“But after all, what is loving?’ 212
- Beauvoir In these early journals, Beauvoir turns to her experience of love to ground her reflections on the relation between self and other. Many of Beauvoir’s readers have been disenchanted, disappointed upon reading in her student journals of her infatuation with her cousin, Jacques, her willingness – almost – to abandon her own ideas and her work to love – of her impatience with her friend, Zaza, and her use of her sister, Poupette.213 How could this be the person who would criticize the woman in love in The Second Sex? How could this be the founder of the second wave in feminism?
These criticisms seem in many ways uncharitable. Taken in context, perhaps it is best to ask how it could not be Beauvoir. When Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex of women’s willingness to allow themselves to be overtaken by love214, she did not write from pure reflection – that is, in adherence to abstract principles and ideas. She knew of what she spoke in terms of her own lived experience. Theory for her helped to elucidate life, it did not define it or replace it. Nowhere is this more evident than in her discussion of love in these journals. She finds herself in these pages struggling with love – struggling to understand its limits and restrictions. And she finds herself enjoying the moments of attention, the sense of belonging and purpose that she experiences when with Jacques or her friends. She feels the pull of romantic love. Those critical of Beauvoir’s account of love in this work need to recall that she writes these passages not as a thirty-nine year old
successful author and public intellectual but as an eighteen year old philosophy student.
212 DPS 298, CJ 390. 213 Helene de Beauvoir.
214 TSSI 642 – 670, DSII 477 – 507. Note that throughout this text references are made to both the Parshley
translation (TSS1) and to the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation (TSS2) of The Second Sex. The choice of translation employed is based on which best reflects the original text and meaning in the work.
The timing of the writing of these journals makes for important points of comparison. In 1929 while Virginia Woolf was writing A Room of One’s Own, Beauvoir was living in just such a room.215 While studying for the aggrégation, she rooms at her grandmother’s house and for the first time has the freedom to come and go as she wishes, has the freedom to read what she likes, and to write what she thinks. For the first time, she knows something of independence. Keeping this in mind, if, at times she seems frivolous, it is perhaps understandable. And while she is no doubt infatuated with Jacques, while she is no doubt tempted to be the woman that her mother wants her to be – to marry Jacques and settle down216 – it does not mean that she does not bring to her experience of love, at least on the page, a kind of criticality and seriousness. Already in these writings, Beauvoir takes as her subject matter for philosophical reflection “lived experience.” This focus of attention would sharpen over time informing and developing in and through her novels, essays and studies.
Of particular interest in these journals is her recognition of the dual nature of love. She desires to unite with the other – whether it is in friendship, passionate love or in service (generosity). As she notes, “To love is to identify with the object that one loves; it is to want oneself in the
other.”217 That is, it is to be founded upon “‘absolute reciprocity and the identity of consciousness.”218 Indeed she notes how “Once I love, I probably desire to be loved. And to found a true love, this reciprocity is necessary.”219 And it is the source of comfort, continuity and connection.
215 PL 11 -12, FA 16.
216 Interestingly, Beauvoir does not address these issues in Memoirs of A Dutiful Daughter. Discussions of love
– her philosophical interest in the issue as well as her lived experience are limited. She does not reveal the depth of her affect, indeed, her infatuation with Jacques but rather couches it as nothing more than a schoolgirl crush. Nor, interestingly does she include any reference to the religious issues that she reflects on in this work.
217 DPS 261, CJ 347.
218 DPS 185, CJ 198. Beauvoir gives no direct source for this quotation that she had transcribed into her diary.
Clearly this is reference to Hegel’s notion of freedom – to his claim that for self-conscious to be free
necessitates that he grant to the other his freedom as well. Klaw in her notes to this passage suggests that this may be a reference to Hegel’s account of freedom in Philosophy of Mind, translated by William Wallace, 431, 532.
She realizes that love is more complicated than this, however. “I speak mystically of love; I know its price. But I know also that it does not put an end to my solitude. Besides, it is not made for that.”220 In this passage she realizes the limitations, indeed, the dangers of love, dangers which she sees as involving
. . . the abandonment of all of oneself that is a simple cowardice because a being is never an end, because evidently duty is all the same above love, and because duty forbids the alienation of one’s liberty.” . . .Nor would I like a being who would always be superior to his love, because it would be proof that his passion is not great enough if it never overwhelms him.221
She worries that she will “be subsumed by others in/through love” or alternatively that she will come to subsume them, as she willingly confesses she loves “others only inasmuch as they are me.”222 Love, she worries, is simply a disguise for egoism – a faint attempt to shroud the desire to dominate with the language of romance and care.
What holds true for romantic love is true as well of friendship and service to others. Love in these guises can lead to harmony or it can lead to conflict. She notes this of her own relationships with Zaza and Poupette. She loves them yet she recognizes her desire to dominate them. And she realizes the threat they pose to her. “One abdicates the self attempting to serve others.”223 However, the more one serves the other “the more the other comes to seem incapable of acting for himself.”224 She acknowledges, as such, that there is fine line that exists between care and conflict, between power and passion, between love and labour. “(W)hat then is love? Not much; not much; I come back to this
220 DPS 256, CJ 342. 221 DPS 77, CJ 73. 222 DPS 285, CJ 374. 223 As cited by Simons, 1999, 223. 224 Ibid.
idea. Sensitivity, imagination, fatigue, and this effort to depend on another; the taste for the mystery of the other and the need to admire; wonderment,”225she concludes.
In thus describing her experiences of love, Beauvoir is led to an important conclusion. She notes that as a result of this intermingling of selves – of affection, thought and desire – the lines that distinguish self from other blur. Reliance results in the other coming to reside not only within the world but also within the self such that she is at one and the same time, self and other. This point is made clear when, in describing memory, she notes that
I would like to understand how I can isolate myself thus from my dearest memories and my closest desires – I often experienced that already: some mild afternoon, some moving conversation, I attribute them to another … They issue from fiction. I cannot immerse myself in them: they are not my memories.226
It is significant that in this passage Beauvoir not only recognizes that the other lies not only within the world but within the self, but that Beauvoir as well characterizes the self in terms of a fiction, more specifically, as the product of self-creation.
Rejecting the Cartesian conception of the self, Beauvoir abandons the idea that the self is to be found, discovered or uncovered. Relying on the many eyes of others, on the images of the self that they reflect, the self is created by the other, and then re-created by the individual yet again. Beauvoir claims, “I will construct my life. I will take myself as an end.”227 Further, she goes on to note that it is “only by free decision and thanks to the play of circumstances that the true self is revealed.”228 The self or self-consciousness thus is always in the process of self-creation.229 There is no self but only the becoming of the self in relation to others, and to the past. In works written from her ‘moral period”
225 DPS 249, CJ 333. 226 DPS 207, CJ 11. 227 DPS 24, CJ 62. 228 DPS 195, CJ 35.
229 This theme is picked up and expanded on by Beauvoir in her last writings, particularly in her
autobiographical works. See Chapter Six of this study for a discussion of her later development of the idea of becoming as self-creation.
onward, one of Beauvoir’s primary goals would be to outline what kind of self should be create in this process – turning from considerations of ontology to reflections on ethics.