(Contributions To Phenomenology 43) Wendy O'Brien, Humber College (Auth.), Wendy O'Brien, Lester Embree (Eds.) - The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir-Springer Netherlands (2001)

THE EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY
OF
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
CONTRIBUTIONS TOPHENOMENOLOGY
IN COOPERATION WITH
THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY
Volume 43
Editor:
John J. Drummond. Fordham Univers ity
Editorial Board:
Elizabeth A. Behnke
David Carr. Emory University
Stephen Crowell. Rice University
Lester Embree. Florida Atlantic University
J. Claude Evans. Washington University
Burt Hopkins . Seattle University
Jose Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University
Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Pennsylvania State University
William R. McKenna. Miami University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University
Tom Nenon, The University of Memphis
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat, Mainz
Gail Soffer. New School for Social Research. New York
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University
Scope
The purpose of this series is to foster the development of phenomenological philosophy through
creative research . Contemporary issues in philosophy. other disciplines and in culture generally.
offer opportunities for the application of phenomenological methods that call for creative responses .
Although the work of several gener ations of thinkers has provided phenomenology with many results
with which to approach these challenges. a truly succes sful response to them will require building on
this work with new analyses and methodological innovations.
THE EXISTENTIAL
PHENOMENOLOGY
OF
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
edited by
WENDY O'BRIEN
Humber College , Toronto, Canada
and
LESTER EMBREE
Florida Atlantic University,
Boca Raton, Florida
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.Y.

A c.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5732-7 ISBN 978-94-015-9753-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9753-1
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or

utilized in any form or by any means , electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system , without wrilten permission from the copyright owner.
Table of Contents
Preface vii
Wendy O'Brien: Introduction 1
1. Margaret A. Simons: The Beginnings ofBeauvoir 's
Existential Phenomenology 17
2. Eva Gothlin: Simone de Beauvoir 's Existential Phenomenology
and Philosophy ofHistory in Le Deuxieme Sexe 41
3. Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook: Beauvoir and Plato :
The Clinic and the Cave 53
4. Elizabeth Fallaize: A Saraband ofImagery:
The Uses ofBiological Science in Le Deuxieme Sexe 67
5. Suzanne Laba Cataldi: The Body as a Basisfor Being:
Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty 85
6. Ursula Tidd: For the Time Being:
Simone de Beauvoir 's Representation ofTemporality 107
7. Sarah Clark Miller: The Lived Experience ofDoubling:
Simone de Beauvoir 's Phenomenology ofOld Age 127
8. Michael D. Barber: Phenomenology and the Ethical Bases of
Pluralism: Arendt and Beauvoir on Race in the United States . . . 149
9. Kristana Arp: Beauvoir as Situated Subject:
The Ambiguities ofLife in World War II France 175
10. Debra B. Bergoffen: Between the Ethical and the Political:
The Difference ofAmbiguity 187
Ted Toadvine: Simone de Beauvoir and Existential Phenomenology:
A Bibliography 205
Notes on Contributors 253
Index 257
v
Preface
This volume stems chiefly from a research symposium of the same title
held in Delray Beach, Florida during May 1997 with the sponsorship of
Florida Atlantic University and the Center for Advanced Research in
Phenomenology, Inc. The papers from that occasion have been revised in the
light ofcriticismby sympathetic colleagues. One paper that was presented has
not been included and two have been added, that ofthe Fullbrooks, which was
prepared for the symposium but could not be presented, and that by Ms .
Sarah Miller because life in South Florida prevents one from forgetting old
age, which Simone de Beauvoirwas the first in phenomenology to describe at
length. Professor Toadvine's bibliography was available from the outset ofthe
project and was then used and praised by all.
The colleagues included here and also Professor Dorothy Leland are
thanked for their sympathetic participation in the symposium. Mr. Samuel
Julian is thanked for the technical editing of this volume.
Wendy O'Brien
Lester Embree
VB
Introduction
Wendy O'Brien
Humber College
Early studies ofthe philosophy ofSimone de Beauvoir read her works through
the lens ofeither Feminism or Existentialism. While both ofthese readings of
her writings have afforded important insights into her thought, they have at
the same time overlooked the basic approach ofher philosophy, resulting in
claims of inconsistencies and of a lack of rigor. Feminist theorists, for
example, found an important political agenda in Beauvoir' s work. However,
with their focus on this element of her writing, they tended to overlook the
philosophical underpinnings ofher reflections on the lives ofwomen. Read as
such, Beauvoir has been criticized by her contemporaries for the incoherence
in her work and for her failure to present positive role models for women in
her novels, essays, and studies.
Criticisms arose as well when Beauvoir's works were read within the
framework ofExistentialism. While this approach made clear the importance
of the concepts of ambiguity and freedom in her philosophy, it led as well to
the characterization of Beauvoir as a "Sartreuse." Her work was deemed to
be little more than an expansion of Sartre's philosophy, a view which she
herselfseemed to encourage. 1 Her lack oforiginality was compounded by her
alleged misunderstanding of the basic principles of Existentialism. Her
advocation of situated rather than radical freedom as well as her desire to
develop an Existential ethics, provided yet further grounds for criticism from
adherents to this school of thought.
A Third Perspective for Beauvoir Studies
Such criticisms occasioned the need to reconsider the framework within which
to read Beauvoir's works. What was required was a return to her texts
themselves. Dislodging her ideas from the confines ofthese two philosophical
frameworks with the help of the posthumous publication of her letters,
journals, and diaries, scholars have re-visited her texts and found what was
heretofore a neglected element of her philosophy. Read anew, Beauvoir's
1. See for example , Beauvoir's 1979 interview with Jessica Benjamin and Margaret Simons
published in Simons ' Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Race, Feminism and the Origin of
Existentialism. New York : Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
W. O'Brien and L. Embree (eds.), The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, 1-15.
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 WENDY O'BRIEN
works revealed the phenomenological approach which she adopted and

practiced.
Phenomenology is grounded in the writings of Edmund Husserl. It is the
study of phenomena, that is, "the study of human experience and the way
things present themselves to us in and through that experience.'? Often
misinterpreted as a return to introspective psychology, phenomenology focuses
on lived experience (Erlebnis or I 'experience vecue) that is, on our encounters
with the world and on the correlative ways in which the world, situations,
objects, others, etc., appear to us in experience, and on the meanings which we
give to those matters. As such, it rejects systematizing and "grand theories"
which have marked much of the history of philosophy and offers instead
analyses founded on reflective observation.' It has been the influence of this
school of thought on her philosophy that has gone unacknowledged in most
existing Beauvoir scholarship.
That her work should be examined from within the framework of both
phenomenological scholarship and phenomenological investigation is suggested
by Beauvoir herself. Her acquaintance with key figures in the
phenomenological tradition are evidenced in her autobiographies, letters, and
journals. Her introduction to phenomenology has generally been regarded to
have been a result of Sartre's acquaintance with Raymond Aron. On leave
from the French Institute in Berlin during 1933, Aron recounted to Sartre and
Beauvoir his studies of Husserl 's works. His characterization of
phenomenology as providing individuals with the opportunity to "talk about
this cocktail and make philosophy out of it," that is, "to describe objects just
as he saw and touched them and extract philosophy from the process'"
provided a framework from which they could "embrace all experience, and ...
bear witness concerning it ."? Describing her reading of Husserl's Zur
Phdnomenologie des innere Zeitbewufitsein in 1934, Beauvoirnoted that "the
2. Sokolowski , Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology (New York : Cambr idge University

Press, 2000), 2.
3. For a further discussion ofphenomenology, its historical development and trends, see The
Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, edited by Lester Embree et al., Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1997.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, Laforce de I 'age (Paris : Gallimard, 1960), 141; translated by Peter
Green as The Prime ofLife (New York : Penguin Books, 1962), 135.
5. Ibid., 30/25.
INTRODUCTION 3
novelty and richness ofphenomenology filled me with enthusiasm: I felt I had

never come so close to the real truth."
Yet, an earlier acquaintance with phenomenology is speculated about by
Margaret Simons in her chapter in this volume. Examining Beauvoir' s 1927
diaries, she suggests that Beauvoir may have become aware ofphenomenology
during her studies at the Sorbonne, in particular, in her courses with her
mentor, Jacques Baruzi. Baruzi's interests lay in German philosophy and thus
he clearly would have been aware ofHusserI's ideas. Despite these references,
scholars nonetheless have overlooked the role which key figures in the
phenomenological tradition played in shaping Beauvoir's philosophy, and thus
failed to appreciate her works as phenomenological analyses.
In Cartesianische Meditationen, the French translation of which in 1931
Beauvoir does not cite but certainly must have read, Husserl outlined a
program for phenomenologists, identifying questions which required analysis
and presenting a method to be employed in such studies. Juxtaposing
Beauvoir's oeuvre with this introduction to phenomenology reveals important
points of overlap. Of particular interest in this context is Husserl's Fifth
Meditation. Therein, he focuses on the problem of intersubjectivity, the
problem of the other, and identifies a series of issues which require
investigation using the phenomenological approach. He includes in this list
issues concerning the body,' time," birth and death;" social life (particularly
ethico-religious problems), 10 and culture and history." In Die Krisis der
europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzenentale Phiinomenologie,
HusserI would reiterate the need for phenomenologists to study these questions
and adds to the list the problem of the sexes.'!
6. Ibid.. 208/201.
7. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, Husserliana Band I, ed. S. Strasser

(Haag : Martinus Nijoff, 1973), 128; translated by Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations
(Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 97.
8./bid., 156,166, and 170/128, 139, and 143.
9./bid., 169/142.
10./bid., 159-160 and 1821131-32 and 156.
II./bid., 153, 160, and 161/125, 132, and 133.
12. See Sara Heinamaa, "Simone de Beauvoir's Phenomenology of Sexual Difference" in

Hypatia , vol. 14, no. 4 (1999): 115.
4 WENDY O'BRIEN
This list provides a useful template for examining Beauvoir' s writings. In

her often-cited interview with Jessica Benjamin and Margaret Simons, she
claimed that "this problem of the consciousness of the other, this was my
problem.?':' While this quotation has often been used to draw connections
between her writings and Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, 14 it can as well be
seen as placing her amongst phenomenologists interested in the problem of
intersubjectivity. Clearly, in her fiction and non-fiction she takes up the
problems outlined by Husserl and begins to explore them using the
methodology that he prescribed.
While it is important to place Beauvoir within the phenomenological
tradition, seeing the influence ofother phenomenologists upon her work as well
as noting the kinds ofquestions which she addressed, what is perhaps the most
important contribution ofthis re-reading ofher texts is the recognition ofher
reliance on the phenomenological method. Beauvoir's works are replete with
descriptive analyses of lived experiences. Whether analyzing the lives of
women, the situation ofthe elderly, life in France after WWII, or her own life ,
Beauvoir devotes careful attention to observing experiences as they are lived.
She is not content with philosophizing about what might have been. Rather,
she begins and ends her studies in the lived experiences of individuals, in
accounts ofhow their lives were lived, not ofhow she might have wished them
to have been lived.
Her method, however, entailed more than just a recounting of lived
experiences. As she noted in La vieillesse, her task, the task of the
philosopher, is not merely to describe the internal, lived experience of
individuals, it is as well to examine those same experiences from an external
perspective, that is, to look at the meanings ascribed to them by society via
such means as science, history, and politics. IS Read in this manner, Beauvoir's
13. Margaret Simons, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Racism , and the Origins of
Existentialism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 10.
14. See, for example , Lundgren-Gothlin's doctoral dissertation, Kon och Existenz,
(Goteggorg University, Sweden, 1991); translated by Linda Schenck as Sex and Existence:
Simone de Beauvo ir 's 'The Second Sex' (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Edward
Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook , Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge:
Polity Press , 1999); and Jo-Ann Pilardi , Simone de Beauvoir: Writing the Self. Philosophy
Becomes Autob iography (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1999).
15. Simone de Beauvoir, La vieillesse (Paris : Gallimard, 1970), 16-17 and 299; translated
by Patrick O'Brian as Old Age (New York : Pengu in Books, 1972), 16-17 and 313.
INTRODUCTION 5
works can be viewed as a series ofstudies-studies, for example, ofthe lived

experiences ofwomen, ofthe elderly, ofthose living in the aftermath ofWWII.
But these studies were not limited to disclosing a particular example. It was
through this process of articulating the particular in its fullness that the
universal was elucidated, according to Beauvoir." The results that were
reached through these studies were not limited in time and space but
transcended the particular and grasped something of what was essential.
Often overlooked, edited out ofher texts, or used as examples of her lack
oforiginality, Beauvoir' s descriptions were disregarded as nothing more than
tangential by her critics and advocates alike . The result has been a failure to
fully appreciate her philosophy, her phenomenology. In retrieving this aspect
of Beauvoir's thought, scholars, many of whom have made contributions to
this volume, have begun the process of re-assessing her works--correcting
misinterpretations and bringing to light neglected elements of her
philosophy-and thus of securing a place for her within the philosophical
canon.
Read within this framework, criticisms ofher works launched by Feminists
and Existentialists can be addressed. Beauvoir herselfprovides the answer to
the charge made that she failed to supply a positive role model for women in
her writings. As she notes in an interview with Madeleine Gobeil, "I've shown
women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.?"
Thus, it should be unsurprising that she does not provide accounts of women
who are intellectually challenged and at the same time successful wives and
mothers. It is likewise unsurprising that she does not recount the lives of
women who are aging "gracefully." Her project was to describe, to encounter
the world around her, it was not to engage in the reconfiguration ofthat world
in accordance with pre-existing philosophical commitments. As such, she
writes of unfulfilled married women, 18 of frustrated intellectual women, 19 of
a
16. Simone de Beauvoir, Lettres Sartre, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Paris :
Gallimard , 1990), 181; edited and translated by Quintin Hoare as Letters to Sartre (New
York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 247.
17. Simone de Beauvoir, interview with Madeleine Gobeil, in The Paris Review Interviews:
Women Writers at Work, edited by George Plimpton (New York: Modem Library, 1998),
149.
18. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxieme sexe (Paris : Gallimard , 1949), vol. II, p. 277-278;
translated by H.M. Parshley as The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989),475.
19. Ibid., II 527/685 .

6 WENDY O'BRIEN
Madame R. who, at the age of 75, must survive in the Paris of 1968 on 317
francs a month," and perhaps, the best example of all, her own life." For
Beauvoir, philosophy had to begin and end in the life-world, a point often
overlooked by Feminist critics.
The criticisms raised by Existentialists that Beauvoir lacked originality and
misunderstood key principles of existential philosophy can likewise be
challenged when reading her works as phenomenological studies. Beauvoir
challenged Sartre's notion of radical freedom based on lived experience.
Individuals were free within the bounds established by the world in which they
lived, a world which was structured in part by others." She recognized that to
study the individual in isolation from others was to engage in a project based
on abstraction and not on observation. Critics who regarded her as simply a
"Sartreuse" overlooked this element of her philosophy. Her commitment to
phenomenology, that is to a philosophy grounded on experience and disclosive
of a situated subject, a subject who is always already embedded in
relationships with others and thus implicated in an ethics distinguished her
from Sartre and other Existential writers.
Beauvoir did not, however, unquestioningly adopt the phenomenological
approach, she as well attempted to transform it. In La force des chases
Beauvoir states that she "believes in our freedom, our responsibility, but
whatever their importance, this dimension ofour existence eludes description.
What can be described is merely our conditioning. " 23 There were some things
that simply escaped elucidation. If the subject is situated, as is evident upon
reflection, how then can she get beyond her present conditioning to identify the
extent of her freedom and responsibility? To address these issues, Beauvoir
looked to other philosophies. As a result, her works intertwine phenomenology
with Existentialism, Hegelianism, and Marxism.
This collection of essays places Beauvoir squarely within the
phenomenological tradition. It includes readings ofBeauvoir 's oeuvre which
20. La vieillesse, 254-255/267 .
21. Simone de Beauvoir , Laforce des choses (Paris : Gallimard, 1963), 683-684; translated
by Richard Howard as Force of Circumstance (New York : Penguin Books, 1968), 671-672 .
22. Simone de Beauvoir , Pour une morale de l 'ambiguite (Paris : Gallimard, 1947), 54-55 ;
translated by Bernard Frechtman as The Ethics ofAmbiguity (New York: Carol Publish ing
Group , 1991), 38.
23. Laforce des choses , 9/6.

INTRODUCTION 7
forefront her phenomenological scholarship and phenomenological

investigation. In so doing, it demonstrates the influence ofphenomenology on
Beauvoir's philosophy throughout her career-beginning as early as 1927 and
continuing through to her later works on old age-and across the genres in
which she presented her observations. Her commitment to phenomenology is
read by these authors as structuring her philosophical essays and studies as
well as informing her novels . Michael Barber best captures this commitment
when he notes in his contribution to this volume that, "phenomenology
pervades her way ofliving, observing, and experiencing-it is for her a way
of being towards the world."
The Essays
A research symposium was held in May 1997 to explore the links between
Beauvoir's writings and phenomenology. This volume represents not only the
works of those present at that conference and those of the Fullbrooks and
Sarah Miller, which were added later, but, in addition, it acknowledges the
continuation and expansion of this line of inquiry in Beauvoir studies.
The essays presented herein have been organized in such a manner as to
make evident not only Beauvoir's reliance on pre-existing phenomenological
scholarship, but as well her phenomenological practice. As such these essays
have been organized along four themes ; namely, the influences on her work,
her development of a phenomenology of the body, her interest in the
phenomenology of time and aging, and her application of the principles of
phenomenology to issues in politics and ethics .
In the first part ofthis volume , attention is given to Beauvoir' s knowledge
and critique ofthe phenomenological tradition. These papers draw attention
to the broad range of influences on Beauvoir's writings from within
phenomenology. Margaret Simons continues her pioneering work on Beauvoir
as philosopher by challenging what has been the heretofore accepted account
of Beauvoir's introduction to phenomenology. In "The Beginnings of
Beauvoir's Existential Phenomenology," she speculates that Beauvoir was
acquainted with phenomenology, at least indirectly, prior to her introduction
to the writings of Husserl in 1930. Her careful reading of Beauvoir's 1927
diary reveals that Beauvoir's earliest attempts to define her philosophical
approach were influenced by or at least converged with the introduction of
phenomenology into French philosophy. In particular, Simons points out three
aspects ofBeauvoir ' s early writings that are consistent with phenomenology;
8 WENDY O'BRIEN
namely, her intertwining ofliterature and philosophy in an attempt to reflect

concrete experience, her investigation of the meanings given to those
experience by the individual, and her reliance on lived experience as the
foundation for reflecting on such philosophical problems as the opposition of
self and other.
Acknowledging the wide range ofphilosophical and literary influences on
Beauvoir evident in the diaries, Simons goes on to speculate that these aspects
of Beauvoir's philosophy, ofher phenomenology, are tied to her readings of
such figures as Bergson ;" to her studies with her mentor Jean Baruzi whose
acquaintance with Husserl's work is clearly evident as early as 1925; and to
her friendship with Merleau-Ponty. Simons thus sets a new agenda for
Beauvoir research. She makes evident the need to investigate Beauvoir's
relationship to key figures in the history ofphenomenology, figures heretofore
kept in the shadows of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty such as Husserl, Levinas,
and Scheler. Simons' work makes clear the need to examine how Beauvoir
picked up the problems of intersubjectivity and relied on the basic approach
of phenomenology even her earliest works, a project advanced by the other
contributors to this volume beginning with Eva Gothlin .
In "Simone de Beauvoir's Existential Phenomenology and Philosophy of
History in Le deuxieme sexe," Eva Gothlin argues that three traditions in
philosophy intersect in Beauvoir's description and explanation of women's
lives. She notes that in Le deuxieme sexe Beauvoir brings together the
following three strandsofcontinentalphilosophy: the philosophy ofHeidegger,
in particular his analysis ofMitsein, disclosure, and the desire for being; the
phenomenological methods advanced by Husserl and by Sartre ; and the
philosophy of history developed by Hegel. She argues that while these
philosophical traditions are tied to different ontologies, Beauvoir attempts to
demonstrate that they are not wholly incompatible. In presenting this
argument, Gothlin encourages scholars to examine these disparate influences
on Beauvoir's thinking and consider the viability of her attempted
reconciliation.
Part two of this volume examines Beauvoir's attempt to address "the
problem of the sexes ." In the papers offered by Fullbrook and Fullbrook,
Fallaize, and Cataldi, Beauvoir's phenomenology ofthe body is explored. In
"Beauvoir and Plato: The Clinic and The Cave," Edward and Kate Fullbrook
24. Bergson's notion of "the given" and his attempt to render an accurate account of
experience overlap with the methods and principles of phenomenology.
INTRODUCTION 9
attempt to locate this aspect of Beauvoir's philosophy within a broader

historical tradition-a tradition which they trace back to Plato's analogy ofthe
cave. Their reading of L 'invitee examines the dimensions of her theory of
subjectivity. Focussing on Francoise's trip to a clinic at the end of the first
part of this novel, Fullbrook and Fullbrook read this text as a study of
competing accounts ofthe mind-body relation with the character ofFrancoise
representing the Kantian tradition, that is, the view of the self as pure
transcendence, and the character ofXaviere portraying the British empiricist
tradition, which viewed the selfas pure immanence. Drawing analogies with
Plato's story ofthe cave , the Fullbrooks read Francoise's stay in the clinic as
a study ofthe limitations ofboth schools ofthought and the development ofan
account ofthe subject as both transcendence and immanence. Beauvoir thus
asserts an alternative theory ofthe mind-body relationship through the "cured"
Francoise. As she recovers from her illness, Francoise is forced to see herself
as embodied consciousness, that is, as a selfthatrecognizes the "subject/object
bimodality of the human body." The characters come to "transcend the body
in realizing a world that transcends them," as noted by the anonymous referee
of the present volume. Beauvoir thus anticipates in this novel much of the
work which would be done by feminist scholars ofsubsequent generations in
developing an alternative to these two traditions via a theory of "situated
subjects. "
While the Fullbrooks take on the task ofre-casting the bounds ofthe theory
ofsubjectivity developed in Beauvoir's philosophy, Elizabeth Fallaize focuses
her attention more specifically on Beauvoir's phenomenology ofthe body by
undertaking a close reading of the controversial chapter on biology which
opens Le deuxieme sexe. In "A Saraband ofImagery: The Uses ofBiological
Science in Le Deuxieme Sexe ," she revisits Beauvoir's discussion of
biology/physiology by questioning her purpose in placing this discussion at the
forefront of her study of women. Fallaize notes that Beauvoir, relying on
phenomenological methods of investigation, examined the biological
differences between males and females to show that science provided no basis
for supporting the myths ofeither women's passivity or their predatory nature .
She notes that Beauvoir adopts a worst-case scenario and concludes that
biology cannot support existing models of social relations between the sexes
that privilege the male . In this manner, she notes that Beauvoir prefigures
present-day Feminist philosophers ofscience such as Sarah Hrdy and Eveyln
Fox Keller. Fallaize makes evident the need for a phenomenology ofthe body
to examine not only the individual's experience of her body but also the
10 WENDY O'BRIEN
meanings ascribed to those experiences, a point further developed by Susan

Cataldi.
In the final essay in this part, "The Body as Basis for Being: Simone de
Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty," Susan Cataldi undertakes a
comparative analysis ofthe phenomenology ofthe body advanced by Beauvoir
in Le deuxieme sexe (1949) with that which is set forth by Merleau-Ponty in
Phenomenologie de la perception (1945). Noting that both works are
premised on the beliefthat the body is the basis for Being, Cataldi examines
the manner in which they differ in their interpretation of this fundamental
claim. She argues that the differences in the accounts of subjective
embodiment described in these texts can be traced back to the inclusion of
gender in the former, and its exclusion in the latter. For Beauvoir, the body is
always already male or female, a fact which frames subsequent meanings
ascribed to bodily experiences perceived from both an internal and external
perspective. While the body for Merleau-Ponty is a body-subject and as such
a direct and normal means for the individual to connect with the world, for
Beauvoir the body, at least the female body, is also a body-object which
interferes with perception and therefore is an obstacle to be overcome. Cataldi
goes on to show how these understandings ofsubjective embodiment configure
different meanings that are ascribed to speech (and speechlessness), sexuality,
and aging.
The third part of this book investigates Beauvoir's attempt to take up
HusserI's challenge to develop a phenomenology ofbirth and death through an
examination ofher philosophy oftime. In her 1963 interview with Madeleine
Gobeil for The Paris Review, Beauvoir remarked that she had "always been
keenly aware ofthe passing of'time.?" Yet, while Beauvoir herselfnotes her
interest in the problem of time , it is an aspect of her philosophy that has
remained unexamined.
Ursula Tidd, in "For the Time Being: Simone de Beauvoir's Representation
ofTemporality," attempts to redress this oversight. Juxtaposing the philosophy
of time advanced by Husserl in Zur Phiinomenologie des innere
Zeitbewuj3tsein with that developed by Beauvoir across her writings, she
argues that while HusserI's notion of temporal success ion is marked by
25. Reprinted in The Paris Review Interviews: Women Writers at Work, 146. Interestingly,
this is further evidenced in Margaret Simons' contribution to this volume. In her
examination ofthe 1927 diaries she notes Beauvoir's reference to the influence of Bergson 's
notion of time, duration, and memory on her philosophy.
INTRODUCTION 11
retention and recollection, Beauvoir explains time in terms of rupture and

division. Tracing the development of her philosophy of time from Pour une
morale de I'ambiguite to her later fiction, Tidd argues that Beauvoir's
reflections on time consciousness are best understood within the context ofan
examination of her project of writing her autobiography.
Tidd concurs with Augustine in his beliefthat all autobiographers must ask
themselves the question "What, then, is time?" for without an answer to this
question, it is impossible to begin the process of recreating personal and
collective history. Tidd convincingly argues that for Beauvoirto write her life ,
she required the collaboration of the reader in order to achieve temporal
recreation of her lost self.
Sarah Miller's chapter, "The Lived Experience of Doubling: Simone de
Beauvoir and the Phenomenology of Old Age," also focuses on Beauvoir's
discussion of aging and death, on its ethical and political implications.
Drawing attention to Beauvoir's extensive but also often overlooked 1970
study La vieillesse, she extends the characterization of Beauvoir as a
phenomenologist into her later works. Miller draws analogies with
phenomenological interpretation of Le deuxieme sexe to set the stage for an
examination of La vieillesse within this framework. Regarding this text as
including both an adoption and a critical reappraisal ofphenomenology, Miller
points towards one ofthe important insights that this new reading ofthis text
offers . She notes how, read phenomenologically, Beauvoir' s work gives voice
to the divided self that characterizes the experience of the elderly. The aged
experience a gap between their subjective experience of themselves and the
objective experience ofthat selfsame body. In pointing out the novelty and the
significance of this experience of doubling, an experience which the elderly
must always negotiate, Miller encourages further examination ofthis ground
breaking work on the phenomenology of aging and of old age.
The last part of this volume offers a series of essays that explore
Beauvoir's reliance on phenomenology to examine the problems ofhistoricity
and of social life. Beauvoir extended the principles of phenomenology to
develop both a politics and an ethics that addressed the central issues of her
day. In the first paper in this section, Michael D. Barber attempts to expand
the frame of reference within which Beauvoir's works are examined by
undertaking a comparative analysis ofHannah Arendt's "Reflections on Little
Rock" and Beauvoir's L 'Amerique au jour le jour. Bringing together the
works ofArendt and Beauvoir is no easy feat. While the two wrote during the
same time period and were influenced by many of the same philosophers
12 WENDY O'BRIEN
(notably, Heidegger and Husserl), their personal and political animosity has
undermined attempts at comparative studies let alone at showing the
interdependence oftheir works." Yet this is precisely the project taken up in
Barber's article "Phenomenology and The Ethical Bases ofPluralism: Arendt
and Beauvoir on Race in the United States."
Barber notes that both Arendt and Beauvoir take on the issue of race
relations in the United States but, due to their broader methodological
commitments, the accounts offered by both are ultimately incomplete and
unsatisfactory. Arendt's retrieval of the ancient Greek notion of the polis
configures her division of society into three realms: the political, the social,
and the private. Arendt argues that while pluralism and its coextensive notions
of equality and tolerance are necessary qualities of the polis, they cannot be
forced onto individuals as they interact in either the social or the private realm.
Thus, while advocating the struggle for enfranchisement rights for African-
Americans, Arendt rejects programs such as the desegregation of schools as
they violate the rights ofindividuals to make personal decisions in the social
and the political realms. As such , individuals have a right to discriminate and
others have a duty to respect that right.
Barber argues that what is missing from Arendt's analysis is a subjective
appreciation of the lived experiences of African-Americans, a perspective
offered by Beauvoir in her work L 'Amerique au jour Ie jour. Relying on
phenomenological methods, Beauvoir elucidates the racist consciousness.
Perhaps best understood within the context of existing literature on
phenomenology and empathy, this face-to-face encounter with the other adds
a missing component to Arendt's philosophy, while Arendt's reflections on
race relations give to Beauvoir's reflections on race in America a broader
political framework which incorporates the ideas ofequality, reciprocity, and
non-coercion. In juxtaposing these two works, Barber points out the need to
further study the existential phenomenologies of both Arendt and Beauvoir,
including their interpretations of the works of Husserl and Heidegger, their
accounts ofpolitical action, and their justification oflimited political violence.
In "Beauvoir as Situated Subject: the Ambiguities of Life in World War
II," Kristana Arp picks up this examination of the phenomenology of social
26. See , for example, Arendt 's discussion of Beauvoir's autobiography and relationship with
Sartre in Between Friends: The Correspondence ofHannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy,
1949-1976, edited by Carol Brightman (New York : Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995),
169-176.
INTRODUCTION 13
life in her study ofBeauvoir ,s advocation oflimited political violence in Pour

une morale de I'ambiguite. Arp argues that the claim that violence is not only
sometimesjustifiable but also necessary must be understood within the context
of her war time experiences, experiences which clearly shaped her ethics. In
so doing, Arp notes how Beauvoir uses, and can be understood by using , the
phenomenological notion ofthe situated subject. Against the backdrop ofWW
II and the Resistance Movement in France, Beauvoir's claim seems less
extreme than it might for her present day readers, at least those readers living
in countries not engaged in some form ofwar. Arp raises important questions
concerning Beauvoir' s philosophy ofviolence. Clearly, she is right to note that
her views must be understood within the historical context in which they were
raised. Arp' s discussion also brings to light the need for future studies that
examine whetherreference to history and social/cultural context can morally
justify violent political action, or iffurther philosophical argument is required
to support such action.
Debra Bergoffen's study of Beauvoir's notion of ambiguity serves as an
apt conclusion to this volume, for in this essay she points towards how the
various elements ofBeauvoir's phenomenology examined herein-that is, her
awareness and commitment to the phenomenological tradition, her
investigations of the problem of the sexes, her concern with the
phenomenology oftime, and her attemptto apply phenomenology to the study
ofhistory and social life-intertwine and inform her projects.In "Between the
Ethical and The Political: The Difference ofAmbiguity," Bergoffen notes that,
for Beauvoir, conscious life viewed phenomenologically is marked by the
experience ofambiguity, an experience which Beauvoir discusses at length in
Pour une morale de I'ambiguite as well as in Le deuxieme sexe.
Bergoffen locates the roots ofBeauvoir' s account ofambiguity in Husserl ' s
theory ofintentionality. Ambiguity arises from the flow and tension between
two moods or moments ofintentionality, namely, the desire to disclose and the
desire for possession. These two ways ofliving our responsibility to and for
others are inevitably in tension with each other, for whereas the former seeks
to establish the freedom ofthe other and thus is premised on the notion ofthe
gift , the later calls on the other to risk that freedom in the creation and
enactment of the project. Bergoffen argues that these two moments mark the
difference between the ethical and the political and goes far in explaining the
inevitable tension between the two. Not wanting to live this tension, she notes
how individuals tum away from ambiguity and attempt to reduce one term to
the other. More specifically, she notes how the ethical, which Beauvoir
14 WENDY O'BRIEN
identifies with the feminine, becomes subordinate to the political, which, within
a patriarchy, is inherently masculine. Bergoffen finds in Beauvoir' s writings
an ethics oferotic generosity which provides the means forrecapturing the two
moments of intentionality and thus conjoining reciprocal recognition and
vulnerability.
This volume ends with a comprehensive bibliography on Beauvoir and
phenomenology. Theodore Toadvine has provided Beauvoir scholars with a
valuable resource to further the project begun by the authors in this volume.
In the first section of his bibliography, he offers a comprehensive
chronological listing of Beauvoir's writings. In so doing, he provides the
backdrop for tracing the development ofBeauvoir's phenomenology across her
career. Then, surveying the secondary literature produced thus far, he
identifies those sources that directly or indirectly place Beauvoir within the
legacy of phenomenology.
*
* *
This collection of essays offers an introduction to the study ofBeauvoir as a
phenomenologist. In this context, it not only identifies how figures within the
phenomenological tradition influenced Beauvoir's thinking but further it
provide insights into Beauvoir' phenomenology of time, of the body and of
social life , identifying subsequent research projects to be undertaken in
Beauvoir's studies and more broadly in phenomenology. For these essays not
only point towards the research that Beauvoir contributed in these areas, they
further demonstrate the value ofusing this methodology in undertaking such
inquiries. Perhaps the most important contribution of this volume is its
recognition ofBeauvoir's phenomenological practice . She did not merely study
the works of phenomenologists, she herself engaged in such investigations,
developing a politics and a social philosophy from her encounters. As such,
she not only provides her readers with insights into the world in which she
lived, but she modelled the benefits ofaddressing issues by beginning rather
than ending with observations in the world. Indeed , to focus on her life or on
her ideas would be evidence of a failure to have appreciated what her
philosophy, her phenomenology had to offer. "To the things themselves" she
tells Sartre she is committed. And this seems best to summarize her legacy. To
understand the problems she addressed as they continue to configure our lives
requires us to look to her not so much for answers as for an approach by
INTRODUCTION 15
which to begin to answer our own questions. Perhaps it is her model for doing
philosophy which will secure her position within the canon and be her legacy
to us all.
Chapter 1
The Beginnings of Beauvoir's Existential Phenomenology
Margaret A. Simons
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
Abstract: Simone de Beauvoir's handwritten diary from 1927

reveals Beauvoir's early philosophical influences, including
Bergson and Baruzi, and provides a moving account ofher struggle
against despair, her dedication to philosophy, and her description
ofthe temptation in badfaith to abdicate oneselfin love, an origin
ofthe opposition ofselfand other.
Introduction
Despite textual evidence to the contrary, critics have long described Simone
de Beauvoir as the philosophical follower ofJean-Paul Sartre and her feminist
masterpiece, Le deuxieme sexe, I as an application of Sartre' s philosophy in
L 'etre et Ie neanr to the situation of women. The problem of differentiating
the philosophies ofBeauvoir and Sartre and tracing their mutual philosophical
influence is a difficult one, with a tradition ofsexist criticism compounded by
Beauvoir herself, who, beginning in the mid-1950s, portrayed herself as a
literary writer and Sartre as the philosopher. Efforts to differentiate Beauvoir
and Sartre philosophically by scholars such as Michele LeDreuff, Sonia
Kruks, Kate and Edward Fullbrook, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Karen Vintges,
Debra Bergoffen, and Margaret Simons,' have been frustrated by the lack of
1. 2 Vols . Paris : Gallimard, 1949. Translated as The Second Sex, by H.M. Parshley. New
York : Knopf, 1952; Vintage, 1989.
2. Paris : Gallimard, 1943. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes as Being and Nothingness . New
York : Philosophical Library, 1953; Washington Square Press, 1966.
3. Michele LeDreuff, L 'etude et le roulet. Paris : Seuil, 1989. Translated as Hipparchia 's
Choice : An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc., by Trista Selous . Cambridge, MA :
Blackwell, 1991. Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Experience: Freedom, Subjectivity and
Society . New York : Routledge, 1990. Kate and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: The
Remaking ofa Twentieth Century Legend. New York : Basic Books, 1994. Eva Lundgren-
Gothlin , K6n och existen, studier I Simone de Beauvoirs 'Le Deuxieme Sexe. ' Goteborg:
17
W. O'Brien and L. Embree (eds .), The Existential Phenomenology ofSimone de Beauvoir. 17-39.
18 MARGARET A. SIMONS
philosophical texts by Beauvoir, including her 1928-29 graduate thesis on

Leibniz, predating herre1ationship with Sartre. This situation changed in 1990
when Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir discovered her adopted mother's handwritten
diary dating from 1927, when Beauvoir was a philosophy student at the
Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre. Now housed in the
Bibliotheque Nationale with Beauvoir' s other manuscripts and early diaries,
the 1927 diary, which forms the subject matter of this paper, has been
transcribed by Barbara Klaw, myself, and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir for
publication in a new series of Beauvoir's texts in translation by Indiana
University Press.
The Diary as Philosophical Text
It might be objected that a diary is an inappropriate text for serious

philosophical study. But diaries, despite the interpretive challenges they pose
for scholars, are not unknown as philosophical texts, perhaps especially in
France, the home of Montaigne and Pascal. 1927 saw the publication of
Gabriel Marcel's Journal metaphysique, an important text in the history of
phenomenology in France." Sartre's war diaries and notebooks on ethics are
more recent examples of diaries as philosophical texts. Furthermore,
Beauvoir's 1927 diary, which contains marginal notations indicating its
importance as a source for her later work, explicitly discusses Beauvoir's
intention ofbecoming a philosopher, defines a philosophical methodology, and
identifies philosophical problems and themes central to her later philosophical
Daidalos, 1991. Translated as Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir 's 'The Second Sex, '
by Linda Schenck. Hanover, NH : University Press of New England, 1996. Karen Vintges,
Filosofie als passie. Het denken van Simone de Beauvoir. Amsterdam: Promethius, 1992.
Translated as Philosophy and Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, by Anne
Lavelle. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Debra Bergoffen The Philosophy
ofSimone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities. Albany, NY : State
University of New York Press, 1997. Margaret Simons, A Phenomenology ofOppression:
A Critical Introduction to 'Le Deuxieme Sexe' by Simone de Beauvoir. Unpublished Ph.D.
Dissertation. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, 1977. Margaret Simons, "Beauvoir and
Sartre : The Question oflnfluence" in Eros: A Journal ofPhilosophy and Literary Arts 8 (1),
1981: 25-42 . Margaret Simons, "Beauvoir and Sartre : The Philosophical Relationship" in
Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, a special issue of Yale French Studies 72, 1986:
165-179.
4. Herbert Spiegelberg. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd

edition (The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff, 1982),450.
BEGINNINGS OF BEAUVOIR'S PHENOMENOLOGY 19
texts. Beauvoir may even have been encouraged to keep a philosophical diary
by her mentor in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Jean Baruzi, whose colleague,
Charles du Bos, kept a j oumal throughout the 1920s that has also been cited
in tracing the history ofFrench philosophy. 5 The diary also gains importance
from the fact, mentioned in posthumously published correspondence and
diaries, that her diaries were read by Sartre and thus are a possible avenue of
Beauvoir's influence on him.
Another objection to reading Beauvoir's 1927 diary as a philosophical text
might be that Beauvoir herself, in her autobiographical text, Memoires d 'une
jeune fille rangee, describes her early interests as literary rather than
philosophical. But Beauvoir's account in Memoires ofher work in philosophy
contains inconsistencies that suggest the possibility of omissions and
misrepresentations, as is evident, for example, in the discussion of her
graduate thesis (dip/orne) on Leibniz at the Sorbonne. The initial reference to
her dip/orne portrays Beauvoir as passively receiving the topic from her thesis
director, Leon Brunschvicg: "He advised me to write on ' the concept
according to Leibniz,' and I acquiesced." But other passages in Memoires
suggest Beauvoir' s passionate interest in Leibniz, as in the account ofa party
where Beauvoir explains Leibniz's system to a friend: "during an hour I
forgot my boredom."? She reports that Sartre first approached her with a
cartoon of"Leibniz bathing with the monads," and later invited her to join his
study group preparing for the oral philosophy exam, "counting on me to work
on Leibniz,"" A couple of years later, Beauvoir's interest was still strong
enough to lead her, with Sartre in tow, to visit Leibniz's home in Hanover
during a driving rain storm," But Memoires tells us nothing ofthe content of
Beauvoir's philosophical work on Leibniz, and of the dip/orne, merely the
bare report that: "I finished my thesis."!" IfBeauvoir was as little interested
in philosophy as Memoires claims, why did she pursue a graduate degree in
5. L 'intelligence mystique. Edited with "Presentation" by Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron. Paris:

Berg International, 1985.
6. Memoires d 'une jeune fille rangee ( Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 369; my translation.
7. Ibid.,388.
8. Ibid., 449, 467.

9. La force de ['age (Paris : Gallirnard, 1968), 209; my translation.
10. Memoires, 426.

philosophy rather than literature? If, on the other hand, her interest in
philosophy was a passionate one, as other passages in the autobiographies
imply, what philosophical subjects and methodologies, and which
philosophers interested her? These omissions from Memoires, point to the
importance of the 1927 diary, which includes entries dated from April 17 to
October 27, 1927, as a means for correcting Beauvoir's later auto-
biographical misrepresentation of herself as a writer and Sartre as the
philosopher.
Philosophy and Literature
The diary confirms Beauvoir' s early dedication to philosophy and provides a

beginning point for an analysis of her method of doing philosophy in
literature, a methodology exemplified in her novel, L 'invitee" (the subject of'
Merleau-Ponty's 1945 article, "Le Roman et la metaphysique")," and
defended in her 1946 essay, "Litterature et metaphysique."!' Belying the
claims of Memoires that literature holds first place over philosophy at this
time of her life, Beauvoir, in the 1927 diary, describes her project of'
combining literature and philosophy: "I must work on a work in which I
believe . . .. To write 'essays on life' which would not be a novel, but
philosophy, linking them together vaguely with a fiction. But the thought
would be the essential thing, and I would be searching to find the truth, not to
express it, to describe the search for truth."!" As the diary nears its
conclusion, Beauvoir's dedication to philosophy has become unmistakable:
"Oh ! I see my life clearly now: . .. a passionate, frantic search . .. I didn't know
that one could dream of death by metaphysical despair; sacrifice everything
11. Paris : Gallimard , 1943. Translated as She Came to Stay, by H.M. Yvonne Moyse and
Roger Senhouser. New York : World, 1954; Norton, 1990.
12. In Cahiers du sud, no. 270 (March 1945). Translated as "The Metaphysical Novel" in
Sense and Non-Sense, by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus . Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1964.
13. In Les temps modernes, vol. I, no. 7 (avril 1946). Reprinted in L 'existentialisme et fa
sagesse des nations. Paris : Nagel, 1948.
14. Camet, Holograph manuscript. Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1927. Transcription by

Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons; my translation; p. 54.
Hereafter, the page numbers for this text will be cited parenthetically within the main body
of the essay .
to the desire to know; live only to be saved . I didn 't know that every system
is an ardent, tormented thing , an effort of life, of being, a drama in the full
sense of the word, and that it does not engage only the abstract intelligence.
But I know it now, and that I can no longer do anyth ing else " (133-34).
Beauvoir's philosophical methodology, combining literature and philosophy,
is des igned to expand the limitations of traditional philosophy by using
literary techniques to reflect the passion and concrete experience of the
philosophical quest.
The Search for Meaning
At the heart ofBeauvoir' s philosophical quest is a search for meaning shaped

by the loss of her childhood faith in God and the development of her critical
consciousness: "What has this year brought me intellectually? a serious
philosophical formation that has ... sharpened my critical spirit, alas! ... I have
everywhere noted only our powerlessness to establish anything in the realm of
knowledge as in that of ethics " (11). The frustrated yearning for "being," for
an absolute justification for her life, leads to despair: "These miserable efforts
for being !" she writes in her diary entry for May 19, " . .. at its very base ,
masked by these daily diversions, the same void!" (55). Beauvoir's references
to the "void" and "nothingness" run throughout the 1927 diary. Her early
focus on the "uselessness of life" and the emptiness of the human pursuit of
being, ant icipates the long introductory section ofSartre ' s L 'etr e et Ie neant,
entitled , "the Pursuit of Being ."
Once Beauvoir lost the certainty ofknowledge guaranteed by an omniscient
God , projects such as education, which she had once blithely assumed to be
part of God 's plan for her life, now seem arbitrary and contingent. The
alternative to despair, trusted only hesitantly, lies in a Kantian tum towards
her own experience as the foundation of her life 's meaning: "I know myself
that there is only one problem and that it does not have a solution, because
perhaps it has no sense ... : I would like to believe in something - to
encounter total exigency - to justify life; in brief, I would like God. Once this
is said, I will not forget it. But knowing that this unattainable noumenal world
exists where alone could be explained to me why I live, in the phenomenal
world (which is not for all that so negligible), I will construct my life. I will
take myself as an end" (62) . Beauvoir's description, in Pour une morale de
I 'ambiguite, 15 ofthe "conversion" ofthe failed desire ofbeing into a desire for
the joys of disclosure of the phenomenal world and of the self, through an
existential bracketing ofthe "will to be" analogous to the Husserlian reduction,
has been identified by Bergoffen" and Lundgren-Gothlin," as a mark of
Beauvoir's philosophical difference from Sartre.
Given the depth ofBeauvoir's despair, it may not come as a surprise that
she also recognized the temptation to flee despair in self-deception. In the
following passages where Beauvoir reflects on the temptation of religious
faith, we find the denunciation ofself-deception and the beginnings ofan ethics
of authenticity: "No , truly ; what I love above all, is not an ardent faith . .. it's
intelligence and criticism, weariness, flaws , those beings who can not allow
themselves to be duped and who struggle to live despite their lucidity" (26).
The following passage also on temptations of self-deception, begins with a
reference to Mademoiselle Mercier, one ofthe first women in France to pass
the graduate agregation in philosophy, and Beauvoir's first mentor in
philosophy, at the Ecole Normale Libre in Neuilly:
Mademoiselle Mercier is trying to convert me; she speaks to me of Father

Beaussard who would like to see me, and I'm thinking of the remark by
Georgette Levy [her friend and fellow philosophy student]: 'You will be
tempted that way '. It's true. This morning .. .1 passionately desired to be
the girl who takes communion at morning mass and walks in a serene
certainty. Catholicism of Mauriac , of Claude I, ... how it's marked me and
what place there is in me for it! and yet I know that I will know it no
longer; I do not desire to believe : an act of faith is the most despairing act
there is and I want my despair to at least keep its lucidity, I do not want
to lie to myself. (94)
Beauvoir's valuing oflucidity and her linking offaith with the temptation
ofself-deception provide key elements in the concept ofbad faith, which Sartre
used in L 'etre et Ieneantand Beauvoir used earlier in her collection ofstories
15. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Translated as Ethics ofAmbiguity, by Bernard Frechtman. New
York: Philosophical Library, 1948; Carol Publishing, 1996.
16. Op. cit., 76-93
17. Op. cit., 161.

from 1935-37, Quand prime Ie spirituel.IS This diary passage, in reflecting

Beauvoir's awareness of the importance ofchildhood experience in shaping
ones consciousness, also points to a philosophical difference between her and
Sartre. As Bergoffen has pointed out, by rooting self-deception in a nostalgia
for childhood certainties, which is counteracted by the joys of disclosure,
Beauvoir opens up the possibility ofan ethics ofauthenticity as an alternative
to self-deception, unlike Sartrean bad faith which is ontologically grounded
and thus unavoidable."
The diary entry for July lOis also interesting for the reference to Leibniz
in Beauvoir's concluding reflections on the uniqueness ofindividuals and their
varying perspectives on the world:
I know that the laws of the mind are the same for all men. But it does not
seem to me that there is only one way of judging sanely. That depends on
the postulates that each has admittedeither explicitlyor implicitly; and the
choice of these postulates is left to each one. It depends on his
temperament, on his sensitivity, on this irreducible given that constitutes
the individuality of each one. I ought to read Leibniz because I sense so
vividly the principle of indiscemibles! I hate mechanism that, reducing
quality to quantity, conjures away quality.... That's why I feel myself to
be not phenomena but noumena, quality is the reflection of the noumena
on the plane of experience... . (95-96)
A final, incomplete sentence in this passage, points to the existentialist reality

that individuals, in the absence of the God, must create their own truth: "As
soon as we truly think, it's necessary to in some way create our truth" (95 -96).
This intriguing passage provides evidence that Beauvoir' s interest in Leibniz
predates the assignment of her thesis topic and also points to a possible
Leibnizian influence on French phenomenological concern with the
perspectival aspect of reality.
18. Paris: Gall imard, 1979. Translated as When Things of Spirit Come First, by Patrick
O'Brien. New York : Pantheon, 1982.
19. See Bergoffen, 182; and Lundgren-Gothlin, 142-144, 159-165 contrast ing Sartrean bad
faith and Beauvoirean inauthenticity.
Love and the Other
The search for meaning leads Beauvoir to turn to her own lived experience,
and to the subject oflove. In an entry for May 28, comparing the love for the
other with the love for God, Beauvoirdefines her philosophical interest in the
problem of placing limits on devotion: "even for the most beloved there is a
measure [oflove] since it is not God. In fact, perhaps not . .. I'll deepen this for
my diplome" (68). On July 7, Beauvoir writes: "It's necessary to study very
profoundly the questions that interest me. There is this subject of' love' which
is so fascinating and ofwhich I've trace the broad lines; it would be necessary
to start from there .. . It would be necessary to have the courage to write not in
order to display ideas but to discover them, not in order to clothe them
artistically but to make them live. The courage to believe in them" (92).
Rereading her diary, Beauvoir defines her central philosophical theme, one that
will recur throughout her later work, as the opposition of self and other: "I
must rework my philosophical ideas . .. go deeper into the problems that have
appealed to me .. .The theme is almost always this opposition ofselfand other
that I felt at beginning to live" (95). In identifying the philosophical theme of
the opposition of self and other, in 1927, two years before her first meeting
with Sartre, Beauvoir originates a theme central not only to her first published
novel, L 'invitee and to Le deuxieme sexe with its description of woman as
Other, but to Sartre's L 'etre et /e neant as well. But there are philosophical
differences with Sartre on this issue .
Sartre, in L 'etre et /e neant, frames the problem ofthe other as a solution
to the classic philosophical problem of solipsism, i.e., the existence of other
minds. That work presents no nurturing relationships or evidence of one's
genuine need to help or be helped by the other. zo For Sartre the experience of
the other's gaze is typified by the hostile gaze of a sniper. He asserts the
primacy of "ontological separation," denying that the "we" can be an
ontological fact or that reciprocal "recognition" between consciousnesses is
possible, calling "respect for other's freedom" an "empty word.'?' For
Beauvoir, in contrast, the problem ofthe opposition ofselfand other arises not
from within solipsism, but from the experience ofour search for love grounded
in the interdependence of self and other.
20. Christine Everly, "War and Alterity in L 'Invitee. " Paper presented at the Beauvoir
conference, Trinity College, Dublin, September, 1996.
21. Op. cit., 328, 536, 529, and 531.

For Beauvoir unlike Sartre, interdependence of self and other is an

ontological, and not a merely psychological, given ofexistence. As she writes
in Pour une morale de I'ambiguite, "there we have an irreducible truth: the
me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-obj ect relationship.':"
But the search for love, interconnected for Beauvoir with the search for
meaning, can also reveal the nothingness of human reality: "Rereading this
notebook, I understand my year : oscillation between the discouragement
brought to me by love, the only great human thing where I have felt the
nothingness ofeverything human-and the desire to search , the confused hope
that there was something to do" (160) . It is in the experience of nothingness
through the search for love where Beauvoir, in her 1927diary, finds the source
of the opposition of self and other that she defines as the theme of her
philosophical investigations.
The search for love leads to the opposition of self and other in two ways :
the first is through egoism, which denies one's dependence on the other and the
other's subjectivity; the second is abdication ofthe self in love for the other,
which involves self-deception and evasion of one's own subjectivity. When
Beauvoir is planning her writing projects, her egoism is reflected in her joyous
discovery of her individual power and of a future determined by her own
action: "Friday I established with force a life's program; in such instants my
solitude is an intoxication: I am, I dominate, I love myself and despise the
rest." But the loneliness of egoism brings an underlying ambiguity to the
experience that can leave Beauvoir yearning, in despair, for woman's
traditional feminine role: " . .. I would so like to have the right , me as well, of
being simple and very weak, of being a woman ; in what a 'desert world' I
walk, so arid, with the only oases my intermittent esteem for myself. I count
on myself; I know that I can count on myself. But I would prefer to have no
need to count on myself' (57). In this anguished experience of isolation we
find a source of Beauvoir's description in Le deuxieme sexe of woman's
temptation to flee her freedom and her complicity with her oppression. The
depth of her despair as she faces a future cut off from the warmth and
companionship of a woman's traditional role, is indicated by a marginal
annotation in the diary dating from May 18, 1929: "Could I again bear to
suffer as I suffered in writing these lines? " (57).
For Beauvoir, dependence on the other is multidimensional. One needs the
other for comfort in times ofdespair; for opportunities to serve others andthus
22. Op cit., 104

26 MARGARET A. SlMONS
to discover the human utility ofones life; and for opportunities to learn from
others' experience of the world. The diary is filled with accounts of her
reliance on friends, as in the following passage: "Once again, I find myself
stronger from the love that others have for me. Charming afternoon at
G[eorgette] Levy's reading poetry together" (87). Ofher love for her cousin,
Jacques, Beauvoir writes: "[W]e cling to one another so tightly that we know
how to support the great vertiginous void; we will not fall into the abyss" (74)
(note that Beauvoir's phrase, "vertiginous void" is later echoed inL 'etre et le
neant). Egoism, cutting oneself off from others by denying our passionate
attachment to them, also cuts one off from one's body, as is evident in this
passage near the end ofthe diary, where Beauvoir writes ofbeing tempted by
a spiritual denial ofworldly attachments: "there are hours when my soul alone
lives (Descartes says the passions come from the body)- my 'egoism' is
affirmed" (157). But feeling engulfed by an anguished sense ofisolation, "this
crushing anguish," "the metaphysical anguish ofman alone in the unknown,"
she is driven to reaffirm her love for her friend, Zaza : "Joy,joy! friendship as
immense as my heart, which will never end" (159). Loneliness can awaken a
yearning for fusion with the other, and the desire to be dominated, a second
way in which the search for love leads to the opposition of self and other.
Love and Domination
Anticipating Same's description, in L 'eire et Ie neant, of masochistic love,

much as her description of egoism anticipates his description of sadism,
Beauvoir describes love as "feeling oneself dominated" (136) . The yearning
for an absolute love hearkens back to a lost faith in God, whose love is
absolute and in whose Divine Presence one is never alone. As we have seen
above, Beauvoir expresses a reluctance to place limits on human devotion, a
desire to love the other as one loves God: "even for the most beloved, there is
a measure [to love] since it is not God . But, perhaps not ... " (68). In the entry
for August 26, Beauvoir describes this desire for love as a form ofidolatry-
that demands self-deception: "love is a fact to which one must submit; the only
sin is that ofidolatry. Don't think too much about that!" (154) . The temptation
ofself-deception in the search for absolute love, as in the search for meaning,
is grounded in the nostalgia for childhood: "Oh! to love again as simply as I
once knew how to do. Only realize that despite what I want, my love must
keep its limits" (47). Beauvoir recognizes the problem ofself-deception, but
the only alternative seems to be isolation: "It's necessary that I know well ...
how 1 am alone. 1 speak mystically of love, 1 know the price .. .. 1 am too

intelligent, too demanding and too immense for anyone to be able to take
charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me in my entirety. 1 have
only myself' (51) . Even recognizing the impossibility ofher desire and the
risk to herself in accepting domination by another, Beauvoir is not able to
suppress the desire . Referring to Jacques, in a July 7 entry, Beauvoir writes:
"I will sacrifice my exams for him; but not my work if! can create one, nor
myself. . .. Refuse to submit to any slavery. And yet, deep down, 1 don't
know ... maybe 1will sacrifice everything to him, everything, and it will not be
a sacrifice" (90) .
Conflict between selfand other in the desire for fusion with the other and
abdication ofthe selfcomes with the resistance ofeither the selfor the other.
In the spring of 1927, as she searches for a way out of disillusionment and
inaction, Beauvoir describes the struggle as an attempt to break away from her
love for her cynical cousin, Jacques, which has come to seem to her as a
betrayal ofherself, "the supreme defeat." "My selfdoes not want to let itself
be devoured by his" (38). Near the end ofthe diary, Beauvoir seems resigned
to giving up the impossible quest for the other who would be everything to her,
despite her dread of her future isolation:
How alone I will be!. .. after 18 months of such passionate love, I found
myself with an empty heart, knowing that there does not exist the one who
would fulfill everything! Courage, be everything to yourself. Search for
your truth; construct your life, a beautiful life;.. . Again, this necessity to
be strong! to be alone always if I do not abdicate! I had a moment of
vertigo, without anything to cling to. I sense so much that no one can be
anything for me, that I can only count on myself, that I have only myself!
and how to lose me? no one is large enough to merit the total gift of
myself! (137-139)
That Beauvoir has not definitively abandoned the desire to abdicate herselfat
the diary's conclusion is evident in a marginal notation dated"1929," opposite
the phrase, "the one who would fulfill everything!" The whole marginal
notation reads : "Sartre-1929."
Thus, at the heart ofBeauvoir's early philosophical writings, we find the
problem of the opposition of self and other framed not by the problem of
solipsism, as it is for Sartre, but by the problem of selflessness arising from
the search for love . Rather than reflecting what critics have charged is
Beauvoir's "masculine identification," her philosophical interest in the
opposition of self and other would thus seem to reflect a problem

characteristic, instead, ofwomen's experience. The desire for abdication ofthe
selfin fusion with the other sets the stage for a "conflict ofselfand other" that
Carol Gilligan terms "the central moral problem for women, posing a dilemma
whose resolution requires a reconciliation between femininity and
adulthood."23
Philosophical Influences
An analysis ofthe 1927 diary has thus revealed Beauvoir's early formulation
ofher philosophical methodology and central philosophical problems. Can the
diary also shed light on the influences that Beauvoir drew upon in her early
philosophical work, and by extension, on the larger historical question ofthe
origins ofFrench existential phenomenology? A list ofthe quotations from the
first pages ofthe diary suggests the breadth ofBeauvoir's reading ofGerman
philosophers and the French intellectual tradition: Alain, who may be best
known as the philosophy teacher ofSartre and Simone Weil; the French poet,
Paul Valery; Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher whose pessimistic
philosophy focusing on the will is quoted at length in the diary; Lagneau,
whose proclamation, "I have only the support of my absolute despair,"
Beauvoir affirms later in the diary; Henri Bergson, the leading French
philosopher in the first decades of the twentieth century; Rudolf Euchen, a
German philosopher of "activism"; the surrealist writer, Louis Aragon; and
Friedrich Nietzsche, whose Willto Power is quoted on the verso ofthe diary's
second page: "Ifour soul only once trembled with happiness and resonated like
the strings of a lyre, all the eternities were necessary in order to provoke this
sole event, and, in this sole moment of our affirmation, all eternity would be
approved, delivered, justified and affirmed." In the rest of the diary,
Beauvoir's extensive references to writers, poets, and philosophers continue,
arguing for a broadening of the analysis of the influences shaping her work
beyond not only Sartre, but also beyond the confines of philosophy as a
separate discipline, to include an intellectual tradition encompassing literature
as well. In the present context, we might explore the influence ofphilosophy,
in the narrow sense, evident in Beauvoir' s 1927 diary, asking, in particular if
the diary can shed light on the origins of Beauvoir's philosophy and on the
23. Carol Gilligan , In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women 's Development
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982): 71.
origins of French existential phenomenology as a whole .

