In the second volume of her autobiography, Force of Circumstance, Simone de Beauvoir describes the literary, political, and personal situations in Paris that gave rise to her essay “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom,” which was first published in the third issue of Les temps modernes, 1945. In 1948, it became the title essay in a collection of previously published short pieces. The year 1945 was the occasion of an “existentialist offensive.”1 Beauvoir’s novel The Blood of Others and Sartre’s The Age of Reason and The Reprieve were published; Les temps modernes was launched; Sartre lectured on existentialism as a humanism, while Beauvoir spoke on the novel and metaphysics; and Beauvoir’s play Les bouches inutiles (The Useless Mouths) was produced. Beauvoir, like Sartre, first rejected the name existentialism, coined by Gabriel Marcel, but accepted it in the end.
At first the public, disillusioned with ideologies based on neo-Kantian universal values, reason, and progress, viewed existentialism’s emphasis on free individual choice as compatible with bourgeois values; amidst the ruin of all other absolute values, at least freedom remained. Soon, however, right-wing critics attacked Sartre and, by association, “la grande Sartreuse” (FC, 46), as a “poet of the sewers, philosopher of nothingness” (FC, 45). Communists found Being and Nothingness a barrier to a philosophy of history (FC, 43) and classified it as a minor aspect of bourgeois ideology. Les temps modernes allowed Beauvoir to respond. “I would read an article that made me angry and say to myself immediately: ‘I must answer that!’ That’s how all the essays I wrote . . . came into being” (FC, 48).
To give a brief summary, then, “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom” is a defense of existentialism against its right- and left-wing critics in post–World War II France. Beauvoir argues that popular wisdom is characterized by two contradictory and ultimately unacceptable views of man: ideal versus real; a rational Kantian idealism versus an egoistic, utilitarian pessimism. Existentialism’s view of singular, existing freedom undermines both contradictions and presents a view of human beings as having the free choice to act authentically in the world, thereby taking responsibility for all past and future values. Despite the ephemeral character of this essay, its major themes reveal serious philosophical issues echoed in works that Beauvoir wrote at the same time and illuminate Beauvoir’s philosophical development up to The Ethics of Ambiguity. The essay also sheds light on Beauvoir’s philosophical method in The Second Sex.
Beauvoir begins her essay with the accusation that existentialism emphasizes man’s wretched condition; it denies friendship and love and abandons man in pure subjectivity, bereft of an objective world and any objective values. Beauvoir answers that popular wisdom cannot face and accept the finite character of human existence; therefore, it attempts to deal with human problems by means of two contradictory strategies. On the one hand, human beings turn to the arts to give them heroic portraits of noble human beings; popular songs, films, novels, public ceremonies, and epitaphs in cemeteries conspire to present an ideal man: patient, modest, selfless, courageous. At the same time, however, popular wisdom mocks a degraded image. From the fathers of the church to literary and philosophical moralists like Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, human nature is characterized by a psychology of cynical self-interest. Under his heroic armor, man is a Hobbesian wolf to other men.
To exemplify this stark dichotomy between the ideal and the real, Beauvoir turns to marriage, love, and friendship. Love is loftily affirmed in speeches at weddings and funerals and in light novels, operas, and films. Lip service to the noble institution of marriage, however, gives way to the shrewish wives and lecherous husbands of comedy routines in farce and vaudeville. As early as her 1935–37 collection of short stories, When Things of the Spirit Come First, Beauvoir underlined the contradiction between spiritual ideals and brutal reality. Jacques Maritain’s “greatest freedom of spirit,”2 reason following faith, turns into Madam Vignon’s attempt to force her daughter, Anne, to give up her true love in order to marry the richer, older man chosen by her parents.3 In Les bouches inutiles, the important men of Vaucelles are building a monument to human freedom, a stone belfry, at the same time that they are planning to abandon the elderly, infants, and women to enemies outside the city gates, in order to preserve enough food for themselves until they are rescued by an approaching army.
Beauvoir’s use of popular wisdom in common sayings, newspapers, and best sellers obviously owes something to Martin Heidegger’s discussion of the they-self in Being and Time. For Heidegger, Dasein loses his authentic self in the world of everydayness, characterized by das man. An analysis of this phenomenon precedes Heidegger’s discussion of authentic existence, just as Beauvoir’s analysis of the many things that “they say” precedes her discussion of authenticity. Perhaps more important, Beauvoir reveals her interpretation of Hegel in her discussion of the contradiction between the “image of the generous and heroic man erected in public places and the image of the bestial and selfish man forged by the bitterness of daily life.” What is at stake is the status of the individual in reference to the universal.
