Beauvoir was an independent philosopher who had an important influence on Sartre's writing. Her love affair with Sartre may have been romanticized, nor did it fit today's demands for "political correctness" in gender. Beauvoir was a late entrant to the feminist movement, not the founder, but the pervasive plight she sketched still hits the world today.
Text/Contributing Writer Dong Muzi
Editor/Zhou Jianping [email protected]
Beauvoir has been dead for 35 years, and even if she lives today, she will be a high-profile intellectual and even a mixed cultural star. She was the perfect little bourgeois elite, and like her lifelong companion, the existentialist philosopher Sartre, her writing rebelled against the class from which she came from—but as a woman.
Simone de Beauvoir's appeal is not yet outdated—perhaps even longer than Sartre's, whose existentialism may have been a blast of the West's postwar psyche, and the pervasive feminine dilemma that Beauvoir sketched still strikes the world today. Her masterpiece The Second Sex gave her an absolute place in feminist history; her golden phrase is still widely quoted: "Women are not born, but acquired." ”
In the long history, there were not many female intellectuals to look up to. Like Hannah Arendt, who was about the same age, and Susan Sontag, who was later, Beauvoir was the kind of female literati who carried the public imagination and worship. They all transcend the common fate of the women of their time with extraordinary personal experiences.
Like the cultural icons of that era, Beauvoir had a strong media personality. This is not only because she is an active media writer and magazine editor-in-chief, writing articles for trendy publications such as VOGUE, Harper's Bazaar – and even some chapters of "The Second Sex" have been published in fashion magazines; but also because Beauvoir talks to ordinary people about the topics they care about: marriage, love, sex, body, motherhood, aging... Strange readers from around the globe wanted to talk to her about their troubles, and a third of those letters came from men.
Beauvoir realized early on that his mind could be as attractive to men as his looks. The status of a "working woman" would detract from femininity, but she survived. Sartre's first impression summed up Beauvoir's peculiarity: "She was beautiful, and incredibly, she had both the intelligence of a man and the sensitivity of a woman." Even, Beauvoir was named the best dressed female writer in the history of literature—"I always dressed like a painting"; her private life was rich enough to have lovers more prestigious than hers, a strong, absolute and open love relationship, and several ardent and heartbreaking entanglements.
At the end of the film Lovers of the Café de La Flora, a magazine photographs Sartre and Beauvoir on the theme of "the existential atmosphere of Paris." People still crave her captivating persona today, as evidenced by the fact that we quote a lot about Beauvoir's golden sentences and love sagas, but know very little about her overall thoughts. As the scholar Dai Jinhua put it, in contemporary China, the image of Beauvoir is more of a "fully romanticized French female intellectual."
After the advent of The Second Sex, Beauvoir was called "the first female philosopher in history" by the Paris Competition newspaper. Before Beauvoir, there had been no female philosophers—Hypasha was a follower of the Neoplatonian Protino, and Anne Conway was a follower of Descartes. Of course, Beauvoir is also often described as a follower of Sartre. In media reports, Beauvoir was a "female Sartre", a loyalist of the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, "the most beautiful existentialist". In fact, her identity as an existentialist philosopher has never been universally recognized by the history of contemporary Western thought.
Like Arendt, Beauvoir never declared his writing purely philosophical. She has lived her life as a writer, but has no concept of the "literary quality" of her work. In fact, she is a writer of a "philosophical brain". Beauvoir's philosophical core did derive from Sartre's existential ideas, but she was the first to speak philosophically about the existence of women and their social status. She brought women from the barren land of philosophy to a remarkable position.
There is no doubt that Beauvoir was a person with strong philosophical tendencies, and even her best-selling autobiography embodies a philosophical ambition.
She wrote a thick four-volume autobiography. It's not so much narcissism as it is about wanting to philosophize her life. For existentialism, the center of the world is the individual, man lives in a meaningless universe, and man's existence itself has no meaning, but man's choice is free, and man can self-shape himself on the basis of his original existence and have an inescapable responsibility for his own choices. Beauvoir saw existentialism as a way of life, she understood her relationship with others through personal experience, and in the process of writing her autobiography, she understood how she fought for freedom and how she "became" what she is today.
Beauvoir was smart and had good luck. She was born in Paris to a wealthy family of nobles from Burgundy. She started reading at the age of 3, writing at the age of 7, and reading all the novels in the family at the age of 8. In school, she was as good as her male classmates, even stronger than her male classmates.
