Abstract

For philosophers familiar with the traditional interpretation of Simone de Beauvoir as a literary writer and philosophical follower of Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir’s 1926-27 student diary is a revelation. Inviting an exploration of Beauvoir’s early philosophy foreclosed by the traditional interpretation, the student diary reveals Beauvoir’s early dedication to becoming a philosopher and her early formulation of philosophical problems and positions usually attributed to Sartre’s influence, such as the central problem of “the opposition of self and other,” years before she first met Sartre in 1929.… Reading the student diary within a larger historical context, we discover that it reflects Beauvoir’s experience as one of the first generation of French women to gain full access to the academic world of philosophy, an experience that problematizes her identity as a woman. The diary shows Beauvoir struggling to accommodate herself to the male world of philosophy while striving to make philosophy her own. For Beauvoir this means following Henri Bergson in rejecting a philosophy that engages only the abstract intelligence. Defining her own unique literary philosophical methodology, Beauvoir vows to create a philosophy that is able, like literature, to encompass emotion as well as reason. This creative process begins in her diary where Beauvoir describes the concrete realities of her own lived experience. Searching for a sense of self in the “nothingness of everything human,” Beauvoir grapples with the existential problem of despair and the temptations of bad faith. Celebrating her newly found freedom and academic achievements, Beauvoir still struggles with the masochistic asceticism of her Catholic upbringing and longs for love, fearing a solitary future bereft of the comforts of woman’s traditional role. Beauvoir’s student diary thus allows us to trace the development of her early philosophy within the context of her life, while providing as well an intimate view of an academic world in transformation…. When the diary opens, with an entry dated August 6, 1926 Beauvoir is grappling with a central problem of her early life and philosophy, the conflicting moral obligations to self and others. Recounting a pilgrimage to Lourdes with an aunt, Beauvoir recalls feeling “ashamed” when faced with the physical suffering of the invalids: “[O]nly a life which was a complete gift of oneself, a total self-abnegation seemed possible to me.” But then, anticipating her critique of self-abnegation in The Second Sex, Beauvoir rejects it, describing the “absolute gift” as “moral suicide.” She vows, instead, to achieve an “equilibrium” between the duty to self and the duty to others. In the August 12, 1926 diary entry, Beauvoir frames the problem in metaphysical terms, referring to one part of herself “made to be given away,” and another “made to be kept and cultivated.” Later, in the November 5, 1926 entry, Beauvoir returns to the problem, writing that she split her “existence into two parts”: one part “for myself” and the other part “for others,” that is “the bonds that unite me with all beings.” Beauvoir’s 1926 description of existence “for myself” and “for others” lays the ground for her later philosophical work on the problem of the Other, as in her 1943 metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay, where the main female protagonist struggles to reclaim an existence for herself instead of existing solely for others, and in The Second Sex (1949) where Beauvoir argues that women are forced to assume themselves not as they exist for themselves but solely as they exist for men, thus as the absolute Other. During the course of the 1926 diary, Beauvoir’s efforts to reconcile these two “parts” of her existence are complicated by various influences, including her reading of Henri Bergson, the leading French philosopher of the early twentieth century. Beauvoir quotes at length in her 1926 diary from Bergson’s Essay on the immediate data of consciousness, which she describes, on August 16, as “a great intellectual rapture.” This diary entry may surprise those who remember the reference to Bergson in Beauvoir’s Memoirs: “I would not have been at all pleased if someone had prophesized that I would become a kind of Bergson; I didn’t want to speak with that abstract voice which, whenever I heard it, failed to move me” (MJFR 288). In this case as in so many others, Beauvoir’s diaries present a very different picture. In the August 16 diary entry, Beauvoir is critical of Bergson’s “impersonal” philosophical voice. But she lauds his methodological “appeal to intuition," which brings philosophy in contact with the « palpable reality » of life, as more characteristic of literature than philosophy. Beauvoir quotes Bergson’s celebration of the « bold novelist » able to tear aside « the cleverly woven web of our conventional self, » and reveal the « fundamental absurdity » of impressions underneath. « Nobody has better than he … defined the art of the modern novelist » Beauvoir writes, suggesting Bergson’s influence on Beauvoir’s developing literary philosophical method. Beauvoir writes, in the August 16 entry, that she is “thrilled” by Bergson’s “analysis of the two aspects of the self,” the authentic inner self and the external social self. For Bergson, unlike Beauvoir who is concerned with serving others as well as the self, our responsibility is wholly to the self and its freedom, which we discover only by breaking through the superficial “crust” of the social self. If his ethic of individual freedom complicated Beauvoir’s search for an ethical “equilibrium,” Bergson’s methodological turn to intuition and rejection of philosophy’s sole reliance on reason might have appealed to a young women trying to enter the male world of philosophy and make it her own….