Abstract
This article revisits Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas on the nature of philosophy. It challenges the view that she is advocating a new literary way of “doing” philosophy and suggests that the clear conceptual boundary she recognizes between literature and philosophy is based not on culture, gender, or philosophical tradition but on fundamental principles of her broader philosophy—notably her understanding of language and the kind of language-use represented by each mode.
A persistent theme in Simone de Beauvoir scholarship over the past few decades is the idea that Beauvoir sees a close connection between literature and philosophy and is advocating a new, more literary way of “doing” philosophy. She is regarded as a proponent of what I will refer to in broad terms as the fusion view: the view that literature and philosophy are or ideally should be fused or combined in some way or should operate in some intermediate space between the two domains.1 This interpretation of Beauvoir’s thought is bound up with efforts to reinstate her as a philosopher and, more broadly, to establish feminist philosophy as a recognized branch of philosophy.2 Beauvoir’s insistence in numerous interviews that she was not a philosopher, and that literature and philosophy are rather different things, has been strongly contested—or dismissed as a mere product of her culture or gender.3 What she said about the differences between literature and philosophy was not what she really meant, and certainly not what she did. It seems hardly credible to me that this careful thinker, philosophically and pedagogically trained and accustomed to using words with expert precision, did not mean what she plainly and repeatedly said. And it seems perverse to me to cite her own literary practice as evidence of her true thinking on this topic, despite her clear pronouncements to the contrary. I wish to take her at her word and to analyze what she says on this topic in the context and language in which her words appear.4 I hope to show that she does mean what she says and, moreover, that the clear conceptual line she draws between literature and philosophy as distinct modes of communication is not a mere product of culture or gender, nor a matter of philosophical tradition, but is based instead on fundamental principles of her broader existentialist philosophy—notably her thinking on language and epistemology.5
This article is intended as a work of exegesis. My concern is to understand what Beauvoir thinks about the nature of philosophy and its relation to literature. I am not seeking to categorize her own works, individually or collectively, nor I am seeking to critique her argument. I focus primarily on those sections of her argument on which scholars tend to rely in attributing to her some version of the fusion view.
1 What Is Philosophy
For Beauvoir, the term philosophie is associated with the intellect and with knowledge in a pure (that is, a distilled or abstracted) sense. It has to do with the nature of things, with their essence. The term littérature is associated with knowledge of a more immediate (unmediated or unrefined) kind. It is concerned not with the meaning of things in a definitional or universal sense (sens universel) but with their unique savor (sens vécu). In other words, it is concerned with what things feel like, not what they are. The savor of something is not static in her view. It changes as the particular thing (person, object, event, etc.) changes over time. But it is distinctive of it: it identifies it at a given point in time. For Beauvoir, as for Jean-Paul Sartre, this latter kind of knowledge involves the imagination—consciousness in the “imaging” mode or on an “imaginary” plane—where we apprehend something as a synthesized whole (an image) but still part of and belonging to the real fragmented (de-totalized) world from which it is being posited as absent:
While the philosopher and the essayist give the reader an intellectual reconstruction of their experience, the novelist claims to reconstitute on an imaginary plane this experience itself as it appears prior to any elucidation. In the real world, the meaning of an object is not a concept graspable by pure understanding. Its meaning is the object as it is disclosed to us in the overall relation we sustain with it, and which is action, emotion, and feeling. We ask novelists to evoke this flesh-and-blood presence whose complexity and singular and infinite richness exceed any subjective interpretation.6
These words come from Beauvoir’s early essay “Literature and Metaphysics” in which she is attempting, explicitly, to do two things at once. First, she is seeking to persuade what she calls the “adversaries of philosophical literature” that this type of literature is indeed proper “valid” literature and not merely philosophy in disguise.7 She wishes to convince these critics that, far from being a “dangerous deviation,” this type of literature is potentially its “highest” and most complete “accomplishment,” able to surpass less “complete” types that focus exclusively on either the internal (“psychological”) or the external (“social”) aspects of our situation.8 This first objective is intended to counter the widespread criticism being leveled at philosophical literature by so many of her contemporaries in the 1940s.9 At the same time, she is seeking to explain the existentialist logic behind this literary trend—its theoretical underpinning—notably the idea that a person’s metaphysical “situation” shapes their ethic and their behavior far more than psychology or social class ever could.10 She wishes to convince philosophers that this type of literature is of genuine epistemic value and can reveal truths that could not be discovered through abstract thought alone. And she is seeking, more broadly, to “defend” existentialism as a serious (non-frivolous, non-gratuitous) philosophy worthy of a place in the philosophical canon. She explicitly mentions this second objective in her preface to the 1948 essay collection containing “Literature and Metaphysics,” and she later recalls this effort as an “existentialist offensive.”11 Her essay is therefore addressing two audiences with two quite different goals in mind. While these goals are not (strictly) incompatible, they do create a tension in the essay that makes it hard to decipher what Beauvoir is saying or where she sits on these issues.
