Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we're taking
on a, well, a truly formidable figure. We've
got a whole stack of material here, biographies,
her own foundational texts, letters, and our
mission is to distill it all for you. We're plunging
into the life, the work, and the intellectual
fortress of Simone de Beauvoir. And she's not
an easy subject to pin down, is she? Born in
1908, died in 1986, a French existentialist,
philosopher, novelist, social theorist. The list
goes on. It really does. And the sources, you
know, they paint this picture of a person defined
by radical freedom, incredible intellectual rigor,
but also a lot of controversy. Oh, immense controversy,
both in her public life and her very private
life. So that's our goal today. We're going to
crank it beyond the cliches, unpack all that
complexity. We want to synthesize her huge intellectual
contributions, dig into her unconventional partnerships,
and really measure the legacy of her most famous
work, The Second Sex. And I think the first thing
to get your head around is the paradox of her
own identity. What do you mean by that? Well,
Beauvoir herself didn't identify as a philosopher.
Not really. She saw herself as a writer, an intellectual.
And, you know, for most of her life, and even
when she died in 86, they didn't really see her
as a top -tier philosopher either. Seriously?
They saw her as what, Sartre's companion? Pretty
much. Sartre's companion may be a very skilled
essayist, but not, you know, a capital -P philosopher
in her own right. That just seems like a massive
historical oversight, given her impact. It was.
It absolutely was. But I think history has sort
of corrected that. Her influence now, especially
on existential phenomenology and, of course,
on feminist theory, it's seen as maybe even more
enduring than some of the famous men she studied
with. Okay, so if we had to place her intellectually,
where does she fit? She's firmly in the camp
of continental philosophy. Existentialism, obviously.
Yeah. Existential phenomenology. And then later
in her life, she moved more towards a kind of
Western Marxism as she got more focused on the,
uh... the economic side of oppression. But the
one thing you can't separate her from, the thing
that defines her legacy, is her pioneering work
in feminist philosophy. I mean, the name Simone
de Beauvoir is basically synonymous with the
second sex. Absolutely. And the second sex deserves
all the attention it gets. It really does. But
it's so important to remember the sheer weight
of her other contributions. Her work on ethics,
for instance. The ethics of ambiguity. Exactly.
And feminist ethics. This wasn't just, you know,
dusty academic stuff. Her books were public events.
She won the Prix Goncourt in 1954. That's France's
highest literary award for novel The Mandarins.
Wow. And she also got the Jerusalem Prize in
75 and the Austrian State Prize for European
Literature in 78. So she was a major public intellectual
recognized at the highest levels. Which just
makes you wonder, how did this woman, born into
the rigid Parisian upper middle class, become
this radical, award -winning, atheist intellectual
who basically defined existential feminism? Well,
to understand that, you have to go right back
to the beginning. To her childhood. So, Simone
Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, born
in Paris in 1908. Her family sounds like the
absolute picture of the French bourgeoisie of
that time. It really was. Her father, Georges,
was a lawyer who secretly wanted to be an actor.
Her mother, Françoise, was from a wealthy banking
family, very devoutly Catholic. And Simone had
one younger sister, Helene. And the sources say
her father was a huge influence on her early
intellectual development. Oh, pivotal. He was
apparently incredibly proud of how smart she
was, always encouraging her studies. There's
this famous quote, and you can just feel the
gender bias of the era dripping off it. He used
to boast, Wow. That one quote just sets up the
entire paradox she'd spent her life fighting,
doesn't it? The idea that being brilliant is
somehow inherently masculine, even when it's
happening in a woman's mind. Precisely. And that
encouragement, it gave her the ambition, but
then her world kind of fell apart. After World
War I, the family lost a huge chunk of their
fortune. And that crisis, ironically, is what
set her free. It was her great liberation. It
really was. Her mother insisted on keeping up
appearances. So Simone stayed in this prestigious
convent school. But the big change was the dowry.
It was gone. Which in that time in class was
a disaster for a young woman's marriage prospects.
A complete disaster. But Beauvoir, she saw it
as an opportunity. She knew she had to work for
a living now. And for her, that wasn't a punishment.
