## 1. Life and Works



Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris, France. Her
parents, Georges Bertrand de Beauvoir and Francoise
(nee) Brasseur provided Beauvoir and her younger sister
Helene, often referred to by her nickname
"Poupette," with a traditional bourgeois, Catholic
upbringing. Beauvoir spent much of her childhood rebelling against the
values of her faith and bourgeois ideology. The disdain for the latter
would continue throughout her adult life. In her childhood, Beauvoir
vowed to never become a housewife or mother and admired her
father's intelligence. He introduced the young Beauvoir to great
works of literature and encouraged her to write. She pursued this out
of her own interest, writing stories and keeping diaries throughout
her girlhood, and more formally in her educational training at the
private Catholic school for girls, the Institut Adeline Desir.
At school, she formed an intimate bond with Elizabeth Mabille, or
Zaza. Together, the two confronted and resisted the rigid expectations
of bourgeois, Catholic femininity. When Zaza died of meningitis in
1929, Beauvoir suffered intense heartbreak. She fictionalized this
heartbreak and their intimacy in the novel *Inseparable*
(2021), which was written in 1954 but deemed "too
intimate" to publish during Beauvoir's lifetime.



In her girlhood, Beauvoir was independent, curious, and a gifted
student. She was often defiant of the rules of the adult world and
desired to fill her life with as many experiences as possible.
Although initially devout in her faith, at age fourteen Beauvoir
rejected the existence of God, which was a pivotal moment in her life,
as was her family's loss of class status in 1919. The former
event propelled Beauvoir into studying philosophy, while the latter
made the bourgeois expectation of marriage improbable. Her early
devotion to an intellectual life proved to have social and material
benefits, offering her a way to concretely realize her independence
during an era when most women were economically dependent on men.



In 1925, at the age of seventeen, Beauvoir passed the
baccalaureat exams in mathematics and philosophy. In 1926, she
earned Certificates of Higher Studies in French literature and Latin
after studying at the Institut Catholique and the Institut
Sainte-Marie. In the fall of 1926 she began studying philosophy at the
Sorbonne where, in 1928-1929, she would write her graduate
thesis (diplome) on Leibniz prior to taking the competitive
agregation exam in philosophy in 1929. At twenty-one Beauvoir
was the youngest candidate to pass the exam, finishing second to
Jean-Paul Sartre who had taken the exam for the second time. As the
eighth woman to pass the agregation, Beauvoir's success
solidified her economic independence and she continued to assume her
independence in the face of patriarchal constraints. In the second
volume of her autobiography, *The Prime of Life* (1960),
Beauvoir recounts this time as carefree, as if she were untethered to
the constraints of the world. Years later, different conditions would
shift her attitude.



While studying for the agregation, Beauvoir met Sartre and they
found in each other intellectual companions and lovers. Although
Beauvoir has often been framed as merely adopting Sartre's
philosophical commitments, her diaries and memoirs tell another story.
They both relied on one another as interlocutors and Sartre often
relied on Beauvoir's intellectual acuity to develop his ideas.
Though they refused the tradition of monogamy, the two remained
together their entire lives. In 1929, they made a famous pact to be
"essential lovers", yet allowed for "contingent
loves" that they disclosed to one another. During her lifetime
Beauvoir had numerous affairs with men and women, but none paralleled
her relationship with American author Nelson Algren, whom she fell
deeply in love with. In various personal writings, Algren seems to
occupy the place of an "essential love" far more than
Sartre. However, the pact with Sartre was never broken and the two
were bonded throughout their lifetime. This open relationship was
radical for the time, yet Sartre and Beauvoir have also been
criticized for their sexual ethics. Given what is exposed in
Beauvoir's diaries about her disappointments with her
relationship with Sartre, it is not entirely clear why she honored
their pact. If anything, Beauvoir's life and work are reminders
of the concrete contradictions and ambiguities we all, and women
especially, face, even in love.



In the 1930s, Beauvoir spent much of her time teaching philosophy
until she was dismissed from her post in 1941 by the Nazis who had
occupied Paris in 1940. The Nazi Occupation and the changing social
and political climate had a profound impact on Beauvoir, and she
became more attuned to ethics and the constitutive relationship
between circumstance and freedom. During this time, she abandoned the
rationalist-voluntarist position of her youth, and became more
preoccupied with morality and agency in the concreteness of social
context. From 1941-1946 she wrote several important works,
including the novel, *The Blood of Others* (1945), her first
philosophical essay *Pyrrhus et Cineas* (1944), a
precursor of sorts to *The Ethics of Ambiguity* (1947), and the
novel *All Men are Mortal* (1946). In 1945, she helped found
the leftist journal *Les Temps Modernes* with other French
intellectuals, including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Beauvoir was a
co-editor of the journal and it quickly became an important venue for
philosophical and political essays of the time, including
Beauvoir's "Eye for an Eye" (1946). While focusing
on her political writings, Beauvoir traveled to the United States and
wrote *America Day by Day* (1948). It was also in *Les Temps
Modernes* that Beauvoir first published extracts of *The Second
Sex* (1949).



Although Beauvoir was not an ardent feminist in her early years,
*The Second Sex* (1949) became one of the most important
feminist texts of the twentieth century, and it launched Beauvoir into
the public spotlight for generations to come. As *The Second
Sex* became a catalyst for challenging women's situations,
Beauvoir's political and intellectual place was also reset.
After repeatedly refusing to align herself with the feminist movement,
Beauvoir declared herself a feminist in a 1972 interview in *Le
Nouvel Observateur* and joined other Marxist feminists in founding
the journal *Questions Feministes*. In 1971, she
authored and signed Manifesto 343, a public declaration of 343 women
who admitted to having an abortion at a time when it was still illegal
in France. In the 1960s, she also used her philosophical voice to
engage in political activism against French colonialism, writing
publicly against the torture of Djamila Boupacha and criticizing the
indifference to the commonplace torture of Algerian women by the
French Army.



Beauvoir's literary and philosophical success and reflections on
the concrete world continued after *The Second Sex.* She
published important essays, including "Must We Burn Sade?"
(1951-1952) and "Right Wing Thought Today" (1955),
that further develop her notions of authenticity, responsibility, and
solidarity. Her novel *The Mandarins* (1954), a story about
left-wing intellectuals at the end of World War II, won the Prix
Goncourt, the prestigious French literary award. As with many of her
other works, this novel examines relationships, events, and struggles
that fictionalize aspects of her own life. As Beauvoir describes in
the third volume of her autobiography, *Force of Circumstance*
(1963), *The Mandarins* is not a novel with a message, but
rather a philosophical investigation of the meaning of life after the
war and the lived confrontation with being and nothingness. It is a
work that exemplifies Beauvoir's turn to literature to do
philosophy. A few years later in 1957, she published *A Long
March*, an essay about her six-week visit to Communist China in
1955 as one of the 1,500 delegates to visit for the Bandung
Conference. From 1958-1963, she published her autobiography in
three volumes (the fourth volume would come out in 1974), and not too
long after *A Very Easy Death* (1964), an intimate reflection
on the last six weeks of her mother's life, and later *The
Woman Destroyed* (1967). After a significant period of
interdisciplinary research, similar to the work undertaken to write
*The Second Sex*, Beauvoir wrote *The Coming of Age*
(1970), offering a harrowing account of what it means to become old
and the oppression it entails in western, capitalist societies.



After spending the latter half of her life as a feminist icon, public
intellectual, and an eminent writer, Beauvoir died at seventy-eight,
on April 14, 1986. She was buried, with Sartre, in the Montparnasse
Cemetery in Paris, wearing the ring Nelson Algren had given her many
years earlier.



In spite of working amidst some of the most prominent French
philosophers of her time, Beauvoir's legacy has often been
denied its philosophical significance. Indeed, the details of her life
have often been taken to be more interesting than her ideas. This
reception exemplifies that circumstances can often steal an
individual's transcendence, a point she pursues time and time
again in her work.


## 2. Beauvoir the Philosopher



Beauvoir was not considered a philosopher at the time of her death.
Some have found Beauvoir's exclusion from the domain of
philosophy more than a matter of taking Beauvoir at her word. They
attribute it to an exclusively systematic view of philosophy which,
apathetic to the philosophical methodology of the metaphysical novel,
ignored the ways that Beauvoir embedded existential-phenomenological
arguments in her literary works. Between those who did not challenge
Beauvoir's self-portrait, those who did not accept her
understanding of the relationship between literature and philosophy,
and those who missed the unique signature of her philosophical essays,
Beauvoir the philosopher remained a lady-in-waiting.



Some have argued that the belated admission of Beauvoir into the ranks
of philosophers is a matter of sexism on two counts. The first
concerns the fact that Beauvoir was a woman. Her philosophical
writings were read as echoes of Sartre rather than explored as
original contributions because it was only "natural" to
think of a woman as a disciple of her male companion. The second
concerns the fact that she wrote about women. *The Second Sex*,
recognized as one of the hundred most important works of the twentieth
century, would not be counted as philosophy because it dealt with the
oppression of women, hardly a burning philosophical issue (so it was
said). But, decades of scholarship on Beauvoir by feminist scholars
has proven that she deserves recognition as a philosopher in her own
right.



