Simone de Beauvoir Studies Volume 14 1997 13

THE SEARCH FOR BEAUVOIR’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY

MARGARET A. SIMONS

In my first meeting with Simone de Beauvoir in 1972, Beauvoir insisted that the only philosophical influence on The Second Sex was Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre. This seemed to me to be an absurd statement. Beauvoir’s philosophy in The Second Sex appeared to reflect many different philosophical influences and it differed significantly from Sartre’s philosophy in Being and Nothingness. Her statement made me wonder, as Terry Keefe would wonder later about La Cérémonie des adieux, “whether all is exactly as it seems” (Keefe 65). “One begins to feel,” Keefe writes of Beauvoir’s account of the last years of Sartre’s life, “that perhaps not everything in the book can be taken at face value”(Keefe 64). I felt the same way about my first interview with Beauvoir. What could her statement possibly mean?, I asked myself, never dreaming that it would be over twenty years before I found an answer. Actually, the puzzle that I faced in my doctoral research in 1972 in trying to separate the philosophies of Beauvoir and Sartre had been noticed by Hazel Barnes years earlier. In 1959, she wrote that the similarity between Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) and Beauvoir’s first published novel, She Came to Stay (1943) was “too striking to be coincidence”(Barnes 122). Although Barnes refers to the philosophy in both texts as “Sartre’s philosophy” and describes Beauvoir as wanting “to show how Sartre’s abstract principles could be made to work out in ‘real life’” (Barnes 122), she recognizes that the question of influence remains open: “I do not at all preclude the possibility that de Beauvoir has contributed to the formation of Sartre’s philosophy,” Barnes writes in a footnote. “I suspect that his debt to her is considerable. All I mean in the present instance is that the novel serves as documentation for the theory, regardless of who had which idea first” (Barnes 122). In 1994, when the Fullbrooks presented their convincing evidence that Sartre’s Being and Nothingness had been influenced by Beauvoir’s philosophy in She Came to Stay—rather than vice versa, as Barnes and others had assumed—, I finally understood the meaning of Beauvoir’s statement to me back in 1972. It was part of her ongoing effort to hide her influence on Sartre, an effort made more desperate, perhaps, by Sartre’s illness. After sexist critics had failed to recognize and Sartre had failed to acknowledge his intellectual debt to her, Beauvoir had apparently decided to go along with it rather than jeopardize their relationship. In her autobiographies, and in interviews like mine, Beauvoir denied her philosophical innovation, thus protecting Sartre’s reputation as a great philosopher, the originator of French existentialism, at the expense of her own reputation. But Beauvoir, and Sartre as well, left us the means of getting at the truth. Before her death in 1986, Beauvoir could have destroyed the letters and 14 Simone de Beauvoir Studies Volume 14 1997

wartime diaries that provided the Fullbrooks with their evidence, but she did not. Just as Sartre had left his diaries to be found and published after his death in 1980, so Beauvoir left both her diaries and her correspondence with Sartre to be found and posthumously published by her adopted daughter and literary executor, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir. Beauvoir and Sartre have themselves provided us with the key to solving a mystery that has puzzled scholars for decades. With the Fullbrooks’ discovery, a host of new questions present themselves concerning the origins and development of Beauvoir’s philosophy in The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex as well as the origins and development of French existentialism as a whole. Once assumed to lie exclusively in Heidegger’s influence on Sartre, these origins must now include Beauvoir’s influence. How are we to address this task of tracing Beauvoir’s philosophical development before She Came to Stay? Once again Beauvoir, through the efforts of her adopted daughter, has provided us with the means of arriving at an answer. In 1990, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir presented Beauvoir’s carnets de jeunesse, her diaries from 1926 to 1930, to the Bibliothèque Nationale for their preservation and use in scholarly research (see Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir 1995). After reading of the Fullbrooks’ discoveries, I returned to Paris in the summer of 1994 to see if I could find passages of philosophic significance in these student diaries, particularly those that pre-dated her relationship with Sartre. If the Fullbrooks were correct in their analysis of Sartre’s War Diaries and Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, one would expect to find in Beauvoir’s 1926-1929 texts an early version of “Sartrian” existentialism. Struggling to decipher Beauvoir’s handwriting, I made a key discovery in the 1927 diary: Beauvoir’s definition of the philosophical theme of “the opposition of self and other.” The presence of this theme both in Beauvoir’s concept, in The Second Sex, of woman as the Other and in Sartre’s description, in Being and Nothingness, of our being-for- others, is usually read as evidence of Sartre’s influence on Beauvoir. But since Beauvoir formulates the theme of the opposition of self and other in her 1927 diary, written two years before her first meeting with Sartre, the diary provides evidence challenging this interpretation. Could the 1927 diary reveal Beauvoir’s early formulation of other elements of French existential phenomenology? Although I had to leave in 1994 without being able to answer this question, fortunately another Beauvoir scholar, Barbara Klaw, arrived in Paris to pursue her own research on the Beauvoir manuscripts. Deciding to combine forces, I left my notes on the 1927 diary with Barbara Klaw, who brought her own superior knowledge of French to the task of transcribing the diaries. Her rough transcription of the 1927 diary, which she generously sent me that fall, enabled me to begin a systematic analysis of Beauvoir’s early philosophy. Inspired by our success, I and a group of philosophers meeting at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1995 founded the Beauvoir Circle to encourage the scholarly study of Beauvoir’s philosophy. With the support of the Beauvoir Circle, I proposed to Sylvie Le Bon