It was the path to economic independence, which
she saw as the only way to be truly free. So
a social failure becomes the catalyst for her
own intellectual success. And this was all happening
while she was having this intense internal philosophical
battle. She was raised Catholic. You know, she
even wanted to be a nun at one point. But then
around age 14, she just started questioning her
faith. And when she let go, she really let go.
Completely. She became a committed atheist for
the rest of her life. And if you read her first
autobiography, Memoirs of a Beautiful Daughter,
she says her whole youth felt like a kind of
endless disputation. A dispute between... between
her parents' worldviews. Her father on one side
with his sort of secular, cynical, almost pagan
ethical standards, and her mother on the other
with her rigidly moral conventionalism rooted
in the church. And she couldn't reconcile the
two. No. She said that conflict, that disequilibrium,
was the main reason why I became an intellectual.
She had to invent a new system for herself, a
way to live where you're constantly making choices
instead of following rules. And she had this...
This really biting critique of faith, didn't
she? Something about it being an evasion. Yes.
She said, faith allows an evasion of those difficulties
which the atheist confronts honestly. It's not
just a rejection of God. It's a critique of any
system that gives you easy answers. Which totally
explains her drive. And that drive led to just,
I mean, spectacular academic success. It really
did. In the late 1920s, she's studying math,
literature, languages, and crucially, she starts
auditing courses at the École Normale Supérieure
to prep for the aggregation. And we should probably
explain what the aggregation is. It's not just
a final exam. It's this incredibly brutal, nationwide
competitive exam for the top teaching jobs in
France. It's a trial by fire. It demands total
mastery. And it was while she was studying for
this that she met that whole circle. Jean -Paul
Sartre, Paul Nizan, René Mahou. Right. And Mahou
gave her the nickname Caster, which is French
for beaver. Because her surname, Beauvoir, sounded
a bit like the English word beaver. And because
she was such a hard worker, I suppose, the name
stuck. So 1929's the big year. She writes her
thesis on Leibniz. But the real moment is the
aggregation exam. And the results. I mean, they
just speak for themselves. Sartre came in first.
She came in second. At just 21 years old, she
was the youngest person ever to pass the philosophy
aggregation. And that did it. That secured her
economic independence. It gave her the salary,
the freedom she'd been fighting for. Exactly.
She taught in high schools the laissez system
for years until she could finally support herself
just from her writing in 1943. So by 1929, she's
got it all lining up. Financial stability. this
incredible intellectual reputation, and she's
in this lifelong relationship with Jean -Paul
Sartre. A relationship that is probably the most
famous non -marriage in intellectual history.
It lasted 50 years, right up until he died in
1980. And it started unconventionally from day
one. Completely. Sartre was immediately fascinated
by her mind. He even proposed marriage, but in
this sort of tentative way, suggesting a two
-year lease. A two -year lease on a marriage.
And she turned him down flat. She did. And her
reasons were deeply philosophical. She saw marriage
as a very alienating institution. She thought
it was dangerous for both people, but especially
for women. What specifically did she object to?
The whole concept of conjugal rights. The idea
that the institution gave a man legal and sexual
access to a woman's body. To her, it reduced
a woman to property and would have just completely
negated the independence she'd fought so hard
for. So instead of marriage, they create this
thing they call a soul partnership. It was their
primary emotional and sexual relationship, but
it was non -exclusive and they never lived together.
Which gave her this radical freedom. She had
the intellectual partner she needed, but also
the time and space to write, to travel, to take
other lovers. And to think. It allowed both of
them to have this incredible freedom. Now their
intellectual relationship, it's always been debated,
hasn't it? Was she just his follower, his best
editor, or was she a genuine influence on his
thinking? History often tried to put her in that
secondary role, but more recent scholarship,
looking at their early letters and notes, shows
how deeply grounded she was in philosophy on
her own terms. She was reading Hegel and Leibniz
before Sartre was, and some sources say she developed
her own original critique of Hegel's master -slave
dialectic. So they were true intellectual equals.