Such recognition was not without its challenges, especially the one
posed by Beauvoir. Her philosophical voice, she insisted, was merely
an elaboration of Sartre's. Those denials coupled with the fact
of her life-long relationship with him positioned her in the public
and philosophical eye as Sartre's alter ego. Decoupling Beauvoir
from Sartre became the first priority of those interested in
establishing her independent philosophical credentials. Sometimes the
issue concerned Sartre's originality: Were the ideas of his
*Being and Nothingness* (1943) stolen from Beauvoir's
*She Came to Stay* (1943)? Sometimes they concerned matters of
influence: What happened in their discussions and critiques of each
other's work? Eventually these arguments abated and scholars
turned from exclusive attention to the matter of Sartre's
influence to the more fruitful question of influence in the broader
sense. They began to trace the ways that she, like her
existential-phenomenological contemporaries, took up and reconfigured
their philosophical heritage, identifying her philosophical
originality and unique contributions to existentialism and
phenomenology. Studying her diaries and memoirs expose her
philosophical influences even more explicitly: Descartes and Kant were
familiar figures in her philosophical vocabulary; her reading of Hegel
was influenced by the interpretations of Kojeve; she was
introduced to Husserl and Heidegger by her teacher Baruzi; she drew on
Bergson before she had studied Hegel or Marx; if she had rewritten
Volume I of *The Second Sex*, she would develop a more Marxist,
less Hegelian account of the Other; and after meeting Jean Walh at a
dinner party in 1939, Beauvoir became immersed in a study of
Kierkegaard which moved her away from Hegelianism and toward an
existentialist ethics of freedom.



Beauvoir's tenuous recognition as a philosopher also has much to
do with her critique of and challenge to its methods. She detailed her
phenomenological and existential critique of the philosophical status
quo in her 1946 essay "Literature and the Metaphysical
Essay", and her 1965 and 1966 essays "Que Peut la
Litterature?" and "Mon Experience
d'ecrivain". This critique, influenced by both
Husserl and Heidegger, focused on the significance of lived experience
and on the ways that literature unveils situated truths in the world.
Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Sartre turned to the language of the novel
and the theater. They looked to Husserl to theorize their turn to
these discourses by insisting on grounding their theoretical analyses
in the concrete particulars of lived experience. They looked to
Heidegger to challenge the privileged position of abstract discourses.
For Beauvoir, however, the turn to literature carried ethical and
political as well as philosophical implications. Literature is a way
to overcome existential separation between self and other, to engage
and be undone by other truths. It allowed her to explore the limits of
the appeal (the activity of calling on others to take up one's
political projects); to portray the temptations of violence; to enact
her existential ethics of freedom, responsibility, joy and generosity;
and to examine the intimacies and complexities of relationships with
others. She found in literature a way to reveal the contingency of the
world, along with its multiple, interwoven meanings, in ways that
traditional philosophical forms could not. Further, many of her works
are shaped by rigorous interdisciplinary research, which allowed
Beauvoir to think in the concrete, rather than in the abstract mode of
traditional philosophy.



In writing *The Second Sex*, Beauvoir undertook a challenge to
the patriarchal status quo. This challenge was a dramatic event that
inspired controversy and social upheaval. At its publication, the book
was regarded more as an affront to sexual decency than a political
indictment of patriarchy or a phenomenological investigation of
"woman". It was the women who came to be known as
second-wave feminists who understood what Beauvoir's first
readers missed. It was not sexual decency that was being attacked but
patriarchal indecency that was on trial. *The Second Sex*
expressed their sense of injustice, focused their demands for social,
political, and personal change and alerted them to the connections
between private practices and public policies. No longer considered
sexually scandalous, its analysis of patriarchy and women's
oppression, and its proposed antidotes to women's domination are
still debated.



Beauvoir's work has suffered in translation further obscuring
her status as a philosopher and her political ideas in particular. The
first English translation of *The Second Sex*, done by H.M.
Parshley, a zoologist with no background in philosophy, is perhaps
most well known for its controversial translation, which omits around
fifteen percent of the original text, inaccurately translating the
central philosophical concepts, and depoliticizing Beauvoir's
feminism. In 1953, when *America Day by Day* was published for
an American audience, it also suffered from serious omissions, many of
which focused on her account of race relations in the U.S. The English
translations of several of Beauvoir's novels are also subtly
emptied of her political commentary.



Nonetheless, Beauvoir's oeuvre challenged the borders separating
philosophy and literature and disrupted the boundaries between the
personal, the political, and the philosophical. Since her death, her
status as an original philosopher has been secured, in large part due
to feminist scholars who resisted the patriarchal constraints of the
discipline of philosophy and reconsidered Beauvoir's own framing
of her life and work. She would have appreciated the fact that her
current philosophical status reflects our changed understanding of the
domain of philosophy and the changed situation of women, for it
confirms her idea of situated freedom--that our capacity for
agency and whether or not we are identified as agents, is constrained,
though never determined, by our situation. She would also have
appreciated the fact that while her works were instrumental in
effecting these changes, their lasting effect is a tribute to the ways
that others have taken up her philosophical and feminist legacies; for
one of her crucial contributions to our ethical and political
vocabularies is the concept of the appeal--that the success of
our projects depends on the extent to which they are adopted by
others.


## 3. *She Came to Stay*: Freedom and Violence



Though Beauvoir's first philosophical essay was *Pyrrhus and
Cineas* (1944) many of her interpreters identify *She
Came to Stay* (1943) as her inaugural philosophical foray. It is a
clear example of what Beauvoir calls the metaphysical novel. The
letters between Sartre and Beauvoir and Beauvoir's diaries of
that period (published in the 1980s), show that both Beauvoir and
Sartre were concerned with the question of the other, the issue of bad
faith and the dynamics of desire. They were also examining the
relationship and tensions between our singular existential status and
the social conditions within which our singularity is lived. *She
Came to Stay* is packed with philosophical
reflections--reflections on our relationship to time, to each
other, to ourselves. These reflections are never, however, presented
in systematic arguments or brought to closure. They are lived in the
concrete, ambiguously triangulated lives of Pierre, Xaviere and
Francoise. Opening with a quote from Hegel, "Each
conscience seeks the death of the other", and ending with
Francoise's murder of Xaviere, which Beauvoir
narrates as an act in which Francoise confronts her solitude
and announces her freedom, the novel does not necessarily confirm
Hegel's claim. The point of the murder was not to eliminate the
other per se but to destroy a particular other, Xaviere, who
was the other who threatened to leave Francoise without the
other she loved, Pierre. Here, existential ambiguity trumps Hegelian
clarity. The issues raised in this first novel, including the
ambiguity regarding the responsibilities and limits of freedom, the
legitimacy of violence, the tension between our experience of
ourselves as simultaneously solitary and intertwined with others, the
temptations of bad faith and the examination of the existentially
faithful relationship to time, will pervade Beauvoir's
subsequent reflections.


## 4. *Pyrrhus and Cineas*: Radical Freedom and the Other



*Pyrrhus and Cineas* (1944), published one year after
*She Came To Stay*, is Beauvoir's first philosophical
essay. It addresses fundamental ethical and political issues, such as:
What are the criteria of ethical action? How can I distinguish ethical
from unethical political projects? What are the principles of ethical
relationships? Can violence ever be justified? It examines these
questions from an existential-phenomenological perspective. Taking the
situation of the concrete existing individual as its point of
departure, *Pyrrhus and Cineas* provides an analysis of
the ways that, as particular subjects, we are necessarily embedded in
the world and inescapably related to others. Though not feminist in
any identifiable sense, this essay raises such compelling feminist
questions as: Under what conditions, if any, may I speak for/in the
name of another?



After opening *Pyrrhus and Cineas* with Plutarch's
account of a conversation between Pyrrhus and Cineas, where the
justification of action is questioned, Beauvoir, finding the
recommendation to be passively inconsistent with the realities of
human nature and desire, asks three questions: What is the measure of
a person? What goals can one set for oneself? What hopes are permitted
to us? She then divides the text into two parts. Part one moves from
the ontological truth--that I am a finite freedom whose endings
are always and necessarily new beginnings--to the existential
questions: How can I desire to be what I am? How can I live my
finitude with passion? These existential questions lead to moral and
political ones: What actions express the truth and passion of our
condition? How can I act in such a way so as to create the conditions
that sustain and support the humanity of human beings? Part I
concludes with the observation that: "A man alone in the world
would be paralyzed by ... the vanity of all of his goals. But man
is not alone in the world" (PhilW 115, cf. P&C 42). Beauvoir
opens Part II with the properly ethical question: What is my relation
to the other? Here the analysis is dominated by the problem created by
Beauvoir's insistence on the radical nature of freedom.
According to Beauvoir, the other, as free, is immune to my power.
Whatever I do--if as a master I exploit slaves, or as an
executioner I hang murderers--I cannot violate their inner
subjective freedom. Making a distinction between freedom as internal
and the external conditions through which self and other engage,
Beauvoir argues that we can never directly touch the freedom of
others. This inner-outer distinction underscores that our
relationships are either superficial, engaging only the outer surface
of each other's being, or they are mediated through our common
commitment to a shared goal or value.



