Margaret A. Peg Simons

This chapter is a memoir of my efforts to solve the puzzle of Beauvoir's denials of her work in philosophy including: an account of my interviews with Beauvoir and my findings that The Second Sex influenced Sartre's later philosophy; Kate and Edward Fullbrook's discovery of clues in the posthumously published texts leading to their solution of the puzzle; and my work on the new puzzle of Beauvoir's misrepresentation in her Memoirs of her early work in philosophy and relationship with Sartre, including their 1929 debate in the Luxembourg Gardens that allegedly drove her out of philosophy.

Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, has traditionally been read as an application of Sartrean existentialism to the problem of women. Critics have claimed a Sartrean origin for Beauvoir's central theses: that under patriarchy woman is the Other, and that 'one is not born a woman, but becomes one.' An analysis of Beauvoir's recently discovered 1927 diary, written while she was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre, challenges this interpretation. In this diary, Beauvoir affirms her commitment to doing philosophy, defines the philosophical problem of 'the opposition of self and other,' and explores the links between love and domination. In 1927, she thus lays the foundations of both Sartre's phenomenology of interpersonal relationships and of her own thesis, in The Second Sex, that woman is the Other. Her descriptions of the experience of freedom and choice point to the influence of Bergson, specifically his concepts of 'becoming' and élan vital. Tracing Beauvoir's shift from her apolitical position of 1927 to the feminist engagement of The Second Sex points to the influence of the African-American writer, Richard Wright, whose description of the lived experience of oppression of blacks in America, and whose challenge to Marxist reductionism, provide Beauvoir with a model, an analogy, for analyzing woman's oppression.

Simone de Beauvoir’s readers who saw a heterosexual ideal in her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre must have been dismayed by the 1990 French publication of her Journal de guerre (Wartime Diary) and Lettres à Sartre (Letters to Sartre). Discovered after Beauvoir’s death in 1986 and edited for publication by her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Beauvoir’s Wartime Diary and Letters to Sartre recount her sexual affairs with several young women. In Deirdre Bair’s authorized biography of Beauvoir, also published in 1990, Bair describes the young women in question as merely Beauvoir’s friends and reports that Beauvoir denied having sexual relationships with women (Bair 1990, 213-15, 510). With the publication of the wartime diary and letters, Beauvoir’s readers and her biographer were thus confronted with the uncomfortable revelation that Beauvoir had lied to them about her sexual relationships. Given society’s attitudes towards bisexuality, Beauvoir’s lies about her relationships with women may be understandable. But evidence, first discovered in Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s wartime diaries and letters by Edward Fullbrook, that Beauvoir lied about her work in philosophy and her influence on Sartre, is more perplexing (Fullbrook and Fullbrook 1993, 97-127; Fullbrook 1999). Beauvoir earned a graduate agrégation degree in philosophy and authored numerous philosophical novels and essays. But her philosophical work, including her metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay (1943)—the story of an unconventional solipsist who, forced to recognize the existence of other minds, resorts to murder as a solution to the problem of the Other—has traditionally been dismissed as a literary application of Sartre’s philosophy in Being and Nothingness (1943), a view paradoxically encouraged by Beauvoir herself. While the evidence that Beauvoir lied about her work in philosophy may be disconcerting, it does open up new areas of research, as I’ll suggest below, raising questions about her philosophy in She Came to Stay, her philosophical relationship with Sartre, and the wartime transformation in her philosophy that were foreclosed by the traditional reading of Beauvoir as Sartre’s follower.

New translations tracing decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement during the turbulent era of decolonization, from articles exposing conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard hitting attacks on right-wing intellectuals in the 1950s, to a 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article calling for the 'two state solution' in Israel. The texts range from a surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic 18th c. pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to the transcription of a co-written 1974 documentary film on the aged in France.

