Simone De Beauvoir

The Feminist
Holly Poirier 7/21/2011

Professor Alexander Izrailevsky, Ph.D for PHIL 1000-003 http://cooperativegoalacheivementatslcc.yolasite.com/general-education.php (link for e-portfolio)

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Simone de Beauvoir- The Feminist

Biography
Simone de Beauvoir was first and foremost a woman. She came to this very conclusion and begins her books and philosophy with this assertion. This is significant because she is one of the very few female philosophers to be given any credence or mention in modern study of philosophy. Beauvoir was born on Boulavard Raspail, Paris in 1908 (Flaherty). She died at age seventy-two in 1980 (Felder). She was from an upper class family that was just shy of formal title. By her own accounts, her early family life was very good. Her mother was French bourgeois, and her father was a lawyer (Flaherty). This afforded her the time and comfort higher thinking and serious philosophy require. Notable achievements for Beauvoir include becoming the youngest person ever to gain aggregation in philosophy at Sorbonne in 1929 and teaching philosophy at lycees in Marseille and Rouen from 1931 to 1937 (Beauvoir, cover). These are all highly respected and serious accommodations and positions. She is known to have had a long and eccentric love affair with Jean-Paul Sartre, but never married (Felder). Some of her best known writings include: Force of Circumstance, She Came to Stay, Ethics of Ambiguity, Les Bouches Infuliter (The Useless Mouth), All Said and Done and The Second Sex. The main issues tackled in her philosophy is the integration of the feminine perspective of life voiced by a female being versus the female perspective voiced in a males point of view. To know Beauvoir is to know the feminine perspective of Existentialism.

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Ontology It is an awe inspiring, angering, and profound realization of a being to come to grips and understanding of why they are not primary but secondary, and subordinate to another class. Many women, particularly the French Catholic bourgeois were absolutely content not to even question or think about these phenomena. This was not true of Simone de Beauvoir, she wanted to know at the very core and essence of human existence what constituted the reasoning and sanctioning of these distinctions. She spends an inordinate and exhausting amount of time and energy breaking apart all the assertions she was combated with from her male contemporaries in her book The Second Sex. When she is not poking holes into other philosophers logic and structure, she finally gets down to the business of detailing in excruciating minuteness her ontological philosophy. With way to many words, Beauvoirs basic theory of existence boils down to this: man and woman are two halves of the same whole. It is our very desire to be separate from the whole that creates us and places us in this world. If you come here as male, then you project the

weaknesses and fallacies, you perceive in yourself, that you want to be distinct from onto the other. What she also realized was that woman also did this. She saw in her own self, parts that she needed to reconcile and not project onto and blame the other, or male for. In coming to this conclusion, she began to study and embrace Existentialism. This philosophy is widely debated and often times completely misunderstood. It is often thought of as an atheistic

philosophy. Yet, this is contradicted by the fact that the branch that Beauvoir belonged to was dubbed Christian Existentialism.

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Epistemology Without Beauvoirs theory of knowledge, it is hard to fully comprehend and appreciate her ontology. By knowing and integrating ones own flaws, strengths, weaknesses, offerings,

fallacies, tendencies, wants, addictions, emotions, and purpose, then one can then learn these things of another being or entity. To know life is to know your own unique essence. Beauvoirs philosophy in line with the Existential view is that each person is their own creation, here to learn what they are and how this relates to all other beings. Spending much time in solitude, much contemplation was put to how to reconcile all of these contradictions about life she came across in her studies. The most specific knowledge that she was looking for had to do with why women had the lot of subordination to men. What was found through extensive studying of biology, religion, psychology, and sociology can be summed up in one sentence. Beauvoir came to the conclusion that, The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life [as women do] but in risking life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills (Beauvoir, 74). To know ones own purpose is all that one is capable of. To know God and any or all purposes or processes it may manifest, are beyond human beings capability. Quite

misunderstood, Beauvoir was asserting the deep knowing that no matter what she learned or knew to be true, that she in her own right could never propose that she could even say what a being higher or even other than her might think or feel. This leads to her moral philosophy, which many considered to be atheistic but in reality was more agnostic.