Ofthe existential philosophers, there is one reference in the 1927 diary to
Nietzsche (in the quotation from Will to Power cited above), and one to
Pascal, to whom Beauvoir refers in defining her central philosophical concern
with the search for meaning: "I know myselfthat there is only one problem and
that it does not have a solution, because perhaps it has no sense; it is the one
posed by Pascal, nearer to me Marcel Arland: 1 would like to believe in
something-to encounter total exigency-to justify life; in brief, 1would like
God ." There is no mention of Seren Kierkegaard or Karl Jaspers, who were
not well known in France at the time, or of Gabriel Marcel, whose Journal
metaphysique was published in 1927.
Bergson
The diary provides evidence of the important, and largely unexplored,

influence on Beauvoir of Henri Bergson, who, in the 1920s, was still the
dominant figure in French philosophy. References to Bergson and his
distinctive philosophical terminology are found throughout the 1927 diary.
Beauvoir makes use of Bergson 's concept of "presence," for example, in
referring to philosophy imposing itselfon one "comme une presence vivante"
(38) . Another Bergsonian concept evident in the 1927 diary is the concept of
becoming, and time consciousness, as in the following passage from August
4: "oh! this perpetual and necessary flow ofthings and ofourselves!. . . . Insane
desire for the being who would be at the same time becoming" (143). In
arguing against mechanistic determinism, Bergson describes free choice as
springing spontaneously from ones whole personality, which is experienced as
an indivisible process ofbecoming, united by the experience ofduration and
memory. Beauvoir makes prominent use of the concept of "becoming"
[devenir], in the famous opening line ofVolume II of Le deuxieme sexe: "one
is not born a woman , but becomes one [Ie devient] ."
Bergson's recognition ofthe centrality ofthe experience oftime, duration,
and memory in the creation of the self may also contribute to Beauvoir's
analysis in Le deuxieme sexe ofhow a sense ofone s gender is constructed in
l
childhood. As we have seen above, in the diary passage about the lingering
effects ofher Catholic upbringing, the 1927 diary already reflects her interest
in how childhood experiences shape one's consciousness: "Catholicism of
Mauriac, ofClaude 1, ... how it's marked me and what a place there is for it in
me !" (94) . This interest in childhood experience marks an area ofBeauvoir's
philosophical influence on Sartre , who first began to explore the effects ofthe
early intervention of the other on the becoming of consciousness in Saint
Gener" some years after the publication Beauvoir's Le deuxieme sexe/"
Beauvoir employs Bergson's concept of the "given" [donne] in the diary
as in the following passage where she defends her interest in philosophy:
"[W]ith my intelligence alone I will try all of my life to advance as far as
possible to the heart of the problem; but in accepting and living the given ,
without waiting to possess the absolute" (72). The Bergsonian concept ofthe
given is significant for the central, and unexamined, place it occupies in the
controversial biology chapter of Le deuxieme sexe, which is entitled "the
givens [donnes] ofbiology" (a reference obscured in the English edition, where
donne is translated as "data"). In the biology chapter, Beauvoir aligns herself
with Bergson in arguing that a human perspective and an ontological context
must be brought to the study ofsexual difference, much as Bergson argues in
L 'evolution creatice (1907) that to the study of evolution we must bring
metaphysics and what our intuition reveals ofthe creative force oflife, which
Bergson calls the "elan vital ," another Bergsonian expression found in Le
deuxiem e sexe .
The 1927 diary entry for May 6 contains a reference to Bergson 's concept
of "e lan vital," at the conclusion ofa lengthy description of an experience of
freedom, choice , and becoming. In the May 6 diary entry, which illustrates
Beauvoir's use ofa descriptive philosophical methodology, Beauvoir describes
an experience of falling for a fellow philosophy student, Barbier:
This morning I experienced a strange moment the echo of which has not
yet died away in me. I had just seen Barbier again, coming so
spontaneously towards me ... . He spoke to me ofmyself, ofphilosophy and
literature with a genuine interest. And then . . . one instant I held in my
hands an entirely new life .... Well! the past did not enchain me, a new
passion blossomed in me, splendid, I loved him .... How to render that? It
was not at all speculation, reasoning; nor dream, imagination; one instant
it was .... my life is no longer a ready-made path on which already from
the point where I have arrived I can discover everything and on which I
need only place one foot after the other. This is a path not yet opened up ,
24. Jean-PaulSartre, Saint-Genet: Comedien et martyr . Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Translated

as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, by Bernard Frechtman. New York: George Braziller,
\9 63.
25. See MargaretSimons, \981.

BEG~GSOFBEAuvom'SPHENOMENOLOGY 31
which my walk alone will create.... Yes, it's only by free decision, and
thanks to the play of circumstances that the true self is revealed. I told
MIle Mercier, that, for me, a choice is never made, it is always being
made; it's repeated each time that I'm conscious of it. .. . Well: this
morning I chose Barbier. The horror of the definitive choice is that it
engages not only the self of today, but that of tomorrow, which is why
basically marriage is immoral.... One instant I was free and I lived [vecu]
that.. .. (35-36)
This passage is interesting for several reasons: Beauvoir's methodology of

exploring her own lived experience, her focus on the existential themes of
freedom and choice, and the intersubjective linking offreedom and choice with
the experience of falling in love. The reference to Bergson, which follows,
provides a metaphysical context for the experience ofselfdiscovery: "It's very
complicated. These possibles that are in me, it's necessary that little by little
I kill offall but one. That's how I see life: thousands ofpossibles in childhood,
which fall little by little until on the last day there is no longer more than one
reality; one has lived one life. But it is the elan vital of Bergson that I'm
thinking ofhere, which divides, allowing tendency after tendency to fall away
until only one is realized" (34-35,37). The reference to one's choice as
realizing "possibles" and her earlier reference to the "play ofcircumstances"
suggest Beauvoir's early view of the compatibility of freedom and
determinism, a position aligning her both with Leibniz, and, through the
concept of the "given," with Bergson.
Beauvoir's methodology ofrendering an accurate account ofher experience
is particularly significant, given its centrality in volume two ofLe deuxieme
sexe, which is entitled "Lived Experience" [l'experience vecue]. It reflects
Beauvoir's methodological turn to the description of women's concrete
experience to challenge the myths of woman's nature constructed by male-
defined science. Bergson's methodological focus on the "immediate givens
[donnes] of consciousness" (as in his Essai sur les donnes immediates de la
conscience, 1889) has obvious affinities with phenomenology. Spiegelberg, in
his history ofthe phenomenological movement, credits Bergson's philosophy
as an important factor favoring the reception ofphenomenology in France and
reports that Husserl' s reaction to first hearing of Bergson's philosophy of
intuition in 1911 was to proclaim: "We are the true Bergsonians?"
Another source of influence on Beauvoir's use of a descriptive
26. Op. cit., 428 .

philosophical methodology might be William James, whose influence is

suggested by the entry for April 20, which cites, in reference to the claim that
the "influence ofthe mind [moral] on the body is reciprocal," the diary ofthe
French philosopher, "Maine de Biran and the theory ofemotions of William
James (10). Spiegelberg discusses the influence of James's descriptive
psychology, and his concept of the stream of consciousness, on Husserlian
phenomenology." There might also be an influence of the Personalism
movement, whose focus, in the first decade of the twentieth-century, on
descriptions of consciousness, makes it an important French philosophical
precursor to phenomenology. In another link with Beauvoir, French
Personalism brought with it a renaissance ofinterest in Leibniz, thanks to the
work ofthe French Leibniz scholar and Personalist, Charles Renouvier, whose
work Beauvoir would have consulted for her diplome on Leibniz written in
1928-29.
Jean Baruzi
There is another link with Leibniz suggested in the diary entry of May 6 on
Beauvoir's mentor in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Jean Baruzi : "I' m thinking
again ofBaruzi's course and ofSchopenhauer: empirical character, intelligible
character. Yes, it is only by a free decision, and thanks to the play of
circumstances that the true selfis discovered" (35). Who is Baruzi? Might he
have influenced Beauvoir's early use of a reflective and descriptive
philosophical methodology and thus influencedher later contribution to French
existential phenomenology? Jean Baruzi, who occupied the history ofreligion
chair at the College de France from 1933 to 1951, taught a course at the
Sorbonne in 1926-1927 and 1927-1928. He was a student of Bergson, a
scholar ofLeibniz' s philosophy ofreligion and William James's psychology
of religion, and the author of a controversial dissertation, Saint Jean de /a
Croix et /e probleme de l'experience mystique/" This influential text,
Baruzi 's existential-phenomenological description ofmystical experience and
the search for a truth not bounded by religious doctrine, was condemned by the
French Thomists, but may have inspired Etienne Gilson's existentialist
reinterpretation of Aquinas as well as Bergson's work on mysticism.
27. Ibid. , 63
28. 2nd ed. Paris : Alcan , 1931.

Baruzi appears in Beauvoir' s 1927 diary as her philosophical mentor. One

ofthe first pages refers to Baruzi "who attracts me this year by his scrupulous
and profound faith, the intellectual ardor ofhis brilliant eyes, and his manner
ofliving his thoughts to the very tips ofhis fingernails; he possesses an interior
life" (9-10). In contrast, Beauvoir characterizes Leon Brunschvicg, the leading
Sorbonne philosopher of the era and director, in 1928-29 (when Baruzi was
no longer teaching at the Sorbonne), ofher thesis on Leibniz, as "zero": "Mr.
Brunschvicg is perhaps a man of value but for me: 0" (9-10). A few pages
later in the diary, she describes Baruzi' s philosophy course: "where the austere
and beautiful ideas give me a solemn and passionate fever" (28). Beauvoir's
reliance on Baruzi is evident in an entry midway through the diary, when, in
planning her philosophical work, Beauvoir declares her intention to : "place
myselfin the hands ofsomeone who criticizes and takes me seriously: Baruzi,
G[eorgette] Levy or Pontremoli [fellow philosophy students]" (91). Finally, in
an entry near the end ofthe diary reflecting Beauvoir's interest in metaphysics
and epistemology, Baruzi once again appears as her mentor:
I know nothing, nothing; not only no answers but no presentable manner

of pos ing the question. Scepticism, indifference are impossible, a religion
is impossible for the moment-mysticism is tempting: but how will I know
the value of a thought which leaves no place for thought? what can I lean
on to reject or accept it. Agree to spend two years in reading,
conversations, fragmentary meditations. I am going to work like a brute:
I don't have a minute to lose. And neglect nothing: link up with Baruzi,
do my homework, endeavour to know, to know . (132-33)
What was Baruzi's philosophical influence on Beauvoir? In drawing closer

to Baruzi, during his brieftenure at the Sorbonne, could Beauvoir have gained
access to Husserlian phenomenology? Baruzi's interest in Leibniz and German
philosophy gave him unusually broad contacts with German philosophers after
World War I, which would have provided opportunities to become acquainted
with Husserlian phenomenology." Spiegelberg makes no mention ofBaruzi
in his history ofthe phenomenological movement, although he remarks on the
strong appeal of phenomenology in France among non-Thomist Catholics."
29. See Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron's "Presentation" in Jean Baruzi, L 'intelligence

mystique. Paris: Berg International, 1985.
30. Op. cit., 429.

Baruzi employs a descriptive methodology in Saint Jean de la Croix, with

reference to the Bergsonian concepts of the "given" [donm:i]31 and "mystical
becoming." But there are suggestions of the influence ofphenomenology in
Baruzi's references to the proj ect of determining whether "phenomenon" of
mysticism issues from an "irreducible experience," a determination Baruzi
describes as inaccessible to sociological, historical or psychological method."
A reference to Husserlian phenomenology also seems apparent in Baruzi' s
description ofhis questto discover "the lived experience" [l 'experiencevecue]
ofthe mystic." In his 1925 presentation to the French Philosophical Society,
"Saint Jean de la Croix et Ieprobleme de la valeur noetique de I'experience
mystique,"Baruzi opens with a reference to the "phenomenology" ofmystical
experience.
Does Baruzi provide a previously unrecognized, if minor, role in
introducing Husserlian phenomenology to France, which, according to
Spiegelberg, dates from the 1926 publication of the texts by Jean Hering,
Bernard Groethuysen, and Lev Shestov?" The answer is not clear. Baruzi's
first direct reference to Husserl' s phenomenology, apparently does not come
until his December, 1926 inaugural lecture, "Le probleme du salut dans la
pensee religieuse de Leibniz," at the College de France, which may well have
been influenced by the three texts on Husserlian phenomenology published
earlier that year. But in this lecture Baruzi makes more than a passing
reference to Husserl, apparently arguing for a phenomenological reduction. In
defending the study of Leibniz, and his "critical method," by an historian of
religion, Baruzi argues that Leibniz's notion ofsalvation, once subj ected to the
severe investigation of"the phenomenology ofHusserl," might present us with
one ofHusserl' s bare "essences": "[Leibniz's] metaphysics ... is part of. . . the
very history of religion and, in the meaning given it by Husserl's
phenomenology, of these essences which it will, subsequently, after
decomposition and analysis, be a question ofpenetration and knowledge. Who
says that "salvation" according to Leibniz will not present us, after some
severe investigations, with one of these bare essences [essences
31. Op. cit., xxiii.
32. Ibid ., xxiv.
33. Ibid., xxvi.
34. Spiegelberg, Appendices, Chart II: "Chronology of the Phenomenological Movement in

France."
BEG~GSOFBEAUVO~'SPHENOMENOLOGY 35
depouiileesvt?" Baruzi 's texts from 1924, 1925, and especially his 1926
lecture, thus provide evidence of his familiarity with and utilization of
Husserlian phenomenology. Given his interest in phenomenology and his role
as Beauvoir's philosophical mentor in 1927, the question arises of whether
Baruzi introduced Beauvoir to Husserlian phenomenology.
Beauvoir's autobiographical text, Laforce de l'dge, describes her early
enthusiasm for phenomenology: "I was enthused by the novelty, the richness
of phenomenology: never had I seemed to approach so close to the truth. " 36
But in La force de l'dg« she credits Sartre , who, according to her account,
first learned ofphenomenology from Raymond Aron, with introducing it to her
in the early 1930s.37 Could Beauvoir have misrepresented the date ofher own
interest in phenomenologyjust as she did her own early interest in philosophy?
Her 1927 diary makes no mention of phenomenology or the concept of
intentionality, or of Edmund Husserl , whose texts were not translated into
French until 1931. Nor is there any mention of Hering, Groethuysen, or
Shestov, whose texts, published in 1926, provided the first discussions of
Husserlian phenomenology. Georges Gurvitch's important article on
phenomenology did not appear until 1928 and Levinas's book on Husserl , not
until 1930. Max Scheler was not translated into French until 1928, and Martin
Heidegger's influential essay, "What is Metaphysics?" was not published in
France until 1931. Nor does a first reading ofBeauvoir 's diary from 1928-29,
when she was completing her graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne,
show any reference to Husserl' s February 1929 Sorbonne lectures, which were
later published as his Meditations Cartesiennes.
Thus there is no indication in the diaries that Beauvoir had any direct
knowledge of Husserl's phenomenology, but is there evidence of Husserl's
indirect influence? The influence ofHusserlian phenomenology is suggested
in her bringing emotion and everyday, concrete experience into philosophy and
in her description ofthe experience offaIling for Barbier.The 1927 diary also
suggests an Husserlian influence on the critique of reason evident in
Beauvoir's later texts , including Quand prime le spirituel (1935-37), where
the short stories are united by the phenomenological task ofpeeling away the
layers of myths and preconceived ideas to confront the things of reality
35. Ibid ., 123.
36. Op. cit., 231.
37. Ibid., 157,215.

themselves, and in Beauvoir's critique ofscientific knowledge in Le deuxieme

sexe. 38
Husserl, according to Spiegelberg, claimed Descartes and Kant as "the two
greatest pioneers" of the epistemological reduction and the critique of
knowledge proposed by Husserl. One ofHusserl ' s innovations, according to
Spiegelberg, was his espousal ofKant, who had been rejected by Brentano as
a speculative idealist, as the protagonist of the critique of reason, laying the
groundwork for Husserl ' s own , much more radical, critique. Phenomenology,
as a "rigorous science," would "undertake the descriptive clarification ofthe
immediate phenomena" that had been neglected by positivist science."
Beauvoir's project of radically questioning everything, in the following
passage from late in the diary, which might be read as simply Cartesian, could,
given Baruzi's influence, also refer to this Husserlian project and the
'phenomenological reduction: "Write to G[eorgette] Levy of my will to call
everything into question because I believe that is a duty, to rethink every
postulate, to even renounce that in which I believe" (142-43). In a move also
intimating the influence ofBaruzi ' s appropriation ofHusserl for the study of
mysticism, Beauvoir describes the critique of reason as opening the door to
mysticism: "all explanatory philosophy confronts us with a residue, reason
yields only the human; necessity ofmysticism.... it's necessary to reread and
med itate on Kant, Bergson and Descartes" (Ill). The combination of Kant,
Descartes, and Bergson seems to point to the influence ofHusserI' s critique
of reason, as does the following passage, where Beauvoir contrasts her
position with that of her new friend and fellow philosophy student, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty:
he begins with an act of faith in reason - 1believe with Kant that one can
not attain the noumenal world. [B]eing does not equal substance - there
is being in the phenomenal order. 1 said, 'I believe in substance,' as 1 said
' I believe in causality' ; 1understood 'I represent things under the order of
substance as well as that of causality' but that is not to say that there is a
substance.
This passage, with its interesting reference to the ontological question ofthe
being of phenomena, continues: "Ponty rests his [philosophy] on the faith in
38. See Chapter 4 below.
39. Op. cit., 107.

reason, I on the ineffectiveness ofreason-who proves that Descartes prevails

over Kant? I persist in my Sorbonne exercises-use reason, and you'l1 end up
with residues and irrationals" (111-12).
Thus it is from her studies at the Sorbonne, and, almost certainly Baruzi,
that Beauvoir draws her critique of reason. Since it is likely that Baruzi
mentioned Husserl and phenomenology, in his Sorbonne lectures, his informal
discussions with Beauvoir, and his critiques of her work, this research
suggests that her autobiographical account crediting Sartre with introducing
her to phenomenology might be a misrepresentation. The evidence ofBaruzi's
influence also suggests the necessity for a reassessment of the historical
development and interaction ofatheistic and theistic existentialism in France.
Where previously French atheistic existentialism might have been seen as
unmediated by influence from theistic existentialism, the 1927 diary suggests
the reverse.
Merleau-Ponty
When looking back, in July 1927, at the academic year, Beauvoir records "the
taste for and habit [familiarity] ofphilosophy" as one ofthe year's conquests
(87) and credits it to the influence ofher new friend, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
In one ofthe final diary entries, in September 7, Beauvoir writes: "Rereading
this notebook, I understand my year; oscillation between discouragement. . .
and the desire to search, the confused hope that there is something to do. Ponty
hasn't changed me so much . He gave me the force to affirm the second
tendency" (159) . Scholars have noted the similarities in the philosophies of
Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, in particular their notions of embodied
subjectivity and situated freedom, which differentiate them philosophically
from Sartre. Does the diary provide evidence that Merleau-Ponty, during the
early years of his friendship with Beauvoir, shaped the direction of her
philosophical search as he encouraged her in its pursuit?
It is in defending herself against Merleau-Ponty's attempts to bring her
back to Catholicism that Beauvoir defines her own philosophy in the diary :
Well, Ponti [sic] is right. I do not have the right to despair. I accepted that
despair was justified, but it needs to be demonstrated.. .But: if, trying to
think without passion, I say: "I have no reason for choosing to despair,"
I also say, "I have no reason to move towards Cathol icism rather than in
any other direction.".. . And, on the contrary, it's because Catholicism
appeals too much to my heart that my reason defies it: tradition, heritage,
memories lead me to adhere to it... . Raised otherwise, Merleau-Ponti
[sic], would your reason, stripped of all passion, attract you to
Catholicism? (105-106)
This passage reveals Beauvoir's early critique ofphilosophy as pure reason,

pointing instead to its social-and biographical-eontext. Beauvoir welcomes
Merleau-Ponty's enthusiasm for philosophy, without sharing his fondness for
metaphysical absolutes : "Ponti says 'better to sacrifice becoming rather than
being'; I say that seeing a flaw in a system, I want to sacrifice the entire
system" (110). Instead of being swayed by Merleau-Ponty's conservative
arguments , Beauvoir rejects his appeal to faith in both Catholicism and reason :
"Ponti rests his [philosophy] on faith in reason, I on the powerlessness of
reason" (112). Thus, in meeting Merleau-Ponty's challenge, Beauvoirc1aims
a modem position, affirming the process of becoming and the critique of
reason.
Exploring the value ofemotions in her experience and differentiating her
position from that of Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir defends a notion of
embod iment that anticipates both her own mature philosophy and that of
Merleau-Ponty:
Thursday, July 28. I envy this straightforward, strong young man who lives
a tranquil life with a tenderly beloved mother and who searches calmly for
a truth that he hopes to fmd .. .. "Aristocrat" he calls me? It's true. I can't
get rid of this idea that I am alone, in a world apart, being present at the
other as at a spectacle ... . Dreams are forbidden him. Ah! me, I have riches
there that I do not want to get rid of. Drama of my affections, pathos of
life.... Certainly, I have a more complicated, more nuanced sensibility
than his and a more exhausting power of love. These problems that he lives
with his brain, I live them with my arms and my legs... . I don't want to
lose all of that. (126)
Beauvoir's argument, in the context ofa 1927 debate with Merleau-Ponty, for
"living" a philosophical problem not only with ones brain, but with ones arms
and legs, anticipates Merleau-Ponty's later concept of the "lived body," a
concept which may in part reflect Beauvoir's early influence .
Conclusion
To close, it is my hope to have shown that the 1927 diary, in recording

Beauvoir's early philosophical methodology, themes, and problems, can
provide scholars with some grounds for tracing early philosophical influences
on her work, for differentiating her philosophically from her contemporaries
(including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), for tracing possible directions of her
influence on the development of French existential phenomenology, and,
finally, for correcting the mistaken view that Beauvoir's use of a literary
methodology meant that she did not do philosophy. Ifthis paper encourages
other scholars to continue these explorations in more depth, my goal will have
been achieved.
Acknowledgments
My research on Beauvoir's 1927 diary has been made possible by the

generous support of the Graduate School, the College of Arts and Sciences,
and the Department ofPhilosophical Studies at Southern lllinois University at
Edwardsville, and by the kind assistance ofMauricette Berne and her staff at
the Bibliotheque Nationale. I would like to thank Julie Ward, Kristana Arp,
and Sonia Kruks from the Simone de Beauvoir Circle, and the participants in
the 1997 Research Symposium on The Existential Phenomenology ofSimone
de Beauvoir, at the Florida Atlantic University/Center for Advanced Research
in Phenomenology, for their helpful comments on this research. I am especially
grateful to Eleanore Holveck, Dorothy Leland, and Eva Lundgren-Gothlin for
their written comments. lowe special thanks as well to my colleague, Ezio
Vailati, for his generous assistance in interpreting the references to Leibniz in
the 1927 diary. To Barbara Klaw and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, whose
scholarly dedication makes this work poss ible, my gratitude goes beyond
words.
Chapter2
Simone de Beauvoir's Existential Phenomenology and

Philosophy of Historyin Le deuxieme sexe
EvaGothlin
GOteborg University
Abstract: In this chapter it is underlined that Beauvoir belongs to the

existential-phenomenological tradition, but that Le deuxieme 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'sphenomenology is closerto Heidegger 's than
to Husserl's.
In the history of philosophy, little attention has normally been paid to female
philosophers. This is not becausetherehavenot been any, for therehave indeed
been femalephilosophersever since antiquity, and womenhave participatedin
everyfieldofphilosophicalinquiry, as A History ofWomen Philosophersamply
demonstrates.' The explanation is rather that there has been a resistance to
including women in the philosophicalcanon, a pronouncedresistance that has
continuedinto modem times.In the caseof SimonedeBeauvoir, it is evidentthat
this process of exclusionhas continued? That she did not gain recognitionas a
philosopheris a fateshesharedwithmanyotherwomen,but her casewas further
complicatedby the fact that she saw herself primarilyas a writer,reservingthe
label of philosopher for her companionJean-Paul Sartre.' Thus, when she has
been mentionedin connectionwithphilosophy, ithas usuallybeen in thecontext
1. See Mary Ellen Waithe (ed.), A History ofWomen Philosophers, volumes 1-4 (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers , 1987-1995).
2. See Margaret A. Simons, "Sexism and the Philosophical Canon : On Reading Beauvoir 's
The Second Sex" in Journal ofthe History ofIdeas , vol. 51, no. 3 (1990) .
3. 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 Michele Le Doeuff 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). Michele Le Dceuff, L 'etude et Ie rouet : Des
femm es, de la philosophie , etc. (Paris : Seuil, 1989); translated by Trista Selous as
Hipparch ias 's Choice : An Essay Concern ing Women, Philosophy, Etc.(Oxford: Blackwell ,
1991).
41
W. O'Brien and L. Embree (eds.), The Existential Phenomenology ofSimone de Beauvoir, 41-51.
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers .
42 EVA GOTHLIN
ofSartre;she has been viewedashis disciple. Evenamongfeminists andBeauvoir

scholars, it is still common to regard her primarily as a writer, not as a
philosopher.'
This picture has come increasingly under attack during the last ten years.'
Today there is growingrecognition that Beauvoir has bequeathed us with an
importantphilosophical oeuvre; shewas,inMichele LeDeeuff's words,a ''hidden
philosopher."
GrantedthatBeauvoiris a philosopherin her ownright,I want to addressthe
questionas towhatkindofphilosophersheisandto whichtraditionshebelongs.
Simonede Beauvoirhas usuallybeen categorized as an existentialist. Although
both Sartre and Beauvoir were inspired by Seren Kierkegaard and their
philosophies sharesomecommonthemes, suchas anxiety, freedom, and choice,
4. 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 philosoph ical medium . See Karen Vintges, Philosophy
as Passion: The Thinking ofSimone de Beauvoir (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press ,
1996),9. In my opinion, Beauvoir is both a philosopher and writer. She does not subord inate
philosoph y to literature nor literature to philosophy. Her fiction is defin itely 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.
5. Margaret Simons, Sonia Kruks, and Michele Le Doeuffwere among the first to point out
differences between Beauvoir 's philosophy and Sartre 's and the claim for her philosoph ical
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 Relationsh ip" in Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, edited
by Helene Vivienne Wenzel, Yale French Studies, no. 72 (1986). Sonia Kruks, Situation and
Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity and Society (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
Michele Le Dceuff, L 'etude et Ie rouet: Des femmes, de la philosoph ie, etc. Eva Lundgren-
Gothlin, Kon och existens, studier i Simone de Beauvoir's 'Le Deuxieme Sexe' ( Goteborg :
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 ofSimone 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.
6. Le Dceuff, 156 ff. One sign of this change is that the new Routledge Encycl opedia of
Philosophy devotes an entire entry to Beauvoir, instead of relegat ing her to a footnote in
Sartre' s.
EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGYAND HISTORY 43
the fact is thatthey didnot originallyconsiderthemselves to be existentialists, but

rather asbelongingto thephenomenological tradition.Duringthe 1930sBeauvoir
and Sartreboth studiedHusserlandHeidegger,enablingthem to break out ofthe
stiflingFrenchidealisttraditiontheyhadbeen formedinat theuniversitythrough
a tum to Germanphenomenology.'DefiningBeauvoirsimplyas anexistentialist
overlooks the very real differencesthat exists between existentialism(or more
broadly, any philosophy of existence) and phenomenology," There are
existentialists like Kierkegaard that does not belong to the phenomenological
traditionandphenomenologists,likeHusserl,suspiciousofexistentialism. Some
phenomenologistseven reject the possibility of an existentialphenomenology.
Beauvoir as an Existential Phenomenologist
The rather loose definition of Simone de Beauvoir as an existentialist is

increasingly being superseded by a recognition that she belongs to the
phenomenological tradition. This is an important step. If we ignore the
phenomenologicalnatureofher work,we lose what is mostdistinctiveabouther
philosophyand theproblemsshetriedto solve. As KarenVintgeshas argued,the
critique thatLe Deuxieme Sexe is repetitiousand unstructuredis based on a lack
of awarenessconcerningthebook's phenomenological approach,"IfBeauvoir is
characterizedasa phenomenologist, thecarefuldescription ofdifferentaspectsof
7. 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'tige (Paris: Gall imard ,1960),
141ff, 208, 363, 483 .
8. 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 ofthe 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.
9. Vintges, Philosophy as Passion, 34. See also Sara Heinamaa, "What is a Woman? Butler
and Beauvoiron the Foundations of the Sexual Difference" in Hypatia , vol. 12, no. 1 (1997):
23 ff.
44 EVAGOTHLIN
women's livesinLe deuxiemesexe makessense.Thisisnotduetocoincidence or

negligence; it is being true to the high value placed on description by
phenomenologists.
Thus, on the one hand, it is important to define Beauvoir's philosophy as
phenomenological, ratherthan asjust existentialist. On the otherhand, it is also
necessary to emphasize that it is an existential phenomenology. In addition to
bringingouttheexistentialist aspects ofher thinking, thisapproach distinguishes
her philosophy from the non-existential phenomenology of philosophers like
EdmundHusser!' This also meansplacingher in the Frenchphenomenological
tradition, a tradition thatisbasednotonlyonHusserl'sphenomenology, butalso
on Martin Heidegger's early development ofHusserl's phenomenology.'?
Husserl's "purephenomenology," withitsscientific ambitions, was difficult
toreconcilewithanexistentialistphilosophy suchasKierkegaard's.Inthissense
itdiffered fromHeidegger'sphilosophywhichwaspartly inspiredbyKierkegaard
and Jaspers, as is apparent by the occurrence of such themes as anxiety and
authenticity. It is true that Heidegger reactedviolently againstthe existentialist
labelandbeingassociated withSartre, anaversion thatcametolightin 1947when
selectionsfromhis"LetteronHumanism" werepublished inFrance." In thistext,
Heidegger stressed theCartesian andanthropologicalnatureofSartre'sphilosophy
as opposedto his own preoccupation with Being.
Even thoughHeidegger is not an existentialist in a traditional sense and his
philosophydiffers profoundly fromSartre's,thefactremains thatphenomenology
10. 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 ofPhenomenology, 49-53 . Bergoffen places Beauvoir in
the "phenomenological-existential" tradition in the Introduction to The Philosophy ofSimone
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 "Aufkliirung (elucidation) rather
than Erkliirung (explanation)" (35).
I J. "Letter on Humanism" was published in Germany in 1947 as "Uber 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.
EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY AND HISTORY 45
took a new turn in the hands of Heidegger and that Sartre and Beauvoir were
influencedby it; theirphenomenologies, likeHeidegger's,underlinedthehuman
being as situated, focused on human existence and dealt with ontological
questions. In Beauvoir's philosophy,just as in Heidegger's and Sartre's, themes
suchasanxietyandauthenticity arerecurrentandthemeaning of suchphenomena
for human life interest her, rather than just their faithful description.
IfHusserl's primary interest was epistemology, Heidegger's was ontology.
Sartrefollowed Heideggerin thissense, as didBeauvoir,thoughtoa lesserextent.
Her maininterestwasneitherepistemologynor ontology,butethics.Ethicsareat
thecoreofherphilosophy,representing a tokenofher originality withintheFrench
phenomenological tradition. 12 Beauvoir's PourunemoraledeI'ambiguitewss the
only existential-phenomenological ethicspublishedduringthe 1940sin France.
During 1947-48, Sartredidworkon developingan ethicsgroundedin L 'eue et Ie
neant. Hethenabandoned theprojectandturnedto Marxisminstead. These"notes
foran ethics"werepublishedafterhis deathin 1983as Cahierspour unemorale.
Beauvoir's Pour unemoralede I'ambiguite is founded upon an ontologypartly
inspiredby Heidegger and Sartre. We will return to this point.
If it is grantedthat Sartreand Beauvoirwere both influenced by Husserland
Heidegger, the questionremainsto whatextent and in what manner. I will argue
that it is important to note that Sartre and Beauvoirappropriated Heidegger in
different ways and that in some ways the Heideggerian influenceis strongerin
Beauvoir's philosophythan in Sartre's.
AlthoughSartresharesHeidegger'spreoccupation withontology, L 'etreet Ie
neant has Husserl's Cartesian orientation. For both Husserl and Sartre,
intersubjectivity and solipsism are problems to be dealt with. Sartre rejected
intersubjectivity inL 'eire etIeneantbutsubsequently struggledto integrate it into
his philosophy, for examplein Cahiers pour une morale. 13
In Heidegger's philosophy, the humanbeingis conceptualized as Dasein and
Mits ein , a "being-there" and a "being-with" others.For Heidegger, the question
12. To my knowledge, Le Dceuff first pointed this out. I have argued for the primacy of
ethics in Beauvoir's philosophy in "Simone de Beauvoir and Ethics" in History ofEuropean
Ideas, vol. 19, nos. 4-6 (1994) and "Gender and Ethics in the Philosophy of Simone de
Beauvo ir" in NORA : Nordi c Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (1995) as have
Vintges in Philosoph y as Passion and Bergoffen in The Philosophy ofSimone de Beauvo ir.
13. Husser! 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.
46 EVA GOTHLIN
of solipsismdoesnot arise,nor is intersubjectivity a problem. Sartrerejectedthe

Heideggerian concept ofMitseininL 'etre etleneant, butBeauvoirseemsto have
regarded what it stands for as decisive from the very beginning. For her, as for
Heidegger, human beings are Mitsein. Though the concept Mitsein does not
appear until Le deuxieme sexe, its content is conveyed as early as Pour une
moraledeI'ambiguite throughtheconceptofinterdependence, somethingwhich
bringsherclosertoHeidegger'sandMerleau-Ponty'sexistential phenomenology
rather than to Sartre's.14
ThereisanotherHeideggerian conceptinBeauvoir'sphilosophy thatdistances
her ontologyandanthropology fromSartre's. In Pourunemorale de I'ambiguite
Beauvoir agrees with Sartre that the human being is a "desir d 'etre" (desire of
being),but she doesnot adopthis pessimistic viewof the human conditionas a
"passion inutile" (uselesspassion).The reason is that the human being in Pour
unemoralede I'ambiguite is defmednot onlyas a "desireofbeing," a desirethat
can neverbe fulfilled, but also as a "desire" to "devoiler I'etre" (disclosebeing),
a desire that is not futile." Disclosure means that the world is invested with
"signijication humainer'" Itisreasonable to supposethatHeidegger'sconceptof
Erschlossenheit inspired Beauvoir's concept of devoilement. Heidegger says:
14. In Sex and Existence , I argue that the Heideggerian concept of "Mitsein" plays an
important role in Le deuxieme sexe . Thus, this concept, and what it stands for, is not rejected
as it is in Sartre 's L 'etre et Ie neant (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,
15. Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l'ambiguite (Paris : Gallimard, 1947), 18; translated by
Bernard Frechtrnan as The Ethics ofAmbiguity (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) .
16. Pour une morale de I 'ambiguite, 60/41.

"Das Dasein ist seine Erschlossenheit.?" or Dasein is disclosedness.

(Erschlossenheit is translatedin Frenchas devoilemeni.y This meansthat human
beings have a creative capacity,an ability to generate meanings. IS
The HeideggerianoriginisthemoreprobablesinceBeauvoir, likeHeidegger,
associate disclosure with authenticity and interdependence/Mitsein. For both,
authenticityentails "grasping" oneselfas a "disclosure"ofbeing, which are also
recognition of one's freedom and responsibility, and a rejection of absolute
truths. 19Interdependence anddisclosure areconnectedforBeauvoir, sincehumans
disclose the world to each other and communicatewith each other through the
things they disclose: "To will that therebe being is also to will that there be men
by andforwhomtheworld isendowedwithhumansignifications. One canreveal
the world only on a basis revealed by other men.... To make being 'be' is to
communicate with others by means of being.''" Authenticity in human
relationships meansseeingothersasfree,assubjects.The "desireofbeing," onthe
other hand, impliesinauthenticityandthe tendencyto oppressothers or accept a
state of subordinationoneself.
Beauvoir modifiesSartre's descriptionofthe humanbeing as a lack ofbeing
desiring being with Heidegger's notion of the human being as a disclosure of
being. Sartre'spessimisticviewofthehumanconditionisthusreplacedby one in
which the individualis torn betweenthe "desire ofbeing" and the "disclosure of
being," between inauthenticityand authenticity.
In L 'etre et Ie neant, Sartre also refers to devoilement or disclosure as a
characteristic of consciousnessor the "for-itself'. For him, disclosure does not
carry the ethical connotations it does for Beauvoir in Pour une morale de
l'ambiguite." although he moved closer to her approach in Cahiers pour une
17. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen : Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), §28, 133.
18. According to Dana R. Vil1athis 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 ofthe Political (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 124.
19. Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate ofthe Political , 129; Pour une moral
de I 'ambigu ite, 34 f./23 f. Authenticity means putting the desire for being 'in parentheses .'
Pour une moral de I'ambiguite, 20/14 .
20. Ibid ., 100171 . Here the term "reveal" (reveler) is used instead of "disclose," but it refers
undoubtedly to the same concept.
21. This is also true for Same's "Qu'est-ce que la litterature?" published in 1947 in Les
temps modernes and subsequently in Situations, II (Paris: Gal1imard, 1948), see e.g., 89f.
48 EVA GOTHLIN
morale, which was begun some time after Pour une moralede I'ambiguite had
beenpublished.Nor is disclosure relatedtointerdependence or Mitsein in Sartre's
earlyphilosophy. In heruseoftheconceptofdisclosure, Beauvoirpoints to amore
fundamental levelofbeing-in-the-world andofbeing-with-others, Thus,I consider
it to be a Heideggerianrather than a Husserlian or Sartriannotion.
Simone de Beauvoir belongs, like Sartre, to the French existential
phenomenological tradition, andis,in importantrespects, influencedbyHeidegger.
Thisissomething thathasnot beentakenintoconsiderationbyBeauvoirscholars;
those who see Beauvoir as part of the phenomenological tradition, like Debra
Bergoffen and Karen Vintges, see her mainly as inspired by Husser!'
On the other hand, to underline Heidegger's importance for Beauvoir's
philosophyshouldnot makeus forgetin whatrespectsher philosophyis focused
on phenomenological investigation and descriptionin line with Husser!' This is
particularlytrue of Le Deuxieme Sexe, wherephenomenological descriptionsof
various aspects of women's life abound. She never wrote strictly
phenomenological studies such as Sartre did in Esquisse d 'une theorie des
emotions. Herphenomenological descriptions inLe Deuxieme Sexe arebased on
a widevarietyof sources- autobiographies, scientific reports, psychological case
studies, fiction, diaries,personalcommunication, etc. - and are combinedwith
ideas and theories from history, biology,psychoanalysis, etc.
Beauvoir's phenomenology isboth descriptive andexplanatory. Ledeuxieme
sexeisnot onlyaphenomenological investigation ofwomen's situation, butisalso
an attempt to explain it. Not a single explanation, but the multiplicity offactors
that haverelegatedwomento a subordinatestatus.This is alsowhereBeauvoir's
existentialphenomenologyconvergeswithherphilosophyofhistory, the second
important aspect of her philosophyto which we will now turn.
Beauvoir's Phllosophy of History
French phenomenology is characterized not only by a close relationship to

existentialism, but also by a tendency to align Hegel and Marx with
phenomenology." In mybook,I arguedthat Simonede Beauvoir's philosophyis
an existentialphenomenology, but one that is synthesized with a philosophy of
historyinspiredby Hegeland Marx/Engels. This secondaspectofher thinkingis
often ignored,perhapsin order to make it appearmore consistent. The Marxian
22. See Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement , 440 ff.; Bernard Waldenfels,
Phiinomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983),28 ff.
and/or the Hegelian aspects of her philosophy is passed over in silence;

alternatively Hegel's philosophy is re-interpreted as belonging to the
phenomenological tradition." I believethis is the wrongapproach.
Examining the French intellectual milieu of the 1930s and 1940s, one
discovers thatthephenomenological tradition wasintroduced atthesametimeas
a Hegel renaissance. The leading exponent of this renaissance was a Russian
emigreby thenameof Alexandre Kojeve, whoseinterpretation of Hegelwas to
influence Frenchintellectual lifefordecades.Kojeve, andtheHegel translatorJean
Hyppolite, who also publishedinfluential introductions to Hegel, both related
Hegel to HusserI, Heidegger and Marx.
Beauvoir was thus far from alone in combining phenomenology with the
philosophies of Hegel and Marx. Hegel was considered by many to be a
phenomenologist, oratleastreconcilable withphenomenology,andhewasoften
read throughMarxistlenses. This is important to keepin mind when analyzing
Beauvoir'sphilosophy. Nevertheless, Ithinkitisnecessarytodistinguishbetween
this particular French philosophical tradition and what ought to be a relevant
pictureof thehistoryofphilosophy.Thus,maintaining a criticaldistance so as to
analyze Beauvoir's philosophy in relation to her time, withoutpermitting this
perspective to absorb ourthinking.Norshould oneoverlooktheproblems involved
in tryingto make different philosophical traditions meet.
In myopinion, Hegel shouldnotbedefined asaphenomenologist, a conclusion
supported by Herbert Spiegelberg's classic work on the phenomenological
tradition. Spiegelberg maintains thatwe shouldbe waryof including everything
related to phenomena or phenomenology in the phenomenological tradition
proper." Hegel's Phiinomenologie des Geistes is not necessarily a precursorto
Husserl's phenomenology, just becauseof the title. Hegel was not a sourceof
inspiration for Husserl, he maintains, and the German phenomenological
movementhasneverregardedhimasbelonging to its tradition." As Spiegelberg
pointsout,Hegelsaw'phenomena' as'stagesofknowledge' in"thedevelopment
of historyof consciousness" (thegradual realization of Spirit), not discoverable
23. Vintges (142 ff.) and Bergoffen, The Philosophy ofSimone 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.
24. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 6. In the Encyclopedia of

Phenomenology, Frank M. Kirkland takes a less definite stand (292-98) .
25. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 12.

50 EVA GOTHLIN
through a particularmethod. In addition, the dialectical method, in its claim to

"logicalself-evidence," is clearlyopposedto thephenomenological method ." It
wastheinterpretations byKojeveandHyppolite thatgavethisFrenchconnection
legitimacy. Despitethefactthattherearesimilarities betweenHegelandHusserl,
phenomenology assuchwasinventedbyHusserl. Hisimportant forerunners were
Franz Brentanoand Carl Stumpf.
Notonlywouldthedistinctive natureofFrenchexistential phenomenologybe
concealed, if thisparticularHegel-interpretation was madeuniversal, we would
alsorisklosingsightofimportantdifferences betweenthephilosophy ofSartreand
Beauvoir.BeauvoirdidnotreadHegelthroughSartre's interpretation,butrather
throughthatofKojeve.ThismeansthatHegelisreadasa philosopher of history,
Which providesBeauvoir'sphilosophy anhistorical dimension, thatSartre'searly
philosophylacks. Forher,theHegelianmaster-slave dialectic isnotanahistorical
struggle, nor does it emphasize the monadic and solipsistic predicament of the
human being, as in Sartre's L 'eire et le neant. For Beauvoir, the master-slave
dialectic is a model for the origin of conflict and oppression, as well as for
historical change. Combined with a Marxistphilosophy of history, it gives an
historical explanation of the oppression of women.
My point is that we need not callHegela phenomenologist in orderto make
Beauvoirlookmoreconsistent. Instead, onecouldlookatLe deuxieme sexe asthe
synthesis of two traditions or perspectives and, rather than seeing this as a
weakness, I thinkwe shouldlookuponit as a strength. Oneof thereasonsthatLe
deuxieme sexe is such an important book is that it combines an existential
phenomenology with a philosophy ofhistoryto generate an analysis, which is
diachronic and synchronic, historical and existential. Beauvoir's existential
phenomenology focuses ontheindividual'srelation to being, tohim/herself, tothe
other, as well as on a phenomenological description of the livesof women. Her
philosophyof history, on the otherhand, underscores the historical situationof
women, its origins, and development. Thus, her thinking ranges across the
existential aspectsof the humanpredicament, as well as historical change. She
looksat therelationbetweenthe sexesfroman existential angle, atthe sametime
historicing thisrelation.Sheoffers aphenomenological description ofthedifferent
aspects ofwomen'slives, while providing ahistorical explanation andbackground
since historicality is part of the phenomenological meaning of women's lives.
The historical background is based on the Hegelian master-slave dialectic,
which, in combination with a Marxist philosophy of history, postulates that
26. Ibid, 13ff.

women became the "absolute Other" because they were outside the dialectic,
taking part neither in the struggle for recognition nor in productive activity.
Beauvoirthus distinguishes betweentwo forms of alterity, one pertainingto the
relationship betweenmen and one to therelationship betweenwomenand men.
Defining women as the "absolute Other" implies saying that the relationship
betweenwomenand men, in contrastto thatbetweenmen (mastersand slaves),
werenon-dialectical andoutside historical change. TheIndustrial Revolution made
womenpart of the productionprocess; alongwith otherhistoricalchanges, this
gavewomen a platformfromwhichto claimtheirrights,to assertthemselves as
subjects. Womencouldnow denouncetheirpositionas "absoluteOther."On an
existential level,Beauvoirviews oppression andsubordination asa function ofthe
human's "desire of being". This desirecan be transcended by the recognition of
oneselfandtheotheras a "disclosure ofbeing,"anethical decision whichrequires
a moral conversion and a conducive historical situation."
These twoperspectives permeatethefirstandsecondvolumeof Le deuxieme
sexe. The philosophy of history dominates the first volume and existential
phenomenology the second. They intersectat variouspoints,e. g. in Beauvoir's
explanationofoppression, atotherpoints theycomplementeachotheror evenfind
themselves inconflict. Inthattheyarerelatedto differentontologies, theyarenot
wholly compatible.
Ifwe keep these two perspectives in mind when, e.g., analyzing Beauvoir's
concept of situation, it is easier to understand how "situation" can refer to the
historicalsituationthe individual finds herselfin (e.g.,withitsspecifictechnical,
economic, andsocialdevelopment,itsspecific culturalcodesforfemininity, etc.)
at thesametimeas itreferstothebodyas"livedexperience," thewayin whichan
individual experiences her/his corporeal being.
"On ne nailpasfemme, on Iedevient" ("One is not born,but rather becomes
a woman")" can thus be interpreted as meaningthat femininity is an historical,
ideological code with differentcharacteristics in differentsocieties, and that it is
constantlyin themaking, a "livedexperience" createdandrecreatedin the lifeof
each and every woman."
27. See the analysis in Sex and Existence.
28. Simone de Beauvo ir, Le deuxieme sexe (Paris : Gallimard, 1949), vol. II, introduction;
translated by H.M. Parshleyas The Second Sex (New York: Penguin Books , 1981),295.
29. I would like to thank Dorothy E. Leland for her valuable comments on this paper.
Chapter 3
Beauvoir and Plato:

The Clinic and the Cave
Edward Fullbrook
Independent Scholar
and
Kate Fullbrook
University of the West of England
Abstract: This essay explores the ways in which Simone de Beauvoir

uses Plato 's allegory of the cave as a template through which to
introduce her concept of embodied consciousness into twentieth-
century philosophy.
Introduction
As Maurice Merleau-Ponty observed in 1945, Simone de Beauvoirmakes the

relation ofbody to consciousness one ofher main areas ofphenomenological
inquiry inL 'invitee. 1 That investigative strand builds to its primary conclusion
in the final chapter of Part One of the novel , where the chief protagonist,
Francoise, becomes seriously ill. Part One concludes with a long description
ofFrancoise 's confinement to a clinic. In this essay we wish to examine that
episode closely, especially in terms ofits deliberate relation to Plato's allegory
of the cave.
That Beauvoir, the hard-nosed phenomenologist, should even think of
superimposing her analysis onto Plato's dualistic conception ofthe world is
a measure ofthe singularity ofher philosophical imagination, and espec ially
of her uncanny ability in transmuting narrative forms . Her adaptation of
Plato 's allegory may seem capricious, but here, as so often, her apparently
1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 'Le roman et la metaphysique' Cahiers du Sud, No. 270 (mars
1945); translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus as 'Metaphysics and the
Novel' in Sense and Non-sense (Evanston, l1Iinois: Northwestern University Press , 1964),
26-40 . Simone de Beauvoir, L 'invitee (Paris : Gallimard, 1943); translated by Yvonne Moyse
and Roger Senhouse as She Came to Stay (London: Flamingo, 1984); hereafter cited within
the body of the text with the page number ofthe original followed by the page number of the
English translation, e.g. (12/34).
53
W. O'Brien and L. Embree (eds.), The Existential Phenomenology ofSimone de Beauvoir, 53-65.
© 2001 Kluwer Academ ic Publishers .
54 EDWARD FULLBROOK & KATE FULLBROOK
whimsical stratagem turns out to rest on sound and interesting logic . Plato
may never have intended his description ofthe perceptions ofhis prisoners as
anything but an allegory, but his is still, for all that, very much a
phenomenological description. Beauvoir seizes upon this dimension ofPlato 's
narrative to anchor her own vision of reality in the deepest traditions of
Western philosophy. We will analyze the nursing clinic episode ofL 'Invitee
in the concluding section of this essay. But first, in preparation for that
analysis, we will review the reasons behind Beauvoir's philosophical interest
in the body, summarize her novel 's phenomenological exploration ofthe mind-
body relation prior to Francoise's illness, and highlight the novel 's use of
dancing as an illustration of embodiment.
The Body in Philosophy
For most ofhistory the human body has scarcely figured in the philosopher's
universe. Beauvoirbroke decisively and influentially with this tradition. Two
factors helped her to do so. The experience ofliving as a young woman in a
deeply chauvinistic society invited awareness ofher body's significance vis-a-
vis her consciousness. And her early rejection of the basic notion of
consciousness or mind to which most ofher predecessors subscribed opened
the way for her phenomenological interest in the body. We need to examine
why this is so.
From its inception, modem philosophy (in both its Continental and Anglo-
American varieties) has been dominated by a "container" theory of mind, in
the sense that it conceives of the mind as analogous to a container in the
physical or literal sense. Isaiah Berlin in his The Age ofEnlightenment notes
that Locke treated the mind "as ifit were a box containing mental equivalents
of the Newtonian particles." This general conception of the human mind
became commonplace among eighteenth-centuryphilosophers. For Locke and
for Berkeley, explains Berlin,
what is characteristic is the assumption commonto both (and to Hume and

many other contemporary empiricists, particularly in France) that the
mind is a container within which ideas like counters circulate and form
patterns as they would in a complicated slot machine; three-dimensional
Newtonianspace has its counterpart in the inner "space" of the mind over
2. Isaiah Berlin, The Age ofEnlightenment (New York: Mentor, 1956), 18.
BEAUVOIR AND PLATO 55
which the inner eye-the faculty of reflection-presides.3
Th is conceptualizing ofmind or consciousness as ifit were a material entity

creates an unbridgeable gap between it and the human body conceived, not
metaphorically, but literally as a material entity. This conceptual
schizophrenia of British Empiricism (that is, its mixing of two levels of
language) is, of course, a refinement of Descartes' and Cartesianism's
conception ofmind as a substance occupying its own realm and ontologically
distinct from the substance of body. In both Empiricist and Cartesian
philosophy, the conception of mind and body as occupying different realms
of existence guarantees the mind/body split.
Against this central tradition, Beauvoir adopted the notion ofintentionality,
which in modem times dates from Franz Brentano's Psychologie vom
empirischen Standpunkt (1874). Rather than thinking of consciousness as a
kind ofreceptacle for perceptions and images , the principle ofintentionality
identifies consciousness as a relation which human beings have to objects,
both real and imagined. The term "intentional" merely refers to the idea that
consciousness always intends an object, in other words , that consciousness is
always consciousness ofsometh ing. That "something" is one ofthe two terms
ofthe relation ofconsciousness, and itwas that term, the intended object, that
Husserl ian phenomenology made the primary focus of its investigations.
Beauvoir 's innovation is to give special attention to the other term of the
relation of consciousness, which, she realized, is ultimately the individual
human body.
Embodied Consciousness"
The originality of Beauvoir's thought on the body stems from the point of
view which she adopts for her inquiries. She is interested in the body as
actuall y lived by the subject. At this existential level, the body is not primarily
a thing, but rather an integrated system of perceptual powers, including its
consciousness, by which one has a hold and a unique vantage point on the
world. In L 'invitee Beauvoir advances her theory ofembodied consciousness
3. Ibid., 19.
4. This section's material is also treated , and at greater length, in Edward Fullbrook and
Kate Fullbrook , Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press ,
1998).
through extended phenomenological critiques of two radically opposed

theories of perception, one based on British Empiricism, the other derived
from Kantian Idealism. Her opening chapter identifies the Kantian position
with Francoise, who thinks ofherselfas a disembodied subject, as one whose
experience ofthe world is not contextualized by her body. "I'm convinced,"
she says, "that wherever I may go, the rest ofthe world will move with me"
(16-17/5). This is tantamount to saying that she thinks of herself as having
a universal point of view on the world, and that there is no elsewhere.
Likewise, she sees her consciousness as "impersonal and free" in the sense of
Kant's transcendental or universal ego (34/21) . She is cured of this
misconception only after her stay in the clinic.
Francoise's efforts at maintaining the illusion that she is pure
transcendence provide an extreme example ofthe bad faith oftranscendence.
She regulates her whole life, even her personal relationships, through the
pursuit ofcarefully chosen projects, and avoids experiences that might remind
her ofher immanence, especially the immanence ofher body. "For most ofthe
time, she was not even aware that she had a face" ; she even "had a vague
hope that it would be invisible," and likes to think of herself as "a naked
conscious[ness] in front ofthe world" (25, 47,184/13,32, 146). Francoise's
"friend," Xaviere, on the other hand , pursues the opposite illusion, that of
pure immanence. She is especially drawn to dancing, which she uses to tum
her consciousness inward on the giveness ofher body. But offthe dance floor,
Xaviere tends toward extreme passivity. She is unable to express preferences
or make plans , because these mental activities would reveal to herself the
transcendent side of her being.
Beauvoirjuxtaposes Francoise' sand Xaviere' s polar extremes ofbad faith
to create a metaphysical black comedy from which her theory of embodied
consciousness emerges . A nightclub, the Pole Nord, serves as Beauvoir's
phenomenological laboratory.There she uses Xaviere's intensified sensuality
to critique the empiricist view ofperception, especially the sense-data theory
of British phenomenalism. Beauvoir's own view ofthe structure of sensory
experience emerges from these situated analyses ofvisual , auditory, tactile,
olfactory, and temporal perceptions. Some ofthese perceptual experiments,
for example Xaviere ' s swallowing of a glass of aquavit, directly aim at the
empiricist doctrine that "sensations" result from awareness of sense-data
rather than from awareness of the objects themselves (65-66/47). For
Beauvoir, perception is an immediate relation with the world, a direct sensing
of its objects, rather than a second-order one based on sense-data.
Beauvoir's text also takes issue with the empiricist tradition ofregarding
perception primarily as a problem ofobjective knowledge. For example, she
argues that perception oftime is not primarily about universal time, but about
our movement toward projected futures (70-72/51-52). One's point of view
on time is a series of present moments defined by the future which one
projects for oneself. The experience oftime rarely focuses on time's physical
dimension in and ofitself. When it does--as when in the Pole Nord, Xaviere,
with no end in mind, counts offthe seconds oftime passing--it appears absurd
(72/52). Beauvoir underlines this view in her description ofFrancoise' s stay
in the clinic.
Beauvoir rejects mechanistic explanations ofperceptual experience. She
uses the situational nature of fiction to reveal how the body, with its organs
of perception, and the subject, with its consciousness, are intertwined. The
body is subjective and the subject embodied. Furthermore, this ambiguous
unity determines a special relation. "In the real world," writes Beauvoir in an
essay from 1946, "the sense of an object... unveils itself to us in the global
relation that we maintain with it and that is action, emotion, sentiment. . ."5
Beauvoir identifies consciousness as a key element in this global relation, as
an active agent in the structuring of experience. Kant, of course, thought so
too . But the ontological ground on which Beauvoir constructs her analysis
differs fundamentally from Kant's. His universal or transcendental subject
does not enter into herreckonings. Instead, Beauvoir's "consciousness" is the
consciousness of the individual existent concretely situated. It is this
underlying principle of Beauvoirean philosophy that makes fiction, with its
rootedness in the concretely situated, so apt a medium for developing her
arguments.
Rather than attributing sense data to the objective body and the data's
interpretation to the "mind" or subject, Beauvoir recognizes only one entity,
embodied consciousness. But this unity, she argues, is subject to shifting
modes ofexistence which give rise, on the one hand, to the dualist confusion
ofphilosophers and, on the other, to the possibility ofthe bad faith exhibited
by Francoise. This subject/object ambivalence ofthe human body is central
to Beauvoir' s philosophical vision. In her fiction, and especially in L 'invitee,
she identifies and explores phenomenologically, often repeatedly, common
5. Simone de Beauvoir, "Litterature et metaphysique" in Existentialisme et fa sagesse des

nations (Paris : Nagel, 1948), I; originally published in Les temps modernes, vol. I, no. 7
(Avril 1946) 1153-1163; our translation .
human experiences which tum on this bi-modality of human reality. Touch,

more than any other sense, reveals this ambivalence, and , therefore, Beauvoir
sometimes loads her narratives with accounts oftactile experiences." And of
these, Beauvoir identifies "double touching," the touching of oneself, as an
especially effective way ofrevealing to her readers the body's subj ect/object
ambiguity. The masturbation scene in "Deux chapitres inedits de ' L'invitee, '"
the original opening to L'invitee, is an important case in point.' L'invitee
offers conspicuous examples ofdouble-touching, as when Xaviere notes '" It's
extraordinary the impression it makes on you to touch your eyelashes'"
(74/54). Contact between any two parts ofthe body, where each part performs
vis-a-vis the other both object and subject roles, is an especially clear
manifestation of the body's ambiguity as subject/object or transcendence/
immanence.! Mirror gazing and dancing are other activities that Beauvoir's
6. See, for example , L 'invitee, 72-81/52-59 .
7. Simone de Beauvoir "Deux chapitres inedits de 'L'invitee'" in Les ecrits de Simone de

Beauvoir, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier (Paris : Gallimard , 1979),279.
8. As is well known, Merleau-Ponty and Husserl also worked on this problem . Emmanuel
Levinas in "Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty" (Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-
Ponty , eds . G. A. Johnson and M. B. Smith, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1990,
55-60) traces Merleau-Ponty's ideas on double-touching in Signes (1960) back to Husserl 's
ld een ll. But perhaps more interesting, because, unexpectedly, it involves Beauvoir, is to
consider the genesis of Merleau-Ponty's passages on double-touching and the body 's
subject/object ambiguity in his earlier Phenomenology ofPerception (1945) , Chapter Two :
"The Experience ofthe Body and Classical Psychology". Here he uses the term "completely
const ituted" which he credits to Husserl with the following footnote : "Husserl, ldeen T. II
(unpublished). We are indebted to Mgr Noel and the Institut Superieur de Philosophie of
Louvain, trustees of the collected Nachlass, and particularly to the kindness of the Reverend
Father Van Breda, for having been able to consult a certain amount of unpublished
material." Merleau-Ponty also lists ldeen II and two other works from the Louvain archives
in his bibliography.
Father Van Breda has written an account, "Merleau-Ponty and the Husserl Archives at
Louvain ," in Texts and Dialogues: Merleau-Ponty, eds. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry,
Jr. (London : Humanities Press, 1992), of Merleau-Ponty's relations to the then unpublished
ldeen ll. In a letter to the institute in Louvain dated 20 March 1939, Merleau-Ponty wrote
"I am currently pursuing a study of the Phenomenology ofPerception for which it would be
extremely useful for me to acquaint myself with volume II of the Jdeen." Van Breda says that
on 28 March he replied that they "did have a longhand copy of volume II of the Jdeen, as
well as transcriptions of other texts that would probably be useful to him" (15 l ). Merleau-
Ponty came to Louvain on I April and stayed until the 6th or the morning of the 7th. After
show ing him around, writes Father Van Breda,
phenomenological approach finds loaded with philosophical significance.