This line of argument would seem to lead either to benign Stoic
conclusions of mutual indifference or to the finding that tyrants and
terrorists pose no threat to individual freedom. Beauvoir does not,
however, let it drift in these directions. Instead she uses the
inner-outer distinction and the idea that I need others to take up my
projects if they are to have a future, to introduce the ideas of the
appeal and risk. She develops the concept of freedom as transcendence
(the movement toward an open future and indeterminate possibilities)
to argue that we cannot be determined by the present. The essence of
freedom as transcendence aligns freedom with uncertainty and risk. To
be free is to be radically contingent. Though I find myself in a world
of value and meaning, these values and meanings were brought into the
world by others. I am free to reject, alter or endorse them for the
meaning of the world is shaped by human choices. Whatever choice I
make, however, I cannot support it without the help of others. My
values will find a home in the world only if others embrace them; only
if I persuade others to make my values theirs.



So, as radically free I need the other. I need to be able to appeal to
others to join me in my projects. The knot of the ethical problem lies
here: How can I, a radically free being who is existentially severed
from all other human freedoms, transcend the isolations of freedom to
create a community of allies? Given the necessity of appealing to the
other's freedom, under what conditions is such an appeal
possible?



In answering these questions Beauvoir turns the inner-outer
distinction to her advantage as she develops the concept of situated
freedom. Though I can neither act for another nor directly influence
their freedom, I must, Beauvoir argues, accept responsibility for the
fact that my actions produce the conditions within which the other
acts. "I am", Beauvoir writes, "the face of the
other's misery... I am the facticity of their situation"
(PhilW 126, cf. P&C 58). Pursuing this difference between my power
to effect the other's freedom and my responsibility for their
situation, and exploring the conditions under which my appeal to the
other can/will be heard, Beauvoir determines that there are two
conditions of the appeal. First, I must be allowed to call to the
other and I must struggle against those who try to silence me. Second,
there must be others who can respond to my call. The first condition
may be purely political. The second is political and material because,
as Beauvoir argues, it is only as peers that others are capable of
responding to my call. Only those who are not consumed by the struggle
for survival, only those who exist in the material conditions of
freedom, health, leisure and security can become my allies in the
struggle against injustice. Thus, it is only as equals that the second
condition can be met. To achieve such equality, we have to strive to
pursue justice, as only then will the material and political
conditions of the appeal be secured.



Violence is not ruled out. Given that Beauvoir has argued that we can
never reach the other in the depths of their freedom, she cannot call
violence evil. She does not, however, endorse violence. Neither does
she envision a future without conflict. The fact that we are
differently situated and engage in the work of transcendence from
different social, historical, and economic positions ensures that some
of us will always be an obstacle to another's freedom. "We
are", Beauvoir writes, "condemned to violence"
(PhilW 138, cf. P&C 77). As neither evil nor avoidable, violence,
she argues, is "the mark of a failure which nothing can
offset" (PhilW 138, cf. P&C 77). It is the tragedy of the
human condition.



The argument of *Pyrrhus and Cineas* ends on an uneasy
note. As ethical, we are obliged to work for the conditions of
material and political equality. In calling on others to take up our
projects and give these projects a future, we are precluded from
forcing others to become our allies. We are enjoined to appeal to
their freedom. Where persuasion fails, however, we are permitted the
recourse to violence. The ambiguity of our being as subjects for
ourselves and objects for others in the world is lived in this dilemma
of violence and justice. Becoming lucid about the meaning of freedom,
we learn to live our freedom by accepting its finitude and
contingency, its risks and its failures.


## 5. *The Ethics of Ambiguity*: Bad Faith, the Appeal, the Artist



It is impossible to know where Simone de Beauvoir's thinking
would have gone had she been spared the cold, the hunger and the fear
of living in Nazi occupied Paris. What we do know is that in coming
face to face with forces of injustice beyond her control, the
questions of evil and the other took on new urgency. Beauvoir speaks
of the war as creating an existential rupture in time. She speaks of
herself as having undergone a conversion. She can no longer afford the
luxury of focusing on her own happiness and pleasure. The question of
evil becomes a pressing concern. One cannot refuse to take a stand.
One is either a collaborator or not. In writing *The Ethics of
Ambiguity*, Beauvoir takes her stand. She identifies herself as an
existentialist and identifies existentialism as the philosophy of our
(her) times because it is the only philosophy that takes the question
of evil seriously. It is the only philosophy prepared to counter
Dostoevsky's claim that without God everything is permissible.
That we are alone in the world and that we exist without guarantees,
are not, however, the only truths of the human condition. There is
also the truth of our freedom and this truth, as detailed in *The
Ethics of Ambiguity*, entails a logic of reciprocity and
responsibility that contests the terrors of a world ruled only by the
authority of power.



*The Ethics of Ambiguity*, published in 1947, reconsiders the
idea of invulnerable freedom advanced in *Pyrrhus and
Cineas*. Dropping the distinction between the inner and
outer domains of freedom and deploying a unique understanding of
consciousness as an intentional activity, Beauvoir now argues that I
can be alienated from my freedom. Similar to *She Came To
Stay*, which bears the imprint of Hegel's account of the
fight to the death that sets the stage for the master-slave dialectic,
and *Pyrrhus and Cineas*, which works through the
Cartesian implications of our existential situation, *The Ethics of
Ambiguity* redeploys concepts of canonical philosophical figures.
Here Beauvoir takes up the phenomenologies of Husserl and Hegel to
provide an analysis of intersubjectivity that accepts the singularity
of the existing individual without allowing that singularity to
justify an epistemological solipsism, an existential isolationism or
an ethical egoism. The Hegel drawn on here is the Hegel who resolves
the inequalities of the master-slave relationship through the justice
of mutual recognition. The Husserl appealed to is the Husserl who
introduced Beauvoir to the thesis of intentionality.



*The Ethics of Ambiguity* opens with an account of
intentionality which designates the meaning-disclosing and
meaning-desiring activities of consciousness as both insistent and
ambiguous--insistent in that they are spontaneous and
unstoppable; ambiguous in that they preclude any possibility of
self-unification or closure. Beauvoir describes the intentionality of
consciousness as operating in two ways. First, there is the activity
of wanting to disclose the meaning of being. Second, there is the
activity of bringing meaning to the world. In the first mode of
activity consciousness expresses its freedom to discover meaning. In
the second, it uses its freedom to articulate meaning and give meaning
to the world. Beauvoir identifies each of these intentionalities with
a mood: the first with the mood of joy, the second with the dual moods
of hope and domination. Whether the second moment of intentionality
becomes the ground of projects of liberation or exploitation depends
on whether the mood of hope or domination prevails.



Describing consciousness as ambiguous, Beauvoir identifies our
ambiguity with the idea of failure. We can never fulfill our passion
for meaning in either of its intentional expressions; that is, we will
never succeed in fully revealing the meaning of the world, and never
become God, the author of the meaning of the world. These truths of
intentionality set the criteria of Beauvoir's ethics. Finding
that ethical systems and absolutes, insofar as they claim to give
final answers to our ethical dilemmas and authoritarian justifications
for our actions, offer dangerous consolations for our failure to be
the absolute source of the world's meaning or being, Beauvoir
rejects these systems of absolutes in favor of ethical projects that
acknowledge our limits and recognize the future as open. From this
perspective, her ethics of ambiguity might be characterized as an
ethics of existential hope.



Beauvoir's *The Ethics of Ambiguity* is a secularism that
rejects the ideas of God and Humanity. Their apparent differences
conceal a common core: both claim to have identified an absolute
source and justification for our beliefs and actions. They allow us to
evade responsibility for creating the conditions of our existence and
to flee the anxieties of ambiguity. Whether it is called the age of
the Messiah or the classless society, these appeals to a utopian
destiny encourage us to think in terms of ends which justify means.
They invite us to sacrifice the present for the future. They are the
stuff of inquisitions, imperialisms, gulags and Auschwitz. Privileging
the future over the present they pervert our relationship to time,
each other and ourselves. Insisting that the future is undecided and
that its form will be shaped by our present decisions, Beauvoir argues
that it is only by insisting on the dignity of today's human
beings that the dignity of those to come can be secured.



Beauvoir rejects the familiar charge against secularism made famous by
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor: "If God is dead everything
is permitted". As she sees it, without God to pardon us for our
"sins" we are totally and inexcusably responsible for our
actions. Dostoevsky was mistaken. The problem of secularism is not
that of license, it is the problem of the "we". Can
separate individuals be bound to each other? Can they forge laws
binding for all? *The Ethics of Ambiguity* insists that they
can. It does this by arguing that evil resides in the denial of
freedom (mine and others), that we are responsible for ensuring the
existence of the conditions of freedom (the material conditions of a
minimal standard of living and the political conditions of uncensored
discourse and association), and that I can neither affirm nor live my
freedom without also affirming the freedom of others.



