Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution by Michelle Boulous Walker

Author:Michelle Boulous Walker [Walker, Michelle Boulous]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781474279932
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

Beauvoir reading the couple:

‘Sartre and Beauvoir’

Let us now move on to ask how these two types of reading – one romantic, one authentic – square with what Beauvoir herself has had to say about her relation to Sartre and his philosophy. It has been said that Beauvoir consistently refused to characterize herself as a philosopher, suggesting that this was rightly Sartre’s role.66 Beauvoir has often been portrayed – in a manner that annoys a good many of us – as Sartre’s ‘follower’ or disciple,67 and yet what remains perhaps most important is the question of what role, if any, she has played in the circulation of this ‘myth’. In her appeal to ‘reopen the question of influence’ between Beauvoir and Sartre, Margaret Simons suggests that Beauvoir’s depiction of herself – in philosophical terms – changes dramatically from the period before meeting Sartre to that afterwards (Simons 1998).68 From the time she meets Sartre, her own quite personal philosophical questions appear to be absorbed into what many depict as her faithful elaboration of Sartrean themes. According to Simons, ‘Beauvoir stated more than once and unequivocally that she was not a philosopher, that she did not do philosophy, and that she could not have influenced Sartre’s philosophy’. However, she notes ‘this denial is contradicted by Beauvoir’s own written words in her recently discovered 1927 diary, written while Beauvoir was a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, two years before her first meeting with Sartre’ (Simons 1998: 17–18).69 In this diary Beauvoir states ‘her passionate commitment to doing philosophy, outlines her literary methodology for doing philosophy, acknowledges early philosophical influences, and defines major themes of her own later philosophy and that of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness’ (Simons 1998: 18).70

Does Beauvoir’s apparent ‘retreat’ from her identity as philosopher tell us anything about how she reads her (intellectual) relationship with Sartre? And if so, can we draw on the distinction she draws between romantic and authentic love in order to understand her reading of ‘the couple’? In Force of Circumstance, the third volume of her autobiography, published originally in 1963 (Beauvoir 1968), Beauvoir has the following to say about her relation with Sartre:

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