Abstract
In this chapter it is underlined that Beauvoir belongs to the existential-phenomenological tradition, but that Le deuxième sexe also involves a philosophy of history inspired by Hegel and Marx. Her thinking thus has an existential as well as an historical dimension. In some respects, Beauvoir ‘s phenomenology is closer to Heidegger’s than to Husserl’s.
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References
See Mary Ellen Waithe (ed.), A History of Women Philosophers, volumes 1 – 4 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987–1995).
See Margaret A. Simons, “Sexism and the Philosophical Canon: On Reading Beauvoir’s The Second Sex” in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 51, no. 3 (1990).
The question as to why Beauvoir did not call herself a philosopher has been answered in a number of different ways. Toril Moi treats the problem from a sociological/psychoanalytical perspective, and Michèle Le Dœuff uses Beauvoir as a case study in discussing the difficulties women have in entering the field of philosophy and in gaining recognition as philosophers. Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Michèle Le Dœuff, L’étude et le rouet: Des femmes, de la philosophie, etc. (Paris: Seuil, 1989); translated by Trista Selous as Hipparchias ‘s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, £/c.(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
See e.g., Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, and Deirdre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (London: Cape, 1990). One solution to this problem is to declare, as Karen Vintges does, that Beauvoir is a philosopher who chooses literature and autobiography as her philosophical medium. See Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 9. In my opinion, Beauvoir is both a philosopher and writer. She does not subordinate philosophy to literature nor literature to philosophy. Her fiction is definitely influenced by the fact that she is a philosopher, as well as her philosophy by the fact that she is a writer. For different reasons, her self-confidence as a writer is apparently greater than her self-confidence as philosopher.
Margaret Simons, Sonia Kruks, and Michèle Le Dœuff were among the first to point out differences between Beauvoir’s philosophy and Sartre’s and the claim for her philosophical originality has also been supported by my own book, as well as by those of Karen Vintges, Debra Bergoffen, and Kate and Edward Fullbrook. Margaret A. Simons, “Beauvoir and Sartre: The Philosophical Relationship” in Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, edited by Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, Yale French Studies, no. 72 (1986). Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). Michèle Le Dœuff, L’étude et le rouet: Des femmes, de la philosophie, etc. Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Kön och existens, studier i Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Le Deuxième Sexe\ Göteborg: Daidalos, 1991); translated as Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir ‘s ‘The Second Sex ‘ (London: Athlone, New England: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (New York: State University Press of New York, 1997). Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (London: Harvester Weatsheaf, 1993). Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir.
Le Dœuff, 156 ff. One sign of this change is that the new Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy devotes an entire entry to Beauvoir, instead of relegating her to a footnote in Sartre’s.
Sartre and Beauvoir read Husserl and Heidegger in the German original as well as in French translation. See Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 141ff, 208, 363,483.
Definitions of phenomenology vary, but one could, like Herbert Spiegelberg define the method as a common ‘core’ or like Lester Embree set up a number of assumptions that most phenomenologists adhere to. See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: An Historical Introduction, 3rd revised and enlarged edition (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 679;
and Lester Embree and J.N. Mohanty, “Introduction” in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Embree et al (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 1 ff. See also Herbert Spiegelberg, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and Sartre’s Existentialism” in The Context of the Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), which discusses differences between phenomenology and existentialism. See also Jo-Anne Pilardi and Jeffner Allen who discuss the differences between existentialism and phenomenology in relation to the concept of the ego and subjectivity. “Simone de Beauvoir” in A History of Women Philosophers, vol. 4, 280 ff.
Vintges, Philosophy as Passion, 34. See also Sara Heinämaa, “What is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of the Sexual Difference” in Hypatia, vol. 12, no. 1 (1997): 23 ff.