They were. They always read each other's work
before publication, gave each other feedback.
The lines between their ideas were often, you
know, intentionally blurry. Outside of Sartre,
her other big famous relationship was with the
American writer Nelson Algren. Yes. She met him
in Chicago in 1947. She was on this four -month
tour of the U .S., which she wrote about in her
book America Day by Day. And that was a very
different kind of relationship, wasn't it? It
seems so. It was very intense, very passionate,
but also very long distance. In her letters to
him, she called him my beloved husband. And,
you know, decades later, she was buried wearing
a silver ring he'd given her. But this is where
her philosophy of radical openness really clashes
with, you know, personal feelings. Yeah. Because
she used that relationship in her work. She did.
Algren was the model for the character Louis
Brogan in her novel The Mandarins. The novel
that won the Prix Goncourt. Right. And while
it was a huge literary success, it was a personal
disaster for their relationship. Algren was reportedly
just devastated. He was outraged by how frankly
she described their sexual life in the novel
and later in her autobiographies. He felt totally
betrayed. It really highlights this constant
tension in her life, doesn't it? This absolute
commitment to authenticity, but then the collateral
damage it could cause to people she cared about.
Exactly. And that leads us directly to the most
controversial part of her personal ethics, her
relationships with her students. This is the
really difficult stuff to talk about. We know
she was bisexual, but these relationships crossed
a serious line. They did. And this is where the
gossip and controversy really intensified. It
wasn't just about unconventional partnerships
anymore. It was about documented exploitation.
And it led to a major public scandal for her
in 1943. That's right. Her teaching license was
actually revoked after she was formally charged
with debauching a minor. And this was in relation
to her 17 -year -old student, Natalie Sorokin.
Yes. The license was eventually reinstated, but
the damage was done. And the allegations, well,
they go much deeper when you read the accounts
of another student, Bianca Lamblin. Lamblin wrote
a memoir about this much later, right? She did.
In it, she alleged that Beauvoir began grooming
and sexually exploiting her when she was just
16. She claims it turned into this exploitative
three -way relationship, a menage a trois, with
Sartre that lasted for years. That's a staggering
accusation of an abuse of power. What made Lamlin
finally come forward with that story? It was
after Sarch's letters were published posthumously.
She discovered that he'd written about her, using
a pseudonym. And reading his detached clinical
descriptions of what she had experienced, she
said she felt nauseated and disgusted. And it
wasn't just her. No, both Lamblin and Sorkin
and another student named Olga Kosakivich. They
all later said that their relationships with
Beauvoir had caused them serious, lasting psychological
harm. It's a profound contradiction, isn't it?
Here's this philosopher who's about to write
a masterpiece about freedom and the ethical need
to will the freedom of others. While at the same
time, she's engaging in these incredibly unequal,
damaging relationships that are built on her
own power and authority. You can't understand.
the whole person without grappling with that
tension. Right. So let's talk about how she translated
her philosophy into public action. This idea
of being an engaged intellectual. The key vehicle
for that was the journal they founded, Les Temps
Modernes, or Modern Times. She started it in
1945 with Sarch and Maurice Merleau -Ponty. It
was meant to be the intellectual engine of post
-war France. They're not just an academic journal.
A political one. Absolutely. Sartre wrote this
famous preface for the first issue laying out
their mission. He called it engaged literature.
He basically said writers have a responsibility
to act in the world. He even attacked Flaubert
for not writing a single line to protest the
violence after the Paris Commune. So the idea
was to take a side. Exactly. The journal's mission
was to influence the society we live in. And
Beauvoir was central to this. She was an editor
until she died. And she used its pages as a sort
of laboratory to test out her own ideas before
they became books. And her first real philosophical
essay came out around this time, in 1944. Yes,
Pyrrhus et Sineas. It's a fascinating piece,
written as a dialogue, where she starts to explore
these questions of ethical action. When is violence
justified? What does it mean to act meaningfully?
