What is existentialism? For Simone de Beauvoir in 1947, this question, pressed upon her repeatedly by both admirers and detractors during her first extended trip to the United States, was decidedly narrow in scope. It had nothing to do with Heidegger or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Indeed, the question was rarely put to her in the spirit of serious philosophical inquiry. It meant, simply, “Why all the fuss about what’s coming out of Paris these days?”
Ironically, both Beauvoir and Sartre had at first resisted identifying their way of doing philosophy as “existentialist.” The term had been coined in the early 1940s by Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic philosopher and playwright. Beauvoir reports in the second volume of her autobiography that in early 1943, when a philosopher who was putting together a volume of essays on “contemporary ideological trends” asked her if she was an existentialist, her first reaction was embarrassment. Despite having read Kierkegaard and being familiar with Heidegger’s “existential” philosophy, she confesses, “I didn’t understand the meaning of the word.”1 As late as the summer of 1945, Beauvoir claims, Marcel was still trying to force the term on a resistant Sartre. “I shared his irritation,” she notes.2 But the label stuck. Just a few months later, in the wake of a spate of publications by the pair—Sartre’s The Age of Reason and The Reprieve; Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others; the first issues of Les temps modernes—Sartre, “hurled brutally into the arena of celebrity,” would give the most famous lecture of his life, under the title “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” and Beauvoir would publish an article entitled “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom” in their new journal.3
By early 1946, the spotlight was shining on both Beauvoir and Sartre. But it was not always flattering, and since Sartre was all but oblivious to its glare, Beauvoir found herself compelled to take on their critics. “At the time,” she writes in her autobiography, “existentialism was being treated as nihilist philosophy, willfully pessimistic, frivolous, licentious, despairing, and ignoble; some defense had to be made.”4 This defense took form as The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which Beauvoir sets out to show that existentialism, far from being morally bankrupt, provides the resources for a thoroughly ethical way of being in the world. In the Ethics, Beauvoir writes as though her thinking is continuous with that of Sartre—as though there is only one “existentialism” to defend. And yet, as recent scholarship on Beauvoir clearly demonstrates, it is precisely in her defense of “existentialism” that we see Beauvoir clearly taking issue with Sartre’s version.5
Perhaps the starkest difference between Beauvoir’s views and those of Sartre lay in her growing conviction, evident at least as early as Pyrrhus and Cineas (1943), that human freedom is boundless only in principle. In reality, she was coming to see, people’s choices are often hopelessly constrained by their unpromising circumstances. In other words, Beauvoir was beginning to develop a robust conception of oppression, one that cannot be squared with the metaphysics of Being and Nothingness.6 For Sartre, all human beings are in theory capable at any moment of asserting their subjectivity in the face of others’ attempts to objectify them. The task of living, it follows, is to attempt to master one’s circumstances. But for Beauvoir, the temptation to mastery is a dead end. Following Hegel, she began in the mid-1940s to see the task of living as coming to grips with the fundamental ambiguity of being a person—that is, a being at once an object and subject in the world.
In “What Is Existentialism?” Beauvoir names this task as an effort to “surpass” (dépasser) the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity—and other such binary oppositions prevalent in the history of philosophy—by means of what she calls a “new synthesis.” Exactly what this new synthesis is to look like remains rather mysterious, although Beauvoir does attempt to sketch its features. The individual is the source of all signification, but he “has reality only through his engagement in the world.” The human will is free, but it cannot be exercised except “against the obstacles and the oppressions that limit the concrete possibilities of man.” Each person must achieve “his own salvation,” but the only way he can do this is by “working actively for the concrete triumph of universal freedom.” Morality and politics thereby dovetail.7
Beauvoir wrote “What Is Existentialism?” in the early summer of 1947 for the weekly newspaper France-Amérique (published in New York as a version of the French daily Le Figaro) shortly after her first trip to the United States, a four-month tour from which she had just returned.8 During her tour Beauvoir gave talks at numerous colleges (for example, Tulane University and Smith College) on the subject of existentialism, often under the same title as the France-Amérique essay. It seems, however, that Beauvoir may have had more than one way of responding to the title question. In reporting on a lecture given at Tulane on April 1, the Times-Picayune in New Orleans claimed—plausibly—that Beauvoir emphasized the extent to which “man cannot exist” without “other men to recognize him and understand his thoughts.”9 This emphasis on recognition, though absent in the France-Amérique essay, would play a key role in Beauvoir’s explicitly Hegelian attempt to work out a synthesis between subjectivity and objectivity in The Second Sex, a project she was just beginning to undertake.
“What Is Existentialism?” begins with an expression of Beauvoir’s exasperation at having been asked on countless occasions, in France as well as in America, to put existentialism in a nutshell. This task is no easier, Beauvoir claims, than summarizing Hegel or Kant “in three sentences.” For existentialism is not primarily a pat formula for living or a social fad or a political movement; it is, she insists, first and foremost a philosophy. And like all other philosophies, one cannot understand it or appreciate its novelty unless one studies its historical roots. The best she will be able to do in her short article is to dispel certain misunderstandings.
And yet, Beauvoir concedes, one must explain why nonphilosophers are so interested in existentialism. The answer, she suggests, is that they rightly grasp that existentialism is not just an abstract theory but a philosophy that demands to be lived. Like Christianity and Marxism, the two other popular ideologies of the time, it seeks to explain the individual’s place “in a world turned upside down”—and here Beauvoir is gesturing at the condition of France in the wake of the German occupation. While Christianity emphasizes the subjective dimension of the struggle for salvation and Marxism the objective dimension, existentialism tries to hold on to “both ends of the chain.” But the world would have to wait for The Second Sex for a vision of how “existentialism”—or at least Simone de Beauvoir—might tackle this seemingly impossible task.
1. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, intro. Toril Moi, trans. Peter Green (New York: Paragon, 1992), 433; Beauvoir, La force de l’âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 625–26.
2. Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, vol. 1, After the War, 1944–1952, intro. Toril Moi, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Paragon, 1992), 38; La force des choses, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 60.
3. For the “hurled brutally” quotation, see Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 38; La force des choses, 60–61. The article “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom,” published in December 1945, is included in the present volume.
4. Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 67; La force des choses, 98.
5. See, for example, Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Margaret A. Simons, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1995); Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1996); Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Simons, Beauvoir and “The Second Sex”: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Kristana Arp, The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics (Chicago: Open Court, 2001); and Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). The authors of these books disagree about when exactly Beauvoir began to emerge as a mature philosopher in her own right, but all agree that at least by the time she wrote the Ethics her views were in tension with those of Sartre.
6. I provide evidence for this claim in Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism; see especially 159–71.
7. Toward the end of “What Is Existentialism?” Beauvoir suggests that Montaigne sums up the main point: “Life is in itself neither good nor evil; it is the place of good or evil, as you make them.” This is also the epigraph to The Ethics of Ambiguity. I am suggesting that it doesn’t quite capture Beauvoir’s developing views on oppression, as expressed in both the essay and the book.
8. Beauvoir chronicles her trip to the United States in America Day by Day, trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
9. New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 2, 1947, 9.