Beauvoir, 19, realized that she wanted to be a philosopher, writing in her diary that "the deepest part of my life is my thoughts" and "I want a great life." I will have. This unquestionable tone is familiar – many accomplished people develop a strong sense of self at a young age and a sense of mission that can guide them throughout their lives. To this end, she did not hesitate to fight a cold war with her parents— her father was tired of the useless and arrogant "female intellectuals", and her mother hoped that she would marry a good family.
Beauvoir's ambitions came at an opportune time. In the era in which she lived (1908-1986), women began to have more possibilities, could receive a university education like men, and began to have the right to vote, divorce and contraception. However, in Beauvoir's France, the situation of women is not improving. It was not until 1944, during de Gaulle's Provisional Government, that French women were given the right to vote and to be elected – not only a significant margin behind other European and American countries, but even later than countries such as Sri Lanka in Asia. In contrast, as early as the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the feminist movement in the United States was already unfolding vigorously. The French women's movement is often confined to bourgeois women, staying at specific rights such as equality in education and equality in inheritance of property. But beauvoir came from the classes that benefited from it.
Beauvoir passed the secondary school teacher qualification exam with Sartre at the age of 21, with Sartre first and her second. The exam was known for its rigor, she was the youngest person to pass in French history, and Sartre hung up on the subject for the first time. The chief examiner of the French National Philosophy Teacher Qualification Examination even felt that she was the "real philosopher" among Beauvoir and Sartre.
First group photo of Beauvoir and Sartre in Paris, June 1929 Photo/Visual China
Beauvoir prefers to understand things rather than seeing them, "what particularly appeals to philosophy is that I think it directly reveals the essence. I've never been interested in details. Most of what I perceive is a general feeling of things, not the particularity of things. "Beauvoir, though rational, was also an emotionally charged person with a lingering anguish (as we later saw, Sartre often had a hard time understanding Beauvoir's delicate and intense emotions). She was troubled by how to balance philosophical rationality with surging emotions. Beauvoir's teacher, Jeanne Messier, encouraged her to see emotions as an integral part of her life. In her diary in July 1927, Beauvoir felt reconciled with herself, realizing that she wanted to "continue to be a woman" but "want to have both the rationality of a man and the sensibility of a woman."
Sartre was a formidable opponent for Beauvoir. In her memoir, The Power of the Times, Beauvoir mentions that her "relationship with Sartre was an inexpressible bond," a deep intellectual friendship. Although Beauvoir and Sartre often disagreed, their intellectual interests were very similar. They share the same intellectual background, not only academic training, but also "door-to-door" origins – sharing the specific culture of bourgeois boys and girls: their childhoods are indisputable, and their parents are qualified petty bourgeois intellectuals. In a 1956 interview with the Paris Review, Beauvoir mentioned that it was this similarity that made her relationship with Sartre particularly strong.
Time may destroy things, but Beauvoir has always known exactly where he is. Her life has a very stable continuity. She had been living in Paris, basically living in the same neighborhood, working from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., meeting friends, and then working from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. She loves hiking and travels abroad every year.
While studying at the Sorbonne, her classmate Simone Vej (who later became a prominent thinker) accused Beauvoir of petty-bourgeois arrogance, which made her angry. Beauvoir, however, was indeed very elite, and even as a teacher, she was only interested in smart (or smart and beautiful) students. In her early years, Beauvoir harbored a bourgeois optimist outlook on life, writing books, learning the truth of things, and achieving success on a social level – until she did everything she wanted to do.
However, success on the real level only exacerbates beauvoir's existential distress, "When desire is fulfilled, the 'deeper distance' contained in desire itself is not realized." There is a void in man, even in his achievements. At the end of The Power of Things, she feels that her previous life has been "deceived": the world has not been made better by the self-actualization of the individual, and the war and social suffering continue.
During his lifetime, Beauvoir published five novels, a four-volume memoir, and three purely philosophical treatises. Perhaps because "literature does not exclude women", people generally agree with Beauvoir's literary identity. Most of Camus's works are also novels or plays, but his status as an existential philosopher is widely recognized (although Camus himself opposed this identity).
In fact, philosopher is probably one of the most difficult titles for women to get recognized. To be precise, in an era when the influence of philosophy was more prominent, the access mechanism of philosophy excluded women. The Western philosophical tradition, represented by Plato, promotes a "contemplative life", but just as the political life of ancient Greece excluded women and slaves, contemplation belongs to men, and women are "confined to day and night, kitchen and love".