L 'Invitee repeatedly focuses attention on these two mundane activities which
illustrate not only the profound metaphysical differences between Francoise' s
and Xaviere' s characters, but also the subject/object bi-modality ofthe human
body.
The Dancer
The dancer, whose spectacle as pure body reminds us ofour incarnate mode
ofbeing-in-the-world, provides Beauvoir with a rich source ofillustration for
her theory ofembodied consciousness. Because the dancer's body manifests
itselfas a whole, it lends itselfto parody ofthe empiricist view ofthe body as
an assemblage ofmechanical parts. (In the novel's "dance ofthe machines,"
Beauvoir provides this description: "Slowly, Paule's arm came to life, the
slumbering machine was beginning to operate" (183/145). As with sex,
dancing revels in the incarnation of consciousness, making visible the
Merleau-Ponty accompanied me to the Franciscan Convent , where from the fall

of 1938 until the end of 1940 I kept in my cell the transcriptions made by
Husserl 's assistants. It was these transcriptions that he studied on his first
consultation of the manuscripts; the three unpublished texts of HusserI cited at the
end of the Phenomenology ofPerception belonged to this group of transcriptions.
(152)
The outbreak of war in September 1939 prevented Merleau-Ponty from returning to Belgium
to complete his study of Husserl manuscripts. But Merleau-Ponty was instrumental in
securing the transfer of a series of manuscripts from Louvain to Paris where they were
housed and he had access from April 1944 until 1948 (153).
Much less well known than Merleau-Ponty's 1939 reading of Husserl 's Jdeen II is his
1940-41 reading of Beauvo ir's She Came to Stay . Like Hussert's text, Beauvoir's book was
for some years available for study by favored aspiring philosophers before being published
in 1943. Sartre seems to have been the first reader, with extraordinary consequences for his
philosophy. (See Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul
Sartre: The Remaking ofa Twentieth-Century Legend, Hemel Hempstead UK: Harvester,
1993; New York : Basic Books, 1994; and Edward Fullbrook, "She Came to Stay and Being
and Nothingness", Hypatia , vol. 14, no. 4, October 1999.)
But Beauvoir also made her manuscript available to Merleau-Ponty. This is scarcely
surpris ing given that for Beauvoir he was a philosophical colleague of even longer standing
than Sartre . Her letter to Sartre on 23 December 1940 says that Merleau -Ponty is reading
her novel as she writes . He apparently continued with his reading of She Came to Stay away
from Beauvoir, because on 5 January 1941 she writes to Sartre that she has j ust returned
from a rende zvous with Merleau-Ponty, at which he paid her "vast compliments" on the first
half of her novel.
experiential unity ofconsciousness and body. ("Fran~oise looked at Xaviere

while she was dancing, her head thrown back, her face ecstatic"(26/23).)
Dancers experience and present to others their bodies as simultaneously object
and subject. ("Pierre 's body, though heavy, gave the impression of being
released from the laws ofgravity and controlled by invisible threads; he had
the miraculous ease of a marionette" (179/142-43).) In dance the
transcendence ofbodily consciousness is provocatively counterpoised to the
body 's immanence. (The belly dancer's "hips began to undulate, and her
stomach to ripple to the rhythm of the tambourine." It seemed to Xaviere
"almost as ifa demon were trying to tear itselffrom her body" (22/11) .) The
professional dancer exploits the body's subjectivity. ("She was miming a
storm: she was a hurricane personified; sharp, pulsating rhythms ... controlled
her movements" (193/154) .)
Every dancer illustrates another dimension of Beauvoir's theory of
embodied consciousness: the body projects its own spatiality. L'invitee is
loaded with incidents intended to demonstrate that space, like time, is not
experienced primarily as a universal or objective , or homogeneous
phenomenon. Through the consideration of concrete cases , Beauvoir's text
develops the analysis that space is essentially relative and personalized, with
human bodies engaged in projects acting as shifting reference points or North
Poles around which physical space is organized . ("The wide flowered skirt
whirled around her muscular legs" (353/284) .) The center of one 's
perspectives, the primary place from which one measures distances, and the
position from which subspaces and their contents are organized is one 's
psycho-physical body. It is this configuration oforiented spaces that Beauvoir
presents as the ambiguous sensory field, rather than the homogeneous space
assumed by rationalism and empiricism.
At the existential level, space is revealed not as an independent set of
points but as a series ofrelations to one's body and projects. " In the ordinary
way," writes Beauvoir, "the centre of Paris was wherever she [Francoise]
happened to be" (145/114) . These oriented spaces or fields of existence,
although subjectively generated, have an objective reality in the sense that
second parties sometimes perceive them, as when a friend visits Francoise's
room in her absence (86-88/64-65). Similarly, Plato 's parable of the cave
turns on its making the reader aware ofthe oriented space or field ofexistence
of the prisoners in the cave. From this famous case Beauvoir models
Francoise's confinement to a nursing clinic to reach her own conclusions.
The Clinic and the Cave
Francoise ceases to personify philosophy's traditional disregard for the body,

when mid-novel she falls seriously ill and awakens to find her sweat-drenched
pyjamas "glued to her body" (217/174). Whereas before she thought of
herself as pure transcendence, she now experiences herself as "j ust a body
shivering with fever, without strength, without speech, even without thought"
(220/176). "Nothing," she realizes, "depended on her will now," as ambulance
men arrive to remove her against her will to a nursing clinic (221/177).
And then the door closed .. .on the past. Francoise was hardly more than
an inert mass, she was not even an organic body. She was carried down
the stairs, head first, her feet in the air, nothing more than a heavy piece
of luggage that the stretcher-bearers handled in accordance with the laws
of gravity and their personal convenience . (222/177-78)
Outside a crowd gathers to watch her placed in the ambulance. She had
frequently seen such scenes. "But this time the invalid is me" (222/178).
After three days in the clinic, Francoise has adjusted to her new mode of
existence: a passive body to which things happen (poultices, injections,
temperature readings, X-rays), a drastically restricted sensory environment,
and an almost complete withdrawal of her powers of transcendence.
Metaphysically speaking, Francoise's new existence is an inversion of her
former one and a parody of'Xaviere' s. Her situation has reduced her to almost
pure Immanence.
She was just a patient , No. 31, just an ordinary case of congestion of the
lungs. The sheets were fresh, the walls white, and she felt within her a
tremendous sense of well-being. That was that! All she had to do was to
let herself go, to give in--it was so simple, why had she hesitated so? Now,
instead ofthe endless babbling ofthe streets, offaces, ofher own head, she
was surrounded by silence and she wanted nothing more. Outside, a
branch snapped in the wind. In this perfect void, the slightest sound
radiated in broad waves which could almost be seen and touched : it
reverberated to the ends of eternity in thousands of vibrations which
remained suspended in the ether, beyond time and which entranced the
heart more magically than music. On the night-table, the nurse had set a
carafe of pink, transparent orangeade; it seemed to Francoise that she
would never tire of looking at it; there it was; the miracle lay in the fact
that something should be there, without any effort being made, this mild
refreshment or anything else at all. It had come there without fuss or

bother, and there it was going to remain . Why then should her eyes cease
to be enchanted by it? Yes, this was precisely what Francoise had not
dared to hope for three days earlier: released, satisfied, she was lying in
the lap of peaceful moments turned in upon themselves, smooth and round
as shingle. (223-224/178-79)
The doctor, sounding Francoise' s thoracic cavity and "listening to her back,"
has her count aloud . He recommends injections "to stimulate the heart "
(224/179). For Francoise, temporality has come to be "moments turned in
upon themselves" because she has lost her capacity for transcendence and,
with it, control of her field of perception. Now Francoise sees the "future
spread out in the distance, smooth and white like the sheets" (225/180).
Beauvoir's story ofFrancoise ' s confinement to the clinic , which runs for
thirteen thousand words , is more than just a parable about the part played by
the body in transcendence, immanence, and perception. It also is a deliberate
play on the most famous allegory in philosophy, Plato's story of the cave .
Beauvoir's text goes to great , perhaps excessive, lengths to establish in the
philosophically informed reader's mind the connection between her tale and
the one which appears in Book vn of Plato 's Republic. Plato 's narrative,
which is told through the voice of Socrates, is intended to illustrate Plato 's
theory ofknowledge. He proclaimed the existence ofa world ofpure ideas or
universals, a reality in comparison to which all else was "a cheat and an
illusion," but to which only he and a few other chosen philosophers had
access . His problem was how to convince people who have access only to the
worlds of sense perception and reason that he was not pulling their leg. His
parable of the cave was his attempt to do so. It concerns prisoners who from
childhood have been kept in a cave and bound so that they cannot move,
cannot even turn their heads. Socrates asks us to
[p]icture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance
behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a
road along which a low wall has been built, like the screen which
marionette players have in front of them and above which they show the
puppets."
9. Plato , Republi c in The Collected Dialogues ofPlato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Hunt ington
Cairns (New York: Princeton University Press , 1961), 747.
People pass along the roadway, talking as they go, but the wall screens
them so that only the things they carry high up show over the parapet.
Because ofthe fire, these objects cast shadows on the cave wall toward which
the bound prisoners are facing. Similarly, the sounds made by people on the
roadway reverberate through the cave to reach the prisoners as echoes. Plato
argues that the prisoners, because they know nothing but this shadow
existence, will inevitably take the shadows and echoes to be reality.
Plato's narrative continues with an account ofthe unbinding ofone ofthe
prisoners. When first turned toward the firelight, he experiences pain ; his eyes
are too dazzled by the light to discern clearly the objects whose shadows he
is accustomed to seeing. Consequently, he regards his shadow world as more
real than the world of"real things" and the reports ofthose who claim to have
seen a higher reality as delusory. And when the prisoner is forcibly dragged
up to the cave's entrance and confronted with the light ofthe sun, his eyes are
so blinded that he is not able to see anything. But over time his eyes grow
accustomed to increasing brightness until he is able is see objects clearly in
full sunlight. Finally, he is able to look directly at the sun. Given Plato's dual
thesis that ultimate truth and reality exist and that they lie beyond embodiment
and reason in a world ofpure ideas, the meaning ofhis allegory is clear. The
eyes represent the mind, and the sun represents his world ofpure ideas .Those
who doubt reports ofthe higher realm do so because they "have not seen the
light." Plato's allegory of the cave is the basis of what has become the
standard defence for many religious beliefs, ideologies, and occult
philosophies.
"A prisoner," and "bound down" by illness in her own reverberant void,
Francoise, like Plato's prisoners, gladly accepts as reality her radically
impoverished environment (261,2311209, 185). Just as "there was a magic
circle round Montparnasse that Xaviere could never bring herself to cross,"
now Francoise' s perceptual world is bounded by the four white walls of her
room (227/182). Her only contact with the world beyond her void are the
reports brought to her by Pierre, Xaviere, and Gerbert. These shadows of"out
there, in Paris" have become more real to her than the reality which they
represent and which she now perceives to be "as chimerical as the black-and-
white world of the films" (237, 228/189, 182). Beauvoir so much wants her
philosophically literate readers to make the connection between her parable
and Plato 's that, with uncharacteristic awkwardness, she now inserts several
pages about puppet shows, including a technical description showing that her
puppets, like Plato's, are operated from below rather than above the stage
(234-36/187-89). Inserted in the middle ofthis puppet talk, is a description of

how rigidly restricted Francoise's movements are even within the confines of
her bed (235/188).
For three weeks Francoise has been continuously bed-ridden, her view on
the world rigorously defined by her immobilized body. The embodiment ofher
consciousness, including the part played by her body in the perception and
construction ofher world, has been demonstrated for her in a way that she is
not likely to forget. Now she is about to receive an especially trenchant lesson
in spatiality. The time has finally come for her to have her lungs X-rayed, "the
principal event round which all other events revolved" (225/180). Like the
cave prisoner dragged toward the light, Francoise's participation is strictly
passive. She is lifted and placed in an arm-chair. "It was strange to find
herself sitting: ... it made her somewhat dizzy" (239/191).
She looked with slightly shocked surprise at this door that was opening to
the outside world; normally, it opened to let people in; now it had
suddenly changed direction and was transformed into an exit. And the
room too was shocking , with its empty bed. It was no longer the heart of
the nursing-home [clinique], to which all corridors and stairs led: it was
the corridor laid with sound-deadening linoleum that became the vital
artery on to which a vague series of small cubicles opened. Francoise had
the feeling of having come from the other side of the world. It was almost
as strange as stepping through a looking-glass . (238/191)
Like the cave life ofPlato 's prisoners, Francoise' s nursing home existence is
something imposed on her, something which comes from her material loss of
freedom, rather than, like Xaviere, from her turning her back on it in bad
faith. But with her slow return to health, Francoise regains the freedom to
choose between immanence and transcendence and to expand her field of
perception, and the remainder of Beauvoir's parable centres on Francoise 's
readjustment to her new existential possibilities. In doing so it continues the
parallel with Plato's allegory of the cave.
Beauvoir's relation to Plato is ambivalent. This is illustrated by her
reworking ofhis allegory. Beginning with data similar to his, she arrives at the
opposite conclusions. Beauvoir's parable tells us that Francoise was wrong
to believe or to pretend that she was a disembodied subject who had achieved
a universal point ofview on the world. Her imprisonment in illness illustrates
the fact that the objects of her consciousness, including her reflections, are
dependent on her material condition. Truth and reality can not be separated
from the knowing subject, and the subject cannot be separated from its body.
Francoise 's "enlightenment" has brought her closer to her body and its
perceptions, rather than taken her away from them as with Plato's freed
pnsoner.
Both Plato and Beauvoir are concerned with the existence of multiple
realities. For Plato there is a definite hierarchy of realities existing
independently of the observer and culminating in the world of abstract
universals. Beauvoir, however, identifies a potential infinity ofrealities. She
sees real ity as a human invention, constructed from points of view, none of
which are universal. Nor are any two realities ever quite alike, because no two
individuals can ever stand in the same place at the same time. Nor is an
individual 's point of view stable: carrying someone to the other side of the
room after three weeks in bed takes them to the other side of their world and
through the looking glass to the point ofview ofanother. These, in Beauvoir' s
eyes, are the simple existential logistics of embodiment.
Both Plato and Beauvoir also locate an ethical dimension in their multiple
realities. Plato's hierarchy of reality doubles as one of ignorance and
understanding. He contrasts the "divine contemplations" ofphilosophers who
have made it to the realm of pure thought to "the petty miseries of men"
residing in the world ofsense-perceptions. Beauvoir has a rather different and
more complex view. Here we can only note that by Beauvoir' s ethical lights
it is good that Francoise recovered her health and it is good that Plato freed
at least one of his prisoners.
What Beauvoir does share with Plato is a literary style and a belief in the
efficacy of various literary devices for the philosophical enterprise. In
combining literary with philosophical brilliance, Beauvoir was defying the
methodological orthodoxy of her age--the austere, abstract and introverted
styli sties of the twentieth-century academy. Her protracted allusion to Plato
and his methods reminds one that what Merleau-Ponty identified as "a new
dimension of investigation" for philosophy is, in fact, an imaginative
recrudescence of a central and ancient tradition.'?
10. "Metaphysics and the Novel," 27.

Chapter 4
A Saraband of Imagery :
The Uses of Biological Science in Le deuxieme sexe
Elizabeth Fallaize
St. John's College, University of Oxford
Abstract: In this essay, I argue that the review ofscientific material

presented in the chapter ofLe deuxieme sexe entitled "The Data of
Biology " can be read in the light of Beauvoir's previously
completed work on myth. Her concern with the role ofmetaphor is
also shown to prefigure Fox Keller's feminist critique ofscience.
But it is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind

free from bias. The way in which questions are put, the points of view
assumed, presuppose a relativity of interest; all characteristics imply
values, and every objective description, so called, implies an ethical
background. I
The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth offemininity.
(II 9/_)2
Introduction
The chapter of Le deuxieme sexe entitled "The Data of Biology" has a

somewhat unenviable reputation. In the first place , its prominent position in
the volume - chapter I ofBook I - was no doubt partly responsible for the
way in which the work reached its English speaking audience, and continues
to reach it, through the translation ofa zoologist. The reasons for considering
Parshley's translation as inadequate are well known, and have been
convincingly demonstrated by Margaret Simons.' In the second place, the
I. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxieme sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), vol. I, 30; translated by
H.M. Parshleyas The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1953; Vintage, 1989),28 . Hereafter,
this text will be cited within the body of the text with the volume and page number of the
original followed by the page number of the English translation, e.g. (I 30/28).
2. My translation; omitted from English translation.
3. Margaret A. Simons. "The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What's Missing from
The Second Sex" in Women's Studies International Forum 6 (1983): 231-238.
67
w: O'Br ien and L. Embree (eds.), The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir; 67-84.
68 ELIZABETH FALLAIZE
chapter has been almost universally lambasted by later generations of

feminists. Toril Moi identifies a "rhetoric ofbiology" in Le deuxieme sexe,
deriving partly from Jean-Paul Sartre's masculinist rhetoric ofexistentialism,
which, in its " phallocentric equation of consciousness and maleness'"
undermines Beauvoir's feminist efforts. Moi captures the reaction ofmany a
female reader when she speaks of "the curiously alarmist intensity in
[Beauvoir's] long, harrowing descriptions of the horrors of menstruation,
pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and the menopause." Moi remains
nevertheless sympathetic to Beauvoir's "heroic struggle" to reconcile her
surreptitious materialism with Sartre's ontology.
Charlene Haddock Seigfried is less sympathetic.Not only does she criticise
the "negativity ofBeauvoir's assessment ofthe female organism" but she also
argues that Beauvoir makes a crucial mistake in failing to realise that not only
could the interpretations ofbiological facts by scientists be prejudiced against
women but that the facts themselves are also far from neutral. 6 She declares
that: "'The whole first chapter on biology is obsolete and irredeemably
flawed ."? Where Moi sees Beauvoir as the unwitting accomplice ofSartre,
Seigfried asserts that "the failure ofthe biology chapter in Le deuxieme sexe
results from Beauvoir's adopting the scientific positions ofher day rather than
criticising them. :" In this paper I want to address the issue ofwhat Beauvoir
is attempting to achieve in the chapter. Whilst agreeing with much of the
excellent work of Moi and Seigfried, I will be approaching the discussion
from a rather different direction and coming to some less dispiriting
conclusions. I will be referring principally to Seigfried, both because her
article, "Second Sex: Second Thoughts," is an important piece ofwork which
deserves further discussion, and because it tackles directly both the biology
chapter and the question with which I began my own thinking about this
chapter - the issue ofthe use Beauvoir made ofthe scientific record, and the
4. Toril Moi, "Existentialism and Feminism : The Rhetoric of Biology in The Second Sex"
in Oxford Literary Review 8 (1986) : 91.
5. Ibid., 90.
6. Charlene Haddock Seigfried . "Second Sex: Second Thoughts" in Hypatia Reborn : Essays
in Feminist Philosophy. Edited by A. AI-Hibri and M. Simons . Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990.
7. Ibid., 320 .
8. Ibid., 319 .
A SARABAND OF IMAGERY 69
ends to which she used it."
I shall disagree with Seigfried' s claim that Beauvoir was the victim ofthe
scientific discourses of her day. Whilst taking the view that she could only
elicit from the record what was there to be elicited, and that some ofthe more
technical and very newest aspects of contemporary research may not have
formed part of the record she consulted, I shall argue that Beauvoir did not
simply approach the scientific record with a blank mind and allow herselfto
be railroaded. Secondly, I shall argue that Beauvoir's biology chapter is not
"obsolete" but resonates with some contemporary developments in the
feminist critique of science. I agree with Seigfried that Beauvoir's chapter
does not prefigure the kind offeminist critique ofscience which Sarah Blaffer
Hrdy began developing in the 1970s, which focuses on demonstrating how
scientific data has been distorted by leaving females out of consideration in
research." On the other hand, Beauvoir's chapter does seem to me to
prefigure other lines of the feminist critique, especially that of Evelyn Fox
Keller. I I
Beauvoir's Biological Review
The famous central thesis of Le deuxieme sexe "One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman" (II 13/295), which establishes the distinction between sex
and gender, implies a fundamental rejection ofbiological destiny. In placing
her chapter on biology right at the start ofher study, Beauvoir would appear
to have the obvious intention ofclearing away the physiological arguments for
biological essentialism as the ones to which any opponent ofher thesis might
tum first. She therefore spends thirty pages or so reviewing the facts that the
contemporary state ofbiological science could make available to her before
firmly concluding that biological facts "cannot be denied - but in themselves
they have no significance" (I 73/66); "it is not upon physiology that values
can be based; rather, the facts ofbiology take on the values that the existent
9. I am grateful to Alan Grafen for his help with scientific aspects of this paper.
10. Sarah Hrdy. The Woman that Never Evolved. Cambridge : Harvard University Press ,
1981.
II . See Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985);
Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death : Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (London :
Routledge , 1992); and Refiguring Life: Metaphors ofTwentieth Century Biology (New York:
Colombia University Press, 1995).
bestows upon them"(175/68-69). Feminists have had relatively little difficulty

in accepting this conclusion; it is, rather, the "facts" that she presents before
coming to her conclusion that have caused the trouble. However, the point
which seems to have largely gone unremarked is that Beauvoir's conclusion
does not depend on the facts she has just reviewed. She makes a logical leap
of a kind which sometimes happens when one has one 's conclusion before
undertaking the documentation of the "facts." Moreover, a great deal of the
chapter does not deal at all with physiology, still less with the physiology of
women, but with biology - that is to say with behaviour and reproductive
strategies across the animal kingdom and with evolution.
Given, then , that Beauvoir's review appears in two ways unnecessary to
her conclusion, we can ask what her purpose is in carrying it out. I want to
propose a number ofanswers to that question, which will depend on a detailed
analysis of the nature and structure of her biological review. But before
beginning on that descriptive analysis, I shall first set out the basis of what I
consider to be the main answer to the question of what she is seeking to
achieve in her chapter. My argument will be that the chapter is not simply
about the biological evidence per se, but about what has been made of
biological data. Her central concern is not so much with science as with myths
and images, a concern which is central to her whole project in Le Deuxieme
Sexe, and which she insists upon right at the beginning ofthe biology chapter:
The wordfemale brings up in his [the male] mind a saraband of imagery

- a vast, round ovum engulfs and castrates the agile spermato zoon; the
monstrous and swollen termite queen rules over the enslaved males; the
female praying mantis and the spider , satiated with love, crush and devour
their partners; the bitch in heat runs through the alleys, trailing behind her
a wake of depraved odours ; the she-monkey presents her posterior
immodestly and then steals away with hypocritical coquetry; and the most
superb wild beasts - the tigress, the lioness, the panther - bed down
slavishly under the imperial embrace of the male. Females sluggish, eager ,
artful, stupid, callous , lustful, ferocious , abased - man projects them all
at once upon woman. (135 /35)
These images of the female are described by Beauvoir as "platitudes," but it

is precisely their mundane nature which makes them effective in maintaining
woman in her place in the male imaginary and thus in her social inferiority.
Much ofBeauvoir 's review ofthe female in nature is designed to identify and
counter the kind of castration-anxiety inducing images of woman that she
evokes in the passage just cited in the very first paragraph of her chapter. I
shall argue that this concern ofBeauvoir's helps to explain why the chapter
so often appears very negative in tone; I shall also argue that it places
Beauvoir's chapter in the mainstream ofcurrent feminist enquiry- indeed the
paragraph cited above has strong resemblances to Marina Warner's analysis
of male hysterical response to female sexual and reproductive powers, as
exemplified in the popular imagination by the film entitledArachnaphobia in
which a monstrous female spider engulfs the basement ofa house, palpating
rhythmically as she produces her multiple offspring. 12 A further issue raised
by the argument that Beauvoir' s central preoccupation here is with soothing
male anxieties is the question of the implicit addressee of the chapter, and
indeed of the book.
It is of course the case that, in the overall structure of argument of Le
deuxieme sexe, the biology chapter occupies a place which seems to make it
part of Beauvoir's consideration of "facts" rather than "myths", since Book
One, which bears the overall title of "Facts and Myths," is subdivided into
three parts, "Destiny," "History," and "Myths," and it might reasonably be
thought that "Destiny," in which the biology chapter appears, together with
"History," constitute the "Facts"part ofthe title. However, I would argue that
Beauvoir is in reality examining the interrelation between fact and myth in the
first two parts. It is also important to recall that the place which the biology
chapter occupies in the finished volume is not the place which it occupied in
Beauvoir's intellectual elaboration and first publication ofher project. From
its beginnings as an autobiographical project, in the autumn of 1946 ,
Beauvoir passed on to the more general consideration of women via a study
of myth; hence she writes in Laforce des choses : "Wanting to talk about
myself, I became aware that to do so I should first have to describe the
condition of woman in general; first I considered the myths that men have
forged about her through all their cosmologies, religions, superstitions,
ideologies and Iiterature.'?" At this stage she was still not planning a whole
book, but, as she began to think ofincluding a section on history, "Sartre told
me I should also give some indication of the physiological groundwork.':"
12. Marina Warne r. Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. London : Vintage, 1994.
13. Simone de Beauvoir, Laforce de chases (Paris : Gallimard, 1963), [258 ; transl ated by
Richard Howard as Force ofCircumstance (Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 195.
14. Ibid., 1258/195.

(We can note in passing that Sartre appears to have been thinking of
physiology and not ofbiology more generally.) She hesitated but eventually
decided that "my study ofthe myths would be left hanging in mid-air if people
didn 't know the reality those myths were intended to mask. I therefore plunged
into works ofphysiology and history. "15 Her emphasis here is on conveying
"the reality," butthe purpose ofso doing remains the countering ofthe myths.
A few pages later, in discussing the hostile reception the book gained on its
publication in France, she notes that she had numerous letters from women
who "have found help in my work in their fight against images ofthemselves
which revolted them , against myths by which they felt crushed.?" Her work
on myths was published in serial form in Les temps modernes in May, June
and July of 1948 and she finished the first volume in which the biology
chapter appears by the autumn." It is evident from an examination of the
chronology that the impulse to demystify and dismantle the myths predates the
reading of the scientific volumes which she undertook in the Bibliotheque
Nationale. The biology did not convince her ofthe myths - the myths drew
her on to biology.
I want to tum now to a detailed reading of the chapter. I have already
described the opening paragraph in which Beauvoir offers examples of the
"saraband of imagery" that she wishes to counter by an examination of the
biological reality.18 She sets out to examine the scientific data available with
two questions in mind: what does the female denote in the animal kingdom?
And what particular kind offemale is manifest in woman? She begins with the
fundamental question ofsexual differentiation and reviews the organisms in
which there is no differentiation - reproduction literally (or more literally)
involves the subdivision of a cell; in parthenogenesis there may be sexual
differentiation but the egg ofthe female develops without fertil isation by the
male. She remarks : "in many species the male appears to be fundamentally
15. Ibid., I 258/195
16. Ibid., I 268/202 .
17. Ibid., I 235/177.
18. "Saraband" is descr ibed in the Q.E.D. as a "slow and stately Spanish dance"; however,
the Robert French dictionary provides a different perspective, descr ibing it as a "danse vive
et fascive, d 'origine esp agnole" (a lively and lascivious dance of Spanish origin), and
drawing attent ion to the metaphorical usage "danser.faire fa sarabande" (to dance or do a
saraband), mean ing "faire du tapage" (to run amok). The disrupt ive, lascivious sense of the
French usage is clearly present in Beauvo ir's metaphor.
unnecessary" (I 37/36). She concludes that though, therefore, "biology

certainly demonstrates the existence of sexual differentiation," it cannot be
inferred at the level ofthe cell. At the level ofthe gametes (the sperm and the
egg) there is no necessary sexual differentiation either, since sperm and egg
may be produced by the same individual. Biologists have argued in the past
that where the sperm and egg are located in two distinct individuals that this
represents an evolutionary "advance"- a value laden term which Beauvoir
appears to accept, but in any case argues against, claiming that this is "the
most debatable evolutionary theorising" (138/37). The existence ofmale and
female is both an insuperable fact and a non-essential one, a claim asserted
more strongly in the original French than in the English translation."
Beauvoir then departs from the biological evidence to review what a
variety of philosophers have had to say about sexual differentiation -
Aristotle, Plato, St. Thomas, and Hegel have all commented on the
significance of sexual differentiation but none has been able to show its
necessity. She repeats, therefore, that: "The perpetuation ofthe species does
not necessitate sexual differentiation. .. . we can imagine a parthenogenetic or
hermaphroditic society" (140/39) She goes on to discuss what scientists and
thinkers have at various times held the respective role in reproduction ofthe
two sexes to be. Aristotle's notion that the foetus arose from the union of
sperm and menstrual blood led him to argue that the woman furnishes only
passive material whilst the male is the active principle, and Beauvoir sees this
idea being perpetuated up through Hegel. But, returning now to science and
to experiments carried out on parthenogenesis, Beauvoir detects the opposite
tendency in some scientists, who suggest that the function ofthe sperm is so
minor that it may not even be necessary at all for reproduction in the future .
"The answer" she acidly remarks "to many a woman 's prayer" (142/41) . Th is
aside reminds us that Beauvoir' s thoughts are never far from the social reality
of women 's lives, even when she is discussing scientific theory, and also,
incidentally, provides an example of the kind of remark which so infuriated
her French male readers, hyper-sensitive to the suggestion that the sex lives
of their female partners were less than blissful.
Despite the suggestion by some scientists that sperm may not be needed in
19. The French reads "la separation des individus en males et f emelles se presente done
comme un fait irreductible et contingent" where Parsh1ey's version reads " It would seem,
then , that the division of a spec ies into male and female individuals is simply an irreducible
fact of observation."
the future, Beauvoir still argues that, even though sexual reproduction in
humans is not strictly speaking necessary, there is no evidence that it can be
reduced to a simpler form of reproduction. Her conclusion is that human
reproduction involves sexual differentiation, even though we cannot explain
why. But the mere fact of sexual differentiation does not provide an answer
to the question of the meaning of being female . Beauvoir thus turns to an to
examination of what she calls the "concrete manifestations" (143/41) ofthe
different roles ofmale and female in sexual reproduction. But first , she inserts
an interesting note on the fact that biologists employ teleological vocabulary
"more or less finalistic language" (143/41) and that she will do the same. She
does not wish to participate in the debate between the mechanistic and the
purposive (or teleological) philosophies, but she does assert that "every
biological fact implies transcendence" and that "every function implies a
project" (I 43/41-42). 20
Beauvoirnow begins on the major sweep ofher exposition, examining the
nature and potential significance ofsexual differentiation level by level, and
it is in this exposition that we see the emphasis on countering myth emerge
strongly . She begins at the level ofthe gametes (sperm and eggs, respectively).
"In general the gametes are differentiated and yet their equivalence remains
a striking fact" (143/42), she asserts in the first paragraph. She shows that the
chromosomes which determine sex and heredity "are conveyed equally in egg
and sperm" (144/43). This equivalence allows her to dismantle two myths :
first the myth of female passivity created by the idea that the egg plays a
passive role and the sperm an active one - "the nucleus of the egg is a centre
ofvital activity exactly symmetrical with the nucleus ofthe sperm" (144/43).
The second that "the permanence ofthe species is assured by the female, the
male principle being ofan explosive and transitory nature."In fact the embryo
carries on the germ plasm of both mother and father.
She then examines at some length whether the notion of the passive
stationary egg "engulfing" and "castrating" the "free slender, agile " sperm has
any basis in biological fact. She puts the worst case by using vocabulary
which is highly anxiety-inducing to the male reader. She then insists that we
must not be misled by allegory. All that the evidence permits us to conclude
is that "the two gametes playa fundamentally identical role ; together they
20. Here the translation is actually in error and reads "the data upon which they are now
based " where it should read "a bizarre contrast with the scientific precision of the data upon
which they are simultaneously [ "dans Ie meme instant"] based ."
create a living being in which both ofthem are at once lost and transcended"
(146/45). It is only "in the secondary and superficial phenomena upon which
fertilization depends" that we find a presumably secondary and superficial
difference. For here "it is the male element which provides the stimuli needed
for evoking new life and it is the female element that enables this new life to
be lodged in a stable organism" (147/45).
The danger of allegories now becomes strikingly evident. "It would be
foolhardy indeed," she goes on, "to deduce from such evidence that woman's
place is in the home-but there are foolhardy people" (translation adapted).
Alfred Fouillee has done precisely this in his book Le temperament et le
caractere, in which he bases his whole notion ofmale and female roles upon
the roles ofegg and spermatozoon. Beauvoirnotes: "a number ofsupposedly
profound theories rest upon this play of dubious analogies" (translation
adapted), and she dismisses these theories of woman's place as "musings"
deriving from "misty minds" in which "there still float shreds of the old
philosophy of the Middle Ages" (147/46). However, for Beauvoir, even
though such theories form a bizarre contrast with the scientific precision of
the data upon which they are based, it is in fact upon that very data that they
nevertheless are constructed." This is probably the most striking example in
her chapter ofthe way in which biological "facts" have been read to produce
a myth which has a direct bearing on the social reality of women's lives .
Beauvoir has now established that the relation ofthe gametes cannot be the
model forrelations between the sexes. She proceeds on to the gonads (testicles
and ovaries), discussing the stage at which and the conditions under which
they develop. Her conclusion is that: "Numerically equal in the species and
developed similarly from like beginnings, the fully formed male and female
are basically equivalent. Both have reproductive glands--ovaries or testes-
in which the gametes are produced by strictly corresponding processes." Both
discharge products. "In these respects, then, male and female appear to stand
in a symmetrical relation to each other" (I 50/48) . At the level ofthe gonads,
just as at the level of the gametes, sexual differentiation cannot be said to
imply any significant difference in role. Along the way to this conclusion she
pauses to again draw attention to what has been made ofthe roles of sperms
and eggs : "it has sometimes been argued that the eggs, being large , consume
21. I am grateful to Debra Bergoffen for the pertinent suggestion that the way in which
Beauvoir connects sexual differentiation to individual autonomy can be linked to Freud 's
establ ishment of sexual and individual identity as co-extensive .
more vital energy than do the sperms, but the latter are produced in such
infinitely greater numbers that the expenditure ofenergy must be about equal
in the two sexes. Some have wished to see in spermatogenesis an example of
prodigality and in oogenesis a model of economy, but there is an absurd
liberality in the latter, too, for the vast majority of eggs are never fertilized"
(I 50-1/48). Another myth is thus firmly nailed on the head.
We now come to a significant shift in the argument as Beauvoir begins to
focus on what she calls "individuality." This seems to refer at one and the
same time to individuation of the sexes (the notion of an increasing sexual
differentiation as we proceed "up" what Beauvoir takes to be the natural
hierarchy ofthe species, the scala naturae) and, simultaneously, the margin
for individual activities outside reproduction in each animal, i.e. individual
autonomy. In some "lower" species the organism may be almost entirely
"reduced" to the reproductive apparatus. In an apocalyptic vision, somewhat
toned down in the Parshley translation, we are offered the spectacle of a
female: "hardly more than an abdomen, and her existence is entirely used up
in a monstrous travail ofovulation. In comparison with the male , she reaches
giant proportions; but her appendages are often mere stumps , her body a
shapeless sac, all her organs degenerated in favour of the eggs" (I 51/49 ;
translation adapted). In another passage a female parasite on a species ofcrab
is described as an "off-white sausage" (translation adapted from "mere sac")
enclosing millions ofeggs, but the male is even less autonomous - both are
described as "enslaved to the species. "
The picture is therefore grim, but it is grim all round. However, as we go
"up" the species "an individual autonomy begins to be manifested and the
bond that joins the sexes weakens" (I 52/49) . Here we see in an explicit form
the link Beauvo ir makes between sexual individuation and individual
autonomy, revealing the way in which she refuses to regard reproduction as
a meaningful activity on the individual level. For the moment both male and
female remain "strictly subordinated to the eggs," and therefore to the
reproductive process.
Several species are then examined in which it appears that the female has
the advantage - already in the parasites the male Edriolydnus "lives under
the shell of the female and has no digestive tract of its own , being purely
reproductive in function " (I 51/49). Now we come on to the male rotifers
which die immediately after copulation - the female lives on to develop and
lay the eggs ; the male termite who is tiny and has to attend the enormous
queen ; the males in "the matriarchal ants" nests and beehives who are
"economically useless and who are killed off at times"; the drone who
succeeds in mating with the Queen bee in flight but who then "falls to earth
disembowelled." Here is apparently the material for a female success story.
However, none of the males in these species are allowed in Beauvoir's
accounts to come off worse than the females -"The female lives longer and
seems to be more important than the male; but she has no independence -
egg-laying and the care ofeggs and larvae are her destiny" (I 53/50). Even the
famous praying mantis "much larger and stronger than the male" rarely does
dine on the male when she is free and in the midst of abundant food, she is
keen to reassure her reader. And "if she does eat him, it is to enable her to
produce her eggs and thus perpetuate the race" (I 53/50) .
Why does this not make the male mantis the "victim ofhis species"? Why,
in examining species in which the female appears to have the upper hand, does
Beauvoir never allow her superior status? The answer is not to be found in the
logical structure of Beauvoir's argument, I think , but in two other factors .
Firstly, it is her determination to deconstruct the images of sexually,
reproductively powerful females , evoked in the first paragraph ofher chapter,
which she instinctively feels will excite that "uneasy hostility stirred up in
[man] by woman " (I 35/35). As she reminds us here, the praying mantis
example has given rise to a "myth ofdevouring femininity-the egg castrates
the sperm, the mantis murders her spouse, these acts foreshadowing a
feminine dream of castration" (I 53/50). This is why she has to be
domesticated by Beauvoir into a friendly gentle creature who prefers not to
"dine on the male."
And secondly, it is herrefusal to allow female dominance ifthe dominance
is directed only towards the reproduction of the species. As Seigfried has
pointed out, there is a considerable irony here in the fact that modern
evolutionary biologists take contribution to successful reproduction as the
only factor in an individual's success-thus their arguments would have
allowed Beauvoir to conclude that the female ofmany species, including the
human, is more favoured than the male." However, Beauvoir always
positions the individual's needs as antithetical to those of the reproduction
process, accounting as important only those other functions which she says
are atrophied in the female. Seigfried argues that Beauvoir takes this line
because she always takes the transcendent individual as the source of all
value. To this should be added Beauvoir's valuing of sexual activity over
22. Seigfried, 312.

nurturing activity, even though both are, strictly speaking, part of the
reproductive process.
Thus when she turns to the male ant, bee, and spider, she credits them with
the beginnings of an individual existence: "In impregnation he very often
shows more initiative than the female , seeking her out, making the approach,
palpating, seizing, and forcing connection upon her. Sometimes he has to
battle for her with other males." Beauvoir concedes that he "often pays with
his life for his futility and partial independence" (I 54/51) but she manages in
the process to convert the male into a kind of freedom fighter against the
fascism of the species: "The species, which holds the female in slavery,
punishes the male for his gesture towards escape; it liquidates him with brutal
force" (I 54/51) . In fact Beauvoir could have chosen to attribute initiative and
individual existence to the female in, for example, her choice ofwhere to lay
her egg-but her valuation here ofthe male over the female derives largely,
1 would suggest, from her own high valuation of sexual activity and mate
choice, combined with her almost obsessive horror of pregnancy and the
associated chores ofchild rearing. Far from deconstructing images , Beauvoir
is here building images of her own, and with gay abandon. However, the
difference is that she does not imagine these images to be in danger offanning
the flames of male hostility against women.
Moving on to species she considers to be "up the evolutionary scale,"
Beauvoir next discusses birds , toads and fish; in these "higher forms oflife"
she is able to examine how the apportionment of looking after the young
varies , and it does vary considerably. She gives many examples ofspecies in
which fathers take charge ofthe offspring. But when we come to the "highest"
group , mammals, the group in which she identifies the highest degree of
"individualization," sexual initiative on the one hand and caring for the
resultant offspring on the other become apportioned, in Beauvoir' s account,
to the different sexes. "The female organism is wholly adapted for and
subservient to maternity, while sexual initiative is the prerogative ofthe male"
(156/52) .
Beginning "The female is the victim ofthe species", Beauvoir begins a
long account ofthe female mammal , "her whole life under the regulation of
a sexual cycle" (I 56/52), engaging in a "rut" which is "largely passive" and
in which the male takes the initiative or uses force. A great deal ofemphasis
is placed on the use offorce and the notion of violation by the male that the
biological evidence makes difficult to justify. She writes , for example, "But
it is in birds and mammals especially that he forces himself upon her, while
very often she submits indifferently or even resists him" (156/53). There is
scientific evidence ofresistance in some birds and mammals, but Beauvoir is
carried away by her own rhetorical force when she goes on: "Her body
becomes a resistance to be broken through, whereas in penetrating it the male
finds self-fulfillment in activity" (I 56/53). Copulation "invades her
individuality and introduces an alien element through penetration and internal
fertilisation"(l57/54) . This is clearly an impossibility in the case of birds,
where no penetration takes place-there are simply two holes that are lined
up. Worse is to come, however, with pregnancy. "The fundamental difference
between male and female mammals lies in this: ... the male recovers his
individuality intact" after the sperm separates from his body; after being "first
violated, the female is then alienated . .. tenanted by another, who battens upon
her" (I 57-8/54). After the birth she "regains some autonomy" (158/54) but
"normally she does not seek to affirm her individuality; she is not hostile to
males or to other females and shows little combatative instinct" (158/55).
Beauvoir has a footnote supplying some exceptions to this--elearly she was
uneasy about the argument that females do not show a combatative instinct,
and it is difficult to sustain from the biological evidence. It is known that
females can be extremely aggressive in defending their young, and this is a
fact which would undoubtedly have been available to her.
However, where her argument looks its weakest, in the light of recent
developments in biological science, is in the assumption that females do not
select their mates. Darwin provided anecdotal evidence offemale mate choice ,
to which Beauvoir refers, but at the time she was writing scientists would
have agreed with her that the female "accepts without discrimination whatever
male happens to be at hand" (I 58/55), though they may not have wished to
go as far as Beauvoir who enthusiastically writes that the "wedding finery"
exhibited by males is a pure manifestation ofthe "power oflife, bursting forth
in him with useless and magnificent splendour" (I 59/55). In fact what
Beauvoir takes to be an exhibition of "vital superabundance" and the male
domination of the mate selection process are crucial to her argument: "This
vital superabundance, the activities directed towards mating, and the
dominating affirmation ofhis power over the female in coitus itself-all this
contributes to the assertion ofthe male individual as such at the moment ofhis
living transcendence" (159/55). Vitality, aggressivity, lack ofpaternal instinct
all serve the male in Beauvoir's account in "his urge towards autonomy
which ... is crowned with success." She concludes the account thus: "He is in
general larger than the female , stronger, swifter, more adventurous; he leads
a more independent life, his activities are more spontaneous; he is more

masterful, more imperious . In mammalian societies it is always he who
commands" (I 60/56). It hardly seems at this point that there could be
anything further to be said about the future of women.
The final ten pages of the biological overview have been frequently
described and analysed by commentators. The way in which "the individuality
of the female is opposed by the interest of the species," the detail of her
"possession by foreign forces" is inexorably detailed. Beauvoir asserts, in
totally unscientific vein, that ofall females woman "most dramatically fulfills
the call ofdestiny and most profoundly differs from her male" (I 61/57) . Her
development into a female adult is described as a series ofcrises, in which the
species is continually "gnawing at her vitals" (I 67/63), brought to an end only
by yet "another serious crisis"(1 68/63), menopause. At the end of this
harrowing account, we are told that although the body "is the instrument of
our grasp upon the world, a limiting factor for our projects" (I 72/66), yet the
facts ofwomen's biological weakness "in themselves have no significance"
(I 70/66). And later "it is not upon physiology that values can be based ;
rather, the facts of biology take on the values that the existent bestows upon
them" (I 75/69) .
And so we are returned to that logical leap which 1 referred to in my
introduction, and to the question of why Beauvoir undertakes this kind of
review ofthe natural world . 1have already largely set out my argument about
her concern with myths of the sexually rapacious and reproductively
hyperactive female. The examples of the praying mantis, a myth which so
concerns her that she returns to it on no fewer than seven subsequent
occasions in the course of Le deuxieme sexe, the Queen bee, and the female
parasite on the crab are amongst the most striking. A second point derives
from the structure of her argument, the movement of which can broadly be
characterised as a "no-no-no-yes-but" structure, and from its often lurid
character. The "no-no-no-yes-but" structure goes as follows: no, the
contingent biological fact that our species is reproduced through sexual
differentiation and reproduction does not imply in itselfany specific role for
the female; at the level ofthe gametes, no, the sex-specific roles ofsperm and
egg do not imply any female specific role; at the level ofthe gonads (testicles
and ovaries) the answer is still no. It is when Beauvoir begins to focus on
"individuality" that the trouble begins . The "no" holds good for the "lower"
species, begins to shade into yes as we come to the ants, bees, and spiders and
turns into a resounding yes when we reach birds and mammals. The key
sentence in the tum to "yes" is the phrase: "The female organism is wholly
adapted for and subservient to maternity, while sexual initiative is the
prerogative of the male"(I 56/52).
The valuation ofthe sexual act over the nurturing act redirects the whole
argument. The more the argument continues to build towards yes, the more
lurid the vocabulary becomes. The argument spins into a frenzy almost
halfway through the chapter so that in the end roughly equal space is devoted
to "no" and "yes," with perhaps a slight advantage to the "yes." Why is "yes"
given such prominence, given the conclusion-that biology is not
destiny-towards which she is building?
There is no doubt an obsessive element, fuelled partly by an echo of
Sartre's distaste for the reproductive female body, as Toril Moi suggests, and
partly by a deeper pre-existing personal anxiety. A further factor ofa different
kind is the question of her intellectual style. Both she and Sartre have a
predilection for the "worst case" scenario . Thus in Pour une morale de
I'ambiguite, Beauvoir reflects on the nature of freedom when we are faced
with a locked door through which we wish to pass . Sartre writes a short story
examining the freedom ofa group ofmen condemned to death." Beauvoir's
conclusion that biology is not destiny could be thought to be best served by
deriving from the grimmest picture possible ofwomen's physical lives. She
looks at the worst that can be said, and still maintains her position that
biology is not determining. In addition, the no-yes-but structure is
recognisablya form ofthe oui-ma is-donc structure that underpins the these-
antithese-synthese shibboleth ofthe French education system and in particular
that ofthe elite gran des ecoles. Here the issue ofthe implicit addressee ofthe
text is again apparent. Beauvoir prepared for her success in the prestigious
agregation examination by working intensively with a small group ofmale
students from the Ecole Normale. Her intellectual circle was still principally
composed ofmen in the late 1940s; her privileged readers - those who read
and commented on her manuscript before publication - were men; the
dedicatee of the book is a man (Jacques Bost) . It is unsurprising that the
response of male readers should be uppermost in Beauvoir's mind .
23. "Le mur" in the collection Le mur (Paris : Gallimard, 1939).

Science and Feminism
In the final section of this paper I want to tum to the question of whether
Beauvoir's approach to biological science is at complete odds with current
developments in feminist thinking about science. Seigfiied criticises Beauvoir
for trying to maintain, as do many working scientists, a strict distinction
between the neutrality of biological facts and the distortive use or
interpretation of facts. She argues that Beauvoir "recognised only the
distortive use ofbiological facts by various interpreters and did not consider
whether the research programmes from which the biological facts emerged
were also distorted by these same cultural prejudices.':" To demonstrate how
feminist work after Beauvoir has carried forward the correction ofdistortions
within research programmes themselves, Seigfiied describes the interesting
work of the primatologist Sarah Hrdy, who seeks to redress the balance by
concentrating on 'female experiences. This has led Hrdy to discover "an
assert ive, lusty, dominance-orientated female who revels in reproductive
success,' :" a far cry from Beauvoir's weak and passive female animal,
overwhelmed by pregnancy. As Seigfried correctly remarks, Hrdy's
investigations have built on the legacy of woman and on the insistence of
reciprocity between women and men that have evolved out of Le deuxieme
sexe. If Hrdy is an intellectual daughter of Beauvoir she is nevertheless
working to the same broad purpose as Beauvoir by a different route .
However, Beauvoir has other intellectual daughters who have chosen
routes with closer affinities to her work. In Reflections on Gender and
Science, Evelyn Fox Keller casts her project in specifically Beauvoirian
terms. Placing a quotation from Beauvoir at the head of her introduction
("Representation ofthe world, like the world itself, is the work ofmen; they
describe it from their own point ofview, which they confuse with the absolute
truth") she goes on to write : "ifwomen are made rather than born , then surely
the same is true ofmen. It is also true of science . The essays in this book are
premised on the recognition that both gender and science are socially
constructed categories.t'" Her project is to enquire into how ideologies of
gender and science inform each other in their mutual construction, and a
24. Seigfried, 308.
25. Ibid ., 316 .
26. Op. cit., 3.

particular concern is that of metaphor, and the influence of metaphor on
scientific disciplines. She makes it clear that her aim is not to dethrone science
but to reclaim it, to make it a human rather than a masculine domain (again
striking a very Beauvoirian note) .
Seven years later in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death. Essays on
Language, Gender and Science, Keller writes rather ruefully that her project
to reclaim science rather than rejecting it altogether can look naive in the
I990s-"yet," she writes, "I am not about to recant. " 27 She now accepts that
she has lost her initial confidence that if some beliefs were mythical, others
were myth-free; she now believes that nature is only accessible to us through
representations and representations are necessarily structured by language,
and hence by culture. At the same time, those representations enable us to
intervene in the world and change it. Language remains central because it both
reflects and guides the development of scientific models and methods. The
essays which follow in her second book analyze the language of secrets and
the various uses to which the metaphor ofthe secret can be put. Most recently
of all, in Refiguring Life. Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology, Keller
continues her exploration of the metaphors that allow scientific work to
proceed, showing how the two interact to define the realm of the possible in
science. In her introduction she draws on the very metaphor ofsperm and egg
discussed by Beauvoir:
Consider for example the ways in which the process of biological

fertilisation has been figured. Twenty years ago that process could
effectively and acceptably be described in terms of the Sleeping Beauty
myth (for example, penetration, vanquishing, or awakening of the egg by
the sperm) precisely because of the consonance of that image with
prevailing sexual stereotypes (see Martin 1991). Today a different
metaphor has come to seem more useful and clearly more acceptable; in
contemporary textbooks fertilization is more likely to be cast in the
language of equal opportunity (defined for example as "the process by
which egg and sperm find each other and fuse" [Alberts et al. 1990:868]).
What was a socially effective metaphor twenty years ago has ceased to be
so, in large part because of the dramatic transformation of ideologies of
gender that has taken place in the interim."
27. Op. cit., 3.
28. Refiguring Life. xii.

Both this dramatic transformation ofthe ideologies ofgender and the attention
to the metaphors of biology clearly owe much to Simone de Beauvoir, who
discussed the sperm and egg metaphor in the language of equal opportunity
not in the 1990s or even in the 1970s but in the late 1940s.
I have argued in this paper that one of Beauvoir's main purposes in
conducting a highly selective review ofbiological data in the first chapter of
Le deuxieme sexe was to enable her to tackle a set of metaphors and myths
about the female pertaining to the world of nature which she felt bedevilled
serious discussion of what role women could play in society and which, in
their emphasis on a monstrous and crushing femininity, do women no service
in their dealings with men . I have also tried to show that her concern with the
role ofmetaphor in biological science anticipates and is broadly in line with
the kind offeminist work on science being carried out by Evelyn Fox Keller.
It is undoubtedly the case that her chapter does echo "Same's masculinist
rhetoric ofexistentialism" (Moi), does appear to be implicitly addressed to the
male reader, does reveal her own valuation of sexual activity over nurturing
activity, and does assume that scientific data is in itself neutral (Seigfried).
However, quite apart from the question of the highly selected evidence she
chooses to present, many of her comparisons between the species and her
arguments about autonomy and individualisation are her own . They are not
present in any scientific record.
The historian Thomas Laqueur writes in Making Sex: "almost everything
one wants to say about sex-however sex is understood- already has in it
a claim about gender."29 He concedes that there "is and was cons iderable and
often overtly misogynist bias in much biological research on women. .. . But
it does not follow that a more objective, richer, progressive, or even more
feminist science would produce a truer picture of sexual difference in any
culturally meaningful sense. "30 Beauvoir may have been engaged on an
impossible task, and certainly a culturally bound one, in trying to disengage
myth from reality in the realm ofbiological data about sexual difference. But
her biology chapter must certainly take some ofthe credit for the factthat "the
women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity."
29. Thomas Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Genderfrom the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), 11.
30 . Ibid., 21-22.
Chapter 5
The Body as a Basis for Being:

Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Suzanne Laba Cataldi

Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville
Abstract: Beauvoir's understanding ofthe process of 'becoming a

woman ' is related to the ambiguities, abilities, and disabilities of
embodiment. Merleau-Pony 's notion ofan ambivilant consciousness
is applied to the question of woman's complicity in her own
oppression. Beauvoir's fictional accounts of women lacking in
sexual desire are connected to her views offemale eroticism in Le
deuxieme sexe and to Merleau-Ponty's notion of intimate
perception.
Introduction
This essay focuses on the existential phenomenologies ofSimone de Beauvoir

and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, using "the body as a basis for Being" as a site
of common philosophical ground. More specifically, I show how Beauvoir
establishes the relevance of existential embod iment in her feminist critique of
gende r, an area about which Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology has little ,
explicitly, to say.
Merleau-Ponty understands existence as "the very process whereby the
hitherto meaningless takes on meaning," a process that "realizes itself' in the
body. As a site or source of significance, the body is a basis for Being.
Beauvoir also interprets the body on a basis of existence and focuses on
meanings ofembodiment that cannot be reduced, except through abstraction,
to the biologically given. 1 She analyzes embodiment through its realization or
inscr iption of gender: the body as a basis for becoming woman.
Because of its connection to the concept of freedom , Existentialism
privileges the notion ofbecoming. Beauvoir disturbs this privileged sense of
becoming, and Merleau-Ponty's sense of the lived body as an ability, in the
1. Simone de Beau voir, Le deuxieme sexe, 2 vols. (Paris : Gall imard, 1949), vol. I, p. 73.
Translated as The Second Sex by H.M. Parshle y (New York: Vintage, 1989),34. Hereafter,
this text will be cited with in the body of the text with the volume and page number of the
original followed by the page number of the English translat ion, e.g. (112 /34).
85
w: O'Bri en and L. Embree (eds.), The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, 85- 106.
© 200 1 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
86 SUZANNE LABA CATALDI
following passage and in her famous statement, "One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman" (II 13/267). "Woman is not a completed reality, but
rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with
man; that is to say, her possibilities should be defined.. . in the human species
individual 'possibilities' depend upon the economic and social situation" (I
73-74/34-35). She describes how the process ofbecoming a woman falls short
of a human standard ofambiguity she and Merleau-Ponty espouse: the body
as both a transcendent subject for me and an immanent object for others.
Embodiments of Freedom and Oppression
The body as a basis ofsubjective existence - as a basis for being a 'self' -

is a sense derivable from Merleau-Ponty's association of embodiment with
consciousness. In his view the body-subject is transcendent - intentionally
directed toward the world and not (simply or as objects are) a piece or a part
ofit. Beauvoir agrees with this key aspect ofMerleau-Ponty's thought, since
she says, in her review of Phenomenologie de la perception: "In the pages
that are perhaps the most definitive of the entire book, Merleau-Ponty
shows . .. that it is impossible to consider our bodies as objects, even as
privileged objects."? From the hindsight of her own phenomenology in Le
deuxieme sexe, however, which is devoted to showing in great detail how it
is possible for women to consider our bodies as objects, this praise is peculiar.
It is less peculiar ifwe read Beauvoir as suspending preconceived notions
of what is and is not possible - in this case the assumption of body-
subj ectivity - to make some sex-based comparisons and to make her case for
women to re-claim the transcendent aspects of embodied existence
undermined by "that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity"
(Beauvoir 1989, xvix).
At the outset of Part IV of Le deuxieme sexe, "The Formative Years,"
Beauvoir observes, for example, that "In girls as in boys the body is first of
all the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that makes possible the
comprehension ofthe world" (II 13/267) . However, due to the imposition and
impediments of gender socialization, it is all down hill from there . The
formative years are deformative years, with respect to subjective embodiment.
The same demands and expectations are not placed upon girls as are placed
2. "La Phenomenologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau -Ponty. Les temps moderne s

I (November 1945): 364.
BODY AS BASIS FOR BEING 87
upon boys. A girlleams to view her bodily functions and appearance with
shame , she is doubled up with a doll as an "alter ego" and as a child, which
not only powerfully impresses her "vocation" upon her, but also, since "on the
one hand, the doll represents the whole body, and on the other hand , it is a
passive object" prompts her "to identify her whole person [with it] and to
regard this as an inert given object " (II 25/278) .
She is treated like a live doll and is refused liberty. Thus a vicious circle is
formed; for the less she exercises her freedom to understand, to grasp and
discover the world about her, the less resources will she fmd within herself,
the less will she dare to affirm herself as a[n embodied] subject. (II 27/280)
Beauvoir can be read as inverting Merleau-Ponty's novel conception ofthe

body as intentional and transcendent, "the body no longer conceived as an
object of the world but as our means of communication with it,"! by
describing how, in patriarchal perception and representation, a woman's
"body is not. .. the radiation of a subjective personality, but ... a thing sunk
deeply in its own immanence ... " As she says, "it is not for such a body to
have reference to the rest ofthe world" (I 257/157) . Women's bodies may be
encumbered with restrictive clothing, styles, jewelry, makeup, and rules of
propriety more than men 's are, e.g., and these
are often devoted to cutting off the feminine body from any possible
transcendence : Chinese women with bound feet could scarcely walk, the
polished fmgemails of the Hollywood star deprive her of her hands; high
heels, corsets ... were intended less to accentuate the curves of the feminine
body than to augment its incapacity. (I 257-58/158)
Notwithstanding such restrictions, body-subjects cannot actually be made

into body-objects. And, despite her divergence from Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir
can still be read as acknowledging that bodies, including the bodies of
females, ought to be understood as he conceives them - that is, primarily as
a transcendent means of communication with the world .
Another point of comparative difference between Merleau-Ponty and
Beauvoir on the issue ofsubjective embodiment is her contention that "Man,"
3. Maurice Merleau-Pon ty, Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).

Translated as The Phenomenology ofPerception by Colin Smith (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962), 92.
ignoring his own anatomical peculiarities, "thinks ofhis body as a direct and
normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends
objectively, whereas he regards the body ofa woman as a hindrance, a prison,
weighed down by everything peculiar to it" (I 14/xxi-ii).
What he thought of women's bodies, 1do not know, but Merleau-Ponty
does think ofthe perceptual body-subject as directly and normally connected
with the world; and perception on the model of intercourse, as a sort of co-
incidence between two sides of reality: "a coition, so to speak, of our body
with things.?' Beauvoir's account of women's mystification shows how the
process ofbecoming a woman interferes with this connection. Made to believe
that "to see things clearly is not her business" and associated with immanence
or the side of the sensed, a woman may stop sensing for her self, may fail to
"grasp. . . the reality around her," accepting masculine authority on blind or
ignorant faith (11423,425/598, 600).
Even when women do attempt to grasp the world directly, our endeavors
are repeatedly stymied in a way that men's are not. We are discriminated
against. More is stacked against us; and our perception of these "outside"
obstacles may reversibly rebound on our bodies. 5 Influenced through a sense
of frustration to consider or experience her embodiment as an obstacle, a
woman may herselfbe led to perceive her body's abilities to be more limited
than they would normally or otherwise be - that is, in a situation of true
social/political/economic equality.
The Loss and Recovery of Voice
'The body as expression, as speech' is thematic in Merleau-Ponty's

philosophy and is one ofthe best-known chapters ofhis Phenomenologie de
fa perception . It is preceded by a chapter on sexuality, where we find
examples of unexpressed or silenced bodies. Beauvoir found in Merleau-
Ponty's Phenomenologie "some rich suggestions, particularly about the
question of sexuality and that of language. :" Sexuality is taken up in the
following section. Here we focus on the ability to speak.
4. Ibid., 370/320.
5. Beauvoir doesn't actually say this. I am extrapolating from Merleau-Ponty's account of the
' reversibility' of Flesh, explained below .
6. "La Phenomenologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty," 367 .

