Beauvoir: The Mother of Existentialism

Edward Fullbrook

The Times Higher Education Supplement. 3 December 1993, p. 15.

She Came To Stay, Simone de Beauvoir's novel, is the only book that has ever driven me to throw it across the room. The first time I read the novel, it caused me no offense at all. But as I began to read it again, the sudden awareness of what this book is really about made me realize that for twenty-five years I had greatly esteemed the wrong person as a philosopher.

At the time of my rereading of She Came To Stay, Kate Fullbrook and I had been working for several years on a biography of the sexual and literary partnership of Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Since their deaths in the 1980s, half a dozen major biographies had been written, and so, when we began our project it seemed nothing new remained to be said.

But in the course of our research two important new sets of documents appeared: Beauvoir's letters to Sartre and her war diaries. These disclosed Beauvoir's bisexuality, a revelation the media reported with glee. Our interest, however, was less in Beauvoir's lesbianism than her repeated denial of it, even in her old age when the truth would not have harmed her.

Her letters and diaries showed she also, in interviews and in her four volumes of autobiography, made many other misrepresentations. Some seemed understandable, others simply bizarre, such as the elaborate untruth she had told biographer Deirdre Bair, about when she had written She Came To Stay.

Realization that Beauvoir, and Sartre, had frequently lied about the nature of their relationship gave fresh significance to the discovery in 1986, the year of Beauvoir's death, that her repeated insistence that she never had any philosophical ideas of her own nor influenced Sartre's philosophy was profoundly untrue.

The earlier revelation had arisen in a most curious and ultimately disturbing way. An American scholar, Margaret Simons, had set about merely comparing the dates at which the concept of the "Social Other" (as opposed to the "Individual Other" as found in Being and Nothingness) first appeared in Sartre's and Beauvoir's works.

This concept, with its underlying theory, has been one of the most influential of the century, having, from the period of decolonization onwards, provided a powerful intellectual lever for liberation movements, as well as being an idea, like the Unconscious, now used in all manner of cultural criticism.

The invention of the idea of the "Social Other" has always been credited to Sartre, in whose post-1950 philosophy it plays a key role. Simons, however, noted that Beauvoir worked out the concept in her The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, books published well before Sartre began to write the work in which he first used the notion.

It seemed incomprehensible how these facts, which Simons published in the prestigious Yale French Review, could have gone unnoticed for so long. Unlike Beauvoir's bisexuality, this discovery that a major idea of the century had originated with a woman was found not to be newsworthy.

Sartre scholars chose to ignore completely Simon's incontrovertible evidence, demonstrating that there is one more right that women have not yet won. "Crediting women with major ideas," said someone recently at a dinner party, "is the last taboo."

Beauvoir's autobiographies had established the basis of the legend surrounding her partnership with Sartre, which, in the main, was faithfully retold by the couple's numerous biographers. But now, armed with a growing appreciation of the pair's capacity for falsehood and with Beauvoir's newly released letters and journals, Kate Fullbrook and I set about re-scrutinizing the famous relationship. Almost at once, old verities crumbled before our eyes. The truth emerged nearly as the inverse of the legend.

Beauvoir had not been a virgin when she met Sartre in 1929, but rather the current lover of one his closest friends. It had not been Beauvoir who had initially pressed for marriage, but rather Sartre. Their agreement that they should each be allowed to have "contingent" loves had been initiated to satisfy Beauvoir's demands, not Sartre's. Soon, in addition to frequent random couplings, Beauvoir was sleeping not just with one, but with two of Sartre's best friends. And as the pair became thirty-something it was Beauvoir, not Sartre, who threatened to forsake the other for someone younger.

These discoveries regarding the sexual and romantic side of Sartre-and-Beauvoir aggravated a growing worry of ours. According to the legend, at the time of Sartre and Beauvoir's first meeting, as they prepared for their final university exams, she had been not only his intellectual equal but also had provided many of the ideas for their endless philosophical discussions.

But, the legend continued, after college Beauvoir became passive in the face of Sartre's intellect, serving for rest of her life merely as a hyper-competent midwife to his fecund philosophical imagination.

Simons's discovery, however, had shown that from the mid 1940s on the Sartre-and-Beauvoir legend regarding the source of their philosophical ideas had no basis in fact. Beauvoir's denial of contributing to "Sartre's" later philosophy had been a lie told for reasons we could not fathom. Perhaps she also had lied about not having originated any of the ideas in Being and Nothingness (1943), the primary basis of Sartre's reputation as one of the century's most important philosophers.

