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Chapter 5
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR:
AN
EXISTENTIAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL ETHICS
Gail Weiss
The George Washington University
1. BACKGROUND
Thanks to the recent efforts of feminist scholars, Simone de Beauvoir's fame as the
lifelong companionofexistential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is slowly giving way
to a recognition of he originalityofher own work as a philosopher, autobiographer,
novelist, essayist, editor, and political activist. Her ethics, in particular, has received
a great deal of attention, not only because she offers the first formal articulation of
an existential ethics in her 1947 book, Pour une morale de l'ambiguite (published
in English in 1948 as The Ethics
of
Ambiguity and hereafter abbreviated as EA), but
also because the moral challenges she discusses there and elsewhere in her works
seem as appropriate today as they were half a century ago.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris on January 9, 1908. Aside from summer
vacations at her relatives' homes in the French countryside as a young girl, a couple
ofyears spent teaching in lycees outside ofParis after she obtained her agregation
in philosophy at the Sorbonne, and her regular travels as an adult, Beauvoir resided
in Paris throughout her life and died there on April 14, 1986. As a member of the
French Resistance, Beauvoir remained in Paris during the difficult years of the
German Occupation, and toward the end of the war, she co-founded and co-edited
with Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and others the political journal Les Temps
Modernes.
Beauvoir's best known philosophical work,
Le deuxieme sexe
(published in
English in 1952 as
The Second Sex
and hereafter referred to as SS), was first
published in France
by
Gallimard in two volumes in 1949. In this book, Beauvoir
uses an existential framework to address the question "What does it mean to be a
woman?" Focusing primarily, but not exclusively, on the situation
of
Western
women, her text incorporates insights from a variety of disciplines, including
philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and biology.
Given its fame today as a "landmark" feminist text, it is easy to forget that the
initial public reception of The Second Sex was far from positive. Indeed, the text
107
J J
Drummond and L Embree (eds.), Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy, 107-118.
2002
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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SIMONE DE
BEAUVOIR 109
on other texts that take up ethical issues, such
as
Pyrrhus
et
Cineas (1944) with its
discussion of he inevitability ofviolence and oppression and The
Second Sex
with
its focus on the constraints placed upon women's freedom by their existence within,
and subjection to, a set
of
interlocking patriarchal social systems. Yet despite this
interest in the ethical implications of her work, there has been relatively little
agreement among Beauvoir's commentators about what the central claims of her
ethics are, or even about the role women, men, society, and women's own bodies
play in an individual's possibilities for living ethically. A point on which there
is
relative agreement, however,
is
that for Beauvoir the ethical cannot be restricted to
a separate sphere of existence, since ethical issues underlie all of the projects in
which we engage. In other words, we cannot view the ethical
as
coming into play
only on some occasions and not others, since it concerns the very manner in which
we live our bodies, our relations with others, and our situations. This point of
consensus has given rise to alternative readings, however, precisely because the
ethical informs and
is
informed by all of the other key concepts that motivate
Beauvoir's work, including transcendence, immanence, choice, commitment,
freedom, oppression, consciousness, the body, the Other, and the situation.
One's understanding
of
the specific moral challenges posed
by
Beauvoir's
conception of the ethical depends, I would argue, upon which aspect
of
human
existence one takes
as
a starting point for one's analysis. For instance,
if
one begins
from the standpoint
of
freedom and transcendence, two seemingly essential
requirements for ethical existence for Beauvoir
as
well as for Sartre, then one's
emphasis will be placed on how specific individuals can realize what Beauvoir calls
"moral freedom." By contrast, if one focuses on the ethical demands placed upon
us by the existence ofothers, then the emphasis will shift from the subjective to the
intersubjective domain.