In the Phenomenologie, Merleau-Ponty methodically examines pathology
in order to throw normal bodily and perceptual phenomena into relief. As
mentioned earlier, the body is primarily an ability in his view (an 'I am able'
or an ' I can '), and bodily disabilities are of immense interest to him and
essential to his method of disclosing certain phenomena of perception.
The method ofexamining disabilities is also essential to Beauvoir's project
of disclosing certain phenomena of oppression. That is, we may interpret
Beauvoir as strategically employing a method analogous to Merleau-Ponty's
and as aiming in its employment at the same sort of end, viz., some account
of normal (human/ambiguous) bodily experience. The difference between
them is that the bodies Beauvoir examines are not physically or
neurophysiologically impaired as are many ofthe bodies that Merleau-Ponty
examines. Instead, Beauvoir's phenomenology of female experiences,
perceptions, and possibilities sets forth a complex and studious account of
disadvantaged bodies - of bodies whose' disabilities' or 'pathologies' are
attributable more to women's situation, to our social and historical dis-
empowerment, than to our biologies. 7 Beauvoir can be read as exploiting the
7. I hope it is clear that I do not agree with readings of Beau voir that imagine her to be
saying that women's bodies are naturally abnormal or essentiall y patholog ical. It also seems
to me unfair (and j ust plain wrong) to charge Beauvo ir as some critics have with adopting
a mascu linist or misogynist view of female bodies. She does show how a woman may
incorporate the sexism in her surroundings , but that is something different (Cf. Ward 1995).
To read Beauvoir's descr iptive identifications of woman's bodies with passivity or
immanence as implying "that women have to somehow rise above their bodies to achieve
transcendence and thus fulfillment as a truly human existence" (Arp 1995, 164) is, I think,
to miss the mark entirely. For such criticism (which is not, by the way, Arp's own)
completel y overlooks the fact that for Beauvoir, as for Merleau-Ponty, bodies are linked to
transcendence; and transcend ence is (only) achievable through (subjective or lived)
embodiment. This is the whole point of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of embodiment and
phenomenology of percept ion - that a body is, in its (human) being, ambiguous - and the
whole force of his objection against survo/ent and disembodied thought. Because of the
body's connection with transcendence and its grounding in contingent enculturation and
variable facticity, there is no one, fixed, essential or ahistorical sense of (any body's)
embod iment.
In any event, I think that critics have tended to read too much of Sartre's and not enough
of Merleau-Ponty's existentialism into Beauvoir's negative depict ions of female
embodiment. For example , in her popular text, Feminist Thought, Rosemarie Tong heads
and positions her entire discuss ion of Beauvoir 's Second Sex against the ' Backdrop' of
Sartre 's L 'etre et neant (Tong 1989, 196). She also 'accounts ' for Beauvoir's negative
depictions of female embodiment with (erroneous) assumptions and (hasty) generali zations
like the following: "The body is a problem within the existentialist framework insofar as it
ambiguity in the French expressionpouvoir in a way that Merleau-Ponty, who

(a-politically) applies this expression to the body, does not.
In his chapter on sexuality, Merleau-Ponty examines the case of a young
woman whose existence is "tied up" and arrested in bodily symptoms: She
loses her appetite and the use of her speech when she is forbidden to see her
lover; her voice and appetite return when the prohibition is lifted and they are
reunited.
The young woman who loses her voice lost her voice before, when as a
child she nearly died. In Merleau-Ponty's interpretation, this trauma was
translated into loss of speech (a disturbance of an active bodily function
intimately linked with communal existence) because ofthe way it "violently
interrupted co-existence, and threw her back on her own personal fate."" The
young woman loses her voice again, that is, her symptoms reappear because
her family's prohibition metaphorically restores the earlier situation, that of
interrupted co-existence and being shut off from the future .
Loss of speech, then, stands for the refusal of co-existence...The patient

breaks with relational life ... More generally .. .with life itself: her inability to
swallow food arises from the fact that swallowing symbolizes the movement
of existence which carries events and assimilates them; the patient is unable ,
literally, to 'swallow' the prohibition which has been imposed upon her,"
We may think through this example ofwomen in the Beauvoirian process

ofbecoming woman as suffering numerous prohibitions and traumatic breaks
with relational life and desired futures that may symptomatically/
systematically carry over into adult life. Historically, women have been
silenced to such an extent that many of us still feel tongue-tied - as though
we cannot speak out, or against our oppression.
Can we speak ofchoice or collusion here, orrecovery from these traumas?
Just how difficult is women's situation? Do adult women not know better than
to be stifled and silenced by unfair prohibitions and restrictions? (Remember
the character/caricature of Edith Bunker - and the way that Archie would
is a stubborn and unavoidable object limiting the freedom of each conscious subject" (Tong
1989, 212) . Th is is obviously and emphatically not true of Merleau-Ponty's existential
framework, and this is a 'backdrop' that Beauvoir explicitly adopts .
8. Phenomenologie, 187/161.
9./bid.,187/160-01.
command her to "Stifle herself,"!") Can't women just "get over" our
indoctrination to "passivity" and simply re-claim our voice, re-assert the
original sense of our bodies as the radiation of a subjectivity? - our bodies
as a basis for freedom?
The question ofresistance and women's complicity in her own oppression
is controversial in Beauvoir scholarship. I I Beauvoir is sometimes accused of
blaming victims . She is criticized for unjustly holding women responsible for
our own losses of liberty, for charging women with bad faith. There is
something to this criticism. However, because bad faith is connected to
freedom and because freedom is not for Beauvoir, any more than it is for
Merleau-Ponty, an all or nothing affair," we need to be careful about what
Beauvoir might intend by it, and not simply suppose that she is 'following'
Sartre's version (see Weiss, this volume). Consider how, in the following
passage, Beauvoir vacillates on the question of choice applied to women:
If a child is taught idleness by being amused all day long and never being led
to study, or shown its usefulness , it will hardly be said, when he grows up,
that he chose to be incapable and ignorant; yet this is how woman is brought
up, without ever being impressed with the necessity of taking charge of her
own existence. So she readily lets herself come to count on the protection,
love, assistance , and supervision of others, she lets herself be fascinated with
the hope of self-realization without doing anything. She does wrong in
yielding to the temptation ; but man is in no position to blame her, since he
has led her into the temptation. (II 566/721)
Beauvoir's language of"letting herselfbe led" into temptations indicates

a definite ambivalence on the question ofchoice and responsibility.13 Merleau-
Pon ty's discussion ofan ambivalent consciousness and the bad faith enta iled
in los ing one 's voice may help to elucidate it.
10. In the popular sitcom from the I970s, All in the Family .
II . See Kristana Arp, "Beauvoir's Concept of Bodily Alienat ion" in Feminist Interpretations
ofSimone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret Simons(University Park: Pennsylvania State Universit y
Press, 1995), 169-17 I.
12. "There is.. . never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and
never bare consc iousness ," Phenome nologie, 517/453.
13. That Beauvoir remained amb ivalent on this issue can be seen in her May I I, 1982
interview with Margaret Simons, "Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir" in Revaluing
French Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana Univers ity Press, 1992), 39-40 .
Merleau-Ponty conceives ofthe loss ofvoice along psychoanalytic lines

as an instance of a body 's ability to repress its own abilities. As an act of
forgetfulness, repression represents a consciousness that has become
ambivalent- one that "knows" enough to resist certain memories but still can
not be described as a deliberate refusal to declare what one knows. He
attributes the possibility for such a consciousness to the body 's ability to exist
in a mode ofenveloping generality, a generality that allows us to "have" some
bodily know-how, but "j ust enough to hold it at a distance from US.,,14 This is
what happens to the girl who loses her voice. She
does not cease to speak, she 'loses' her voice as one loses a memory ... .
lost. ..insofar as it belongs to an area of my life which I reject. .. I keep the
memory at ann's length, as I look past a person whom I do not wish to see.
Yet.. .though the resistance certainly presupposes an intentional relationship
with the memory resisted, it does not set it before us as an object; it does not
specifically reject the memory. It is directed against a region of our
experiences, a certain category, a certain class of memories... .Thus, in
hysteria and repression, we may well overlook something although we know
of it, because our memories and our bodies, instead of presenting themselves
to us in singular and determinate conscious acts, are enveloped in generality. IS
The loss or diminishment of a certain freedom of behavior on the part of

women is understandable in this context; that is, not simply as an (externally-
imposed) suppression but also as an (internally-sanctioned) repression, a
rejection or forgetful avoidance ofa general region ofexperience , ofwhatever
is labeled or sociall y constructed as "masculine." Thus a woman 's
consc iousness may be described as ambivalent (simultaneously active and
pass ive) as she "lets herself be led" to incorporate the oppression in her
situation by taking it up, by living or acting out the restrictions of femininity
in her own behavior.
According to Beauvoir, a woman is not entirely responsible and so cannot
summarily be blamed for this renouncement of freedom. She believed that
most women are "baffled" and states that only a "clear-headed person who
decides upon his [sic] acts in full knowledge of the situation is to be curtly
14. Phenomenologie , 189/162.
15. Ibid ., 188-89/161-62.

approved or blamed" (I 371/243). And according to Merleau-Ponty's

understanding of ambivalent consciousness:
Of course we may go on to speak of hypocrisy or bad faith. But then it will be

necessary to draw a distinction between psychological and metaphysical
hypocrisy. The former deceives others by concealing from them thoughts
expressly in the mind of the subject. It is fortuitous and easily avoided . The
latter is self-deceiving through the medium of generality, thus leading fmally
to a state or a situation which is not an inevitability, but which is not posited
or voluntary (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 162_3).16
It appears then that the self-deception involved in gendered structures of

behavior may be thought as a type ofmetaphysical hypocrisy - a form ofbad
faith that depends on a body's 'envelopment in generality ' and its ability to
forget.
Merleau-Ponty contends, additionally, that "To have lost one's voice is not
to keep silence: One keeps silence only when one can speak.?'? In a
meaningful sense then , a repressed body can not transcend or express itself
beyond the state ofits repression - not even in the form ofa bona fide refusal
to speak. (An anorectic cannot go on a hunger strike, for instance, to protest
her condition any further than her loss of appetite already bespeaks.)
However, while the loss ofspeech (or appetite) is not a deliberate or voluntary
shut-down ofbodily functioning, neither is it a physiological or biologically-
based paralysis - as is evidenced in Merleau-Ponty's case study: When the
young woman is "left free by her family" to do as she pleases, she remarkably
recovers. Her body comes back to life. She can talk, she can eat. She begins
once again to live her body in its transcendent dimensions. When her situation
is altered so that external restrictions are removed, we find the "momentum
of. .. existence toward others, toward the future , toward the world.. . restored
as a river unfreezes.?"
Just so, the enactment offemininity may be, in Beauvoir' s view, something
less than a deliberately chosen act, an outright or explicit refusal ofautonomy
(since it is an environmentally-imposed and generalized repression, and one
may refuse autonomy only when one is free), but it is still not reducible to a
16. Ibid., 190/162-63 .

17. Ibid., 188/161.
18. Ibid., 192/165.
causal determination to behave in certain ways and not others. In this

repressed mode of being-in-the-world, one forgets in such a way that we
simultaneously do and do not have access to our own bodily abilities. Our
intentionality is inhibited; and we experience the knowledge we "have" as a
restriction or in the manner of a deprivation.
This interpretation ofgendered becoming leaves some sense ofcollusion
or complicity intact without blaming victims and, since forgetting is a basis
for remembering, it also leaves open some avenue for recovery. Despite the
difficulties in doing so, women who are partially emancipated can regain the
freedom ofmovement necessary to retrieve bodily abilities and possibilities
that have been "tied up" - suppressed and repressed in the past. This is the
liberating light at the end ofthe tunnel ofbecoming woman - the conclusion
we can read in Le deuxieme sexe:
The fact is that oppressors cannot be expected to make a move of gratuitous

generosity ; but.. .men have .been led, in their own interest, to give partial
emancipation to women: it remains only for women to continue their ascent .. .
It seems almost certain that sooner or later they will arrive at complete
economic and social equality, which will bring about an inner metamorphosis.
(II 573-74/729)
One further observation of Merleau-Ponty's, on the body as a basis for

freedom, may be worth mentioning in connection with Beauvo ir 's feminism;
namely, his insight that "Even what are called obstacles to freedom are in
real ity deployed by it." He means by this that "obstacles have no meaning for
anyone who is not intending to surmount them, for a subject whose projects
do not carve out .. . from the uniform mass ofthe in itself.. . a significance in
things. ,,1 9 To perceive the obstacles in our way as obstacles in our way means
that we are able to imagine the possibility ofsurpassing them ; and this itself
is an act of transcendent freedom, a step in the right direction, of "getting
over" them.
Intimate Perception and the Dis-abling of Desire
For Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, the ambiguity of human existence is

poignantly and rudimentarily disclosed in erotic desire . Erotic experience
19. Ibid ., 498/436.

leads to an awareness of ourselves as simultaneously autonomous and

dependent," simultaneously "flesh and spirit, as the other and as subject" (II
168/402). Merleau-Ponty understands sexuality as an original intention;
Beauvoir's understanding of eroticism is foundational to her ethics."
In their analogous methods of examining pathology in order to throw
normal experience into relief, both thinkers also provide existential accounts
of sexually dysfunctional or disabled bodies: Merleau-Ponty by interpreting
a case of male impotency as a breakdown in the erotic structure of "intimate
perception" and Beauvoir through examples offemale frigidity meant to show
how women's eroticism "reflects the complexity ofthe feminine situation" (II
131/372). In this section, I relate this complexity to that intimacy.
In his study ofsexuality, Merleau-Ponty claims that objective perceptions
have embedded within them a more intimate perception, whose significance
is "secreted" through a certain veiling ofperception and blindly apprehended
in the opacity ofembodiment. Ordinarily, intimate perception is experienced
through the intimations ofdesire, which "comprehends blindly by linking body
to body.?" To illustrate his point about intimate perception and its correlation
to lived embodiment, Merleau-Ponty examines the case of Schneider, a man
who has suffered a brain injury" that affects his sexual functioning. Schneider
is impotent. He has lost all interest in sex.
In Merleau-Ponty' s view, Schneider's impotence is not entirely explicable
in terms of an organic lack in Schneider's objective body. Merleau-Ponty
interprets Schneider's impotence as a perceptual deficit that affects
Schneider's lived body. Schneider does not appear to "grasp" what he is
supposed to do when presented with sexual situations. Due to a breakdown in
the erotic structure of Schneider's perceptions, he can no longer perceive, in
them , their special, sexual significance, and so he fails to follow through or
act on sights or touches that are intended to sexually stimulate him. Schneider
"doesn't get it" - their erotic significance, that is. He cannot conform his
behavior or adapt his body to sexual cues or promptings because he (literally)
20./bid., 195/167.
21. Debra B. Bergoffen's excellent study of Beauvoir 's 'muted voice' clarifies this
connection . The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic
Generosities . New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.
22. Phenomenologie , 183/157.
23. A shell splinter at the back of his head.

has "lost sight of' and "has no feel for" the erotic . Nothing is
(perceptibly/significantly) there to serve as a basis for sexual functioning.
From Merleau-Ponty's existential perspective then, the nature of
Schneider's disability is the loss ofa certain significance due to the loss of a
certain power ofperception. Sexual performance depends on this power, and
Schneider is, in this important 'regard,' impotent. What is damaged or
disturbed in the case of Schneider is not simply his organic brain or
anatomical body, but a whole field of sexual possibilities, possibilities that
cannot be realized because he cannot intimately perceive them.
In a brief discussion of female frigidity and citing Stekel (as Beauvoir
frequently does in Le deuxieme sexe), Merleau-Ponty states that it is
scarcely everbound up with anatomical or physiological conditions, but that

it expresses in most cases a refusal of orgasm, of femininity or of sexuality,
andthis in tum expresses the rejection of the sexualpartnerand of the destiny
whichhe represents."
In Beauvoir's view, female sexuality "not only involves the whole nervous
system but also depends on the whole experience and situation of the
individual" (II 132/373) .The number ofreasons she cites for female frigidity
are, on the whole situational-e.g., (in-bred) shame ofbodily appearance (II
60/309); resentment of male power and privilege (II 157/393); the
'humiliation' oflying beneath a man (II 572/728); hygienic procedures (II
149/387) or the planned use ofcontraceptives (II 149/388); fear ofpregnancy
(II 149/388); "too sudden or too many changes in position, any call for
consciously directed activities;" (II 139/379) repugnance at the idea of
treating, or having one 's body treated, as a thing (II 149/387). "The man 's
attitude" is for Beauvoir "ofgreat importance" (II 157/392).Female eroticism
may be repulsed by male "crudeness" and "coarseness"; maladroit (II
143/382), detached (II 157/392) or ' mechanical' (II 162/397) lovemaking; or
it may be incapacitated by roughness and force (II 138/377): that is, the
"brutality of the man or the abruptness of the event" (II 154/389).
As expression or speech, "frigid" bodies intentionally point beyond
themselves; they are meaningful as gestures. A gesture of frigidity can be
interpreted as a symbolic outburst (II 435/609) or a reaction of refusal (II
157/393) . It may be read as a form ofprotest or an expression of frustration,
24. Phenomenologie, 184/158.

an attitude that women are "always prepared to take" (II 434/608).
Resentment is the most common source of frigidity in women, according to
Beauvoir. A woman may resort to it to deliberately insult (II 264/466) or
punish "the male for all the wrongs she feels she has endured" (II 157-
58/393) . In terms ofits aims and impact, this bodily expression is comparable
to what Beauvoir calls "women's aptitude for facile tears." By turning her
body against or away from men in these passively-aggressive (or passively-
subjective) ways, a woman may take refuge in herself; she may use her body
as an instrument of revenge or as a means for eluding, disarming, and
infuriating men. Beauvoir remarks : "He considers this performance unfair;
but she considers the struggle unfair from the start, because no other effective
weapon has been put in her hands" (II 435/608-609).
According to Beauvoir, the (heterosexual) "erotic drama" may be lived out
in amity or enmity. "In those combats where they think they confront one
another, it is really against the selfthat each one struggles, projecting into the
partner that part of the self which is repudiated.. ." (II 573/728). Moral or
normal eroticism involves for Beauvoir the assumption of ambiguity, the
striking of a delicate and precarious balance on the part of partners who
regard each other as equally ambiguous in their being-for-each-other, who
grasp "existence in one's self and in the other as both subjectivity and
passivity" and "merge in this ambiguous unity.?" To respond erotically (in
Beauvoir's sense of the word) a woman must be able "to reconcile her
metamorphosis into a carnal object with her claim to her subjectivity..." (II
157/392)
[S]he wants to remain subject while she is made object... she retains her
subjectivity only through union with her partner; giving and receiving must
be combined for both. If the man confmes himself to taking without giving or
if he bestows pleasure without receiving, the woman feels that she is being
maneuvered, used. (II 162/397)
The "normal and happy flowering" or full development offemale eroticism

requires that a woman find "in the male both desire and respect" (II 167/401) .
Ifa man "really seeks domination much more than fusion and reciprocity," if
he does not renounce the illegitimate, privileged position ofabsolute or sole
25. Simonede Beauvoir,"Faut-il bnller Sade?" (Paris: Gallimard, 1944),33 . Translated by

Annette Michelson as "Must We Bum Sade," in TheMarquis de Sade (New York: Grove
Press, 1966), 21-22.
subject (II 162/397), then he may arose in women, instead of sexual interest,
"reactions of refusal."
Refusals ofrepulsive sexual advances are elaborated in Beauvoir' s fiction
and contrasted with normal or healthy erotic response . InLes mandarins,26 for
example, Beauvoir's protagonist Anne describes her experience of sex
before" and after her lover stops loving her, when she is jolted out of the
feeling that she is being given "his heart. With his hands, his lips, his sex, with
his whole body?" and into the following experience instead:
Suddenly, he was lying on top of me, entering me, and he took me without a
word , without a kiss. It all happened so fast that I remained dumbfounded ...
Not for an instant had he given me his presence ; he had treated me as a
pleasure machine . Even if he didn't love me any more, he shouldn't have
done that. I got out ofbed; ...went into the living room, sat down, and cried
myself out .. . Sleeping together cold like that, it's ... it's horrible!"
Anne cannot respond erotically in this loveless exchange because of the

abruptness of the event and the way that they are sleeping together. Notice
that the "coldness" is not attributed to Anne, but to her situation.
The experience of"sleeping together cold" is prefigured earlier in the novel
when Anne has sex with a relative stranger. She wants to mow what would
happen iffor once she takes offher "white, kid gloves" - Beauvoir' s symbol
for Anne's bourgeois morality and a certain delicacy of feminine eroticism.
The experience is not so hot: "A man, I discovered, isn't a Turkish bath.''"
His "foreplay" consists in rushing her to bed, imposing his fantasies on her,
and becoming angry when he learns that she is not using contraception. Not
surprisingly, Anne relates
When he went into me, it had almost no effect upon me.. .. "Tell me what you
feel?" he said. "Tell me." I remained mute. Inside me, I sensed a presence
26. Simone de Beauvoir, Les mandarins. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Translated by Leonard M.
Friedman as The Mandarins . New York: Norton, 1956.
27. Ibid., 319/341.
28. Ibid.,5 I8/548.

29. Ibid., 518-19 /547-58 .
30. Ibid., 74/83 .

without really feeling it, as you sense a dentist's steel tool against a swollen
gum. "Do you like it? I want you to like it." His voice sounded vexed,
demanded an accounting. "You don't? That's all right--the night is long."...
I unclenched my teeth and with great effort ripped words from my mouth.
"Don't worry so much about me. Just let me...
"You're not really cold," he said angrily. "You're resisting with your head.
But I'll force you "
"No," I said. "No ".. .
It would have been too difficult to explain my feeling. There was a look of
hate in his eyes...
"You don't want to!" he was saying."You don't want to! Stubborn mule!" He
struck me lightly on the chin; I was too weary to escape into anger. I began to
tremble. A beating fist, thousands of fists... "Violence is everywhere," I
thought. I trembled and tears began running down my cheeks.
He crushed me ardently against him and once more went into me. "I want
it to happen together," he said. "All right? When you're ready, say 'now,"?'
Ofcourse Anne does not want to, and she is "not really cold ." Anne's body
is not organically lacking in sexual ability. Nothing in this man's behavior
erotically appeals to her. There is nothing to serve as a basis for sexual
feeling or functioning on her part because there is nothing but dominance
serving as a basis for his. He only constrains her sexuality, crushes her desire.
She cannot respond, erotically, to his "mechanical" insistence on
synchronicity, and ne ither can she respond, erotically, to his "drilling" her
with questions or with his "steel tooL" "Ifthe male organ. . . seems not to be
desirous flesh but a tool skillfully used, woman will feel . . . repulsion" (II
157/392). Given situations like these and Beauvoir's understanding of
eroticism, her comment that "the whole desire of women called frigid [by
whom? my emphasis] tends toward the normal" makes sense (II 157/392).
In both instances ofsexual violation, Anne is stifled silent, "dumbfounded"
in the one case and "mute" in the other. Her body cannot "take up" its own
pleasure because her pleasure is not "echoed" in her partner's heart." Her
apparent frigidity is a complex reaction ofrefusal- a refusal of (erotic) co-
existence based on a refusal of(erotic) co-existence. In both cases ofsleeping
together "cold" or dispassionately, she also resorts to another form ofprotest:
She "cries herself out" to passionately express her displeasure at being
31. Ibid., 74-75/82-83.
32. Ibid., 75/83 .

forcibly treated like a thing, made into the object of blatantly and brutally
disrespectful desires on the part ofmen who assume the dominant , "superior"
position of sole subject.
Merleau-Ponty's remarks about breakdowns in the erotic structure of
intimate perception can obviously be brought into play here. While Schneider
really is impotent and Anne is "not really cold," Anne 's perceptions, like
Schneider's, are comparably deficient: They lack erotic significance and so
cannot stimulate sexually responsive behavior. In Anne 's case as in
Schneider's, a whole field ofsexual possibilities is disturbed - because her
perceptions (ofhatred, anger, force, violence) are so disturbing and because
there is no emotionally intoxicating' chemistry' here; no ambiguous unity to
speak of.
Anne's "frigidity" can also be interpreted on the model ofMerleau-Ponty' s
thesis ofthe reversibility of Flesh. As an element or basis ofBeing, Flesh or
Perceptibility is ambiguously two-sided; and its reversibility accounts, in
Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy, for chiasmic transfers or cross-overs of
meaning, for the way that perceiving subjects can, so to speak, contagiously
or transitively "catch on" to perceived significances by sharing or
incorporating them . It contains the idea that one 's external perceptions and
subjective impressions can switch places - reversibly wind up on their
"opposite" sides."
Along this view, even a woman's perception ofherselfas sexually "cold,"
indifferent or deficient may reversibly be understood as indicative of a
perceived coldness, indifference, or deficiency in her external situation.
Anne 's body, for example, remains mute - sexually silent or speechless -
not because it is physiologically impaired or biologically inorgasmic. Her
libidinal "deficiency" is tied to her situation, reversibly expressive of a
perceived deficiency on the part ofher partner. She "winds up'.'experiencing
herself as sexually incapacitated because she senses something missing,
something lacking in her situation - a lack that crosses over onto her, that
she herselfincorporates. Anne's faking an orgasm (her willingness to sigh, to
moan) in order "to be done with it" is also significant from the standpoint of
reversibility. This charade on Anne's part mirrors her situation, exposes it as
one that is not truly or genuinely erotic, but only a parody or perversion of
33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard , 1964), 172-204.

Translated by Alphonso Lingus as The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston : Northwestern
University Press, 1968), 130-155.
eroticism. This meaning ofher situation reversibly crosses over onto her and
is expressed in and through her body, as she incorporates, "takes up" or "acts
out" this perverse pretense by imitating an orgasm.
We find other instances of"manhandling" and further breakdowns in the
erotic structure of intimate perception in Beauvoir's work. For example, in
their study ofBeauvoir and Sartre, Kate and Edward Fullbrook have focused
attention on the contrasting behavior oftwo young women characters in these
parallel passages of L 'invitee (1954):
In another comer, a young woman with green and blue feathers in her hair
was looking uncertainly at a man's huge hand that had just pounced on hers.
"This is a great meeting-place for young couples," said Pierre.
Once more a long silence ensued . Xaviere had raised her arm to her lips and
was gently blowing the fine down on her skin .. ..
And a few minutes later:
The woman with the green and blue feathers was saying in a flat voice: " ...
I only rushed through it, but for a small town its very picturesque." She had
decided to leave her bare arm on the table and as it lay there, forgotten ,
ignored , the man's hand was stroking a piece of flesh that no longer belonged
to anyone.
"It' s extraordinary," the impression it makes on you to touch your
eyelashes ," said Xaviere. "You touch yourselfwithout touching yourself. It's
as if you touched yourself from some way away."?' (quoted in Fullbrook and
Fullbrook 1994, 99)
The Fullbrooks' commentary" is as interesting as the passages they cite .

I disagree, however, with their interpretation ofthe woman with the feathers.
While it is true that her response to the "flirtatious" male "is to dissociate the
two sides ofher human reality, which is that she is simultaneously subject and
object," I do not believe that the woman's behavior is vividly illustrative ofthe
34. Quoted in Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul
Sartre: The Remaking ofa Twentieth Century Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1994),99.
35. Ibid., 99ff.

concept of bad faith," as they contend." For even as they substantiate their
case for Beauvoir' s influence on Sartre, they still make the mistake ofreading
Sartre back into Beauvoir by relying only on the Sartrian interpretation ofthe
strikingly similar and frequently-cited passage found in L 'eire et Ieneant"
They do not allow that these passages might have meant something else to
Beauvoir or that she might have written them to illustrate something other, or
something more, than the concept which became known, in Sartre's
unattributed use of her example, as bad faith. Different meanings of these
passages emerge ifwe situate them in the context ofBeauvoir's own thought
- on female frigidity; male impetuosity; the equivocal nature oftouch and of
"virginal desire" in young women.
In Le deuxieme sexe, Beauvoir describes man's approach to sexuality as
impetuous: "[M]an dives upon his prey like the eagle and the hawk," she says.
According to her, this precipitousness not only sets up in women "resistance
to the subjugating intentions ofthe male, but also a conflict with herself' (Il
148/386). She may feel, simultaneously, attracted and repulsed.
The man in Beauvoir's example is obviously impetuous; and the woman
is just as obviously wearing feathers, like she is some kind of prey. I agree
with the Fullbrooks that she is in a quandary. I disagree, however, with their
claim that, in deciding "to leave her bare arm on the table .. . forgotten,
ignored.'?" as the text states, the woman with the feathers "decides to
experience her arm as a mere thing impersonally related to her consciousness"
(which is a very Sartrian take on the situation). In suggesting that the woman
decides, in bad faith, to experience her arm "as an inert piece of flesh," they
suggest, in one fell swoop, that she, alone, is responsible for the decision
(rather than one into which she is pressured) and that she bears some kind of
fault. No responsibility or bad faith is assigned to the man in the example,
perhaps because the Fullbrooks ignore, in their commentary, a key aspect of
36. Also see Debra Bergoffen, "The Look as Bad Faith" in Philosophy Today, vol. 36, no.
3 (1992) : 221-227.
37. Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre : The
Remaking ofa Twentieth Century Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 100.
38. Jean-Paul Sartre, L 'etre et Ie neant (Paris : Gallimard, 1943),94-95. Translated by Hazel
Barnes as Being and Nothingness (New York : Washington Square Press, 1956), 96-98 .
39. L 'invitee (Paris : Gallimard, 1943), 62. Translated by Yvonne Moyse and Rober
Senhouse as She Came to Stay (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1954),61.
the situation: that it is initially he who treats her arm "as a mere thing" by
treating it as something to pounce upon; and that he does so without her
consent and without any evident desire on her part.
And so, perhaps, it is not, as the Fullbrooks say, that she dissociates her
"self ' from her body because, "[a ]lthough she does not welcome the man 's
desire, she also, perhaps, does not wish to shatter her impression that he
' desires' her conversation."? I should think that his pouncing hand would
have shattered that impression already, and she does not seem very interested
or excited about conversing with him (Beauvoir describes her voice as flat) .
Her bodily dissociation may instead be a form ofprotest against his bad faith
treatment of her as a thing. Perhaps it is her way ofresisting his subjugating
intentions; an attempt to establish some distance between them (notice how
her conversation has drifted to some other, distant spot) . It may be a reaction
of refusal, a means of rejecting advances that are not experienced as erotic,
but only expressive of male dominance. Perhaps she resents being pounced
upon . Perhaps she considers this gesture coarse, or crude . Maybe she finds it,
or him, offensive or frightening. Perhaps she feels overwhelmed or
overpowered by his "huge" hand. Dominance is threatening; and it is perfectly
normal to "freeze" or stay still when one is afraid. Beauvoir' s phenomenology
certainly allows for just these sorts ofcontingencies, circumstances that may
cause a woman to dissociate from her body and "detach" from some
undesirable element in her situation.
It is significant that the female characters in this novel are both young .
Given their youth and the way that Beauvoir contrasts them, she may have
meant by their example to say nothing at all about bad faith (at least on the
part of the woman), but something about how, in the course of heterosexual
initiation, a woman may feel divided against herself. Consider what Beauvoir
later says about the conflicts of virginal desire in Le deuxieme sexe :
[T]he virgin does not know exactly what she wants. The aggressive eroticism
of childhood still survives in her; her first impulses were prehensile, and she
still wants to embrace, possess. She wants her coveted prey to be endowed
with the qualities which, through taste, odor, touch, have appeared to her as
values. For sexuality is not an isolated domain, it continues the dreams and
jo ys of early sensuality; children and adolescents of both sexes like the
smooth, creamy, satiny, mellow, elastic ...She has no liking for rough fabrics,
gravel, rockwork ... ; what she, like her brothers , first caressed and cherished
40. Op. cit., I00.

was her mother 's flesh. In her narcissism, in her homosexual experiences,
whether diffuse or defmite, she acts as subject and seeks possess ion of a
feminine body. When she confronts the male, she feels in her hands ...the
desire to caress a prey actively. But crude man, with his hard muscles , his
rough and often hairy skin, .. .his coarse features, does not appear to her as
desirable ; he even seems repulsive .. ..
Thus she is divided against herself; she longs for a strong embrace that will
make of her a quivering thing, but roughness and force are also disagreeable
deterrents that offend her. Her feeling is located both in her skin and in her
hand , and the requirements of one are in part opposed to those of the other.
(136-37/376-78)
Here we have, interestingly enough, another version of the story and

another instance ofan ambivalent consciousness - one connected to tactility,
a basic bodily sense , and one that may result in a immobilizing uncertainty of
active bodily intention. We may reasonably suppose it is this ambivalence (not
bad faith) operating behind the scene of the woman with the feathers.
Beauvoir may have intended in her example for the woman's feathers to
contrast with Xaviere's eyelashes and the down of Xaviere 's skin." The
woman with the feathers is not so attached to her "feathers." They are not
natural to her. They are tacked on or pinned to her body (as the male hand is),
and their colors are depicted as clashing, in a visual representation of the
tactile conflict she is experiencing in her hand - a hand which, like the
feathers , is simply laying there - "a piece offlesh that no longer belonged to
anyone." Still we may suppose, since after all she is sporting them , that she
enjoys ' feminine' things, things that are feathery-soft. Xaviere certainly does;
she is clearly (autoerotically, narcissistically) enjoying herself-engrossed
in the extraordinary sensations of touching her own eyelashes and gently
blowing on the fine down, the innermost covering, ofher own skin. Xaviere
is not so separated from herself, not separated from active bodily intention or
the "joys ofearly sensuality." She forms, within herself, a type of"ambiguous
unity" that is, for Beauvoir, characteristic of erotic experiences generally.
The delicate sensitivity ofXaviere's gestures, her obvious enjoyment ofher
own soft touch, vividly contrasts with the "crude" pouncing ofthe man 's hand
4 1. Beauvoir may also have intended to compare these two characters. It may be argued , for
example , that in not desir ing Pierre and resisting any physical relationship between them ,
Xaviere is in the same position as the woman with the feathers .
and the way that it leaves the other woman unaffected, "cold." It is not the
case as Sartre would have it, in "his" example ofbad faith, that "she realizes
herself as not being her own body" - accomplishing "a divorce ofthe body
from the soul"? and eclipsing into the transcendent "nothingness" of some
disembodied consciousness that she strives in vain to "be." Because the body
is not for Beauvoir simply or solely objective, because it has lived or
transcendent dimensions, the opposition in her fictional situation may be
considerably more "fleshed out" than that. It may be that the transcendent
aspects ofthe young woman's body - the active intentions ofher embodied
subjectivity - are detained, or inhibited, because the passive requirements of
her skin (how she likes to be touched/what she likes to be touched by) are
opposed, through the tactless male gesture, to the requirements in her hand
(her own desire to actively caress a "prey"). Her desire is dis-abled,
immobilized by this conflict in her feeling ; and that is why, I suspect, the
young woman with the feathers isn't "quivering" at all!
Conclusion
Beauvoir's manifest interest in touch distinguishes her phenomenology

from Sartre's focus on "the look" and is an obvious point of contact with
Merleau-Ponty, who used the example of touched and touching hands to
model the ambiguities ofembodiment and reversibilities of"Flesh. "Merleau-
Ponty was also well aware of Beauvoir's work. In fact, he wrote a very
favorable review? of L 'invitee; and Xaviere's comment about "touching
herself from some way away" anticipates an idea of perceptual non-
coincidences that is developed in his later thought.44 The important difference
in their phenomenologies of perception is of course that Beauvoir's takes
account ofgender. She did not believe that women and men inhabit the same
perceptual world, and she thought that woman's situation within a texturally
"rough" masculine universe not to her liking, could, by way ofcompensation,
"give rise to a real delicacy" of sensitivity (II 453/625).
42. L 'eire et Ie neant, 95/98.
43. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Le roman et la metaphysique" in Sens et non-sens (Paris:

Nagel, 1948), 45-71. Translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus as
"Metaphysics and the Novel" in Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston : Northwestern University
Press, 1964),26-40.
44. Le visible et I'invisible.

As a basis for Being, embodiment is also the basis for being in time.
Beauvoir's phenomenology gives us more ofa sense than Merleau-Ponty's of
the body's experience ofthe possibility ofdeath, the body as a basis for non-
being. She is more sensitive to the "corpse behind the body.''" the ravages of
old age and time "hacking away" at life, restricting the freedom of active
bodily intention so that "instead ofbeing an instrument the body becomes a
hindrance. "46 While Merleau-Ponty focuses on the "reversibility" ofpast and
future, Beauvoir concretely describes "the piercingly sad feeling" of time's
irreversibility in old age, 47 noting "how the very quality of the future
changes": a boundless, indefinite future is exchanged for one that "finished"
- short, closed, blocked, finite."
The aged share with women the fact that they are looked upon as objects,
not subjects." In a situation of oppression where possibilities are limited,
women may also share with the aged a sense ofthe future as all and already
"marked out" (II 424/599). The difference between them (unless one is an
aged woman) is that women suffer from externally-imposed closures of
horizons. Woman is not biologically destined to live a "life closed in about
itself," paralyzed between a "limited future and a frozen past.?"
So when Beauvoir writes, in support ofher freedom, that the future should
be "let open" to her, it is really about time - about mobilizing future
generations to transcend the oppression of"becoming woman" so that woman
may finally become, in that strong existential sense of the word, all that she
can possibly and subjectively be.
45. Elaine Marks, Simone de Beauvo ir: Encounter with Death (New Jersey: Rutgers
Universit y Press , 1973), 103.
46. La vieillese (Paris : GalIimard, 1970),336. Translated by Patrick O'B rien as The Coming
ofAge (New York : Norton , 1972),317.
47. Ibid., 320/302.
48. Ibid., 395-400/373-78 .
49 . Ibid., 504/479 .
50. Ibid., 400 /378 .

Chapter 6
For the Time Being: Simone de Beauvoir's

Representation of Temporality
Ursula Tidd
University of Manchester
Abstract: This chapter analyses Simone de Beauvoir's

representation oftemporality across the range ofher writing, with
particular emphasis on her four volumes of autobiography
published in Francefrom 1958-72. It traces Beauvoir 's adaptation
ofsome ofHusser! 's notions of temporality from his lectures Zur
Phanomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917) and
refers briefly to the influence of Martin Heidegger and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty on Beauvoir's representation of the experience of
temporality. It argues that in her view the collaboration ofauthor
and reader is crucialfor recreating the lost selfofautobiography.
Introduction
How to represent and account for the experience of time is a persistent

preoccupation throughout Simone de Beauvoir's writing - from her first
published novel, L 'invitee (1943), to her study of aging, La vieillesse,' This
is unsurprising because time is one ofthe most pervasive phenomenological
questions; moreover, Beauvoir's philosophical training had encouraged her to
explore the role oftemporality in the experience ofsubjectivity in her writing
because she was a philosopher trained in the French Cartesian tradition who
read widely in German phenomenology from the early 1930s.2
I. Simone de Beauvoir, L 'invitee (Paris: Gallimard, 1977); translated by Yvonne Moyse and
Roger Senhouse as She Came to Stay (Glasgow : Fontana/Collins, 1975). La vieillesse (Paris :
Gallimard, 1970); translated by Patrick O'Brian as Old Age . (Harmondsworth: Penguin ,
1977).
2. Moreover , despite the fact that in the early decades of the twentieth centu ry, Henri-Louis
Bergson 's influence was diminishing in French philosophical circles, Beauvoir knew his
work quite well, see Memoires d 'une jeune jille rangee (Paris : Gallimard, 1988), 287;
translated by James Kirkup as Memoirs ofa Dutiful Daughter (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1963), 207.
107
W. O'Brien and L. Embree (eds.), The Existential Phenomen ology ofSimone de Beauvoir, 107-126.
108 URSULATIDD
Although this interest in temporality has often been noted by literary
scholars in Beauvoir studies, it has been largely framed as constituting
evidence of Beauvoir' s personal inability to cope with the process of aging
and death. While this personal preoccupation with temporality is indeed
evident in her writing, in this chapter it will be argued that Beauvoir had a
philosophical interest in temporality which is manifest in both her literary and
philosophical writing. To reduce this interest uniquely to what is claimed to
be Beauvoir's personal obsession with aging and mortality appears to be
another instance ofthe topos of"reducing the book to the woman " identified
by Toril Moi in her survey of cliches in the reception ofBeauvoir 's writing.
Although in this particular case, it is a question of"reducing the philosophy"
to a personal obsession with aging and mortality.' In Jean-Paul Sartre's
fiction , plays, and philosophy of the late 1930s and of the 1940s we find a
similar interest in temporally-situated subjectivity, yet this interest is not
deemed to const itute evidence of Sartre's personal inability to cope with the
aging process.
In this chapter, therefore, Beauvoir's notions about temporality will be
explored in the context ofher broader ethical concerns in her philosophical
and literary writing. I will draw on her arguments concerning temporality in
her 1947 essay Pour une morale de l'ambiguite and refer particularly to the
representation of temporality in her memoirs. The discussion will also be
situated briefly in relation to Edmund Husserl's Zur Phiinomenologie des
inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
(1927) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's arguments concerning temporality in La
Phenomenologie de la perception (1945) .4 In some respects, these texts were
signifi cant for Beauvoir in developing her own notions about temporality,
although her overriding preoccupations are ethical rather than ontological. As
3. Toril Moi , ' Politics and the Intellectual Woman: Cl iches in the Reception of Simone de
Beauvo ir's Work ' in Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir (O xford: Blackwell, 1990 ),
21-60 (27-33).
4. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phiinomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917) in

Husserliana 10, edited by RudolfBoem (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969);
translated by John B. Brough as On the Phenomenology ofthe Consciousness ofInternal
Time, (Dordrecht: Kluw er Academic Publ ishers, 1991). Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit
(Tubingen: Max N iemeyer, 1967); translated by Joan Stambaugh as Being and Time (N ew
York: SUNY , 1996 ); Mau rice Merleau-Ponty, Phenom enologie de la perception (Paris:
Gallimard , 1994); translated by Colin Smith as The Phenomenology ofPerception (London:
Routl edge , 1962 ). Space constraints prevent me from analysing here the differences between
Sartre ' s and Beauvoir 's not ions of temporality.
BEAUVOIR'S REPRESENTATION OF TEMPORALITY 109
her laudatory review of La phenomenologie de la perception in Les temps
modemes in 1945 demonstrates, Beauvoir had much philosophical sympathy
with Merleau-Ponty's account of subjectivity in the Phenomenologie?
Moreover, she shares his Heideggerian emphasis on the importance of
temporality in the lived experience ofthe body-subject which is geared into the
world with others.
Allusions to temporality in the titles ofmany ofBeauvoir 's works alert us
to her continuing phenomenological preoccupation with the subject's
experience oftime. Both the English and French titles ofher first novel- She
Came to Stay and L'invitee - suggest that the conflictual self-Other
relationships which are explored in this novel can only ever be a temporary,
naive response to the Other and that those relationships are necessarily
experienced in time." The 'guest' to whom the title refers can enjoy her
privileged status for a short time only until she is annihilated, and yet the event
ofthe Other's ephemeral presence leaves its trace on Francoise and Pierre, the
novel's protagonists. The title ofher third published novel, Tous les hommes
sont mortels, similarly implies that for human existence to be meaningful, it
has to be experienced within a finite temporal framework which is ordered by
the inevitability of death . The titles which Beauvoir chose for her four
volumes of autobiography - Memoires d 'unejeune fille, La force de 1'age,
La force des choses, and Tout compte fait - all similarly contain temporal
allusions and imply that the autobiographical subject is historically located.
In L 'invitee, as Kate and Edward Fullbrook have noted, Beauvoir represents
time and action as co-implicated. In a conversation which takes place early in
the text, Pierre tells Xaviere, a young woman whom he and his partner,
Francoise, have befriended, that although she might not like having to follow
rules, it is nevertheless impossible to live only for the moment. Xaviere replies:
"Why? Why do people always have to drag so much dead weight around with
them?" Pierre explains: "Look, time isn 't made up ofa stack of separate little
5. Simone de Beauvoir, 'La phenomenologie de la perception' in Les temps modernes

(1945) , no. 2,363-367. Several critics have examined the philosophical proximities between
Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, see for example , Sonia Kruks, "Simone de Beauvoir: Teaching
Sartre about Freedom" in Sartre Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van Den Hoven
(Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1991),285-300.
6. Kate and Edward Fullbrook have argued that Beauvoir expounds a theory of temporality
in L 'invitee, see Kate and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean -Paul Sartre: The
Remaking ofa Twentieth Century Legend (Heme IHempstead : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993),
118-120 .
110 URSULA TIDD
slices into which you can successively shut yourself away. When you think
you 're living in the present, you 're automatically involving the future. "?Here
the past, present, and future are represented as simultaneously co-implicated
in our proj ects. We do not accumulate time or progress through time because
we do not possess our past, although it is always imbricated with our present
and future concerns.
In Pyrrhus et Cineas , Beauvoir's philosophical essay published in France
in 1944, a year after L 'invitee, she explains her notion that temporal succession
is experienced as rupture and this militates against any totalisation of
expenence:
The successive moments of a life are not preserved but separated by the
passing of time; for an individual as much as for humanity, time is not
progress but division .. .there is no single moment in a particular life when
all these separate moments are reconciled.'
Chantal Moubachir, one ofthe few critics to consider Beauvoir's notions

about time from a philosophical perspective, agrees that although Beauvoir
views time as tridimensional, each moment is radically divided from the next.
The past is therefore irrevocably lost to us. Our lives only assume meaning
through our current projects, which characterise our present. 9 Moubachirreads
this as a refutation ofthe teleology ofthe Hegelian dialectic on Beauvoir' s part:
that a life cannot be totalised in a finite absolute. Life is therefore not a
progressive or a productive continuity; it slips through our fingers like grains
of sand. Moreover, Moubachir briefly examines Husserl 's influence on
Beauvoir's notion oftime and this is worth some detailed consideration here .
For it will be argued that Beauvoir was both influenced by Husserl and
incorporated certain elements ofhis theory oftime-consciousness into her views
on writing and the author-reader collaboration. Thus while I agree with
Moubachir that Beauvoir rejects Husserl ' s notion of time as continuous flux
and that she rather views temporal succession as marked by rupture, I argue
here that as far as Beauvoir is concerned, this rupture can be overcome in
7. L 'invitee, 70/51 (tr. adapted), cit. also by Kate and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de
Beauvoir and Jean -Paul Sartre: The Remaking ofa Twentieth Century Legend, 118.
8. Pyrrhus et Cineas (Paris: Gallimard ' idees' , 1983),317 (my translation).
9. Chantal Moubachir, Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Seghers, 1971),42-47.

autobiography through the author-reader collaboration in which language plays
a key role.
Husserl and the Consciousness of Internal Time
According to Beauvoir's memoirs, she claims to have first become aware of

Husserlian phenomenology in the earIy 1930s, although it is likely that her
acquaintance with HusserI' s work actually began in the late 1920s. As far as
I can ascertain, unlike Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir did not attend HusserI's
lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris in February 1929 and does not mention them
in her memoirs. These lectures were revised and published as the Meditations
cartesiennes. According to Beauvoir's memoirs and to her biographer, Deirdre
Bair, Beauvoir had 'flu which developed into a severe bronchial infection in
February which obliged her to curtail her teaching practice at the lycee Janson-
de-Sailly begun in January 1929, so it is likely that illness prevented her from
attending. 10 However, as she had a close friendship with Merleau-Ponty at this
time and was on teaching practice with him and Claude Levi-Strauss, it is
extremely probable that she talked about Husserl's 1929 Paris lectures with
MerIeau-Ponty. Yet in a celebrated passage in La force de I'age (1960), her
second volume ofmemoirs, Beauvoirrelates that Raymond Aron 'introduced'
her and Sartre to Husserl in the early 1930s:
Raymond Aron was spending a year at the French Institute in Berlin and
studying Husserl simultaneously with preparing a historical thesis. When
he came to Paris he spoke of Husserl to Sartre. We spent an evening
together at the Bee de Gaz in the Rue Montpamasse. We ordered the
speciality of the house, apricot cocktails; Aron said, pointing to his glass :
' You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about
this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!' II
Enthusiastic to learn more, Sartre replaced Aron at the French Institute in

Berlin and spent 1933-4 studying HusserI 's phenomenology. Later in Laforce
de I 'age, Beauvoir explains how she began to study HusserI in her own right:
10. See Memoires d'une fi lle rangee, 411, 425/294, 303; and Deirdre Bair, Simone de
Beauvo ir, A Biography (London: JonathanCape, 1990), 136-7. Merleau-Ponty appearsboth
as Pradelle and Merleau-Ponty in Memoires d'une fille rangee.
II. Simone de Beauvoir, La force de I'age (Paris: GallimardFolio, 1989), 157; translated
by P. Green as The Prime ofLife (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 135.
112 URSULA TIDD
I.. .dipped into Husser! for the first time. Sartre had told me all he knew
about Husserl: now he presented me with the German text of Lecons sur fa
conscience interne du temps, which I managed to read without too much
difficulty, Every time we met we would discuss various passages in it. The
novelty and richness of phenomenology filled me with enthusiasm; I felt I
had never come so close to the real truth. 12
Beauvoirrapidly acquired a thorough knowledge ofHusserlian phenomenology,

including his notions on the consciousness of internal time. Indeed, Sartre
observed that her knowledge ofHusserIwas more thorough than his own at this
time."
How did Beauvoir take up Husserl' s ideas about time-conciousness in her
own writing? Chantal Moubachir, referring briefly to Husser!' s 1905 lectures
on Zur Phiinomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), argues
that although Beauvoir shares his view that the present is consciousness as
action, she does not agree with Husser!' s notion oftime as continuous flux nor
that it is possible to retain what has been experienced through what Husser!
calls "protention" and "retention."
In Husserl's example oflistening to a melody on which he draws throughout
much of Zur Phiinomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), he
says we have a primal impression ofthe note occuring at a given moment but
also "retain" an impression of the previous note as having just occured. We
therefore retain an impression ofthe succession ofindividual notes. Listening
to the melody, we also "protend" its future course as being within certain
limits. For example, even if we do not have prior knowledge of a Schubert
string quintet, we do not "protend" the quintet to break into classical jazz in its
second movement, for such a development would exceed the horizons of the
melody already established. Husserl distinguishes retention (which he also calls
primary remembrance) from recollection and protention from anticipation. If,
for example, I am attempting to remember an earlier part of the melody, this
distracts me from the hearing the note occuring now because I am concentrating
on an earlier sequence. However, as far as retention is concerned, when I hear
the note occuring now, I also retain the notes of the melody I have heard
without being distracted from listening to the present note, as Husserl's
characterization of retention as "a comet's tail that attaches itself to the
12. Ibid ., 2311201 (tr. adapted).
13. Ibid ., 253/220 .

perception of the moment" indicates." My focus of attention is therefore
different in the cases of retention and recollection. Thus , retention and
recollection are distinct because in the former, the melody is the object or the
very recent object ofmy perception, whereas in recollection, I am attempting
to re-present it to myself from re-presentations of earlier perceptions. IS Yet,
both retention and recollection indicate that the past is recoverable in some
form.
However, as already noted, in Beauvoir's writing, consciousness of
temporal succession is marked by rupture. We do not achieve self-coincidence
because we are radically separated from ourselves by the three temporal
ekstases (meaning literally, a "standing out from") ofpast, present and future
because the passing oftime operates by division rather than progression. Life
does not become more meaningful through time, but through action. Yet, the
human subject's production of time, manifested corporeally through aging,
diminishes his or her ability to act.
As in Sartre's L 'eire et neant, Beauvoir's emphasis on the "ekstatic"
rupture in our experience of time and on the human subject's transcendence
towards death also signals a Heideggerian influence in her thinking on time . 16
At a basic level, Beauvoir shares the Heideggerian notion that "Dasein" or the
"being-there" of human existence is temporal and that "Dasein" lives out its
existence as authentic or inauthentic, depending respectively on whether it
recognizes and accepts its own mortality or rejects it and lives in the present.
Furthermore, like Heidegger and unlike Sartre, Beauvoir argues, as we will see,
that we exist in the world with other people or in Heidegger's terms , "Mit-
dasein."?
A Changing Relationship to Time
Beauvoirrepresents our experience oftime as subjectto change as we age and

she represents the subject's changing experience oftime in her memoirs, fiction,
14. Husserl, PCIT, §14, 37.
IS. Husserl, rctr, §14,37-8.

16. Sartre and Beauvo ir began seriously discussing Heidegger's philosophy in 1939, see La
force de l 'dge, 404/355 .
17. See §§ 26-27 in Heidegger's Being and Time, 110-122 and Eva Lundgren-Gothlin's
discussion of Heidegger and Sartre in Sex and Existence, Simone de Beauvo ir 's The Second
Sex (London : Athlone Press, 1996), 216-7.
114 URSULATIDD
and in La vieillesse. For example, when she is describing her early adolescence
in Memoires d'unejeunefille rangee, she represents time as being a bourgeois
commodity which she learns to manage carefully - this became a lifelong habit
for Beauvoir, as entries in her diaries indicate. However, she also represents
time in the Memoires as something which is perceived in different ways by the
autobiographical subject. For example, she relates how she perceived time
differently whenever the teacher entered the classroom at the Cours Desir, the
Catholic school which she attended. She says:
The moment Mademoiselle entered the classroom, time became sacred . Our
teachers didn't tell us anything particularly exciting, we used to recite our
lessons to them, they used to correct our homework, but I asked nothing
more than that my existence should be publicly sanctioned by them. My
merits were written down in a register which perpetuated their memory.
Each time I had either to surpass myself or at least equal my previous
performance. The game always started anew; to lose would have distressed
me whereas victory exalted me. These sparkling moments were the
highlights of the year: each day was leading me somewhere . I felt sorry for
grown-ups whose uneventful weeks are barely livened up by the dullness of
Sundays . To live without expecting anything seemed dreadful to me. IS
Individual moments assume here a privileged status for the autobiographical

subject and, although each performance must begin anew, it is nevertheless
measured in terms ofpast performances and the illusion ofprogress is created
through the accumulation of these privileged moments. Yet Beauvoir makes
clear here that this is a nafve and childishly egocentric conception oftime which
she contrasts with what she perceives as the purposeless time of adults.
Later in her study, La vieillesse, she notes again the subject's changing
perception oftime in a markedly Heideggerian passage which emphasises the
projective movement of transcendent consciousness:
For human reality, existing means actively existing in time: in the present
we look towards the future by means of projects which go beyond our past
- a past into which our activities are once more engulfed because they have
now become static and loaded with passive demands . Age changes our
18. Memoires d 'une jeune fll/e rangee , 93/67 (tr, adapted).

BEAUVOIR.'S REPRESENTATION OF TEMPORALITY 115
relationship to time; as the years go by, our future shrinks while our past
carries increasing weight.19
As Beauvoir explains in the preface to the final volume of her memoirs, Tout
compte fait, after a certain period of time has elapsed, it is poss ible to take
stock ofone 's life in so far as it can be recollected, because our situation is no
longer liable to be profoundly transformed. This taking stock is a narrative
process, which does not restore the past because the autobiographical subject
experiences an attitude of rupture vis-a-vis that past."
Nevertheless, one way in which we are perpetually confronted with the past
is through our experiences as embodied subjects in the world. At this point it
is helpful to consider certain points ofconvergence between Beauvoir' s notions
about temporality and corporeality and those of Merleau-Ponty in
Phenomenologie de fa perception.
Time and the Body
Temporality and corporeality are represented in the Phenomenologie as deeply

imbricated. For Merleau-Ponty, our body is completely enmeshed with space
and time; it expresses how we exist in relation to space and time." His theory
that the body comprises two layers: the "present body" and the "habitual body"
and the related examples of"the phantom limb" and the bodily disfunctionalism
exhibited by Schneider demonstrate how temporality permeates corporeal
identity ." For in these examples, Merleau-Ponty describes sophisticated ways
in which temporality pervades our experience of our bodies. The case of the
amputee who continues to move as ifhis or her limb had not been amputated
suggests that we can remember past styles of corporeal existence." In
Schneider's case , he had become brain-damaged and was unable to perform
spontaneous, abstract actions on demand although he could perform actions
which had been previously learned in a specific context. His actions were
19. La vieillesse , 383/402 (tr. adapted).
20. See also Moubachir, Simone de Beauvoir, 50-51 .
21. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de fa perception, 162/139-140 .
22. Ibid., 97-98/82.
23. Ibid., 90-105 /76-87.

116 URSULA TIDD
therefore triggered by the situation in which he found himself." Both these
examples are related to our memories of corporeal identity and how that
sedimented identity or 'habitual body' is imbricated with the 'present body'.
Merleau-Ponty' s notions about the habitual body and the present body find
points of productive convergence with Beauvoir's views on temporality and
bodily identity. The habitual body is the mode ofexisting our bodies based on
past experience (as seen above in the example ofthe amputee). This involves
gestures formerly learned within a spatial, temporal and an intersubjective
context. The present body, however, is the manner in which we assume our
physicality according to the demands ofpresent and future contexts, which may
require a reworking ofour learned physical identity. This is evidently germane
to Beauvoir's argument in Le deuxieme sexe that women's gendered bodily
identity can be viewed as a corporeal style, which is learned and sedimented
'over a period oftime." For Beauvoir, as for Merleau-Ponty, the body is always
already anchored in time, space, and in relation to others and constitutes the
point at which we assume our subjectivity in the world.
In much of her writing, especially in her memoirs and La vieillesse,
Beauvoir represents our relationship to time as inscribed through the body, as
a relationship which we understand through the body, in an almost Kafkaesque
way." At the end of La force de chases, for example, she describes the shock
of experiencing time written on her body:
How is it that time, which has no form nor substance, can crush me with so
huge a weight that I can no longer breathe? How can something that doesn't
exist, the future, so implacably calculate its course? My seventy-second
birthday is now as close as the Liberation Day that happened yesterday. To
convince myself of this, I have but to stand and face my mirror. I thought,
one day when I was forty: 'Deep in that mirror, old age is watching and
24. Ibid., 119ff./103ff.
25. This is evident throughout the first three chapters of Book Two of Le deuxieme sexe; a
specific example is in Beauvoir's discussion of gender and spatial identity, see Le deuxieme
sexe, vol. II (Paris: Gal1imard, 1949), 34; translated by H. M. Parshley as The Second Sex
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 313-314.
26. In Kafka's story "In the Penal Colony," the condemned prisoner is executed by having
the commandment which slhe has transgressed inscribed on hislher body and which, during
a twelve-hour period, slhe deciphers through the wounds sustained, Franz Kafka, "In the
Penal Colony" in The Transformation and Other Stories, trans. Malcolm Pasley
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 127-153.
BEAUVOIR.'S REPRESENTATION OF TEMPORALITY 117
waiting for me; and it's fatal, it'll get me' . It's got me now. I often stop,
flabbergasted, at the sight of this incredible thing which serves me as a face .
I loathe my appearance now: the eyebrows slipping down .... towards the
eyes, the bags underneath, the excessive fullness of the cheeks , and that air
of sadness around the mouth that wrinkles always bring. Perhaps the people
I pass in the street see merely a woman in her fifties who simply looks her
age, no more, no less. But when I look, I see my face as it was, attacked by
the pox of time for which there is no cure. 27
Here the autobiographical subject's experience of time is distinct from how

other people perceive her, for only she is aware of the physical effects of
temporal succession in her memories ofher past bodily states. Nevertheless, the
collective meanings attributedto temporality to which Beauvoir alludes here are
significant and considered in more depth elsewhere in her writing.
Collective experiences of time
In Pour une morale de I'ambiguite and in La vieillesse particularly, Beauvoir

explains that some ofthe collective ways in which we experience or are obliged
to experience temporal succession and the past have implications for us as
individuals. For example, in Pour une morale de I'ambiguite she argues that
people can act as curators of objects in the same way that they can act as
curators ofthe past. The past can therefore be exploited as a refuge against any
change by these curators of the past or "conservatives.':" Yet, preserving
objects as traces of the past cannot restore the past to us, but they can remind
us of our history - a reminder which can empower us in the present or
immobilise us if we use it to avoid the realities of the present situation .
These two responses to the past - as preserved either through objects or
through ideology in order to deny or transform the present moment- are
demonstrated in Beauvoir's penultimate fictional text, Les belles images,
published in 1966. The father of the central protagonist, Laurence, is
represented as a humanist "passeiste" or as someone with an exclusive
attachment to the past. However, the self-deception and inhumanity of his
27. La f orce des chases (Paris : Gallimard Folio , 1983), 505-506; translated by Richard
Howard as Force ofCircumstance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968),672-673 (tr. adapted).
28. "Curator" and "conservative" are expressed by the same word "conservateur" in French.
Pour une morale de l'ambigu ite (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 132; translated by Bernard
Frechtman as The Ethics ofAmbiguity, (New York : Citadel Press, 1994),9 1.
118 URSULATIDD
"passeisme" is made particularly clear when he and Laurence visit the
monuments of Ancient Greece and he takes refuge in an idealised past and
dismisses the material hardships suffered by the present-day Greeks . The
collective exploitation ofthe myth ofthe future to deny the present realities of
material hardship is similarly demonstrated in the attitudes of the affluent,
bourgeois technocrats represented in Les belles images. Characters such as
Jean-Charles live twenty years ahead of themselves by discussing earthly
utopias and meanwhile dismiss the material oppressions of the present-day
world. In both cases, Laurence's father and Jean-Charles deny the experience
ofthe present and therefore do not assume their existence authentically across
the three temporal dimensions.
Yet back in the late 1940s, Beauvoir had argued in Pour une morale de
I'ambiguite against the glorification ofthe past or the future at the expense of
assuming the present situation. She says for example that we cannot deny the
past because it is part of us and is needed to forge our future projects:
The fact of having a past is part of the human condition; ifthe world behind
us were bare, we would hardly be able to see anything before us but a
gloomy desert. We must try, through our living projects, to tum to our
account that freedom which was undertaken in the past and to integrate it
into the present world."
Beauvoir describes the past as an appeal to the future, which can only save
the past by destroying it; through this perpetual destruction of the past, we
assume our existence. Doubt is an inevitable part ofaction because we cannot
predict the future implications ofour actions . As time elapses, our actions often
assume different meanings, which may conflict with our original aims. In
addition, we may be tempted to use methods which conflict with the ultimate
resul t. Beauvoir asserts in Pour une morale de I'ambiguite that the end only
justifies the means if it is completely disclosed from the outset, although it is
difficult to see how this is possible ifuncertainty is an integral part ofaction. 30
The word "end" has a twin meaning here of ultimate target and fulfilment.
Beauvoir explains that through festivals and celebrations, we collectively
valorize the present, as the end or fulfilment ofa particular history. The plural
29. Ibid., 134/93.
30. This is a central dilemma in both Beauvoir's second published novel Le sang des au/res
and Sartre's play Les mains sales.
BEAUYOIR'S REPRESENTATION OF TEMPORALITY 119
significance of"end" is demonstrated by the celebration ofthe Liberation at the
end ofher second volume ofmemoirs, Laforce de I'age - it is the end of the
war, the fulfilment of the Resistance struggle and the end to that particular
episode of Beauvoir's story. It is therefore both a collective "end" and the
moment of narrative closure. The celebration acts as a confirmation of the
present moment, although Beauvoir argues in Pour unemoralede I'ambiguite
that to avoid the trap of instant gratification, this celebration of the present
must be replaced by a new project.
La vieillesse, as the title implies, is similarly concerned with temporally-
situated existence. In this text, Beauvoir describes the situation of old people
and society's often negative attitudes to aging and temporal succession which
are imposed upon that social group . She explains:
Apart from some exceptions, the old man no longer does anything . He is
defined by an exis, not by a praxis: a being, not a doing. Time is carrying
him towards an end - death - which is not his and which is not postulated
or laid down by any project. This is why he looks to active members of the
community like one of a different species, one in whom they do not
recognise themselves ."
Here, temporally-situated existence is again imbricated with (reduced)

possibilities of action in the present. But, according to Beauvoir, collective
meanings attributed to temporal succession and its relationship to action are
imposed upon old people as a particular social group and an attitude of non-
reciprocity is adopted by the dominant group. Thus aging involves subjective
and collective experiences of temporal succession which , as we have noted,
may be radically at variance.
Time in Autobiography
If we now consider temporality once more in the context of Beauvoir's

autobiography, the paradoxes constituted by the experience of time are
particularly acute here because she is precisely confronted by the problem of
representing her experience of temporality. Like many an autobiographer,
Beauvoir is faced with the same question as St. Augustine in Book 11 of his
Confessions, namely: "What, then, is time?" He reasons that he knows what
time is as long as no one asks him what it is, but when he is asked, he is then
31. La vieillesse, 231/244.