Beauvoir's argument for ethical freedom begins by noting a
fundamental fact of the human condition. We begin our lives as
children who are dependent on others and embedded in a world already
endowed with meaning. We are born into the condition that Beauvoir
calls the "serious world". This is a world of ready made
values and established authorities. This is a world where obedience is
demanded. For children, this world is not alienating for they are too
young to assume the responsibilities of freedom. As children who
create imaginary worlds, we are in effect learning the lessons of
freedom--that we are creators of the meaning and value of the
world. Free to play, children develop their creative capacities and
their ability to confer meaning to the world without, however, being
held accountable for the worlds they bring into being. Considering
these two dimensions of children's lives, their imaginative
freedom and their freedom from responsibility, Beauvoir determines
that the child lives a metaphysically privileged existence. Children,
she says, experience the joys but not the anxieties of freedom.
Beauvoir also, however, describes children as mystified. By this she
means that they believe that the foundations of the world are secure
and that their place in the world is naturally given and unchangeable.
Beauvoir marks adolescence as the end of this idyllic era. It is the
time of moral decision. Emerging into the world of adults, we are now
called upon to renounce the serious world, to reject the mystification
of childhood, and to take responsibility for our choices.



All of us pass through the age of adolescence; not all of us take up
its ethical demands. The fact of our initial dependency and obedience
to the serious world has moral implications because it predisposes us
to the temptations of bad faith, strategies by which we deny our
existential freedom and our moral responsibility. It sets our desire
in the direction of a nostalgia for those lost Halcyon days. Looking
to return to the security of that metaphysically privileged time, some
of us evade the responsibilities of freedom by choosing to remain
children, that is, we submit to the authority of others and live in
the serious world.



Beauvoir does not object to the mystification of childhood. She
acknowledges that parental authority is necessary for the
child's survival, and she insists that this shelter of safety
should cultivate a child's freedom. To choose to remain a child
is an act of bad faith. To treat adults as children, however, is
immoral and evil. If we are exploited, enslaved or terrorized,
however, our submission to authority of the other cannot be counted as
an act of bad faith. Absent these conditions, Beauvoir holds us
accountable for our response to the experience of freedom. We cannot
use the anxieties of freedom either as an excuse for our active
participation in or for our passive acceptance of the exploitation of
others. Hiding behind the authority of others or establishing
ourselves as authorities over others are culpable offenses.



Beauvoir portrays the complexity of the ways that we either avoid or
accept the responsibilities of freedom through the figures of the
sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate
man, the critical thinker and the artist-writer. These figures are
imaginary, but also historical in the sense that they are lived, and
so, disclosed in the actions of human beings. The point of delineating
these human types is several fold. It is a way of distinguishing
between two kinds of unethical positions. One position, portrayed in
the portraits of the sub-man and the serious man, is to refuse to
recognize the experience of freedom. The other position, depicted in
the pictures of the nihilist, the adventurer and the maniacally
passionate man, is to misread the meanings of freedom. The ethical
person, as portrayed by Beauvoir, is driven by passion. Unlike the
egoistic, maniacal passion of the tyrant, however, the ethical passion
of the artist-writer is defined by its generosity--specifically
the generosity of recognizing the other's singularity and
protecting the other in their difference from becoming an object of
another's will.



In describing the different ways that freedom is evaded or misused,
Beauvoir distinguishes ontological from ethical freedom. She shows us
that acknowledging our freedom is a necessary but not sufficient
condition for ethical action. To meet the conditions of the ethical,
freedom must be used properly. It must, according to Beauvoir, embrace
the ties that bind me to others and take up the appeal--an act
whereby I call on others, in their freedom, to join me in bringing
certain values, projects, and conditions into being. Artists and
writers embody the ethical ideal in several respects. Their work
expresses the subjective passion that grounds the ethical life. They
describe the ways that the material and political complexities of our
situations can either alienate us from our freedom or open us to it.
By envisioning the future as open and contingent, artists and writers
challenge the mystifications that validate sacrificing the present for
the future. They establish the essential relationship between my
freedom and the freedom of others.



*The Ethics of Ambiguity* does not avoid the question of
violence. Determining that violence is sometimes necessary, Beauvoir
uses the example of a young Nazi soldier to argue that to liberate the
oppressed we may have to destroy their oppressors. However, she
distances herself from the argument of *Pyrrhus and
Cineas*; now she identifies violence as an assault on the
other's freedom (however misused) and as such this violence
marks our failure to respect the "we" of our humanity.
Thus, *The Ethics of Ambiguity* provides an analysis of our
existential-ethical situation that joins a hard-headed realism
(violence is an unavoidable fact of our condition) with demanding
requirements. It is unique, however, in aligning this realism and
these requirements with the passion of generosity and a mood of
joy.


## 6. *America Day by Day*: A Concrete Encounter



In January of 1947, Beauvoir traveled to America, landing at LaGuardia
Airport in New York. The purpose of her trip, which was sponsored by
the French government, was to give lectures at colleges and
universities on "the ethical problems of the post-war
writer". In the four months of her visit, she delivered twelve
lectures, including those at Vassar, Oberlin, Mills College, and
Harvard. Yet, her trip was also much more than a lecture tour.
Traveling all over the country by car, train, and bus, Beauvoir
visited nineteen states and over fifty cities, furthered her
friendship with Richard Wright, fell in love with Nelson Algren, and
developed various political critiques of the United States. She
details her visit in *America Day by Day*, a genre bending
travel-diary-essay, published in French in 1948. Although often cast
as just a travel writing, it should not be overlooked as a political
or philosophical text. Indeed, central to Beauvoir's concerns in
*America Day by Day* is how one's concrete situation is
constitutive of recognition and freedom. 



Similar to her autobiographical writings, *America Day by Day*
is a narrated record of Beauvoir's daily, concrete experiences.
Rather than advancing an argument, Beauvoir sets out to describe what
she did and what she perceived, while also at times offering critical
views of the social and political attitudes she encountered. For these
reasons, this book is both a break from the general, abstract writing
of her previous philosophical works, and generative of her more
concrete, politicized writings, thereby acting as a precursor to her
concrete analysis of women's situation (which she had already
begun prior to her visit to America), her account of China, and her
personal writings. It is only by being in the everydayness of America,
being in its concrete proximity, that Beauvoir is able, perhaps
willing even, to offer an account of its problems.



Beauvoir's account of America elucidates the dominant attitudes
of bad faith in America. She writes about her observations of the
expressions of political apathy, anti-intellectualism, moral optimism,
social conformism, and a capitalist-driven passivity among many
Americans, especially among the white, elite. She describes her
confrontations with segregation in the South, the violence of
whiteness in the North, and she notices the racism of white women and
the contradictions between America's commitment to democracy and
its racism. Further, she accounts for class politics and labor
relations, America's foreign policy, and she reflects on the
kinds of mystifications of ethics and politics in America that lead
Americans into bad faith.



Beauvoir's attention to America's race relations and her
confrontation with her own whiteness during her visit have much to do
with Wright's influence on Beauvoir, whom she spent time with
during her long stay in New York, and her reading of Gunnar
Myrdal's *An American Dilemma* (1944), which she often
references. Yet, even as Beauvoir attends to race relations and white
people's racial hatred in America, scholars have pointed out
that there are also aspects of her account that expose
Beauvoir's own white perception and colonizing encounters. This
dimension of *America Day by Day* complicates but does not
erase Beauvoir's political critique of America or the import of
her description of the moral and political dispositions of Americans.



## 7. *The Second Sex*: Woman As Other



While writing *America Day by Day*, Beauvoir was beginning to
work out her ideas for what would become her most famous book, *The
Second Sex*. In her autobiography *Force of Circumstance*,
Beauvoir looks back at *The Ethics of Ambiguity* and criticizes
it for being too abstract. She does not repudiate the arguments of her
text, but finds that it erred in trying to define morality independent
of a social context. *The Second Sex* may be read as correcting
this error, reworking and materially situating the analyses of *The
Ethics of Ambiguity*. Where *The Ethics of Ambiguity*
conjured up images of ethical and unethical figures to make its
arguments tangible, the analyses of *The Second Sex* are
materialized in Beauvoir's experiences as a woman and in
women's lived realities. Where *The Ethics of Ambiguity*
speaks of mystification in a general sense, *The Second Sex*
speaks of the specific ways that the natural and social sciences and
the European literary, social, moral, political and religious
traditions have created a world where impossible and conflicting
ideals of femininity produce an ideology of women's
"natural" inferiority to justify patriarchal
domination.



Beauvoir's self-criticism suggests that her later works mark a
break with her earlier writings. We should, however, resist the
temptation to take this notion of discontinuity too far. Rather than
thinking in terms of breaks it is more fruitful to see *The Second
Sex* in terms of a more radical commitment to the phenomenological
insight that it is as embodied beings that we engage the world. Our
access to, awareness of, and possibilities for world engagement cannot
be considered absent a consideration of the body as it is lived in a
concrete situation.



