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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings

Edited by Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 351 pages. $40. ISBN: 0-252-02982-8.

Reviewed by Dera Sipe
Villanova University, dera.sipe@villanova.edu

The Beauvoir Series is an earnest endeavor to pull Simone de Beauvoir out from behind the veil of Sartre’s shadow once and for all. This series is the most ambitious of many recent attempts to persuade the philosophical community to take Beauvoir seriously. The need for such a series is great; as Edward Fullbrook rightly points out, "Until quite recently, getting anyone to read a Beauvoir text for its philosophical content was nearly impossible. And reading one with a view to finding in it philosophical originality was deemed laughable. Beauvoir the philosopher had been erased from existence" (34). Through the use of fresh translations and by directing our attention to the philosophical import of overlooked texts, this series calls on the philosophical community to add Beauvoir’s name to the overtly patriarchal canonical registry. Time will tell whether the series is able to fully succeed in its goal, but the value of this project can already be ascertained from the first book.

The series begins with Philosophical Writings, a collection of Beauvoir’s lesser known, mistranslated, or previously untranslated philosophical writings, to be followed by translations of her student diaries, a war diary, several fictional works, as well as literary, political, and feminist essays. In her introduction to the volume, Simons argues that Beauvoir’s "unique philosophical methodology" (5) requires that we consider her formal philosophical essays as well as her fictional pieces, political articles, and even personal journals and correspondences. This is, in part, because Beauvoir forces us to curb the inclination to judge a philosopher on the basis of a magnum opus. A just reading of her work requires that we resist the temptation to assign her the sort of tidy conspectus often distilled from philosophical systems; indeed, an accurate understanding of her philosophy demands that we resist the urge to systematize it at all. As Simons points out, "Beauvoir argues that philosophy should reflect the ambiguities of actual life" (2)—in line with this belief, her efforts to write philosophy are not always done in treatise form.

With a few exceptions, Philosophical Writings focuses primarily on Beauvoir’s essays but is structured such that the methodology indicated by Simons is never ignored. Various distinguished Beauvoir scholars aid this project with their contextualizing introductions to each selection (Kristana Arp, Nancy Bauer, Debra Bergoffen, Edward Fullbrook, Sara Heinämaa, Eleanore Holveck, Sonia Kruks, Shannon Mussett, Hélène N. Peters, Margaret A. Simons, Karen Vintges, and Gail Weiss). The introductions lend intelligibility to the pieces, situating them biographically and in relation to other texts. However, due to their (perhaps necessary) brevity, the critical commentary included in each introduction often comes across hurried; this is vexing particularly when the author is making controversial claims about the status of Beauvoir’s work in relation to that of Sartre. In such cases, the reader is pulled to investigate the subsequent texts for validation of the commentator’s arguments. To some extent the task of an introduction is to awaken interest in a text, so in this sense even the occasional hyperbolic claim does a service for Beauvoir. Still, the reader is left a bit dissatisfied at times. It is unfortunate that the introductory sections are not full essays in themselves.

The contents of the book span from 1924 to 1947, ranging from an essay written when Beauvoir was only sixteen to her defense of existentialism. Situated chronologically, the volume reveals both the coherence and the subtle progression of her philosophical inclinations. While a system proper should not be outlined from Beauvoir’s anti-systematic corpus, central philosophical themes are traced by the book’s commentators.

The earliest piece, "Analysis of Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine," is probably the least philosophically interesting, though it does provide rough evidence that themes from her later work may be traceable to her pre-Sartre schooldays. Simons and Peters point to three such themes in their introduction to the essay: the "valuing of philosophical doubt," the "rejection of ‘scholasticism’, ‘immutable truths’, and philosophical system-building," and the "valuing of the discovery of the external world" (18). The identification of particularly the latter two of these themes sets the stage for the rest of the volume.

To demarcate Beauvoir from Sartre, subsequent commentators continuously stress Beauvoir’s understanding, further developed throughout her life but present in nascent stages early on, of situatedness and the accompanying ambiguity of the human condition. As early as She Came to Stay (1938), Beauvoir’s philosophy explores the ambiguity of embodied consciousness and the self/other relation, though, unfortunately, she presents these solipsistically in the novel.

