Simone de Beauvoir

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Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy,
Simone de Beauvoir
Name: Simone de Beauvoir
Birth: January 9, 1908 ( Paris, France )
Death: April 14, 1986 ( Paris, France )
School/tradition: Existentialism
Feminism
Main interests: Politics, Feminism, Ethics
Notable ideas: ethics of ambiguity, feminist ethics
Influences: Descartes, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, the French existentialists
Influenced: The French existentialists, feminists (specifically Betty Friedan)
"Beauvoir" redirects here. For other uses, see Beauvoir (disambiguation).

Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986) was a French author and philosopher. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography. She is now best known for her 1949 treatise Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.

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[edit] Early years

Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris to Georges Bertrand and Françoise (Brasseur) de Beauvoir. The elder of two daughters of a conventional family from the Parisian 'bourgeoisie', she depicts herself in the first volume of her autobiography (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter) as a girl with a strong commitment to the patriarchal values of her family, religion, and country. From the outset, she is subject to the opposing influences of her agnostic father and her devoutly Catholic mother. The two formative peer-relationships of her childhood and adolescence involve her sister Hélène (whom she calls Poupette) and her friend Zaza. She traces back to her relationship with Poupette, whom she sought to teach and influence from an early age, her taste for teaching, and it is the tragic life and death of Zaza that forms the subject matter for her first, unsuccessful, literary endeavours.

[edit] Middle years

After passing the baccalauréat exams in mathematics and philosophy, she studied mathematics at the Institut Catholique and literature/languages at the Institut Sainte-Marie, then philosophy at the Sorbonne. While at the Sorbonne, she met Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929, who was taking courses there while enrolled at the elite École Normale Supérieure. It is a common misconception that de Beauvoir studied at the Ecole Normale. She was, however, well acquainted with the school and its curriculum, thanks to Sartre and others within their philosophic circle.

In 1929, de Beauvoir also became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy. Sartre was first that year, but she was a close second. Certain people hold that de Beauvoir was in fact first in philosophy: they simply placed Sartre first due to the obvious aspect of being a man. While at the Sorbonne, she acquired her lifelong nickname, Castor (the French word for "beaver")—a pun derived from the resemblance of her surname to "beaver".

In 1943, de Beauvoir published L'Invitée (She Came to Stay, 1943), a fictionalized chronicle of her lesbian relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz, one of her students in the Rouen secondary school where she taught during the early 30s. The novel also delves into the complex relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre, as well as how that relationship was affected by the ménage à trois with Kosakiewicz.

[edit] Later years

At the end of World War II, de Beauvoir and Sartre edited Les Temps Modernes, a political journal Sartre founded along with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. De Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and remained an editor until her death.

Although her book Pour Une Morale de L'ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947) has been little noticed, it is perhaps the most accessible point of entry into French existentialism. Its simplicity keeps it understandable, in contrast to the obtuse nature of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. The ambiguity about which de Beauvoir writes clears up some inconsistencies that many, Sartre included, have found in major existential works such as Being and Nothingness.

De Beauvoir was uninhibitedly bisexual. However, she did not attain her first full orgasm until 1947, after meeting Nelson Algren while on an American lecture series. In Chicago, Algren helped de Beauvoir achieve this elusive orgasm which in part inspired her to write The Second Sex, which was originally published as a two-volume book in France. These works were very quickly published in America as The Second Sex due to the quick translation of Howard Parshley, as prompted by Blanche Knopf, wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf (see Peter Watson's The Modern Mind, pages 421-423).

Thus in her own way, de Beauvoir anticipated the sexually charged feminism of Erica Jong and Germaine Greer. Algren, no paragon of primness himself, was outraged by the frank way de Beauvoir later described her American sexual experiences in Les Mandarins (dedicated to Algren and on whose character Lewis Brogan is based) and elsewhere, venting his outrage when reviewing American translations of her work. Much bearing on this episode in de Beauvoir's life, including her love letters to Algren, entered the public domain only after her death. On de Beauvoir's sexuality and the paper trail she left, see [1].

[edit] Woman: Myth and Reality

Simone de Beauvoir once wrote an essay called Woman:Myth and Reality. In it she argued that men had made women the "other" in society by putting a false aura of "mystery" around them. And she argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them and to subjugate them. She argued that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy so that the lower group became the "other" and had a false aura of mystery around it. And she said that this also happened with other things such as race, class, and religion. But she said that it was nowhere more true than with sex in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.

[edit] The Second Sex

De Beauvoir's The Second Sex, published in French in 1949, sets out a feminist existentialism with a significant Freudian aspect. As an existentialist, de Beauvoir accepts the precept that existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her analysis focuses on the concept of The Other. It is the (social) construction of Woman as the quintessential Other that de Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression.

De Beauvoir argues that women have historically been considered deviant, abnormal. She submits that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. De Beauvoir says that this attitude has limited women's success by maintaining the perception that they are a deviation from the normal, and are outsiders attempting to emulate "normality". For feminism to move forward, this assumption must be set aside.

De Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the 'immanence' to which they were previously resigned and reaching 'transcendence', a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's freedom.

[edit] Death and afterwards

Her 1970 The Coming of Age is a very rare instance of an intellectual meditation on the decline and solitude all humans experience if they do not die before about age 60. In 1981 she wrote La Cérémonie Des Adieux (A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre's last years. She is buried next to him at the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. Since her death, her reputation has grown, not only because she is seen as the mother of post-1968 feminism, especially in academia, but also because of a growing awareness of her as a major French thinker, existentialist and otherwise. She is seen as having influenced Sartre's masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, while also having written much on philosophy that is independent of Sartrean existentialism.

[edit] Bibliography

Some of Simone de Beauvoir's other major works include, Les Mandarins (The Mandarins, 1954); Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, 1958).

[edit] Translations

  • Patrick O'Brian was de Beauvoir's principal English translator, until he attained commercial success as a novelist.
  • Philosophical Writings (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2004, edited by Margeret A. Simons et. al.) contains a selection of essays by de Beauvoir translated for the first time into English. Among those are: Phyrrhus and Cineas, discussing the futility or utility of action, two previously unpublished chapters from her novel She Came to Stay and an introduction to Ethics of Ambiguity.

[edit] Sources

  • Bair, Deirdre, 1990. Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Summit Books.

[edit] Bibliographic sources

  • Beauvoir, Simone de. Woman: Myth & Reality,
    • in Jacobus, Lee A (ed.) A World of Ideas. Bedford/St. Martins, Boston 2006. 780-795
    • in Prince, Althea, and Susan Silva Wayne. Feminisms and Womanisms: A Women's Studies Reader. Women's Press, Toronto 2004 p.59-65.

[edit] External links

English Translation online The Ethics of Ambiguity.

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