Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) was born and educated in Paris, studied and taught philosophy, was conscripted in the second World War, captured and was in a prisoner of war camp for nearly a year.
‘Man, being condemned to be free, carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.’ Being and Nothingness 1943
His most important works were Being and Nothingness (1943) in which he argued that people are free (a surprising concept in occupied France!) meaning that human beings aren’t designed to be anything in particular (as for example a penknife is), we can choose to be and do and think.
‘Existence precedes essence’ was his famous saying, and is the basis of Sartre’s philosophy of Existentialism.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne and was closely associated with Sartre and Existentialism.
In ‘The Second Sex’ (1949), she asserted that historically, philosophical knowledge was by default ‘male’ and that the female was therefore regarded as the ‘Other’.
For Aristotle, full humanity was explicitly male. He called women’s deliberative faculty ‘inoperative’, or unauthorative (‘she can reason but she cannot command’). Kant is said to have stated that women who studied science ran the risk of growing beards - and that would ‘weaken the charm with which she exercised her great power over the other sex’.
De Beauvoir distinguished between sex (biological characteristics) and gender (based on social constructs, standards). She said ‘One is not born but becomes a woman’, so women must overcome the various social and psychological barriers to equality with men and, in Existentialist terms, be free to choose and create meaning for their own lives.
De Beauvoir has been criticised by Marxist, Liberal and PostModern Feminists for failing to acknowledge inequalities for other groups (e.g. based on race and class). Nevertheless, her thoughts about the repression of women set the ground-rules for much Feminist philosophy.
Come and join our Philosophy group – we meet at Enterprise House on the 4th Tuesday of the month. All welcome.
Ruth Sansom and Christine Price