In the passage I have just quoted, she is drawing a distinction between two kinds of meaning: the kind that is an “intellectual reconstruction” of something and “graspable by pure understanding” and the kind that is an “imaginative reconstitution” of it as it is disclosed “in the overall relation we sustain with it.” In other words, she is distinguishing between definitional or distilled meaning, with which she thinks philosophy is ultimately concerned, and lived or experienced meaning, with which she thinks literature is concerned. Her reference to the “real” world is to be understood not in opposition to some fantasy world, nor to some perfect idealized world, but in opposition to the conceptual world—the world as we encounter it through our intellect. The “real” world in Beauvoir’s philosophy is the contingent, temporal world of perceivable things—as opposed to the absolute, eternal world of concepts or ideas.12 Similarly, her reference to the “imaginary” plane is to be understood not in opposition to the literal or factual plane but in opposition to the other two modes of consciousness that she and Sartre recognize: the perceptual and the reflective, or reflexive, modes.13 In the same essay she goes on to argue:
Existentialist thought claims to grasp the essence at the heart of existence; and if the description of essence is a matter solely for philosophy properly speaking, then the novel will permit us to evoke the original upspringing [jaillissement] of existence in its complete, singular, and temporal truth. For the writer, it is not a matter of exploiting on a literary plane truths established beforehand on the philosophical plane, but, rather, of manifesting an aspect of metaphysical experience that cannot otherwise be manifested: its subjective, singular, and dramatic character, as well as its ambiguity. Since reality is not defined as graspable by the intelligence alone, no intellectual description could give an adequate expression of it. One must attempt to present it in its integrity, as it is disclosed in the living relation that is action and feeling before making itself thought.14
Again, we see her drawing a distinction here between the nature (“essence”) of existence—what existence is—and what existence feels like. Literature, she explains, can convey what existence feels like. It does so by presenting it “in its integrity”—that is, in its raw, intact state before it is “elucidated” (clarified, distilled) and becomes “thought.”15 Elsewhere, she describes this “felt” aspect as the experience of life while it is “still throbbing,” before it is “reduced to concepts.”16 To argue that “no intellectual description could give an adequate expression of reality” is not intended as a criticism of philosophy. Literature equally (according to her definition of it) could never give an adequate expression of the whole of human life. She is not suggesting a hierarchy. Rather, she is suggesting that literature alone can convey the “felt” aspect of our encounter with the world, as the world appears to us un- or pre-reflectively—which includes the very feeling of contradiction or “ambiguity” that we experience between the “felt” aspect and the “intellectual” aspect. Existentialists (for whom feeling, or experience, precedes thought) are especially interested in this “felt” aspect—and particularly in those Alice in Wonderland moments of “ipseity” when we first become aware of ourselves as distinct creatures within a bigger whole.17 As a result, in exploring this aspect, they are more likely, she claims, to resort to literature. And they are especially likely to resort to “metaphysical literature”—that is, to literature that gives priority to these fundamental “metaphysical” experiences rather than to other elements of our “situation” such as psychology or social class.18
Scholars often cite these two key passages from “Literature and Metaphysics” as evidence that Beauvoir is rejecting philosophy in the “description of essence” sense and advocating a new literary way of “doing” philosophy. She is presented as clearly taking sides in Plato’s ancient quarrel. Metaphysical literature is assumed to constitute a superior form of philosophy for her.19 She is therefore widely seen as rejecting system-building.20 It seems to me Beauvoir is saying something rather different in these passages. After all, existentialism is a system in her account of it. And system-building is closely associated for her with creativity and originality:
In short, I possessed both considerable powers of assimilation and a well-developed critical sense; and philosophy was for me a living reality, which gave me never-failing satisfaction.
Yet I did not regard myself as a philosopher; I was well aware that the ease with which I penetrated to the heart of a text stemmed, precisely, from my lack of originality. In this field a genuinely creative talent is so rare that queries as to why I did not attempt to join the elite are surely otiose: it would be more useful to explain how certain individuals are capable of getting results from that conscious venture into lunacy known as a “philosophical system,” from which they derive that obsessional attitude which endows their tentative patterns with universal insight and applicability.21
The pejorative tone of the translation here (“elite,” “lunacy,” “obsessional”) is not evident, I would suggest, in the original French—certainly not in such stark terms.22 Rather than expressing skepticism, Beauvoir is expressing curiosity about the origins of this rare talent.23 Her description of the philosopher’s “obsessional attitude” (“entêtement”) recalls an earlier article in which she had described all philosophy as “arrogant” in the sense that it aims to “lay claim to” (arrogate) truth:
A philosophy is always arrogant, and has to be. This is because its raison d’être is to lay claim to something excessive: possession of truth. Existentialism is no exception. It is a doctrine which aims—like the philosophies of antiquity—at disclosing the true measure of man and of his values.24
Her reference to laying claim to the possession of truth refers to possession of the truth—not a (singular) truth and certainly not my (personal) truth.25 But this search for the truth (essence) of existence is not incompatible with the “real” world in Beauvoir’s view. She is not criticizing or denouncing it. Far from it. In her preface to the 1948 collection containing “Literature and Metaphysics,” she writes:
[These essays] do not seek to define existentialism once again, but to defend it against the reproach of frivolity and gratuity addressed to all organized thought since Socrates. In truth, there is no divorce between philosophy and life.