It was in 1946, while at the Deux Magots cafe in Paris, that Beauvoir
first came up with the idea for *The Second Sex*. Inspired by
*L'age d'homme* (1939) written by Michel
Leiris, Beauvoir comes up with the question: "What has it meant
to me to be a woman?" Beauvoir's immediate reflection
disregarded the significance of being a woman, but she soon realized
the world around her had always been a masculine one. Beauvoir then
pursued the question through an interdisciplinary study of the myths
of femininity, while taking herself, her situation as a woman, and the
situation and embodiment of being a woman more generally as the
subjects of her philosophical reflections. It is Beauvoir's
initial interest in the myths of femininity and their role in
women's lives that led her to develop the claim central to the
book: woman is the Other, man is the essential being.



*The Second Sex* is a deliberate feminist phenomenological
investigation of the sexed/gendered body, and it is considered a
founding text in the field of feminist phenomenology. Beauvoir draws
explicitly on narrative accounts of women's lived experience and
focuses on the entanglement of the general and the particular, rather
than bracketing the contingent to arrive at pure experience. In doing
so, she exposes how masculinist ideology exploits sexual difference to
create a system of oppression that positions and traps women in the
role of the Other. Such entrapment is part of history and mythology
(which she explores in Volume I) and lived experience (described in
Volume II). Central to Volume I is her discussion of the myth of the
eternal feminine, a master myth that works to ensnare women in an
unattainable ideal in order to undermine their existence as
individuals. For Beauvoir, the myth of the eternal feminine is
socially powerful and generative of "feminine existence".
It is through the sociohistorical creation and legacy of this myth and
through lived experience that women become anchored to the realm of
immanence and are forced to relinquish their claim to transcendence.
In doing so, women become split subjects, namely those who have the
capacity for world-making activity but are pushed into the repetitive,
passive, closed realm of existence.



Beauvoir's liberatory response to women's oppression is a
feminism of freedom. *The Second Sex* argues against the
either/or frame of the woman question (either women and men are equal
or they are different). It argues for women's equality, while
insisting on the reality of sexual difference. Beauvoir finds it
unjust and immoral to use sexual difference as an argument for
women's subordination. She insists that women and men must both
have the capacity to assume their existence as immanence and
transcendence, and therefore must treat each other as equal. Yet, such
treatment requires that their sexual differences be validated. She
finds it un-phenomenological, however, to ignore it. As a
phenomenologist she is obliged to examine women's unique
experiences of their bodies and to determine how these experiences are
co-determined by what phenomenology calls the everyday attitude (the
common-sense assumptions that we unreflectively bring to our
experience). For Beauvoir, since the body is a situation, it is not
merely that a subject has a body. Rather, the body is lived and so it
is experientially constituted, such that for Beauvoir, what it means
to become a woman is to live or experience one's body in a
particular way.



As a phenomenologist, this experiential account of embodiment does not
commit her to a biological account of 'woman'. Beauvoir
explores cultural and historical assumptions that frame women's
experience of their bodies and that alienate them from their
possibilities. She draws attention to the experiential basis of facts,
including biological, psychological, historical, and economic ones,
and considers how they obscure the contingent articulation of
'woman' or account for women's experience as an
essence. For example, it is assumed that women are weaker. What, she
directs us to ask, is the ground of this assumption? What criteria of
strength are used? Upper body power? Average body size? Is there a
reason not to consider longevity a sign of strength? Using this
criterion, would women still be considered the weaker sex? A bit of
reflection exposes the biases of the criteria used to support the
supposedly obvious "fact" of women's weakness and
transforms it from an unassailable reality to an unreliable
assumption. Once we begin this questioning, it is not long before
other so-called facts fall to the side of "common sense"
in the phenomenological sense.



What is perhaps the most famous line of *The Second Sex*,
"On ne nait pas femme: on le devient" (SS:1949, 13),
translated in 1953 as "One is not born but becomes a
woman" (SS:1953, 267) and in 2010 as "One is not born but
becomes woman" (SS: 2010, 283), is credited by many as alerting
us to the sex-gender distinction. Whether or not Beauvoir understood
herself to be inaugurating this distinction, whether or not she
followed this distinction to its logical/radical conclusions, or
whether or not radical conclusions are justified are matters of
feminist debate. What is not a matter of dispute is that *The
Second Sex* gives us the vocabulary for analyzing how societal
notions of femininity are lived and a method for critiquing them. In
this sense, Beauvoir offers a critical phenomenological analysis of
the socially constituted meanings of 'woman' and how one
comes to assume and negotiate those meanings experientially. For
Beauvoir, one becomes a woman not just because others say so, but
because she actively assumes her bodily existence in such a way.



Beauvoir's account of becoming is crucial to understanding how
human beings called women come into existence. Beauvoir's target
here is essentialist arguments that view 'woman' as a
biological fact. Beauvoir believes it to be faulty to accept the
common sense idea that to be born with certain genitalia or
reproductive capacities is to be born a woman. In rejecting this
position, asserted in the most famous line of *The Second Sex*,
she pursues the first rule of phenomenology: identify your
assumptions, treat them as prejudices and put them aside; do not bring
them back into play until and unless they have been validated by
experience. Accordingly, she offers a descriptive account of how some
human beings become women as a matter of living an imposed social
destiny rooted in and generated by particular historical, economic,
and political conditions, as well as social and moral conventions. On
this view, 'woman' is an invention, but also a lived,
embodied reality. For Beauvoir, the social destiny those who become
women are expected and often coerced to assume is bound up with
heterosexism such that to become a woman is to be made and to make
oneself an object for men. The detriment of such self-making, Beauvoir
shows, is that a woman comes to live an existence relative to men. In
doing so, a woman becomes the Other. Women, however, are usually
accomplice to this self-making, as being made the Other, although a
condition of oppression, also bestows recognition and
self-justification in a patriarchal milieu.



A brief but packed sentence that appears early in the *The Second
Sex* alerts us to the ways that Beauvoir used existential and
Marxist categories to analyze the unique complexities of women's
situation as the Other. It reads,



> 
> 
> Hence woman makes no claim for herself as subject because she lacks
> the concrete means, because she senses the necessary link connecting
> her to man without positing its reciprocity, and because she often
> derives satisfaction from her role as the Other. (SS: 2010, 10, cf.
> SS: 1949, 24)
> 
> 
> 



Who becomes a woman in the way Beauvoir describes is an important
question. Scholars have noted the impact of Richard Wright's
intellectual influence on Beauvoir's account of women's
situation and oppression, and Beauvoir herself makes direct reference
to Wright in *The Second Sex*, yet her treatment of race in the
book is vexed. Scholars have pointed out that her treatment of
women's situation focuses explicitly on becoming a woman, thus
privileging an analysis of patriarchal oppression as the most
significant form of oppression, and have noted that she generalizes
from a white, bourgeois perspective. At the same time, as other
scholars have noted, at the beginning of *The Second Sex*,
Beauvoir argues that the patriarchal subjection of women is distinct
in kind from racial subjection. While discrete historical events have
been generative of other forms of oppression, she describes the
subjection of women as feature of human existence across time and
place and so not identifiable by a discrete historical event. So, for
Beauvoir, it is not that women's subjection is the only form of
oppression or that it is more significant than other forms of
subjection. Rather, the formation, structure and effects of the
subjection of women is distinct and therefore, on her account,
requires a focused investigation. 



To account for what it means to become a woman, Beauvoir introduces
the concept of the Other early in the text and it drives her entire
analysis. She uses it again in her last major work, *The Coming of
Age* (1970), to structure her critique of the ways that the
elderly are othered by society. In *The Second Sex*,
Beauvoir's notion of the Other is based on the Hegelian
master-slave dialectic. Unlike Hegel who universalized this dialectic,
Beauvoir distinguishes the dialectic of exploitation between
historically constituted Subjects and Others from the exploitation
that ensues when the Subject is Man, a sovereign existence, and the
Other is Woman, a relative existence. In the first case, the Other
experiences their oppression as a communal reality. They see
themselves as part of an oppressed group. Here, oppressed Others may
call on the resources of a common history and a shared abusive
situation to assert their subjectivity and demand recognition and
reciprocity. The situation of women is comparable to the condition of
the Hegelian Other in that men, like the Hegelian Master, identify
themselves as the Subject, the absolute human type, and, measuring
women by this standard of the human, identify them as inferior.
Women's so-called inadequacies are then used as justification
for seeing them as the Other and for treating them accordingly. Unlike
the Hegelian Other, however, women are unable to identify the origin
of their otherness. They cannot call on the bond of a shared history
to reestablish their lost status as Subjects. Further, dispersed among
the world of men, women identify themselves in terms of the
differences of their oppressors (e.g., as white or black women, as
working-class or middle-class women, as Muslim, Christian, Jewish,
Buddhist or Hindu women) rather than with each other. According to
Beauvoir, they lack the solidarity and resources of the Hegelian Other
for organizing themselves into a "we" that demands
recognition. Unlike the Other of the master-slave dialectic, women are
not positioned to rebel. Beauvoir uses the category of the Inessential
Other to designate the unique situation of women as the ambiguous
Other of men. As Inessential Others, women's routes to
subjectivity and recognition cannot follow the Hegelian script.