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Moral Philosophy Considered atheist, because of association with her Existential philosophies and friends, Beauvoirs axiology could be best described as a reconciliation and appreciation for the course of natural events. She definitely believed in two major schools of thought that were influenced by the opposing influences of her mother and father. From Catholic influence, she saw how others in positions of power and influence were highly hypocritical. Not wanting to be this way herself, she embraced the idea that all beings are by their very nature separate and incapable of holding the interest of another above their own. She says, Christian ideology played no little role in womans oppression (Beauvoir, 104). This thought implies that those that spoke of Gods commandments, ideals, or desires for human kind were actually speaking of their own will and thought, not Gods. For Beauvoir it is simply impossible to know the will of God for humanity. The second part of this complicated ideal of morality came about as a result or answer to what to do about the first assertion of morality. The course of action Beauvoir must take in order to fulfill her life purpose is to undergo strict self awareness and accept all findings. This value comes from ones own thoughts and not that of another being, a church, or an unknowable God. Beauvoir also despises private property and the family structure sanctions. She states, All the European Codes were drafted on the basis of canon, Roman and Germanic law all were unfavorable to the woman, and all the countries recognized private property and the family, deferring to the demands of these institutions (Beauvoir, 112). These are her major values or anti-values. Feminism. These conclusions lead her to have a radical and new social philosophy of

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Social Philosophy Most likely Beauvoir biggest contribution to society is her gift of an in depth explanation of the phenomena of female. How could this be anything but a feministic philosophy? Feminism has such a negatively charged connotation it is ridiculous. Just like slave-owners in the south had no idea they were even wrong, neither do men in our society today. When you are the dominating half, why would you put yourself in someone elses shoes and see what it feels, looks, smells, and is like to be the other. She is also acutely aware and addresses the class separation that society experiences through manifestation. Beauvoir has to come off strong and over the top to be heard and noticed. So, she does. She is very vocal about her stance on the treatment and positioning of women in society. On social structures she has much to say. In fact, the bulk of her book The Second Sex is dedicated to her insistence that women understand their circumstances. This is evident in the following statement she makes, The bourgeois woman clings to the chains because she clings to her class privilege. It is drilled into her and she believes that womans liberation would weaken bourgeois society; liberated from the male, she would be condemned to work while she might regret having her rights to private property subordinated to her husbands, she would deplore even more giving this property abolished; she feels no solidarity with the working class woman; she feels closer to her husband than to a woman textile worker. She makes his interest her own (Beauvoir, 130). As an answer to years of male philosophers and societies flawed injustice, Simone de Beauvoir tackles these tough issues of existence, knowledge, and social structure with academic logic and personal intuitional experience. This is a valuable addition to the world of philosophy. She does not just blame or project her frustration of the female lot, but she seeks to understand

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and enlighten the rest of society to her findings. Beauvoir was a serious thinker and deserves more credit than the modern male dominated society of philosophical ideals and accolades afford her. Beauvoir herself knew that the battle for womans rights was uphill and she was only laying a foundation for the generations to come to build on. She did not seek to reconcile these injustices in the world but by understanding the conflict within, she was hoping to add to the collective reconciliation of this separation.

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Works Cited Beauvoir, Simone De, Constance Borde, and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. The Second Sex. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print. Crowell, Steven, "Existentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/existentialism/>. Felder, Steve, comp. Simone De Beauvoir and Existentialism. Irvine Valley College. Web. 01 July 2011. <faculty.ivc.edu/sfelder/simonedebeauvoir1.ppt>. Flaherty, Tarraugh. "Simone De Beauvoir." Webster University. Women's Intellectual Contributions to the Study of Mind and Society. Web. 04 July 2011. <http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/beauvoir.html>.