Indeed, literature was less exclusive of women, and for much of the 19th century women even dominated the English literary market—both readers and writers. The Three Brontë Sisters in England, Mrs. Gaskell, and Georges San in France were all women, and Georges Eliot was the male pseudonym of the female writer Mary Ann Evans. At that time, the novel was still young, soft and malleable, and "all the literary training that women received consisted in the observation of character and the analysis of feelings", as Woolf said, "when a middle-class woman began to write, she naturally wrote novels".
The starting point of Beauvoir is also the novel. Rather than philosophy, she favors the expression of the novel: "A good novel inspires imaginary experiences that are as complete and unsettling as practical experiences." Today, there are not many readers of Beauvoir's novels. Although her attempts to overcome the overly abstract flaws of philosophy with literature did not seem to succeed—critics often accused Beauvoir of sacrificing literature for philosophy.
Compared with literary skepticism, there is also an extremely harsh evaluation: Beauvoir's ideas lack true originality. Beauvoir's autobiography always spoke of his intellectual relationship with Sartre as humble as possible. It also reinforces the stereotype that Beauvoir's ideas are subordinate to Sartre. Kate Kirkpatrick, author of the latest biography, Becoming Beauvoir (published domestically in 2021), vigorously objected to this, arguing that Beauvoir either underestimated herself or deliberately hid her edge in her autobiography.
Kirkpatrick, a former researcher at Sartre and apparently a fan of Beauvoir, wanted to confirm Beauvoir's independent identity as a philosopher. To this end, Kirkpatrick even moved Sartre out of the world center of Beauvoir without mercy.
In a new batch of beauvoir manuscripts, the researchers found that Beauvoir's love letters to other lovers were a hundred times more enthusiastic than those to Sartre—for example, from the American lover, the writer Nelson Argren, and the young philosopher and director Claude Lantzmann, she seemed to have acquired true love. Instead, Beauvoir and Sartre's relationship is closer to friendship than love—they lack real sex. Compared to sex, Sartre was more obsessed with the process of flirting. Beauvoir clearly cannot be satisfied with this. At the same time, Beauvoir also has several female lovers.
Sartre's influence on Beauvoir does not seem to be decisive, and it should be said that their academic cooperation and exchange of ideas are intertwined and mutually beneficial. In fact, Beauvoir had a significant influence on Sartre's writing. Even the experts who studied Sartre had to admit that "there is no reason to suspect that Sartre did indeed borrow ideas from Beauvoir ... Sartre was a clever borrower (Richard Campbell," Sartre, paraphrased from Qu Mingzhen's "Female Sartre," or a female philosopher?). 》）”。
On October 16, 1970, Beauvoir and Sartre hawked the banned newspaper "People's Cause" photo/IC photo on the street
Beauvoir's complex and entangled love life led her to take a keen interest in "moral freedom." At the end of June 1946, Beauvoir completed the book "The Ambiguous Morality". In her view, what human beings need is a morality that can confront the ambiguity of human nature, not a morality that excuses people. Only if we wish to be free can we prove that we are moral. Like Sartre, Beauvoir believed that human existence was destined to be free, but beauvoir was more interested in philosophical ethics than in ontology.
This philosophical trait is also reflected in her novels. Beauvoir's first novel, The Guest, about the triangular relationship between a man and two women, actually discusses the question of "self and the other"; "The Blood of others" writes about the resistance movement in France during the occupation of France, but the real concern is how people gain "freedom" in conflict; "Man is Dead" attempts to explore the relationship between death and life, clarifying the meaning of life. The problems tangled in these novels are also the core thesis of existentialism.
In writing The Second Sex, Beauvoir's inner trouble was: "What does it mean to me to be a woman?" She loved Michelle Lyris's Manhood and decided to write about herself. One of the central points of Second Sex is that no woman can live her own life "free from stereotypes and prejudices" – and Beauvoir herself apparently did not. Femininity also constitutes an intrinsic constraint on women, and femininity is not a nature or essence, but some labels that have been shaped and constructed in the long history of civilization.
Sartre said that as human beings we are destined to be free; but Beauvoir feels that as women we are destined to feel divided, destined to be divided subjects. The Second Sex extends the existentialist conception to the idea of equality between men and women, and the views of Gary Gutting, a contemporary American philosophy professor, aptly illustrate the philosophical significance of the Second Sex.