Simone de Beauvoir’s early enthusiasm for the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941)—denied in her 1958 autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter—is a surprising discovery in her 1927 handwritten student diary, as I reported in 1999 and explored at more length in 2003 (Simons 1999; Simons 2003). Discovered by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir after Beauvoir’s death in 1986 and now housed in the Bibliothèque nationale, Beauvoir’s student diary first appeared in print in the 2006 volume, Diary of a Philosophy Student: 1926-27, followed in 2008 by the French publication, Cahiers de jeunesse: 1926-1930. Since my 1999 analysis of the 1927 diary, the publication of the 1926 diary and other posthumously discovered texts has deepened and complicated the evidence of Bergson’s influence.1 In this chapter, I propose to take up and expand upon my earlier analyses in the light of this new evidence, arguing that Beauvoir’s methodological turn to the description of immediate experience, especially her method of writing philosophy in literature and her lifelong interest in describing the subjective experience of time, drew upon Bergson’s philosophy before her first encounter with Husserl’s phenomenology which may have come as early as 1927; that her concept of bad faith and interest in exposing distortions in perception and thinking, as in the chapters in The Second Sex on myths about women, drew upon Bergson’s philosophy long before she had read Marx; and that her earliest formulation of the problem of the Other drew upon Bergson’s distinction between the “social self and the deep self,” two years before she met Jean-Paul Sartre and two decades before she first read Hegel’s Phenomenology.

The topic of this chapter, the early philosophical influence of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) on Simone de Beauvoir, may surprise those who remember Beauvoir’s reference to Bergson in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter where she denies Bergson’s importance. She writes there of her interests in 1926: “I preferred literature to philosophy, and I would not have been at all pleased if someone had prophesized that I would become a kind of Bergson; I didn’t want to speak with that abstract voice which, whenever I heard it, failed to move me.” But in this case, as in so many others, Beauvoir’s diaries present a very different picture. Her unpublished 1926 diary, written when Beauvoir was eighteen years old and beginning her study of philosophy, contains several pages of quotations from Bergson’s Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), which Beauvoir describes, in an entry dated August 16, as “a great intellectual intoxication.” The entry continues: “whereas in reading other philosophers I have the impression of witnessing more or less logical constructions, here finally I am touching palpable reality and encountering life. Not only myself, but art, the truths suggested by poets, and everything that I studied this year is magnificently explained. Simply a call to intuition…. in short the method that I spontaneously apply when I want to know myself and the most difficult problems disappear. How many things [there are] in the 180 pages of Bergson’s The immediate givens of consciousness” Intriqued by this diary passage, I began analyzing Beauvoir’s early philosophy for evidence of Bergson’s influence, focusing on Bergson’s three most important texts: Time and FreeWill (1889), Matter and Memory: An Essay on the Relation of the Body to the Mind (1896), and Creative Evolution (1907). My analysis uncovered evidence of Bergson’s influence in several of Beauvoir’s important early texts, especially She Came to Stay, Beauvoir’s metaphysical novel written from 1937 to 1941, but also Beauvoir’s essays in existential ethics and The Second Sex (1949). Indeed Bergson now seems to me to be a key to understanding the roots of Beauvoir’s philosophy. In this paper, I will narrow my focus to Bergson’s philosophical methodology, and its influence on She Came to Stay, identifying three Bergsonian elements of Beauvoir’s philosophical methodology. First of all, Beauvoir takes seriously Bergson's criticism of intellectual understanding and accepts his implicit challenge to do philosophy through the novel. Secondly, Beauvoir shares with Bergson a methodological interest in exposing distortions in perception and thinking. Finally, they both rely on a methodological turn to immediate experience, which discloses our freedom. Beauvoir did not follow Bergson completely or uncritically. She did not follow him, for example, in the vitalist system building of Creative Evolution or the mysticism of his later work, Two Sources of Morality and Religion. In Beauvoir’s short story cycle, When Things of the Spirit Come First, written from 1935-37, which Beauvoir describes as “clarifying the genesis” of her later work, (QPS, viii) she satirizes her early intellectual passions, including Paul Claudel’s morality of feminine self-sacrifice, André Breton’s Surrealism, and Bergson's philosophy. Furthermore, Beauvoir’s early work, including She Came to Stay, focuses on an aspect of reality ignored by Bergson’s early work, i.e. the problem of the opposition of self and other.