For Beauvoir, women's conflict with men is ambiguous. She calls
the relation between men and women a "primordial
*Mitsein*" (SS:2010, 9, cf. 1949, 22) in order to make a
claim about their original togetherness in the world. For Beauvoir,
this relationship between women and men draws attention to the
interdependence between the Subject and his Other and is the unique
tie that binds women to their oppressors. As such, it is generative of
women's inability to identify a common history. This assertion
that women live a necessary bond with men regardless of a lack of
reciprocity draws on the notion of appeal developed in *The Ethics
of Ambiguity*: in making an appeal to others to join me in my
pursuit of justice I validate myself and my values. Given that my
appeal must be an appeal to the other in their freedom, I must allow
for the reality that the other may reject it. When this happens, I
must (assuming that the rejection is not a threat to the ground value
of freedom) recognize the other's freedom and affirm the bond of
humanity that ties us to each other. In the case of women, Beauvoir
notes, this aspect of the appeal (the affirmation of the bond between
us) dominates. She does not approve of the way that women allow the
affirmation of the bond to eclipse the requirement that they be
recognized as free subjects. But, she does alert us to the fact that
recognition in itself is not the full story of the ethical
relationship. To demand recognition without regard for the bond is
unethical; it is the position of the Subject as master. What is
needed, Beauvoir argues, is a reconstitution of the bond that enables
women to accomplish themselves.



Such change does not concern women's happiness. Happiness may be
chosen or accepted in exchange for the deprivations of freedom.
Recalling the argument of *The Ethics of Ambiguity* we know
why. As Others, women are returned to the metaphysically privileged
world of the child. They experience the happiness brought about by bad
faith--a happiness of not being responsible for themselves, of
not having to make consequential choices. From this existential
perspective women may be said to be complicit in their subjugation.
But this is not the whole story. If women are happy as the Other, it
may be because, given the material and ideological realities of their
situation, this is the only avenue of happiness open to them.
Beauvoir's existential charge of bad faith must be understood
within her Marxist analysis of the social, economic and cultural
structures that frame women's lives. Though Beauvoir does not
argue that these structures deprive women of their freedom, neither
does she ignore the situations that make the exercise of that freedom
extremely difficult.



For Beauvoir, the work of liberation will not be easy. It is work that
will cause conflict because it requires refusing and ultimately
sacrificing norms and customs of femininity and masculinity, the very
ones that are, for many, sources of happiness and self-justification.
Liberation is also not a matter of appealing to men to give women
freedom; it is a matter of women discovering their solidarity,
rejecting the bad faith temptations of happiness and discovering the
pleasures of freedom. While Beauvoir alerts us to the tensions and
conflicts that this will create between men and women, she does not
envision a permanent state of hostility. Here her Hegelian-Marxist
optimism prevails. Men will (ultimately) recognize women as free
subjects, but only when both commit to sacrificing patriarchal
myths.



Speaking in reference to sexual difference, Beauvoir notes that
dismantling patriarchal mythology is not a recipe for androgynous
subjects. Given the realities of embodiment, there will be sexual
differences. Unlike today, however, these differences will appear
differently. They will not be used to justify the difference between a
Subject and his Inessential Other. Ultimately, according to her, the
goal of liberation is our mutual recognition of each other as free and
as other.



Despite the heterosexist structure of the myth of the eternal
feminine, Beauvoir describes one situation in which mutual recognition
sometimes exists: the intimate heterosexual erotic encounter. Speaking
of this intimacy, she writes, "the dimension of the other
remains; but the fact is that alterity no longer has a hostile
character" (SS: 2010, 415, cf. 1949, 189). Why? Because
authentic lovers experience themselves and each other ambiguously,
that is, as both subjects and objects of erotic desire rather than as
delineated according to institutionalized positions of man and woman.
In Beauvoir's words,



> 
> 
> The erotic experience is one that most poignantly reveals to human
> beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as flesh and as
> spirit, as the other and as subject (SS: 2010, 416, cf. SS: 1949,
> 190).
> 
> 
> 



The concept of ambiguity, developed abstractly in *The Ethics of
Ambiguity*, is erotically embodied in *The Second Sex* and
is identified as a crucial piece of the prescription for transcending
the oppressions of patriarchy. This description of the liberating
possibilities of the erotic encounter is also one of those places
where Beauvoir reworks Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of
embodiment. By drawing on Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of the
ways that we are world-making and world-embedded subject-objects, she
reveals the ways that it is as subject-objects "for the
world", "to the world", and "in the
world" that we are passionately drawn to each other.



The last chapters of *The Second Sex*, "The Independent
Woman" and the "Conclusion", speak of the current
(1947) status of women's situation--what has changed and
what remains to be done. Without ignoring the importance of women
gaining the right to vote and without dismissing the necessity of
women attaining economic independence, Beauvoir finds these liberal
and Marxist solutions to women's situation inadequate. They
ignore the effects of women's socialization (the subject of
Volume II) and they are inattentive to the ways that masculine norms
and the masculinist, sovereign subject remain the standard of the
human. The liberated woman must free herself from two shackles: first,
the idea that to assume herself as a freedom and be independent she
must be like men, and second, the socialization through which she
becomes feminized. The first alienates her from her existence as a
(sexual) subject. The second makes her averse to risking herself for
her ideas/ideals. Attentive to this current state of affairs, and to
the phenomenology of the body, Beauvoir lays out a few prerequisites
for liberation. Women must be socialized to engage the world. And,
they must be allowed to discover the unique ways that their embodiment
engages the world. In addition, there must be a complete overhaul of
patriarchal morality, affective dispositions, and customs that demand
girls' and women's passivity and deny them their bodily
autonomy. In short, the myth of the eternal feminine must be
dismantled. So long as it prevails, economic and political advances
will fall short of the goal of liberation.



Controversial from the beginning, *The Second Sex*'s
critique of patriarchy continues to challenge social, political and
religious categories used to justify women's inferior status.
Ultimately, what was a phenomenological breakthrough became in *The
Second Sex* a liberatory tool: by attending to the ways that
patriarchal structures use sexual difference to deprive women of their
"can do" embodiment, Beauvoir made the case for declaring
this deprivation oppressive. Taken within the context of the feminist
movement, this declaration of oppression was an event. It opened the
way for the consciousness-raising that characterized second-wave
feminism. It has and continues to validate the injustices experienced
by girls and women. What was, from an existential-phenomenological
perspective, a detailed analysis of the lived body and an ethical and
political indictment of the ways that patriarchy alienates women from
their embodied capacities, was, from a feminist perspective, an appeal
that called on women to take up the politics of liberation.


## 8. "Must We Burn Sade?" Freedom and the Flesh



Written in response to a request to author an introduction to
Sade's *Justine*, Beauvoir's essay "Must we
Burn Sade?" (1951-1952) continues her ethical reflections
on the drama of intersubjectivity and her interest in the relationship
between freedom and intimacy. Indeed, what interests Beauvoir about
Sade is that "[he] posed the problem of the *other* in
its extremest terms" (1963[1965], 243, cf. 1963, 333). 



"Must we Burn Sade?" identifies Sade's decision to
write as an existential project. Beauvoir credits Sade with uncovering
the despotic secrets of the patriarchal political machine. She is
sympathetic to his utopian appeal to freedom. She finds, however, that
Sade perverted the meaning of freedom. Thus, Beauvoir identifies Sade
as a great moralist who endorsed an unsatisfactory ethics.



Sade is Beauvoir's Janus-faced ally. She does not refute his
claim that cruelty establishes a relationship between the self and the
other. Sade is correct. Cruelty reveals us to each other in the
particularities and ambiguities of our conscious and fleshed
existence. The tyrant and victim, Beauvoir tells us, are a genuine
couple. They are united by the bonds of the flesh and freedom.



For Beauvoir, Sade is the epitome of maniacal passion dedicated to the
project of cruelty. Because he takes full responsibility for his
choices, he must be credited with choosing freedom and accepted as
being authentic. This does not, however, make him either an ethical or
moral figure for his choices destroy the intersubjective bonds of
humanity. His account of the power of cruelty provides a convincing
critique of our social, political and personal hypocrisies, but it
does not critique the ways that cruelty is a perversion of freedom and
an exploitation of the vulnerability of the flesh. As a result, his
descriptions of the powers of cruelty and the meaning of torture are
incomplete and inadequate. The case of the Marquis de Sade makes it
clear that assuming responsibility for one's choices, is a
necessary, but not sufficient, condition of an existential ethics of
freedom.



In the end, Beauvoir finds that Sade was misled (which does not mean
that he was innocent). He mistook power for freedom and misunderstood
the meanings of the erotic. In his fascination with the conflict
between consciousness and the flesh, Sade exposed the failure of the
sadistic enterprise. In his attempt to lose himself in the pleasures
of the flesh, and so to experience both the ambiguity of his being as
consciousness made flesh (or flesh made consciousness) and the reality
of his being for and with others, Sade substitutes the spectacle for
lived experience and accepts counterfeit transactions of domination
and assimilation/incorporation as genuine relationships of reciprocity
and gratuitous generosity. In doing so, he never reaches the
other.