In fact, from the early philosophical writings to The Second Sex, Beauvoir has been exploring freedom in different situations and the limits of freedom. Beauvoir's understanding of freedom and personal relationships differs from Sartre's, who tends to emphasize her own conflict with others, while Beauvoir is less pessimistic and values the positive possibilities between the two. Perhaps this has something to do with Beauvoir's intensity and delicacy on an emotional level, or perhaps this is where the originality of her thoughts lies.
The life energy of Beauvoir is amazing. She is extremely disciplined, never a day is not working, never waste time. Although her sense of mission has kept her farther and farther away from the traditional female characters, she has not spent less time in love. The feelings did not affect her ambition to achieve something in her career, but made her life "full and enriched". Beauvoir's philosophy and love are intertwined, lips and teeth.
In the love letter, Beauvoir shows her pure love girl side. She loves romantic elements and has had "love brain" moments. Similarly, in Beauvoir's novels, no female character is completely immune to love. Women are more wholehearted in love than men – and in real life, this is often the case. Most women don't have the same choice of rich and difficult careers as men do. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir discerned the differences in the views of men and women on love, and love "has a completely different meaning for both genders." Byron put it accurately, "Love is just a pastime in a man's life, but it is a woman's life itself." ”
"Only the desolation of the madman who can see a thousand strands of rose petals inspires me to be so humble," Beauvoir writes of his emotions. The flow and pain in the relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre has long been legendary, and their most famous love contract is a lifelong experiment: "There is a necessary love between us, but we also need to experience accidental love." ”
Their philosophy of love has a strong existential color, pursuing the emotional freedom and sexual freedom of the individual, emphasizing an equal and reciprocal love. For Beauvoir, the ideal love allows her to keep her true nature and do what she wants; to "accompany" her for a lifetime without "consuming her" completely.
Satellite-like lovers, surrounded by the contractual love between Beauvoir and Sartre. Algren, a Beauvoir-American lover writer who wrote slum stories in Chicago, was "as rude as a boxer" and took her to notorious bars and meet thieves, drug dealers and prostitutes. Sartre's young students, the French journalist Bost, the youthful Cossack sisters Orga and Wanda, the energetic Bourdain, the 25-year-old director and philosopher Claude Landsmann, and Sartre's countless third parties have all brought youth and vitality, as well as exhaustion and torture, to their lives.
Existential love believes in the power of transparency, which is certainly the ideal situation. Usually, deception in love is always there. "Incomplete sharing is perhaps the worst kind of betrayal," said Franwald, the heroine of Beauvoir's novel "The Lady.". In the 1950s, this kind of contractual love both provoked social criticism and anger, and was also overly idealized.
1974, Beauvoir/Visual China
As Beauvoir himself said, "It is ridiculous to think of us as models. People have to find their own common hobbies and their own way of getting along. "Contractual love contains a revolutionary character against the ravages of life, but there is also violence and cruelty in its essence," and it is a wall built to resist the pain of love, to resist the destruction that passion can incur. "When you have that sense of security, you don't get jealous. However, once the stability of the contract is destroyed, jealousy and harm will appear.
Argren, the lover who had proposed to Beauvoir many times and later parted ways with her, satirized this contractual love: "How can love be accidental?" ...... Stripped of all philosophical jargon, she actually meant that she and Sartre had created a petty-bourgeois decency behind which she could continue to search for her own femininity. Madame Beauvoir felt she could trust Jean-Paul Sartre's infidelity. How clever! He denied the illusion of contractual love, arguing that Beauvoir, while ready to give everything to preserve his freedom, was never willing to take any realistic risks.
A similar situation occurred in Sartre's "accidental lover". Sartre once proposed to the Russian female translator Zonina. But the balance of Zona's world was later upset by the weightlessness of the contract: "The more I look at Beaver's Memoirs, the more I realize that I will never change those things." In proposing a breakup to Sartre, Zonina wrote: "Together you and the beaver have created an amazing thing, but it is so dangerous for those who are close to it. ”
The vague sexual morality practiced by Beauvoir and Sartre is also extremely dangerous by the standards of today's anti-sexual harassment movement, and it is bound to bring them to ruin. "Beauvoir was a hunter who searched for fresh, young flesh among his schoolgirls, tasted it himself, and gave it to Sartre to enjoy," Bianca, a young lover of Beauvoir and Sartre, once wrote an autobiographical complaint that the two of them were consuming their lives. Beauvoir and Sartre's avant-garde love at the time was no longer in line with today's demands for "political correctness" in gender.
