Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler

Editor’s introduction

1 More than twenty years after her death, the magnetism and authority of Simone de Beauvoir’s writings continue to inspire new theories and connections in philosophical thinking. the resulting explosion of interest and scholarship treats her as a fully independent thinker, expressing her own views on ethics, politics, sexuality, literature, existentialism, and phenomenology. although she now stands on her own as one the most far-reaching and innovative minds of the last century, one significant indicator of her importance has been neglected. true philosophers are extensively discussed in relation to other canonical figures in the philosophical tradition. to that end, our collection places Beauvoir in an engagement with the full spectrum of the philosophical tradition by bringing her into one-on-one conversation with individual thinkers from Plato to irigaray. this volume thus presents Beauvoir’s intellectual relationship to a remarkably wide array of thinkers: her influences, her contemporaries, and her successors, written by scholars whose expertise centers not only on Beauvoir, but also each thinker with whom they put her in direct conversation. thus far, scholars have demonstrated Beauvoir’s independence from the circle of Sartre by showing that she either originated some of his ideas or that her ideas differ from his. rather than address either of these approaches, our collection offers a third way to view her as a philosopher in her own right. By showing how she dialogued with a variety of thinkers and intellectuals of her own choosing, the essays in this volume show that Beauvoir sought to offer her voice as a unique response to the philosophical canon. additionally, Beauvoir’s writings inspired the works of a number of contemporary feminist thinkers, thus broadening the very definition of what constitutes the Western “canon” and offering a trajectory into future thinking that is intimately tied to the traditional sense of the history of Western philosophy. each chapter reveals how Beauvoir’s engagement with philosophers and intellectuals is remarkable in its breadth—including meditations on philosophers with approaches as different as Bergson and kant, political thinkers like rousseau and Marx, unexpected connections with philosophers such as Plato, important but marginal voices like Sade, as well as current philosophers such as Butler and hooks. in fact, Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler has no article on the Editor’s introduction 2 Be au voir anD WeStern t h ouGh t relationship to Sartre, in order to highlight the richness of her unique philosophical background and the independence with which she chose philosophical interlocutors apart from her association with Sartre. Beauvoir iS not a PhiloSoPher What does it mean to call oneself a philosopher? What does it mean to take a position of theoretical engagement with prominent figures in the history of Western philosophy while remaining critical of the overall project and methodology of truth formulation at play in this history? that Beauvoir was never comfortable with the mantle of philosopher is well known. yet, equally clear is her impact on philosophical thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as her thorough knowledge of and dialogue with thinkers ranging from the Greeks to the phenomenologists. as in most matters, Beauvoir’s simultaneous unease with being a “philosopher” and advocacy of philosophical theory illustrates her notion of ambiguity as the core fact of human existence. as some of the authors in this collection point out, when Beauvoir objects to the position of the philosopher, she is largely criticizing the omniscient and atemporal claims of systematic and scientific truth. the scope of his systematicity is part of why Beauvoir abdicated to Sartre—a thinker deliberately absent from the present collection—in matters philosophical. Much debate has taken place over the status of Beauvoir as a philosopher and how far we are to believe her own self-proclamations as to her philosophical inferiority. toril Moi, guided by Michèle le Doeuff, points to an important event in the young Beauvoir’s development as a thinker and a philosopher. as Beauvoir recounts in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she confronted Sartre in 1929 at the age of twenty-one for the first time with her own philosophy. She writes that, Day after day, and all day long i set myself up against Sartre, and in our discussions i was simply not in his class. one morning in the luxembourg Gardens, near the Medici fountain, i outlined for him that pluralist ethics which i had cobbled together to vindicate the people i liked but whom i didn...