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Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986)

Beauvoir built an existentialism with the ethics that existentialism had been accused of lacking, and turned it on the condition of women. Her starting point is that the human being is ambiguous — at once a free consciousness and a thing in the world, transcendence and facticity — and that value is not given but made, in the exercise of a freedom that is bound, by its own logic, to will the freedom of others. The Second Sex (1949) applied this to a single, vast fact: that across history man has been taken as the Subject, the absolute, the measure of the human, and woman as the Other, the inessential second term defined against him. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”: what woman is has been made, not found, and can therefore be unmade. For decades she was read as a gifted expositor of Sartre; she is now read as an original philosopher whose account of the situation, the body, and the Other goes its own way.

Life

Born in Paris on 9 January 1908 into a declining bourgeois family. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and in 1929, on her first attempt and among the youngest ever to pass, took the agrégation in philosophy — placing second to Sartre, with the examiners, by some accounts, hesitating over which of the two deserved first. The meeting began the central relationship of her life: a lifelong, non-marital, avowedly non-exclusive partnership of “essential” and “contingent” loves, and an intellectual companionship that ran until Sartre’s death in 1980.

She made her living and her name as a writer across genres — philosophy, the novel, the memoir, the political essay — and became, late, an activist: in 1971 she drafted the Manifesto of the 343, in which women publicly declared they had had illegal abortions, and from 1972 she identified herself, for the first time, as a feminist. She died in Paris on 14 April 1986 and is buried beside Sartre.

The ethics of ambiguity

Where Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) had deferred its ethics, Beauvoir wrote one. In Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944) and above all The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) she argued that the very condition existentialism describes — a freedom with no given foundation, thrown into a world it did not choose — is the ground of an ethics rather than an obstacle to it. To be human is to be ambiguous: neither pure consciousness nor mere thing, but both at once, a freedom that is also a body, a situation, a finitude. Value is created by freedom taking up its own situation and projecting itself toward ends; and because my freedom is realised only in a world shared with others, willing my own freedom genuinely commits me to willing theirs. Oppression is the wrong of cutting others off from their own transcendence, reducing them to mere facticity.

Much of the book is a typology of the ways people flee the burden of freedom: the sub-man who declines to engage at all, the serious man who dissolves himself into an external value taken as absolute, the nihilist, the adventurer who wills only his own action and not its meaning for others, the passionate man — against which she sets the genuinely free person who assumes ambiguity and wills freedom, their own and others’, without the consolation of a guarantee.

The Second Sex

The Second Sex (1949), in two volumes, is her major work and one of the founding texts of modern feminism. Its governing idea is that “woman” is not a natural kind but a situation produced within a civilisation: “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Drawing on, and altering, Hegel’s dialectic of self and other, she argued that man has posited himself as the Subject and the Absolute and woman as the Other — but an Other peculiarly unable to turn the relation around, because women are dispersed among men, bound to them, and have largely internalised the secondary status assigned them. The book anatomises this through the categories of immanence — the closed round of repetition, the domestic, the body as mere facticity, to which women have been confined — and transcendence, the free projection toward chosen ends from which they have been barred. Volume I treats the myths and histories that built the category of woman; Volume II, the lived experience, follows a life from girlhood to old age.

It is here that Beauvoir registers her well-known objection to Levinas. In a footnote to the introduction she takes up his account, in Time and the Other, of “the feminine” as the very figure of alterity and mystery, and turns it back on him: Levinas, she writes, “deliberately takes a man’s point of view,” and “his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege” — to call woman mystery is to describe her only as she appears to man, and to forget that she is a consciousness and a subject for herself. The footnote is a compact instance of her whole method: the apparently neutral, universal standpoint is in fact a particular one, the masculine taken as the human as such.

Originality and the Sartre question

For much of the twentieth century Beauvoir was filed as Sartre’s disciple — a reading she herself encouraged, refusing the title “philosopher” and describing her work as an elaboration of his. That assessment has been overturned. Scholars including Margaret Simons, Toril Moi, and Kate Kirkpatrick have established her as an original thinker whose commitments diverge from Sartre’s at decisive points: she gives the body and the situation a weight his early philosophy denies; and where Sartre’s Other is first of all a threat to my freedom, the look that turns me to stone, Beauvoir’s Other is the necessary condition of my freedom, the one whose own liberty mine requires. The ethics that Being and Nothingness postponed, she supplied. A stronger and more contested claim — that ideas Sartre presented as his own were first worked out in Beauvoir’s novel She Came to Stay — is debated: some read it as a one-way debt, while the prevailing view treats the influence as mutual. What is no longer debated is that she was a philosopher in her own right.

Where Beauvoir stops

Beauvoir’s ethics turns on a passage it affirms more firmly than it grounds: that to will my own freedom is already to will the freedom of all. The claim is the moral heart of the book, but the step from my freedom to an obligation binding me to others is asserted as a structural necessity more than it is demonstrated, and the difficulty of deriving a duty to others from a freedom that has no foundation is one existentialist ethics never fully resolved. The account names oppression powerfully; how exactly freedom obliges remains its open seam.

The Second Sex, too, speaks from a standpoint more particular than its universal address. The “woman” whose situation it analyses is drawn substantially from a Western, white, bourgeois experience, and later feminists — materialist, postcolonial, Black — pressed that the category is less uniform than the book allows. And its central frame, valuing transcendence over immanence, the project over the repetition, risks taking the masculine model of a free life as the standard of liberation and devaluing the bodily, domestic, and caring activity it files under immanence — a tension feminist thought after her has worked to rebalance. Beauvoir showed, more clearly than anyone before her, that woman had been made the Other; what a liberation not measured against the existing image of the free man would look like she left for others to imagine.

Key works

See also: Sartre · Merleau-Ponty · Levinas · Phenomenology