Why you should read Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a 20th century French philosopher, who wrote on her life, ethics, authenticity, problems of the self and the other, emancipatory politics, feminism and more. I think that her work deserves your attention, and in this article I’ll try and convince you that it does.

What is Simone de Beauvoir’s contribution to Philosophy?

In short, her life.

Not that she was a martyr by any means, in fact, from reading her memoirs it seems that she really enjoyed her life. But her philosophy was deeply personal, rooted in personal fears, cares and anxieties. she once said “my life is my work”, exhibiting her existentialist belief that our lives- the values we hold, the relationships we form and the work we do- are something that we construct the significance of (even if we don’t have the freedom to construct their contents).

Her personal work

This means that she was able to produce a unique and broad body of work, exploring universal human struggles for freedom, authenticity and life through autobiography and novels imbued with personal features. One contribution then, is her life story and her accounts of her personal struggles with the same concepts and ideas that she discusses more dispassionately in her essays. For example, her preoccupation with death works its way through her memoirs- where she tells of of the times that her fear of death became so intense that she couldn’t hold back a scream- to her American travel diary where she writes poignantly about the loss of of all her varied experiences that will come with annihilation, and finally in her novel All Men are Mortal that shows that even though death is dreadful, immortality would be worse. This kind of multi-faceted and personally grounded analysis of a single issue gives Beauvoir’s writing its unique richness.

Her Existentialism

Many of the ideas that Beauvoir developed fall under the broad umbrella term Existentialism. Existentialism was a philosophy developed (mostly) in post-war France, that reminded the public of their human freedom, a much needed intervention after years of oppression and confinement during the Second World War. As well as underwriting much of the work that defined and explained Existentialism in the public sphere, she also put her own spin on the movement, using it to frame some of her concerns. In her essay Pyrrhus and Cineas for example, she deals with questions of authenticity and purpose and ethics in a way that leaves the world filled with a human meaning- though not an unproblematised one. She doesn’t shy away from using Existentialism to approach political questions, and her work applying the notion of authenticity to political as well as personal projects is still very relevant today.

Her contributions to Feminism

No discussion of work would be complete without a mention of The Second Sex. one of her better known contributions to Philosophy, it is also one of her best. The social significance of the work is hard to overstate. This two-volume exploration of woman was instrumental in founding the second wave of feminism, the movement that argued that a woman’s personal life and social existence are negatively influenced by her gendered role in society. In this work she focused on the lived experiences of various women, as well as providing enduringly insightful analyses on subjects such as love, marriage and the eternal feminine.

Beauvoir is a philosopher who demonstrates a great range. In a short space I can’t express all the philosophical work done in her novels, memoirs, essays, travel-writing, political articles, and studies. She was a philosopher who turned her life’s passions for meaning, happiness and freedom into a body of work that will help any reader who shares those passions. When she was 21, she wrote in her diary: “Strange certitude that these riches will be welcomed, that some words will be said and heard, that this life will be a fountainhead from which many others will draw”. I agree that it is.

Why is Beauvoir still important today?

I think, because of her recognition of life’s insoluble ambiguity, and her determination to act anyway. Expressed in many ways, it is this centrally motivating joyful seriousness that makes Beauvoir’s work life-affirming to read, and deeply needed.

Ambiguities and Freedom

Her recognition of ambiguity is important by itself as well. She recognises that we are split between two realms, that of the subjectivity that creates projects, brings values into existence and experiences a unique world, and the human considered as an object, considered through the lens of a society and constitutive of an obstacle or utensil in the projects of others. Her post-war work especially is written from the position of considering the human as an ambiguous combination of the two.

This is key to her idea of freedom-in-situation. We must accept our freedom and responsibility, but the situation that we find ourselves in restricts that freedom, and can even do so to the point of rendering us objectively unfree. This idea, tempering absolute freedom With a recognition of the very real binds that our situations can put us in, makes Beauvoir’s work more politically applicable than that or other existentialists who emphasize freedom in isolation.

An Existentialist Ethics

The scant normative resources of Existentialism make creating an ethics very difficult. The focus on authenticity which is a value in much of Beauvoir’s work promotes a view that the task to be completed in bettering ourselves is simply to be true to ourselves, to not deny that we are free and that we choose our ends by ourselves. Beauvoir’s work allows Existentialism to become ethical, extending beyond mere authenticity and arguing that we cannot be free unless we will the freedom of others. An example of her application of the normative power of authenticity to political analysis is her account of the conservative in her essay Moral Idealism and Political Realism. When a progressive policy is mooted, the conservative says that it is impossible. But though the conservative may think themselves as reporting a fact about the world, there are rarely facts about the world of this sort. Actually, the conservative is creating that very impossibility through his utterance, acting inauthentically in attributing an external author to a fact that he himself is creating. Maintaining authenticity, while also willing the freedom of others, is Beauvoir’s answer to a better world.

She is free of Academia

Another quite unrelated point which I think makes her work relevant today is that she is a philosopher unaffiliated with the Academy and she writes in a way that is very different to the papers you might see recommended on an undergraduate philosophy course in the UK. Beauvoir’s work can be used as a demonstration or how a more grounded and personal philosophy which attempts to engage not with the parts of a problem but with the world considered in its entirety (for example, through constructing a world in a novel) is a fruitful way of thinking through the big questions that we all share.

Conclusion

There is much to explore in Beauvoir’s work, whether you are preoccupied with living a more honest and authentic life, interested in the pervasive effects of sex and gender on our lives, or looking to read literature grounded in metaphysical issues. I hope that after reading this article, you are intrigued to find out more about her writing.

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