In his Présentation of the first issue of Les temps modernes, Sartre describes two methods of dealing with the individual/universal distinction in Hegel. The bourgeoisie use the myth of the universal to approach individual men by means of the analytic method. From this viewpoint, the individual is a simple element, “the vehicle of human nature . . . like a pea in a can of peas. . . . All men are brothers: fraternity is a passive bond among distinct molecules.”4 Individuals are social or psychological atoms viewed from a universal point of view. Les temps modernes, on the other hand, uses a method Sartre calls “synthetic anthropology” (Sartre, 261), viewing men as having in common “not a nature but a metaphysical condition . . . the necessity of being born and dying, that of being finite and of existing in the world among other men” (Sartre, 260). Viewed synthetically, men make themselves. A man, for example, makes himself a worker. “Though he is completely conditioned by his class . . . conditioned even in his feelings and his thoughts, it is nevertheless up to him to decide on the meaning of his condition and that of his comrades” (Sartre, 265).
Beauvoir’s analysis might seem to agree with Sartre’s; however, I would submit that there is a major difference in emphasis. Beauvoir argues in “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom” that contradictions in popular wisdom permit men “to jump from one plane of truth to another.” The self of the ethics of self-interest is “an object of the world.” Likewise, “[i]n edifying stories, young people smile as they die for their country. . . . [W]e are demigods as we eat and sleep.” For Beauvoir, one must reject both the universal and the individual, which lead to bad faith, and her solution anticipates her position in The Ethics of Ambiguity. “I exist as an authentic subject, in a constantly renewed upspringing that is opposed to the fixed reality of things. I throw myself without help and without guidance into a world. . . . I am free, and my projects are not defined by preexisting interests.” Instead of floundering between an ideal of perfect love between soul mates united in a permanent sacred union, or giving in to a brute desire to possess, which day by day forges a chain that weighs down two people who ultimately loath their cellmates, two people can freely choose to meet, to act together, to love each other today, knowing that their free choice must be constantly renewed.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir describes existential conversion, which brackets all beliefs in absolutes, whether that absolute be a universal value or a factual individual, as analogous to Husserl’s phenomenological epoché. Existential conversion reveals not my stance as an individual in the light of the universal, but my free existence as a singular, gushing, spurting spontaneity.5 At the same time, the existential freedom of others is revealed. In this essay about popular wisdom, Beauvoir seems not to have quite formulated existential conversion. She emphasizes, rather, that existing freedoms are separate and that action in the world overcomes the separation. “The separation of consciousnesses is thus a metaphysical fact, yet man can surmount it. He can, through the world, unite himself to other men. Existentialists are so far from denying love, friendship, and fraternity that in their eyes the only way for each individual to find the foundation and accomplishment of his being is in these human relationships.” Hence, by acting freely in the world, by recognizing the freedom of others in my action, I create myself and others as free and accept responsibility for my choice.
The emphasis on action, without prior description of existential conversion, is characteristic of Pyrrhus and Cineas and The Blood of Others. In the latter novel, Beauvoir describes the creation of a new sense of family through actions centering around the heroine, Hélène Bertrand. In occupied France, a young girl, a stranger, rescues Hélène by giving her food and finding transportation for her by claiming that she is her sister. Hélène is not Yvonne’s biological sister nor is Paul her brother, but she creates them as free sister and brother with her free action of driving a truck to help them escape Nazi prisons.
Beauvoir’s emphasis on freedom of action is more radical, more existential, more grounded in the world, than Sartre’s. A woman is not completely conditioned by class or biological facts, or even in her feelings and thoughts, as Sartre would have it. Beauvoir’s method in The Second Sex is both analytic and synthetic. She studies the universals, and then she studies how the universals are used to create the individuals, how women are not born but rather become, that is, develop into, grow up to be, similar peas in the same can. But in the midst of all the descriptions on the level of things—universal things, individual things—there is the hope that what man has made might be unmade and remade by women. Beauvoir’s political actions for and with other women after writing The Second Sex suggest that her position in 1945 remained with her. She chose to act in the world with other women. Her autobiography is not filled with heroic clichés, nor is it the saga of a woman determined by her sex, her psychological makeup, or her class. Rather, her autobiography presents an example of a singular freedom struggling to act in the world, creating a world where she is free and others are free with her, and taking responsibility for her actions as a real woman.
1. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Putnam, 1965), 38 (hereafter referred to as FC).
2. Jacques Maritain, The Things That Are Not Caesar’s, trans. J. F. Scanlon (London: Sheed and Ward, 1930), 25.
3. Simone de Beauvoir, When Things of the Spirit Come First, trans. Patrick O’Brian (1935–37; New York: Pantheon, 1982), 119–20.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Introducing Les temps modernes,” in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays, trans. Bernard Frechtman (1948; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 256 (hereafter referred to as “Sartre,” followed by page number).
5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (1948; New York: Citadel, 1976), 25.