Simone de Beauvoir and Life

Björk, Ulrika

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_21

Ulrika Björk³

Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 66))

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Abstract

Although de Beauvoir herself did not engage directly with Husserl’s writing, this chapter shows how ideas and approaches developed by Husserl figured in to the development of her own thinking. The second part of this chapter presents a phenomenological analysis of life as a unifying force that cannot be captured in approaches to it oriented strictly on modern biology.

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Notes

1.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (New York: Lancer Books, 1962), 241; La force de l’âge (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969), 231. The text referred to is the original 1928 publication of a series of lectures that Husserl gave in 1905, republished and supplemented in 1969 as Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm. Husserliana X (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff).
2.
Simone de Beauvoir, Pyrrhus et Cinéas (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1944); Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1947).
3.
Simone de Beauvoir, La vieillesse (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970).
4.
Simone de Beauvoir, Tout compte fait (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1972).
5.
Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 444 (trans. modified); La force de l’âge, 419: “Je crois encore aujourd’hui à la théorie de ‘l’Ego transcendantal’; le moi n’est qu’un objet probable, et celui qui dit je n’en saisit que des profils; autrui peut en avoir une vision plus nette ou plus juste.” The context of this statement is a discussion of the motivation to write autobiography. The exposition of her life, Beauvoir says, is based on her conviction that one cannot know oneself (se connaître), only tell about oneself (se raconter).
6.
Jean-Paul Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego. Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique (Paris: Vrin 1978). In this essay, Sartre offers a critique of the Husserlian notion of a supposed transcendental ego or subject, and presents his own non-egological theory of consciousness. What he aims to show is that there is no “I” or ego behind our conscious experiences, neither as a formal condition of possibility, nor as a real or material inhabitant of consciousness (conscience), but that the ego is outside consciousness. As he writes; the ego “is a being of the world, like the ego of another.” The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. Forrest Williams & Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), 31; La transcendance de l’ego, 13.
7.
The lectures given in Paris form the basic structure of Cartesian Meditations, which appeared originally in French in 1931 and in the first Husserliana volume in 1950. Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes. Introduction à la phénoménologie, trans. Gabrielle Peiffer Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: A. Colin); Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950).
8.
Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1958); Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. La vie – l’écriture, eds. Claude Francis & Fernande Gontier (Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1977), 33–34. In the spring of 1929, Beauvoir was completing her studies at Sorbonne and École normale supérieure, working on a thesis on the meaning of the concept in Leibniz’ philosophy, and preparing her teaching diploma, the French “agrégation de philosophie.”
9.
Simone de Beauvoir, “La phénoménologie de la perception de Merleau-Ponty,” Les temps modernes 1/2 (novembre): 363–67; Le deuxième sexe I & II (Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1949).
10.
Beauvoir, “A Review of Phenomenology of Perception,” 162; “La phénoménologie de la perception de Merleau-Ponty,” 365.
11.
Beauvoir, “A Review of Phenomenology of Perception,” 159–60; “La phénoménologie de la perception de Merleau-Ponty,” 363.
12.
Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses II (Paris: Gallimard 1963), 62.
13.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Mon expérience d’écrivain,” Les écrits de Simone de Beauvoir. La vie – l’écriture, eds. Claude Francis & Fernande Gontier (Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1977), 446. Beauvoir’s “poetics” explicitly draws on Kierkegaard’s distinction between direct and indirect communication, but her intuition about the philosophical value of literature echoes Husserl’s in Ideen I, §70: “Extraordinary profit can be drawn from the offerings of history, in even more abundant measure from those of art, and especially from poetry, which are, to be sure, imaginary, but which … tower high above the products of our own phantasy.” Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten. Collected Works II (Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1982), 160; Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel. Husserliana III (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1950), 132.
14.
Le deuxième sexe is thus a significant contribution to what Husserl himself calls “the problem of the sexes,” a problem he viewed as an area for future phenomenological research. See Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 188; Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 191–92.
15.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 49; Le deuxième sexe I. Les faits et les mythes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1949), 80.
16.
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 202; Illuminationen: ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), 336. “Denn ein erlebtes Ereignis ist endlich, zumindest in der einen Sphäre des Erlebens beschlossen, ein erinnertes shrankenlos, weil nur Schlüssel zu allem was vor ihm und zu allem was nach ihm kam.”
17.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1; Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turino: Giulio Einaudi, 1995), 3. “Life” is a translation of the Italian word vita.
18.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1; Homo sacer (original), 3.
19.
In response to Michel Foucault’s claim that the politicization of bare life, or the entry of zoē into politics, constitutes “the decisive event of modernity” (when natural life is included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, politics turns into “biopolitics”), Agamben argues that Western politics as such is founded on the exclusion of bare life, or on the exceptional status of homo sacer (4); Homo sacer (original), 7. What characterizes modern politics is the gradual coincidence of zoē and bios; through modern democracy (and subsequently totalitarianism) bare life is not only liberated, but turned into a way of life.
20.
The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories, ed. Glynnis Chantrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 301. Cf. The Bernhard Concise Dictionary of Etymology, ed. Robert K. Bernhart (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 432.
21.
The definition Aristotle, for instance, gives of zoē is the capacity for self-nutrition, growth and decay: “Of natural bodies some have life (zoē) in them, others not; by life we mean self-nutrition and growth and decay” (On the Soul, II 412a). The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 656.
22.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham: University Press of America, 1983), 87, 102; L’évolution créatrice (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948), 95, 111.