The consequences ofemphasizing the subjective dimensions offreedom rather
than its intersubjective dimensions (or vice versa) can be quite serious. For
if
one
concentrates too narrowly on those places where Beauvoir describes freedom as the
transcendence of the givens of one's own situation, the danger is that her ethics
appears to be too solipsistic since the attainment ofmoral freedom appears to be a
purely individual project. On the other hand,
if
one concentrates too heavily on the
passages where she emphatically maintains that one's freedom cannot be achieved
unless others are also free, then freedom (and an ethical existence) seems
impossible to achieve, since millions of oppressed peoples continue to exist in the
world. Rather than privilege one domain at the expense
of
the other, it
is
essential
to appreciate that for Beauvoir, attaining one's moral freedom
is
never merely an
individual project, but always a social and political project as well. Thus the very
project of"willing one's freedom" always occurs within a broader context in which
my freedom both enables and
is
enabled by, constrains and is constrained by, the
freedom of others.
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SIMONE
DE BEA UVOIR
111
Undoubtedly, these are all very different kinds
of
failures, and Beauvoir goes
on to discuss them through the examples she provides of the subman, the serious
man, the nihilist, and the adventurer. The subman clings to his facticity, thereby
failing to recognize and act upon his transcendence, while the serious man's
unquestioning acceptance ofa set of fixed values absolves him of the need to take
responsibility for them. The nihilist responds to the anxiety of his freedom by
attempting to
be
nothing (EA, 52). The adventurer comes closest to living ethically
because the meaningfulness of his actions flows from the commitments he has
made to them, but he operates too solipsistically to be granted ethical standing
unless he wills the freedom
of
others at the same time that he wills his own
freedom.
In all these examples, with the exception of the adventurer, the individual's
failure to become ethical
is
directly due to his failure to live the tension between
freedom and facticity; instead of
affirming this tension as an inescapable feature
of
human existence, he tries to resolve it by negating his freedom (subman), by
negating his facticity (nihilist), or by sacrificing his freedom to a self-created
facticity (the serious man). The adventurer alone does justice to both his freedom
and his facticity, but he too fails
if
he does not recognize that his own freedom
depends upon his securing the freedom
of
others.
The failure
of
he adventurer
is
qualitatively different from the failures
of
hese
others because it highlights the indispensable role the Other plays in determining
the ethicality of my existence. Indeed, the limitations of viewing the tension
between freedom and facticity as the sole ground for Beauvoir's ethics is revealed
especially poignantly at this point in her discussion. Before moving on to discuss
the possibilities and failures associated specifically with the Other, however, it
is
important to take stock
of
what
is
at stake in Beauvoir's depiction
of
ethical
existence as seeking to affirm freedom
as
an "absolute end" over and against the
factical demands of
the situation.
Precisely because this account is
so Sartrean, understanding the ethical
primarily
as
an exercise of transcendence over the immanent aspects of existence
exposes Beauvoir to the same criticisms Sartre faced regarding the dualist ontology
ofL 'etre
et
le
neant
(translated into English
as
Being
and
Nothingness and hereafter
abbreviated
as
BN). Not merely the situation
as
such, but also the individual's own
body is relegated to the sphere of immanence that threatens, if one's will is not
strong enough, to lead one to abandon the movement of ranscendence. Indeed, the
claims Beauvoir makes about women's bodies, for instance, in "The Data
of
Biology" chapter
of
The
Second
Sex,
frequently relegate their bodies to the status
of immanent objects that represent an ongoing threat
to
their transcendence as this
latter
is
apprehended both by the individual herself and by others.
It is
paradoxical, Beauvoir observes, that female members
of
the species that
is
the most independent and individualized are also the most enslaved by the
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112 Gail Weiss
requirements
of
its perpetuation. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, all
represent, for Beauvoir, obstacles that women must contend with to realize their
freedom. While, she argues, "the male finds more and more varied ways in which
to employ the forces he is master of; the female feels her enslavement more and
more keenly, the conflict between her own interests and the reproductive forces is
heightened (SS, 25, emphasis added). Of all female mammals, it is woman,
Beauvoir concludes, "who most dramatically fulfills the call of
destiny and most
profoundly differs from her male" (SS, 25).
If freedom and transcendence are associated with escaping the restrictions
placed upon us by our bodies and our situations, and
if
his latter effort is necessary
to secure an ethical existence, then difficulties arise in assessing the ethicality
of
individuals who seem unable to move beyond these constraints or who do not see
the "call
of
destiny" as constraining in the first place. Beauvoir, as many
commentators have observed, does address the status ofsuch individuals, whom she
often characterizes as "the oppressed." She also recognizes that failure to transcend
the "givens" ofexistence need not be due to a "weak will" or a desire to escape the
anguish
of
taking responsibility for one's own choices and the unknown
consequences that follow from them; rather, such failure is often due to the mental
and physical domination of oneself by others, a domination that can lead to what
Beauvoir calls mystification.
