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Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir

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Victor Eremita
 
Reply Sun 6 Sep, 2009 11:04 pm
Simone de Beauvoir
Existential Feminist
(1908 - 1986)

Life
Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris. In her teenage years, she decided to become a writer and went to study philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne. While there, she met Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and helped them found the Les Temps Modernes in 1945. As she intended, she wrote several novels including The Blood of Others and All Men are Mortal; however, it was her two major works, The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947 and The Second Sex in 1949, which solidified her reputation as the most important feminist after Mary Wollstonecraft. However, her relationship to Sartre obscured her contributions to philosophy for several decades. Nevertheless, she continued writing and contributing to activist projects along with Sartre, including some later short stories and participation in the Russell-Sartre War Crimes Tribunal. She died in Paris on April 14, 1986.

The Ethics of Ambiguity
READ IT HERE!: The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir
In this essay, she explains that the existential philosophy is one of the most honest philosophies because it is the first to recognize the human situation in its full complexity. Kierkegaard was the first to recognize the problem and Sartre had done the most to expand on the problem since. However, Beauvoir's goal is to fill in the details of this problem by providing a way for freely creating individuals to interact well together and to create values which also take others into account. Beauvoir thinks that whatever values one creates, freedom is the common value which everyone values and she thinks freedom is the key to create an "ethics of ambiguity". She makes sure to discount solipsism and anarchy as possible outcomes to an ethic based on freedom as a valid law for all by saying that in regards to the former, individuals are defined through their free relationships to others, and in regards to the latter, that positive and negative freedom exists and that negative freedom would reject the oppression of others.

The Second Sex
READ IT HERE!: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/index.htm
In this book, Beauvoir develops an account of male-female relationship which is based on ideas from Hegel's master and slave. For Beauvoir, everyone is hostile to every other and would like to make sure that the 'I' is an autonomous subject and all others are object. Some people, let's call them MEN, have succeeded in perpetuating the master/slave relationship in actuality and dominating another group of people; let's call these people WOMEN. Men are subjects, and the women are the Other and this arrangement has defined the relationship for sexes for ages.

When Beauvoir famously writes, one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman, she doesn't mean any weird transsexual post-op, but rather that females grow up believing she is naturally inferior to men, that the definition of "woman" is to be man's Other. Beauvoir quotes Aristotle: "The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,' said Aristotle; 'we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness." For Beauvoir, it is high time that women wake up and smell the master/slave relationship for what it is: "that she is being tricked ... 'What a misfortune to be a woman! And yet the misfortune, when one is a woman, is at bottom not to comprehend that it is one,' says Kierkegaard." Man and woman... we are all human beings and this species will have matured when we understand that.
 
jgweed
 
Reply Mon 7 Sep, 2009 03:53 pm
@Victor Eremita,
It would seem that Simone's place and importance in the women's movement is assured; more recently, her contributions to Existentialist philosophy, especially The Ethics of Ambiguity, are being recognised. This book reads almost as a commentary on parts of Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and there continues to be discussion about the extent to which her thinking contributed to his thinking.
 
Victor Eremita
 
Reply Tue 8 Sep, 2009 01:26 am
@Victor Eremita,
One thing I wanted to know, since I don't have a copy of the Second Sex and I only read it through the Marxist website, is where Beauvoir quotes Aristotle when he says female is naturally defective. Does anyone know which book that's from?
 
 

 
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