The book "The Philosopher and Love" summarizes the pattern of "lovers in the café of the god of flowers" in this way: the process of mutual derailment, which is ultimately a bourgeois life, "like a comedy between the gods of Olympus, and Beauvoir has played the play to the end." Novelist Doris Lessing has also said that she has never believed in the "illusory and revolutionary love union" between Sartre and Beauvoir. In her view, Beauvoir was merely acting "like a woman," while Sartre was only "like a man." The fact is that the flow and pain of love are still eternally opposed, which is the ultimate truth in the relationship between men and women.
Sociologist Anthony Giddens believes that open relationships may be the most suitable way to fall in love today. But after Sartre and Beauvoir, love remains what it once was: a painful question.
"I think people will still read me for some time to come. I contributed a little bit to the discussion of women's issues. I know this from the letters sent to me by readers. Beauvoir was actually well aware of his own intellectual contribution.
After the Bohemian upsurge of Paris in the 1930s, and the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s, Beauvoir's The Second Sex came out in 1949 during this period. In the process of writing, she combed through a large number of historical, biological, psychoanalytic and other documents, and gradually realized that her "female" identity is both universal and special.
It's easy for Beauvoir to travel alone, it's easy to write in a café, and it's no longer difficult to stand shoulder to shoulder with any male writer. This strengthens her sense of independence and equality, and makes it easy for her to forget that a female secretary is absolutely unable to enjoy the privileges she has —people who are accustomed to enjoying dividends often lack awareness of their dominant position.
Although many Americans see Second Sex as the source of the contemporary feminist movement, in fact, the contemporary feminist movement in the United States began five or six years before the book was published, and is dedicated to the political and social rights of women. Beauvoir was more like a late entrant, and she herself was initially closer to a philosopher who was constantly exploring herself than a feminist who was keen on social activity. The writing of "The Second Sex" is also a gender enlightenment for her.
Beauvoir became a "feminist" in the sense it is today, more precisely after being involved in the development of the movement. Her profound and profound thoughts provide a powerful theoretical weapon for these realistic feminist movements.
In The Power of The Times, she also claimed that she "avoided falling into the trap of 'feminism'" when writing The Second Sex. It wasn't until 1972, in an interview with German journalist Alise Schwartzer, that Beauvoir first claimed to be a "feminist."
Funeral at Beauvoir, Paris, April 19, 1986 Photo/Visual China
After 1968, the May Storm and the Sexual Liberation Movement dramatically changed social attitudes in Europe and the United States. Beauvoir's work seems to be more popular with Americans than in France, and she is more inspired by the actions of American women. To her, American women seem to be more conscious than women in other countries around the world, because they were the first to realize the paradox between new technologies and the traditional role of women in the kitchen. Of course, this is also because the United States is the most advanced in social and technological development, mental labor is replacing physical labor, and the patriarchal consciousness of "women are inferior and only deserve to be attached" has gradually lost its practical support.
In France, a large number of women's organizations and feminist classes have also emerged. Through rally speeches, they confide in each other about things that are difficult to say in front of men. "They had a deep exchange that I had never thought about or understood at the age of 25," Beauvoir later recalled. When she was young, she had many girls around her, but they never formally discussed the plight of women themselves, as they did; just as she was immersed in the promise of a better bourgeois future in her youth, she did not yet understand that "the world is made of pain and oppression."
If it was Sartre's political enthusiasm that led Beauvoir to understand the war situation and to go deep into the real situation of the real world, then the rise of women's actions at that time also gave Beauvoir's philosophical thinking a gender body. True friendship between women begins based on an awakening to the situation: "In the early days, women never really became friends with other women. They see each other as rivals, arguing better than competitors and not being enemies. ”
In an interview with the Paris Review, a reporter asked Beauvoir: How do you think about your future life?
Beauvoir's answer was quite the zeitgeist of the revolution and love of the 20th century: "All I know is that I will continue to be with women, with feminists and their organizations." I will continue to do something for feminism in some way, calling it a 'revolutionary struggle' for the time being. I knew I would always be with Sartre unless one of us went first. ”
(Thanks to Liu Haiping and Tang Ling for their inspiration for this article.) References: Kate Kirkpatrick's "Becoming Beauvoir", "Paris Review: Interviews with Women Writers" edited by the editorial board of the Paris Review, "The Philosopher and Love: From Socrates to Beauvoir", Simone de Beauvoir, Qu Mingzhen," "Female Sartre," or a female philosopher? ——Reappraisal of Beauvoir's Philosophical Status, Dai Jinhua, "Traces of Time: Simone Beauvoir in China")