Every living step is a philosophical choice and the ambition of a philosophy worthy of the name is to be a way of life that brings its justification with itself.26
This much-quoted passage has usually been interpreted as an assertion on Beauvoir’s part that there are two different types of philosophy and as a plea for system-building to be replaced by a new non-systematic “lived” form of philosophy.27 On the contrary, it seems to me she is seeking to defend all philosophy (“organized thought”) from the charge that it is “frivolous and gratuitous” and has nothing to do with real life. Her words are not normative but descriptive. In referring back to Socrates (a proponent, after all, of a rather more objective or transcendent worldview), she makes it crystal clear that she is not talking only of existentialist philosophies. On the contrary, she is attempting to place existentialism squarely within a long tradition of philosophical inquiry. All philosophy, she argues, not just existentialism, involves persistent “questioning” and “refusal of the given.”28 All philosophy involves a forensic search for the truth:
The question [what does one gain by being an existentialist] will seem strange to any philosopher. Neither Kant nor Hegel ever asked himself what would one gain by being Kantian or Hegelian. They said what they thought was the truth, nothing more. They had no other goal but the truth itself. But perhaps it is the philosopher who is wrong here; perhaps he is a victim of a distortion endemic to his profession [une déformation professionnelle]. Is it good to speak the truth? If it is useless or harmful, shouldn’t it be masked? Such prudence makes sense only if the truth is seen as exterior to reality. If it is a light that a foreign heaven pours out onto the world, one may wonder whether or not it is opportune to let it dissipate our darkness. But this conception is radically false. The truth is nothing other than reality. One can refuse to apprehend it through words and sentences, that is to say, express it systematically, but one cannot elude it. The very effort one makes to escape it is one of the ways of manifesting it. […] Existentialism does not intend to disclose to man the hidden suffering of his condition either, but only wants to help him assume this condition that it is impossible for him to ignore.29
When Beauvoir criticizes Hegel’s “system” at the end of The Ethics of Ambiguity, she is criticizing the substance of his philosophy, not its status as philosophy.30 Similarly, when she contends in “Literature and Metaphysics” that metaphysics is not “d’abord un système” (a “ready-made system,” my translation) and cannot be “done” in the way you would “do” math or physics, she is not arguing for some new “lived” form of philosophy to replace system-building.31 Instead, she is drawing attention to the inherently speculative and exploratory nature of any philosophical inquiry. In philosophy, she is saying, there is no grammar. And when she declares that the ambition of any philosophy “worthy of the name” is to be a “way of life” (“mode de vie”), she is not suggesting the philosopher must “live” it, or “perform” it, rather than think it.32 She means, rather, that all philosophy, whatever its stripe, aims to show us how to live as human creatures in the real world and wants to help us “assume” our condition. All philosophy is about us—about this world—as it always has been “since Socrates.” And all philosophy “brings its justification with itself” in the sense that it must be its own advocate, its own guarantor. In philosophy, there is no external guarantee, no “light” poured out by a “foreign heaven.” Otherwise it would be religion, not philosophy.
If literature is to be useful to those philosophers who attach weight in their philosophy to what life feels like—in her essay she cites Plato and Hegel among such philosophers, in contrast with Aristotle, Leibniz, and Spinoza—it is only because literature in her view is conceptually distinct from philosophy.33 As she puts it in relation to the novel: “The novel is justified only if it is a mode of communication irreducible to any other.”34 Literature equally, by extension, has no justification, no reason for being, unless it is distinct from all other modes of communication. This is not to say philosophers may not “collaborate” with literature as a form of “concrete meditation” to help them “clarify” their thought and “teach” them things they could not otherwise learn.35 Nor is it to say literature may not be concerned with the same fundamental metaphysical issues with which philosophy is concerned. But literature is concerned with the concrete experience of them, not with the nature of that experience. Philosophical literature, in Beauvoir’s view, is proper “valid” literature. It is conceptually distinct from philosophy—just as psychological literature is from psychology.36
Far then from advocating a fusion of literature and philosophy or recommending a new form of “lived” philosophy, Beauvoir is insisting on a clear distinction between them as discrete “modes of communication.” This understanding of the nature of literature and philosophy persisted across the decades in my view, notwithstanding significant shifts in the intellectual and cultural landscape in which she was working. Her focus and her vocabulary may change in response to the forces operating on her at a given time, but the underlying thinking remains the same. This is because her perception of the difference between these two modes is based, as I hope to show, on fundamental principles of her broader existentialist vision that do not change.
2 The Ancient Quarrel
The more significant issue, however, that Beauvoir is addressing in these early essays is not the relationship between literature and philosophy at all. It is the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity—between the two sides to our encounter with the world and the two kinds of meaning that they concern: what life is and what it feels like. Literature and philosophy are proxies in effect for what she refers to as “two aspects of our condition”:
Where was truth to be found? On earth or in eternity? […]
I think that any mind [esprit] sensitive both to the seductions of fiction and to the rigor of philosophical thought has known more or less this distress. For, after all, there is only one reality; it is in the midst of the world that we think the world through. If some writers have chosen to retain exclusively one of these two aspects of our condition, thereby raising barriers between literature and philosophy, others, on the contrary, have long sought to express this condition in its totality.37
These two aspects—the temporal and the eternal—are typically reflected in two ways of looking at the world that give rise to two competing belief systems. These two worldviews have been represented, ever since Plato, by the image of a quarrel between literature and philosophy. The more “objective” way of looking at the world is associated, broadly speaking, with the Socratic world of Forms, where what is ultimately real is the Form of things, not their actual manifestation (a bed, say) and certainly not a painting of a bed—which in Plato’s Republic stands “third in succession from the throne of truth.”38 The more “subjective” way is associated with the pre-Socratic world of chaos and disorder, subject to whim and chance and without any ultimate transcendent truth, or without one that humans can ever hope to access. The terms “objectivity” and “subjectivity” are notoriously vague of course. They have multiple meanings in philosophy, and their use in modern philosophy does not map neatly onto ancient Greek thought. Sartre rejected them in favor of “intériorisation et extériorité” (“interiorization and exteriority,” my translation).39 But the idea of some basic opposition in the way we encounter the world has persisted down the centuries. Beauvoir’s central argument in “Literature and Metaphysics” is that a philosophy that attaches at least some weight to what life feels like cannot rely solely on an abstract account of it since such an account would continually undermine itself by implying the opposite. If, unlike existentialism, your worldview makes no room whatsoever for objectivity—she gives the example of Kafka—an abstract account would be utterly perverse.40 And vice versa:
There is an original grasping of metaphysical reality, and just as in psychology, there are two divergent fashions of making it explicit. We can strive to elucidate its universal meaning in an abstract language, thus developing theories where metaphysical experience will be described, and more or less systematized in its essential character, thus as timeless and objective. If, moreover, the system so constituted affirms that this aspect alone is real, and, if it posits the subjectivity and historicity of experience as negligible, it obviously excludes any other manifestation of the truth. It would be absurd to imagine an Aristotelian, Spinozan, or even Leibnizian novel, since neither subjectivity nor temporality have a real place in their metaphysics. But if, on the contrary, a philosophy retains the subjective, singular, and dramatic aspect of experience, it contests itself if, like a nontemporal system, it makes no allowance for its temporal truth.41
With this argument, Beauvoir is acknowledging the partiality inherent in any philosopher’s choice of method or form. But this partiality is not fatal to the whole project of philosophy if philosophy is seen as a process—a process of system-building.42 This, I would suggest, is how Beauvoir sees it—and how she thinks it has always been seen by philosophers across the ages, including in the “philosophies of antiquity.”43 It is a process of “speculative thought.”44 If at the outset of your inquiry you reject the very notion of objective reality—even in the existentialist sense of a reality that is ever “becoming”—there is no room for “philosophy properly speaking” in her understanding of the term.45 There is only Kafka. This conception of philosophy as a process of system-building is rather different from the way that philosophy was being practiced by many of Beauvoir’s contemporaries in France or America—whether Catholic or Marxist philosophers in France or linguistic philosophers in America. Their approach (which she portrays as an attack on philosophy itself) rests on a set of “biases” (she uses the term “partis pris”) that are themselves speculative and are therefore “philosophy” in her sense of the word.46
3 What Is (Prose) Literature
Literature too, in Beauvoir’s understanding of it, is a process—but it is not a process of system-building. It is not trying to build a system, construct a “mode” of life. It is not laying claim to the possession of truth. But it does manifest singular truths: tiny segments of what collectively and cumulatively make up the truth. A work of literature, she suggests, is a “spiritual” adventure.47 It reveals the “taste” (“goût”) of the writer’s life as it stands cumulatively at the time of writing.48 This “goût” is not something the writer can ever actually experience in reality:
[O]ur experience is detotalized in the sense that Sartre gives to this word, that is to say that we never live all aspects of it at the same time. My consciousness is always a surpassing of the present moment. […] I am always in the future and consequently there is never a total plenitude of the moments I am in the process of living. The novel can, on the contrary, render the meaning which is on the horizon of my experience but which does not manage to be enclosed in it with complete plenitude.49
But it is a singular truth—a singular universal—and as such it can be transmitted to others:
So it is impossible for a writer to reduce reality to a fixed and completed spectacle that he might show in its totality. Each of us grasps but a moment of it: a partial truth. A partial truth is a mystification only if it is taken for the whole truth. But if it is taken for what it is, well, then it is a truth, and it enriches the one to whom it is communicated.50
These “partial truths” are not partial in the sense of being my truth—the truth as seen from my perspective—nor in the sense of being either part-truths or provisional truths. Rather, they are contingent truths: snapshots in time and space. They reveal what it feels like to be a human being, which is necessarily a singular concrete thing, and a changing thing, since we are single embodied creatures. These truths, Beauvoir contends, come into existence as truths (universals) through the very process of writing:
You don’t start with a clearly defined, ready-made truth already formed in your mind, sitting there waiting to be translated and put into words. Writing is not translating: it is designating “something” that is coming into existence, being formed, in the very instant of designation.51
Literature, she insists, is not just a matter of wrapping a predefined message in words “as chocolates are packaged in a box.”52 Both the materials used (that is, words) and the manner of using them are indivisible from the truth manifested in that specific act of writing—that particular use of those words by that writer. Used in this way, the words will necessarily embody the writer’s quest, and hence convey the unique taste of their world as it then stands, because the words will necessarily carry the writer’s “mark” as it then stands.53 Beauvoir recalls how in her own writing practice the phrase j’ai été flouée had come to her in the very act of writing:
And then, trapped as I was in that defeatist, disheartened state of mind, the words did indeed come to me: words that, beforehand, were not there inside of me. […] And I would note in this regard that we must never put into a writer’s mouth anything other than the exact words that they have written, on pain of denying the very phenomenon of literature itself. […] So, yes, undoubtedly, the truth of this statement [j’ai été flouée] does indeed hang on the precise form that I gave to it, and cannot be expressed in any other way nor read other than by taking account of exactly where it appears, at the end of this paragraph, at the end of this epilogue, and of course at the end of this book.54
The statement, she explains, expressed not a literal truth but a truth of a “literary” order, “almost” a “poetic” order.55 It substantiated, in an entirely new substance, what she had been feeling.
The “spiritual adventure” that Beauvoir sees as essential to the character of literature is therefore equally and essentially a verbal adventure. The writer is seeking to verbalize flesh—not the word (logos) made flesh, but flesh made words (discourse). Beauvoir, as Pascale Fautrier rightly contends, conceives of literature as a form of ongoing “justification by literary work”—but justification, I would suggest, both in a redemptive sense and, equally, in a specifying sense.56 The verbalizing and specifying (pinpointing or making specific) is for Beauvoir an intrinsic part of the spiritual adventure. The reader’s position is slightly different in Beauvoir’s view: a text by then is already in play, a use of language has been initiated. The reader’s task is more guided. But reading, she insists, is also not “translation”: it is about “giving life to” (“vivifier”) the words on the page.57 The image she uses here is of resurrecting the words-made “thing” and raising it to new life.58 It seems to me Beauvoir’s account of literature is therefore about more than just giving us an experience of the ambiguous nature of our condition or, for instance, appealing to our inherent human freedom.59 Something more existential or “spiritual” is at stake for both reader and writer. Verbalizing flesh offers a chance of new life.