120 URSULATIDD
forced to represent it in some way and he is baffled." For Beauvoir, as much
as for St. Augustine, the challenge is how to represent time and temporal
succession in autobiography.
In Beauvoir's extensive auto/biographical project, the diversity of forms
exploited such as the diary, memoirs, letters, and biographical narrative
indicates a fascination with the pivotal role time plays in the experience of
subjectivity and how we experience and represent that experience of time in
different ways . The narrative representation in autobiography of temporally-
situated experience which is produced for the Other as reader-collaborator is
indeed important for Beauvoir's notion of her autobiography as a successful
project which re-creates her past, for this enables subjective and collective
experiences of time to be shared.
In these memoirs, the Other is ever-present - as lost self, as reader, as all
that which is not 'I' and which must be contested or embraced. For Beauvoir
as existentialist and feminist, the Other has a philosophical and political
existential reality, and temporally-situated existence is produced
intersubjectively. As temporally-situated reader, the Other enables the
production ofthe autobiographical subject. This (lost) subject is situated in the
otherness ofhistory, and is recovered through the collaboration ofreader and
autobiographer.P They are both situated differently in time : Beauvoir as
autobiographer is situated in the narrative present and is separated, as we have
noted earlier, from the past selves which she relates, whereas the reader is
situated in a future present, separated from the narrator's present, and the past
related. However, this three-fold temporal rupture between the future time of
the reader, the present moment of the narrator and her past autobiographical
selves, and the alienation which this rupture entails can be overcome by a
crucial collaboration between the author and the reader. Moreover, it is perhaps
32. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans . R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1961),

264.
33. In Qu 'est-ce que fa liuerature, Sartre similarly talks of the relationship between the
writer, the reader, and the act of reading . Although in her 1966 lecture , "My Experience as
a Writer", Beauvoir discusses the collaborative relationship between author and reader in
the context of the representation of temporal experience in autobiography and, thus, it is
symptomatic of a much wider problem for her, (namely the subject's experience of time and
temporal succession). See Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu 'est-ce que fa Iitterature (Paris : Gallimard,
1993),48-58 ; translated by Bernard Frechtrnan as What is Literature? (London : Methuen ,
1967), 28-36 .
worth emphasising that language, as the keystone ofintersubjectivity, enables
this collaboration to take place.
Beauvoir explains this collaboration in a lecture she gave in Japan in 1966,
after she had completed three volumes of her autobiography. She explains:
Chronological narrative distorts the living movement of a life. There is,

nevertheless, one way and only one way of evoking that movement. The
reader, who is a living being in time, has to lend me his or her own time;
at any given moment when reading my books, the reader remembers
everything that has been read up until that particular moment; he or she
remembers the little girl that I was and wonders what kind of woman I am
going to become. The reader then supplies me with the density of his or her
own time, and the lack will be compensated . Although to achieve that, I
have to capture the reader's interest, so my book has to have a literary
quality. Through the tone, style, and the way in which I speak and tell the
story I have to charm and attract the reader and allow for the reader 's
freedom so that he or she freely continues to listen to me and engages in
this creative activity which belongs to the reader alone."
This description of the reading process draws on Beauvoir's knowledge of

Husserl 's distinction between retention and recollection described earlier. Here,
the reader retains knowledge ofBeauvoir' s past states as she represents them
in autobiography and is able to evoke a present synthesis, whereas Beauvoir
herselfcan only recollect and re-present but not achieve that living synthesis of
her life perceived by the reader through retention. There is therefore a necessary
collaboration between reader and narrator to achieve the temporal recreation
of lost selves in autobiography. The reader brings the third dimension of
perspective to the two-dimensional past created by Beauvoir.
Thus, although Beauvoir disagrees with HusserI's notion of time-
consciousness as continuous flux as far as the subject's experience of time is
concerned, she effectively adapts some ofhis ideas about time-consciousness
within the context of the act of reading and the author-reader relationship, so
that the reader imaginatively creates the lost self of autobiography. Beauvoir
refers to this creative process and the impossibility ofself-coincidence when she
says in La force de I 'age that she still believes in a "transcendental ego" or a
residual irreducible ego after the phenomenological reduction has taken place,
34. "Mon experience d'ecrivain" in Claude Francis and Femande Gontier, Les ecrits de
Simone de Beauvoir, (Paris: Gallimard, 1979),453-454 (my translation).
122 URSULATIDD
which is a spontaneous transcendent unification ofour states and actions." She
explains that in her view "the self is only a probable object of which the
speaking subject only glimpses an outline; another person can have a clearer
or more accurate picture"."
This author-reader collaboration is an important factor when we consider
Beauvoir's decision to represent her life chronologically throughout most ofher
autobiography. It can be argued that she adopts such an approach and relates
the life in much of its contingent detail not with the aim of producing a
complete and mimetically "true" account of her life (which is in any case
impossible) but rather to facilitate the recreation ofthe temporally-situated life
in the future time of the reader.
Beauvoir's decision to employ a chronological method of narration and
thereby represent her life as a temporal succession is, therefore, in part, the
result ofphilosophical objectives. It constitutes an attempt on her part to enable
the temporally-situated reader to recreate the lost autobiographical selfin the
future. However, the literary disadvantages of such a method are that the
meaning ofthe life represented appears perpetually deferred and the narrative
can be laborious reading, for the amassed contingent detail of the life can
appear uninteresting and insubstantial.
Philippe Lejeune, in his reading ofSartre,s autobiography, Les mots, in Le
pacte autobiographique, has described Beauvoir's chronological narrative
methodology in autobiography as a natve failure , because it renders the past as
a series of separate moments, disguised as a dialectical progression ." This
demonstrates, as far as Lejeune is concerned, Beauvoir's inability to understand
Sartre 's notion of temporality, namely that "the past in itself' does not exist,
and that the past only assumes significance in the light ofmy present proj ect. 38
In Lejeune 's view , "[Beauvoir] should frankly use the diary format instead of
35. Beauvoir takes issue here with the solipsism of Husserl's transcendental ego, as does
Sartre in La transcendance de l 'ego (Paris : Librairie philosophique Vrin, 1988).
36. Laf orce de l'tige, 419/368 (tr. adapted). This is why for both Beauvoir and Sartre , there
is no sharp division between biography and autobiography.
37. Philippe Lejeune, Le pa cte autobiographique, (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 235-6 .
38. Sartre explains his notion of the past in 'M y Past' in L 'ei re et neant (Paris : Gallimard ,
1995), 541-549 ; translated by Hazel E. Barnes as Being and Nothingness , (London:
Routledge, 1969), 496-504 .
trying to disguise it in autobiography.?" In response to Lejeune's criticisms,
Leah Hewitt has argued that Beauvoir's chronological method of
autobiographical narration is successful precisely because
it reveals its own impossible underpinnings and responds to the structure

ofthe broken promise. Given that chronology is conventional and arbitrary ,
it is particularly apt for portraying the breakdown in a necessity or absolute
through the writing and the life. Although de Beauvoir is not intending
such an outcome, and seems to ignore it by the end of her autobiography,
the collapse of the chronological structure of the first three books
successfully registers the broken promise . The "failed" structure enacts both
her continuing belief that a totality can be revealed and its textual
impossibility through time."
In the sense that the chronological method conveys the progression and
purpose of the life represented and its subsequent decline through aging,
Beauvoir's method therefore appears to work. For as Lejeune pointed out
earlier in his discussion in Le pacte autobiographique:
Chronology governs all our relationsh ips with other people ... and ultimately
claims to govern all our relationships with ourselves . We are only
constituted as 'Subjects through this relationship to other people , and it goes
without saying that chronology, which is the basis of our history, has a key
role in life narrative."
Beauvoir acknowledges that the past is a narrative contruction of her own

making, and seeks to recreate the process of that past in so far as it has
culminated in the existence of the celebrated writer of the autobiographical
present. In answer to Lejeune's criticism of her use of a chronological
presentation in her autobiography, it can be argued that what is appropriate
methodologically for Sartre in his autobiography, Les mots, in the briefironic
evocation of a future writer's life which he offers, is inappropriate in
Beauvoir's multi-volume testimonial autobiography. Her project is quite
39.0p. cit., 236 (my translation).

40. Leah Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes, (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990),47.
41. Lejeune , Le pacte autobiographique, 198 (my translation) .

124 URSULATIDD
different, for she appears to seek to bear witness to her various experiences as
a temporally-situated subject, within a collective historical framework.
At the end ofthe section marked' Interlude' in Laforce de choses, her third
volume ofautobiography, Beauvoirexplains the difficulties ofautobiographical
narration and the impossibility of rendering her experience as a temporally-
situated subject:
The further I go, the more the world fills my life to bursting point. To relate
it, I'd need a dozen musical registers and a pedal to sustain the feelings -
melancholy, joy, disgust - that have coloured whole periods of it, through
the heart's intermittences. Each moment reflects my past, my body, my
relationships with other people, my tasks, the society in which I live, the
whole of this earth; linked together and yet independent, these realities
sometimes reinforce and work together in harmony, and sometimes
interfere, conflict with or neutralise each other. If their totality does not
remain ever-present, I can say nothing with any accuracy. Even if I
overcome this difficulty, I stumble over others. A life is a strange object,
from one moment to the next both translucid and completely opaque,
something which I fashion with my own hands and yet which is imposed on
me, for which the world provides me with the material which it then steals
from me, an object which is pulverised by events, fragmented, broken,
carved up like a map into areas of different densities, and yet still keeps its
unity."
It appears then that autobiography functions for Beauvoir as an

intersubjective locus oftemporal self-recreation, and as a means ofrecreating
a vital agency which the passing oftime destroys, because as noted already, in
Beauvoir's writing, time does not operate progressively but by division and
diminution. The Other as reader-collaborator thus plays a literally vital role in
the production of past selves in the future time of autobiography.
Mary Warnock, in her study Memory, agrees with Beauvoir' s notion ofthe
past as largely irretrievable for the individual concerned, and argues that in
remembering "what I cannot do is make it necessary to choose again. In the
past I was free; now, looking back on the past , my choices are determined. I
can tell the story as it was ; but I cannot change the plot at will ."43 Self-recovery
(as opposed to self-recreation) in autobiography is a fallacy, for one can never
42. La f orce des chases 1,374-75/287 (tr. adapted ).
43. Mary Warnock , Memory (London: Faber, 1987), 138.

choose twice, and a life without choice and agency is not an option that
Beauvoir would endorse. Self-recreation in her autobiography appears to be an
attempt at the conservation of past states of the self achieved through the
narration ofa recreated past which relies on memories, recovering traces ofthe
past and consulting collective accounts of that past such as newspapers and
histories. The reader of Beauvoir's autobiography then assumes the role of
creator and curator of her life.
Yet Beauvoir is also concerned to bear witness to a collective past in the
representation oftemporality in her autobiography. For her collaboration with
the reader as Other also facilitates the recovery of lost others . On several
occasions, her memoirs offer the reader micro-biographies ofcharacters in her
entourage. Autobiography and memoirs (which are differentiated here on the
basis of being primarily concerned with the evocation of a subject situated in
relation to a personal past or to a collective past respectively) act as a site of
recovery or as an opportunity to rework lost relationships with the Other
-friends or members of her family who have died, such as Zaza, Jacques,
Bourla, her father , Giacometti, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty. In La vieillesse,
Beauvoir describes how the deaths of others entail the death of a part of her
life, for subjectivity is assumed always already in relation to and with others
with whom we share experiences of'time." Thus the death ofSimone ' s friend,
Zaza , related at the end of Memoires d 'une jeune fille rangee transforms
Beauvoir's relationship to a section ofher past experienced with Zaza, which
will in tum always be shaped by the event of that death.
In this way, because we share temporally-situated experiences with others
in the world, Beauvoir seems to agree with Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenologie
de faperception that our present experiences are open to other experiences of
temporality (including deaths) which do not belong to us as individuals. These
experiences can enlarge our individual experience ofthe world to incorporate
a collective temporal and historical dimension.f As Beauvoir writes in her
review ofthe Phenomenologie: "If! exist as a subject it's because I am able to
stitch together a past, present and future, it's because I make time ; to perceive
space, to perceive an object is to extend time around myself'.46 Iffor Beauvoir,
I am time in the world with other people, then she, like Merleau-Ponty, is
44. La vieillesse , 389/408-9 .
45. Phenomenologie de la perception, 495/433.
46. Simone de Beauvoir's review of ' La phenomenologie de la perception,' 366.

126 URSULA TIDD
rejecting the traditional notion of time experienced by the subject as a flow
because this presupposes the existence of an external witness who observes
time. According to Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, I do not observe time passing
in this way because I am always already part ofevents . The witness's vantage
point which Beauvoir assumes in her memoirs is therefore both a narrative
device and a specific response to history.
In her autobiography, particularly in her diary extracts ofthe Second World
War and the Algerian War, Beauvoir sometimes represents events as they
happen in all their contingency, attempting to attribute them with no more
apparent significance than at the time of their occurence. By representing
events across different time scales, she represents the mechanisms ofhistory.
But this technique ofrepresenting historical events contingently has sometimes
resulted in charges ofpolitical naivety being levelled at Beauvoir by those who
claim the benefit ofhindsight and imaginatively recreate these historical events
decades later." As she recognises, the reader always has the privilege to
perform this temporal synthesis in autobiography for, as we have seen, it is
how personal and collective histories are recreated and thereby live on.
Justifying her largely chronological approach to self-representation in
autobiography in Laforce des choses, Beauvoir observes:
But what counts above all in my life is that time goes by; I grow older, the
world changes, my relationship to it changes; to show the transformations,
the developments, the irreversible deteriorations of others and myself -
nothing is more important to me than that."
Representing a variety oftemporal experiences in autobiography, philosophy,

and fiction, Beauvoir has literally shown us the times of our lives.
47 . See, for example, the controversial Gilbert Joseph , Une si douce occupation ... Simone
de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul Sartre 1940-1944 (Paris : Albin Michel , 1991).
48. Laforce des choses 1,375-76/288 (tr, adapted).

Chapter 7
The Lived Experience of Doubling:

Simone de Beauvoir's Phenomenology of Old Age
Sarah Clark Miller

State University of New York at Stony Brook
Abstract: This essay demonstrates that Beauvoir 's La vieillesse is a

phenomenological study of old age indebted to Husserl's
phenomenology ofthe body. Beauvoir's depiction ofthe doubling in
the lived experience ofthe elderly-a division between outsiders'
awareness of the elderly's decline and the elderly's own inner
understanding of old age-serves as a specific illustration of
Beauvoir's particular method ofdescription and analysis.
We must stop cheating: the whole meaning of our life is in question in the
future that is waiting for us. If we do not know what we are going to be,
we cannot know what we are: let us recognize ourselves in this old man
or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the
entirety of our human state. And when it is done we will no longer
acquiesce in the misery of the last age; we will no longer be indifferent,
because we shall feel concerned, as indeed we are.
-Simone de Beauvoir, La viei/lesse
Re-reading La vieillesse:
A Phenomenology of Old Age
Simone de Beauvoir dares to tell forbidden stories about the elderly , their
lives, and their bodies . I By so doing she disturbs a cultural system which
I. Simone de Beauvoir's works after her fiftieth year are remarkable for the portraits of old
age which they provide. Unflinching in nature, she demands that her readers confront the
deep-seated disgust which arises within them when contemplating the aging body through
her portrayal of female protagonists in works such as Les belles images (Paris : Gallimard,
1966), translated by Patrick O'Brian as Les belles images (New York: Putnam , 1968) and
Lefemme rompue (Paris : Gallimard, 1968), translated by Patrick O'Brian as The Woman
Destroyed (New York : Putnam, 1969). Beauvoir explores both the psycholog ical and the
socia l difficulties associated with aging as Elaine Marks notes in "Transgressing the
(In)cont(in)ent Boundaries: The Body in Decline ," Yale French Studies , no. 72 (1986) , 189.
It is not only in her autobiographical and fictional works that such subjects are of great
127
W O'Br ien and L. Embree (eds.}, The Existential Phenomenology ofSimone de Beauvoir, 127-147.
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publish ers.
128 SARAH CLARK MILLER
demands that such things be kept from view. The epigraph above functions as
a clue to her corpus, posing the challenge found throughout her work on old
age: can we come to recognize ourselves in the aging men and women we see?
In 1970 Beauvoir advanced this specific challenge in a lengthy work entitled
La vieillesse, translated as The Coming ofAge.2 Through her critics' censure,
she has paid the price for daring to raise such an impertinent question. As a
scholarly work, La vieillesse has received little philosophical attention. While
the fiftieth anniversary of the French publication of Le deuxieme sexe has
spurred a resurgence of interest in Beauvoir's writing, scholars still largely
overlook her work on old age, deeming it unworthy of specifically
philosophical investigation.'
In this essay I seek to redress this neglect. I read La vieillesse with an eye
toward the philosophical contributions Beauvoir offers therein. Specifically,
I argue that La vieillesse is a work of phenomenology, one which continues
the research begun by Edmund Husserl and thereafter refined by such authors
as Maurice Merleau-Ponty."Beauvoir uses the methodological apparatus of
import. La vieillesse (Paris : Gallimard, 1970) is Beauvoir's theoretical treatment of the

topic .
2. In its first American edition, La vieillesse appeared as The Coming ofAge , translated by
Patrick O'Brian (New York : Putnam, 1972). Commenting upon this particular translation
of the title, Margaret Simons notes, "Beauvoir published Old Age [which was]
euphemistically translated as The Coming ofAge ... ." Margaret Simons, "Introduction," in
Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvo ir, ed. Margaret Simons (University Park :
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995),5.
3. Important exceptions to this oversight include Debra B. Bergoffen's treatment of La

vieillesse in The Philosophy ofSimone de Beauvo ir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic
Generosities (Albany : State University ofNew York Press , 1997) and Penelope Deutscher's
discussions in "Bodies, Lost and Found: Simone de Beauvoir from The Second Sex to Old
Age ," Radical Philosophy, No. 96 (July/August 1999),6-16 and in "Living Aged Skin:
Simone de Beauvoi r on Desire , Embodiment and Old Age," in Thinking Through the Skin,
eds. S. Ahmed et al. (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming) .
4. See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phiinomenologie und phiinomenologischen
Philosophie. Zweites Buch : Phiinomenologishe Untersuchugen zur Konstitution, edited by
Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and
Andre Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology ofConstitution . Collected Works,
vol. 3. (Dordrech t: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989); Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische
Meditat ionen und Pariser Vortriige, edited by S. Strasser (The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff,
RE-READING LA VIEILLESSE 129
a phenomenology of the body to conduct her study of senectitude. She

presents a phenomenology of old age which treats the lived experience of
being old. Approached from this perspective, the novelty and complexity of
Beauvoir's phenomenology-particularly of her analysis of the lived
experience of doubling-become clear. Recently, scholars have begun to
examine the phenomenological roots of Le deuxieme sexe? Exploring La
vieillesse in a similar manner can give rise to a better understanding of the
significance ofthis substantial work. In particular, we can discover what La
vieillesse offers in terrns of a continued effort to understand Beauvoir's
relation to phenomenology. Previously, she had focused on what Debra
Bergoffen calls "the phenomenological-existentialistproject ofhistorici zing
the embodied subject" by noting that "subjective embodiment. ..is always
sexed and gendered.?" Beauvoir extends this observation in La vieillesse,
discerning not only that subjective embodiment is always sexed and gendered,
but also that it is continuously involved in a process ofaging. The penultimate
stage of such subjective embodiment, more often than not, is old age.
Old age is ofparticular interest for a phenomenology ofthe body because
aging, quite obviously, is a process which every human being experiences. As
embodied creatures, we all age. In this sense, the body is indeed a site of a
kind of universal: barring premature death, all humans will experience old
age. In La vieillesse, Beauvoir sets herself to the task of creating
phenomenological descriptions of the embodied experience of old age.
1973), translated by Dorion Cairns as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to

Phenomenology (The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff, 1960); and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), translated by Colin Smith as
Phenomenology ofPerception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).
5. Such discussions include those of Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de

Beauvoir; Sara Heinamaa, "Simone de Beauvoir's Phenomenology of Sexual Difference,"
Hypatia, vol. 14, no. 4 (Fall 1999), 114-132; Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Kon och existens.
Studier I Simone de Beauvoir 's 'Le Deuxieme Sexe' (Goteborg : Daidalos, 1991), translated
by Linda Schenk as Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, (Hanover,
Conn. and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Jo-Ann Pilardi , Simone de Beauvoir
Writing the Self: Philosophy Becomes Autobiography (Westport, Conn. and London:
Greenwood Press, 1999); and Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of
Simone de Beauvoir, trans. Anne Lavelle (Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University
Press, 1996).
6. Debra B. Bergoffen, "From Husserl to de Beauvoir: Gendering the Perceiving Subject,"

Metaphilosophy, vol. 27, nos. I & 2 (January/April 1996),57.
Wanting to avoid a pitfall of Le deuxieme sexe, Beauvoir is careful not to

approach this task with the assumption that she can describe the experience
of the aged, as if there exists a single experience shared by all the elderly.
Rather, the acknowledged universality of the experience is limited to
recognition of the biological certitude of one 's progression into old age.
Beauvoir clarifies that although all human beings undergo aging, there is
necessarily a wide variety of experiences of this biological certainty. 7
But what historical basis is there for an exploration of La v.ieillesse as a
phenomenological work? What kind and extent ofexposure did Beauvoirhave
to phenomenology? Though a full historical treatment of the trajectory of
Beauvoir's development as a phenomenologist is beyond the scope of this
essay , the two following points serve to demonstrate her familiarity with its
methodology." Recognizing the significance of Husserl and Heidegger's
theories for his own philosophical development, Same traveled to Berlin to
engage their work in the 1930s. Beauvoir, wanting to follow the progression
of Same's thought, also conducted a thorough study of these two
phenomenologists,"Through her own efforts and in conversation with Same,
Beauvoir absorbed the practice ofthe phenomenological method. 10 Second,
Beauvoir exhibits her familiarity with Merleau-Ponty's development of
Husserl's notion of the lived body in writings such as Le deuxieme sexe,
wherein she refers to Merleau-Ponty when discussing women and
embodiment. In addition, in 1945 Beauvoir reviewed Merleau-Ponty's
Phenomenologie de la perception in Les temps modernes, thus concretizing
her familiarity with Merleau-Ponty's development of Husserl's
7. In the Preface to La vieillesse, Beauvoir writes: "Hitherto I have spoken of old age as
though that expression stood for a clearly defined reality. In fact, as far as our own species
is concerned old age is by no means easy to define .. .although old age, considered as a
biological fate, is a reality that goes beyond history, it is nevertheless true that this fate is
experienced in a way that varies according to the social context" (15-16/9-10).
8. See Margaret Simon's essay entitled "The Beginnings of Beauvoir's Existential

Phenomenology," in this volume, wherein she reveals that Beauvoir most likely had an even
earlier understanding of phenomenology than scholars have previously known.
9. Eva Gothlin examines this influence in the context of Beauvoir's philosophy of history
in "Simone de Beauvoir's Existential Phenomenology and Philosophy of History in Le
deuxieme sexe," in this volume.
10. Vintges , 35.

phenomenology of the lived body. 11

The approach which Beauvoir takes in La vieillesse will not be foreign to
readers who have already covered the terrain of Le deuxieme sexe, as the
phenomenological methodology behind the two texts is similar. Like Le
deuxieme sexe , in La vieillesse Beauvoir considers the situation of a
particular group of people. No longer solely concerned with women 's
situation, though still querying this problem to some extent, La vieillesse
details the circumstances ofthe lives ofthe elderly in modem Western culture.
In so doing, she renders a treatment of the aged as situated human beings.
According to Beauvoir, the aged lead a marginalized existence largely
determined by society's designation ofthem as Other. Reflecting an approach
aligned with the phenomenological perspective of philosophical
anthropology, 12 Beauvoir discusses what she in Le deuxieme sexe termed the
"total situation" of senectitude. Hence , she attempts to comment upon all
possible aspects of the elderly's multifold situation. As a phenomenologist,
Beauvoir begins her investigation from the supposition that the elderly are
human beings situated within the complex context ofthe world. One can only
truly shed light on the meaning of their situation through a careful
consideration of the various facets of this complexity. Her approach to the
topic necessarily reflects this complexity.
Beauvoir's interest in the phenomenon ofold age spans a panoply ofareas.
She exposes its biological significance (in terms ofthe physical organism), its
psychological consequences, and its existential dimension. Moreover,
Beauvoir insists upon the interdependence of these standpoints. It is not
possible to truly understand anyone part divorced from the others. Rather, a
rich understanding can only be achieved when considering the ways in which
these views interpenetrate one another , thus bringing forth a careful
comprehension ofthe significance ofold age.How exactly, however, are these
views interrelated? Beauvoirprovides the following illustrative explanation:
"what is termed the individual's psychic or spiritual life can only be
understood in light ofhis existential situation: this situation, therefore, also
affects his physical organism. And the converse applies, for he experiences his
relationship with time differently according to whether his body is more or
II . Sara Heinamaa provides a more detailed discussion of Beauvoir 's phenomenological

roots in "Simone de Beauvoir's Phenomenology of Sexual Difference ."
12. Vintges, 34.

less impaired.t'" Thus Beauvoir reveals that one can only understand the
psychic life of an individual in old age in the light of that individual 's
existential situation. This existential situation affects the individual's aging
physical organism . The reverse also holds true as the extent to which an
individual's body is impaired as he or she ages affects that individual 's
existential experience oftemporality. Beauvoir's descriptive analysis ofold
age thus adeptly weaves multiple strands ofthe experience of aging. As she
later states: "old age can only be understood as a whole: it is not solely a
biological but also a cultural fact.?"
Beauvoir also conceptualizes the means of approaching old age
theoretically as split between an outside perspective (involving descriptions
from the standpoint of biology and sociology, for example) and an inside
perspective (amounting to individuals ' own inner understanding of their
experience of old age).15 Beauvoir divides the work fairly evenly between
these two perspectives in Part One and Part Two of La vieillesse.
Importantly, however, they can be heard to be in conversation with one
another throughout the work. In the first part, Beauvoir describes old age
from an "outside" point ofview, explicitly acknowledging that she considers
aged individuals as objects, viewed in turn from a scientific, historical, and
social standpoint. She entertains what the disciplines ofbiology , sociology,
history, and anthropology have to contribute to a discussion of old age. Ifin
the first part of La vieillesse Beauvoir renders the elderly as objects , in the
second halfshe illuminates their position as subjects, as Part Two ofher work
is devoted to the elderly's own inward experience ofold age. In this way, the
structure of La vieillesse highlights a phenomenological framework, as
Beauvoirreveals the lived experience ofthe elderlyto be one in which they are
both objects and subjects. Concerning the aged's inward experience of
senectitude, Beauvoir treats three separate, yet intertwined issues : the
transformation which takes place in the relationships ofindividuals with their
bodies and their body images, the changes which occur in the temporal
experience in old age, and the differences apparent in old persons'
14. Ibid., 19/13.
IS. This theoret ical approach is mirrored in Beauvoir's descriptions of the lived experience
of doubling, as I discuss at the beginning of the second section of this essay.
relationships with others in the world." Beauvoir carefully reminds her

readers that though she may tease out each strand in tum, the "various factors
that define the old person's state influence one another. .. none has its real
meaning except in its relationship with the others... [and] must be read from
the viewpoint of a final synthesis. ,,17
Such an approach is to be expected from one schooled in Husserlian
phenomenology. When directing specific attention to the resonance between
Husserlian phenomenology and Beauvoir's project in La vieillesse, several
points ofconvergence emerge. For the purposes ofthe present discussion, one
such point is perhaps most salient. Like Husserl, Beauvoir maintains a certain
distrust of the sciences as offering the singular, correct view. As Karen
Vintges observes: " ...there is a question of division of tasks between the
sciences and philosophy; philosophy places the results of the sciences in a
broader framework. Beauvoir's view in The Second Sex is in line with
Husserl's on this point. Her point ofdeparture is also the necessity ofa broad,
direct approach, as opposed to the reductionism of the sciences. "18 What
Vintges says about Le deuxieme sexe can also be applied to La vieillesse.
Careful to avoid the reductionism of the sciences, Beauvoir's point of
departure in La vieillesse is decidedly broad-spanning multiple
disciplines-as we have seen above. This insight into the purposive breadth
ofBeauvoir' s analysis helps to make sense ofwhat critics have denounced as
a far too expansive and vaguely disorganized work.
These critical reactions to Beauvoir's discussions of aging also uncover
clues leading to the source ofthe cultural bias against aged bodies. Swift and
severe in their condemnation, her critics were quick to engage in a "systematic
disparagement ofthis content,"!" complaining about the meticulous attention
to detail which Beauvoir employed when writing about the failing bodies of
the elderly, including her friends and family members." In comments so brutal
16. La vieillesse, 299-300/279 .
17. Ibid., 299-300/279.
18. Vintges, 37.
19. Marks, 187.
20. In an interview with Madeleine Gobeil, Beauvoir responds to this critic ism. Gobeil
observes, "Some critics and readers have felt that you spoke about old age in an unpleasant
way." Beauvoir responds: "A lot of people didn 't like what I said because they want to
believe that all periods of life are delightful, that children are innocent , that all newlyweds
134 SARAH CLARK. MILLER
that they border on the humorous, Time magazine provided the following
critique of Beauvoir's writing in 1966: "A merciless record of the trivia of
death--old age and bed wetting, pubic baldness, enemas .. ." The Spectator,
in 1972, scathingly denounced her then recent work as consisting of "just
short of five hundred obsessive and ultimately negative pages.'?'
To what can we attribute the strength of reaction against Beauvoir's
portrayals ofold age? Elaine Marks provides one answer, observing that what
Beauvoir may be guilty of in the eyes ofthe press is not only that she drones
on too long about things far too depressing, but also that she crosses
boundaries into unmentionable topics. Marks suggests, "the question is then :
to what degree is Simone de Beauvoir being accused of transgressing
boundaries established by phallocentric discourse ...boundaries that have
made and maintained certain areas taboo: incontinence, old age, dying?"22
Marks illuminates the possibility that the "bad taste" of which Beauvoir's
critics accuse her actually serves as the site of her originality. Specifically,
Beauvoir crosses boundaries of genre, daring to write about that which
previously had been contained within limits established by "the
institutionalization ofspecialized discourses on the body ...."23 Pushing this
analysis beyond a recognition ofher originality, it seems that her "bad taste"
is indicative of her radical focus upon the bodies of aging persons.
Disregarding the suggested rules ofliterary discourse , Beauvoir demands that
her readers view in plain light the embodied existence ofaging. She includes
material which disturbs people precisely because it makes visible that which
they do not want to see. This move of Beauvoir's is both courageous and
useful. Professionally, she risked much in repeatedly choosing to make visible
are happy, that all old people are serene . I've rebelled against such notions all my life, and
there 's no doubt about the fact that the moment, which for me is not about old age but the
beginning of old age, represents-even if one has all the resources one wants , affection,
work to be done-represents a change in one's existence, a change that is manifested by the
loss of a great number of things . If one isn't sorry to lose them it's because one didn 't love
them . I think that people who glorify old age or death too readily are people who really don 't
love life." Simone de Beauvoir, interviewed by Madeleine Gobeil, in Women Writers at
Work: The Paris Review Interviews, trans. Bernard Frechtrnan , ed. George Plimpton (New
York : Random House, 1998), 154-55.
21. Quoted in Marks, 187-88.
n .lbid.,188.
23. Ibid., 190.

the abject bodies of old men and women in her texts. The critical reaction to
such visibility serves as a concrete demonstration of the attempted cultural
denial of the embodied reality of aging .
Karen Vintges provides another line ofreasoning which sheds light on the
critics' vituperative response, one which employs a phenomenological
framework in the process of explanation. In illuminating the structure of Le
deuxieme sexe, she uncovers a key to understanding the work as a systematic
whole. We have already seen the fruitful way in which application of
Vintges's insights regarding Le deuxieme sexe to La vieillesse can aid in
grasping how Beauvoir endeavored to examine the total situation of the
elderly and to resist the reductionism ofthe sciences in favor of the broader
starting point ofphenomenology. In addition, Vintges suggests analyzingLe
deuxieme sexe against "the backdrop ofphenomenological epistemology, in
which the immediate experience is decisive . .. ."24 Doing the same with La
vieillesse reveals the inventive way in which Beauvoir turns to the variety of
lived experience ofthe elderly in order to bring two points into relief: first, the
inherent inj ustice oftheir situation and second, the falsity ofmany supposed
truisms about the elderly. By drawing attention to the fact that the purported
truisms are not representative of the varied experience of the elderly, but
rather function as misguided and convenient stereotypes, she opens an
important possibility: to consider the lives ofthe aged apart from the various
stereotypes which pigeonhole them into certain styles of existence. Within
Beauvoir's phenomenological framework, the meanings which old age has are
allowed to come forth in all their diversity-diversity arising from the lived
cultural, historical and class specificity ofthe situated existence ofthe elderly.
Ultimately, the opportunity for such a realization originates within the
phenomenological method: withoutthe weight placed upon the embodied lived
experience of the elderly-weight which a phenomenological approach
encourages-the myths surrounding old age would go unchallenged. Thus , her
method ofaccumulating an extensive stockpile ofexamples from the lives of
numerous elderly individuals is "totally in line with the methodology of
philosophical phenomenology; in this approach examples are not used as
empirical evidence but rather as a means to show something, to pass on a
spec ific insight.':" When viewing La vieillesse through a phenomenological
lens, what Beauvoir's critics deemed "a merciless record ofthe trivia of. .. old
24. Vintges, 37.
25. Ibid., 37.

age" can be understood as part of Beauvoir's systematic structuring of a

phenomenological study of old age.
Lest we mistakenly cast Beauvoir in the shadow ofthe phenomenology of
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, we should pause to note a remarkable
contribution which she makes . A frequent criticism made ofHusserl entails
charges that his phenomenology is, in fact, locked in an epistemological
perspective. Such a perspective certainly accounts for a subject who is a
knowing subject, but limitation thereto ignores other crucial matters. Beauvoir
eschews such limitation, instead insightfully signaling and, as Debra
Bergoffen has noted, insisting upon the relationship between phenomenology
and ethics ." More specifically, Beauvoir accomplishes this through an
analysis ofthe embodied subjectivity ofthe elderly. By advancing what Gail
Weiss has termed "bodily imperatives.':" she moves beyond a solely
epistemological perspective to consider the ethical import ofsuch subjectivity.
In calling attention to the ethical ramifications of the elderly's embodied
subjectivity, Beauvoir provides a subtle critique of the strongly
epistemological nature ofHusserl's phenomenology.
It is certain that La vieillesse is not only a phenomenological study, but
also an ethical work. In it Beauvoir does not simply wish to put forth
descriptions ofthe myriad ways in which people experience old age. Rather,
she does so with a particular ethical purpose in mind: to set in plain view the
"criminal" way in which Western society forces their aged to live their last
years, hence rendering an implicit critique ofHusserI' s phenomenology which
avoided the political and ethical implications ofdescribing lived phenomena.
Like Pyrrhus et Cineas and Pour une morale de l'ambiguite, Beauvoir's
essay on old age is normative as well as descriptive ." Also indebted to the
Marxist tradition, she reproaches a capitalist world wherein "long-term
interests no longer have any influence: the ruling class that determines the fate
ofthe masses has no fear ofsharing that fate.?" With its emphasis on profit,
the market economy has little time for the old person who no longer generates
such profit. Beauvoir points to societies wherein those "active" members of
26. Bergoffen, The Philosophy ofSimone de Beauvoir, 21.
27. For a discussion of this notion, see Gail Weiss , Body Images: Embodiment as
Intercorporeality (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 129-163.
28. Eva Lundgren-Gothlin makes a similar observation in Sex and Existence, 152.
29. La vieillesse , 12/6.

the community (who can still provide for themselves, unlike the elderly, who
cannot), with an eye to the future, devise compromises between their current
and long-term interests. Doing so, she maintains, would redress the
dehumanizing treatment which the elderly receive . Beauvoir believes that
calling for such changes will catalyze no less than a complete upheaval of
society.
In La vieillesse, Beauvoir clearly succeeds in challenging the limits ofthe
discourse on old age, as Elaine Marks has argued. Beauvoir, however, has
something greater and more practical at stake than her desire to transgress
certain limits of phallocentric discourse: she seeks to give voice to the
suffering and discomfort of the neglected elderly of her time. She writes:
Society looks upon old age as a kind of shameful secret that is unseemly
to mention.... And that indeed is the very reason why I am writing this
book. I mean to break the conspiracy of silence . As far as old people are
concerned this society is not only guilty but downright criminal.. .. To
reconcile this barbarous treatment with the humanist morality they profess
to follow, the ruling class adopts the convenient plan of refusing to
consider them as real people : if their voices were heard, the hearers would
be forced to acknowledge that these were human voices. I shall compel my
readers to hear them. I shall describe the position that is allotted to the old
and the way in which they live: I shall tell what in fact happens in their
minds and their hearts .... ,,30
These strong words of Beauvoir's firmly root her work in the practical,
thus lending support to Bergoffen's claim that in La vieillesse Beauvoir
corrects what she saw to be a significant flaw in Le deuxieme sexe. By
focusing less upon "the abstract issue ofconsciousness" and more upon "the
material conditions of scarcity.'?' she places one foot squarely in the realm of
praxis, a position from which she can powerfully portray the real suffering of
the elderly. She seeks to give voice to "old people" whom she feels are treated
unjustly by their society. Beauvoir charges that society refuses to hear the
voices of the aged, hence denying them their humanity. Extending this
sentiment, we can say that the same society refuses to see the aged-and in
refusing to see them it also denies them their humanity. Revealing the intimate
connection between recognition and identification ofthe humanity ofothers,
30. Ibid ., 7-8/1-2 .
31. Bergoffen, The Philosophy ofSimone de Beauvoir, 187.

she helps us to begin to understand the ethical insight that the invisibility
which we force upon the bodies ofthe elderly functions to relegate them to a
sub-human class . Perhaps fearing our own inevitable entrance into old age,
we neglectfully turn our focus elsewhere, searching for affirmation of a
perpetual youthfulness for which our culture obsessively yearns.
Doubling: A Phenomenological Example of the

Lived Experience of the Elderly
Having demonstrated that La vieillesse is a phenomenological study of old

age, I now explore a key component of this work: Beauvoir's description of
the doubling in the lived experience of the elderly. My examination of
doubling is meant to serve as a specific illustration ofthe kind ofobservation
and analysis which her phenomenological study of senectitude entails.
Beauvoir's exploration of doubling employs the general phenomenological
methodology found inLa vieillesse, a methodology which I have treated in the
first section of this essay. An investigation of doubling, therefore, can offer
a richer understanding of the role of phenomenology in her work on the
elderly. Doubling functions as a particularphenomenological example which
elucidates the approach she takes in La vieillesse. Doubling is imbedded in
Beauvoir 's phenomenology in a significant way: structurally, La vieillesse
displays Beauvoir ' s theoretical approach to senectitude as a split between an
outside perspective and an inside perspective. Practically, this cleft is
evidenced in the different subject matter of Part One and Part Two of her
work. In the second section I will reveal that this cleft is also represented in
the particular phenomenological description ofthe elderly' s lived experience
of doubling. In such an experience , the elderly endure divergences between
outsiders' awareness of their decline and their internal sense of self.
Phenomenologically, the elderly's lived experience is one in which they are
both subject and object.
In using the term doubling, Beauvoir attempts to capture a sense ofa split:
a split between the elderly's own inward feeling of constancy of identity as
they age and external observers' objective awareness ofthe declining bodies
of the elderly. One can conceptualize this split as occurring between the in-
itselfand the for-itself, as indeed Beauvoir does in La vieillesse. I will analyze
this distinction in order to shed light upon its import for her phenomenological
description of old age. Generally, Beauvoir characterizes doubling in two
different , though decidedly related ways. The first directl y stems from a
phenomenology ofthe body: she describes the process ofdoubling in terms of

the aged 's own embodiment. Second, Beauvoir analyzes the relationship
between self and other , specifically examining the impact of the beliefs of
outside viewers upon the identity of the elderly.
When focusing upon embodiment specifically, doubling amounts to an
assertion of the realness of an internal and constant sense of self over and
against an external, deteriorating appearance. The aged maintain an internal
selfapart from the negative changes ofdecline which happen to their bodies
as they grow older. Doubling thus functions as a way to combat the inevitable
deterioration that occurs in old age. The elderly may believe that if they do not
acknowledge such forms of decline as intimately part of themselves, this
decline can not then challenge their established internal sense ofselfand will
not have to comprise a significant aspect oftheir lives . Senescent individuals
cannot remedy this rupture which occurs in their subjectivity. They cannot
reconcile that which they see in the mirror with that which they understand
themselves to be. Their "I" consists not of those wrinkles, that gray hair.
Speaking for the elderly, Beauvoir explains that the identity of old age is
difficult to assume "because we have always regarded it as something alien,
a foreign species: 'Can I have become a different being while I still remain
myselfi"? " As they peer into the mirror in a disbelieving fashion , what do
they come to see? When gazing into the mirror, the elderly can rej ect their
own embodied existence to such an extent that that which they see is a
wrinkled, grayed objec t which is not their self. Though eventually they must
come to recognize in themselves that which society sees-a sadl y fading
object from which to avert one 's eyes-initially, their double no longer
resembles them."
In La vieillesse, Beauvoir offers an extended philosophical discussion
regarding the doubling which arises in conjunction with the process ofaging.
The resulting division rests upon a distinction which Beauvoir, drawing upon
Sartrean ontology, makes between the in-itselfand the for-itself. She explains
that "it is impossible for us to experience what we are for others in the for-
32. La vieilless e, 301/283.
33. On e may object that the portrait of old age that Beau voir provides in her discus sion of
doubling is undul y negative. Though it is not the focus of the present dis cussion , it is
inte resting to note and then to question both Beauvoir's general tone of negativity concerning
old age and the viability of her solut ion to the "identification crisis" that doubl ing repre sen ts.
itself mode .... "34 The in-itself, then, is related to what we are for outside
viewers. Our experience ofour own lives for ourselves comprises the for-itself
mode. "Age," however, "is not experienced in the for-itself mode .... "35
Others' objective awareness ofthe aging ofour bodies comprises the in-itself
mode , whereas the inward feeling ofconstancy (a feeling ofeternal youth, of
never changing) encompasses the for-itself mode. Revealing a key to the
motivation behind doubling, Beauvoir elaborates upon the "benefits" for the
subject of maintaining a distance between the in-itself and the for-itself.
Through this separation the subject lays claim to a sense of everlasting
youth." When the elderly keep other's perceptions regarding the aging oftheir
bodies apart from their own conception of themselves, they are able to
maintain a constant internal sense of youthfulness which is not then
challenged by how others see them. Ultimately, however, the split between the
in-itselfand the for-itself is a moment of"identification crisis.''" one in which
"there is an insoluble contraction between the obvious clarity ofthe inward
feeling that guarantees our unchanging quality and the objective certainty of
our transformation. All we can do is waver from the one to the other, never
managing to hold them both firmly together.' :"
Though Beauvoir' s use ofthe theoretical apparatus ofthe in-itselfand for-
itself is certainly indebted to Sartrean ontology, the way in which this
distinction plays out in the context ofher description ofthe lived experience
of old age illuminates her additions to Sartre's theory. As Jo-Ann Pilardi
elucidates, "the sovereignty of the subject [the self as for-itself] can be
' disturbed' in two ways. Both disturbances have to do with the existence of
other people .... First, the subject can also be an object for others. Second, the
subject, though it is an individual, is also ... a being-with-others." Beauvoir's
contribution to Sartre' s existentialist-phenomenological ontology manifests
itselfin her "combining these two disturbances ofsubjectivity.... "39 Doubling
renders the nature ofthis combination particularly clear. The lived experience
35. Ibid., 311/292.
36. Ibid., 311-12/293 .
37. Ibid., 314/296.
38. Ibid., 309/290 .
39. Pilardi , 16.

ofdoubling disturbs the subjectivity ofan elderly individuals because oftheir

capacity to be viewed as deteriorating objects by a community of external
observers.
La vieillesse also contains a second contribution by Beauvoir to Sartre's
ontology. In this work, Beauvoir identifies the challenge to the for-itself's
transcendence by its facticity." Pilardi explains, "an ontological system which
rejects determinism and virtually equates the human being with freedom, as
did Sartrean existentialism, must make at least some concession to the
hindrances or resistances which freedom encounters; ... they include one 's
place, one's body, one's past, one's general environment, other human beings,
and one's death .,,41 Certainly, old age is yet another resistance which freedom
encounters, one which issues forth from the human situation of being
embodied. Beauvoir's phenomenology of old age accounts for the ways in
which facticity-in the form ofbodily decline and outsiders' interpretation of
this decline-ereates a hindrance for freedom in a way in which Sartre never
did. As Penelope Deutscher observes, Beauvoir "increasingly rejects freedom
of consciousness as primary in relation to one's situation. She comes up
against a limit point for which freedom of consciousness offers little
consolation.?" Old age is this limit point. In this way, La vieillesse perhaps
emphasizes that which Le deuxieme sexe never emphasized enough: the
individual subject cannot always affirm freedom. Old age makes this point
abundantly clear: the elderly are saddled with the reality of physiological
decline and with societal interpretation of such decline , both of which can
offer significant challenges to an assertion of freedom."
The notion of doubling also appears in Le deuxieme sexe, in a chapter
entitled "From Maturity to Old Age." In this chapter Beauvoir likens the
40. Beauvoir also articulates this challenge in Pour une moral de I'ambiguite (Paris:
Gallimard, 1947); translated by Bernard Frechtrnan as The Ethics ofAmbiguity (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1948).
41. Pilardi, 17.
42. Deutscher, "Bodies, Lost and Found: Simone de Beauvoir from The Second Sex to Old
Age," 8.
43. Beauvoir emphasizes the importance of the societal interpretation of the elderly's
decline : "A clear statement of what constitutes advance or retreat for man implies the
knowledge of a certain goal: but there is no given a priori end, existing in the absolute .
Every society creates its own values: and it is in the social context that the word decline
takes on an exact meaning." La vieillesse, 19/13.
doubling which occurs in old age to that which one withstands in a near-death
experience:
Individuals also who have in full health come close to death say that they
experienced a curious sense of doubling; when one feels oneself a
conscious, active, free being, the passive object on which the fatality is
operating seems necessarily as if it were another: this is not I being
knocked down by an automobile; this cannot be I , this old woman reflected
in the mirror! The woman who "never felt so young in her life" and who
has never seen herself so old does not succeed in reconciling these two
aspects of herself.... The woman puts trust in what is clear to her inner
eye rather than in that strange world... where her double no longer
resembles her, where the outcome has betrayed her."
In the passage, Beauvoir defines doubling as the incongruity which arises

when one feels oneself to be "a conscious, active, free being" and yet also
must necessarily acknowledge oneselfas a passive object upon which a force
acts , thus clearly articulating a Sartrean tension between freedom and
facticity. In the case ofa near-death experience, a potential fatality acts upon
an object which is oneself. In the case ofaging, Chronos himselfregisters his
mark upon the passive body. During such experiences, Beauvoir maintains
that we distance ourselves from the trauma to such an extent that the body
seems to belong to another person, not to ourselves. Simultaneously, the
unconscious mind "clings to the illusion of perpetual youth. ":" The split
between an internal sense of self and a sense of self linked to the body is
complete.
Beauvoir formulates what she takes to be the only possible solution to
doubling (though she acknowledges the inadequacy ofthe solution): "In order
to resolve the ' identification crisis' we must unresolvedly accept a new image
ofourselves .,,46 Perhaps surprisingly, the new image which Beauvoir suggests
the elderly must endeavor to accept is the image established by external
observers. Phenomenologically, however, what is the scope and nature ofthe
"image" to which Beauvoir refers? Michel Philibert, in "The
44. Beauvoir, Le dieuxieme sexe, 2 vo/s. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), II 283 ; translated by H.
M. Parshley as The Second Sex, (New York : Random House, 1989),580.
45. La vieillesse, 310/292 .
46. Ibid., 314-15/296.

Phenomenological Approach to Images ofAging," explains that images ofthe

elderly "constitute orientations or perspectives." He employs the term in a
general sense, not wishing to limit images "to mental pictures, schemas,
dynamic sequences, or mental films ." Instead, he explains, "people hold
opinions, beliefs, or mental attitudes toward aging that are more or less
coherent and that carry images and memories together with the beginnings or
outlines of knowledge. We shall call these multiform constructions
' images. ",47
When viewing Beauvoir' s assertion above in light ofPhilibert's analysis
of images of old age, her claim becomes lucid. She argues that although no
easy task, the elderly must take on new images of themselves which are
constituted by external observers, images which carry with them the opinions
and beliefs of other people toward old age. Thus, the revelation of the
elderly's status as old necessarily comes from outside ofthemselves." "This
viewing is effected by means of an image : we try to picture what we are
through the vision that others have of us. The image itself is not provided in
the consciousness: it is a cluster ofrays ofintentionality directed. .. towards
a missing object. " 49 Beauvoir maintains that the elderly attempt to gamer an
image ofthemselves through the images which outside viewers have ofthem.
The intentionality ofthis effort, however, must be directed toward a missing
object, as the aged cannot conceive ofthemselves as being old. The complex
images that outsiders hold oftheir aging bodies generate a new understanding
which, Beauvoir argues, the elderly must adopt in order to ameliorate the
identification crisis which old age can induce. "In order to recapture a picture
ofthemselves they are forced to use another's eyes-how does he see me?"
How people view the elderly varies. Beauvoir elaborates: "The reply is vague :
each man sees us in his own way and it is certain that our own vision does not
coincide with anyone of theirs." There is, however, one point of certainty:
"They all agree in stating that our face is that of an elderly person .. .. " 50
47. Michel Philibert, "The Phenomenological Approach to Images of Aging" reprinted in

Philosophical Foundations of Gerontology, ed. Patrick L. McKee (New York: Human
Science Press, 1982), 304.
49. Ibid., 309/291 .
50. Ibid., 315/296-97 .

144 SARAH CLARK. MILLER
Beauvoir captures the experience ofdoubling and the complex truth ofold
age in the following quote, explaining it in terms ofa dialectical relationship:
for the outsider it is a dialectical relationship between my being as he

defmes it objectively and the awareness of myself that I acquire by means
of him. Within me it is the Other-that is to say the person I am for the
outsider-who is old: and that Other is myself. In most cases, for the rest
of the world our being is as many-sided as the rest of the world itself. Any
observations made about us may be challenged on the basis of some
differing opinion. But in this particular instance no challenge is
permissible : the words 'a sixty-year-old' interpret the same fact for
everybody. They correspond to biological phenomena that may be detected
by examination. Yet our private, inward experience does not tell us the
number of our years; no fresh perception comes into being to show us the
decline of age.51
For the elderly, the truth of their old age is the Other within themselves.
Through a dialectical process thoroughly dependent upon outsiders' definition
of their being, the external viewers usher the elderly into an objective
realization oftheir own age. This experience is complex . The one who is old
is an Other within the elderly, but this Other is also themselves. This tension
is apparent in the above quote. In addition, old age flattens the many-
sidedness of being: no challenge can alter the fact of one's age. This fact,
however, does not resonate with the inward experience of the elderly.
Therefore, the phenomenological lived experience of the elderly is one in
which they are both object and subject. The perspective ofoutsiders confirms
the validity ofthe elderly's decline as biological objects ofa certain age. The
elderly, however, resist the integration of this information into their inward
experience ofthemselves as subjects. As Beauvoir explains , the "fact" oftheir
age does not easily register in their inward experience.
Although Beauvoir grants that while the view which the elderly hold of
themselves may not coincide entirely with the view which external observers
hold of them, it is still true that outsiders' views affect the elderly's
understanding of themselves. Others' "images" are comprised not only of
mental pictures, but also of a system ofbeliefs regarding the meaning ofold
age. To the extent that Beauvoir argues that the elderly must take on the
images ofthemselves as constituted by external observers, they necessarily
51. Ibid., 302/284.

also adopt the external observers' beliefs about old age. These beliefs can be
quite negative, consisting of fears about bodily decline in old age, or can be
restrictive, containing inaccurate stereotypes. Therefore, external social
constructions of old age can directly influence how the elderly understand
their own old age. Because an unfortunate kind ofcultural baggage frequently
accompanies the images which people have of senectitude, the elderly often
assume the weight of society's loathing of the aging body .
In order to protect themselves from such persistent abhorrence, they must
necessarily maintain the split between a negative external understanding ofthe
themselves (as failing or withering, for example) and their inward identity (as
perpetually youthful). Thus , for Beauvoir, we are never able to have a "full
inward experience" of old age. She asserts that .old age ultimately exists
beyond the lives of the aged.52 Though she argues that in the end the elderly
submit to the "outsider's point ofview" regarding old age, this does not mean
that they reconcile this point ofview with their inward feeling ofconstancy.53
This inward feeling remains distinct from the outsider's point of view. It
seems here that the lived experience ofthe elderly is always one characterized
by doubling; Beauvoir reports that the elderly's lived experience of old age
amounts to a problematic vacillation between the two views .
Conclusion
I have argued that Beauvoir offers a phenomenology of old age in La

vieillesse. Seeking to redress the way in which scholars have ignored this
work, I investigate La vieillesse as a philosophical essay, asserting that in it
Beauvoir employs the methodological apparatus of a phenomenology ofthe
body-initially developed by Husserl-to conduct her study ofsenectitude.
Beauvoir presents a panoply of phenomenological descriptions of the
embodied, lived experience of the elderly, wanting to avoid the false
presumption that there is one experience which characterizes old age. As a
phenomenologist, she begins her investigation from the supposition that the
elderly are human beings situated within the complex context of the world.
Furthermore, it is impossible to understand the meaning of their multifold
situation without considering various facets of this complexity. Beauvoir's
approach to the topic necessarily reflects this complexity: she considers old
52. Ibid., 309/291.
53. Ibid., 308-09 /290 .

age from the vantage point of an impressive array of disciplines, including

biology, sociology, history , psychology and anthropology. Moreover, she
insists on the interdependence of these standpoints, asserting that a rich
understanding can only be achieved when one treats the ways in which these
views interpenetrate one another.
Beauvoir turns to the variety oflived experience ofthe elderly in order to
emphasize two points : first, the inherent injustice of their situation, and
second, the falsity ofmany supposed truisms about the elderly. In doing so,
she opens up the possibility ofallowing the variety ofmeanings which old age
has to come forth in all their diversity. The phenomenological method makes
such a realization possible: without its illumination of the embodied, lived
experience of the elderly, the myths surrounding old age would go
unchallenged. In addition, Beauvoir encourages her readers to consider the
ethical importance arising from the descriptions of the elderly's lived
experience which she provides, hence moving beyond the restrictive
epistemological nature of Husserl's phenomenology into ethics. Speaking
from a position ofpraxis, Beauvoir powerfully portrays the real suffering of
the elderly.
As part of her phenomenological methodology, Beauvoir also
conceptualizes the means of approaching old age theoretically as a split
between an outside perspective (involving descriptions from the standpoint of
sociology, for example) and an inside perspective (amounting to individuals'
own inner understanding oftheir experience of old age). Interestingly, these
perspectives can be heard to be in conversation with one another throughout
La vieillesse. This theoretical approach is also reflected in Beauvoir's
descriptions of the elderly's lived experience of doubling in that this
experience amounts to a division between outsiders' awareness ofthe elderly's
decline and their own inner understanding ofold age. Continuing the thread
ofdiscussion regarding phenomenology, my treatment ofdoubling serves as
an exploration of one particular way in which Beauvoir details her
phenomenology of old age. It is an example of the kind of observation and
analysis which Beauvoir's phenomenology of senectitude entails.
One can describe doubling in several different sets ofterms. With the word
doubling, Beauvoir attempts to capture a sense ofa split: a split between the
elderly's own inward feeling ofconstancy ofidentity as they age and external
observers' awareness of the elderly's decline. In terms of embodiment,
doubling amounts to an assertion of the realness of an internal and constant
sense ofselfover and against an external, deteriorating appearance. In terms
indebted to Sartrean ontology, doubling is a split between the in-itselfand the

for-itself. Though Beauvoirinitially identifies some "benefits" ofmaintaining
distance between others' objective awareness ofthe elderly's aging bodies and
the elderly's own inner experience ofold age, ultimately she recognizes that
this is a moment of "identification crisis" which must be resolved. Beauvoir
proposes a difficult solution to this problem: the elderly must take on new
images of themselves which are constituted by external observers, images
which carry with them the opinions and beliefs of other people toward
senectitude. Through a dialectical process thoroughly dependent upon
outsiders' definition oftheir being, the external viewers usher the elderly into
a realization oftheir old age. The fact oftheir old age is difficult for the aged
to acknowledge. Their inward feeling ofconstancy as subjects remains distinct
from the outsiders' view of the them as deteriorating objects. Thus the lived
experience of the elderly remains one characterized by doubling.
Phenomenologically, the elderly experience themselves as both subject and
object. Ultimately, Beauvoir maintains that their experience ofold age is one
of an uncomfortable wavering between the two perspectives.
Chapter 8
Phenomenology and the Ethical Bases of Pluralism:

Arendt and Beauvoir on Race in the United States
Michael D. Barber
Saint Louis University
Abstract: Though differing in their approach to race in the United

States, Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir work on two
different levels of a philosophical-ethical spectrum , paralleling
Husserl 's distinction between the transcendental and'pretheoretical,
life-world levels. Each level needs the other in order to realize an
authentic sociopolitical pluralism.
Introduction
On the surface, no thinkers seem more incompatible than Hannah Arendt and
Simone de Beauvoir. While Beauvoir affirmed that after reading Edmund
Husserl she had never come closer to the real truth, Arendt considered
phenomenology part ofa long history ofworld-alienation and homelessness
that began with the origins ofmodernity. In Arendt's view, phenomenology's
focus on consciousness was sustained by the hubristic hope that humanity
could be the creator ofthe world and itself. Even the trajectories of Arendt's
and Beauvoir's theoretical careers contrast, with Arendt moving from political
philosophy to a concern for the life of the mind , and Beauvoir forsaking
earlier beliefs in an exaggerated notion of freedom to recognize pervasive
class and cultural conditioning. Although both women devoted attention to the
top ic ofrace relations in the United States, their conclusions diverged. Arendt
in "Reflections on Little Rock" argued against legal efforts to eliminate forms
of social segregation that Beauvoir in her L 'Amerique au jour lejour found
pervasive and morally repulsive.
In this chapter, I consider their differing reflections on the question ofrace
in the light oftheir underlying theoretical frameworks. I argue that , in spite of
differences, they work on two levels ofa philosophical-ethical spectrum, each
of which requires the other, as I hope to show in the course of the article,
especially in the conclusion.
149
W. O'Brien and L. Embree (eds.), The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir; 149-174.
150 MICHAEL D. BARBER
"Reflections on Little Rock"
.Departing from the anguished face ofan African-American girl, persecuted

by a white mob on her way home from a newly integrated school , Arendt
opposes the forced integration of schools in her 1959 Dissent article. Since
her argument rests on the claim that equality is a matter ofthe political realm
but not ofthe social realm where discrimination is permissible, it is crucial to
appreciate her distinctions between political, social , and private realms.
In The Human Condition, she retrieves a model ofpolitics from the Greek
polis, which contrasted with the private realm of the household, in which
families, under male rule, shouldered the burdens of survival. However,
insofar as male heads ofhousehold sufficiently secured life 's necessities via
their governance over women and slaves, they were able to enter the polis, a
domain free of such necessities. In the polis, the free Athenian men engaged
each other as equals , with none ofthe hierarchization typical ofthe household.
Through a plurality ofsimultaneous, innumerable perspectives, these partners
in the polis created a common world, without common measurement or
denominator. These exchanges between civic interlocutors, that is, processes
of action and speech , produced neither end-results, nor works of art, nor
products for consumption. Instead, those participating submitted themselves
to the harsh light of the public realm, a "merciless exposure," where even
one 's private passions, thoughts, and delights could be transformed,
depri vatized, and deindividualized. Such exposure to critique and to the
unpredictability of action in concert with others required above all courage.
Since persuasion and dialogue rather than force and coercion characterized the
polis, political discourse lacked the compulsion of scientific truth.
Nevertheless, critics like Plato , impatient with persuasion as a guide, sought
the ground of politics in "unwavering, 'absolute ' standards (ideas) for
political and moral behavior and judgment," and thus succumbed to the
"tyranny of reason." I
Insofar as participants in the polis experienced a common world ofseeing
and hearing others and ofbeing seen and heard by them in their diversity, the
polis stands as a corrective to the homelessness and isolation ofmodem mass
society, oscillating between atomism or mindless conformism . Admittedly the
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, New York, 1958),26-27,28-29,30,
33, 46, 52, 53, 82-83, 163, 166, 180-181, 197; Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future,
Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), 107, 110.
THE ETHICAL BASES OF PLURALISM 151
polis was deeply flawed in its exclusion of women and the institution of
slavery-which, Arendt acknowledges, produced unjust and degrading misery
in its American version. Nevertheless, Richard Bernstein is on the mark when
he praises Arendt's explanation ofpublic freedom as radically anti-dogmatic,
anti-totalitarian, based on a genuine recognition ofplurality, and precluding
coercion and violence. For Bernstein, "her sensitive description [of
partic ipatory politics] stands as a shining exemplar of what politics once
might have been, and even more important, what it may yet become."?
Perhaps because Arendt had already expounded her vision ofpolitics, she
devotes more time in "Reflections on Little Rock" to explaining the social
domain . One encounters this social sphere upon leaving one's private home
to earn a living, follow a vocation, or seek company. In society, people group
together and "therefore discriminate against each other along lines of
profession, income, and ethnic origin," even though such associational
preferences make little rational sense. In contrast to such diversification,
Arendt discerns in "mass society" a dangerous force, blurring lines of
discrimination and leveling group distinctions and, thus, she insists that
discrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right.'
Arendt's distrust ofmass society and her interest in preserving distinctive
social groups makes better sense against the background ofher other writings.
In The Origins ofTotalitar ianism , she interprets the unlimited expansion of
capitalism and its aimless accumulation of power as undermining political
institutions, since the bourgeoisie viewed a political institution "exclusively
as an instrument for the protection of individual property" (149) . This
instrumentalization ofpolitical institutions resulted in "the destruction ofall
living communities, both conquered peoples and those at home" (137). As
Arendt , herself a Jew, observes in the Jew as Pariah , the Jews themselves
were the first victims of these atomizing processes. Thus , if a Jew wanted
what everyone else had, "a home, a position, real work to do" (85), then he
would have "to become 'indistinguishable' from his gentile neighbors" (85),
"to behave as ifhe were indeed utterly alone; he has to part company, once
and for all, with all who are like him" (85). This splintering of the political
domain by economic self-interest bred rootless, worldless individuals, who,
2. The Human Condition, 53, 65, 103; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: The
Viking Press, 1965), 65-66 ; Richard J. Bernstein , Philosoph ical Profiles. Essays in a
Pragmati c Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986),246-247.
3. "Reflections on Little Rock," Dissent 6 (1959): 5I.

