A Brief Glance at Simone de Beauvoir

1. Life, Influences and Works:

Simone de Beauvoir was born on 9^th January, 1908, in Paris, France. She received a Catholic education in her student years. While in college she met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she entered into a life-long intellectual and physical companionship. They never married and had no kids together.

In the 1930’s, she studied the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, along with the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard. During and after World War II, she developed an interest in the philosophies of Hegel and Marx. Her thought was largely influenced by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, a contemporary and friend of hers.

She was acknowledged as an inspiration to the Feminist Movement which sprung up in the 1970’s and 1980’s. She is better known as a novelist than as a philosopher. Some of her books are: Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), The Second Sex (1949)-which is considered to be one of the most influential books of the 20^th century. Two of her novels are: She Came to Stay (1943) and All Men Are Mortal (1946). Most feminist scholars have criticized her views but none can deny her influence on early feminism.

2. Core Features of her Philosophy:

The most prominent feature of her philosophy is its ethical orientation, together with an analysis of the subordination of women. She is an existential phenomenologist and hence takes the notion of freedom seriously. In her writings, we see the reflection of the existential credo, “Essence does not precede existence.” She writes in Pyrrhus et Cinéas, “The human being is an existent that lacks inherent essence. He/she has to form his/her life and give it meaning.” There is no predetermined meaning. Meaning and values are for us to create and discover. Facticity and freedom are key constituents of the human reality. Not all situations equally allow the ability to act on or take up one’s freedom. Freedom is situated; hence it is subject not only to the physical reality but also to one’s historical and social location. Freedom ought to be founded and defended by the individual, while society’s role is to facilitate the conditions for the positive fulfillment of this freedom.

2.1. Human Freedom

Human freedom is relational and it requires reciprocal recognition. Hence, such freedom can only exist between equals who are not bound by relationships of dependence. In Ethics of Ambiguity, she argues that each person needs the others freedom to realize his/her own. The human reality is a being-with-others (mitsein, in Heideggerian terms). This being-with unfortunately, often takes the form of a subject-object relationship. In objectifying the other, one is denying the other his/her freedom and hence, assumes living in bad faith, which could also be an outcome of denying one’s own freedom or objectifying oneself. Bad faith is an existential term meaning, “a belief in something about oneself or the world which is not true or proven false.” Bad faith is a characteristic of inauthenticity and it is in the struggle against it that one assumes responsibility for one’s own freedom.

2.2. The Human Body

The body is not a thing, rather it is a situation. The implication is that one does not choose one’s body as one would perhaps choose what clothes to wear. But one finds oneself in a particular body. The body becomes the primary locus of facticity. Our relation with others occurs basically at the level of the body. Our freedom is exercised in and through our body and hence is also limited by it. Therefore, one is not ‘radically’ free as Sartre thought, one is ‘situatedly’ free. For Beauvoir, embodied subjectivity is an important theme.

2.3. Re-looking at Gender

Beauvoir is best know for her quote, “One is not born a woman, one becomes a woman” (The Second Sex [will be referred to as ‘SS’ henceforth], 267). In her tour-de-force, The Second Sex, she explores this question: “What is a woman?” and seeks to provide an explanation. Just as the body is a situation so also is one’s gender. Gender is an aspect of the human reality but is not natural or innate. It is “a condition brought out by society, on the basis of certain physiological characteristics” (Prime of Life, 291).

A look at human history will show us that superiority has been accorded to the sex that kills rather than that which brings forth (SS, 89). Traditionally, power and authority have been associated with the masculine gender while qualities like reciprocity, gentleness and concern have been associated with the feminine. This kind of attribution gradually gave rise to male-domination or patriarchy. Marx pointed out that productive activity or work is a key to the development of both, the human being and society. Since women, owing to their reproductive function and their lesser physical strength, stood outside both the struggle for recognition and productive activity, they were defined by males as the ‘Absolute Other’. Women were looked down on as Objects that never became the Subject in relation to men, a situation that with the advent of private property and the state became institutionalized into patriarchal society.

Beauvoir feels that the devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity (SS, 100). Without it she contends, society would not develop. If the woman had not to give into man, no relationship would exist between them, thus giving rise to two autonomous groups within the human species. Some feminist scholars reject this view and claim that she inherited this androcentric view from Hegel and Marx, sequentially terming her a misogynist.

Her writings seem to suggest that a woman’s sexual faculties are less conducive than man’s to achieve transcendence. My reading of Beauvoir has led me to think that she was describing the situation as she perceived it and was not propounding a metaphysical doctrine. Rather, her aim was to show that every human being, male and female alike, are metaphysically capable of freedom and transcendence in an equal manner. Women, because of their situation and social conditioning are less likely to exercise their freedom.

Woman sustains man’s self-esteem by reflecting back to him an image of himself albeit in an exalted manner. Men “seek to find in two living eyes their image haloed with admiration and gratitude, deified” (SS, 217). He looks in a woman’s facial expression for confirmation of his own worth and through her body a manifestation of her admiration. A woman gains her social status, wealth and connections from her relationship with a man. Man has tried to fulfill his desire by taking possession of woman but has failed and ended up alienating himself in her. Similarly, woman too, has tried to fulfill her desires by alienating herself in man as if he were an Absolute Subject and could take responsibility for her life.

3. Conclusion

I perceive Beauvoir as an iconoclast bent on destroying patriarchy. Gender, she writes, is socially produced and self created within the confines of a socio-historical situation. “One is not born a woman”, thus suggests that gender is an aspect of identity gradually acquired. It is the cultural meaning given to one’s body. For her, being female and being a woman are two different states of being. Birth as a female is a given but growth and maturity as a woman is entirely a personal affair. It entails becoming. This movement requires a renewing and organizing of one’s cultural history anew. For genuine freedom to be possible, social conditions of women’s lives must be radically transformed.

References:

Card, Claudia. Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006. Volume 6, “Simone de Beauvoir”.

Fallaize, Elizabeth. Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge, 1998.

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998. Volume 1, “Simone de Beauvoir”.