But the big one. The central statement of her
existentialist ethics is the ethics of ambiguity
from 1947. That's the one. In it, she argues
that existentialism is the philosophy for our
time because it's the only one that takes seriously
the collapse of religious certainty. It starts
from Dostoevsky's famous challenge. If God is
dead, then all things are lawful. So if there
are no pre -made rules, how do you build an ethical
system from scratch? She says you start by confronting
what she calls bad faith. This is the tendency
we all have to run away from our own freedom.
We pretend we don't have a choice. She has different
categories for this, right? The serious man.
The serious man, yes. He's the person who denies
his freedom by saying, well, the rules are just
the rules. He bows down to some external authority,
the state, the church, his boss, to avoid taking
personal responsibility for his choices. He hides
in the system. Precisely. And then you have the
nihilist who sees that there's no preordained
meaning and just concludes that nothing matters
at all. So why bother? Both are a flight from
freedom. So the only truly moral or authentic
way to live is to embrace that ambiguity, to
accept that we are both fact and freedom at the
same time. Yes. And this is her core ethical
insight. The truly authentic person realizes
that their own freedom depends on the freedom
of others. You can't be free by oppressing someone
else. Because their projects, their choices,
interfere with yours. Exactly. She put it perfectly.
No project can be defined except by its interference
with other projects. My freedom to act is only
meaningful in a world where you are also free
to act. If I enslave you, I diminish the very
meaning of my own freedom. It's a radical call
for mutual responsibility. It wasn't just abstract
theory for her. She applied it in some really
high -stakes, difficult political situations.
Very much so. After the war, during the trials
of collaborators, there was the case of Robert
Brossilock. He was a prominent writer who had
supported fascism and genocide. And Beauvoir
argued for his execution. She did. It was controversial,
but she defended it in an essay called An Eye
for an Eye. She argued that because he used his
freedom as a writer to call for oppression and
death, he was guilty of intellectual crimes that
had real lethal consequences. It's a really stark
application of her ethics of responsibility.
That intensity, that direct application of philosophy
to life, it all culminates in her 1949 masterpiece,
The Second Sex. This is it. This is where existentialism
and feminism fused together to create something
totally new. It's the intellectual blueprint
for what would become second wave feminism. And
it all starts with that core existentialist idea.
Existence precedes essence. She just takes that
and applies it directly to gender. And in doing
so, she produces probably the single most revolutionary
sentence in 20th century feminist thought. One
is not born, but becomes a woman. On n 'est pas
femme, on le devient. It's so famous now, but
what made it so explosive at the time? Because
it drew this clean, sharp line between biological
sex and socially constructed gender. Before Beauvoir,
the assumption was that your anatomy was your
destiny. Biology determined your personality,
your role, your essence. And she just said no?
She said, no, the biological facts of being female
exist, sure. But everything we associate with
womanhood, the stereotypes, the behaviors, the
limitations, that's all historical and social
construction. It's something that is taught,
enforced, and conditioned from birth. And this
conditioning, she argued, forces women into a
state she called Imminence. Exactly. Imminence.
It means to sort of remain within. It's a state
of passive being, of being trapped in the domestic
sphere, defined by biology and repetition, the
endless cycle of housework, childcare, being
an object rather than a subject. And the opposite
of imminence is transcendence. Transcendence
is what she saw as authentic human existence.
It's actively choosing your future, taking risks,
creating projects in the world, writing a book,
starting a company, leading a movement. And her
argument was that men are automatically granted
transcendence, while women have historically
been confined to imminence. Why? What's the mechanism?
She argues it's because woman has been constructed
as the ultimate other. The man is the self, the
default, the absolute. The woman is defined only
in relation to him. She is the second sex, the
incidental, the inessential. And she backed this
up with centuries of evidence. Oh, yeah. The
first volume of the book is this massive historical
deep dive. She quotes Aristotle viewing women
as a certain lack of qualities, basically a defective
male. She quotes Thomas Aquinas calling women
an imperfect man. She showed this wasn't an accident.
It was a deep -seated philosophical tradition.