in search ofthe solidaristic human relationships they lacked politically, were

willing to immerse themselves in conformist mass movements. Thus they
sought "a home" in their race, mystically conceived; in Pan-Slavism and Pan-
Germanism, which transcended national boundaries; and in totalitarian
societies, which required "self-less" loyalty. The horrors of Nazism might
never have occurred had a politics like that ofthe polis been preserved intact,
immunized against subversion by economic motivations and supported by a
foundation ofautonomous ethnic groups, which presumably would not have
instrumentalized political processes in their self-interest either."
However, in Arendt's thought, the economically or ethnically self-
interested were not the only ones tempted to manipulate the political field . In
addition, those feeling compassion for disadvantaged social groups could also
wreak havoc. In On Revolution, she contrasts the more popular, but
disastrous French Revolution with the less popular, but more successful
American Revolution. The French Revolution was motivated by a boundless
"passion ofcompassion" (79), which, in contrast to reason, "can comprehend
only the particular, but has no notion of the general and no capacity for
generalization" (80) . Once those motivated by compassion set out to
transform the world, they "shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of
persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes oflaw and
politics" (82) and insist upon swift, direct, even violent, action. These
proponents ofthe "goodness that is beyond virtue" (82) often fail to learn the
arts of persuading and arguing and ofpracticing a solidarity, that, partaking
ofreason, can comprehend "the strong and the rich no less than the weak and
the poor" (84). These advocates ofthe poor flee the political sphere as ifthey
know all too well that however heartfelt a motive (such as compassion) may
be, as Arendt puts it, "once it is brought out and exposed for public inspection
it becomes an object of suspicion rather than insight" (91). By contrast, the
American revolutionaries, in spite of the degrading misery of slavery
surrounding them, separated the sphere ofnecessity from politics, as did the
polis. Thus, they allowed "no pity to lead them astray from reason" (90), and,
rather than use politics to rectify social ills, they concentrated on establishing
political freedom and lasting institutions. Arendt concludes that "the whole
4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
Company, 1951), 137, 149, 157, 161, 166, 170, 175, 178, 183,221-226,232,236,239-240,
249, 297, 302, 309, 310, 351-352, 397, 423, 427-432; Hannah Arendt, The Jew as
Pariah:Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York:
Grove Press, Inc. 1978), 41-44, 64, 66, 84-85, 107-110.
record of past revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to

solve the soc ial question with political means leads into terror" (108).5
In addition to separating the social context from the political, Arendt
finally demarcates a realm of privacy, governed by exclusivity rather than
political equality or social discrimination. In the privacy ofhome, life-partners
commit themselves to each other in their uniqueness, without being guided by
the qualities one shares with a group,"
With these distinctions, Arendt defends her opposition to forced school
integration. First of all, she argues that it is permissible to abolish
discrimination supported by law in the political domain, particularly
segregation laws that deny political equality by restricting the franchise or
eligibility for office on a racial basis. But desegregation efforts ought not go
any farther by utilizing the law to end social forms of discrimination, since
discrimination, rather than equality, remains the rule in the social sphere.'
Hence, Arendt rejects government intervention on behalf of social goals
and tolerates discrimination, defined as "the right to free association" in the
social sphere, whether such discrimination blocks access to hotels or
recreation areas - a legitimate exclusion, according to Arendt - or to public
services such as buses and railroads- even though such exclusion positively
hurts the political realm. Although forms ofsocial discrimination are morally
reprehensible and deserve opposition from churches, such discrimination is
unavoidable in a pluralized social 'domain designed to resist the "mass
movements" that threaten a diversified polis. Therefore, Arendt endorses
social discrimination as part of what James Bohman has called "the moral
costs ofpolitical pluralism." In fact, she equates the effort to enforce school
desegregation with European totalitarianism, which also ran roughshod over
pluralism. In her "Reply to Critics," she claims that only dictatorships would
be so bold as to deprive parents of the right to decide in what company their
children must be educated. Further, the utopic dream of changing the world
5. On Revolution, 49, 79,80,81,84,85,91,108,110.
6. "Reflections on Little Rock," 52-53.
7. Ibid ., 50-51.
through education leads inevitably to institutionalizing children in schools
apart from their parents - something that "happens in tyrannies?"
In addition, the political realm illegitimately invades the third realm, the
private, insofar as government laws ban intermarriage and miscegenation, and
hence such laws ought to be repealed. Concluding from these analyses, Arendt
claims that in the forced integration of public schools the political sphere
oversteps two boundaries, both the social and the private, thus forcibly
suppressing pluralities that condition its own plurality: "To force parents to
send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive
them ofrights which clearly belong to them in all free societies - the private
right over their children and the social right to free association.?"
Reason and Plurality: A Critique
Arendt's portrayal ofthe political sphere as anti-dogmatic, anti-totalitarian,

noncoercive, and based on a genuine recognition of plurality represents the
centerpiece of her reflections and explains her strange reluctance to utilize
force on the social plane even against morally repugnant racists. Her
confidence in the capacity ofa political community to employ a non-absolutist
version of reason publicly, to submit ideas to "the test of free and open
examination," has its deepest roots, as she acknowledges, in the history of
philosophy, from Plato's emphasis on "giving an account" to Kant's and the
Enlightenment's promotion of"the public use ofreason. " Arendt's vision of
"communicative rationality" contrasts with an instrumental approach to the
political sphere in which persons pursue their own purposes, taking account
of others only to advance their own interests or moral purposes and evading
any scrutiny oftheir own opinions. To uphold this communicative rationality
between plural perspectives, Arendt resists economic, social, or moral
infiltration of the political realm. 10
8. Ibid., 52, 53; Hannah Arendt, "Reply to Critics ," Dissent 6 (1959) : 180-181 ; James
Bohman, "The Moral Costs of Political Pluralism: The Dilemmas ofDifference and Equality
in Arendt's 'Reflections on Little Rock,'" in Hannah Arendt. Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry
May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge , Massachusetts and London, England : The MIT Press,
1996), 53-80. The italics in the last sentence are mine.
9. "Reflections on Little Rock," 55, and also 45,49,53.
10. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 39-41.
For the same reason, she locates a model of political rationality not in
Kant's political or ethical writings, but rather in his description of the
debatable but non-compelling judgments of taste described in the third
Critique. Those who claim validity for suchjudgments, which are exposed to
constant communal testing, must be more tentative and more tolerant. Such
judgments cannot command the universal assent of cognitive/scientific
propositions, whose validity compels the senses and the mind. Similarly, the
contingent claims of political discourse differ from moral propositions, in
which one proclaims laws valid for all rational beings , who would rationally
contradictthemselves by violating a general law under which they would also
wish to be protected.II
Even though Arendt endorses the ideal of a plurality of perspectives in
respectful dialogue at the political level, her discussions at the social level
betray a curious lack ofawareness ofalternative interpretive perspectives. For
instance, she initially presents discrimination as an innocent "free association"
ofpeople for the sake of"identifiability" along the lines ofprofession , income,
and ethnic origin. Such a "right to free association" entails a "right to
discrimination." Five paragraphs after this explanation of discrimination,
Arendt turns to less innocent examples of discrimination that involve
prohibiting people from sitting where they please or from entering hotels or
restaurants. These services, "though not strictly in the political realm," are
clearly in the public domain , and, although she finds such discrimination
scandalous, she opposes any legal prohibition of such practices even as she
disapproves ofthe South's legal enshrinement ofthem in Jim Crow laws. One
wonders if she would have maintained her own categorical distinctions, had
she begun by carefully considering how African-Americans might have
experienced such discrimination. 12
In "Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World," published
a year before Arendt's essay, phenomenologist Alfred Schutz is more astute
in this regard. For Schutz, one understands the meaning of "social group ,"
"equality," or "equality ofopportunity" differently ifone adopts the objective
viewpoint ofan observer or the subjective perspective ofthe group observed.
Schutz no doubt would have concurred with Arendt on the prima facie
innocence of free group association since the mere typifying of an another
group as different from one 's own does not necessarily entail discrimination.
11. Ibid. , 10, 20, 72-74, 83; Between Past and Future, 219-222 .
12. "R eflections on Little Rock ," 51-52 .

However, discrimination-and its very meaning is pejorative for Schutz

-"presupposes both the imposition ofa typification from the obj ective point
ofview and an appropriate evaluation ofthis impositionfrom the subjective
viewpoint of the afflicted individualP? Further, Schutz emphasizes how
degrading it is when a system ofrelevances, imposed by power, forces one to
identify oneself wholly with a social category formerly irrelevant in one's
definition ofone's situation. Thus, for instance, it was debasing to be singled
out for mistreatment by the Nazis because of one's descent from Jewish
grandparents, even though one may have considered one's grandparentage
irrelevant. While Arendt's political theory underemphasizes the subjective
meaning ofmatters for African-Americans, who would never have construed
discrimination as innocent free association, Schutz's version ofsocial science
is more attuned to it. This concern for the subjective meaning ofactors derives
from his phenomenological underpinnings, since phenomenology attends not
just to the object given but to the intentionality through which it is given , not
just to external behaviors, but to the subjects interpreting their world. 14
Moreover, Arendt imposes categories drawn from her sorry experience of
nineteenth and twentieth century Europe upon the United States when she
associates civil rights efforts in the United States with dictatorships overriding
parents' rights to determine their children's companions and with tyrannous
proj ects ofchanging society through educating children in isolation from their
parents. Since Arendt's social scientific classifications fail to do justice to
viewpoints different from her own , she would have benefited from
incorporating Schutz's methods within her own. Indeed, a more sustained
attention to divergent outlooks in her work would have been more consistent
with the pluralism for which her theory of politics so strongly advocates. 15
In addition, Arendt at times contradicts her confidence in the power of
political reasoning to adjudicate disputes and test opinions - a confidence
also to be found in Pericles' Athens or Kant's Enlightenment. For instance,
because she believes that European totalitarianism results from the economic
instrumentalization ofthe political sphere, she rules out economic interests as
13. Alfred Schutz, "Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World ," in Collected
Papers, vol. 2: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff,
1964),26 I.
14. Ibid., 250-273 ; Alfred Schutz , Collected Papers, vol. 1: The Problem ofSocial Reality,
ed. Maur ice Natanson (The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff, 1962),58-59.
15. "Reply to Critics," 180-181.

legitimate topics for a political discourse . It is as ifshe believes that economic

interests would so control participants in political discourse that they would
be incapable of raising the questions about whether their interests and the
modes of satisfying them would serve or destroy their political existence
together or whether and how much economic autonomy should be
"universalizable" to all in a given society. Likewise, just as she mistrusts a
heartfelt motive as "an object of suspicion rather than insight," so it seems
inevitable that those who feel compassion for the disadvantaged will be
incapable of pursuing a rational dialogue with other citizens to determine
whether a certain level of well-being ought to be guaranteed for all.
Unfortunately, Arendt never wonders whether these advocates of the poor
might not find such anti-political behavior radically inconsistent with the
compassion motivating them. 16
The problem with Europe 's decline into totalitarianism and the violent
denouement ofthe French Revolution, though, did not have to do with the fact
that the topics of economic self-interest or the plight of the poor were
introduced into the political domain, but rather with the fact that political
participants were insufficiently rational or dialogic about these topics . By
refusing even to entrust such topics to political discourse, Arendt displays a
diffidence about political reason at odds with her own PlatoniclKantian
sources. Given this diffidence, it is comes as no surprise that she interdicts
from the start any political discussion of whether the social respect that
African-Americans seek might be a condition for a vibrant, fully participatory
politics instead of the first step down the slippery slope of totalitarianism.
Criticizing Arendt in a similar vein, Richard Bernstein rightly observes
that since issues do not come labeled as "social," "political," or "private," it
is itself a political question how to classify them; that Arendt's own rather
absolutely polarizing distinction of the political from the social conceals a
political judgment in its own right; and that the drawing ofdistinctions as to
16. Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 40-44; On Revolution, 91; James Bohman, in
"The Moral Costs of Political Pluralism: The Dilemmas of Difference and Equality in
Arendt's 'Reflections on Little Rock,'" 64, 72, makes the case that segregation deprives
citizens of abilities to initiate human action, blocks genuine access to the public world, and
renders their actions ineffective and their opinions insignificant. Critical of the diversity that
Arendt thus upholds and that would undermine full participation in the political sphere,
Bohman summarizes the contradiction in Arendt's position: "diversity can hardly be
maintained at the costs of the very conditions that maintain it: public equality and common
citizenship."
what is politically debatable or not should be determined not by the

philosopher or the political theorist, but by the participants in a political
community. Bernstein's comments point out a further diffidence toward
reason in Arendt's unwillingness to trust in a political community's ability to
separate reasonably legitimate from illegitimate topics for political discourse.
His observations also suggest that Arendt erroneously conceived the social
and political as two domains filled with contents to be kept separate from each
other. Instead, she should have conceived the political realm as the
formal/procedural context within which it could be determined what is to be
discussed politically. In the political realm, paradoxically, a polity must
discuss and decide which discussions and decisions might undermine its own
ability to discuss and decide. I?
By conceiving the political formally and procedurally, Arendt would not
only have been more consistent with her own commitment to communicative
reason as means for adjudicating conflicts, but she would also have
augmented the political pluralism that her acceptance ofdiscrimination at the
social level was meant to preserve. For in well conducted discussions about
economic self-interests and the needs ofthe poor or about what is or is not to
be a topic for political discourse, political participants would undoubtedly
come to recognize and examine critically their own presuppositions. Such
participants would come to see more clearly what can be "universalized" and
what cannot, to recognize with greater clarity and hopefully with greater
respect their differences, and to experience that enlargement of mind and
liberation from prejudice for which Ancient Greece and the Enlightenment
yearned. Seyla Benhabib has pointed to the enlarged and sharpened sense of
pluralism that has accompanied the public debate on such topics as abortion,
pornography, or domestic violence - topics that Arendt might well have
consigned to the social or private spheres. 18
Furthermore, Arendt often regards moral-practical rationality as
endangering pluralism, as evidenced in her critique ofthe French Revolution;
in her preference for aesthetic judgment as a model for politics over the
coercive, universalizing nature of moral laws - in brief, for Kant's third
Critique over the second; and in her explanation of morality as a socially
learned "silent intercourse" within oneself, solipsistically concerned to avoid
17. Philosoph ical Profiles, Essays in a Pragmatic Mode, 252-253.
18 Seyla Benhabib , Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodern ism in
Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992),98.
self-contradiction. Albrecht Wellmer rightly observes that Arendt embraced

from the start, in spite of her criticisms, the epistemological tradition of
modem philosophy in which a singular, cognitive subject confronted an
external world . As a result, she was unable to "uncover a suppressed
dialogical dimension ofKant's conception ofpractical reason. " Nevertheless,
had Arendt conceived practical reason intersubjectively, after the fashion of
the present-day Frankfurt School, she might have located its norms in the
highly formalized procedural norms that anyone who sincerely enters
argumentation, including argumentation about political theory, already
presupposes. Such moral norms, transcendentally based, would have
supported and not endangered pluralism. 19
According to Jurgen Habermas in "Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program
of Philosophical Justification," anyone who seriously enters argumentation
assumes that general symmetry conditions will prevail and that each
participant will be accorded the chance to speak without being coercively
constrained. For Habermas, these norms of argumentation are also moral in
character, mandating that all participants treat each other as ends in
themselves by appealing to each other's free assent, with reasons only and
without recourse to coercion or manipulation. Such norms foster pluralism by
mandating that the opinions of all participants be taken into account and,
rather than banning participants' interests from a discourse, as Arendt is
tempted to do, encourage participants to express needs and to test them for
universalizability.Indeed, Arendt's own ideal ofpolitics modeled on the polis
and its reciprocity between equal interlocutors already draws implicitly on the
moral capital of these ideals that are presupposed by and transcend every
specific discourse , whether about a specific political action, about the very
character ofpolitics itself, or about what moral norms ought to prevail. These
norms , functioning then at a transcendental level, resemble the norms ofthe
polis that inform Arendt's political theory and thus could provide moral
grounding for her theory."
19. Lectures on Kant 's Political Philosophy, 21; Hannah Arendt, The Life ofthe Mind , vol.
1: Thinking (New York and London: HarcourtBrace Jovanovich, 1978),37,186, 188-189,
191 ; AlbrechtWellmer,"Hannah Arendton Judgment: The UnwrittenDoctrineof Reason,"
in Hannah Arendt, Twenty Years Later , 38,41,43.
20.JiirgenHabennas, "Discourse Ethics:Notesona ProgramofPhilosophical Justification,"
in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action , trans. Christian Lenhardtand Shierry
Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990),88-98. Habennas
characterizeshis argumentsas "weak" transcendental arguments. Karl-OttoApelhas argued
Finally, although Arendt mistrusts moral appeals to human rights detached

from any political institutionalization, as Robert Bernasconi has shown, she
is aware of how moral norms operate as counterfactual ideals. Out of this
awareness, she defends Judah Magnes' s plea for a moral resolution ofMiddle
East tensions in 1948 :
In a world like ours, however, in which politics in some countries has long
since outgrown sporadic sinfulness and has entered a new stage of
criminality, uncompromising morality has suddenly changed its old
function of merely keeping the world together and has become the only
medium through which true reality, as opposed to the distorted and
essentially ephemeral factual situations created by crimes, can be
perceived and planned. Only those who are still able to disregard the
mountains of dust which emerge out of and disappear into the nothingness
ofsterile violence can be trusted with anything so serious as the permanent
interests and political survival of a nation . 21
Although oppressors thwart protests or revert to sham-discourses to justify

their oppression, the regulative moral ideal of reciprocity and equality
continues, anticipating counterfactually a pluralism, which, yet to come, will
retrieve the best aspects of its earliest exemplification-the polis. 22
Phenomenology and Race in Beauvoir's

L 'Amerique au jour le jour
While the move to a more formal and procedural level improves on Arendt's
rigid isolation ofthe political from the social and furnishes an ethical basis for
that the transcendental presuppositions of argumentation, including the moral character of

those presuppositions, are stronger since even if one were to argue against them one must
presuppose a discourse in that very argumentation and that discourse would make use of
those very transcendental presuppositions . See Karl-Otto Apel, "Normatively Grounding
' Critical Theory' through Recourse to the Lifeworld? A Transcendental-Pragmatic Attempt
to Think with Habermas against Habermas," trans. William Rehg, in Philosophical
Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, ed. Axel Honneth, Thomas
McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge ,
Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1992), 142-143.
21. The Jew as Pariah, 217.

22. Robert Bernasconi, "The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and
America's Racial Divisions," Research in Phenomenology 26 (1996): 8.
pluralism that escapes the dangers of a monologically imposed morality, it

does not fully ensure the pluralism Arendt recovered from the Greeks as an
ideal. For it is always possible that , within the discourse ofa more formally
conceived political community open to a broad range ofproblems or within
the theoretical debates of political scientists, alternative viewpoints will be
suppressed or disregarded. Ironically, this can occur in the name of greater
rationality, increased pluralism, or a defense against totalitarianism - and
Arendt's "Reflections on Little Rock" is a case in point. Is there , though, a
way of approaching the other , such as Schutz's phenomenological focus on
the subjective interpretation of meaning, that can better capture the other's
meanings, to which Schutz was more attuned than Arendt, and that can, as a
result, produce the most fully pluralistic discourse possible? Does the
transcendental approach ofHabermas and Apel risk repeating Arendt's errors
unless it employs supplementary methods to gain access to other 's viewpoints,
even though according to its own ideal norms of argumentation it would be
contradictory to suppress another viewpoint (while expecting one 's own to be
heard)? Simone de Beauvoir, deploying a unique version ofphenomenological
method that shapes her account ofa visit to the United States presented in the
diary format of L 'Amerique au jour Ie jour, develops just such a
complementary approach."
L 'Amerique aujour lejour, with entries dating from January 25,1947 to
May 19, 1947, was first published in 1948, and the first English translation
in was published in 1953. Thus, the French edition appeared ten years before
Schutz's essay and eleven years before Arendt's. Although Beauvoir's
preoccupation with the anti-black racism she experiences in the United States
appears in the first English translation, the translation fails to convey the
intensity of her concern since it omits at least fifteen discussions, often
pointed, about race relations , including Beauvoir' s most extensive reflections
on race in the United States (231-242), an important account of a visit to an
African-American church with Richard Wright (265-269), and a rather long
discussion ofthe treatment ofAfrican-Americans within the cotton industry
in the South (207-210). When one considers these many key omissions,
23. I am indebted to Elizabeth Fallaize for pointing out that although L 'Amerique au jour
lejour is presented as a diary, Beauvoir constructed this diary after the fact on the basis of
a diary she kept while in the United States, newspaper accounts , and other sources . Hence
I use the term "diary format." Margaret Simons has suggested that this text is the first of
Beauvoir's autobiographical texts and that Beauvoir undertook such an autobiographical
style at least in part under the influence of Richard Wright 's Black Boy .
including a regular deleting ofcomments on labor relations, red-baiting, and

Truman's foreign policy, with which Beauvoir often introduces her daily
entries, one realizes that the English translation has been depoliticized and
actually so deformed that it is hardly the same book. Nevertheless, her
frequent and insightful observations on race in the French make this book,
whose title sounds like that of any innocent travelogue, every bit as much a
serious tract by a European intellectual on United States race relations as
Arendt's "Reflections on Little Rock.?"
Beauvoir's methodology differs, though, from Arendt's. Beauvoir alerts
the reader to her phenomenological approach by mentioning in her preface
that she intends to "to relate day by day how America unveiled itself (s 'est
devoileei to a consciousness: mine." A further comment in the Preface, that
"since a concrete experience envelopes at once subject and object, I have not
tried to eliminate myself from the story," reminds one of her Les temps
modernes review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's La phenomenologie de la
perception-a place where critics have found Beauvoir at her most
phenomenological and opting more for Merleau-Ponty's brand of
phenomenology than Jean-Paul Sartre 's. In that review, she writes', "One of
the immense merits ofphenomenology is that it has restored to humanity the
right to an authentic existence by suppressing the opposition of subject and
object; it is impossible to define an object by separating it from the subject by
which and for which it is an object; and the subject reveals itselfonly through
the objects with which it is engaged.'?'
The phenomenological underpinnings ofher book and her resolve not to
banish subj ectivity re-emerge later when she diagnoses the roots ofAmerican
inertia. Consistent with her preface, she faults Americans for not having
undertaken something like phenomenological reduction. They require a
"reconquest" (reconquetey ofself, an "interior revolution," and a "wrenching
24. Page references in this paragraph are to the French version that will be cited throughout
this essay: Simone de Beauvo ir, L 'Amerique au jour Iejour (Paris : Gallimard, 1947), cf.
231-42,265-69, and 207-10. The first English translation appeared as America day by day ,
trans . Patrick Dudley, pseud o(New York: Grove Press, 1953). A second translation has been
produced: America day by day, trans . Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California
Press , 1999). The author of this chapter did not have access to this most recent translation
when writing this chapter. Translations in this chapter were made by the author of the
chapter.
25. Simone de Beauvo ir, "La phenomenologie de laperception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,"

Les temps modernes I (1945) : 363.
[of themselves] from the given" (arrachement au donne') to return to the

original sources of the existence that each one feels within his or her
interiority. Such attention to self, repugnant to Americans, involves "a placing
ofoneselfin question (remise en question) analogous to that which Descartes
effects on the level ofideas." This recovery ofone's selffinds its theoretical
parallel in Husserl' s reminder to naturalists and positivists that, as they
explain consciousnessawaythrough neurophysiology, they forget the complex
conscious activity involved in the constitution of neurophysiology itself.
Through the practical re-appropriation of consciousness that Beauvoir
recommends, Americans would learn that "the human being is the measure of
the things and it is not the things which impose upon humanity a priori their
limits." They would come to recognize-in words that echo the preface-that
"the object, erected into an idol, loses its human truth and becomes an
abstraction for the concrete reality .. .which envelopes at once the object and
the subject.':"
Phenomenologists, however, do not lose sight of the object; on the
contrary, they adopt a particular subjective attitude as free as possible from
prejudices that might obscure the object. Beauvoir adopts this attitude as her
plane is about to land in New York:
In spite of all the books that I have read, the films, the photographs, the
stories, New York is within my past a legendary city: from the reality to
the legend, there is no route ... For the ordinary traveler there is the
temptation to annex to my universe a new object: the enterprise is already
fascinating. But today, it is different: it seems to me that I am going to
leave my life behind; I do not know if it will be through anger or hope, but
something is going to unveil itself (se devoilery; a world so clear, so rich
and so unforeseen that I would know the extraordinary adventure of
becoming myself another person.'?"
One does not only get to the object by negatively divesting oneself of
prejudices, but also, for Beauvoir, one must give oneself positively to the
object to know it. At the bottom ofthe Grand Canyon, in a passage not in the
first translation, she expounds on the kind of self-donation necessary to
"return to the things themselves":
26. L 'Amerique aujour lejour, 304-305.
27./bid., 11-12.
I have not the time, I know: but in place of this traveling in a caravan, it
would have been necessary to walk for a long time and alone along the
paths, to sleep at the side of the river at nights and at nights to travel on
foot or in a canoe; it would have been necessary to live with the intimacy
of the Grand Canyon. It is an intimacy that ought to be singularly difficult
to establish: the beauty of the site is at first glance quite evident to all; its
rarer secrets, however, are not able to be conquered without struggle. But
I envy those to whom they are revealed...The landscapes give (donnent)
nothing more ifone does not give (donne) to them something of oneself."
Similarly, as her time to leave New York draws near, she admits to still
being a spectator, while continuing to become intimate with the city. Although
New York is no longer a mirage to be converted into flesh and bone, it
remains a staggering reality, having the opacity and the resistance ofreality
in general. In order to know it further, she acknowledges, "I would only
receive something of it in giving (donnant) myself to it.,,29
This idea of handing oneself over to reality in order to know has its
phenomenological precedents in Max Scheler's view of phenomenological
reduction as surrendering (Hingeben) to the things or in the Heideggerean
attitude ofreleasement (Gelassenheit). Beauvoir's practice ofphenomenology
as "giving ofoneself' to what is to be known, whether the Grand Canyon or
New York City, can be traced back to her review of Merleau-Ponty's
Phenomenology ofPerception. There she notes that Merleau-Ponty describes
how the phenomenological attitude provides a new access to the world and to
oneself since "it is in giving (donnant) myself to the world that I realize
myself." She cites without criticism his view that to perceive the blue sky one
does not set oneself over against it. Rather, it is necessary "that I abandon
myself to it (m 'abandonne alui), that it think itself in me: at the moment of
perception, 'I am the sky itselfthat gathers itselftogether, collects itself, and
posits itself as existing for itself (pour soi) .", All perception presupposes a
"communication with the world older than thought.?"
28. Ibid., 179.
29. Ibid., 339.
30. "La phenomenologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty," 364-366; Max

Scheler, "The Nature of Philosophy and the Moral Preconditions of Philosophical
Knowledge," in On the Eternal in Man, trans. Bernard Noble (New York: Harper &
Brothers Publications, 1960),74,83,88,89-90,91-92,95-98; Michael D. Barber, Guardian
ofDialogue : Max Scheler 's Phenomenology, Sociology ofKnowledge, and Philosophy of
One needs to give oneself to what is to be known since it is frequently

covered over by cliched thinking and prejudices that Beauvoir constantly
questions, defies, and discards throughoutL 'Amerique aujour lejour. Such
prejudices, whether hers or others' , include mistaken understandings ofNew
York, hysterical stereotypes of"communists," beliefs that blacks are violent
and to be avoided, and preconceptions limiting women. Like Arendt, Beauvoir
is particularly wary of the moral strand frequently interlaced with such
conventional prejudgments that divide the world into tidy camps ofgood and
evil and that, linked with the American puritan tradition, can, in the name of
goodness, lead one to burn witches, censor film and literature, or drop an
atomic bomb on Russia."
Beauvoir's practice of phenomenology not only avoids hackneyed
categories, but also positively illuminates the activities ofhidden conscious
subjectivity. For instance, although she portrays nature as untamed, she
detects the hidden presence ofhuman freedom that has revamped for tourist
purposes the seemingly savage Grand Canyon, just as Sartre discloses
freedom lurking beneath the bad faith in which freedom seems all but
suppressed. Later, Beauvoir waxes eloquently about this same freedom that
nature never dominates, in spite of the efforts of naturalistic scientists,
criticized by Husserl, to explain away consciousness or of sexist biologists,
who deny the freedom ofwomen and whom Beauvoir rebuts at the outset in
Le deuxieme sexe. Rather , freedom masters nature, as this passage of
Beauvoir 's , a quintessential example ofwhat Debra Bergoffen calls the "ethic
ofthe project," indicates:
It is that which moves me in the skyscrapers : they claim that humanity is

not only a being that stagnates within its being, but that it is elan,
expansion, and conquest; and within the wild profusion of drug-stores,
there is as frantic a poesy as that of a baroque Church: humanity has
seized the brute thing in the meshes of its desire, it affirms the power of
its imagination over matter. New York, Chicago, reflect the existence of
Love (Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University
Presses, 1993), 141-146; Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M.
Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966),54-57.
31. L 'Amerique aujour lejour, 18,25,38,40,55,69-70, 117-118, 120,' 142, 147-148, 154,
169,170,190-191 ,205 ,212,252,254,260,264,267, 270-271, 282, 283, 289, 292, 318,
325.
this demiurge with imperial dreams, and this is why these are the most
humane and most exciting towns I know.32
The reclamation ofpreviously unrecognized conscious activities, such as

the unnoticed presence offreedom, need not only serve the ethic ofthe project,
but can also aid in self-critique, wounding the imperial subject. Beauvoir
elucidates such activities and criticizes them, for example, when upon being
warned not to enter Harlem because "at dawn one found whites with their
throats cut lying in the gutters," she deliberately heads there. Though not
frightened, she senses fear, and, on reflection, pinpoints the origin ofthis fear
not in the proneness ofHarlem residents to violence but "within the heart of
the people who have my color of skin." She notes that "the irrational fear
which they [blacks] inspire can only be the inverse of a hatred and a type of
remorse," and that "it is they [the whites] themselves that they [the whites]
fear meeting on the corner of the streets [in Harlem]."33
In a later eleven-page incisive analysis of American racism-omitted by
the translator in a strange haste to get on with descriptions ofthe Charleston
gardens-s-Beauvoir, recalling a French professor urging her not to write about
blacks, repeatedly focuses on the subjectivity ofthe racists. Although racists
are responsible forracial problems, in bad faith they assert that their attitudes
are causally produced by blacks. By exposing such involuted modes of
thinking, as Sartre did in Reflexions sur la questionjuive and she herselfwill
do in Le deuxieme sexe, Beauvoir concurs with Gunnar Myrdal that the
problem ofblacks is really a white one; points out the bad faith ofSoutherners
who deny the problem and blame Northerners for "stirring up" blacks; and
affirms that the historical garbage heap ofdiscredited scientific justifications
for racism reveal a consciousness committed without reasons long before it
sought outside data to confirm its beliefs. Beauvoir sums up her
phenomenological elucidation ofthe racist consciousness, blind to itselfand
pretending to be only the causal plaything of "facts" outside itself:
32. Ibid., 369-370 . See also 111, 116, 134, 177. On the ethic of the project versus the ethic
of the erotic , of generosity, see Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy ofSimone de Beauvoir,
Gender ed Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany, New York: State University of
New York Press , 1997), 41, 64, 90, 173, 185, 188. The mention of elan here may refer to
Bergson 's elan vital.
33. Ibid., 40.

The defaults and blemishes thrown up as reproaches to blacks are

precisely created by the terrible handicap of segregation and
discrimination ; they are the effect and not the cause of the attitude of
whites in their regard. There is here a vicious circle which Bernard Shaw,
among others, has denounced with this quip, "The haughty American
nation ...obliges the black people to shine its shoes and then demonstrates
their physical and mental inferiority by the fact that they can only shine
shoes.'?'
This abdication of responsibility for racism parallels American fatalism, in

which "no one can do anything because everyone thinks they can do nothing,
and thus fatalism triumphs over those who believe in it.,,35
While a reflective revelation of hidden consciousness as self-critique
renders sovereign consciousness more vulnerable , Beauvoir also opens herself
to the consciousness ofAfrican-Americans, so well hidden to most whites, and
allows it to be seen by her readers. To bring to light this African-American
experience, she resorts to a phenomenological strategy that differs from the
self-reflection on one's own unacknowledged activities that Husserl practiced
with regard to naturalist dismissals ofconsciousness or that Sartre employed
when uncovering freedom in bad faith denials of freedom. This new
investigative procedure, aimed at elucidating African-American experience
and drawing upon her extensive phenomenological repertory, most resembles
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. She returns, as will be shown, to a
"communication with the world older than thought," to that point at the
beginning ofreflection where, according to Merleau-Ponty, reflection "knows
itselfas reflection-on-an-unreflected experience." By not confining herselfto
phenomenology either as self-conscious reflection or as reversion to the murky
origins of reflection itself, she straddles the phenomenological currents
represented both by Husserl and Sartre and by Merleau-Ponty. With these
methods, she approaches United States racism-a phenomenon whose
complexity requires a flexibly deployed diversity of stratagems."
34. Ibid., 235, see also 230-242.
35. Ibid., 301.
36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945);

Phenomenology of Percept ion, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1962), 62.
An instance of this return to the "world older than thought" occurs when
Beauvoir's bus stops at a station after crossing the Texas state line. There she
sees "for the first time" "with her own eyes" the Jim Crow racial divisions of
which she "had only heard others speak": a spacious hall with many seats for
whites as opposed to a small black waiting room; an expansive diner for
whites, four seats and a table for blacks; restrooms designated for "white
ladies" and "colored women," for "white gentlemen," and "coloured men."
In this phenomenological moment, face to face with the reality, where prior
anticipations are modified, it is as ifthe suffering skin ofAfrican-Americans
transfers its pain to Beauvoir's skin. She comments, "Something is falling
upon our shoulders which will not leave us as we cross the entire South; it is
our own skin which has become heavy and suffocating and its color burns
us." It is as ifthe clear line that reflection would draw between one 's skin and
the other's is blurred at this pre-theoretical level where one's flesh
commingles with another. It is as ifthe pain ofthe oppressed, who mutely cry
out for ethical attention, overleaps a synapse and becomes one 's own."
This "skin trade," this exchange between bodies, takes place in other ways
throughout Beauvoir'sjournal when, forinstance, she deliberately walks alone
through Harlem, strolls arm in arm with Richard Wright through Manhattan,
enters Harlem's Savoy dancing hall where no other white face is to be seen,
and wanders through the black belt around Savannah, through streets known
to be "hostile." In such settings, Beauvoir feels in her own flesh what it is to
be alone in a setting where those of another race predominate. As a black
person might experience in a white world, she encounters indifference, cabs
that pass by her and Wright, solitude in the company ofthe other race, and ,
in Savannah, suffocating silence, disgust, people spitting on the ground when
she and her friend pass, and children screaming out "enemies, enemies." Thus
she "knows" bodily the daily lot of African-Americans, who , as Richard
Wright informs her, every minute of their lives are penetrated by a social
37 L 'Amerique aujour Ie jour, 200. The italics in the quotations in this paragraph are my
own. Susan Cataldi has rightly pointed out that although Beauvoir writes as if the pain of
African-Americans becomes her own, she still remains at a distance from their pain.
Scheler 's account of sympathy permits an entrance into the other 's experience , but that
experience is never felt as one would feel it if the experience were one's own. I have
recognized this distance by using the term "as if." Gail Weiss has suggested that Beauvoir's
becoming aware of her whiteness here resembles the grasp of one's body through a "racial
epidermal scheme, " described by Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks , trans. Charles
Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld , 1967), 111-112, 161-164.
consciousness that they are black, from birth to death, working, eating, loving,
walking, dancing, and praying."
At this corporeal level, where the suffering of the incarnate other is felt ,
where one communicates with the world before thinking, where, according to
Levinas, one, exposed to the other, senses the other hungering for the bread
one puts in one 's mouth, it becomes difficult to distinguish so easily the
other's skin from one 's own , what is the other's and what is one's own,
"object" and subject. Another example ofthis fusion occurs in the gardens at
Charleston that symbolize for Beauvoir the successfully completed projects
ofcivilization. However, in a deserted section looms the long rectangular hall,
in which the slaves were received long ago, and she observes that "the delicate
petals of azaleas and camellias, are tinged with blood." Similarly, in New
Orleans after Beauvoir and new friends leave a black bar where they were
greeted by hostile stares and after black taxi drivers refuse to pick them up
because they are white , she comments that "the moist air clings to the skin and
the odor of dead leaves oppresses the earth." The next day.t'the wind blows
over the palm trees, the azaleas, and the baskets ofgreat red flowers, bitter as
a kind ofvengeance, and from time to time the rain beats down in brieffits of
sobbing."39
Although such descriptions might appear to detached spectators as mere
human proj ections onto a nature independent ofthem, Beauvoir here does not
impose herself upon what is given, but rather she acts with delicate
receptiveness to her environs, absorbing in her own body the weight of the
world 's evil and the other's pain or anger in the same way that she smells
leaves , sees flowers, or feels humidity. It is as ifthe events, buildings, history,
colors, air moisture, odors, rain , and wind coalesce together to communicate
a mood that anyone attuned to all the dimensions ofthe ambiance would feel.
In such an experience, where context and nature inundate a perceiver in such
a way that it is difficult to separate what comes from the setting and from
oneself, one seems far removed from the sense of freedom and mastery that
one feels in pondering skyscrapers.
Furthermore, these personal encounters, in which one is overtaken by the
other's ethical demand to be taken account of, take place, as Emmanuel
38. L 'Amerique aujour le j our , 39-42, 61, 224, 230.
39. Ibid. , 224-225, 243; Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being. or Beyond Essence,
trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 68-77.
Levinas has noted, at a pre-theoretical level, prior to the theoretical level on

which Habermas rationally articulates ethical principles. Although Beauvoir
attends keenly to her experiences ofothers, the initiative in such experiences
usually comes from the other, from blacks crammed into designated waiting
rooms in Texas or staring back in Savannah with hatred. Beauvoir repeatedly
finds the other's pain intruding upon her, as for instance on the train to
Lynchburg when from a distance on the hills she perceives a cabin ofgloomy
wood around which some black men are standing and she is emotionally
moved. Likwise, upon seeing strikers warm themselves at a fire outside
Hollywood studios, which produce glitzy and shallow advertisements,
Beauvoir experiences their picketing as clutching at her heart because she
knows their ineffectual strike is only "symbolic." In these situations, Beauvoir
never interposes defensive rationalizations between herself and others and
never explains why these forlorn victims have brought this suffering upon
themselves, as the wealthy film moguls or bad faith racists might do. On the
contrary, in a country wary oftakingresponsibility, Beauvoir drops her guard
and embraces a responsibility that begins with the other's need , and thus one
is responsible for the other whether one has done anything wrong to the other
or not. Hence after a series offrustrating encounters with African-Americans
in New Orleans, she reflects, "We traverse on foot this enemy town , this town
where in spite ofourselves we are the enemies, justly responsible for the color
of our skin and for all that which, in spite of ourselves, it implies.?"
Although the initiative in such ethical encounters rests with the other
breaking in upon one like summer humidity, Beauvoir, to be consistent with
her refusal to consider the object apart from the subject, would have to
acknowledge that certain subjective dispositions are requis ite to recognizing
the other's ethical mandate. Her own dispositions become patent during an
incident on a bus in the South in which a young pregnant African-American
woman frequently faints at the bus's rear and her head repeatedly thuds
against the bus window. When the bus stops, Beauvoir, with her ethical
sensitivities sufficiently sharpened, contrasts with other white passengers on
the bus who go to buy coca-colas, as iftheir accustomed patterns oftreating
40. L 'Amerique aujour lejour, 224, see also 83,122. On the pre-reflective character of this
anarchic , ethical meeting with the other see Levinas, Totality and Infinity : An Essay on
Exteriority , trans . Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus NijhoffPublishers, 1979),28,35-
40, 80-81, 195, 201, 212-214; Otherwise than Being, 99-102.
blacks has deprived them ofeven the capacity to sense the other's desperate
need ."
In addition to responding ethically to the other's summons at a pre-
theoretical level, one can exercise generosity, or "contest the ethics of the
project," in other ways. In Amerique au jour Iejour, for instance, Beauvoir
criticizes "college girls" for clinging to their interior defenses, their puritan
backgrounds, or their desires to dominate men-all ofwhich are incompatible
with the erotic animal gift (un don animal) ofoneself. Likewise, she praises
the main character in Anna Magnani's Rome, The Open City who is the more
human the more animal she becomes and the more free the more she
generously gives herself. Beauvoir urges women to allow themselves to be
torn out (arracheei from their self-preoccupation in order to commit
themselves positively to politics, science, or the arts. That she would use
arrachee , the same word used earlier to describe the freeing which Americans
need from their attachment to the given via an analogue to Cartesian doubt or
phenomenological reduction, suggests that implementing the reduction
parallels devotion to cultural endeavors. Phenomenological reduction,
dedication to culture, erotic self-donation-all are so many divergent ways of
letting go ofthe need for control and security and ofgaining freedom through
generosity. As a final instance offreedom, Beauvoir admires those who give
themselves over to an ecstatic experience of art, as did, for instance, an
African-American cook in New Orleans, who setting aside worries about her
children and sickness, forgot the past and the future, in order to submerge
herself in jazz. "With a religious ardor," her body sways to the rhythms, and
peace and joy descend upon her, as she appreciates jazz better than Sydney
Bechet who played it,42
In a final, self-critical tour de force, Beauvoir raises the possibility that
even generosity can conceal a covert desire to subordinate others . Thus, in her
last exchange with Richard Wright, he criticizes whites who adopt a
paternalistic attitude toward blacks, that is, who consider blacks to be
dreamers, poets, and mystics, musically talented, and rich in animal instinct
and who covertly believe that blacks can succeed in all these areas because
they are undisciplined and infantile. It is as if Beauvoir, who has praised
41. L 'Amerique au jour Iejour, 227-228.
42. Ibid., 258, 304, 320, 322; The Philosophy ofSimone de Beauvoir, 103, 110.
African-Americans for many ofthese qualities Wright mentions, subjects even

her compassion to scrutiny, wondering if it might have sprung from such
condescending attitudes . Likewise, Beauvoirmentions that Wright criticizes
the white musician Mezzrow because he preferred blacks to whites, even
though Beauvoir herselfhad praised Mezzrow as enlightened in racial matters
earlier. To Beauvoir's credit, she entertains the possibility that her very
openness to African-Americans, exhibited throughout the book, could be in
league with the forces that have oppressed them for centuries. Wright's
comments illustrate how even ethical responsiveness to others can be a mere
disguise and how paternalists, still gravitating about themselves, have not yet
been really drawn beyond themselves by the other."
In L 'Amerique au jour le jour, Simone de Beauvoir shows herself the
masterful phenomenologist, but not by formally enacting the reduction on a
rare academic occasion in the private laboratory of her mind. Rather
phenomenology pervades her way ofliving, observing, and experiencing-
it is for her a way of being toward the world . She continually engages in
multiple phenomenological practices, divesting herselfofprejudices, yielding
herself to the objects and persons she encounters, reflecting on unnoticed
conscious activity, however wounding it might be to the imperial subject,
reverting to the pre-theoretical encounter with the other's ethical demands,
exercising a bodily susceptibility to be touched by the other's suffering, and
cultivating generous subjective dispositions through erotic generosity,
dedication to cultural pursuits, and absorption in art or music. While it is
beyond the scope ofthis paper to determine who influenced whom, Beauvoir's
phenomenological practice shows similarities with that ofHusserl, Scheler,
Sartre , Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. None ofthem, however, seems as adept
as Beauvoir both at internalizing phenomenology as a way ofbeing toward the
world and at deploying such a varied repertoire of methodologies at once .
43. L 'Amerique aujour lejour, 314, 341.

Conclusion: A Dialectic Between the

Transcendental and Pre-theoretical Levels 44
In this paper, I have argued that Arendt's insights into pluralism derive from
her confidence in the kind of rationality depicted in her PlatoniclKantian
sources. Arendt develops a anti-totalitarian, anti-dogmatic notion ofpolitical
reasoning that, opposed to coercion and violence , upholds plurality. In spite
ofher concern for plurality, she fails to take sufficient account ofviewpoints
other than her own, such as that ofAfrican-Americans toward discrimination;
projects her European experience on the American scene; and creates
distinctions, such as between the social and the political, that belie her own
confidence in reason to adjudicate issues and even to determine which issues
are to be adjudicated. I have suggested that she could better maintain the
pluralism she advocates by formalizing and proceduralizing the political
domain and by grounding her political theory in a discourse ethics, already
implicitly governing the discourse about politics and mandating, even in its
counterfactuality, the noncoercion and plurality that are the hallmark of her
political theory.
Simone de Beauvoir's version ofphenomenology enriches Arendt's pursuit
of pluralism by reverting to a pre-theoretical moment at the root of any
discourse in which any authentic pluralism will be preserved, namely that
moment in the face-to-face encounter when the other interpellates one
ethically. This other invites one to approach with generos ity, to set aside
44 . This head ing and the discussion throughout the paper might have given the mistaken
impress ion that there are only two levels of human activity: transcendental thought and the
pre-theoretical sphere . There is indeed the transcendental level, but I have interpreted it in
the first part of the paper along the lines of an examination of the conditions of the
possibility of every discourse, as Habermas and Apel might interpret it. These conditions ,
which include the ethical presuppositions, which Habermas has fleshed out and to which
Arendt might have appealed, are "transcendental" in the sense that they make possible any
discourse, including a discourse that might seek to question these conditions (even as it must
make use of them) . It would be possible to show the compatibility of Apel 's description of
the transcendental plane with Husserl's eidetic analyses, especially since Apel repeatedly
credits Husser! with influencing him in this regard. The pre-theoretical level refers to an
experiential moment in which one encounters the other 's ethical demand before reflecting
on that demand, assessing it, etc. It seems to me that Beauvoir and Levinas are both
speaking of such an experiential moment and such a level. Of course, there is much
reflection and theory that goes on between these levels, and so I would not equate all
theoret ical reflection with transcendental reflection , nor would I construe the
phenomenological "natural attitude" as merely practical, devoid of any theory or reflect ion.
preconceptions, and to criticize self. Far from leading to the worldlessness and
hubris that Arendt attributes to Husserlian and existential philosophy,
Beauvoirian phenomenology draws one into involvement with others and
decenters one from hubris. Had Arendt practiced such a phenomenology, she
could not have looked so benignly upon discrimination and she could not have
overlooked how destructive social discrimination has been upon African-
Americans and upon pluralism in the political sphere. Such exposure to the
subjective interpretation ofAfrican-Americans would not have allowed her to
be comfortable with opposing government intervention at Little Rock or with
her own categorical system that demarcates so neatly the political from the
social.
At the same time, however, proposals for action generated in the face-to-
face encounter with the other require testing by the standards of equality,
reciprocity, and noncoercion that Arendt's political theory emphasizes. By
producing and justifying such standards and their correlative ethical first
principles, one acquires criteria for assessing, for instance, whether the other's
ethical demands reduce one to an unjustifiable subservience or whether one's
ethical response reduces the other to a less than equal object ofpity .However,
since the theoretically derived and justified standards of equality and
reciprocity, like rationality itself, can even be employed to eliminate pluralism,
they can never dispense with the need for the open , generous encounter with
the other at the pre-theoretical moment that L 'Amerique au jour le jour
exhibits. In the quest for authentic pluralism, the dialectic between these
philosophical-ethical levels must be unending.
Chapter 9
Beauvoir as Situated Subject:

The Ambiguities of Life in World War II France
Kristana Arp
Long Island University, Brooklyn
Abstract: In her work on existentialist ethics, Pour une moral de

I'ambiguite, Simone de Beauvoir argues that the struggle against
oppression sometimes justifies the sacrifice of life. I explore how
her position on this issue was influenced by her reactions to events
before and during World WarII
To act in concert with all men, to struggle, to accept death if need be, that life
might keep its meaning - by holding fast to these precepts, I felt , I would
master that darkness whence the cry of human lamentation arose.
Simone de Beauvoir, Laforce de I'age
During the first halfof 1946 Simone de Beauvoir wrote a long essay on ethics
entitled Pour une morale de I 'ambiguite. This essay was the last in a series
of works she wrote that addressed ethical questions. 1 Pour une morale de
I 'ambiguite, unlike these others, is a systematic attempt to found an
existentialist ethics. As an existentialist she bases her ethics on freedom: "The
man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and
above everything else," she says.' Her innovation is to insist that my quest for
I . See Pyrrhus et Cineas (Paris: Gallimard, 1944). Several shorter pieces on ethical themes
were published in Les temps modernes in the late forties which were later published together
in a small book. L'existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (Paris: Les Editions Nagel ,
1986). Several of Beauvoir's novels from the period also touch on ethical themes, most
notably Le sang des autres (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), translated by Y. Moyse and R.
Senhouse as The Blood ofOthers (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948) and Tous les hommes
sont morte/s (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), translated by L. Friedman as All Men Are Mortal
(Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1955).
2. Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l 'ambiguite (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 34;
translated by Bernard Frechtrnan as The Ethics ofAmbiguity (New York: Carol Publishing
Group, 1991), 24. Hereafter, this text will be cited within the body of the text with the page
number of the original followed by the page number of the English translation, e.g., (34/24).
175
W. O·Brien and L. Embree (eds.}, The Existential Phenomenology ofSimone de Beauvoir, 175-185.
176 KRISTANA ARP
freedom need not conflict with others' pursuit of it. Indeed, she argues, I
cannot achieve genuine freedom unless I work to insure the freedom ofothers.
Dra wing from the phenomenological tradition she presents various analyses
to support her central thesis: "To will oneself free is also to will others free"
(102/73). For Beauvoir an obligation to seek the freedom of others is built
into my own quest for freedom. In this way she manages to construct an ethics
of political commitment starting from an existentialist focus on individual
freedom. According to her ethics everyone has a moral obligation to struggle
against oppression, whether oppressed oneselfor not. When confronted by a
situation in which people are kept from developing their freedom, she says ,
" ... every man is affected by the struggle in so essential a way that he cannot
fulfill himself morally without taking part in it" (124/89).
But living out this commitment constantly confronts one with difficult
decisions, which often have to be made in the heat ofthe moment. In the last
section of Pour une moralede I'ambiguite Beauvoir alludes to certain moral
dilemmas that arise in political action and what she says might shock a
present-day reader. She says , for instance, that, " ... every struggle obliges us
to sacrifice people whom our victory does not concern, .. .these people will die
in astonishment, anger or despair" (152/108). She adds, " .. .often it even
happens, that one finds himself obliged to oppress and kill men who are
pursuing goals whose validity one acknowledges himself' (138/99). Beauvoir
even presents ajustification for the limited use ofpolitical violence. By acting
as they do, oppressors give up their humanity, she argues . Thus their actions
are experienced as blind blows offate by those they oppress. Since, she states,
ethics demands "the triumph offreedom over facticity," since the subjectivity
of the oppressor is our of reach, they "have to be treated as things, with
violence" (136/97). Perhaps she is referring to this earlier argument when she
says at the end of the book that" ...without crime and tyranny there could be
no liberation of man" (216/155).
I have deliberately picked out the most provocative remarks that Beauvoir
makes and certainly it is wrong to judge her moral theory just on the basis of
them. But I am singling them out to make a specific point. Given the times in
which Beauvoir wrote, these statements are not so extreme. Pour une morale
de I'ambiguite, like any intellectual work, is a product ofthe historical times
in which it was written. My thesis is that Beauvoir's ethics as a whole must
be understood within the context ofthe events leading up to the second World
War, the German occupation of France, and its subsequent liberation.
However, before I explore how Beauvoir's war-time experiences influenced
BEAUVOIR AS SITUATED SUBJECT 177
the stance she took in Pour une morale de I'ambiguite, and the question this
raises as to the continued validity of her ethics today, I want to say a little
about the key phenomenological concept ofthe situated subject. This is not as
radical a shift in topic as it may sound. For this concept provides the rationale
for asking how historical circumstances affect a writer's thought.
Furthermore, the tracing of the lineage ofthis concept will show that this is
a particularly appropriate question to ask in Beauvoir's case.
The Situated Subject
The concept of the subject, that is, of an individual conscious being, is a

central concept in philosophy. One central contribution of the
phenomenological tradition was to point out that consciousness should not be
considered in abstraction from the world it is conscious of. This insight lies
behind Edmund Husserl's concept ofintentionality, which is the foundation of
his phenomenology.3 Martin Heidegger, following Husserl's lead, coined the
terrn 'Being-in-the-World' in order to capture the necessary reciproc ity ofthis
relationship. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, taking another tack, transformed
Husserl's focus on the perceiving subject into a meditation on the role the
body plays in making consciousness ofthe world possible. All these thinkers,
then, conceive of the subject as necessarily situated in a particular time and
place. Sartre, deeply influenced by both Husserl and Heidegger, actually
develops a concept of situation. A person's situation for him is neither
objective nor subjective. Rather it is produced by my reaction to the
circumstances I find myselfin, which to a great extent I have no control over.
Simone de Beauvoir's thought is also shaped by the conviction that the
individual is always a situated subject. Given the genealogy ofthis concept I
just laid out, one might assume that this conviction was handed down to her
by Sartre . This assumption is fed by Beauvoir's repeated assertions that Sartre
was the philosopher, not she, and that she got all of her philosophical ideas
from Sartre. However, there is ample evidence that Beauvoir encountered the
ideas ofHusserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty on her own, not as filtered
through Sartre . Elizabeth Fallaize writes that Beauvoir first turned her
3. Debra Bergoffen traces the roots of'Husserl's-and Beauvoir 's-conception of subjectivity

back to Descartes. See Debra Bergoffen, "From Husserl to Beauvoir: Gendering the
Perceiving Subject" in Feminist Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2000), 57-70.
178 KRISTANA ARP
attention to Husserl's ideas when she visited Sartre in Berlin in 1934: "The
discovery of Husserllaid the base for the discussions which Beauvoir had
with Sartre throughout the 1930's, and which in turn eventually led to their
essays on existentialism published in the early 1940's.,,4 Furthermore,
Beauvoir said that during this period she "was infused with Heidegger's
philosophy.'? Before the war she translated long passages from Sein und Zeit
for Sartre.? Finally, Beauvoir published a review of Merleau-Ponty's
Phenomenologie de la perception in November 1945 endorsing his views
about the role ofthe body in perception. In it, interestingly enough, she says,
"Only with it [phenomenology] as a base can one succeed in constructing an
ethics which man can totally and sincerely adhere to."?
Soon after this review was published Beauvoir began in Pour une morale
de I 'ambiguite to sketch out the only ethics she thought appropriate for
humans, given the ambiguous nature of their existence. Here her explicit
starting point is Sartre's pronouncement that a human is "a being who makes
himself a lack of being in order that there might be being" (17/11). 8 This
statement, although couched in the paradoxical language that Sartre favors,
is really only are-statement ofHusserl's theory of intentionality, which ties
the meaning ofall objects in the world, and thus the phenomenon ofthe world
itself, back to the meaning producing activities ofconsciousness. (One makes
4. Elizabeth Fallaize , The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (London: Routledge, 1988), 8.

Beauvoir's familiarity with Husserl can only be inferred from what she says about this visit
in her memoirs. In summarizing Sartre's argument in The Transcendence of the Ego she
says, "he outlined-in a Husserlian perspective but contrary to some of'Husserl 's most recent
theories-the relationship between the self and the conscious mind . ... " Simone de Beauvoir,
La fo rce de I'age (Paris : Gallimard, 1960),2 I0; translated by Peter Green as The Prime of
Life (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1962), 147. Of course, she would have to
know what Husserl 's theories were to say this.
5. Beauvoir told Margaret Simons this in an interview when talking about the composition
of Le deuxieme sexe, which she started right after she finished Pour une morale de
l'ambiguite . Margaret Simons, "Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir ," Hypatia, vol.
3, no. 3 (Winter 1989): 20.
6. Simone de Beauvoir , Le ceremonie des adieux, suivi de entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre
(Paris : Gallimard, 1981),223 ; translated by Patrick O'Brian as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 172.
7. Simone de Beauvoir , "La phenomenologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,"

Les temps modernes, vol. I (1945),363.
8. I have been unable to locate this exact quotation in L 'etre et neant.

oneself a lack of being through the negating powers of consciousness and

consciousness is the source of what Sartre calls the phenomenon of being.)
Thus Beauvoir does base her ethics on phenomenology, as she had claimed an
ethics should be. Indeed it could be argued that she bases it on the concept of
the situated subject itself.
The notion of a situated subject is of course central to Le deuxieme sexe.
Beauvoir argues there that there is no such thing as a female essence. Instead,
in order to understand what it means to be a woman one has to examine
different aspects ofwomen's concrete situations, now and in the past. This is
the monumental task that Beauvoir takes on herselfin this work, particularly
in the second volume, which is titled, in an uncanny echo ofMerleau-Ponty,
"L'experience vecue" ,
Beauvoir's allegiance to the concept of the situated subject is also
demonstrated by her choice ofthe novel as her favored mode of expression,
even for philosophical ideas. The characters in her novels often represent
different philosophical or ethical positions and spout complex philosophical
ideas. But Beauvoir takes care to construct an elaborate concrete context for
their utterances. Their ideas are tied to the situations they live in.
Beauvoir as Situated Subject
Not only are the characters in Beauvoir's novels situated in a particular time
and place but Beauvoir the author was too . In fact, she lived through many of
the same experiences that the characters in her novels from this period did .
These experiences cannot have helped but shape the perspective she adopted
in Pour une moralede I'ambiguite. It is a central tenet ofphenomenology that
the subject can only be understood in terms of its relation to the world. This
concept of the situated subject thus provides a rationale for my enquiry into
details of her situation at the time she wrote the work.
Certainly others who have written on Beauvoir readily accept that her
thought was shaped by her life experiences. But many have focussed primarily
on the details of her personal life, her relationship with Sarlre in particular.
I have nothing to say on this subject. It seems clear to me at least that the
stance that Beauvoir takes in her writings on ethics and politics was shaped
180 KRISTANA ARP
by world history, not her romantic history." Even in analyzing her other
works , I think, people put too much emphasis on her relation with Sartre.
Beauvoir herself has provided a very useful tool for delving into the
historical context of her work: her memoirs. They contain a wealth of
significant detail. But what she says there should not always be taken at face
value. The point I have been making about Pour une morale de I'ambiguite
applies to the memoirs as well: they too were written in a specific time and
place. Laforce de I 'age was first published in 1960 and Laforce des chases
in 1963, while Pour une morale de l'ambiguite was written in 1946. 10 She
says in Laforce des choses that the popularity of her previous volumes of
memoirs enjoyed among the bourgeoisie horrified her.11 For this reason she
deliberately adopts a less optimistic point of view in La force des chases,
where she stresses that "the truth ofthe human condition" is that "two-thirds
ofthe world's population are hungry." 12 This anti-bourgeois, Marxist tinged
materialism underlies the harsh things Beauvoir says about Pour une morale
de l'ambiguite. There she calls it the book ofhers "that irritates me the most
today" and castigates herself for the idealism that this book and her other
writing on ethics displays : "Why did I write concrete liberty instead ofbread,
and subordinate the will to live to a search for the meaning of life?"l 3
Not only was the political situation in France different in 1946 than in
1963, but Beauvoir's (and Sartre's) political allegiances were different too. As
she depicts in Les mandarins, they were working in the late 1940s to set up
an alternative to communism on the Left . She was inspired to write Pour une
morale de I'ambiguite partially by attacks Communist party writers had made
9. Tori! Moi, on the other hand, says that the inadequacies of Pour une morale de
l 'ambiguite can be traced back to the fact that Sartre was in New York with his lover
Delores during most of the time she worked on it and that she was thus depressed. See Toril
Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making ofan Intellectual Woman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
10. In La force de choses she remarks, "My seventy-second birthday is now as close as the
Liberation Day that happened yesterday." Simone de Beauvoir, La Forc e de choses (Paris :
Gallimard , 1963),684; translated by Richard Howard as Force ofCircumstance (New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1964),656.
II . It particularly galled her when someone called La force de I 'age dynamic and optimistic.
Ibid., 678/649 .
12. Ibid., 682/654 .
13. Ibid., 79,8 1/67,68.

on her ideas." However, what Beauvoir says about Marx and Trotsky there
shows her knowledge of and respect for these thinkers themselves (164,
166/118, 119).
Beauvoir's earlier volume of memoirs, Laforce de l'iige, is informed by
a keen political awareness, but her point of view there is not the materialist
one of La Force des choses. In it she records the evolution she underwent
during the war years from an isolated self-absorbed bourgeois bohemian to an
accomplished, politically committed intellectual. She often says that it was
History that affected this transformation. ("History took hold ofme ...History
burst over me.")" But of course History had been there all along and even
before the war, Beauvoir had been interested in historical events. Her travels
and her close friendship with Femando and Stepha Gerassi led her to identify
intensely with the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. She felt that the
refusal ofFrance and other countries to supply them with arms immediately
after the war broke out was directly responsible for the tragedy oftheir defeat.
Beauvoir also lived through some of the darkest days of the German
occupation ofParis unsure whether the Nazis would prevail or not, because
the United States had yet to enter the war. These experiences help explain why
Beauvoir was no pacifist. In Pour une morale de I'ambiguite, as I have
already emphasized, she espouses a willingness to shed blood (even innocent
blood) for a valid cause. Perhaps events like these convinced her that a
reluctance to shed blood often leads to more harm in the end.
Beauvoir by no means felt that the sacrifice of human life was always
justified in the service of a "higher" cause. For instance she welcomed the
capitulation ofthe French troops, because it saved lives that otherwise would
have been lost in useless resistance." And she says of the first World War:
"what a contradiction in terms it was to condemn a million Frenchmen to
death for the sake of humanity?" The question of just what situations
justified such sacrifice is one that preoccupied her during this period. In her
a
14. See Simone de Beauvoir, Lettres Sartre 2 vols., ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, vol.
2, 272; transla ted by Quintin Hoare as Letters to Sartre (New York: Arcade Publishing ,
1992), 402 . In La force des choses she also talks about Pour une morale de I 'ambiguite as
presenting arguments against the views of the communists. Ibid., 79/67 .
15. Laforce de l 'iige, 413/285 and 426/295 .
16. Ibid., 513/354 .
17. Ibid., 412/284-85 .