In December 1924 when Simone de Beauvoir almost certainly wrote her essay analyzing Claude Bernard's "Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine," a classic text in the philosophy of science, she was a 16 yr old student in a senior-level philosophy class at a private Catholic girls' school. Given the popular conception of existentialism as anti science, Beauvoir's early interest in science, reflected in her baccalaureate successes as well as her paper on Bernard, may be surprising. But her enthusiasm for Bernard is unmistakable. We have identified three themes in Beauvoir's essay that reappear in her later work, including the valuing of philosophical doubt

The Useless Mouths" and Other Literary Writings brings to English-language readers literary writings--several previously unknown--by Simone de Beauvoir. Culled from sources including various American university collections, the works span decades of Beauvoir's career. Ranging from dramatic works and literary theory to radio broadcasts, they collectively reveal fresh insights into Beauvoir's writing process, personal life, and the honing of her philosophy. The volume begins with a new translation of the 1945 play The Useless Mouths, written in Paris during the Nazi occupation. Other pieces were discovered after Beauvoir's death in 1986, such as the 1965 short novel "Misunderstanding in Moscow," involving an elderly French couple who confront their fears of aging. Two additional previously unknown texts include the fragmentary "Notes for a Novel," which contains the seed of what she later would call "the problem of the Other," and a lecture on postwar French theater titled Existentialist Theater. The collection notably includes the eagerly awaited translation of Beauvoir's contribution to a 1965 debate among Jean-Paul Sartre and other French writers and intellectuals, "What Can Literature Do?"

In a compelling chronicle of her search to understand Beauvoir's philosophy in The Second Sex, Margaret A. Simons offers a unique perspective on Beauvoir's wide-ranging contribution to twentieth-century thought. She details the discovery of the origins of Beauvoir's existential philosophy in her handwritten diary from 1927; uncovers evidence of the sexist exclusion of Beauvoir from the philosophical canon; reveals evidence that the African-American writer Richard Wright provided Beauvoir with the theoretical model of oppression that she used in The Second Sex; shows the influence of The Second Sex in transforming Sartre's philosophy and in laying the theoretical foundations of radical feminism; and addresses feminist issues of racism, motherhood, and lesbian identity. Simons also draws on her experience as a Women's Liberation organizer as she witnessed how women used The Second Sex in defining the foundations of radical feminism. Bringing together her work as both activist and scholar, Simons offers a highly original contribution to the renaissance of Beauvoir scholarship.

Since her death in 1986 and the publication of her letters and diaries in 1990, interest in the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir has never been greater. In this engaging and timely volume, Margaret A. Simons and an international group of philosophers present 16 essays that reveal Beauvoir as one of the century’s most important and influential thinkers. As they set Beauvoir’s work into dialogue with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and others, these essays consider questions such as Beauvoir’s philosophical relationship with Sartre; her ethic of the erotic; her views on marriage, motherhood, and female friendship; and her interpretations of oppression and liberation. This book discusses the full range of Beauvoir’s work, including The Second Sex, her unpublished diaries, autobiographical writings, novels, and philosophical essays, and broadens the scope and interpretive context of her unique philosophy. Contributors are Nancy Bauer, Debra Bergoffen, Suzanne Laba Cataldi, Edward Fullbrook, Eva Gothlin, Sara Heinämaa, Laura Hengehold, Stacy Keltner, Michèle Le Doeuff, Ann Murphy, Shannon M. Mussett, Margaret A. Simons, Ursula Tidd, Andrea Veltman, Karen Vintges, Julie Ward, Gail Weiss