4 Language-Use
Beauvoir’s understanding of literature and philosophy as different “modes of communication” rests principally, I would suggest, on her understanding of the kind of language-use represented by each mode—and on her conception more broadly of the nature of language. The clearest exposition we have of her thinking on language comes in her contribution to the 1964 debate “What Can Literature Do?,” but her views were evident even in her early theoretical work.60 She sees language as having two discrete aspects to it, one transparent (or informative) and one opaque (evocative):
I think that I say what I say, and that is what you hear. That is a true relationship created through language, which is opacity but is also a signifying vehicle common to all and accessible to all.61
Words for Beauvoir can be used to point to (signify) things or to embody (stand for) them. Where they point to things, they are operating as tools and the attention is being directed toward what is meant conceptually by them—toward the thing as a concept. Where words embody things, they are operating as a proxy and the attention is being directed toward what is evoked by them—toward the thing as an experience before it is “reduced to concepts.” These two aspects are not two kinds of language for Beauvoir. Nor are they two kinds of language-use. The distinction only comes into being when language is actually being used.62 It is a function primarily of the participants’ attitude vis-à-vis the words being used.
Toril Moi suggests this view of language, with its focus on use, is broadly in line with the later thought of Wittgenstein, as interpreted by Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond—which Moi equates with a particular understanding of “ordinary language” understood by her as meaning “everyday” language.63 Ursula Tidd claims Beauvoir considered language a “universalist Trojan horse.”64 I am not sure either characterization is entirely apt. When Beauvoir describes language as a “universal instrument” that women must “steal” and try to “change” in a “feminist way,” she is recognizing that language is in one sense shared and conventionalized, even if it evolves over time by virtue of being used.65 We are not free, in Beauvoir’s view, just to make it up, as some of the more experimental literature associated with the Tel Quel group was seeking to do. But equally, she is recognizing that any use of language necessarily incorporates something of the users’ own respective situations, including their gender. Her point here is that language itself is a concrete universal. This vision does not equate to a “five red apples” view of language where meaning is a function primarily of context and circumstance and of the kind of “language-game” being played—a learned response.66 Beauvoir’s emphasis, in her existentialist account of language, is on the fact that any communication will necessarily involve flesh-and-blood situated users and will therefore always also have a singular sensory “opaque” side to it. Both aspects, she insists, are present at some level in all communications. However factual a communication, however poetic, it will always operate by virtue both of what is communal (“commun”) and of what is singular and noninformative (“désinformatif”).67 However poetic a communication, it will always have a conceptual side too (“cette part du savoir”).68
But different modes of communication involve different modes of language-use in Beauvoir’s view. Philosophy, she believes, communicates to a far greater extent through what is communal. In philosophy, language is primarily intended to be transparent—to mean what it says. In lyric poetry, the sensory “opaque” aspect comes far more to the fore. What makes prose literature distinct for Beauvoir, I would suggest, is the way it manages to combine these two aspects in such a way that neither has the upper hand. Prose literature unites both aspects in a single work without compromising or diluting either of them:
[Literature] alone can succeed in reconciling all the irreconcilable moments of a human experience.
Words struggle, therefore, against time and against death, but they also struggle against separation, since they have the power to restore generality to what we have that is most singular: the passage of time, the taste of our life, death, solitude. And I think this is precisely one of the most obvious and most necessary functions of words. […]
And I think that that is what literature can and should give. It should render us transparent to one another in what is most opaque about us.69
With this argument, she is suggesting that the uniqueness of prose literature is its power simultaneously to “struggle […] against time” by “reconciling all the irreconcilable moments of a human experience” and at the same time to “restore generality to what is most singular” by generalizing one person’s experience such that we are rendered “transparent to one another.” Neither aspect (opaque or transparent) is compromised. As a result, prose literature in Beauvoir’s view is able to convey what I will term a transubstantiated form of knowledge that allows us to savor an “other” world without either subsuming or being subsumed by it. Beauvoir describes this phenomenon as a “miracle.”70 And through this shared act of communion, she explains, we become part of a “community”—we are in communication (intransitively) through our shared “love” of Proust.71
5 Kinds of Knowledge
This brings us back to the distinction we saw earlier between two kinds of meaning (sens) associated with the two (discrete but related) ways we apprehend the world. Thinking for Beauvoir (conceptualizing) is associated with knowledge in the conceptual (savoir) sense, while feeling (experiencing) is associated with knowledge in a non-conceptual (non-savoir) sense:
I respond, “Yes, these are banalities, but the fact is that to be acquainted with them as knowledge [savoir], as conceptualized universality, is completely different than to experience them as a personal, lived, and singular experience which keeps its singular dimension even when you universalize it.” Therefore the creative task consists either in giving a universal dimension to what you have lived singularly, or in finding a way to singularize a conceptually impoverished knowledge [connaissance].72
The contrast Beauvoir is making here is not the familiar one between savoir (knowledge) and connaissance (acquaintance). Rather, it is between two ways of grasping, or understanding, something. A work of prose literature is uniquely able to keep the “singular” dimension “even when you universalize it”:
In any case, it is a question of communicating through the widest possible knowledge that which cannot be communicated directly: the flavor of my century, the flavor of my life, something that is impossible to render in a direct way.73
The conceptual link between eating and knowledge that is implied by the notion of communicating the flavor (“goût”) of something is of course an ancient one, fixed in the Western imagination through the story of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge and later through the Christian doctrine of incarnation (word made flesh) and the sacrament of the eucharist, understood in Catholic theology as a form of transubstantiation where the body and blood of Christ is changed, without loss of substance, into a wholly different and more digestible substance. In more recent times, eating has again become a frequent metaphor in theories of knowledge—not least in existentialist theories. Both Sartre and Beauvoir, in their epistemology, recognize a crucial distinction for them between two ways of eating corresponding to two different ways of knowing (connaître) or possessing (avoir).74 In Pyrrhus and Cineas, Beauvoir distinguishes between two forms of “appropriation”: on the one hand, asserting external rights over something (contractual rights, say) and, on the other hand, making it mine in the sense of learning to swim in its seas and fly in its skies and of throwing in my whole lot with it.75 In the first case, something is ingested and absorbed but never actually tasted: it is devoured. In the second case, it is ingested and fully savored but remains distinct from me as a substance. It is not absorbed. This same logic tracks through to Beauvoir’s theory of literature. As a reader, she says, I do not “annex” the writer’s world, merging it with my own; instead, I visit it as an invited guest while remaining “myself” and citizen of “my” world.76 The writer too, in creating the work, does not objectify their world—give an “intellectual reconstruction” of it. Instead they assume a “fictive constitution” where their “je qui parle” (their discursive “I”) is held at one remove from their “je vécu” (their lived felt “I”) thereby allowing them to extract their own lifeblood and turn it into something capable of being ingested by others—and of being fully savored by those believers willing to accept the invitation and participate in the venture in “good” faith.77 A literary work, Beauvoir contends, is a way of “embodying in something this everything which one wants to express starting from a nothingness.”78 In other words, the artwork for her is not merely a symbolic representation of the writer’s world. It substantiates it in a form that can be ingested by others. It transubstantiates it. Beauvoir is implicitly likening it to a foodstuff that can be consumed by and become a constitutive part of its readers, but without ceasing to be distinct from them.