182 KRISTANA ARP
novel Le sang des autres her protagonist, the Resistance leader Jean Blomart,
argues that carrying out terrorist attacks against the occupying forces is
morally right, even though they will execute a number ofFrench prisoners in
reprisal.
When Beauvoir describes these Resistance activities in her memoirs she
puts the word "terrorist" in quotation marks." Were these actions by the
Resistance terrorism? They did involve violence carried out by private
individuals against the ruling government. Today terrorism is strongly
condemned. But the political situation in Western democracies today is
radically different than the political situation in World War II Europe. Nazi
Germany and Vichy France were legally instituted governments, but they were
also brutally oppressive, and directly responsible for the death ofmany, many
people. Reading La force de I 'age one is struck by how common political
violence was during this period. It was practiced by right-wing groups in
France before the war, then routinely pursued by the Nazis under the
occupation, as well as resorted to by the Resistance, although on a completely
different scale, in order to weaken the Germans' hold .
The position that Beauvoir takes in Pour une morale de I'ambiguite that
the sacrifice of human life is sometimes justified in order to insure human
freedom must be understood against this background . Beauvoir developed her
ethics in the midst of and in response to a political situation that is different
from the situation that confronts many of her readers today.
Challenges Posed by this Approach
Howe ver, my strategy of regarding the author of Pour une morale de

I 'ambigu it e as a situated subject might serve a contrary purpose. It might lead
readers to discount Beauvoir's ideas instead of merely appreciating their
historical context. My focus on Beauvoir's situation raises two issues in this
regard.
First, some writers have charged that Beauvoir did not exactly distinguish
herselfby her behavior during the war. 19 The main charge against her is that
after she lost her teaching job on a morals charge she worked for a German-
controlled radio station producing a show on Medieval history. And before she
18. See Ibid., 574/395 .

19. See, for instance, Susan Suleiman, "Simone de Beauvoir's Wartime Writings,"
Contentions, Winter 1992.
lost her job she signed an oath required ofall teachers swearing that she was
not a Free -Mason or a Jew, which Sartre reproached her for when he returned
from his prison camp. These lapses were not all that serious, as even her
crit ics admit. 20 Nonetheless, it is the case that Beauvoir mainly waited out the
war years , not taking any direct action to bring about the end of the
occupation and the downfall ofthe Nazis. She was a member ofa Resistance
group for awhile, but their activities were confined to gathering and
disseminating information and drawing up plans for political programs for the
future.
However, Beauvoir herselfrelentlessly criticized her own lack ofpolitical
involvement before and during the war. In Laforce de I'age she writes that
she feels, "nothing but contempt for this part of my life .,,21 She records how
the events she lived through then taught her "the value of solidarity. ,,22 This
transformation in her attitude undoubtedly inspired her to adopt the viewpoint
she does in Pour une morale de I'ambiguite. After the war she became
committed to a number of political causes. The objection that Beauvoir did
not practice what she preached is thus not really relevant. After all, no one
contends that Beauvoir was some kind of paragon, herself least of all .
There is a second much broader challenge that an attempt like mine to
situate a writer 's thought historically presents to the legitimacy ofthis writer's
ideas . In this case , the question it raises is: Why take Beau voir's ethics
seriousl y today? I have been arguing that the positions Beauvoir took in Pour
une morale de I'ambiguite were influenced by the times in which she wrote,
and given those times , were not as extreme as they might sound. But one may
believe that times have now changed and the political situation is much
different. Are these positions still valid ? More broadly, is it not possible that
Beauvoir's ethical theory as a whole, as a historical product, is now no longer
relevant?
Certainly an approach like the one I have adopted challenges the authority
of any philosophical position. To understand any philosophical theory as a
historical product seems to undercut its claims to truth. This issue is central
20. "She did no worse than many others of the time, and certainly did better than many ."
Ibid., 3-4. Deirdre Bair, her most recent biographer, says about Beauvoir and Sartre : "Their
record is not scrupulously clean, but neither is it clearly soiled." Deirdre Bair, Simone de
Beauvoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 296.
2 1. Laforce de I'age, 419/289.
22. Ibid., 41 3/2 85.

184 KRISTANA ARP
to some ofthe deepest philosophical debates ofmodernity. To even sketch out

the various sides in this debate is beyond the scope ofthis paper. I want only
to suggest that existential phenomenology seems better suited to withstand this
wider challenge that a historical approach poses than many other philosophies
are . An analysis of an ethical theory that attempts to tie it to a particular
historical context does challenge the philosophical validity of that theory if
that theory aspires to uncover eternal values or universal principles. But
existential phenomenology does neither of these things. The existentialist
position is that all values are human creations. As human creations they must
change over time . For existentialism freedom is the source of all values. But
the type offreedom that is the source ofall values is not the same thing as the
various conceptions of freedom that have been embraced over the ages . It is
the freedom that humans cannot escape according to existentialism. History
- humans' ability to act and give various interpretations to their actions -
springs from this type of freedom. That we possess this type of freedom is
thus presupposed by historical change, not brought into question by it.
Nonetheless, this argument really does not get Beauvoir ofIthe hook as far
as the problem I have posed is concerned. An ethics, even an existential ethics ,
must be able to detail what obligations humans do have in order to escape
being merely an empty pretense. And Beauvoir's ethics certainly does so.
Undoubtedly her view ofwhat people's moral responsibil ities are was shaped
by the times in which she lived. The question remains whether we still have
these obligations today. Thus Beauvoir's ethics , even as an existentialist
ethics based on freedom, cannot evade the challenge a historical analysis
poses to the legitimacy ofher ideas . Furthermore, what she says indicates that
she does not want to evade it.
For Beauvoir herself glimpses the possibility that the cond itions that
obtained when she was writing Pour une morale de I'ambiguite may one day
no longer obtain. She muses: "Perhaps it is permissible to dream of a future
when men will know no other use oftheir freedom than this free unfurling of
itself; constructive activity would be possible for all; each one would be able
to aim positively through his projects at his own future" (114/81).
Immediately she responds, "But today the fact is that there are men who can
justify their life only by negative action ." The line ofargument that Beauvoir
follows in herresponse to these utopian musings reduces this wider challenge
back to a narrower one. One cannot know whether the features of our moral
universe will always remain the same. No one can foresee the future , because
it does not exist yet- this point is central to Beauvoir's argument in Pour une
moralede I'ambiguite. The crucial question is what the situation is like today.
In answering this question one can point out that even today there are still
countries that are at war, where large groups ofpeople are brutally oppressed.
To assert that the world situation has changed so radically from Beauvoir's
day is to equate Europe and North America with the world. Beauvoir argues
that one 's own freedom is linked to the freedom ofothers. Certainly this bond
extends beyond the bounds ofone 's immediate community, especially today
when economic ties bring us into contact with people from all corners of the
globe. I am sure that she would say that we have an obligation to work to
further the freedom of these people too.
So in addressing this broad philosophical issue, we ultimately must return
to a consideration ofour own present situation and that ofothers. This shows
that while Beauvoir's thought is not immune to the challenge posed by a
historical approach, neither is it defeated by it. Even ifone judges some ofthe
positions Beauvoir takes - on the necessity for political violence , for instance
- to be no longer justified today, that does not mean that her thought has
nothing to offer us. Elsewhere I argue that the conception of freedom
Beauvoir develops in Pour unemoralede l'ambigui1erepresents an important
contribution to philosophy," Freedom is the touchstone ofBeauvoir ' s ethics.
What she learned during the war years is that a commitment to freedom
provides a moral anchor in dark times. Each ofus, as situated subjects, must
decide if it still does today.
23. Kristana Arp, The Bonds a/Freedom: The Existentialist Ethics ofSimone de Beauvoir,
forthcoming .
Chapter 10
Between the Ethical and the Political:

The Difference of Ambiguity
Debra B. Bergoffen
George Mason University
Abstract: Taking up Beauvoir IS theories of intentionality and

ambiguity, I argue that patriarcy misreads the relationship between
the ethical and the political, that we need to reconsider this
relationship and that ajust politics ofliberation must remember its
debt to the ethical moment ofthe gift.
Introduction
I write and think about Simone de Beauvoir from the position ofan heir- not
an heir close enough to be mentioned in her will, but a distant one marked by
her legacy; for it is Beauvoir's legacy that interests me and it is by virtue of
this interest rather than by virtue ofher designation that I situate myselfas an
heir of Simone de Beauvoir.
Beauvoir's most famous legacy is her phrase, "One is not born, one
becomes a woman." Her most enduring legacy, however, may prove to be her
thought of ambiguity. Not surprisingly, this idea of ambiguity is difficult to
classify. It speaks of difference without creating dualisms. It speaks of
identities without insisting on unities. It fissures the subject without dissecting
it.
Working with Beauvoir's idea ofambiguity I discover a subject that eludes
itselfinsofar as it pursues its unity; a subject whose splits are also folds. This
subject turns back upon itselfwithout closing in on itself - for as ambiguous,
the subject described by Beauvoir is also and necessarily an intentionality. As
an intentionality it is an opening to the world and the other. In its intentionality
the ambiguous subject is also and necessarily an ethical and political subject.
It cannot avoid the question of the other. Considering the subject as
phenomenologically ambiguous, however, challenges our usual ways of
marking the differences between the ethical and the political. This paper
attends to these challenges. It looks at the ways in which Beauvoir's
description ofthe phenomenologically ambiguous subject leads us to sever the
ethical from the political without destroying the bond between politics and
ethics.
187
W. O'Bri en and L. Embree (eds.), The Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir, 187-203.
188 DEBRA B. BERGOFFEN
Beauvoir introduces us to her idea of ambiguity in Pour une morale de

I 'ambiguite. Though she claims that her account ofambiguity echos Sartre's
analysis ofconsciousness inL 'etre et neant, things are not, I think, so simple.
The roots ofBeauvoir's idea of ambiguity go deeper. They are nourished by
a certain strain of Descartes' thought and are embedded in Husserl's idea of
intentionality.
In taking the singular subject as her philosophical point of departure,
Beauvoir announces her ties to Descartes. Her reading of the Cartesian
subject is not, however, the canonized reading. It is not the isolated,
autonomous subject of the Second Meditation that attracts Beauvoir's
attention, but the necessarily and essentially relational subject of the Third
Meditation that interests her. Taking up the Third Meditation's thought of
consciousness as relational rather than the Second Meditation's thought of
consciousness as autonomous, Beauvoir takes the task of philosophy to be
that ofdetermining the meaning ofour necessary relationship to the world and
the other. Descartes saw this task as essentially epistemological. Beauvoir
sees it as fundamentally ethical. Seeing his task as epistemological, Descartes
struggled to align the subject's claim to an independent rationality with its
need of God's guarantee and produced the quandary that is often referred to
as the circular argument. Seeing her task as ethical , and having the benefit of
coming after Husserl's phenomenological tum, Beauvoir distinguishes
between the singularity of the subject and her claims to autonomy. As
singular, the phenomenological subject is not and cannot be autonomous.
The laws of constitution challenge all claims of independence. As a
meaning giving authority , consc iousness does not weave from its own cloth.
It is born into an already meaningful world and exists in this wold among
others. Its life is fundamentally relational. The phenomenologist must
recognize that consciousness, as consciousness of. .. , always and necessarily
reaches out beyond itself. As a phenomenologist attenti ve to our lived
existential situation, however, Beauvoir notices that consciousness harbors a
desire for autonomy. It is drawn to the drama ofthe master-slave dialectic. It
is only willing to recognize the other as an instrument of its authority.
Attentive to the truths of phenomenological intentionality and existential
desire , Beauvo ir calls the subject ambiguous. It is a singularity that
necessarily fails to fulfill its desire for autonomy. As ambiguous , the subject
is both political and ethical; political insofar as it moves to impose its meaning
on the world ; ethical insofar as it acknowledges the mark of the other .
BETWEEN THE ETHICAL AND THE POLITICAL 189
Whether Beauvoir comes to the idea of intentionality with the idea of

ambiguity already in hand or whether her reading ofthe idea ofintentionality
alerts her to the phenomenon of ambiguity I cannot say. Either way, her
understanding ofintentionality is crucial for her philosophical trajectory and
central to the paths cleared by her thinking. For, in addition to grounding the
arguments ofPour une moralede I'ambigutte and establishing the horizon of
the critique of patriarchy in Le deuxieme sexe, Beauvoir's interpretation of
intentionality alerts us to the ways in which the ambiguous subject exists on
the fault line between ethics and politics. Seeing this we find that the
disruptive possibilities of Beauvoir's thinking are neither confined to nor
exhausted by the trouble it has created for patriarchy. We find that her
thought ofambiguity requires that we rethink the demands ofthe ethical and
reconsider the relationship between the ethical and the political. It requires
that we neither join the fault that separates ethics and politics nor forget that,
however unbridgeable this gap may be, a politics unhinged from the ethical
leads to disaster and an ethics that cuts itself off from politics is barren.
Phenomenological Ambiguities
While I discount Beauvoir's claims to be Sartre's other voice, I do see Pour

une morale de I'ambiguite establishing an ethics grounded in the principles
of existential phenomenology. As a phenomenology, Pour une morale de
I'ambiguite takes its cues from an analysis ofconsciousness as intentionality
and takes it as given that consciousness is always and necessarily
consciousness of something. i.e., that consciousness is always occupied,
concerned, in relationship to/with an other. As an activity, consc iousness is
a relating activity. Its relationships according to Beauvoir take two basic
forms and express two different desires. Determining that this duality of
conscious life is contesting but relational, she allows for a subject that is
singular rather than unified and refers to us as ambiguous rather than divided.
Further, conceived of as an intentionality, the ambiguous subject discovers
that its boundaries are permeable. It is always in some sense outside itself;
always in some sense toward the other/otherness; and always in some sense
permeated with others/otherness.
Beauvoir's focus on the ways in which we are always and necessarily a
desire for the other/otherness allows us to understand the affirming and
negating power ofrelationships. It also allows us to retrieve the Aristotelian
conception of "man" as the political/social animal; for we cannot speak of
consciousness as the desire which propels us toward the other without

confronting the questions ofthe "we" and the law. Beauvoir approaches these
questions through the ideas ofvulnerability, responsibility, freedom, and the
bond. As bound to the others I am responsible for them. I can live this bond
of responsibility legitimately through projects ofliberation or perversely in
projects ofmastery. It is in the name ofbearing responsibility for the weaker
sex that patriarchy justifies its domination of women. It was in the name of
being responsible for their souls that European Americans took Native
American children from their families and educated them in boarding schools
where they were forbidden to speak their own languages.
Pour une morale de I 'ambiguite tries to show us how to draw the line
between the political project ofmastery that calls itselfjust and the political
project of liberation that is just. It also shows us, as in the example of the
young Nazi, that the line dividing actions that enact our responsibility for the
other justly from actions that effect the domination ofthe other is not always
clear. Usual readings ofPour une morale de I'ambiguite identify just political
projects as ethical and equate injustice with the unethical. These readings do
not take account ofthe unique features ofthe ethical relationship. They do not
see that in addition to teaching us how to distinguish the legitimate from the
illegitimate political project, Pour une morale de I 'ambiguite identifies a gap
between the ethical and the political and alerts us to the mistake ofrushing to
close it.
Insofar as Pour une morale de I 'ambiguite is read as concerned with
distinguishing the ethical from the unethical political proj ect it will be read as
treading familiar existential ground. But once it is seen as discerning the
difference between the political relationship that solicits the other's freedom
for joint projects ofliberation from ethical relationships that ask nothing of
the other's freedom, it cannot be confined within the traditional existential
space . From this perspective there are two ways ofliving our responsibility
to/for the other. One, the ethical, which sees itselfas responsible for clearing
the space for the other's lived freedom; two, the political, which sees itselfas
responsible for calling on the other to join it in the quest for freedom. Given
this difference, the ethical cannot be a matter ofthe project, no matter how
just the project may be.
Beauvoir discovers that the other, as other, is something strange, free, and
forbidden.' Making this discovery, she discerns that the proper way to affirm
the strangeness of the other is to allow their freedom to elude us - to
renounce all forms ofdirection or possession, to forgo all projects. Declaring,
throughout her writings, that freedom, not happiness, is the fundamental
human value, she discovers the difference between the ethical and political
articulations of the respect for freedom. In identifying the other as the
stranger, and in speaking ofthe obligation to respect the other's strangeness,
Beauvoir moves into unfamiliar existential territory. Both ethics and politics
concern the other; both recognize the other as free; both recognize that it is
through our freedom that we are bound to each other. Ethics and politics,
however, represent different ways ofaddressing the other's freedom. Politics
focuses on the ways in which we, as free, share certain needs/desires. It
engages in projects aimed at guaranteeing that these needs are met. It insists
that we are each responsible for guaranteeing the conditions of freedom.
Ethics attends to the ways in which we, as free, live our humanity in radically
different ways . It attends to the ways in which we are, as other to each other,
vulnerable to the other's desire to negate and/or assimilate our otherness.
Taking up the question of responsibility from the perspective of this
vulnerability, the ethical takes up the relationship ofletting be. It binds itself
to the other by keeping a space for their otherness open. Political acts take up
projects. Ethical acts are gifts. They express a generosity that asks nothing,
neither recognition nor reciprocity, from the other, for as soon as something
is asked, the other's vulnerability is compromised, its freedom is now caught
up in the law of exchange.
This difference between the gift and the proj ect, between attending to the
other's vulnerability and attending to my responsibility, speaks both to the
difference between the ethical and the political and to the ambiguity ofthis
difference. I am led to make this distinction between the ethical and the
political and to speak ofit as an ambiguous difference by Beauvoir's thoughts
ofthe erotic, generosity, and the gift. In noting this dimension ofher thought,
however, and in working through its ethical and political implications, I also
note that Beauvoir was not led to focus on this dimension ofher thinking. She
I. Simone de Beauvo ir, Pour une morale de l'ambiguite (Paris : Gallimard, 1947), 92;
translated by Bernard Frechtrnan as The Ethics ofAmbiguity (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1948),64. Hereafter, this text will be cited within the body of the text with the page
number ofthe original followed by the page number ofthe English translation , e.g., (92/64) .
does not see that Pour une morale de I'ambiguite has more to do with politics
than ethics. As Beauvoir's heirs we are not obliged to be her disciples. We do
not have to follow her lead when she conflates the ethical and the political.
Instead, we can read Pour une morale de I'ambiguite, especially its
descriptions ofintentionality, for the ways in which it draws our attention to
the tensions and tethers that mark the relationship between the ethical and the
political and for what it teaches us regarding these different ways ofliving the
intentionality of our being.
Like Sartre, Beauvoir links ethics with passion. But unlike Sartre, who at
one point in his career defined us as a useless passion and gave up on the
possibility ofan ethic, Beauvoir distinguishes maniacal from generous passion
(93/64) and links the possibility of an ethic to the possibilities of generous
passion. Beauvoir's trek from phenomenology to ethics begins with a unique
account of intentionality. She writes:
Thanks to [man], being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure . There

is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship
'wanting to be' but rather the relationship 'wanting to disclose being .' Now
there is not failure but success ...1 take delight in this every effort toward
an impossible possession...This means that man, in his vain attempt to be
God makes himself exist as man...It is not possible for him to exist
without tending toward this being which he will never be. But it is
possible for him to want this tension even with the failure it involves .
(16/12)
I have , over the years , read and reread this passage, and it has over the
years led me in a similar direction. However often I read this passage, I find
that it is crucial for delineating Beauvoir's concept ofambiguity. It directs us
to understand ambiguity as an inherent feature ofintentionality and leads us
to understand intentionality as saturated with desire . As ambiguously
intentional, consciousness desires the disclosure of being. It desires a
relationship with being. It also wants to possess being. It even wants to be
God . As the desires ofconsciousness are multiple, its aims are polymorphous
and incompatible. Some ofits aims are impossible . It cannot fulfill its passion
for absolute possession. It cannot be God. Some ofits aims may be reached.
It can disclose the mean ings of being.
Were Beauvoir guided by the logic of contradiction or persuaded by the
logic ofthe dialectic, she might have condemned the desires ofpossession or
sought a resolution for the tensions ofintentionality. Guided, however, by her
logic ofambiguity, Beauvoir determines that our desire ought to embrace the
tension that divides and joins it to/with/from itself. She determines that we
ought, in short, to desire to be who we are - neither the success ofthe first
moment of intentionality, nor the failure of the second moment of
intentionality, but the ambiguity ofboth moments ofintentionality and their
lived tension.
Pour unemoralede 1'ambiguitedescribes consciousness as comprised of
two moments. Each ofthese moments is characterized by a unique desire and
aim . These moments, desires, and aims contest each other. The desire for
disclosure cannot take up the desire for possession without negating itself. The
desire for possession cannot accept the aimlessness ofthe desire for disclosure
without denying itself. As contesting and negating each other, these desires of
consciousness also intersect each other. The desire for disclosure finds itself
moving toward the disclosed world possessively. The desire for possession
finds itselfseeking new worlds to possess. In calling us ambiguous, Beauvoir
marks us as this tension of contesting, negating ,and intersecting desires.
To understand the full meaning ofour ambiguity, we must remember that
the play of desire it identifies is never the isolated play of the desires of an
autonomous subject. These desires are the desires ofa singular subject always
engaged in a world and always engaged with others. Remembering this brings
me to the questions of ethics and politics and leads me to ask about the
relationship between ethics and politics. Turning again to Beauvoir's
description ofintentionality, I am led to suggest that the ethical and political
intersect at the point where consciousness takes delight in its effort toward an
impossible possession. As I see it, the ethical resides in the desire that lives its
attachment to being as a "wanting to disclose being." It is the effort of
disclosure - an effort whose delight consists in its failure to possess. The
ethical lives the desires of possession in the negative.
The political lives the effort at possession positively. It moves to
materialize its vision ofthe world. It is an effort to make particular meanings
and conditions of freedom real. Seen in this way, projects of liberation are
political rather than ethical. They are informed by the ethical insofar as they
are guided by the ideas ofthe vulnerability of freedom and otherness. As an
expression of the subject's sense of its responsibility for the world and the
other, however, the political will is also an expression ofthe desire to be God ,
the desire of the second intentional moment. As an inherent dimension of
intentionality, this desire is inescapable. Politics is where/how this desire is
played out, lived. The politics of domination lives the desire to be God
perversely. It does not recall the intersection between the ethical and the
political and forgets the inherent impossibility ofits desire - it believes that
it can be God. The politics of liberation pursues the desire to be God
differently. This politics takes up the desire to determine the meaning ofthe
world attentive to the necessary limits of its efforts. As a politics that takes
responsibility for the other, it attends to the vulnerability of the other for
whom it claims to speak.
This account ofthe distinction between the ethical and the political places
all projects in the domain ofthe political. It distinguishes legitimate political
projects from illegitimate ones by distinguishing projects which reflect the call
ofthe first intentional moment from those which ignore it. On this account,
however, no projects are ethical per se, for the ethical is identified with the
desires of disclosure that refuse to impose a meaning on the world. It is an
openness of active passivity; a generosity marked by an aimlessness that is
receptive to the unfolding that we call world.
Thinking ofthe distinction between the ethical and the political in this way,
I think of the ethical as a lived openness to the world that is best understood
through the concept of the gift . As gifts, ethical acts are situated
beyond/outside the political field of exchange, debt, and accountability.
Asking neither for reciprocity nor recognition - asking fornothing in return-
these acts enact the desires that take delight in the otherness ofthe world and
the other offreedom that eludes us. Guided by these generous desires, we do
not move to transform the givenness ofthe "is" into the ideal of an "ought."
We do not judge the world, we place ourselves within/before it. If we allow
our understanding ofthe ethical to be guided by this experience, we discover
an ethical site of gifting generosity where the otherness of the world and I
meet and where this meeting is valued for itself rather than for what can be
made of it. This moment, desire and experience, however, is inherently
unstable; for we are inherently ambiguous. The judgments that characterize
the second intentional moment contest the excessive passivity ofthe original
intentionality ofdisclosure. The seemingly innocent, it is good, it is beautiful,
already interrupts the aimlessness ofthe ethical intentional stance. Already we
are poised at the project and the political. For to say that it is good and
beautiful is to say that it ought to be preserved. Now we want to protect it
from the flows that threaten it; we want to distinguish it from the bad and the
ugly; we want to create the conditions for its continued existence; etc.; etc.;
etc.
We usually assume that ethics must be intertwined with judgment. Now we

see that this may not be the case . This is not a repudiation of judgment.
Judgments are the stuffofpolitical intentionality. They are intrinsic to the life
of consciousness and necessary for liberatory action. Recusing judgments
from the intentionalities of the ethical, but referring them to it, we see that
their ultimate justification refers to the pre/non-judgmental ethical principle
of generosity. My point in paying such close attention to Beauvoir's
description ofintentionality; in drawing out the ambiguities ofthe desires of
intentionality, and in delineating the different intentional stances toward the
world, the other, and otherness, is to identify the ways in which the logic of
ambiguity contests the logic ofthe either/or. According to Beauvoir, the life
of consciousness is inherently ambiguous because it is characterized by the
flow and tension between two moods and moments ofintentionality. Though
Beauvoirprivileges the first intentional moment ofopenness by identifying it
as our original relationship to the world and marking it with the mood ofjoy;
and though she links the bad faith desires ofmastery to the second intentional
moment's forgetfulness of finitude and the mood of anxiety, she does not
suggest that we should or could choose between these moods and attitudes
toward the world, the other, and ourselves. In calling us ambiguous, Beauvoir
teaches us that each of these modes of intentionality carry certain promises
and dangers. The ethical generosity of the gift that opens us to the other
carries the dangers of voyeurism, exoticism and complicity. The political
responsibility ofthe project that moves us to act for those who have no voice
and/or with those who are oppressed, carries the dangers of manipulation,
misrepresentation, and repression. In recalling us to our ambiguity, Beauvoir
calls our attention to the mistake ofreducing all political projects to bad faith
camouflages of domination and to the error of idealizing all gifts as ethical.
In delineating the meanings ofambiguity, Pourunemoralede I'ambiguite
opens the way for Beauvoir's critique of patriarchy. For, if we read Le
deuxiemesexe against the description ofintentionality in Pour unemoralede
I 'ambiguite, we find that the fundamental failure ofpatriarchy may lie in its
inversion of the priorities of intentionality and in its refusal of ambiguity.
Where Beauvoir privileges the original joyful intentionality of disclosure,
patriarchy is dominated by the anxieties of the second intentional moment.
Where Beauvoir affirms the tensions ofambiguity, patriarchy erases them in
its pursuit ofautonomy. Patriarchy values the desires ofmastery, possession,
and self-assertion. It legitimates the desire to be God. It "forgets" the desires
of disclosure and their associated delights. It wants neither the tensions, nor
the failures associated with the life ofconsciousness. It codifies this refusal
in its system of gendering.
In a world that reflected the life of consciousness, we would each
experience ourselves as ambiguous intentionalities. We would take delight in
our failed effort toward impossible possession. In our world the contest
between the desires ofthe first and second moments ofintentionality becomes
the war of the sexes. Women arefrom Venus, Men arefrom Mars. Further,
as the desires ofthe first intentional moment are named woman and feminized
and the desires of the second intentional moment are named man and called
masculine, the value ofaimless generosity is "othered" and marginalized. We
"forget" its privileged ethical place. The phenomenological difference between
the ethical and the political is expressed as the patriarchal difference between
woman and man . Ethical generosities are designated as inessential to the life
ofthe polis. Political projects are identified with proper subjectivity. The logic
ofdifference is substituted for the tensions ofambiguity. Ethics is reduced to
politics as the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate projects is
substituted for the distinction between the ethical and the political.
Read from this perspective, Le deuxieme sexe may be read as an expose
ofthe slight ofhand by which patriarchy uses the excuse ofbodily differences
to justify a system that forecloses the ethical moment, erases the meaning of
generosity, and calls this foreclosure and erasure necessary, natural, and
moral. Reading in this way we see that though it is only in its specific
examples of the harem woman, the old woman, and the wife that Pour une
morale de l'ambiguite attends to the question of women, its delineation of
intentionality already contains the beginnings ofa systematic critique of the
patriarchal order. Further, we see that the breakthrough of Le deuxieme sexe
consists in its determination to investigate the lived reality of embodied
consciousness. It is this decision to pay attention to the body that leads
Beauvoir to analyze gender. As these analyses show how perverting the
meaning of our embodied existence corrupts the meaning of conscious life ,
they teach us that the way back to our desire for ourselves, the tensions ofour
ambiguity, the delights ofgenerosity, and the excess ofthe ethical, is through
the body.
Existential Vulnerabilities
As Pour une morale de I'ambiguite recovers the generosity of

intentionality for ethical considerations, Le deuxieme sexe recovers the value
ofthe bond from its feminization. As Pour une morale de I'ambigu ite alerts
us to the way in which conscious life is inherently relational, Le Deuxieme
Sexe asks about concrete human relationships. It focuses on the question
raised but not pursued in Pour une morale de l'ambiguite: How did the
ethical desires of gifting become subordinated to the political desires of
appropriation/domination? Now, however, the question is sexed; for within
patriarchy the generosity of the original intentional moment is figured as
woman . We see this most dramatically in the introduction to Le deuxieme sexe
where Beauvoir, digging for an answer to the question that haunts her : How
did woman become the inessential other? writes: "woman may fail to lay
claim to the status ofthe subject because she lacks definite resources, because
she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless ofreciprocity and
because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other?"
Here Beauvoir discovers a difference between woman's and man's attitude
toward relationships. The difference is historical not necessary, but given the
ubiquitous presence ofpatriarchy it appears essential. The difference is this :
though both man and woman need and desire each other they live their desires
for the other differently. Man orients his desire around the requirements of
reciprocity. Woman privileges the bond. Man will sacrifice the bond to the
demands ofreciprocity. Woman will forgo the demands ofreciprocity in the
name ofthe bond. To adequately understand this difference between man and
woman, we need to focus on the terms necessary and reciprocity. Read
historically, woman's feeling ofher necessary bond to man refers to the fact
that woman lacks definite resources of/for independence. Read from the point
of view of patriarchy, this feeling of the bond is a sign of a natural
dependency. Woman's feeling ofthe necessity ofthe bond is translated into:
She needs a man. She cannot exist on her own . It is assumed that woman
would not privilege the bond, would not experience it as necessary, if she
could demand reciprocity - if she were less dependent.
Patriarchy values reciprocity more than the bond. It sees man's demand for
reciprocity as a demand for recognition and reads this demand as a sign of
independence and autonomy. Man is said to subordinate the value ofthe bond
to the value of recognition because he can, it is said , stand on his own . For
patriarchal man the issue is clear, no recogn ition, no relat ionship. Better to
break or refuse the bond than to accept a relationship without recognition.
2. Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxieme sexe, 2 Vols. (Paris : Gallimard, 1949), vol. I, p. 23;
translated by H.M. Parshle y as TheSecond Sex (New York :Vintage Books ,1974), xxiv-xxv.
If we step back from the patriarchal understandings of this different

attitude toward relationships, i.e., if we pause before speaking of this
difference in terms of man's independence and woman's dependency, we
discover certain phenomenological possibilities. Phenomenologically,to value
the bond as necessary is to value the relationship to the other. Further, to
value this relationship regardless ofreciprocity is to enact the generosity of
the original intentional moment. From this perspective, valuing the bond
marks woman as gifting, not weak. From this perspective, man's privileging
of reciprocity marks him as forgetful rather than independent. From this
perspective , patriarchy's move to value autonomy and independence expresses
the anxieties ofthe second intentional moment. It is a flight from the tensions
of ambiguity. Put more polemically, but not, given Beauvoir's critique of
patriarchy, I think, too polemically we might say: The feminization/
marginalization/devaluation ofthe values ofthe bond, the gift, and generosity
is one of the crucial ways in which patriarchy disorders lived human
experience and perverts the meaning of humanity.
Beauvoir is a humanist. She does not therefore accept the idea that there
are essential differences between men and women and cannot accept the idea
that men and women embody different values. The patriarchal division of
values and the claim that this division represents an essential distinction
between man and woman challenges Beauvoir's humanism. Her analysis of
intentionality, however, allows her to meet this challenge; for given her
description ofintentionality, the valuesmarginalized as feminine by patriarchy
reflect an original moment of consciousness. This moment is human not
feminine . It is an ethical moment of openness, relationship, and joy that is
definitive for all of us. Taking up this phenomenology of intentionality,
Beauvoir takes up the humanist project oftransforming the gendered ethic of
the bond and generosity from an Other value to a human value. She uses the
phenomenological description of consciousness of Pour une morale de
I 'ambiguite to make the feministlhumanist case of Le deuxieme sexe - the
feminine value of generosity is not reserved for women . The point is not to
dismiss the values ofrecognition and reciprocity but to critique the ways in
which these values have been identified as masculine and to challenge their
authority. We ought not assume that reciprocal relationships are the only
genuine moral relationships. The parent- child relationship is generous, not
reciprocal. We ought not assume that feeling the necessity of the bond is a
feminine experience or a sign of weakness. We ought not assume that
demanding recognition is the essential mark of the subject.
Remembering the distinction between the ethical and the political, we

expose the ways in which the feminization ofthe value ofthe bond divorces
the political from its link to the ethical. We question current formulations of
the public and private spheres. We become suspicious ofa social structure
that materializes the ethical-political difference in ways that devalue the
ethical and/or collapse the difference between the political and the ethical. We
insist that recognition and reciprocity be identified as political - not
ethical-values and that the ethical meanings ofgenerosity are acknowledged.
Once the question of intentionality and relatedness (Pour une morale de
l'ambiguite) is transformed into the question ofrelationships (Le deuxieme
sexe, "Faut-il bruler Sade?"), we discover our vulnerability. Pheno-
menologically, our relatedness to the world marks us as ambiguous;
existentially our relationships with each other mark us as vulnerable.
Phenomenology reveals our tendency to refuse the tensions oflived conscious
life; existentialism exposes the ways in which we flee the risks of
relationships. Patriarchy codes this flight. Teaching women that they must
become woman and subordinate their desire for reciprocity and recognition to
the demands ofthe bond , patriarchy teaches woman that she must be generous
and must not take up the risks ofrecognition. Teaching men that they must be
man and subordinate their desire for the bond to the demands ofrecognition
and reciprocity, patriarchy teaches man that he must demand recognition and
refuse the risks ofvulnerability. Phenomenological/existential ambiguities are
bifurcated in patriarchal gendered identities. These identities and their
associated values and risks are not, however, equally esteemed. Patriarchy
privileges the risks of recognition. Further, it associates the risks of
recognition with violence. One receives recognition by demanding it. The only
recognition worth having is the recognition won in combat or competition -
the recognition that comes from having stood up for yourself like a man. In
barring woman from violence (it being clearly unfeminine for a woman to
stand up for herself like a man), patriarchy bars woman from the contests
necessary forrecognition. Thus patriarchy makes it impossible for women or
men to live the ambiguity oftheir desire. Women coded as woman must live
the desires of generosity; men coded as men must not. Men coded as man
must live the desire to be God; women coded as woman must not.
Ethical Risks
As Beauvoir's analysis of intentionality in Pour une moralede I'ambiguite

provides the phenomenological ground for exposing the perversions of
patriarchy, her analysis ofthe erotically fleshed body inLe deuxieme sexe and
"Faut-il bruler Sade?" shows us how to challenge these perversions; for it is
here, at the erotically fleshed body, that the disaster of the patriarchal
perversion is clearest; and it is here that the phenomenon ofthe ethical is most
evident. The spontaneities of erotic desire disrupt the patriarchal codes of
subjectivity and risk-now the ethical excesses ofgenerosity take precedence.
Here the politics ofreciprocity is decoupled from violence. Now, reciprocal
recognition and political responsibility can be understood in terms ofmutual
vulnerability. Here the possibility ofa politics responsive to the ethical finds
an opening.
The ways in which erotic myths ofromance and love sustain patriarchal
power are well documented. The ways in which the erotic is corrupted by
sadistic, masochistic, and abusive practices is also well known. Turning to the
erotic for ethical and political guidance is dangerous business. Asking it to
show us a path out of patriarchy treads treacherous ground . Practicing the
techniques ofbracketing is one way ofguarding against the seductions ofthe
patriarchal erotic . Knowing the limitations ofthese techniques, I do not claim
to be able to be able to return to the erotic experience itself; knowing the
poss ibilities ofthese techniques, I do allow that in using them we can strip the
erotic of many of its current covers and that we can, in this way, discern
certain of its ethical features and political possibilities.
The following passages from Le deuxieme sexe set my path:
In both sexes is played out the same drama of the flesh and the spirit, of
fmitude and transcendence; both are gnawed away by time and laid in wait
for by death, they have the same essential need for one another ... 3
and
3. Ibid., II 499/448 .
The erotic experience is one that most poignantly discloses to human

beings the ambiguity of their condition; in it they are aware of themselves
as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as the subject.'
and
in the midst of carnal fever [men and women are] a consenting, a

voluntary gift, an activity; they live out in their several fashions the
strange ambiguity of existence made body.S
These passages make certain things clear. First, we are returned to the
questions of need and the bond. Where patriarchy equates valuing the bond
with woman's neediness, in the "drama ofthe flesh " lovers experience/affirm
their mutual need for each other. Rather than place the value ofthe bond and
the demands ofrecognition at odds with each other, lovers live the carnal bond
as a fleshed supplication. Each risks being violated in their otherness. Each
asks to be received by the other in their vulnerability. Each offers themselves
to the other as a fleshed gift. Each lives its excess of/for/to the other. Each
turns to the other in the generosity of disclosure where the aimlessness of
desire immerses itself in the flows of the flesh and its otherness. Here the
mood of our original intentionality prevails.
Like the first intentional moment, however, the erotic is neither stable nor
self-sustaining. It is soon taken up by the anxieties of the second moment of
intentionality and its desire to be God . Judgments move in to capture/to
stabilize the flow ofthe gift. A distinction is made between foreplay and "the
act." The erotic is identified with the projects of intercourse, orgasm, and
reproduction. Given our ambiguity, these moves are inevitable. What is not
inevitable, however, are the particular interventions ofpatriarchy. We are not
destined to forget the excessive generosities ofthe erotic, to forgo the gift of
the flesh, or to equate risk with violence. It is not necessary to choose between
the bond and recognition. No necessity drives us to value autonomy more than
relationship.
To see the erotic as the concretely lived original intentional moment and
to argue (as I am doing) that our ethical critiques and analyses ought to be
guided by the event oferotic generosity allows us to critique patriarchy on two
4. Ibid., II 478/449.
5. Ibid., II 499/810.
fronts. First, we are able to trace the perversions of patriarchy to its

misreading of the relationship between vulnerability, risk, and subjectivity.
From the perspective ofthe erotic, we see that this misreading is not innocent.
It is directed by the anxieties offreedom. By equating risk with subj ectivity,
subjectivity with recognition, and recognition with violence, patriarchy
pacifies those whose bodies are designated as strong. It allows them to believe
that their strength will save them from their vulnerability. It allows for the
fantasy of invulnerability: the James Bond fantasy.
The reality of the vulnerable subject always at risk before the other is
exchanged in patriarchy for the myth ofman and woman. Man is identified as
the one who proves that he is a real subject by taking up the risks associated
with violence.He may be vulnerable before other men, but he is always secure
before woman; for woman, identified as the weaker sex, is deemed unfit for
the risks of violence and therefore unable to challenge man's position as the
subject. The risks associated with her body, the risks of childbirth for
example, are said to be imposed on her by nature rather than taken up by her
freely . They are not recognized as risks taken up by beings in the affirmation
ofthe ir humanity. The lived erotic explodes this myth ofman and woman and
unravels the patriarchal equation ofrisk, violence, and subjectivity. It shows
us that strength does not save us from the vulnerabilities ofthe flesh and that
violence is a perverted route to subjectivity.
More than providing the principles ofa critique, however, the erotic offers
positive ethical and political guidance. It leads us to formulate an ethic
grounded in the principle ofgenerosity where the pre/nonjudgmental openness
to otherness is accorded moral value . It directs us to a politics where projects
ofliberation and judgments ofgood , bad, and evil affirm ourresponsibility for
each other in ways that remember our vulnerability to each other. The
paradigm ofman and woman is replaced by the paradigm ofthe couple where
the generosity ofthe gift rather than the demands ofrecognition constitute the
way in which we negotiate our need for and relatedness to each other.
The Feminine Bond as Feminist Ethic
An ethic and politics guided by the principles of the erotic carries two
injunctions. First, I am enjoined to assume/accept the tensions of my
ambiguity. Second, I am enjoined not to violate the other's vulnerability.
Together, these injunctions create the opening for a meeting between us-an
opening that we might call the space of generous intersubjectivity. Within
patriarchy this space is a feminine place. Taking up Beauvoir's legacy I

transform it from a feminine place reserved for woman to a feminist place
open to all. As feminist, this generosity affirms the value that women as
woman have represented throughout the patriarchal era - the value of the
bond. As feminist, this generosity refuses to allow the value ofthe bond to be
perverted by the demands of a subject committed to the intersubjectivity of
violence and violation. As feminist, it refuses to allow the value ofthe bond
to become a sacrificial value . It rejects the idea that those who value the bond
are obliged to submit to the demands ofthe subject who claims to be absolute.
It refuses to subordinate those who value the bond to those who value
autonomy.
As feminist , this ethic is not only for women . It is an impossible ethic for
both men and women who adopt the gendering of patriarchy. An ethic of
generosity cannot find a place among those who prefer the securities of
inequality to the risks ofmutual vulnerability. It is, however, a possible ethic
for those men and women who understand that it is neither as men nor as
women, but rather as ambiguously desiring, fleshed, and embodied beings that
they occupy the place of the subject. They understand that this place is an
opening not an enclosure. Entering this opening, these men and women,
guided by the generosities ofthe erotic event, take up the risks ofthe flesh, the
gift, and the bond . Recalling these vulnerabilities, these men and women
recover the desire ofthe opening intentional moment and mark the distinction
between the ethical and the politica1. This marking bears witness against the
politics that refuses to acknowledge its link to the original generosity that
marks us as human .
Simone De Beauvoir & Existential Phenomenology:
A Bibliography
Ted Toadvine
Emporia State University
I. Primary Sources (Listed Chronologically)
The following have been consulted for primary sources by Simone de Beauvoir:
Bennett, Joy, and Gabriella Hochrnann. Simone de Beauvoir: An

Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland , 1988. (Interviews
only.)
Cayron, Claire. La nature chez Simone de Beauvo ir. Paris: Gallirnard,
1973.
Francis , Claude and Femande Gontier. Les ecrits de Simone de
Beauvoir. Paris: Gallirnard, 1979.
Simons, Margaret A., ed. Feminist Interpretations ofSimone de
Beauvoir. University Park: The Pennsylvania State
University, 1995.
Moi, ToriI. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making ofan Intellectual Woman.
Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers , 1994.
Zephir, Jacques J. Le neo-feminisme de Simone de Beauvoir.
Paris: Denoel-Gonthier, 1982.
Of these, Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Francis and Gontier, is the
most comprehensive through 1977 and contains many useful summaries and
quotations from obscure sources.
1926
Camet. Holograph Manuscript. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.
1927
Camet #4. Holograph Manuscript. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.
1928-29
Camet #6. Holograph Manuscript. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris .
1929-30
Camet #7. Holograph Manuscript. Bibliotheque Nationale de France , Paris .
1943
L 'invitee. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as She Came To Stay , by Yvonne
Moyse and Roger Senhouse. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1954.
206 TED TOADVINE
1944
"Jeunes agregee de philosophie de Beauvoir va presenter sa premiere piece,"
interviewed by Yves Bonnat. Le Soir (13 October).
"Un promeneur dans Paris insurge," in collaboration with J.-P. Sartre.
Combat (28, 29, and 30 August; 1,2, and 4 September).
Pyrrhus et Cineas . Paris: Gallimard.
1945
Les bouches inutiles. Paris : Gallimard. Translated as Who Shall Die, by
Claude Francis and Femande Gontier. Florissant, MO: River Press ,
1983.
"C'est Shakespeare qu'ils n'aimentpas." Action (11 May) . Reprinted inLes
ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis and
Femande Gontier, 324-6. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
"L'existentialisme et la sagesse des Nations." Les temps modernes 1, no. 3
(1 December): 385-404.
"Idealisme moral et realisme politique." Les temps modernes 1, no . 2
(November) . Collected inL 'existentialisme et la sagesse des nations.
Paris : Nagel , 1948.
"La phenomenologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty." Les
temps modernes l(November): 363-67.
"Le Portugal sous le regime de Salazar." Under the pseudonym Daniel
Secretan, Combat (23 and 24 April): 1-2. Reprinted in Les ecrits de
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317-323. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
"Quatrejours a Madrid." Combat (14-15 April): 1-2.
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by Dominique Aury. Les lettres francaises (1 December): 4.
"Roman et theatre." Opera, no. 24 (24 October). Reprinted in Les ecrits de
327-331. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
Le sang des autres . Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Blood ofOthers , by
Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse. New York: Knopf, 1948.
1946
"Alcune domande a Jean-Paul Sartre e a Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed
by Franco Fortini. II Politechnico (Milan)(July-August): 33-35 .
"Introduction a une morale de I'ambiguite." Labyrinthe, no. 20 (1 June).
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1947. Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by
BIBLIOGRAPHY 207
Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, 327-343. Paris: Gallimard,

1979.
"Jean-Paul Sartre, Strictly Personal." Translated by Malcolm Cowley .
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"Litterature et metaphysique." Les temps modernes 7: 1153-63. Translated
as "Literature and Metaphysics." Art and Action (New York) (1948):
86-93. Collected in L 'existentialisme et la sagesse des nations, 89-
107. Paris: Nagel, 1948.
"CEil pour CEil." Les temps modernes 1 (5 February): 813-830. Translated in
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nations. Paris: Nagel, 1948.
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1955.
1947
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208 TED TOADVINE
1948
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1949
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no. 20 (6 August): 25-28.
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"L'initiation sexuelle de la femme." Les temps modernes 4, no . 43 (May):
769-802. Reprinted with minor changes in Le deuxieme sexe.
"La lesbienne," "La maternite." Les temps modernes 4, no. 44 (June): 994-
1014, 1014-1024. Reprinted with minor changes in Le deuxieme
sexe .
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minor changes in Le deuxieme sexe.
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"Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Gilbert Sigaux. La gazette des lettres
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1951
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Lucien Mazenod.
1952
"Faut-it brtiler Sade?" Les temps modernes no. 75 (January): 1197-1230.
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"Must We Bum Sade?," by A. Michelson, in The Marquis de Sade.
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1954
"Entretien avec Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by J.-F. Rolland.
L 'humanite dimanche (19 December): 2. Reprinted in Les ecrits de
358-362 . Paris : Gallimard, 1979.
Les mandarins. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Mandarins, by Leonard
M. Friedman. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956.
"La pensee de droite aujourd'hui." Les temps modernes, nos . 112-113 &
114-115(April-May & June-July): 1539-1575,2219-2276. Collected
in Privileges. Paris: Gallimard, 1955.
1955
"Merleau-Ponty et Ie pseudo-Sartrisme." Les temps modernes 10, nos. 114-
115 (June-July): 2072-2122. Translated as "Merleau-Ponty and
Pseudo-Sartreanism," by Veronique Zaytzeff and Frederick
Morrison. International Studies in Philosophy 21 (1989): 3-48.
Collected in Privileges, 203-272. Paris: Gallimard , 1955.
Privileges. Paris : Gallimard. Reprinted in the Collection Idees under the title
Faut -il briiler Sade? Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
"Une soiree a Pekin avec Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir,"
interviewed by Paul Tillard. L 'humanite dimanche (23 October).
1956
"Temoin acharge." Les temps modernes 12,no. 127-8 (September-October):
297-319. Collected inLa longue marche, 465-484 . Paris : Gallimard,
1957.
"Tete-a-tete avec six jeunes romancieres," interviewed by Andre Maurois .
EUe (3 December).
210 TED TOADVINE
1957
La longue marche. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Long March , by
Austryn Wainhouse. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1958.
"Voici la Chine telle que je l'ai vue," interviewed by Pierre Descargues.
Tribune de Lausanne (17 March).
1958
"Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee." Les temps modernes 13, nos . 147-8 &
14, no . 149 (May-June & July). Collected in Memoires d 'unejeune
fille rangee. Paris : Gallimard, 1958.
Memoires d 'unejeunefille rangee . Paris : Gallimard. Translated as Memoirs
of a Dutiful Daughter, by James Kirkup . Cleveland: World
Publishing, 1959.
1959
"Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome." Translated by Bernard
Frechtman. Esquire (August) : 2-38. Reprinted as Brigitte Bardot
and the Lolita Syndrome. New York: Reynal Press, 1960. French
text published inLes ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claude
Francis and Fernande Gontier, 363-376. Paris : Gallimard, 1979.
Introduction to Le planningfamilial, by Marie-Andree Lagrou Weill-Halle,
3-5. Paris : Maloine.
1960
"13 Preguntas a Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Edith Depestre. Lunes
de revolucion (21 March): 36-7.
"Aujourd'hui Julien Sorel serait une femme," interviewed by Maria Craipeau.
France-Observateur, no. 514 (10 March) : 14-15. Reprinted in Les
Fernande Gontier, 377-380 . Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
"Avec Sartre au Bresil par Simone de Beauvoir." Afrique-Action (5
December): 8.
"Contradicoes na muhler dificultam sua emancipacao." 0 Estado de sao
Paulo (9 September): 6-7.
"Cuba est une democratie directe ." Text from press conference in Havana.
Revolucion (Cuba) (11 March): 1,2, 12.
"Cuba, la revolution exemplaire," interview of Sartre and de Beauvoir by
Jean Ziegler. Dire (Geneva), no. 4 (August): 13.
"Defesa da mulher por Simone de Beauvoir." 0 Estado de Sao Paulo (8
September): 11.
BffiLIOGRAPHY 211
La force de I'age. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Prime of Life, by

Peter Green. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962.
"Nada existe de substancial na literatura de Franca de hoje," interview. 0
Estado de Sao Paulo (4 September): 14.
"au en est la Revolution cubaine?" France-Observateur (7 April): 12-14.
"Pour Djamila Boupacha." Le monde (2 June): 6.
Preface to La grandepeur d 'aimer, by Marie-Andree Lagrou Weill-Halle, 3-
13. Paris: Julliard-Sequana. Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de
Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, 397-400.
Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
"Sartre y Beauvoir por la Provincia de Orinete," interviewed by Lisandro
Otero . Revolucion (27 February): 1-2.
"Simone de Beauvoir. Entretien avec Madeleine Chapsal." In Les ecrivains
en personne, by Madeleine Chapsal, 17-37. Paris: Julliard. Reprinted
in Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis and
Fernande Gontier, 381-396. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
"Simone de Beauvoir fala sobre a condicao de Mulher." 0 Estado de Sao
Paulo (26 August): 10.
"Suite." Les temps modernes 15, no. 171 & 16, no . 172 (June & July) .
Collected in La force de I 'age. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.
"Voici le but aatteindre." Press conference in Paris. Liberation (2 December)
and L 'exp ress (8 December).
1961
"La condition feminine, par Simone de Beauvoir." La Nef18, no. 5 (January-
March): 121-127. Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir,
edited by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, 401-9 . Paris:
Gallimard, 1979.
"Contradditorio francese." L 'Europa letteraria 11, no. 9-10: 268-272.
1962
Djamila Boupacha. With Gisele Halimi. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as
Djamila Boupacha, by Peter Green. New York: MacMillan, 1962.
"Mes memoires." Biblio (November): 8-11. Collected in modified form inLa
force des choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.
1963
"La cinema nous donne sa premiere tragedie: les Abysses." Le monde (19
April): 15. Translated in Atlas (July, 1963): 118-9.
"La force des choses. " Les temps modernes 18, nos. 203-5 (April-June).
Collected in La force des choses . Paris: Gallimard, 1963.
212 TED TOADVlNE
Laforce des choses. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Force ofCircumstance,

by Richard Howard. New York: Putnam, 1965.
1964
"Entrevue avec Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Madeleine Gobeil. Cite
libre, no. 15 (August-September): 30-31.
Introduction to Blue Beard and Other Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault.
Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Macmillan.
"Une mort tres douce ." Les temps modernes, no . 216 (May): 1921-1985.
Reprinted in Une mort tres douce. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
Une mort tres douce. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as A Very Easy Death, by
Patrick O'Brian. New York: Putnam, 1966.
Preface to La Bdtarde by Violette Leduc, 7-23. Paris: Gallimard. Translated
as Foreword in Violette Leduc , La Btitarde, translated by Derek
Coltman, v-xvi . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1965.
1965
"The Art ofFiction: An Interview with Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by
Madeleine Gobeil. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Paris Review
34, no. 22 (4 June) , 22-40 . French translation in Cite libre (August-
September, 1964).
"Interview ofSartre and Beauvoirpar Antonin J. Liehm." Rozhovor (Praha):
71-86.
Preface to James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years by Gisele Freund and V. B.
Carleton. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc.
"Que peut la litterature?" Debate including Y. Berger, J.-P. Faye, J.
Ricardou, J.-P. Sartre, and J. Semprun. Le monde, no . 249.
Beauvoir's remarks appear on pp. 73-92 .
"Rester suject de l'histoire," interviewed by Jacques Vivien. Paris-
Normandie (19 February).
"Wh at Love Is and Isn't." McCall's (August): 53-55 .
1966
Les belles images. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Les Belles Images, by
Patrick O 'Brian. New York: Putnam, 1968.
"Deux entretiens de Simone de Beauvoir avec Francis Jeanson." In Simone
de Beauvoir ou I 'enterprise de vivre, by Francis Jeanson, 251-256;
279-297. Paris: Seuil.
"lIs n ' etaient pas des laches. Entretien avec Simone de Beauvoir." Le nouvel
observateur (27 April) : 14-17.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 213
Preface to Majorite sexuelle de la femme , by Drs. P. and E. Kronhausen

[Translation of Sexual Response in Women] . Paris : Buchet-Chastel.
Preface to Treblinka, by Jean-Francoise Steiner, 5-9. Paris: Artheme Fayard .
"Reponse aDavid Rousset , apropos du Treblinka de J.F. Steiner." Le nou vel
observateur (11 May): 2-3.
"Rester sujet de I'histoire: Une interview de Simone de Beauvoir,"
interviewed by Jacques Vivien . Paris-Normandie (19 February): 7.
"Samoie glavnoie dlia menia-eto dicistvie," interview with Sartre and
Beauvoir. Inostranaia literatura (Moscow), no. 9 (September): 1.
"Simone de Beauvoir presente Zes belle images," interviewed by Jacqueline
Piatier. Le monde (23 December): 1.
1967
"L 'Age de discretion." Les temps modernes, no. 252 (May) : 1952-1981.
Collected in Lafemme rompue. Paris : Gallimard, 1968.
"Ecoutez cette femme.... Un entretien de Simone de Beauvoir avec Claire
Etcherelli." Le nouvel observateur no. 157 (15 November): 26-28.
"Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir en Israel." Les cahiers Bernard
Lazare, no . 10 (May): 4-20. Translated as "Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir in Israel." New Outlook 10, no. 4 (May) .
"Parler de la vie et non des mythes," article-interview. Literatournaia
Gazeta , no. 6 (14 February) : 8.
"The Philosopher of the Other Sex in Cairo." Al Ahram (22 February).
"Sartre e la De Beauvoir in memoria di Ilja Ehrenburg." L 'Unita (3
September): 7.
1968
"La femme entre le defi de la suffragette et la passivite de la femme-objet ,
Simone de Beauvoir trace la voie de la femme pleinement realisee. Un
grand entretien par Martine de Barsy." Penela. Connditre et
comprendre, no. 16 (September): 7-17.
Lafemme rompue. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Woman Destroyed,
by Patrick O'Brian. New York: Putnam, 1969.
"Intervj u med Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Ved Solverg Saetre."
Vinduet, no. 3 (22 August): 196-201.
Preface to Simone de Beauvoir ou Ie refus d'indifferen ce , by Laurent
Gagnebin. Paris: Fischbacher.
"Sve moje radosti i nazocaranjajednog doba," interviewed by D. Janekovic.
Vjesnik (Zagreb) (12 May).
214 TED TOADVINE
1969
"Amour et po1itique." Le nouvel observateur, no. 222 (10-16 February): 23.
"Aujourd'hui plus que jamais l'engagement," Sartre and Beauvoir
interviewed by Dagmar Steinova. La vie tchecoslovaque (March):
14-15.
1970
Letter from Simone de Beauvoir to Le monde (19 October).
"Pour les ouvriers, c'est 1'heure de la justice." La cause du peuple, no. 24 (24
June): 6-7.
"Pourquoi on devient vieux? Une interview accordee aPatrick Loriot." Le
nouvelobservateur, no. 279 (16 March): 48-60.
"Sartre and the Second Sex: An Interview by Nina Sutton." The Guardian
(19 February): 11.
"Simone de Beauvoir Faces up to Mortality," interviewed by Nina Sutton.
The Guardian (16 February): 9.
"The Terrors of Old Age," interviewed by Steve Saler. Newsweek (9
February): 54.
"Via il vecchio dal ghetto: integriamolo alIa citta," interviewed by Ugo
Ronfani. II Giorno (18 February): 9.
La vieillesse. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Coming of Age, by Patrick
O'Brian. New York: Putnam, 1972.
1971
"En France aujourd'hui on peut tuer impunement." J 'accuse, no. 2 (15
February).
Letter from Simone de Beauvoir to M . HalIier , founder of L 'idiot
international. Le monde (5 May) .
"Le Manifeste des 343. Avortement. Notre ventre nous appartient." Le nouvel
observateur, no. 334 (5-11 April): 5-6.
1972
"La femme revoltee. Propos recueillis par Alice Schwartzer." Le nouvel
observateur, no. 379 (14-20 February): 47-54 . Translated as
"Radicalization of Simone de Beauvoir," by Helen Eustis. Ms.
Magazine (July): 60-63, 134.
"Proces: I' avortement des pauvres. Marie-Claire C. a ete acquittee, Mais sa
mere sera jugee Ie 8 novembre." Le nouvel observateur, no. 414 (16
October): 57.
"Reponse a quelques femmes et a un homme." Le nouvel observateur, no .
382 (6-12 March): 40-42. Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de
BffiLIOGRAPHY 215
Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis and Femande Gontier, 498-405.