Centering his life in the erotic, Sade missed the truth of the erotic.
This truth, Beauvoir tells us, can only be found by those who abandon
themselves to the risks of emotional intoxication. Living this
intoxication we discover the ways that the body turned flesh dissolves
all arguments against the immediacy of our bonds with each other and
grounds an ethic of the appeal, risk and mutual vulnerability.



Ultimately, in this essay Beauvoir leaves behind the idea that our
freedom, as absolutely internal, is immune from an assault by the
other, and accepts the radical vulnerability of our lived embodiment.
In doing so, the questions of violence and desire cannot be severed
from the question of our shared humanity or questions of ethics and
justice. In condemning Sade for his perversion of the erotic, Beauvoir
also faults him as an artist, which marks a return to the question of
the responsibility of the artist raised in *The Ethics of
Ambiguity*. Though she accuses him of being a technically poor
writer, the heart of her criticism is ethical not aesthetic. According
to Beauvoir, Sade violated his obligations as an author. Instead of
revealing the world to us in its promise and possibilities, and
instead of appealing to us to work for justice, he took refuge in the
imaginary and developed metaphysical justifications for suffering and
cruelty. In the end, Beauvoir accuses Sade of being the serious man
described in *The Ethics of Ambiguity*.


## 9. *The Long March*: Time, Politics, and Possibility



In 1957 Beauvoir published *The Long March*, an essay about her
six-week visit to China in September and October of 1955. Although a
travelogue in many respects, *The Long March* does not take on
the memoir style form of *America Day by Day*. She undertook
interdisciplinary research to inform her descriptions of her visit,
and like *The Second Sex* and *The Coming of Age*,
Beauvoir mines various sources for ways to engage the observations of
her trip. She narrates lengthy descriptions of what she saw and
critically considers facts and myths of the time. Similar to
*America Day by Day*, there are standout themes that exemplify
Beauvoir's philosophical and political concerns: labor
struggles, the gendered politics of the family, political economy, and
the relation between customs, law, and freedom. Beauvoir's
materialist understanding of struggle and revolution underlies these
concerns. For these reasons, this travel writing is also a political
writing. Notably, American anti-Communists were outraged when the book
was translated into English in 1958.



The book is at once a response to right-wing French views on China,
and hence a further criticism of her ongoing disdain for French
bourgeois ideals, and a consideration of the promise of communist
China. While her optimism about communist China is worthy of
criticism, Beauvoir's optimism was not totalizing. She was aware
and bothered by her curated visit and she expressed her own doubts and
uncertainties about the reality she encountered. But still, she makes
no final judgment about China, refusing to have the book serve as a
mouthpiece for French anticommunist sentiments. Beauvoir was
interested in alternatives to bourgeois capitalism and so she engaged
the possibilities of communist China. She attended to the formation of
meaning as it broke with the past to create a new future, an
engagement with historical time that is necessary for all political
projects. Her descriptions also tend to her perception of the cultural
differences between China and France, yet the outcome can be
disappointing. She describes some encounters with Chinese culture and
traditions in dismissive ways, which challenges the possibility of
cross-cultural solidarity.



Beauvoir was deeply unsatisfied with and embarrassed by the book. She
admitted it was outdated within years of its publication and believed
it to be lacking in philosophical rigor. There are also inaccuracies
and questionable representations in her account. Among scholars, it is
up for debate whether her intellectual curiosity and Western privilege
to tour China are part of an orientalizing gaze at work in the text.
In spite of, or perhaps even because of, these complicated dimensions
and the book's limits, *The Long March* is another
interesting example of Beauvoir's political voice and exposes
the complexities of the appeal. It also invites us to engage the
limits of a particular appeal.


## 10. Djamila Boupacha: The Concrete Appeal



In 1962, Beauvoir and Gisile Halimi co-authored the story of Djamila
Boupacha, an Algerian girl accused of being a terrorist who was
tortured by the French during the French-Algerian War. This book may
be read as an extension of Beauvoir's critique of the Marquis de
Sade. Instead of fleeing from the horrors of the real into the safety
of the imaginary, Beauvoir takes up her responsibility as an author to
expose and confront realities that the state would rather hide. Her
purpose in writing is concrete and political. The book is both a
protest and an appeal. Countering Sade, Beauvoir and Halimi show that
the truth of torture lies in the unjustifiable politics of abusive
power.


## 11. *All Men are Mortal*, *A Very Easy Death*, *Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre*: Finitude, Passion and the Body



Beauvoir's phenomenological understanding of the lived body can
also be tracked in her considerations of the question of human
finitude. This question is raised early in her 1946 novel, *All Men
Are Mortal*, which is a story of Fosca, a man who chooses to cheat
death. His desire for immortality is driven by his desire to realize
the abstract ideal of humanism. Fosca does not embrace immortality to
escape the ambiguities of the flesh and embodiment. His decision is
motivated by his desire to save the world. He believes that time is
his enemy, so long as his time is limited. He believes that with
sufficient time he can bring the humanist project to closure and
secure it from failure.



Contrary to his initial belief, Fosca learns that time becomes his
enemy when it stretches endlessly before him. It turns out that time
is not what he needs to secure his vision. Rather, what he needs is
the commitment of others. No amount of time can secure that. As
immortal, Fosca confronts the inevitability of failure that haunts
humanity. Unlike mortals, however, who, confronted with the
constraints of time, take up their failures with passion, Fosca
becomes immobilized. Indifference to life replaces the passion for
life. In the end, he discovers the crucial truth of ethical action
from his many-generations-removed grandson, Armand. Understanding that
the future belongs to others who may or may not take up his projects,
Armand commits himself to the concrete possibilities of the present.
His passion is embodied in the appeal to others, not in an abstract
goal that, however just it might seem, would deny future generations
the right to determine their own destiny.



In *All Men Are Mortal* the givenness of finitude and death
concerns our relationship to time. Eighteen years later, writing about
the dying and death of her mother in *A Very Easy Death*
(1964), and six years after that, analyzing the situation of the aged
in *The Coming of Age* (1970), and eleven years subsequent to
that, chronicling Sartre's last days in *Adieux: A Farewell
to Sartre* (1981), it is not so much our relationship to time but
more a matter of our embodiment that concerns Beauvoir. In *A Very
Easy Death* and *Adieux*, Beauvoir assumes the position of
the phenomenological witness. The bodies of her mother and Sartre are
given to us in all their disturbing breakdowns and deteriorations.
Some have found these works cold, insensitive and even cruel. They
miss Beauvoir's point. She is showing us who we are. The
"I can" body revealed by other phenomenologists as a
crucial mark of embodiment is the limited condition of the mature
healthy body. It is but one phase of the life of the body. In its
early days the body is still learning its "I can's".
As we age, the body begins losing them. It is one thing, as with the
myth of Woman, to alienate an "I can" from its capacities.
It is quite another to refuse to attend to the full range of embodied
life and to assess the value of that life in terms of its "I
can" possibilities.


## 12. *The Coming of Age*: The Other Again



We need to read *A Very Easy Death* and *Adieux* within
the context of the analyses of *The Coming of Age* to fully
appreciate Beauvoir's role as witness. The project of *The
Coming of Age* is similar to that of *The Second Sex*. Like
*The Second Sex*, it focuses on a group of people designated as
Other; like *The Second Sex* it exposes the mythical status of
the "facts" about aging and the aged; and like *The
Second Sex* it indicts society for its dehumanization of those it
designates as Other. *The Coming of Age* also emulates *The
Second Sex* in its method and scope. It brings a phenomenological
lens to bear on biological, psychological, historical, economic, and
sociological factors in order to understand the phenomenon of a
particular kind of marginalized otherness. 



In *The Coming of Age*, Beauvoir considers the injustices
endured by the aged. She describes the experiences of old age and
argues that it throws one into the position of the Other not by
necessity, but as a result of culturally produced stigmas and a
societal loathing of aging. Thus, while the process of aging may be
inescapable, old age as a situation of Otherness is not. This
non-subject status is a matter of the conditions of experience that
foreclose transcendence, including myths, societal attitudes, and the
economic conditions of the aged. Whereas in *The Second Sex*,
Beauvoir accused patriarchy of depriving women of their subject
status, *The Coming of Age* argues that the non-subject status
of the aged can be traced to the fact that they are barred from
existential projects and meaningful relationships with others. To
experience old age in this way, Beauvoir argues, is to be denied
one's humanity. "The old man", Beauvoir writes,
"looks to active members of the community like one of a
'different species'" because he is not engaged in a
project (1970[1972], 231, cf. 1972, 217).



Like *The Second Sex*, which attended to the givens of biology
without allowing them to determine the meaning of the subject, *The
Coming of Age* also gives biology its due. The lack of engagement
of the aged, Beauvoir notes, is in part imposed from without and in
part comes from within; for as we age, the body is transformed from an
instrument that engages the world into a hindrance that makes our
access to the world difficult. The point of *The Coming of
Age*, however, is that it is unjust to use these difficulties to
justify reducing the aged to the status of the Other.
*Adieux*'s witnessing makes this point clearly. However
diminished Sartre's body became, it never severed him from his
projects. He could not have sustained his work by himself, however.
Rather, he was in a situation where others refused to marginalize him.
They did not equate his diminished bodily capacities with a diminished
humanity. *The Coming of Age* argues that the situation of a
privileged Sartre ought to be our common destiny.