4.
MYSTIFICATION AND OPPRESSION
Mystification, she suggests, involves the belief that one has no control over one's
situation, that the givens of the situation wholly constitute the situation as such and
that they alone define its meaning and possibilities. The mystified individual does
not seek to transform the situation through her free choices because she does not see
herself as having any choices to begin with. "Ignorance and error," Beauvoir
asserts, "are facts as inescapable as prison walls" (EA, 38). Although Beauvoir
seeks to differentiate the case
of
the severely oppressed person from the case
of
he
subman and the serious man, who also fail to enact their freedom positively, this
description
of
the phenomenon
of
mystification-as well as the word
"mystification"
itself-suggests
that the oppressed individual exists in a state
of
false consciousness, unaware
of
the "true" nature
of
the situation in which she is
immersed. Ignorance and error, however, are often considered to be morally
blameworthy (especially within a Sartrean framework), and it is because Beauvoir
has not yet seriously addressed the role that others play in enabling or inhibiting my
freedom that this acknowledgment of the constraints placed upon one by an
oppressive situation seems rather unsatisfactory.
Hence it seems clear that Beauvoir cannot give a comprehensive account
of
ethical ambiguity
if
she relies solely upon the opposition between transcendence
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SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
113
and immanence, since the Other introduces further ambiguities into the situation
with which each ofus must contend. Moreover, ifwe try to reduce the role played
by the Other to that
of
another for-itself who
is
also trying to secure (or flee from)
an ethical existence and who, in doing so, may engage in projects that often conflict
with and even threaten my own, then the Other becomes another potential obstacle
to my freedom rather than a means of achieving it.
It
is a virtue ofBeauvoir's account that she moves away from both Sartre's and
her own negative descriptions of the inevitable conflicts that characterize
intersubjective relationships to introduce and defend the claim that my own freedom
requires (rather than merely tolerating) the freedom ofothers. And ifone begins an
examination ofBeauvoir's ethics by unpacking the significance
of
his latter claim,
a claim that
is
made not once but several times across different works, the focus of
her ethics changes dramatically.
5. ETHICS AND THE
OTHER
One danger
of
viewing an ethics predicated on the opposition between
transcendence and immanence as the sole voice in Beauvoir's work
is
that we fail
to see how she moves beyond not only the Cartesian ontological framework
employed by Sartre, but also Hegel's depiction
of
the "master-slave dialectic"
as
models for intersubjective relationships In both Sartre's and Hegel's accounts of
what Sartre calls "being-for-others," my relations to others are characterized by
structural inequalities that must continually be renegotiated but can never be
eradicated. Garcin's famous proclamation that "hell
is-other
people" in Sartre's
play No Exit, and Sartre's claim that "I grasp the Other's look at the very center of
my act
as
the solidification and alienation
of
my own possibilities" (BN, 352) are
just two examples of he constant conflict that marks our relations with others in his
work.
If
the look
of
the Other,
as
Sartre asserts, reveals no more and no less than
"my transcendence transcended," then it is indeed difficult to see how the Other can
be other than an obstacle to the exercise of
my freedom.
It
cannot be denied that Beauvoir also repeatedly emphasizes the inevitable
conflicts that characterize intersubjective relationships. "To be sure," she tells us
in The
Second Sex,
"every human relationship implies conflict, all love brings
jealousy" (SS, 347). And yet,
as
one contemporary Beauvoir scholar has
persuasively argued, this conflictual model of intersubjectivity, a model that is so
in keeping with both Sartre's and Hegel's respective accounts, is
not the only
framework to which Beauvoir appeals in order to describe our relations with
1
See Debra Bergoffen, The Philosophy
of
Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomen
ologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany, NY: State University ofNew York Press, 1997).
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Gail Weiss
others.