That's what gave the book its power. It wasn't
just a polemic. It was a scholarly takedown of
Western thought. Absolutely. Which is why it's
such a tragedy that the first English translation
was so, well, so bad. Right. This was done by
Howard Parsley, who wasn't even a philosopher.
He was a biology professor. And the publisher,
Alfred A. Knopf, rushed him. He had, you know,
pretty basic French. So he cut huge sections
of the book, nearly a third of the original text.
He took out the dense philosophical arguments,
the history, the footnotes that were the entire
foundation of her argument. So for decades. The
entire English -speaking world was reading a
dumbed -down, distorted version of her masterpiece.
That's right. It hobbled the philosophical reception
of her work for years. Scholars knew it was bad,
but Knopf blocked a new translation for a very
long time. The first complete, accurate English
version didn't come out until 2010. 2010. That's
incredible. So the feminist movement was literally
built on a partial text. In many ways, yes. And
speaking of feminism... It's interesting that
Beauvoir herself was reluctant to even call herself
a feminist at first. She was. Her primary political
commitment was to socialism. She kind of believed
that a full -scale class revolution would automatically
solve the woman problem. She thought feminism
on its own was a distraction. What changed her
mind? Just seeing the women's liberation movement
explode in the late 60s and early 70s, she realized
that patriarchy was its own system of oppression
separate from class. So in 1972, she finally
publicly declared herself a feminist. She said,
you know, a socialist revolution isn't enough
on its own. And then she became a very active
participant. Yeah. especially around abortion
rights. In 1971, she was one of the main forces
behind the Manifesto of the 343. It was this
incredible public statement signed by 343 prominent
French women, including her, all publicly admitting
to having had an illegal abortion. Dearing the
government to prosecute all of them. Exactly.
It was a hugely powerful act of civil disobedience,
and it worked. Abortion was legalized in France
in 1974. So even as she got older... Her output
never really slowed down. She kept writing novels,
autobiographies, but her focus seemed to shift
a bit towards aging and death. It did. The Mandarins,
which we mentioned, came out in 54. But then
in 1967, you get The Woman Destroyed, which is
a collection of stories about older women grappling
with aging and feeling invisible. And her book
about her mother's death is supposed to be incredibly
powerful. A very easy death from 1964. It's this
almost brutally honest yet very moving account
of her mother dying from cancer. And it was one
of the first mainstream books to really tackle
the ethics of end -of -life care, you know, the
doctor -patient relationship when things are
terminal. And then there was that novel that
was only published a few years ago, right? Decades
after she died. Yes. Les Inseparables. The Inseparables.
It was published in 2020. It's a novelization
of her intense, passionate childhood friendship
and first love with a girl named Elizabeth LeCoin,
who she called Zaza. And Zaza's death had a huge
impact on her. A profound impact. Zaza died tragically
young, but Beauvoir always believed it wasn't
just the illness that killed her. She blamed
the oppressive, conventional bourgeois society
they grew up in for crushing Zaza's spirit and
her will to live. It's like the origin story
for her entire rebellion. But her public statements
in her later life, they could be just as controversial
as her early life. Absolutely. Especially her
views on motherhood and housework. This is the
1975 interview with Betty Frieden, right? It's
often used to paint Beauvoir as being against
women's choices. It's a very thorny moment. Friedan
asked her if housewives should get a minimum
wage, and Beauvoir's answer was shocking. She
said, no woman should be authorized to stay at
home and raise her children. Which sounds incredibly
authoritarian, coming from the great philosopher
of freedom. It does, but her reasoning, whether
you agree with it or not, was philosophically
consistent. She argued that as long as staying
home is seen as a valid choice, societal pressure
and conditioning will force too many women into
it. She believed you had to remove the choice
to create the conditions for real freedom from
that conditioning. It's an extreme position.