In a world that recognized the phenomenological truth of the body, the
existential truth of freedom, the Marxist truth of exploitation and
the human truth of the bond, the derogatory category of the Other
would be eradicated. Neither the aged nor women, nor anyone by virtue
of their race, class, ethnicity or religion would find themselves
rendered inessential. Beauvoir knows that it is too much to hope for
such a world. She understands the lures of domination and violence.
Throughout her career, however, she used philosophical and literary
tools to reveal the possibilities of such a world and appealed to us
to work for it.


## 13. Life Writings: Situation, Becoming and the Self-Other Relation



Beauvoir's practices of writing the self were deeply connected
to her philosophical ideas. Indeed, for Beauvoir, living is
philosophy, a point that is evident in her autobiographical works.
Beauvoir wrote a four-volume autobiography where she recounts
fifty-four years of her life, from the years 1908-1962. In
*Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter* (1958), Beauvoir narrates the
formative years of 1908-1929, while *The Prime of Life*
covers 1929-1944. *Force of Circumstance* (1963) is
written in two volumes, 1944-1952 (*After the War*) and
1952-1962 (*Hard Times*). Beauvoir was also a devoted
diarist. Her diaries, including *Diary of a Philosophy Student
Volume 1* (1926-27) and *Volume 2* (1928-29),
and her *Wartime Diaries*, often complicate the narration of
her autobiographies, exposing different details of her life and thus
expose a different Beauvoir to the reader. For Beauvoir, diary writing
was an integral part of self-understanding and self-making. The
significance of these autobiographical works is threefold. They offer
a detailed account of events, experiences and relations with others
out of which Beauvoir made her self, that is, these works reveal how
she became Beauvoir. They also shed light on Beauvoir's
philosophical trajectory, intellectual influences, the ideas and
themes central to her novels and philosophical works, and they offer
glaring evidence that her philosophical ideas developed prior to,
alongside, and often against Sartre's.



In writing her life, it is evident that the notion of situation, the
set of concrete circumstances, including one's embodiment that
significantly shapes but does not fix one's existence, is
central to Beauvoir's philosophy of self. It is only in living
and living out one's choices, constrained but not determined by
social and historical context, that one's existence takes shape.
Beauvoir's autobiographical writings make clear that her
situation as a girl raised in a Catholic, bourgeois household, as a
woman with a certain level of independence and privilege, an
intellectual, a writer, a leftist living amidst and in the aftermath
of war and colonial projects, are all generative circumstances for
her. She is neither the mere product of circumstance nor does she just
will herself into existence. Yet, her understanding of
'situation' takes time to develop, as Beauvoir herself
notes that she did not always recognize the force of circumstance.
Though, perhaps that she did not recognize this to be the case was a
constraint of her own particular situation. In *The Prime of
Life*, for instance, the Beauvoir we read about is still full of
bourgeois idealism and is focused on happiness, which she marks as
characteristic of the times. Ultimately, in narrating her experience,
Beauvoir discloses the connection between the personal and the
collective, and the distinctness of a self unfolding in time.



The ethical significance Beauvoir places on the self-other relation is
also central to her autobiographical writings. Although it is not
until 1939 that she rejects individualism, Beauvoir's younger
years show a deep interest in her relationships with others. Her
relationship with her parents and her love for Zaza and her cousin
Jacques, for instance, reveal the capacity of others to open and close
the world and to make and remake the self. Indeed, there is a robust
philosophy of love across Beauvoir's personal writings,
including her love with Zaza (fictionalized in *Inseparable*),
to the complicated relationship with Sartre, to her longing for Nelson
Algren (detailed further in *A Transatlantic Love Affair*, her
published letters to Algren), to her discussion of *She Came to
Stay* and the narration of the triad with Olga in *The Prime of
Life*, that speak not only to Beauvoir's preoccupations with
the role of love in life more generally, but to the bond between self
and other that takes shape in an erotic encounter. In *Force of
Circumstance*, Beauvoir considers the self-other relation in more
political terms as she describes the politicization of her private
existence and the Algerian War and colonial oppression.
Beauvoir's attention to the Algerian War was an encounter that
placed an ethical demand on her, out of which she politicized and so
reshaped her self.



For Beauvoir, the writing of her life, including writing about her
desire to write, is ultimately a way to disclose the ambiguities of
concrete existence. The detail at which Beauvoir narrates her life,
including the omissions she makes, which are exposed in her diaries,
offers important insights about Beauvoir's philosophical ideas
and their emergence within and out of her experience. These writings
are also philosophically significant investigations of the meaning of
existence and an ethics, one that is not laid out programmatically but
that is disclosed in the joys, banality, and failures of living.


## 14. Influence and Current Scholarship



Beauvoir is no doubt a feminist icon and one of the most impactful
feminist thinkers of the twentieth century. *The Second Sex*,
translated in 40 languages, has inspired generations of women to
challenge their status and pursue freedom. In spite of her impact,
readings and receptions of Beauvoir among feminist scholars were
initially largely antagonistic. The renaissance in Beauvoir
scholarship served as a response. While difficult to pin down its
exact beginning, it was after Beauvoir's death in 1986 that
different questions about and inquiries into her thinking became more
prevalent. *The Second Sex* has also been the source of
important debate and criticism in the interdisciplinary field of
feminist theory, and even among those who distance themselves from her
work, it has been no less impactful. For instance, Beauvoir's
legacy is apparent in the work of more contemporary thinkers like Sara
Ahmed, Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Luce Irigaray.



A significant aspect of the renewal in Beauvoir scholarship has much
to do with the posthumous availability of previously unpublished
personal writings, the increasing number of works translated into
English, especially those in the Beauvoir Series published by
University of Illinois Press, and the 2010 new English translation of
*The Second Sex*. Access to such work, made possible by the
labor of Beauvoir scholars, has helped shed light on Beauvoir's
philosophical influences and her own criticisms of and distance from
Sartre. That access has also challenged misinterpretations stemming
from inadequate translations and has encouraged interest in and more
thorough engagement with Beauvoir's work beyond *The Second
Sex*. The interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, *Simone de
Beauvoir Studies*, founded in 1983 and reorganized in 2016, and
the International Simone de Beauvoir Society, are important venues for
the study of Beauvoir's life and works.



Given the scope of Beauvoir's influence internationally and
interdisciplinarily, it is difficult to succinctly capture her legacy.
The following highlights a few key areas scholarship: Beauvoir's
original philosophical contributions to existentialism (e.g., Le
Doeuff 1980; Butler 1986; Kruks 1990 and 2001; Fullbrook and Fullbrook
1994; Gothlin 1999; Arp 2001; Kail 2006; Deutscher 2008; Daigle and
Colomb 2009) and phenomenology (Bergoffen 1997; Heinamaa 1997 and
2003; Oksala 2016 and 2022; Mann 2018); her contributions to ethics
(e.g., Gothlin 1995; Tidd 1999a and 1999b; Stoller 2014) and political
theory (e.g., Kruks 2012;); situating *The Second Sex*
philosophically (e.g., Bauer 2001; Lundgren-Gothlin 1991; Moi 2001;
Simons 2001; Heinamaa 2003; Mann and Ferrari 2017); the
historical and global receptions of *The Second Sex* (e.g.,
Chaperon 1999; Dongchao 2005; Coffin 2020; Rouch 2019 ; Chaperon and
Rouch 2020); the limitations of *The Second Sex* with regard to
race and ethnocentrism (e.g., Spelman 1988; Simons 2001; Deutscher
2008; Belle 2010, 2014 and 2017; hooks 2012; Berruz 2016; Collins
2017; Jones 2019; Altman 2020); her perspective on race and racism in
*America Day by Day* (e.g., Alfonso 2005; Bernasconi 2019;
Altman 2020; Mussett 2020); Beauvoir's engagement with the
injustices of French colonialism and her position as a colonizer
(e.g., Surkis 2010; Nya 2019); critical engagement with
Beauvoir's life (e.g., Moi 2009) and personal writings (e.g.,
Tidd 1999b); and biographical projects (Bair 2002; Kirkpatrick
2019).



Additionally, Beauvoir's work inspires feminist philosophical
analyses of various lived experiences, such as embodiment and
oppression (Young 1980; Bartky 1990; Burke 2019; Froidevaux-Mettiere
2021), patriarchal love (Mann 2009), masculinity and nationalism (Mann
2014), hook-up culture (Bauer 2017), #BlackGirlJoy (Mason 2018),
street harassment (Vera-Gray 2018), feminine submission (Garcia 2018),
body positivity (Leboeuf 2019); trans subjectivity (Antonopoulos 2017;
Burke 2020), non-monogamy (Kean 2018; Anderson 2021), #MeToo (McKinney
2019; Melo Lopes 2021), obstetric violence (Shabot 2021), old age
(Stoller 2014; Kruks 2022); rape (Bergoffen 2017); and authenticity
(Cleary 2022).