"La sexualite feminine, ce qu'elle est, ce qu'elle n'estpas. Les reponses de...
Simone de Beauvoir." Mademoiselle (November): 88.
"Simone de Beauvoir: La Femme est asservie a la maternite." Le nouvel
observateur, no. 419 (20 November) : 58.
Tout compte fait. Paris : Gallimard . Translated as All Said and Done, by
Patrick O'Brian. New York: Putnam, 1974.
"Women Must Take Their Destiny in Hand," interviewed by Alice
Schwarzer." Militant (New York) 36, no. 18 (12 May) : 4.
1973
"Changer la vie des femmes, pour qui est-ce dangereux?," interviewed by
Madeleine Gobeil. LeMaclean 's (Canada) B,no. 21-2 (2 February):
41-45. Translated in part as "Beauvoir to the Barricades."
Macl.ean's 86, no. 34-5 (February): 35, 66-70; and as "No Exit: A
Conversation with Simone de Beauvoir by Madeleine Gobeil. Old
Age as the Ultimate Experience." Macl.ean 's 86, no. 38-9 (March) :
38,44-46.
"Deposition de Mme Simone de Beauvoir, ecrivain, presidente de
I' Association Choisir." In Avortement: Une loi en proces: L 'affaire
de bobigny , 124-128. Association Choisir. Paris: Gallimard.
Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claude
Francis and Femande Gontier , 510-3. Paris : Gallimard , 1979.
"L 'Enfance de Francoise Miquel." In Simone de Beauvoir: Encounters with
Death, by Elaine Marks, 12-13, 138-9. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
"La Primaute du spirituel." In Simone de Beauvoir: Encounters with Death,
by Elaine Marks, 22, 45-6, 140-1, 147-8. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press .
"Polemique : L' autre bataille de Bobigny. Simone de Beauvoir: 'Je m'associe
a cette protestation.'" Le nouvel observateur (26 November): 50.
Preface to Avortement: Une loi en proces: L 'affaire de bobigny, 9-14.
Association Choisir. Paris: Gallimard . Reprinted in Les ecrits de
505-9. Paris : Gallimard, 1979.
"Le sexisme ordinaire." Les temps modernes no. 329 (December): 1092-
1104. Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by
Claude Francis and Femande Gontier, 514. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
216 TED TOADVINE
"La Syrie et les prisonniers." Le monde (18 December).

"Woman Against the System: Simone de Beauvoir. Interview by Mo
Teitelbaum. Photographs by Eva Sereny." Sunday Times (29 April) :
28-31.
1974
Editorial. Nouvelles feministes, no. 1 (December): 1-2.
"Happiness is a snare when the world is a horrible place-Childhood plays
a central role in Beauvoir's Theory," interviewed by Carolyn
Moorehead. The Times (London) (16 May): 11. Reprinted as "A
Talk with Simone de Beauvoir." New York Times Magazine (2
June): 16-34.
"Les lettres d'un Juif allemand a sa mere." Le monde (22 February).
Preface to Divorce en France, by Claire Cayron, 7-10. Paris : Denoel -
Gonthier. Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by
Claude Francis and Femande Gontier, 515-8. Paris : Gallimard, 1979.
"Presentation: Perturbation rna seeur.. .. Les femmes s'entetent" Les temps
modernes 29, no. 333-4 (April-May): 1719-20. Reprinted in Les
femmes s 'entetent, 11-13. Paris : Gallimard, 1975. Also reprinted in
Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis and
Femande Gontier, 519-21. Paris : Gallimard , 1979.
"Presidee par Simone de Beauvoir, la Ligue du droit des femmes veut abolir
la prostitution." Le monde (8 March) .
"Simone de Beauvoir: Marriage is a very Dangerous Institution. A Talk with
Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Caroline Moorehead. Times
(London) (15 May): 9.
1975
"Annee de la femme. Non au sexisme, par Simone de Beauvoir.Une interview
de Janine Alaux ." Marie-Claire, no. 272 (April) : 86-7, 185, 187,
190,195,197,200-202.
"Demain soir ala television un ecrivain engage plaide la cause des femmes.
Simone de Beauvoir: Le 'deuxieme sexe' toujours second . Un
entretien avec Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber." Extracts from televised
interview. Le figaro (5-6 April): 24. Other extracts from this
televised interview have been published as "Simone de Beauvoir: Les
femmes peuvent bouleverser la societe de demain." Tele 7jours (7
April) : 30-31.
BffiLIOGRAPHY 217
"Des femmes en lutte. Comment changes les mentalites? C'est la cle de voute
des revolutions qui viennent." Round-table discussion including
Beauvoir. L 'are, no . 61: 19-30.
"Les femmes et les etudiants. Simone de Beauvoir et les femmes." Liberation
(23 April): 4-5.
"Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma: A Dialogue between Simone de
BeauvoirandBettyFriedan." Saturday Review (14 June): 13,16-20,
56.
"Simone de Beauvoir interroge Jean-Paul Sartre." L'arc, no. 61: 3-12.
Reprinted in Situations X; by Jean-Paul Sartre, 116-132 . Paris:
Gallimard, 1975. Translated as "Simone de Beauvoir Interviews
Sartre," in Life/Situations, by Paul Auster and Lydia Davis, 93-108.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
"Solidaire d'Israel. Un soutien critique." Les cahiers Bernard Lazarre, no .
51 (June): 30-37. Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir,
edited by Claude Francis and Femande Gont ier, 522-532. Paris:
Gallimard, 1979.
"Terrorism can be Justified: An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir, by Jane Friedman." Newsweek (10 November): 56 .
1976
Introduction to Amelie I, by Henri Kellner. Paris: Les Presses d 'aujourd 'hui.
"Das Ewig Weibliche ist eine Liige," interviewed by Alice Schwartzer. Der
Spiegel, no. 15 (5 April): 190-197 ,200-201. Extracts published in
French as "Polemique. L'eternel feminin . Simone de Beauvoirparle
du 'deuxieme sexe' en pays socialiste." Le figaro (7 April): 24.
Sightly edited full version published in French as "Simone de
Beauvoir: Le deuxieme sexe trente ans apres. " Marie-Claire, no . 209
(October): 15-20.
"Mon point de vue , par Simone de Beauvoir: une affair scandaleuse. Lettre
ouverte, adressee au president de tribunal de la 26< chambre." Marie-
Claire, no. 286 (June): 6.
Preface to Crimes Against Women: Proceedings of the International
Tribunal, edited by D. H. Russell and N. Van de Ven , xiii-xiv.
Millbrae, CA: Les Femmes.
Preface to Regards fem inins. Condition feminine et creation litteraire, by
Anne Orphir, 15-17. Paris : Denoel-Gonthier, Reprinted inLes ecrits
de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis and Femande
Gontier, 577-9. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
218 TED TOADVINE
"Quand toutes les femmes du monde. . .." Le nouvel observateur, no. 590 (1
March): 52. Reprinted in Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited
by Claude Francis and Femande Gontier, 566-567. Paris: Gallimard,
1979.
"Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex Twenty-Five Years Later. An
Interview by John Gerassi." Society 13, no. 2 (January-February):
79-85.
"Talking to a Friend-An Interview with Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed
by Alice Schwartzer. Ms. Magazine (July): 12-13, 15-16.
1977
"De Beauvoir on Women's Liberation," interviewed by Dorothy Tennov.
Majority Report (New York) 6, no. 18 (8-21 January): 4-5, 12.
"Le cas de docteur Mikhail Stem. Un appel de Mme. Simone de Beauvoir
aux chefs d'Etats membres de la Conference d'Helsinki." Le monde
(12 January).
"Entretien de Simone de Beauvoir avec Jean-Paul Same." In Sartre. Texte
integral dufilm realise par Alexandre Astrue et Michel Contat, 33-
42 ,51-52,61-64,93-97, 113-117. Paris: Gallimard.
Preface to Histoires du M. 1. F., by Anne Tristan and Annie de Pisan, 7-12.
Paris: Calmann-Levy,
Preface to La storia, by Elsa Morante. Franklin Library Book Club.
Transcript of Interview on New York Public Television, January 17, 1977,
interview by Dorothy Tennov. Spokeswoman (January).
Une histoire queje me racontais. Record. "Les ecrivains de notre temps,"
no . 24 . Dunod.
1978
"Entretiens avec Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Pierre Viansson-Ponte,
Le monde, no. 10247-8 (10 and 11 January): 1-2. Reprinted in Les
Femande Gontier, 583-592. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
"Entretien avec Simone de Beauvoir (20 juin 1978)," interviewed by Yolanda
Astarita Patterson. French Review 52, no. 5 (April 1979): 745-54.
"Une image de Simone de Beauvoir. Entretiens avec Francoise Gardet." Le
spectacle du monde, no. 192 (March) : 110.
"Simone de Beauvoir au pays de la vieillesse. Entretien avec Liliane Sichler."
L 'exp ress (26 June-2 July) : 90-91.
"Simone de Beauvoir nous parle de ses soixante-dix ans . Les femmes et 1'age.
Interview d' Alice Schwartzer." Marie-Claire, no. 310 (June): 73-79 .
BffiLIOGRAPHY 219
1979
"Beauvoir elle-meme," interviewed by Catherine David . Le nouvel
observateur, no. 741 (22-29 January): 82-90. Translated as
"Becoming Yourself." Vogue 168 (May) : 266, 294-297.
"De l'urgence d'une loi antisexiste." Le monde (18 March): 6.
"Deux chapitres inedites de L 'invitee." In Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir,
edited by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, 275-316 . Paris:
Gallimard, 1979.
Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir. Edited by Claude Francis and Fernande
Gontier. Paris : Gallimard.
"Entretien avec Claude Francis" (22 June 1976). In Les ecrits de Simone de
Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, 568-576.
Paris: Gallimard.
"Entretiens de Jean-Raymond Audet avec Simone de Beauvoir. Paris, le 6
Juin 1969." In Simone de Beauvoirface ala mort, by Jean-Raymond
Audet, 137-141. Lausanne: Editions l' Age de 1'Homme.
"Une femme de notre temps. Un entretien de Simone de Beauvoir avec Jean-
Claude Lamy." France-soir (18 February): 1-2.
"La femme et la creation." Text from conference in Japan, September 1966.
In Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis and
Fernande Gontier, 458-74. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as "Women
and Creativity," by Roisin Mallaghan, in French Feminist Thought,
edited by Toril Moi, 17-32. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
"Interferences. Entretien de Michel Sicard avec Simone de Beauvoir et Jean
Paul Sartre ," interviewed by Michel Sicard . Obliques 18-19: 325-
329.
"Interview with Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Alice Jardine. Signs :
Journal ofWomen in Culture and Society 5, no. 2 (Winter): 224-35 .
"Mon experience decrivain." Text from conference in Japan, September
1966. In Les ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Claude Francis
and Fernande Gontier, 439-457 . Paris : Gallimard.
Preface to Le sexisme ordinaire, 7-8. Paris: Seuil.
Quand prime le spirituel. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as When Things of
the Spirit Come First : Five Early Tales, by Patrick O'Brian. New
York: Pantheon, 1982.
Simone de Beauvoir. Texte integral de la bande sonore du film de Josee
Dayan et de Maika Ribowska. Paris: Gallimard.
220 TED TOADVINE
"Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview," interviewed by Margaret A. Simons and

Jessica Benjamin. Feminist Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer): 331-45 .
Complete version reprinted in Beauvoir and The Second Sex:
Feminism, Race, and the Origins ofExistentialism, by Margaret A.
Simons , 1-21. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
1981
La Ceremonie des adieux suivi de Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre. Aoiit-
Septembre 1974. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Adieux:A Farewell
to Sartre, by Patrick O'Brian. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
"Interview with Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Hazel Rowley and
Renate Reismann. Hecate (Brisbane, Australia) 7, no . 2: 90.
"Sartre grandeur nature ," interviewed by Jean-Paul Enthoven et al. Le Nouvel
Observateur, no. 959 (25 March): 50-66.
"Simone de Beauvoir et le 8 Mars: 'Le Feminisme n'est pas menace,"
interviewed by Christiane Chombeau and Josyane Savigneau. Le
Monde , no. 11851 (6-7 March): 1, 16.
"Sur quelque problemes actuels du feminisme: entretien avec Simone de
Beauvoir," interviewed by Genevieve Brisac, Marie-Jo Dharemas,
and Irene Thery, La revue d 'en face 9-10.
1983
"Sartre Interviews Simone de Beauvoir." Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 969
(15-21 April) .
"Simone de BeauvoirTa1ks about Sartre ," interviewed by Alice Schwartzer.
Ms. Magazine 5 (4 July): 12.
1984
"Les Aveux de Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Michele Stouvenot.
Journal du Dimanche, no. 1950 (22 April): 7.
"Conversations avec Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Lilian Lazar.
Simone de Beauvoir Studies 2 (Fall): 4-11.
Simone de Beauvoir aujourd 'hui: Six entretiens, by Alice Schwartzer. Paris:
Mercure de France. First published in German as Simone de
Beauvoir: Gesprache an 10 Jahren 1971-1983. Reinbeck bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, 1983. Translated (from French)
as After the Second Sex: Conversations with Simone de Beauvoir,
by Marianne Howarth. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
"Simone de Beauvoir, feministe," interviewed by Helene Pedneault and Marie
Sabourin. La Vie en rose, no. 16 (March): 25-36.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 221
"Simone de Beauvoir parlez nous d'elle," interviewed by Anne Zelinsky.

Hommes et libertes 33(March): 1-11.
"My Life .. . This Curious Object: Simone de Beauvoir on Autobiography,"
interviewed by Deirdre Bair. New York Literary Forum: 12-13, 237-
245.
"Women's Rights in Today's World: An Interview with Simone de
Beauvoir," interviewed by Deirdre Bair.1984 Brittanica Book ofthe
Year, 27-8. Chicago : Encyclopedia Brittanica.
1985
"Interview with Simone de Beauvoir (June 24, 1970)," interviewed by Michel
Fabre. In The World ofRichard Wright. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi.
"Simone de Beauvoir 'J'ai recu Shoah comme un choc' ," interviewed by
Patrice Carmouze . Le Quotidean de Paris (30 April) : 29.
"Simone de Beauvoir: Ie desaveu," interviewed by Cathy Bernheim and
Antoine Spire. Le Matin (5 December) .
"Simone de Beauvoir: La Traversee des temps modernes ," interviewed by
Jean Mery. Le Matin (30 October): 22-3.
1986
"Interview with Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Helene Wenzel. In
Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century . Special Issue of Yale
French Studies 72: 5-32.
"Lettres de Simone de Beauvoir." Edited by Marie Denis . Les Cahiers du
Grif, no. 34 (Winter): 11-16.
"La Revue litteraire des femmes," interviewed by Helene Wenzel. The
Woman's Review ofBooks 111, no. 6 (March) : 11.
1989
"Interview with Simone de Beauvoir, September 14, 1985," interviewed by
Yolanda Astarita Patterson. In Simone de Beauvoir and the
Demystification ofMotherhood, by Yolanda Astarita Patterson, 319-
347. Ann Arbor : UMI Research Press .
"Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir," interviewed by Margaret A.
Simons. Hypat ia 3 (Winter) : 11-27. Reprinted in Revaluing French
Feminism : Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, Culture, edited by
Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky, 25-41. Bloomington: Indiana
222 TED TOADVINE
1990
Lettres aSartre. Edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. Paris: Gallimard.
Edited and translated as Letters to Sartre, by Quintin Hoare. New
York: Arcade Publishing, 1992.
Journal de guerre: Septembre 1939-Janvier 1941. Edited by Sylvie Le Bon
de Beauvoir. Paris: Gallimard.
1992
"Lettres de Simone de Beauvoir asa soeur," presented by Helene de Beauvoir
in collaboration with Selda Carvalho. Simone de Beauvoir Studies 9.
1997
Lettres aNelson Algren. Un amour transatlantique. 1947-1964. Edited by
Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. Paris: Gallimard. Translated as A
Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, by Sylvie Le
Bon de Beauvoir, Sara Holloway, Vanessa Kling, Kate LeBlanc, and
Ellen Gordon Reeves. New York: The New Press, 1998.
II. SELECTED SECONDARY SOURCES (Listed Chronologically)
Secondary sources have been selected according to the following criteria: (a) works
explicitly discussing existential phenomenological themes in Beauvoir's work; (b)
works discussing Beauvoir's philosophical relationship with existential
phenomenology or existential phenomenological authors; (c) works elucidating
Beauvoir's personal relationship with Sartre and other representatives of existential
phenomenology; (d) significant critical responses to Beauvoir's philosophical
writings , including those representative of early assessments of her work and those
of significant philosophical or personal importance for Beauvoir. Recent
philosophical works on Beauvoir have been consulted to assure the inclusion of
those works having the greatest impact on recent scholarship in the field. In
addition, The Philosopher's Index on CD-ROM and Simone de Beauvoir: An
Annotated Bibliography, by Joy Bennett and Gabriella Hochmann (New York:
Garland, 1988), have been particularly helpful. The latter provides annotations for
many of the following entries, as well as a much larger selection of secondary
sources on Beauvoir.
1945
Blanchot, Maurice. "Les Romans de Same." L 'Arc 2, no . 3 (October): 121-
134.
Blin, Georges. "Simone de Beauvoir et Ie probleme de l'action." Fontaine,
no. 45 (October): 716-730.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 223
Borel, P. M. "Pyrrhus et Cineas." L 'Esprit 108 (March): 593-595.
Emmanuel, Pierre. "Reflexions sur une mise au point." Fontaine, no. 41
(April): 107-112.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Le Roman et la metaphysique." Cahiers de sud
270 (March). Reprinted in Sens et non-sens, by Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, 34-52. Paris : Nagel, 1948; Gallimard, 1996. Translated as
"Metaphysics and the Novel" in Sense and Non-Sense, by Hubert
Dreyfus and Patricia Dreyfus, 26-40. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964. Translation reprinted in Critical Essays on
Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Elaine Marks , 31-44. Boston: G. K.
Hall,1987.
Thiebaut, Marcel. Review of The Blood ofOthers. Revue de Paris 52, no. 9:
107-8.
1946
Magny, Claude-Edmonde. "Les Romans : Existentialisme et litterature."
Poesie (Paris) 46, no. 29 (January): 58-67.
1947
Anonymous. "De Beauvoir Speaks on Recent Literary Attitudes ofFrance."
Vassar Miscellany News (12 February): 3-4.
Anonymous. "Existentialism's Tenets Explained." The New Orleans Times-
Picayune (2 April) .
Anonymous. "French Novelist Delivers Lecture to Group in French." The
Thresher. The Rice Institute (29 March) .
Anonymous. "French Novelist Speaks at Vassar." Poughkeepsie New Yorker
(8 February).
Anonymous . "La Responsabilite de 1'Ecrivain." Daily Princetonian (22 & 24
April) .
Anonymous. "La Responsabilite de 1'Ecrivain." Harvard University Gazette
(18 April) .
Anonymous . "Topic ofLecture is Existentialism." Smith College Scan 41 (15
April) : 1.
Domenach, J. M. L 'Esp rit 15, no. 4: 711-712.
Stock, Ernest. "La Responsabilite de I' ecrivain." Daily Princetonian, no. 72
(22-24 April).
Sylvestre, Guy. "Existentialisme et Iitterature." La Revue de I'Universite de
Laval 6: 423-433 .
224 TED TOADVINE
1948
Bays, Gwendolyn. "Simone de Beauvoir: Ethics and Art." Yale French
Studies, no. 1 (Spring-Summer): 106-112.
Davy, M. M. Review of The Ethics ofAmbiguity. Le Nef, no. 39 (February):
148-150.
McLaughlin, Richard. "MouthingBasic Existentialism." Saturday Review of
Literature 31, no. 29 (17 July): 13.
1949
Blanchot, Maurice. La Part de feu . Paris : Gallimard.
Child, Arthur. Review of The Ethics ofAmbiguity. Ethics 59 (July) : 292.
"Conditional Freedom." Anonymous review of The Ethics ofAmbiguity.
Times Literary Supplement (London) (9 September): 589 .
Cumming, Robert. Review of The Ethics of Ambiguity. Journal of
Philosophy 46: 857-868.
Hartt, Julian N. "On the Possibility ofan Existential Philosophy." Review of
Metaphysics 3: 95-106.
Jolivet, Regis . "La Morale de I'ambiguite de Simone de Beauvoir." Revue
Thomiste 49, no. 1-2: 278-285.
Kemp, Robert. "Evades de l'existentialisme." Les Nouvelles litteraires (4
August): 2.
1950
Ames , Van Meter. "Existentialism: Irrational, Nihilistic." The Humanist 10
(Fall): 15-22 .
Hart , S. L. Review of The Ethics of Ambiguity. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 10: 445-7 .
Jeanson, Francis. "Simone de Beauvoir: Le Deuxieme sexe." Revue du caire
12 (March): 403-8.
1951
Caillet, Gerard. "Simone de Beauvoir." Hommes et Mondes 6, no. 58 (May):
745-747.
Jenkins, Iredell . "Some Large Scale Moral Theorizing." The Review of
Metaphysics 5 (December):309-326.
Salvan, J. L. "Le Scandale de la multiplicite des consciences chez Huxley,
Sartre, et Simone de Beauvoir." Symposium 5, no. 2 (November):
198-215. Reprinted in 1. L. Salvan , The Scandalous Ghost (Detroit:
Wayne State, 1967).
BffiLIOGRAPHY 225
1952
Grene, Marjorie. "Authenticity: An Existential Virtue." Ethics 62, no. 4
(July): 266-273.
- - , . "A nous la liberte." New Republic 128 (9 March): 22-23 .
Hardwick, Elizabeth. "The Subjection ofWomen." Partisan Review 20, no .
3 (May-June): 321-331.
Perroud, Robert. "Esistenzialismo, logica e sensibilita umana." Vita e
Pensiero 35 (October): 583-586.
1953
Mead, Margaret. "A SR Panel Takes Aim at The Second Sex ." Saturday
Review ofLiterature 36, no . 8.
1954
De Boesdeffre, Pierre. "L'Oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir." Combat (9
December).
Reuillard, Gabriel. "Simone de Beauvoir-'papesse' de l'existentialisme."
Paris-Normandie (17 February).
1955
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "Les femmes sont-elles des hommes?" L 'Exp ress
88 (29 January): 4. Translated as "Are Women Men?", by Michael
B. Smith , in Texts and Dialogues, edited by Hugh J. Silverman and
James Barry, Jr., 21-3. Atlantic Highlands, NJ : Humanities Press,
1992.
a
Monnerot, Jules. "Zero Mme de Beauvoir." Parisienne: Revue litterarie
mensuelle 30 (July): 831-840.
Patri, Aime , "Mme de Beauvoir et la pseudo-marxisme." Preuves, no. 56
(October): 94-5.
Peyre, Henri. "Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir." The Contemporary
French Novel, edited by Henri Peyre, 240-262. New York: Oxford
University Press.
West,Anthony. "Prison ofWretchedness." The New Yorker 30 (5 February):
109-112.
1956
Aron, Raymond. "Mme de Beauvoir et la pensee de droite ." Le Figaro
Litteraire 12 (21 January): 5.
Murdoch, Iris. "At One Remove From Tragedy." The Nation 182 (9 June):
493-494.
226 TED TOADVINE
1957
Freehof, SolomonB. "Existentialism: World's Despair." Carnegie Magazine
31 (April): 120-125.
Nahas, Helene. La Femme dans la litterature existentialiste. Paris: PUF.
1958
Genet, Jean. "Letter from Paris." The New Yorker (8 November): 186-194.
1959
Barnes, Hazel. The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic
Existentialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Partially
reprinted in Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, edited by
Elizabeth Fallaize, 157-170. London: Routledge, 1998.
Robinet, Andre. "Le Glas de la litterature existentialiste de choc. " Critique
15 (March): 228-232.
1960
Chapsal, Madeleine. "A Union without Issue." Reporter 23, no . 23: 40-46.
Otero, Lisandro. "Sartre y Beauvoirpor la Provincia di Orienti." Revolucion
(Cuba) (27 February).
1961
Girard, Rene. "Memoirs ofa Dutiful Existentialist." Yale French Studies 27
(Spring-Summer): 41-6.
Mesnard, Pierre. "Le Pot-au-feu existentialist." La France Catholique (10
March).
Prosch, Harry. "The Problem of Ultimate Justification." Ethics 71 (April
1961): 155-174 .
1962
Hourdin, Georges. Simone de Beauvoir et la liberte . Paris: Cerf.
1963
Donohue, H. E. F. Conversations with Nelson Algren. New York: Hill &
Wang.
Mauriac, Francois, Review of Force ofCircumstance. Le Figaro Litteraire,
no. 917 (14 November): 24.
Wasmund, Dagny. Der "Skandal '' der Simone de Beauvoir. Mun ich : Max
Huber.
1964
Fitch, Brian T. Le sentiment d'etrangete chez Malraux, Sartre, Camus et
Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Minard.
Houston, Mona Tobin. "The Sartre of Madame de Beauvoir." Yale French
Studies 30: 23-9.
BffiLIOGRAPHY 227
Kleppner, Amy M. "Philosophy and the Literary Medium: The Existentialist

Predicament." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, no. 2
(Winter): 207-218.
1965
Barrett, W. "Married in Heaven." The Atlantic 215 (May): 150.
Beis, Richard H. "Atheistic Existentialist Ethics: A Critique." The Modern
Schoolman 42 (January): 153-178.
De Urmeneta, Fermen. "Sobre estetica Sartreana-Beauvoiriana: Sartre 0 el
existencialismo anticonformista." Revista de Ideas Esteticas 23
(April-June): 39-42.
Gobeil, Madeleine. "Sartre Talks." Vogue (New York) 146 (July): 72-3.
Reprinted in Simone de Beauvoir, by Serge Julienne-Caffie, 38-43.
Kazin, Alfred. "Sartre's Boswell." Reporter 33 (1 July): 32.
Montagu, Ashley, and 1. M. Demos. "Inscrutable Priestess: Letters to the
Editor." Harper's Magazine 230 (6 January): 6.
Nelson, Algren. "The Question ofSimone de Beauvoir." Harper's Magazine
(May): 134-6.
Sturm, Douglas. "Natural Law and the Ethics of Simone de Beauvoir." The
Bucknell Review 11, no. 2 (May): 88-101.
1966
Berghe, Christian van den. Dictionnaire des idees dans I'oeuvre de Simone
de Beauvoir. The Hague: Mouton.
Jeanson, Francis. Simone de Beauvoir ou I'enterprise de vivre. Paris: Seuil.
Partially reprinted and translated in Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical
Reader, edited by Elizabeth Fallaize, 111-119. London: Routledge,
1998.
- - - . "Une Prison de luxe." Le Nouvel Observateur (14 December).
1968
Gagnebin, Laurent. Simone de Beauvoir ou Ie refus de l'indifference. Paris:
Fischbacher.
Sheridan, James F. "On Ontology and Politics, a Polemic." Dialogue 7, no.
3: 449-460.
1969
Lilar, Suzanne. Le malentendu du Deuxieme sexe. Paris : PUF .
1970
Durant, Will and Ariel Durant. "Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir."
In Interpretations of Life: A Survey of Contemporary Literature,
228 TED TOADVINE
edited by Will Durant and Ariel Durent. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Lasocki , Anne-Marie. Simone de Beauvoir ou I 'enterprise d 'ecrire: essai de
commentaire par les texts. The Hague: Nijhoff.
1971
Cismaru, Alfred. "Enduring Existentialists. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
in their Golden Age." Antioch Review 31 (1971-2): 557-64.
Schiiler, Gerda . "Simone de Beauvoir." In Franzosische Literatur der
Gegenwart in Einzeldarstellungen, edited by W. D. Lange, 193-212.
Stuttgart: Kroner.
1972
Algren, Nelson. "How to Break the Silence Conspiracy Over Old Age." Los
Angeles Times (25 June).
Coles , Robert. "Old Age." The New Yorker 48 (19 August) : 68-78 .
Jeanson, Francis. "La Rencontre du Castor." In Sartre dans sa Vie, 49-68 .
Paris: Seuil.
1973
Cayron , Claire . La nature chez Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Gallimard.
Marks , Elaine. Simone de Beauvoir: Encounters with Death . New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Partially reprinted in
Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, edited by Elizabeth Fallaize ,
132-142. London: Routledge, 1998.
Mead , Margaret. Review of The Coming ofAge. The American Journal of
Orthopsychiatry 43, no. 3: 470-474 .
1974
Grether, Judith K. "Existentialism and the Oppression of Women." The
Insurgent Socialist 5, no. 1 (Fall): 25-40.
1975
Cixous , Helene . "La Rire de Madusa." L 'Arc 61. Translated as "The Laugh
of Medusa." Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 1
(1976): 875-99.
Clement, Catherine, ed. Simone de Beauvoir et la lutte des femmes. Special
Issue of L 'Arc 61.
Contat, Michel. "Entretien avec Jean-Paul Sartre." Le Nouvel Observateur,
no. 544-6 (23 June, 30 June, 7 July): 66-88; 64-80; 68-74.
Friedan, Betty . "No Gods, No Goddesses." Saturday Review (14 June): 16-7.
Genet, Jean. "La Religion de l'adolescent." L 'Action Nationale 65 (1
September): 55-65.
BffiLIOGRAPHY 229
1976
Anderson, Thomas C. "Freedom as Supreme Value: The Ethics ofSartre and
de Beauvoir." American Catholic Philosophical Association:
Proceedings ofthe Annual Meeting 50: 60-71.
John , Helen James. "The Promise ofFreedom in the Thought of Simone de
Beauvoir: How an Infant Smiles." American Catholic Philosophical
Association: Proceedings ofthe Annual Meeting 50: 72-81.
Lobato, Abelardo. La Pregunta por le Mujer. Salamanca: Siguene.
1977
Armogathe, Daniel. Le Deuxieme sexe: Simone de Beauvoir: analyse
critique. Paris: Hatier.
Chaine, Catherine. "Entretien: Jean-Paul Sartre et les femmes." Le Nouvel
Observateur, nos. 638-9 (31 January and 7 February): 74-85; 64-82.
Chaperon, Sylvie . "La Deuxierne Simone de Beauvoir." Les Temps
modernes, no. 593 (April-May): 112-143.
1979
Anderson, Thomas. The Foundation and Structure of Sartrean Ethics.
Lawrence, KS: Regents Press .
Astruc , Alexandre and Michel Contat. Sartre. Unfilm realise par Alexandre
Austruc at Michel Contat avec la participation de Simone de
Beauvoir, Jacques-Laurent Bost, Andre Gorz et Jean Pouillon.
Texte Integral. Paris: Gallimard.
Audet, Jean-Raymond. Simone de Beauvoir face a la mort. Lausanne:
Editions l'age d'homme.
Clement, Catherine. "Les Pelures du reel. " Magazine Litteraire no. 145
(February): 25-27. Translated as "Peelings of the Real " in Critical
Essays on Simone de Beauvoir, edited and translated by Elaine
Marks , 170-2. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
Craig , Carol. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in the Light of the
Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic and Sartrian Existentialism.Ph.D.
Dissertation. University of Edinburgh.
Le Doeuff, Michele. "De l' existentialisme au Deuxieme Sexe." Le Magazine
Litteraire 145 (February): 18-21.
- -- . "Operative Philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism."
Translated by Colin Gordon . Ideology and Consciousness 6
(Autumn): 47-57. Reprinted in Feminist Studies 6 (Summer 1980):
277-89. Also reprinted in Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir,
edited by Elaine Marks, 144-54. Boston: G.K. Hall , 1987.
230 TED TOADVINE
Francis, Claude and Femande Gontier. Les Ecrits de Simone de Beauvoir.

Paris: Gallimard.
Hanson, Linda. "Pain and Joy in Human Relationships: Jean-Paul Sartre and
Simone de Beauvoir."Philosophy Today 23 (Winter): 338-346.
McCall, Dorothy Kaufinann. "Existentialisme ou feminisme." Obliques 2, no.
18-9 : 311-320.
- - - . "Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, and Jean-Paul Sartre."
Signs : Journal ofWomen in Culture and Society 5 (Winter): 209-23 .
Sabrowsky, Judith A. From Rationality to Liberation. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.
1980
Algren, Nelson. "Last Rounds in Small Cafes: Remembrances of Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir." Chicago 29 (December): 210-213,
237-240.
Comesana, Gloria M. "La Alteridad, estructura ontologica de las relaciones
entre los sexos." Revista defilosofia 3: 81-112.
Dijkstra, Sandra. "Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan." Feminist Studies
6 (Summer): 290-303.
Felstiner, Mary Lowenthal. "Seeing The Second Sex Through the Second
Wave." Feminist Studies 6 (Summer 1980): 247-276.
Ferguson, Kathy E. Self, Society, and Womankind: The Dialectic of
Liberation . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Greene, Naomi. "Sartre, Sexuality, and The Second Sex ." Philosophy and
Literature 4 (Fall): 199-211.
Keefe, Terence. "Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre on mauvaise foi. " French
Studies (Oxford) 34 (3 July): 300-314.
a
Le Doeuff, Michele. "Colloque feministe New York: Le deuxieme sexe
trente ans apres." Questions feministes , no. 7 (February): 103-9.
Richards, Janet Radcliffe. The Skeptical Feminist: A Philosophical Inquiry.
Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
1981
Ascher, Carol. Simone de Beauvoir: A Life ofFreedom. Boston: Beacon.
Keefe, Terence. " 'Heroes ofour Times' in Three ofthe Stories ofCamus and
Simone de Beauvoir." Forumfor Modern Language Studies 17, no.
I : 39-54.
Simons, Margaret A. "Beauvoir and Sartre: The Question ofInfluence." Eros
8, no. I: 25-42.
BffiLIOGRAPHY 231
Whitmarsh, Anne. Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits of Commitment.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wittig, Monique. "One is not born a woman." Feminist Issues 1: 1-11.
Reprinted in her The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1992.
1982
Barnes, Hazel. "Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiography as a Biography of
Sartre." French Review: Journal of the American Association of
Teachers ofFrench 55, no. 7: 79-100.
Biagini, Enza. Simone de Beauvoir. Florence: La Nuova Italia.
Borne, Etienne. "Sartre en son Miroir." La croix (15 January).
Morris, Phyllis. "The Lived Body: Some Patterns of Identification and
Otherness." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13
(October): 216-225.
Zephir, Jacques J. Le neo-feminisme de Simone de Beauvoir: trente ans
apres Le deuxieme sexe: un post-scriptum. Paris: Denoel-Gonthier.
1983
Bair, Deirdre B. "In Summation: the Question of Conscious Feminism or
Unconscious Misogyny in The Second Sex." Simone de Beauvoir
Studies : Simone de Beauvoir and Women 1.
Hartsock, Nancy. Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Femin ist Historical
Materialism. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Keefe, Terry. Simone de Beauvoir: A Study ofher Writings. London: Harrap.
Nadeau, Maurice. "Le temoignage de Simone de Beauvoir: Sartre est mort
'content' ," review ofLa ceremonie des adieux . Simone de Beauvoir
Studies : Simone de Beauvoir and Women 1.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Lettres au Castor. 2 vols. Edited by Simone de Beauvoir.
Paris: Gallimard. Volume 1 translated as Witness to my Life: The
Letters ofJean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1929-1939, by
Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1992; Volume 2 translated as Quiet Moments in a
War: The Letters ofJean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1940-
1963, by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MavAfee . New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1993.
Simons, Margaret A. "The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What's
Missing from The Second Sex ." Women 's Studies International
Forum 6: 559-64.
232 TED TOADVINE
Zephir, Jacques J. "Simone de Beauvoir et la femme: Feminisme authentique

ou misogynie inconsciente?" Simone de Beauvoir Studies: Simone
de Beauvoir and Women 1. Reprinted in Revue d'Universite Ottowa
54 (Jan.-March, 1984): 37-53.
1984
Bell, Linda A. and Linda Alcoff. "Lordship, Bondage, and the Dialectic of
Work in Traditional MaleIFemale Relationships." Cogito 2: 79-94.
Bieber, Konrad. "Simone de Beauvoir et l'apres-Sartre." Simone de Beauvoir
Studies: Simone de Beauvoir in 1984 2.
Faure, Christine. "Simone de Beauvoir et Simone Weil: deux trajectoires
philosophiques." Simone de Beauvoir Studies: Simone de Beauvoir
in 19842.
Hatcher, Donald. "Simone de Beauvoir and Why it's immoral to be a
housewife." Simone de Beauvoir Studies: Simone de Beauvoir in
19842. Reprinted in Journal ofValue Inquiry 23 (March, 1989) : 59-
68 .
- - . Understanding 'The Second Sex. ' New York: Peter Lang.
Levaux, Michele. "Simone de Beauvoir: une feministe exceptionelle." Etudes
360: 493-498 .
Lloyd, Genevieve. TheMan ofReason. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota
Press.
Seigfried, Charlene H. "Gender-Specific Values." Philosophical Forum
(Boston) 15 (Summer): 425-442.
Zephir, Jacques J. "Importance des ecrits feministes de Simone de Beauvoir
posterieurs au Deuxieme sexe." Simone de Beauvoir Studies: Simone
de Beauvoir in 1984 2.
1985
Barnes, Hazel E. "Beauvoir and Sartre: The Forms ofFarewell." Philosophy
and Literature 19 (April): 21-40.
Boschetti, Anna. Sartre et "Les temps modernes '': une entreprise
intellectuelle. Paris: Ed. de Minuit. Translated by Richard C.
McCleary as The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and "Les temps
modernes. "Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988 .
Dallery, Arleen. "Sexual Embodiment: Beauvoir and French Feminism."
Hypatia : A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Special Issue of
Women's Studies International Forum 8, no . 3: 197-208. Reprinted
in Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy, edited by Azizah
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Y . Al-Hibri and Margaret A. Simons. Bloomington: Indiana

Ferguson, Ann. "Lesbian Identity: Beauvoir and History." Hypatia : A
Journal ofFeminist Philosophy. Special Issue of Women's Studies
International Forum 8, no . 3: 203-208.
Francis, Claude, and Femande Gonthier. Simone de Beauvoir. Paris: Perrin.
Translated as Simone de Beauvoir, by Lisa Nesselson. London:
Sidgewick, 1987.
Godard, Linda. "Pour une nouvelle lecture de la question de la femme: essai
apartir de la pensee de Jacques Derrida." Philosophique 12 (Spring):
147-164.
Lazar, Liliane. "Sartre dans l'intimite: Les lettres au Castor." Simone de
Beauvoir Studies: In Memoriam 3 (1985-1986).
Megna-Wallace, Joanne. "Intertextuality and Intersections: Simone de
Beauvoir's Le deuxieme sexe and Jean-Paul Sartre's Dramatic
Heroines." Simone de Beauvoir Studies: In Memoriam 3 (1985-
1986) .
Sanabria, Jose Ruben. "Hay una moral en la filosofia de Sartre." Revista de
filosofia (Mexico) 18: 443-491 .
Singer, Linda. "Interpretation and Retrieval: Rereading de Beauvoir."
Hypatia : A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 3. Special Issue of
Women 's Studies International Forum 8: 231 -8. Reprinted in
Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy, edited by Azizah
Al-Hibri and Margaret A. Simons, 323-35. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990 . Also reprinted in her Erotic Welfare: Sexual
Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic , 131-44. New York:
Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1993 .
Zephir, Jacques J. "Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir: Une relation de
couple authentique et reussie." Simone de Beauvoir Studies: In
Memoriam 3 (1985-1986). Reprinted in Petite Revuephilosoph iques
8 (Spring 1987) : 1-28.
1986
Bair, Dierdre. " Simone de Beauvoir: Politics, Language, and Feminist
Identity." In Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, edited by
Helene Wenzel. Special Issue of Yale French Studies 72 : 149- 162.
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Notes on Contributors
Kristana Arp (ph .D., University ofCalifornia, San Diego, 1987) is Associate
Professor and Chair ofthe Philosophy Department at Long Island University,
Brooklyn. She is the author of articles on Edmund Husser! and Simone de
Beauvoir. Her book, The Bonds of Freedom: The Existentialist Ethics of
Simone de Beauvoir, will be published in 2001 . At present she is at work on
a book comparing existentialist conceptions offreedom with other conceptions
of freedom in the history of philosophy.
Michael Barber (Ph.D., Yale University, 1985) is Professor of Philosophy

at St. Louis University. He is author of numerous articles and four books:
Social Typification and the Elusive Other (1988) , Guardian of Dialogue
(1993), Ethical Hermeneutics (1998), and Equality and Difference
(forthcoming). His current interests are the phenomenology of the social
world, ethics, and philosophy and race. At present he is working on a
biography of Alfred Schutz.
Debra Bergoffen is Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Women 's

Studies Research and Resource Center, and a member of the cultural studies
faculty at George Mason University. Her writings focus on epistemological,
ethical , and feminist issues raised by the work ofNietzsche, Lacan , Irigaray,
and Beauvoir. She is the author of the book The Philosophy ofSimone de
Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities, the writer of
numerous journal and anthology articles, and the editor ofseveral collections
of essays.
Suzanne Cataldi (Ph.D. , Rutgers University, 1991) is Associate Professor of

Philosophy and Coordinator of the Women's Studies Program at Southern
Illinois University, Edwardsville. She is the author of Emotion, Depth and
Flesh: A Study ofSensitive Space (1993). She has published articles in the
areas offeminism, phenomenology, and ethics and is currently working on a
manuscript applying Merleau-Ponty's philosophy to contemporary social
Issues.
Elizabeth Fallaize (Ph.D ., Exeter University, 1984) is Reader in French at

Oxford University and Fellow of St. John 's College. She has published a
range ofartilces and books on modern French literature and women's writing.
Her most recent books are: French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years (2000 ,
254
with C. Davis), Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (1998), French

Women's Writing: Recent Fiction (1993), The Novels ofSimone de Beauvoir
(1988) .
Edward Fullbrook is a regular contributor to economics journals and editor

ofIntersubjectivity inEconomics (forthcoming). Kate Fullbrook is Professor
ofLiterary Studies at the University ofthe West ofEngland and the author of
Katherine Mansfield (1986) and Free Women: Ethics and Aesthetics in
Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction (1990) . Together the Fullbrooks have
co-authored numerous essays and two books on Beauvoir: Simone de
Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century
Legend (1993/1994) and Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction
(1998) .
Eva Gothlin (Ph.D., Goteborg University, 1991) has a post as Researcher at

the Department ofGender Studies, Goteborg University. She is the author of
numerous articles and the book Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir 's 'Le
deuxieme sex' (1996). She is currently working on a book about the ethics of
Simone de Beauvoir.
Sarah Clark Miller (M.A ., State University of New York at Stony Brook,
1999) is a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy Department of the State
University of New York at Stony Brook. Her current research interests
include ethics, phenomenology, and feminist theory. She is writing a
dissertation on vulnerability, embodiment, and ethics .
Wendy O'Brien (M.A., University ofWestern Ontario, 1991) is a doctoral

candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University ofWaterloo and is
a professor of social and political studies at Humber College in Toronto,
Canada. Herresearch interests include phenomenology, the philosophy oflaw,
and contemporary political theory, Her dissertation, titled "Encountering the
Other: Simone de Beauvoir and the Phenomenology of Recognition,"
examines the influence of Hegel and HusserI on Beauvoir's work.
Margaret A. Simons (Ph.D., Purdue University, 1977) is Professor in the

Department of Philosophical Studies at Southern Illinois University,
Edwardsville and Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy. She is the author of Beauvoir and 'The Second Sex ':
255
Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (1999) and numerous

articles on Beauvoir's philosophy. A founding editor of Hypatia: A Journal
ofFeminist Philosophy, she is co-editor, with Azizah al-Hibri, of Hypatia
Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy (1990), and editor of Feminist
Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (1995), and "The Philosophy of
Simone de Beauvoir," a special issue of Hypatia (Fall 1999). She is currently
co-editing, with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, a six volume series ofSimone de
Beauvoir's philosophically significant texts in English translation.
Ursula Tidd is a Lecturer in French in the Department of French Studies,

University of Manchester, UK . She has published a book on Beauvoir's
literature and philosophy, Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony
(1999) and recently co-edited Womenin Contemporary France (with Abigail
Gregory) (2000). She has also published a range of chapters and articles on
Beauvoir's writing and in the broader field ofgender studies injoumals such
as Hypatia and Women in French Studies. Her current research interests
remain Beauvoir's literary and philosophical writing, French
authobiographical writing, and the relationship between literature and ethics.
Ted Toadvine (Ph.D., The University of Memphis, 1996) is Assistant

Professor ofPhilosophy at Emporia State University. In addition to authoring
and translating essays in the areas of phenomenology and continental
philosophy, he is co-editor of Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husser!
(forthcoming) and Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself
(forthcoming), and co-translator of Renaud Barbaras's The Being of the
Phenomenon : An Essay on Merleau-Ponty 's Ontology (forthcoming). His
current interests include intersubjectivity, the phenomenology of aesthetic
experience, and the history of the philosophy of nature.
Index of Topics
action, 109 consciousness of time, 29

addressee, 81 conversion, 22
African-Americans, 150, 157 counterfactua1 ideals , 160
aging , 113, 118, 129 critique, 36, 38
allegory, 74 desire, 26f, 95, 102f, 188, 189,
ambiguity, 86, 95, 97,187, 188, 192f, 197
189, 192f, 195f despair, 20, 22, 95
ambivalence, 92f, 104 determinism, 29, 31
anticipation, 112 dialogue, 150, 158f
argumentation, 159 diary , 17ff, 29, 35, 39
authenticity, 22, 47 dictatorships, 156
author, 120 diplome , 19,24,32
autobiography, 119-125 disability, 89, 96
autonomy, 188, 193, 197,201 disclosure, 22f, 46ff
bad faith, 22, 91, 93, 102ff discourse, 157f
Beauvoir's legacy, 187 discrimination, 15H, 155, 174
becoming, 29, 38 dispositions, 170
being, 21, 85, 106 doubling, 138-145
body, 115-116, 196, 199 economic interests, 156
body-subject, 86ff egoism, 25
bond, 197,202 elan vital, 30
bourgeoisie, 151 embodied subjectivity, 129, 136,
British Empiricism, 9, 55 139, 142
carnal bond , 201 embodiment, 37f, 55, 85, 88
Cartesianism, 44, 45 equality, 88, 150f, 153
Catholicism, 22, 29, 33, 37f erotic, 200ff
chiasm, 100 eroticism, 95ff, 101, 103, 191
childhood, 23, 29 essences, 34
choice, 29, 31, 91 ethic of the project, 165f
co-existence, 90 ethical relationship, 190
collaboration, 120 ethics, 21f, 136ff, 168, 170,
collusion, 91, 94 172ff, 189, 192, 194
communicative rationality, 154 exclusion, 151
Communist party, 180 existence, 85
compassion, 152 existential ground, 190
complicity, 25, 91 existential phenomenology, 1, 5f,
consciousness, 163, 167, 188, 28,32,39,42,44,48,50,
189, 193f 68,85 , 184
258
existentialist ethics , 175, 184 joy, 195

experience, 31,34 Laforce de l 'dge, 35, 180ff
facticity,141f Laforce des choses, 180
faith,21f L 'Amerique au jour Ie jour, 161
female philosophers, 41 language , 82, 89
female sexuality , 96, 98 La vieillesse, 127-138
femininity, 86, 94, 96 Le deuxieme sexe, 17, 24f, 29,
feminism, 1, Sf, 203 30, 179
flesh, 100, 168, 199,201 Le sang des autres , 182
for-itself, 139f Les mandarins, 180
freedom, 25, 31,37,94, 141~ L 'invitee , 24, 54f, 57, 59, 60
149, 165f, 169, 175f, 184f, literature , 20f
190ff "Litterature et metaphysique," 20
frigidity, 96f, 100f lived body, 85, 96, 105
future , 184 lived experience, 135, 138, 144f
gender , 29, 93f, 196 loss of voice, 92f
gender socialization, 86 love, 24f, 31
generosity, 171f, 191, 194ff, marriage , 31
202f Marxism, 45, 50, 136
gift, 164, 171, 191, 194, 197f mass movements, 153
given, 30 mass society, 151
God,21 ,24,29, 188, 194,201 master-slave, 50
habitual body, 115 materialism, 180
history, 181, 184 maternity, 78, 80
history of philosophy, 49 Memoires d 'une jeune fille
humanism, 198 rangee ,19f
idealism, 56 memories, 92
identity, 139, 145 menopause, 79
imagery, 70, 72, 77 metaphor, 72n, 82f
images, 142f metaphysical hypocracy, 93
immanence,56,62,87 method ,20
impotency, 95 methodology, 21, 28, 30ff, 39
in-itself, 139f Mitsein , 46f
integration, 153 modernity , 184
intentionality,94, 178, 187ff, morality, 160, 165
192ff, 199,201 moral-practical rationality, 158
interpretation, 155 mysticism , 32ff
intersubjectivity, 3f, 46 mystification, 88
259
myth, 70f, 74f, 82f politics, 151, 156, 193f

narration, 12Iff Pour une morale de I'ambiguite,
nature, 169 22,24,175-185
non-being, 105f praxis, 137
nothingness, 25 praying mantis, 76f, 80
object, 162 pregnancy, 78, 81
old age, 106, 127-147 prejudices, 163, 165ff, 172
oppression, 51, 89 presence, 29
other, cf. self and other present, 118
passion, 192 present body, 115
past, 118 pre-theoretical level, 170
paternalism, 172 privacy, 153
patriarchy, 189, 196, 198f, 201 private sphere, 154
perception, 62,88, 95f, 100f, project, 193
106, 164 propositions, 155
Personalism, 32 protention, 112
phenomenological difference, Quand prime Ie spirituel, 23, 35
196 race, 149, 152, 161, 168
phenomenological method, 133, racism, 168
135f, 138 rationality, 161
phenomenological movement, 14, reader, 120
31,45 reality,164
phenomenological reduction, 22, reason, 152, 157, 173
36, 162, 171 reciprocity, 194, 197f
phenomenology, 2ff, 6f, 18, 31ff, recognition, 137, 197
43,48,50,89,156,162L recollection, 112
165ff, 172f, 177ff, 192 relationship, 197, 199
philosophy of history, 48-51 repression, 92, 94
physiology, 71, 79 reproduction, 70ff
pluralism, 152, 156, 158ff, 173 resentment, 97
plurality, 154, 173 Resistance, 182f
polis, 150 responsibility, 93, 170, 202
political community, 154 retention, 112
political project, 190 reversibility, 101, 105f
political reason, 157 revolution, 153
political sphere, 153 risk,201
political theory, 159, 173 romance , 200
political violence, 176 sacrifice, 27
260
salvation, 34 World Warn, 175, 182
segregation, 149
self and other, 24ff, 187, 189f,
197
self-deception, 22f, 26
selflessness, 27
sexuality, 102f
sexual desire, 99
sexual differentiation, 72ff
shame, 96
situated subject, 177, 179, 185
situation, 51, 131f, 135
skepticism, 33
slavery, 27, 151
social sphere, 153f
solipsism, 24, 27
Spanish Civil War, 181
speech,88,90
subject, 162, 187ff, 193
subjective interpretation, 161
subjective viewpoint, 156
subjectivity, 37, 166,201
tactility, 104
techniques of bracketing, 200
temporality,107-125
terrorism, 182
things themselves, 163
time, 106
titles, 109
touch, 105
Thomists,32
transcendence, 56, 62, 86f, 95
transcendental ego, 121
typification, 156
void, 21, 26
vulnerability, 199ff
world, 194
World War I, 181
Index of Names
Alain, 28· Brentano, Franz, 50, 55

Allen, Jeffner, 43n, 44n Brunschvicg, Leon, 19, 33
Apel , Karl-Otto, l59n, l60n, Camus, Albert, 124
l6l,173n Cataldi, Susan, 10, 168n
Aquinas, 32, 73 Champigneulle, 124
Aragon, Louis, 28 Claudel, 22, 29
Arendt, Hannah, llf, 149, 150- Compton, John J., 44n
160, 161, 165, 173f Darwin, Charles , 79
Aristotle, 73, 189 Descartes, 26, 36f, 55,163,171,
Arland , Marcel, 29 188
Aron,Raymond,2,35,111 Deutscher, Penelope, 128, 141
Arp, Kristana, 12f, 89n, 91n, Embree, Lester, 43n
185n Engels, 48
Augustine, 11, 119 Euchen, Rudolf, 28
Bair, Deirdre, 42n, 111, 183n Fallaize, Elizabeth, 8f, 161, 177,
Barber, Michael B., 7, llf, 164n 178n
Barbier, 30 Fanon, Franz, 168n
Baruzi, Jean, 3, 8, 19,32-37 Fouillee, Alfred, 74
Beauvoir, Simone de, passim Fullbrook, Kate and Edward , 4n,
Beauvoir, Sylvie Le Bon de, 18 7, 8f, 17,42, 55n, 59n,
Bechet, Sydney, 171 101ff,109
Benhabib, Seyla, 158 Gerassi, Fernando and Stepha,
Benjamin, Jessica, 4 181
Bergoffen, Debra, 13f, 17, 22f, Giacometti, Alberto, 124
42n, 44n, 45n, 46n, 48,49n, Gilligan, Carol, 28
75n, 95n, 102n, 128n, 129, Gilson, Etienne, 32
l36n, 165, l66n, l77n Gobeil, Madeleine, 5, 10, 133
Bergson, Henri, 8, 28, 29-32, 34, Gothlin, Eva, 4n, 8, 17, 22, 42n,
36, 107n 49n, 113n, 129n, 130n,
Berkeley, 54 136n
Berlin, Isaiah, 54 Groethuysen, Bernard, 34f
Bernasconi, Robert, 160 Gurvitches, Georges , 35
Bernstein, Richard, 151, 157 Habermas, Jiirgen, 159, 161,
Biran, Maine de, 32 170,713n
Bohman, James, 153, 154n, 157n Hegel, G.W.F., 4,6,8,41, 48ff,
Bos, Charles du, 19 73, 110
Bost, Jacques , 81 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 12,35,41,
Bourla, 124 43ff, 107f, 113f, 130, 164,
262
165n,177f Magnani,Anna, 171

Heinamaa, Sara, 3n, 43n, 129n, Magnes,Judah,160
BIn Marcel, Gabriel, 18, 29
Hering, Jean, 34f Marks, Elaine, 127n, 133n, 134,
Hewett , Leah, 122 137
Hrdy,Sarah,9,69,81 Marx, Karl, 6, 41, 48f, 181
Hume, David, 54 Mauriac, 22,29
Husserl , Edmund, 2ff, 7f, 10, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice , 8, 10,
12f, 31, 35ff, 41, 43, 44ff, 20,36,37-38,39,46,53 ,
48ff, 55, 58n, 59n, 107, 58n, 590, 65, 85ff, 92ff,
108ff, 121, 127ff, 145, 149, 100, 105, 107f, 110f, 116,
163,165, 167, 172, 173n, 124f, 128, 130, 162, 164,
174, 177f, 188 167, 172, 177ff
Hyppo1ite, Jean, 49f Mezzrow, 172
James , William, 31f Miller, Sarah Clark, 11
Jaspers, Karl, 29, 44 Mohanty, J.N., 43n
Joseph, Gilbert, 125n Moi, Toril , 41n, 42n, 67f, 80,
Kafka, Franz, 116 83, 108, 180n
Kant , 9, 21, 36f, 56, 57, 154ff, Montaigne, 18
173 Moubachir, Chantal , 110, 112,
Keller, Evelyn Fox, 9, 69, 81, 114n
82,83 Myrdal, Gunnar, 166
Kierkegaard, Seren, 29, 42ff Nietzsche , Friedrich, 28
Klaw , Barbara, 18 Parshley, H.M., 67, 73n, 76
Kojeve, Alexandre, 49f Pascal, 18, 29
Kruks , Sonia, 17,42n, 46n, 1090 Pericles , 156
Lacion , Elizabeth 'Zaza,' 124 Philibert, Michel, 142f
Lagneau,28 Pilardi, Jo-Ann, 4n, 43n, 129n,
LeDreuff, Michele, 17, 41n, 42, 140f
45n Plato, 9, 53f, 60, 62ff, 73, 150,
Leibniz, 18f, 23, 3lff 154,157,173
Lejeune , Philippe, 122f Pontremoli, 33
Levinas, Emmanuel , 8,35 , 169f, Renouvier, Charles , 32
172,173n Rockmore, Tom, 44n
Levi-Strauss, Claude, III Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1, 2, 8, 17ff,
Levy, Georgette , 22, 26, 33,36 2lff, 26ff, 35, 37, 39, 4lff,
Locke, John, 54 50,59n,68,71 ,80, 83,
Mademoiselle Mercier, 22, 31 10lff, 108, Ill , 113, 120n,
263
121n, 122n, 123, 130, Weiss, Gail, 136, 168n

139, 140, 142, 162, Wellmer, Albrecht, 159
165ff, 172, 177ff Wright, Richard, 161, 168, 17lf
Scheler, Max, 8, 35, 164, 168n, Young, Iris, 44n
172
Schneider, 95f, 115
Schopenhauer, Puthur,28,32
Schubert, 112
Schutz, Alfred, 155f, 161
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock,
68f, 77, 81, 83
Shaw, Bernard, 167
Shestov, Lev, 34f
Simons, Margaret, 3f, 7f, lOn,
l7,4ln,42n,67,92n,128n,
BOn, 16ln, l78n
Socrates, 62
Sokolowski, Robert, 2n
Spiegelberg, Herbert, l8n, 31,
32ff, 36, 43n, 45n, 48n, 49
Stekel, Wilhelm, 96
Stumpf, Carl, 50
Suleiman, Susan, l82n
Tidd, Ursula, 10f
Toadvine, Theodore, 14
Tong, Rosemarie, 89
Trotsky, Leon, 181
Truman, Harry S., 162
Valery, Paul, 28
Van Breda, Father, 58n
Villa, Dana R., 47n
Vintges, Karen, 17, 42n, 43, 44n,
45n, 48,49n, l29n, l30n,
BIn, 133n, 135
Ward, Julie K., 89n
Warner, Marina, 70
Warnock,Mary, 123, l24n
Weil, Simone, 28
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THE EXISTENTIAL PHENOMENOLOGY

John J. Drummond. Fordham Univers ity

Springer-Science+Business Media, B.Y.

ISBN 978-90-481-5732-7 ISBN 978-94-015-9753-1 (eBook)

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved

© 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or

A Third Perspective for Beauvoir Studies

works revealed the phenomenological approach which she adopted and

2. Sokolowski , Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology (New York : Cambr idge University

novelty and richness ofphenomenology filled me with enthusiasm: I felt I had

7. Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, Husserliana Band I, ed. S. Strasser

8./bid., 156,166, and 170/128, 139, and 143.

10./bid., 159-160 and 1821131-32 and 156.

II./bid., 153, 160, and 161/125, 132, and 133.

12. See Sara Heinamaa, "Simone de Beauvoir's Phenomenology of Sexual Difference" in

This list provides a useful template for examining Beauvoir' s writings. In

works can be viewed as a series ofstudies-studies, for example, ofthe lived

19. Ibid., II 527/685 .

20. La vieillesse, 254-255/267 .

23. Laforce des choses , 9/6.

forefront her phenomenological scholarship and phenomenological

namely, her intertwining ofliterature and philosophy in an attempt to reflect

attempt to locate this aspect of Beauvoir's philosophy within a broader

meanings ascribed to those experiences, a point further developed by Susan

retention and recollection, Beauvoir explains time in terms of rupture and

life in her study ofBeauvoir ,s advocation oflimited political violence in Pour

The Beginnings of Beauvoir's Existential Phenomenology

Abstract: Simone de Beauvoir's handwritten diary from 1927

philosophical texts by Beauvoir, including her 1928-29 graduate thesis on

The Diary as Philosophical Text

It might be objected that a diary is an inappropriate text for serious

4. Herbert Spiegelberg. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd

5. L 'intelligence mystique. Edited with "Presentation" by Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron. Paris:

8. Ibid., 449, 467.

10. Memoires, 426.

Philosophy and Literature

The diary confirms Beauvoir' s early dedication to philosophy and provides a

14. Camet, Holograph manuscript. Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale, 1927. Transcription by

The Search for Meaning

At the heart ofBeauvoir' s philosophical quest is a search for meaning shaped

Mademoiselle Mercier is trying to convert me; she speaks to me of Father

17. Op. cit., 161.

from 1935-37, Quand prime Ie spirituel.IS This diary passage, in reflecting

A final, incomplete sentence in this passage, points to the existentialist reality

Love and the Other

21. Op. cit., 328, 536, 529, and 531.

For Beauvoir unlike Sartre, interdependence of self and other is an

22. Op cit., 104

Love and Domination

Anticipating Same's description, in L 'eire et Ie neant, of masochistic love,

how 1 am alone. 1 speak mystically of love, 1 know the price .. .. 1 am too

opposition of self and other would thus seem to reflect a problem

origins of French existential phenomenology as a whole .

The diary provides evidence of the important, and largely unexplored,

24. Jean-PaulSartre, Saint-Genet: Comedien et martyr . Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Translated

25. See MargaretSimons, \981.

This passage is interesting for several reasons: Beauvoir's methodology of

26. Op. cit., 428 .

philosophical methodology might be William James, whose influence is

28. 2nd ed. Paris : Alcan , 1931.

Baruzi appears in Beauvoir' s 1927 diary as her philosophical mentor. One