See John J. Compton’s essay on “Existential Phenomenology” in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, 205–209. The term existential phenomenology is not particularly common in connection to Beauvoir. I use it in my book, and it is also used by Jeffner Allen and Iris Young in the “Introduction” to The Thinking Muse, Feminism and Modern French Philosophy (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 2 ff. and in Jeffner Allen’s article on Beauvoir in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, 49–53. Bergoffen places Beauvoir in the “phenomenological-existential” tradition in the Introduction to The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (1–8) but does not see her as influenced by Heidegger (3). Vintges sees Beauvoir as belonging to the phenomenological tradition, and mentions only passingly the “existential-phenomenological tradition” (142). She points out Heidegger’s importance for Beauvoir’s philosophy, but despite this, she sees her mainly as a descriptive phenomenologist in the tradition of Husserl, underlining “Aufklärung (elucidation) rather than Erklärung (explanation)” (35).
“Letter on Humanism” was published in Germany in 1947 as “Über den ‘Humanismus,’“ but parts of an earlier version were translated for the review Fontaine, no. 63 (1947). See Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), 92, 224.
To my knowledge, Le Doeuff first pointed this out. I have argued for the primacy of ethics in Beauvoir’s philosophy in “Simone de Beauvoir and Ethics” in History of European Ideas, vol. 19, nos. 4–6 (1994) and “Gender and Ethics in the Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir” in NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (1995) as have Vintges in Philosophy as Passion and Bergoffen in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.
Husserl attempted a theory of intersubjectivity in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations, but this theory has been seriously criticized. As Spiegelberg says: “Few, if any, other phenomenologists have found this account of intersubjectivity satisfactory.” The Phenomenological Movement, 141.
In Sex and Existence, I argue that the Heideggerian concept of “Mitsein” plays an important role in Le deuxième sexe. Thus, this concept, and what it stands for, is not rejected as it is in Sartre’s L’être et le néant (216–226). See also Bergoffen who has a different view of Mitsein and its importance in Beauvoir’s philosophy. She sees it as incidental to the philosophy of Beauvoir and as a problematic concept. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, 166–178. See my analysis on interdependence in “Gender and Ethics in the Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.” See also Kruks, who treats the relationship between Beauvoir’s philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s.
Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 18; translated by Bernard Frechtman as The Ethics of Ambiguity (New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1948), 12. I analyzed the concept of disclosure and its relation to the “desire of being” in Sex and Existence but did not at the time see the Heideggerian connection (159–65). Bergoffen has also analyzed this concept in “Out from Under: Beauvoir’s Philosophy of the Erotic” in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. M.A. Simons (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) and The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. Unlike me, she sees it as a Husserlian concept. I have also treated the concept of disclosure in “Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics and Its Relation to Current Moral Philosophy” in Simone de Beauvoir Studies, no. 14 (1998).
Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, 60/41.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), §28, 133.
According to Dana R. Villa this means that human beings have “the basic character of ‘uncovering’ or discovering” and of “bringing new ‘entities’ (things, discourses, cultural achievements from art to political forms)” to the world. Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 124.
Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, 129; Pour une moral de l’ambiguïté, 34 f./23 f. Authenticity means putting the desire for being ‘in parentheses.’ Pour une moral de l’ambiguïté, 20/14.
Ibid., 100/71. Here the term “reveal” (révéler) is used instead of “disclose,” but it refers undoubtedly to the same concept.
This is also true for Sartre’s “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” published in 1947 in Les temps modernes and subsequently in Situations, //(Paris: Gallimard, 1948), see e.g., 89f.
See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 440 ff.; Bernard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 28 ff.
Vintges (142 ff.) and Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (143), who both define Hegel as belonging to the phenomenological tradition, take the latter approach. For a survey of those that take the former approach, see Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence, 67, 86.
Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 6. In the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Frank M. Kirkland takes a less definite stand (292–98).
Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 12.
Ibid, 13ff.
See the analysis in Sex and Existence.
Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), vol. II, introduction; translated by H.M. Parshley as The Second Sex (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 295.
I would like to thank Dorothy E. Leland for her valuable comments on this paper.
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Gothlin, E. (2001). Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Phenomenology and Philosophy of History in Le deuxième sexe . In: O’Brien, W., Embree, L. (eds) The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9753-1_3
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