In 1945, Merleau-Ponty published an extensive study in the philosophy of experience, titled La phénoménologie de la perception.1 The book is a phenomenological inquiry into the living body; it studies the perceptions, emotions, and movements of the body as well as the world surrounding the body and appearing to it. In addition to traditional philosophical topics, Merleau-Ponty addresses the problem of sexuality. He argues that sexuality cannot be explained as a specific function of the body but must be understood as an expression of existence.
Merleau-Ponty’s first publication, La structure du comportement (finished 1938, published 1942),2 had dealt with similar subjects but was different in its methodology. Merleau-Ponty had acquainted himself with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology through secondary sources already in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but it was not until 1939 that he started to work systematically with Husserl’s publications and manuscripts.3 This research period led Merleau-Ponty to adopt Husserl’s descriptive transcendental approach and the methods of reduction that made possible a philosophical study of experience.4 The new work testified to a comprehensive phenomenological turn in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.
Especially important to Merleau-Ponty were Husserl’s detailed descriptions of the body and his late reflections on the crisis of science.5 But Merleau-Ponty was also influenced by several interpreters and critics of Husserl, above all Eugen Fink, Martin Heidegger, and Aron Gurwitsch. He did not uncritically accept Husserl’s descriptions and analyses but reworked several of his basic distinctions.
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology had a crucial importance to Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking. We can see his influence in the reference that she makes to his Phénoménologie in the introduction to Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) (1949). The three central ideas that she leans on are Merleau-Ponty’s description of the living body, his notion of sexuality, and his understanding of the temporal nature of experience.
But Le deuxième sexe is not the first document of Beauvoir’s philosophical encounter with Merleau-Ponty. Beauvoir wrote a review for Les temps modernes on Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie right after its appearance in 1945.6 The text is short—in its original printing only five pages long—but it has a great importance to our understanding of Beauvoir’s thought. It illuminates the phenomenological background of Beauvoir’s own inquiries, most importantly Le deuxième sexe, which for a long time has been considered as lacking any philosophical content.
When Beauvoir read Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, she was already familiar with the principles of Husserl’s new philosophy. She tells in her autobiography that in 1934 and 1935 she studied Husserl’s works in German as well as Fink’s explications of them.7 She also knew Heidegger’s critical response to Husserl, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1927), as well as Emmanuel Lévinas’s early study Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (1930), and discussed all these sources eagerly with Sartre (FA, 157, 404, 497; PL, 135–36, 355, 433).8
So Beauvoir read Merleau-Ponty’s book with a good background in phenomenological philosophy. This made it possible for her to find easily the core of Merleau-Ponty’s argumentation and to identify the original aspects of his work. She gives a clear view of the merits of the book and takes on a comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s approach and that of Sartre, presented in L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) two years earlier (1943).
Beauvoir emphasizes that Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the body, its expressivity and sexuality, are faithful to experience as it is lived. Merleau-Ponty does not build a theoretical system, as Hegel and Sartre did. His philosophical goal is not constructive but critical: he aims at revealing the flow of experiences as the hidden basis of all theoretical and conceptual constructions.
There are two remarks in Beauvoir’s review that are especially important from the point of view of understanding her own philosophical work. The first discussion concerns ethics, and the second is about the notion of subjectivity.
Beauvoir starts her review by reminding her reader of the achievements of phenomenological philosophy. She points out that this philosophy abolishes the opposition between subject and object. In the phenomenological framework, the object is always given to a subject, and the subject is always directed toward an object. The two are interdependent but can be separated by analysis (see FA, 157, 404, 497; PL, 135–36, 355, 433).
Here Beauvoir refers to Husserl’s well-known thesis about the intentionality of experience. Husserl argued that every experience is intentional; that is, every experience is an experience of something, directed toward some kind of an object or another.9 The subjective side of the experience includes such states or acts as perceiving, imagining, knowing, valuing, and desiring. The objective side includes different kinds of objects, for example, perceivable things, imaginable things, facts, states of affairs, and values. The two sides correlate in systematic ways, and the correlation can be studied by the phenomenological methods of reduction.10
In the review, Beauvoir states that the phenomenological notion of intentionality has far-reaching philosophical implications that are especially important to our understanding of ethics. She does not, however, specify what these ethical implications are. To find an account, one has to turn to her essay Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity) (1947).11 In this text, Beauvoir argues that values are not provided by nature or by God. The source of values is not in some natural or supernatural being but in our own actions, interactions, and practices. For Beauvoir, an existentialist attitude in ethics means that we recognize our role in the constitution of values and take responsibility for it (MA, 20–21; EA, 13–15).
Le deuxième sexe is an application of this notion of ethics to the problem of women’s subordination. Beauvoir argues that every explanation offered thus far for women’s subjection rests on a naïve notion of values. Thus, a radical philosophical inquiry into the subjection of women must problematize the validity and origin of human and natural values.12
The other important aspect of Beauvoir’s review concerns the notion of subjectivity. The traditional understanding has been that Beauvoir was Sartre’s faithful pupil and that she merely applied Sartre’s philosophy to concrete problems—in Le deuxième sexe, to the problem of the sexual hierarchy.
It is only recently that scholars have approached Beauvoir’s texts without assuming that they are applications of Sartre’s ontological doctrines. This work has shown that Beauvoir’s philosophy has several sources and that her analysis of sexual relation is based on her original understanding of existentialist ethics.13
The review, even if short, testifies to the complexity of Beauvoir’s thinking. Beauvoir distances herself from Sartre’s ontology and describes Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as a fruitful alternative. Its strength is in its nondualist notion of subjectivity, based on a phenomenological inquiry into the experience of temporality. This includes an implicit criticism of Sartre’s account of consciousness and subjectivity.