Our research had turned up many facts pointing circumstantially to this conclusion. There were the numerous hints in Beauvoir's writing, that she had helped with the making of Sartre's philosophical system.

There was the fact that in the mid 1930s, as Sartre's interest turned away from philosophy, Beauvoir renewed her commitment to it. There were their joint admissions that Beauvoir, not Sartre, was the expert on phenomenology and that his German hadn't been up to reading Heidegger.

Instead it had been Beauvoir, they revealed in an interview in their old age, who had read the German existentialist in 1936, with Sartre reading only those passages that she translated for him. Her letters and diaries also described how she, not Sartre, read and analyzed Hegel at the end of the 1930s.

Then there was the question of whether it was humanly possible to have done all that Sartre and Sartre scholars claimed he did between 17 February 1940, when he had his first original philosophical ideas, and October 1942, when he submitted his manuscript of Being and Nothingness for publication.

The feats claimed for Sartre in this period of 32 months include the following: read and closely analyzed Hegel and Heidegger; invented from scratch his own highly original and monumental philosophical system; wrote a 700 page account of his philosophy; wrote, produced and acted in a play, wrote and published another one; wrote one and a half long novels; wrote numerous articles; spent four months as soldier in an army at war; spent nine months as a prisoner of war; escaped from a German prison camp; worked for a year as full-time lycée teacher; seduced many young women; organized a resistance movement; travelled for a whole summer by bicycle through France, and so on.

On paper Sartre looked like an intellectual Arnold Schwarzenegger character, a stereotypical male fantasy.

My own admiration for Sartre had always been focused on his existentialist philosophy as expounded in Being and Nothingness. Reading it was one of the key intellectual adventures of my youth. I felt gratitude towards someone whose ideas had for so long enriched my mental life. Yet I was apprehensive about the need now to reconsider those ideas.

In the quarter century since my Sartrean feast I had digested a lot of philosophy, most of it in the analytic tradition. Rereading Being and Nothingness, I was delighted to find that my youthful ardour had been so well placed. The metaphysical daring, logical strength and, above all, human relevance of Sartre's philosophical system was no less impressive than I remembered.

Hard evidence of a contribution by Beauvoir to that system had failed to materialize, as our publisher's deadline neared.

But the circumstantial evidence was so overwhelming that we no longer found remotely plausible the notion that Beauvoir had contributed nothing to Sartrean existentialism. We also felt that somewhere in the vast stack of Sartre-and-Beauvoir biographical material were the rigid facts that would nail the case.

Scholar's pride on the one hand, and on the other the hope that the last taboo might fall in our lifetimes, drove us to repeatedly reexamine the main documents. We were looking for a five or, just perhaps, a ten per cent contribution.

Sartre's War Diaries told us that the genesis of his philosophical system had begun, for him, suddenly and spectacularly on February 17, 1940. For months he had laboured to come up with original philosophical ideas, and, by his own admission, had failed totally. But on the 17th, having returned the previous morning from 11 days leave in Paris, Sartre began one of those fabled bouts of male creativity. In the next 11 days our philosopher-hero sketched in his diary the rough outline of the philosophical system of Being and Nothingness.

For the nth time I reread the entry of the 17th. In it Sartre credits Beauvoir with a very minor philosophical idea. He indicated that while on leave he had gleaned this idea from her then unpublished novel She Came To Stay. I recalled how she had convinced her biographer, Bair, that she had written hardly any of her novel at the time of Sartre's February leave and how the letters she had left to be discovered after her death proved this to be untrue.

It took forty minutes to find the passage mid-novel from which Sartre had picked up the inconsequential concept which he named "unrealizables". I recalled that Beauvoir's diaries show that Sartre, while on leave, had at least eight reading sessions with She Came To Stay.

Still, I could not imagine how he could have spotted this one small philosophical nugget. Unless, of course, (as one does with his novel Nausea) he had read the whole of Beauvoir's novel as a philosophical text. I opened She Came To Stay at random and began reading. It was a philosophical text! I turned back to page one. By the time I'd finished reading the first chapter, nine pages, I'd read a succinct and lucid outline of the central arguments of Sartrean existentialism.

Sartre in his diaries, it was suddenly clear, had merely been transcribing the philosophical system he had found in Beauvoir's novel. Sartrean existentialism is really Beauvoirean existentialism.

Edward Fullbrook is co-author with Kate Fullbrook of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth Century Legend, to be published by Basic Books in January 1994.

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