This rich web of conceptual links—drawn in large measure from Christian, and specifically Catholic, theology—emerges yet more insistently in a passage from the chapter originally intended by Beauvoir as the opening chapter of She Came to Stay. In that passage, Françoise, alone in the forest, sits eating an apple (against her parents’ wishes) while reading act 1 of a steamy play about adultery (again off-limits) and then proceeds to stroke herself “between her thighs” with the stalk of the apple:
The image of her mother came to her and she dismissed it without shame; it was like another existence where one had no more parents, no future, no longer even a name. There was a scent of scrub; there were pine needles, a taste of apple, a gentle and mysterious sensation that turned the whole body, from head to toe, into a shivering piece of tissue paper; and all this was neither good nor bad.79
The clear Biblical and erotic allusions in this story demonstrate (perhaps too obviously) the close links in Beauvoir’s mind between eating, knowledge, literature, desire, possession, and salvation. Eating of this literary tree of knowledge reveals to Françoise not the existence of good and evil but rather its non existence in any fixed or given sense.
For Beauvoir then, literature offers a transubstantiated form of knowledge that differs radically from the conceptual knowledge communicated by philosophy.
6 Beauvoir Revisited
In this article, I have argued that Beauvoir sees philosophy as a process of system-building and I have shown how the clear distinction she draws between literature and philosophy as different “modes of communication” was based on fundamental principles of her broader philosophy—notably her thinking on language, knowledge, and meaning. And I have contested claims that she regarded metaphysical literature as a new form of “lived” philosophy superior to philosophy in the strict (description of essence) sense. With these arguments, I hope to have demonstrated the subtlety of her position—a subtlety that tends to be obscured in more extreme interpretations of her thought. Without reading into her essays and lectures a wealth of philosophical ideas behind the scenes—regardless of who influenced whom in the building of that system—it seems to me the subtlety and interest of her position is lost. Beauvoir’s strength as a philosopher lies in her ability to take highly complex abstract ideas and apply them to particular situations—and to do so using a simple and direct style of address. But that should not deceive us into reading her arguments as simpler or more extreme than she intended.
The word “fusion” is borrowed from Yi-Ping Ong’s study of Beauvoir in The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2018, p. 87. I use fusion view as an umbrella term to cover a range of interpretations of Beauvoir’s position, all taking what I perceive to be a broadly similar line with respect to her views on the nature of philosophy and its relation, or ideal relation, to literature. In addition to Ong, see for example: Eleanore Holveck, Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Lived Experience: Literature and Metaphysics, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, p. 19; Margaret A. Simons, introduction to “Literature and Metaphysics,” in Philosophical Writings by Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmermann and Mary Beth Mader, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2004, 263–268, p. 266; Ashley King Scheu, “The Viability of the Philosophical Novel: The Case of Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay,” Hypatia, vol. 27, no. 4, 2012, 791–809, p. 795; Christine Daigle and Louise Renée, “Performing Philosophy: Beauvoir’s Methodology and Its Ethical and Political Implications,” Janus Head, vol. 14, no. 2, 2015, 71–86, pp. 72–73; Manon Garcia, “Vivre la philosophie: les Mémoires comme oeuvre philosophique,” Littérature, vol. 3, no. 191, 2018, 53–67, pp. 55, 60. Some of these scholars see an evolution in Beauvoir’s thought across the decades, while others suggest her position remained broadly the same.
For useful surveys of these efforts, see Emily R. Grosholz, “Editor’s Preface,” in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Emily R. Grosholz, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004, pp. vii–xxxii; Laura Hengehold, introduction to A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer, Oxford, John Wiley & Sons, 2017, pp. 1–10.
Margaret A. Simons, Jessica Benjamin, and Simone de Beauvoir, “Simone de Beauvoir: An Interview,” trans. Veronique Zaytzeff, Feminist Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1979, pp. 330–345.
My interpretation is based on analysis of the French texts. Where necessary to explain my thinking, I have included the original French version too.
In Beauvoir’s reflections on the nature of literature, it seems clear from the examples she gives, and from the substance of her argument, that she is mainly referring to prose literature, not poetry. Some scholars go further and suggest her argument is confined to “novelistic form”—even when she expressly mentions other prose forms. See Ong, Art of Being, p. 271. But even in the 1940s, when interest in the novel is particularly strong, Beauvoir expressly extends her argument to include drama and other prose forms that could not reasonably be termed “novelistic.” When she talks in “An American Renaissance in France” of giving philosophy a “novelistic form,” she does so because she is discussing the influence precisely of American novelists on French thinkers and because, as Elizabeth Fallaize points out, she is eager to justify French enthusiasm for novels considered second-rate in America. Simone de Beauvoir, “An American Renaissance in France,” trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in “The Useless Mouths” and Other Literary Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmermann, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2011, 107–110, p. 110. Essay originally published in 1947. Elizabeth Fallaize, introduction to “Short Articles on Literature,” in Useless Mouths, ed. Simons and Timmermann, 91–97, p. 94. Beauvoir’s early preference for the novel, in her theory and her practice, mirrored a general literary and philosophical preoccupation with the novel in the 1940s but, as Ann Jefferson explains, this quickly faded in the 1950s. Ann Jefferson, “A Gaggle of Geese or Technical Rigour: Re-forming the Novel in 1940s France,” in What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st-Century French Literature and Thought, ed. Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020, 39–52, pp. 40–41, 52.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” trans. Veronique Zaytzeff and Frederick M. Morrison, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Simons with Timmermann and Mader, 269–277, p. 270. Essay originally published in 1946 and based on a lecture given by Beauvoir in 1945.
