Since Peter Burke published The Fabrication of Louis XIV in 1992, research in the name fabrication has exploded, with scholars and writers focusing on discovering the history of image making, dissemination, and reception.
In 2019, Kate Kirkpatrick, a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, published the best biography of Beauvoir to date under the title Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. The intention of the title is obvious, and the author uses Beauvoir's famous point of view: "Women are not born, but acquired." However, in the process of "becoming" Beauvoir, Beauvoir himself and others joined forces to "create" a public figure named "Simone de Beauvoir".
Putting aside sartre, existentialist, feminist and the like, what kind of person is the real Beauvoir?
Simone Beauvoir
Don't be Miss de Beauvoir
Simone Beauvoir was born in 1908 to a family of declining aristocrats in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the son of a lawyer and the daughter of a merchant. Beauvoir began reading at an early age and showed talent, and her family worked hard to cultivate her interest in reading.
After entering the marriageable age, Simone's father began to resent her intelligence. She seemed too smart to get married, and girls from aristocratic families were expected to marry on time, and staying in school or becoming a teacher was not a decent choice.
At the age of sixteen, Beauvoir began to think about love and marriage. She doesn't like housework and doesn't want to let trivial matters delay her reading and thinking. But once into marriage— which is usually a woman's destiny — she had to become a housewife who took care of the housework.
After graduating from secondary school, Beauvoir went on to study for his diploma. In that year, she was fascinated by philosophy and determined to pass the French Philosophy Teacher Qualification Examination. Even though her parents objected, she continued to study and take exams. Over the next two and a half years, Beauvoir passed six qualifications in mathematics, French literature, Latin, history of philosophy, introduction to philosophy, and Greek, equivalent to a university diploma and a half.
In July 1927, Beauvoir again decided to "articulate his philosophical ideas clearly." She wants to delve into topics of interest, especially "love" and "the opposition of the self to others." In his diary, Beauvoir told himself, "Don't be Miss de Beauvoir, be yourself." Don't chase the goals imposed on you from the outside, don't blindly follow the established social structure. ”
In 1929, at the age of 21, Beauvoir passed the philosophy teacher examination, the youngest candidate ever to pass the examination, and became the first female teacher in French history to teach philosophy at a boys' school. Also in this year, when she was preparing for the review, she joined the review group of Sartre and her friends and met Sartre.
After 13 days of knowing Sartre, Beauvoir wrote in his diary: "He understood me, he could see through me, and I was fascinated by him." A few weeks later, she wrote: "My mind, my body, but most of all, my mind has gained an incomparable friend." The companion of the body and mind, others can also do, but the friend of the mind is only him, irreplaceable. ”
On October 14, 1929, Sartre and Beauvoir went for a walk, and they made a two-year pact, stipulating that they could have other lovers besides each other, and promising to tell each other everything. To distinguish himself from other less important lovers, Sartre told Beauvoir, "There is essential love between us, but we can also experience contingent love." ”
Since then, the histories of the two of them have entangled with each other, opening a lifelong story.
In 1955, Beauvoir and Sartre were in Beijing
In 1986, hunan literature and art publishing house published "The Second Sex", the author was translated as Simon Beauva
Beauvoir's work has been criticized
Beauvoir and Sartre were fairly close collaborators, and even in his later years, Sartre claimed that he had never published a single article before the Beauvoir Reading Review. Beauvoir and Sartre were the most popular and controversial intellectual couple of the last century. Unfortunately, almost throughout the 20th century, the public believed that Sartre contributed "intellectuals", while Beauvoir contributed only "the two".
As early as the late 1970s, China introduced Beauvoir. In 1986, Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House published the next volume of "The Second Sex", and on the cover of the book, Beauvoir was called "Simon Beauva", full of romance and delicacy. Later, many people realized that Beauvoir was his family name, and that Simone was the french female name. In translations such as "Beauvoir" and "Beauvoir," we can see what Chinese readers and editors think of Beauvoir—first women, and then philosophers and intellectuals.
Everyone felt that Beauvoir was intellectually dependent on Sartre, and they decided that Beauvoir had no original thinking at all. Many have speculated that Beauvoir's book was written for her by Sartre, and that The Second Sex is a clumsy copy of two of Sartre's hypotheses in Existence and Nothingness and then played on them.
This is not fair, as Sartre paid no special attention to the problem of the situation of women, which haunted Beauvoir for a long time, especially when the problem was intimately bound up with freedom, the other, and love.