2
For instance, in The
Second
Sex, Beauvoir also describes the possibility of
an ethical, erotic encounter between two lovers in which neither dominates the
other, and in which each recognizes the transcendence of he other (SS, 401 ). In this
encounter, the two lovers freely give themselves to one another without one seeking
to entrap the other or to lose herself in the other. As Beauvoir observes, "Under a
concrete and carnal form there is mutual recognition of the ego and of the other in
the keenest awareness
of the other and of the ego" (SS, 401).
This mutual celebration of the intertwining ofmy own freedom and facticity
with that
of
the other offers a positive model of ethical engagement that moves us
beyond the limitations
of
the for-itself/in-itself and transcendence/immanence
dichotomies. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen how well the early version
of
Beauvoir's existential ethics, with its emphasis on individual freedom and
responsibility for one's situation, can simultaneously encourage the development
oflong-lasting, nonhierarchical relationships with others outside as well as within
the erotic domain.
The key to reconciling my own freedom with an affirmation of the freedom of
the other whose projects may and often do conflict with my own lies in Beauvoir's
conception of he "existential conversion" that she claims is necessary to transform
my original freedom into moral or genuine freedom. I perform this existential
conversion by willing myself free, a paradoxical project insofar as I actively will
to possess the freedom I already possess. Moreover, Beauvoir claims that I must
will to possess my freedom in an indefinite movement, that is, I must actively
affirm my freedom through all
ofmy actions in such a fashion that my freedom will
realize itself through its own self-perpetuating movement. One danger
of
willing
my freedom, however, is that I may end up willing it in the form of he in-itself, that
is, as something given, rather than as a perpetual accomplishment. The opposite
danger is that I will become so entranced with the movement
of
transcendence that
is synonymous with my freedom that I will fail to realize my freedom in a specific
project, a project that in tum will result in a concrete tranforrnation ofmy situation.
We can better understand these dangers as well as how to avoid them through
Beauvoir's distinction between what she calls the "will to be" and the "will to
disclose" the world
of
my concern. Both draw upon my freedom. The will to be,
however, causes my freedom to
tum
against itself by willing itself as facticity (and
this is precisely what Beauvoir accuses the serious man of doing). The will to
disclosure, she suggests, reveals the limits of the will to be precisely because it is
attuned to the ambiguities of human existence that preclude fixed and fmal
meanings. According to Beauvoir, "the disclosure implies a perpetual tension to
keep being at a certain distance, to tear oneself from the world, and to assert oneself
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SIMONE DE BEA UVO/R 115
as a freedom" (EA, 23-24). Thus the requirements for ethical existence demand that
I disengage myself from the world in order to make its disclosure possible, but I
must also exercise my transcendence concretely upon the world of my concern
through the pursuit of a specific project. For if the will to disclose the world does
not issue in action, then it becomes an empty intellectual exercise, devoid ofethical
significance.
Whereas death would seem to present a natural limit to my efforts to will my
freedom in an indefinite movement, Beauvoir argues that "just as life is identified
with the will-to-live, freedom always appears as a movement
ofliberation.lt
is only
by
prolonging itself through the freedom ofothers that it manages to surpass death
itself and to realize itself as
an
indefmite unity" (EA,
32).
Insofar as the will to
disclose the world discloses a world in which I coexist with others, I cannot will to
disclose the world without willing that the world should
be
equally disclosed to
them. And Beauvoir suggests that this is a movement that I will to continue even
when I am no longer part of that world and when other wills must take up my
projects and transform them.
6. N EMBODIED ETHICS
I earlier claimed that the varying interpretations offered
ofBeauvoir
s ethics depend
largely upon which of her existential concepts is used as the starting point for
analysis. While Beauvoir's emphasis upon ethically realizing my freedom through
the transformation
of
the givens
of
my situation relies primarily upon the notion
of
transcendence (and thereby sets up a tension between transcendence and
immanence that makes the situation of the oppressed individual who does not
and/or cannot seek to alter the situation extremely problematic), she also recognizes
that my freedom is dependent upon the freedom
of
others and that actively working
toward the latter is the only way of giving lasting meaning to the former. Clearly,
the notion of ranscendence has not been abandoned with this focus onmy relations
with others; quite the contrary, the intersubjective dimensions of my existence
deepen the significance of human transcendence
by
presenting it as a collective
achievement rather than an individual project. The question remains, however, how
a collective affirmation of human freedom can
be
achieved in and through the
various conflicts and tensions that mark intersubjective existence.