23.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 89 (italics in original); L’évolution créatrice, 97.
24.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 99; L’évolution créatrice, 108.
25.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 100; L’évolution créatrice, 109. For a detailed discussion of the ambiguous meaning of élan vital, see, e.g., John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). According to Mullarkey, élan vital is often used as an equivalent of life, spirit, and consciousness (80). For a critique of Bergson’s concept élan vital, and the philosophy of life associated with it, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago & Oxford: Chicago University Press, 1998), 117, 311–13.
26.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, 100; L’évolution créatrice, 109.
27.
Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 2 (trans. modified); Tout compte fait, 46. “…qu’en nous réalisant nous perdons la plupart de nos possibilités.”
28.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 29; Tout compte fait, 46.
29.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 29–30; Tout compte fait, 46 –47.
30.
Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), ed. Rudolf Boehm, Husserliana X (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969).
31.
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana III (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1950), 161–62.
32.
Bernet, Rudolf, “Framing the Past: Memory in Husserl, Proust and Barthes,” The Husserlian Foundations of Phenomenological Psychology (Pittsburgh: The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University Press, 1993), 5.
33.
Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnet Brough Collected Works IV (Dordrecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 43, 47; Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 41, 45.
34.
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 186.
35.
According to Augustine, we experience objects through perception, but what remains available to memory are the images of the perceived objects (Confessions, 186).
36.
Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 44 –51; Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 42–49; cf. Bernet, “Framing the Past,” 3– 4.
37.
Husserl, Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 27, 41; Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 25–26, 39.
38.
Cf. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 42; Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 40.
39.
Bernet, “Framing the Past,” 4.
40.
Saint Augustine, Confessions, 185– 86.
41.
Bernet, “Framing the Past,” 5.
42.
Saint Augustine, Confessions, 10, 186– 87. Infancy, for Augustine, is on the level of life lived in his mother’s womb and he feels no responsibility for a time he cannot recall (10).
43.
Beauvoir, Old Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 407; La vieillesse, 388.
44.
Beauvoir, Old Age, 404; La vieillesse, 385.
45.
Beauvoir, Old Age, 404; La vieillesse, 385.
46.
Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” The Case of Schreber, Papers on Techniqe and Other Works. Standard Edition, vol. XII (1911–1913), trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), 147–56; “Erinnern, Widerholen und Durcharbeiten,” Gesammelte Werke. Zehnter Band: Werke aus den Jahren 1913–1917 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1966), 126 –36.
47.
Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” 151; “Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten,” 131.
48.
Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” 151; “Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten,” 131.
49.
Beauvoir, Old Age, 404; La vieillesse, 385.
50.
This is Bernet’s main claim in his essay on memory in Husserl, Proust and Barthes; every memory, and indeed every analysis of memory, is in need of being framed (8).
51.
For a discussion of the experience of time and fictional narrative, see Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit II. L’expérience temporelle fictive (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), especially 150–255; cf. Bernet, “Framing the Past,” 7–13.
52.
Beauvoir, “Mon expérience d’écrivain,” 452.
53.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 2; Tout compte fait, 12; cf. “Mon expérience d’écrivain,” 443. In La force des choses Beauvoir is more specific about the “totality” that a life constitutes. It is diverse and fluid, and its most characteristic aspect is that it changes with time and implies “transformations, ripening and irreversible deteriorations.” After the War: Force of Circumstance I, 276; La force des choses I, 375–76. See also La vieillesse: “[L]ife is an unstable system in which the balance is continually lost and continually recovered … Change is the law of life” (Old Age, 17; La vieillesse, 17).
54.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 3; Tout compte fait, 13. In addition to this initial investigation, Beauvoir continues in the last autobiographical volume to recount her primary occupations during the most recent past: reading, writing, travelling, and, more than ever between 1962 and 1972, engaging herself in the political events of her time.
55.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, “Prologue” (trans. modified); Tout compte fait, 9. “Plus je me rapproche du terme de mon existance, plus il me devient possible d’embrasser dans son ensemble cet étrange objet qu’est une vie.”
56.
Leah Hewitt draws attention to the intertextual connection between Tout compte fait and the first volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu, Du côté de chez Swann, in Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
57.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 1; Tout compte fait, 11.
58.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 39; Tout compte fait, 60.
59.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 1; Tout compte fait, 11.
60.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 1–2; Tout compte fait, 12.
61.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 2; Tout compte fait, 12.
62.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 2; Tout compte fait, 12.
63.
Beauvoir, After the War: Force of Circumstance I, 275–76; La force des choses I, 374.
64.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 2 (trans. modified); Tout compte fait, 12. “Ce fait: ‘Je suis née à Paris’ ne représente pas la même chose aux yeux d’un Parisien, d’un provincial, d’un étranger.”
65.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 2; Tout compte fait, 12; cf. La force de l’âge, 419.
66.
Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 2; Tout compte fait, 12.
67.
Beauvoir, Old Age, 407; La vieillesse, 388.
68.
Beauvoir, Old Age, 415; La vieillesse, 395; cf. Sartre, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1943), 150–74; Critique de la raison dialectique, I (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1960), e.g., 154, 231–32 and Livre I: “De la ‘praxis’ individuelle au pratico-inerte.”

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Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Ulrika Björk

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, Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Rd, Boca Raton, 33431, Florida, USA
Lester Embree
Dept. Philosophy, University of Memphis, Clement Hall 316, Memphis, 38152, Indiana, USA
Thomas Nenon

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Björk, U. (2013). Simone de Beauvoir and Life. In: Embree, L., Nenon, T. (eds) Husserl’s Ideen. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_21

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_21
Published: 12 September 2012
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