Ibid., pp. 270, 272–273.
Ibid., pp. 275–276.
The debate is well illustrated by a special 1943 edition of Confluences magazine containing more than sixty articles discussing the “problems” of the French novel. Clara Malraux’s piece, to take one example, suggested that the contemporary novel was seeking in many instances to be metaphysics (“être une métaphysique”) and required a detailed knowledge of current philosophy in order to be understood. Clara Malraux, “Métamorphoses du roman,” in Problèmes du roman, ed. Jean Prévost, Brussels, Le Carrefour, 1945 [1943], 315–316, p. 316. The debate was fueled in part by Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that “une technique romanesque renvoie toujours à la métaphysique du romancier,” meaning that the particular narrative form adopted by a novelist always points back to the novelist’s own metaphysical stance. Sartre, “La temporalité chez Faulkner,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, Critiques littéraires, Paris, Gallimard, 1993 [1947], 65–75, p. 66. Essay originally published in 1939. See also Jo Bogaerts, “Beauvoir’s Lecture on the Metaphysical Novel and Its Contemporary Critiques,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies, vol. 29, 2014, pp. 20–32.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 273. In this respect, she is building on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account in his 1945 essay “Metaphysics and the Novel,” where he links this literary trend to the rise of phenomenology as a new philosophical method that seeks not to “explain” the world but to “formulate” our experience of it. Merleau-Ponty, “Metaphysics and the Novel,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1964 [1948], pp. 26–40.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Preface,” trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Simons with Timmermann and Mader, 216–218, p. 217. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964 [1963], p. 38.
Beauvoir describes concepts as skeletal “bony-structured” things. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, trans. James Kirkup, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987 [1958], p. 17.
These modes were described in much more detail in Sartre’s early study L’Imaginaire. Sartre, L’Imaginaire, Paris, Gallimard, 1940, translated by Jonathan Webber as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, New York, Routledge, 2004.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” pp. 274–275.
In the original French, “dans son intégrité” has the sense of virgin or intact, whole in the sense of unbroken. Beauvoir, “Littérature et métaphysique,” in L’Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations, ed. Michel Kail, Paris, Gallimard, 2008 [1948], 71–84, p. 81.
Simone de Beauvoir, “An American Renaissance in France,” p. 109.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 273.
Beauvoir’s clearest expositions of what she understands by the term “metaphysical literature” (or “philosophical literature”) come in two remarkably similar pieces from 1947: Simone de Beauvoir, “Existentialist Theater,” trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in Useless Mouths, ed. Simons and Timmermann, pp. 137–150; and “New Heroes for Old,” in Useless Mouths, ed. Simons and Timmermann, pp. 113–123.
Scheu, for instance, claims Beauvoir regards the philosophical novel as a “superior work” that “outshines the vast majority of grand philosophical systems” and as a form of “lived philosophy” that “invites” rather than dictates the reader’s response. Scheu, “Viability of the Philosophical Novel,” pp. 794–795, 805.
See, for example, Simons, introduction to “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 265. My footnote 1 lists other examples where scholars have read Beauvoir’s argument in a broadly similar way.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green, London, André Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962 [1960], p. 178.
The term “elite,” for instance, has more negative connotations in English.
The last clause reads: “Il faudrait plutôt expliquer comment certains individus sont capables de mener à bien ce délire concerté qu’est un système et d’où leur vient l’entêtement qui donne à leurs aperçus la valeur de clés universelles.” Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de l’âge, Paris, Gallimard, 2020 [1960], p. 288. The word “and” is missing in the English translation.
Simone de Beauvoir, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans,” in Philosophical Writings, ed. Simons with Timmermann and Mader, 307–315, p. 307. Article originally published in 1947.
This is clear from Beauvoir’s reference to “universal insight” (“clés universelles”) in the passage quoted from The Prime of Life, p. 178. Note also that Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, in their collection of Beauvoir’s writings compiled with her express support, translate “possession of truth” as “la possession de la vérité.” Simone de Beauvoir, “Point de vue d’une existentialiste sur les Américains,” trans. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, in Les Écrits de Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Paris, Gallimard, 1979, 344–352, p. 344.
Beauvoir, “Preface,” pp. 217–218.
Simons, introduction to Philosophical Writings, ed. Simons with Timmermann and Mader, 1–12, p. 2.
Beauvoir, “Preface,” p. 217.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom,” trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Simons with Timmermann and Mader, 203–220, pp. 214–215. The essay was first published in 1945.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, Secaucus, NJ, Citadel Press, 1948 [1947], p. 158.
Beauvoir, “Littérature et métaphysique,” p. 78; “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 273.
Beauvoir, “Preface,” p. 218; “Préface,” in L’Existentialisme et la sagesse, ed. Kail, 7–9, p. 9.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 274.
Ibid., p. 270.
Beauvoir, “Existentialist Theater,” p. 139.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” pp. 272–273.
Ibid., pp. 269–270.