Perhaps the most serious challenge to the possibilityofprolonging my freedom
through assisting in the realization of the freedom of others is offered through an
extended autobiographical example provided
by
Beauvoir
herself-namely
her
description ofher mother's fmal illness and subsequent death from stomach cancer
in
Une mort tres douce
(1964; translated and published in English as
A Very Easy
Death,
1965). This autobiographical narrative itself has an ambiguous place in
Beauvoir's work. It is not fiction, not philosophy, and not quite like her earlier
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Gail Weiss
autobiographies either, since the focus
is
not primarily on herselfbut on her mother,
Franc;oise de Beauvoir.
3
Despite the fact that it is by no means a formal ethical
treatise and has not received much philosophical attention, it is
an important work
to discuss because it offers a very poignant description of the challenges that
deception poses to ethics.
In the course of
A Very Easy Death,
Beauvoir reveals the limits not only of a
Kantian, disembodied ethics, but also a Sartrean morality that seems inevitably to
align any form ofdeception with bad faith. Moreover, I would argue that the ethics
that appears in an unthematized form in this narrative cannot be subsumed within
the disclosure of individual freedom discussed in
The Ethics ofAmbiguity
or within
the model
of
mutually confirming subjectivities that Beauvoir provides in the erotic
encounter described in
The Second Sex.
This
is
because neither
of
these accounts
can do justice to the paradoxically enabling consequences of the deception
practiced by Beauvoir and her sister toward their mother in the face of her
impending death.
In
A Very Easy Death,
Simone de Beauvoir painstakingly describes the roles
she, her sister, the doctors, and the nurses all played in deceiving her mother about
the seriousness
of
her illness and the imminence
of
her death. Beauvoir willfully
(albeit with much anguish) participates in the deception, because she recognizes
that although her mother tacitly knows that she
is
dying, Franc;oise
is
not
emotionally, intellectually, or physically equipped to acknowledge the diagnosis
explicitly. Significantly, Beauvoir's participation in her mother's self-deception
appears within the text to be an
ethical
response to her mother's desire even though
this desire demands responses that are at odds with Beauvoir's own ethical
inclinations. These latter, rejecting the path
of
willful self-deception, privilege the
lucid evaluation
of
the situation that characterizes the will to disclosure.
An emphasis on lucidity and a disavowal
of
deception
is
not only a key feature
ofBeauvoir's and Sartre's existential frameworks, but also
is
foundational to the
Kantian, deontological model and to the entire rationalist tradition. Indeed, Kant
argues that we must abstract from the particularities of
the individuals involved in
a given situation in order to determine a universal ethical response to that situation.
Insofar
as
a moral response, for Kant, rests solely on reason and must be applicable
to
any situation in which questions
of
deceiving another might arise, his ethics
demands that we ignore those aspects ofFranc;oise de Beauvoir's personality that
explain her desire for deception.
Undoubtedly, there are many individuals (including Simone de Beauvoir
herself) who would prefer the additional suffering that comes with knowing the
3
Beauvoir pursues a similar strategy in her later volume Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre,
trans. Patrick O'Brian New York: Pantheon, 1984).
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SIMONE DE BEA UVOIR 117
truth to any relief from suffering that might follow from allowing oneself to be
deceived about one's situation. Moreover, the wish to be deceived, as Sartre points
out in
Being and Nothingness, is
itself contradictory and doomed to failure, since
one must know what one wants
to
be deceived about in order to engage actively in
the project ofself-deception. Despite these and other difficulties with the project
of
self-deception, much less Fran9oise's tacit demand that her daughters assist her in
realizing this project, a surprising, very un-Kantian and un-Sartrean result occurs
from the family's collusion-namely, Fran9oise de Beauvoir experiences a sense
of moral agency that she has perhaps never before realized (or at least has not
realized since her childhood and early adolescence). The affirmation that she can
demand and receive respect and consideration from others because
of
her
bodily
suffering, Beauvoir implicitly suggests, is precisely what allows Fran9oise to
experience the transcendent dimensions of her own embodiment in the final days
ofher life.