Together, Sartre and Beauvoir coined the concept of "self-deception" in the 1930s. Sartre defines self-deception this way in Being and Nothingness: "It is a way of escaping freedom, either by over-identifying with one's own 'facticity' or by over-identifying with one's own 'transcendence'", which is a form of self-deception. This concept leads Sartre to the position that everyone must break free from the limitations of his "real situation", because whatever the situation we are in, we have the freedom to use it to the extreme.
Beauvoir disagreed. She questioned: "What can a woman in a boudoir surpass?" "Theoretically, there is a difference between the freedom to make choices and the right to choose in real-world situations. Most of "The Second Sex" describes the "real situation" of women. However, this work made many philosophers angry.
Philosophy is concerned with the situation of "man", but not with the situation of "woman". Philosophy focuses on "love", but does not focus on "female" love. When Pascal, Kant, and Mill discuss love and justice, love and morality, love and freedom, they are not turned away by philosophy. And when Beauvoir tried to derive this topic into gender relations, in other words, to introduce women into her philosophy, she was immediately opposed and humiliated.
The literary field did not reject Beauvoir, but her literary work was also criticized. In 1954, Beauvoir published the novel "The Merry Tales of the Famous Men", which depicted the situation and worries of French intellectuals after World War II, and won the Goncourt Literary Prize that year. However, perhaps because of the subject matter, many people believe that this work lacks imagination and is completely autobiographical. Beauvoir's other works met a similar fate, with critics convincingly claiming that the novels were chronicles of the "Sartre family."
This assessment was unpleasant, and Beauvoir was bitter about it: "This statement turned my creation into a rash act, even a condemnation of my creation." ”
Not only was Beauvoir considered incapable of originality, but was also seen as a loser and victim of his relationship with Sartre. Sartre pursues Beauvoir's "accidental" lovers, leaving them in a love triangle and four corners.
Beauvoir is seen as a victim because of the conviction that all women still want a man to love her for the rest of their lives. Beauvoir knew all this and her mission, so she dedicated herself to herself. Beauvoir knew that it would take time and freedom to write on his own, and at the same time knew that he would not enter into marriage.
Reacquaint yourself with Beauvoir
In 1959, the American sociologist Owen Goffman published "Self-Presentation in Everyday Life", proposing the theory of dramatization. This theory holds that people behave differently in theater performances on different occasions of daily life based on cultural values, social etiquette, and people's expectations of each other. People's lives are divided into front and back office, and many people behave very differently in front office and back office.
Since Socrates, philosophers have emphasized: "Know yourself." Nietzsche wrote that the task of being born human is to "be yourself." But Beauvoir had to spend a great deal of time dealing with the question of how the human ego is constantly shaped and connected to the other. Women, in particular, are kidnapped by their social roles and front-end images.
Beauvoir asked: What if, as a woman, you are not allowed to "be yourself"? What if being yourself means you're a loser in the roles you're supposed to be—a failed woman, a lover, or a mother? What if being yourself makes you the target of everyone, ridiculed, resented, humiliated?
So, in her memoirs, she chose to hide it. She hid her beloved lovers, with whom she had a strong relationship with men and women, and the words in her letters were warm. It was not until because of the publication of beauvoir's letters, years after beauvoir's death, that the public understood that Beauvoir was not a victim of her relationship with Sartre. She also hid her own personal reflections, and it was not until her diary was published that people were surprised to learn that Beauvoir's thinking on what came to be called existential philosophy predates Sartre's. Although she openly refuted doubts about the originality of her thoughts, she eventually left the spotlight to the "great philosopher" Sartre.
Society is afraid of female geniuses. The media and readers are reluctant to believe the story of two geniuses, and they love the great love of a genius and a slightly intelligent woman.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes that women are always "faced with the dilemma of opposing roles: either to become slaves or to become idols." And women have never been able to choose their own destiny. "For men, success doesn't conflict with their social roles or reduce their likelihood of being loved." But women are in a lose-lose situation: being yourself means not being worthy of love, and if you want to get love, you have to give up on yourself. Sartre once wrote that as human beings, we are "destined to be free." Beauvoir writes here that as women, we are destined to feel divided, destined to be "divided subjects."
Backstage in life, Beauvoir never gave up "becoming" herself. But at the foreground of her life, she was well aware that she was destined to become a "divided subject," and she chose to join the portrayal of "Simon de Beauvoir," a female public intellectual. Fortunately, following Kate Kirkpatrick, we have the opportunity to peel back the foreground illusion and get to know Beauvoir's life-and-death love.
Original title: Making Beauvoir and Becoming Beauvoir
Text/White Ran ran
Source/Beijing Evening News