Philosophical Writings

"Because Beauvoir wrote across several genres, I’ve chosen works that I think are good representatives from the different modes in which she wrote. I’ve chosen to start with Pyrrhus and Cinéas , which is a philosophical essay that was written in 1943 and published in 1944. It’s extremely important not only for understanding Beauvoir’s later works and her philosophical framework, but also because even some of the best secondary literature on Simone de Beauvoir in English says that she was not critical of Sartre. Sometimes people say this about his philosophical thinking and sometimes about his personal behaviour. In both cases, it’s clear that she was critical of him. Pyrrhus and Cinéas gives us the first published record of their disagreement. So in 1943 Sartre published Being and Nothingness , which gives an extremely pessimistic account of human existence. It was also an extremely inspiring one, because of the way it discussed freedom in the context of occupied Paris. “ Pyrrhus and Cinéas gives us the first published record of Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s disagreement” But Beauvoir thought Sartre had misunderstood freedom. Sartre said that everyone is free and that most people flee their freedom in bad faith—but all they needed to do was look it squarely in the face and then they could make themselves more or less whatever they wanted to be. He did acknowledge some limitations, but Beauvoir didn’t think he acknowledged the limitations that affected certain groups of people enough. So in Pyrrhus and Cinéas , she talks about the concept of freedom and rejects many of the claims Sartre made in Being and Nothingness . Because this book wasn’t published in English until the last decade, people didn’t know about her role in the development of existentialist philosophy. She does more than reject certain of Sartre’s views: she also puts forward an existentialist ethics. She says explicitly—in a radio interview in 1945—that existentialism does not have an ethics and her aim, in this essay, was to provide it. Then, a year later, Sartre gave a famous lecture published as “Existentialism is a Humanism” which Simone de Beauvoir edited for publication, and existentialist ethics became more widely associated with Sartre’s name—even though she had played a significant role in the development of the ideas. I don’t know because I haven’t seen the documentary evidence that would provide a conclusion either way. What we do know is that the lecture was given an interrogative title: “Existentialism: Is it a Humanism?” But by the time it was published, it had become an affirmative statement: “Existentialism is a Humanism.” We also know that Sartre was anti-humanist. He was on the record saying that humanism is ‘shit.’ And so it was a conversion on his part to affirm that humanism had value and Beauvoir made a humanist statement in Pyrrhus and Cineas, that it was incoherent to value your own freedom unless you value the freedom of others. I don’t think Sartre developed it as clearly in Existentialism is a Humanism as he does later. Yes, it’s Dostoevsky—if God does not exist, anything is permitted. Beauvoir develops this idea in Pyrrhus and Cinéas. She says that our actions create the conditions for other people’s possibilities in the world. So, to not recognize the role of our own freedom in perpetuating suffering and injustice is ‘bad faith.’ She does use that term, but she also uses the term ‘alibis’ a lot: that people hide from their own responsibility in alibis. It’s already there in this text that she was writing in 1943. In English, it’s published in her book of philosophical writings edited by Margaret Simons. It’s part of this huge scholarly effort to bring Beauvoir’s philosophical work into English. In French, it’s a slim volume of about 120 pages."