It is, but not nearly as unsettling as the other
major controversy from her later years. Her signature
on that 1977 petition. Yeah, this is this is
really troubling. In 1977, she, along with Foucault,
Search and a number of other French intellectuals,
signed a petition to abolish the age of consent
in France. It was in support of three men who
had been arrested for sexual relations with minors
between 12 and 13. It's just it's impossible
to reconcile that with the philosophy of protecting
the freedom of others. It really is. It stands
as this profound and disturbing contradiction
in her public life and one that's very difficult
to explain away. A deeply complicated, flawed
figure right to the end. Her last years were,
of course, overshadowed by Sartre's decline and
death in 1980. And she wrote about it in A Farewell
to Sartre, a very painful, unflinching look at
his final years. It was the only major work she
ever published that he didn't read first. A final
act of intellectual independence, in a way. Perhaps.
But her final personal act was maybe the most
rebellious of all. It involved her long -term
partner, Sylvie Le Bon. Right. In 1980... When
Beauvoir was 72, she legally adopted Sylvie Le
Bon, who was in her late 30s at the time. Her
partner, her companion, became her legal daughter.
For someone who rejected the institution of marriage
her entire life, this embrace of a legal institution,
adoption, is just fascinating. So how do people
interpret that? Was she giving in to the system?
The common scholarly interpretation is the exact
opposite. They see it as a final act of subversion.
She used a legal structure designed for the traditional
bio -heteronormative family and used it to legitimize
and protect a queer, nontraditional kinship.
It wasn't a surrender. It was a raid. It was
her way of securing Sylvie's future and defining
their relationship on her own terms one last
time. She died a few years later in 1986. And
she's buried right next to Sartre. A partnership
right to the very end. So when you take a step
back from all the personal chaos, all the controversy,
and you just look at the intellectual legacy.
It's undeniable, isn't it? It's profound. The
second sex literally provided the philosophical
vocabulary for second wave feminism around the
world. Pioneers of the movement all said so themselves.
Betty Friedan said Beauvoir's book led her directly
to her own analysis in the feminine mystique.
Kate Millett's sexual politics leans heavily
on her. The debt is enormous and openly acknowledged.
Her ideas just reshaped everything. The very
concept of a sex -gender distinction became the
starting point for decades of work in sociology,
history, literary criticism. It all comes back
to that one sentence. One is not born, but becomes
a woman. It just keeps inspiring new generations
of thinkers. Absolutely. Monique Wittig riffed
on it directly. And then you get someone like
Judith Butler, who takes that verb to become
and pushes it. even further. This is Butler's
theory of performativity. Right. Butler looks
at to become and says, well, if gender is something
you're always becoming and never something you
just are, then it can't be a static thing. It's
not a noun. It's a verb. It's an incessant and
repeated action. So gender is this performance
that we're all constantly doing every day reinforced
by the culture around us. Exactly. And that whole
line of thought, which has been so influential,
it starts right there with Beauvoir applying
an existentialist framework to the problem of
gender. It's why she's still so relevant. And
she's getting the recognition now. There's a
square in Paris named after both her and Sarch.
Time magazine named her Woman of the Year for
1949. Her place is secure. Messy, complicated,
but absolutely secure. So we've come to the end
of our deep dive. We've traced Simone de Beauvoir's
journey from this brilliant, rebellious daughter
of the bourgeoisie to the architect of modern
feminism. Her life was this constant, difficult
synthesis of ideas and actions. A life defined
by philosophical clarity on the one hand and
deep personal ambiguity on the other. She showed
us that living an authentic life is a messy business.
It requires making hard choices, and sometimes
those choices create a lot of friction. So as
always, we want to leave you with a final thought
to chew on, something that brings all this together.
It centers on that final tension in her life
between freedom and institutions. Beauvoir spent
her entire life fiercely rejecting traditional
structures like marriage, calling them alienating
institutions. But then at the very end of her
life, she used a highly restrictive legal institution
adoption to formalize her relationship with Sylvie
Le Bon. So the question for you is this. Given
that her entire philosophy was about radical
freedom and authentic choice, was that final
decision to use the legal system to formalize
a queer kinship the ultimate application of her
existential ethics, subverting an institution
from within, or was it a final contradiction
of her lifelong opposition to those very constraints?
That choice, using the system you hate to get
the freedom you want, it's a fascinating and
very human problem, isn't it? It is. That's our
deep dive. We'll see you next time.