What is paramount here, just as in the erotic encounter discussed earlier, is an
affirmation ofthe other
as
subject rather than
as
object. As a distinctively embodied
subjectivity, the desires
of
the other can never be reducible to my own. However,
the "bodily imperatives" that motivate Beauvoir's acceptance of her mother's
wishes cannot be done justice through the model
of
an erotic relationship (though
there are undoubtedly,
as
Freud and even Beauvoir herself point out, strong erotic
dimensions in the child's relation to her mother).
4
The insufficiency of the erotic
model provided in
The Second Sex to
account for these bodily imperatives becomes
abundantly clear when these latter emerge from the bodies ofstrangers or even from
my own body.
The poignant picture Beauvoir offers in
A Very Easy Death
of an ethical
relationship between a mother and her daughters that paradoxically arises through
a shared deception requires a rethinking of the sufficiency of earlier existentialist
as
well
as
deontological models in providing a comprehensive account ofour moral
possibilities. This means that there is much more work to be done if we are to
plumb the depths
of
Beauvoir's ethical insights. The challenge
of
such a project
should not discourage us, however, since
as
Beauvoir herself notes in
The Ethics
of
Ambiguity,
"There
is
an ethics only
if
there
is
a problem to solve" (EA, 18).
In closing, I would argue that the tensions that arise among the various
depictions of ethical encounters that Beauvoir offers, must be taken not
as
a failure
on her part, but
as
emblematic of the multiple ambiguities that characterize human
4
For an in-depth discussion of the expression "bodily imperatives" please see chapter
seven
ofmy ody Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality
(New York: Routledge, 1999).
This term is intended to stress the tension between Beauvoir's embodied ethics and Kant's
categorical imperative.
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Gail
Weiss
existence, ambiguities that we must all contend with
on
a daily basis. If it is indeed
true, as she observes, that "without failure, no ethics," (EA, 10), then we must seek
ethics
in
and through this failure rather than
by
striving to transcend the very need
for ethics itself.
SELECTED BIBUOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Beauvoir, Simone de.
Pyrrhus et Cineas.
Paris: Gallimard, 1944.
. P o u r
une morale de 'ambiguite.
Paris: Gallimard, 1947; The
Ethics ofAmbiguity.
Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library 1948; rpt. Citadel Press,
1997.
--- .
Le deuxieme sexe.
2 vo1s. Paris: Gallimard, 1949;
The Second Sex.
Trans. H.M.
Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1952; rpt. Vintage, 1989.
--- .
Une mort tres douce.
Paris: Gallimard, 1964;
A
Very
Easy Death.
Trans. Patrick
O'Brian. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
--- .
La Ceremonie des adieux suivi de Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre. Aout
Septembre 1974
Paris: Gallimard, 1981;
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre.
Trans. Patrick
O'Brian. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Hegel, G.W.F.
Phiinomenologie des Geistes
[1806];
The Phenomenology
of
Mind.
Trans.
J.B. Baillie. London: MacMillan, 1910.
Kant, Immanuel.
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten
[1785];
Groundwork
of
the
Metaphysic
of
Morals.
Trans. H.J. Paton. New York: Harper Row, 1964.
Sartre, Jean-Paul.
L 'etre et le neant.
Paris: Gallimard, 1943;
Being and Nothingness.
Trans.
Hazel
E.
Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
Secondary Sources
Bergoffen Debra.
The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies,
Erotic Generosities.
Albany, NY: State University
ofNew
York Press, 1997.
Fallaize, Elizabeth, ed.
Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader.
London: Routledge, 1998.
Kruks, Sonia.
Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity, and Society.
New
York: Routledge, 1990.
Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva.
Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
Trans.
Linda Schenck. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
Simons, Margaret.
Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins
of
Existentialism.
Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield, 1999.
---
ed.
Feminist Interpretations
of
Simone de Beauvoir.
University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
Weiss, Gail.
Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality.
New York: Routledge, 1999.
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