In 1936–37, Sartre had published an article, “La transcendance de l’ego: esquisse d’une description phénoménologique” (The Transcendence of the Ego), which criticized Husserl’s notion of the subject. Sartre argued that Husserl’s claims about the subject or the ego are unwarranted and defy Husserl’s phenomenological method.
In Ideen (Ideas), Husserl had claimed that the phenomenological reduction that discloses the pure consciousness does not nullify the ego as a principle that unifies the passing experiences. The ego necessarily belongs to every possible experience. Sartre stated against Husserl that the ego is nothing but an object of consciousness. Consciousness has no ipseity; it is nothing but a series of nonmotivated nihilating acts. As such it is empty of all content and form, “absolutely empty,” as Beauvoir explains in La force de l’âge (FA, 240; PL, 208).
In the review, Beauvoir points out that Merleau-Ponty’s work offers an alternative to the doctrine of the empty consciousness. In Merleau-Ponty’s description, consciousness is not opposed to being but forms “a hollow, a fold” in it.
As noted, commentators have traditionally assumed that Beauvoir follows Sartre in the controversy about subjectivity. The review gives evidence that the question of interpretation is more complex.
Beauvoir’s discussions of subjectivity have many more starting points than just Sartre’s works. They are inspired by Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel, Nietzsche’s attack on Christian morality, and the different interpretations of phenomenology that she studied. To these she adds a radical question about the sexual hierarchy, stemming from the works of Virginia Woolf and other woman writers.
If we let go of the assumption that Beauvoir’s philosophical position adheres to the commitments of her private life, then it becomes possible to pose scholarly questions of interpretation. We can ask if Beauvoir’s discussion of subjectivity really is similar to that of Sartre, or perhaps nearer to that of Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger. These questions are still largely unanswered, but the discussion of Beauvoir’s philosophy has already begun.
1. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
2. See Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon, 1963).
3. On Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s texts, see Ted Toadvine, “Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl: A Chronological Overview,” in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, ed. Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 221–86.
4. On Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology, see Sara Heinämaa, “From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Husserl’s Reduction,” in Toadvine and Embree, Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl, 127–46.
5. Husserl gives a detailed description and analysis of the experience of the living body in the second book of his Ideen. This work was not published until 1952, long after Husserl’s death, but Merleau-Ponty studied it as a manuscript in the Husserl archive in Louvain. He was also well acquainted with the late work Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, which involved an extensive critique and analysis of the crisis of science. For Husserl’s description of the body and its influence on the so-called existentialist philosophies, see Sara Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
6. Simone de Beauvoir, “La phénoménologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Les temps modernes 1, no. 2 (1945): 363–67. See also Beauvoir’s later essay, “Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme,” in Privilèges (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), reprinted from Les temps modernes 10, nos. 114–15 (1955): 2072–2122; it appears in English as “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” trans. Veronique Zaytzeff, in Jon Stewart, ed.: The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), reprinted from International Studies in Philosophy 21 (1989): 3–48.
7. See Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 231, 254 (hereafter referred to as FA), trans. Peter Green as The Prime of Life (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Eng.: Penquin Books, 1962), 201, 221 (hereafter referred to as PL).
8. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); Emmanuel Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
9. A good nontechnical introduction to Husserl’s notion of intentionality is given by Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8–21.
10. Husserl’s notion of intentionality has its roots in Brentano’s philosophy, and from there we can trace the notion back to medieval discussions of the different modes of existence. But Husserl gave Brentano’s idea of intentionality a whole new interpretation and developed methodological and conceptual tools that made possible a detailed description and analysis of the different modes, aspects, and levels of intentionality.
11. Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), trans. Bernard Frechtman as The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1994) (hereafter referred to as MA and EA, respectively).
12. A more detailed account of this argument is given in Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference; see also Heinämaa, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Sexual Difference,” Hypatia 14, no. 4 (1999): 114–32, and idem, “The Body as an Instrument and the Body as an Expression,” in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 66–86.
13. See Michèle Le Dœuff, “De l’existentialisme au Deuxième sexe,” Le Magazine Littéraire 145 (1979), in English, “Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism,” Feminist Studies 6, no. 2 (1980): 277–89; Margaret A. Simons, “Beauvoir and Sartre: The Question of Influence,” and “The Silencing of Simone de Beauvoir: Guess What’s Missing from The Second Sex,” both in Beauvoir and “The Second Sex”: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Margaret A. Simons, “Beauvoir and Sartre: The Philosophical Relationship,” in “Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to the Century,” ed. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 165–79; Judith Butler, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex,” ibid., 35–49; Michèle Le Dœuff, L’étude et le rouet (Paris: Seuil, 1989), trans. Trista Selous as Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity, and Society (New York: Routledge, 1990); Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Kön och existens: Studier i Simone de Beauvoirs “Le Deuxième Sexe” (1992), trans. Linda Schenck as Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (London: Athlone, 1996); Sara Heinämaa, “What Is a Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of the Sexual Difference,” Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1996): 20–39; Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); Heinämaa, “Simone de Beauvoir’s Phenomenology of Sexual Difference”; Jo-Ann Pilardi, Simone de Beauvoir Writing the Self: Philosophy Becomes Autobigraphy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999); Eleanore Holveck, Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); and Heinämaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference.