Simone de Beauvoir
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986, France) : existentialism and feminist philosophy. For Beauvoir, a woman is not the product of a biological, psychic or economic destiny: it is civilization as a whole that fashions the figure of "woman", and each girl becomes it. In The Second Sex (1949) she shows how man posits himself as the Subject and the Absolute, and makes woman the Other, the inessential. On AskPhilosophy: 5 reconstructed arguments, 4 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 3 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why she matters
The Second Sex is one of the books that most changed how the condition of women is thought about. Beauvoir does not only claim rights: she asks how a situation fabricates beings, and what it means to be free in a situation that assigns you a place. Her distinction between what the body gives (the "human female") and what society makes of it (the "woman") remains at the centre of the debates on gender. And her ethical texts raise a question existentialism could not dodge: how can a freedom will the freedom of others?
Her times
She published The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947 and The Second Sex in 1949, in two volumes, in the postwar Paris where existentialism was fashionable. She belonged to the same intellectual circle as Sartre, whose vocabulary she uses (the "for-itself", the "in-itself", transcendence, bad faith). But she applies it to a subject Being and Nothingness did not treat: the situation of women. She died in Paris in 1986.
Mind what you quote
The French text of The Second Sex comes from an unproofread OCR scan: we kept only clean sentences, but checking against the printed edition remains to be done. The English is the complete translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (2009), which is more faithful; H. M. Parshley's (1953), for a long time the only one, cuts a sizeable part of the book (often estimated at 10 to 15 %) and mistranslates some philosophical terms: we flag it when we quote it. For The Ethics of Ambiguity we only have chapter I, in English (Frechtman, 1948): the French original is not in our corpus and the French rendering of our quotations is our own. Paragraphs are numbered by us, not by the publisher. Finally, in The Second Sex she quotes and discusses many other authors (Aristotle, Aquinas, Michelet, Benda, Poulain de la Barre…): check who is speaking.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceShe sees the idea of God as a projection of man, who dreams of an impossible synthesis of the "for-itself" and the "in-itself". And she writes that God's absence, far from permitting everything, makes man's acts final. She does not prove atheism in our chapter: she takes it as a starting point.
She does not address the origin of knowledge in the texts of our corpus.
She holds the fact of being a subject to be a universal fact, and the cogito to express "the most objective truth". But she also writes that no "objective" description stands out except against an ethical background: better to state one's principles than hide them.
She blames dualism for setting up a hierarchy between body and soul that lets part of the self count as negligible. The body is first, she says, "the radiation of a subjectivity", the instrument through which we grasp the world. She does not defend a materialist thesis either in our texts (she even sets existentialist ontology against dialectical materialism, but about the meaning of situations, not about the mind). This placement is provisional.
"We believe in freedom." Every man is originally free, in the sense that he spontaneously casts himself into the world. But this freedom is "situated": a situation can leave it little hold, and it must also be willed in order to become moral.
She refuses to believe in unconditioned values that would set themselves up against freedom "like things": it is human existence that makes values spring up in the world. For her, though, freedom is what grounds them all, and it requires itself universally.
She does not treat the question as such. She rejects any "foreign absolute" to man, and blames believers for using the formula "if God does not exist, everything is permitted". But she does not discuss what reason can or cannot judge about faith.
Before existence there is no more reason to exist than not to exist. One cannot say in advance that our earthly destiny has or has not importance: it depends on us to give it importance. She sets aside pessimism and optimism alike.
There is no ethics for a being defined as a nature, as something given. Man is first, she says, a "negativity", at a distance from himself, which makes an evil will possible: he is neither good nor bad by nature. On woman, she writes that so-called feminine traits are imposed by education and society, not given by biology.
She judges institutions "from the point of view of the concrete opportunities they give to individuals" and recognises no public good other than one that assures the citizens' private good. But she also thinks in terms of classes, castes and collective "we"s that make revolutions. Her economic and political chapters are not in our corpus: provisional placement.
Neither a calculation of consequences, nor a rule of duty, nor virtue: freedom is the source of all values, and it must will itself. She places herself in the line of Kant and Hegel in saying that the source of values lies in the subject, but she refuses an impersonal universal man: the sources are concrete, particular men. Some readers see an ethics of freedom, others one close to Kant.