Plato, Republic, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford, in The Republic of Plato, ed. Francis MacDonald Cornford, London, Oxford University Press, 1976 [1941], p. 327 (book X, 597e).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, IX: mélanges, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 51.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 274.
Ibid., pp. 273–274.
“[I]n the course of the building of the system.” Ibid., p. 272.
Beauvoir, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans,” p. 307.
Beauvoir, “Preface,” p. 216.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 274
Beauvoir, “Preface,” p. 217; “Préface,” p. 7.
Beauvoir, “Littérature et métaphysique,” pp. 76–77, 82, my translation. In the English translation published in Philosophical Writings, “aventure spirituelle” is translated on each occasion as “adventure of the mind.” See Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” pp. 272, 275. This strikes me as too narrow and overdetermined in the context of Beauvoir’s argument, even if “mind” is read very broadly as embodied consciousness.
Simone de Beauvoir, “What Can Literature Do?,” in Useless Mouths, ed. Simons and Timmermann, 197–209, p. 201; “Que peut la littérature?,” in Beauvoir, ed. Éliane Lecarme-Tabone and Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Paris, Éditions de L’Herne, 2016 [2012], 335–339, p. 336. Paper originally published in 1965.
Simone de Beauvoir, “My Experience as a Writer,” trans. J. Debbie Mann, in Useless Mouths, ed. Simons and Timmermann, 282–301, pp. 285–286. Lecture originally published in 1979.
Beauvoir, “What Can Literature Do?,” p. 200.
Simone de Beauvoir, “J’ai été flouée,” extract from an interview conducted by Francis Jeanson, in Beauvoir, ed. Lecarme-Tabone and Jeannelle, p. 228, my translation. Interview originally published in 1966.
Beauvoir, “What Can Literature Do?,” p. 202.
Ibid., p. 200.
Beauvoir, “J’ai été flouée,” p. 229, my translation.
Ibid.
Pascale Fautrier, “Les Cahiers de jeunesse de Simone de Beauvoir ou la tentation de l’absolu”, Les Temps modernes, 2010, vol. 2, no. 658–659, 191–205, p. 196, my translation.
Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” p. 276; “Littérature et métaphysique,” p. 83.
Later, Beauvoir uses “susciter” (“bring into being”) to express the same idea. “Mon expérience d’écrivain,” in Les Écrits de Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Francis and Gontier, 439–457, p. 453, my translation. Sartre, in his account of literature, uses the word “reprendre” (“renew”, “revive”) and “reprise” (“renewal”, “revival”) to describe the process of what he calls “spiritualisation.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, Paris, Gallimard, 2016 [1948], p. 162, my translation. These words all have obvious Christian connotations, consistent with Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s explicit attempts to transpose Christian theology onto the secular realm of literature.
Daigle and Renée, for instance, read “aventure spirituelle” to mean a “metaphysical adventure” where the structure and style of a text give the reader an experience of “constant questioning.” Daigle and Renée, “Performing Philosophy,” pp. 77–80. Toril Moi meanwhile emphasizes the “open-minded” spirit in which the reader is expected to approach the adventure. Toril Moi, “The Adventure of Reading: Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir,” Literature & Theology, vol. 25, no. 2, 2011, 125–140, p. 133.
See Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” pp. 270, 273. Her views on language begin to crystallize in the 1940s after the Second World War. She uses her memoir to chart how she finally arrived at that position.
Beauvoir, “What Can Literature Do?,” p. 199.
Simone de Beauvoir, Pyrrhus and Cineas, trans. Marybeth Timmermann, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Simons with Timmermann and Mader, 89–149, p. 133. Essay originally published in 1944. Subsequent references to this work are indicated by the abbreviation PCE.
Toril Moi, “Meaning What We Say: The ‘Politics of Theory’ and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” in Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Grosholz, 139–160, p. 142; “What Can Literature Do? Simone de Beauvoir as Literary Theorist,” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, 2009, 189–198, p. 191. See also Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir, London, Reaktion Books, 2009, p. 47.
Simone de Beauvoir and Alice Jardine, “Interview with Simone de Beauvoir,” Signs, vol. 5, no. 2, 1979, 224–236, p. 230.
Wittgenstein’s “five red apples” example is examined in his later work Philosophical Investigations. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, Chichester, UK, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009 [1953].
Beauvoir, “Mon expérience d’écrivain,” p. 441, my translation.
Ibid., p. 451, my translation.
Beauvoir, “What Can Literature Do?,” pp. 204–205.
Ibid, p. 201.
Beauvoir, “My Experience as a Writer,” p. 296. That translation uses the word “like” for Beauvoir’s phrase “aiment ce livre.” “Mon expérience d’écrivain,” p. 455. I think “love” would be a more apt choice in light of the explicit transposition of Christian doctrine and Christian imagery in Beauvoir’s account of literature.
Beauvoir, “My Experience as a Writer,” p. 284.
Ibid., p. 292.
For a discussion of the metaphor of eating in Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s epistemology, see Catharine Savage Brosman, “Les Nourritures sartriennes”, in “Littérature et gastronomie,” special issue, ed. Ronald Tobin, Biblio, vol. 17, no. 23, 1985, pp. 229–263; Nina Hellerstein, “Food and the Female Existentialist Body in Simone de Beauvoir’s L’Invitée,” French Forum, vol. 22, no. 2, 1997, pp. 203–215.
PCE, p. 94.
Beauvoir, “What Can Literature Do?,” p. 201; Beauvoir, “My Experience as a Writer,” p. 296.
Simone de Beauvoir, Tout compte fait, Paris, Gallimard, 1979 [1972], pp. 163–164, my translation.
Beauvoir, “My Experience as a Writer,” p. 283.
Simone de Beauvoir, “Two Unpublished Chapters from She Came to Stay,” trans. Sylvie Gautheron, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Simons with Timmermann and Mader, 41–75, pp. 44–45.
