way one exists. Female embodiment in particular has been substantially shaped by the social-historical conditions under which women have lived; the body of women has been treated as object, as instrument, as occasion of social anxiety and control, in ways that have shaped what female embodiment actually is.

The analysis shaped subsequent phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty's work on embodiment runs partly in parallel) and has been particularly important in feminist philosophy of the body through Iris Marion Young and contemporary phenomenologists.

The autobiography and the philosophical memoir

Beauvoir's four-volume memoir sequence — Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance (1963), and All Said and Done (1972) — plus the late Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981), together constitute one of the major autobiographical projects of twentieth-century literature. The memoirs are also substantially philosophical: they trace the development of a particular intellectual life within the conditions that produced and constrained it, providing extensive primary material for the historical understanding of twentieth-century French philosophy.

Key works

• She Came to Stay (L'Invitée, 1943). First novel; the philosophical engagement with the situation of consciousness encountering other consciousnesses.
• Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944). Early philosophical essay on action and the relation to the other.
• The Ethics of Ambiguity (Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté, 1947). The major systematic ethical work.
• The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949). The foundational feminist work.
• The Mandarins (Les Mandarins, 1954). Prix Goncourt-winning novel about post-war French intellectuals.
• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, 1958). First volume of the memoir sequence.
• The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse, 1970). Major late work on aging and the situation of the old.
• Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981). The documentation of Sartre's final years.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Sartre (the lifelong philosophical partner; the influence was reciprocal); Kierkegaard (the existentialist predecessor); Husserl and Heidegger (the phenomenological background); Hegel (especially the master-slave dialectic, which shaped Beauvoir's analysis of women as the Other); Marx (the structural analysis of historical and material conditions).

Influenced: the entire subsequent feminist philosophical tradition — Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, Sara Ahmed, and many others; the existentialist phenomenology of embodiment; contemporary phenomenology of gender and sexuality; the autobiographical-philosophical tradition that runs through subsequent feminist memoir; the contemporary recovery of women philosophers in the historical canon.

Reception

The initial reception of The Second Sex in France was substantial and controversial; the Vatican placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books, and reviewers across the political spectrum attacked it. The international reception developed gradually; the first English translation (H.M. Parshley, 1953) was substantially abridged and made significant philosophical errors that obscured the work's argument for nearly six decades. The new translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (2009) finally made the full philosophical argument available in English and was a major event in feminist philosophical scholarship.

The twentieth-century reception of Beauvoir tended to treat her primarily as Sartre's intellectual companion and the author of The Second Sex; her substantial philosophical work outside The Second Sex was largely under-engaged. The contemporary recovery (especially through the work of Toril Moi, Kate Kirkpatrick, Margaret Simons, and Edward and Kate Fullbrook) has restored Beauvoir as a major philosopher in her own right and has substantially revised the standard picture of her relation to Sartre.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Toril Moi's Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994; revised 2008), Kate Kirkpatrick's Becoming Beauvoir (2019, the major recent biography), the Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Claudia Card, ed., 2003), Margaret Simons's substantial editorial and interpretive work, and Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café (2016, accessible introduction). The new English translation of The Second Sex (2009) and the ongoing publication of Beauvoir's correspondence and previously unpublished philosophical manuscripts continue to make new material available. Active scholarly debates concern the philosophical originality of Beauvoir relative to Sartre, the precise interpretation of The Second Sex's analysis of the Other, the contemporary applicability of Beauvoirean situated freedom, and Beauvoir's place in the genealogy of contemporary feminist philosophy.

Further reading

• Existentialism — the tradition
• Sartre — the lifelong philosophical partner
• Kierkegaard — the existentialist predecessor
• Authenticity — the existentialist value
• Free Will — the metaphysical condition of situated freedom
• Justice — the political concept the analysis of women's situation engages

The French philosopher whose The Second Sex reshaped twentieth-century thought about gender and whose existentialist ethics developed the framework of situated freedom.