This matured a bit as Beauvoir cultivated an existential ethics rooted in ambiguity, entering into what she termed her "moral period." Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944)—translated into English for the first time here—is representative of this period. Written approximately six years after She Came to Stay, Pyrrhus and Cineas evidences Beauvoir’s growing consideration of alterity. Debra Bergoffen introduces the text, situating Pyrrhus and Cineas within the context of what Bergoffen finds to be the general trajectory of Beauvoir’s thought and highlighting the growing inclusion of intersubjectivity into Beauvoir’s existential ethical scheme. Though in Pyrrhus and Cineas Beauvoir clings to a somewhat Cartesian distinction between inner and outer, she takes steps anticipatory of her later works toward a phenomenological understanding of human freedom as ultimately situated in the world and necessarily involving others. Here, Beauvoir posits a notion of human freedom as supported through reciprocal recognition: "Our freedoms support each other like the stones in an arch, but in an arch that no pillars support" (140). As Bergoffen points out in her introduction, even the radically free subject must appeal to others so that her projects might be realized in the world (85).

The works of Beauvoir’s "moral period" begin to broach the topics of situatedness, ambiguity, and intersubjectivity, but they do not quite go far enough; she has yet to fully situate the human in a socio-historical world. Beauvoir’s later works will develop these themes further, eventually abandoning the inner-outer distinction for a more developed notion of embodiment that better accounts for the ambiguity of our condition. This development can be identified in a text published just one year later, Beauvoir’s review of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945). In her introduction to the review, Heinämaa complicates the question of influence by exploring how Beauvoir’s notion of subjectivity is actually more in line with that of Merleau-Ponty than that of Sartre. Beauvoir seems to prefer the former’s description of consciousness as "‘engorged by the sensible’…not a pure for-itself…but rather ‘a hollow, a fold’" (163). Beauvoir’s laudatory review of Merleau-Ponty’s text indicates that her own philosophy has moved further in the direction of situatedness. This development is apparent in subsequent pieces included in Philosophical Writings, particularly "Eye for an Eye," but the reader must look outside of this volume to find the most obvious indications of this turn—namely, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), of which only an earlier published portion of the first chapter is included in Philosophical Writings, and to The Second Sex (1949).

Thus, while this first volume works to affirm Beauvoir’s place as a prominent philosopher in her own right, it should not be read with the assumption that a comprehensive understanding of Beauvoir’s philosophy can be garnered from even a close examination of these texts in isolation. Rather, Philosophical Writings should be read as an auxiliary text that provides the English reader with trustworthy access to Beauvoir’s work on the periphery of her larger, more familiar texts.

Fortunately, despite the suggestion indicated by the title, the editors do not propose that this first volume’s aim is a complete presentation of Beauvoir’s philosophical ideas. Simons offers simply that the volume compiles "diverse elements of Beauvoir’s philosophical work, ranging from metaphysical literature to essays on existentialist ethics, and highlights continuities in the development of her thought" (6). This volume accordingly does Beauvoir a necessary justice on several fronts. Most importantly, it does not merely speculate as to why Beauvoir has not been taken seriously as a philosopher (a topic which has taken up too many disheartening pages already)—it goes beyond that, providing a forum for a conversation about just what Beauvoir’s philosophy might be if we decide to take her seriously.

If the selections were chosen for this volume with the intent of setting Beauvoir up as an independent thinker, the goal was not met. Rather, the selections only amplify the problem of influence: we see Beauvoir in conversation with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bernard, Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Camus, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, and Fouillée. However, is this not the mark of a good philosopher, especially a philosopher of intersubjectivity, of ambiguity, of situatedness? That Beauvoir was never taken seriously as a significant interlocutor in the philosophical conversation is what is remedied with this book. The problem of influence—a "problem" perhaps rooted in a patriarchal understanding of what it means to engage in philosophy—should not be such a problem for us if we truly endeavor to understand what Beauvoir advocated. Given her philosophical convictions, Beauvoir would have demanded nothing less than to be recognized as a vital member of an engaged philosophical community.

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