SIMONE DE BEAVOUR

INTRODUCTION
 Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most preeminent French existentialist
philosophers and writers. Working alongside other famous existentialists
such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, de
Beauvoir produced a rich corpus of writings including works on ethics,
feminism, fiction, autobiography, and politics.
 Beauvoir’s method incorporated various political and ethical dimensions.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she developed an existentialist ethics that
condemned the “spirit of seriousness” in which people too readily
identify with certain abstractions at the expense of individual freedom
and responsibility.
 In The Second Sex, she produced an articulate attack on the fact that
throughout history women have been relegated to a sphere of
“immanence,” and the passive acceptance of roles assigned to them by
society.
 In The Mandarins, she fictionalized the struggles of existents trapped in
ambiguous social and personal relationships at the closing of World War
II. The emphasis on freedom, responsibility, and ambiguity permeate all
of her works and give voice to core themes of existentialist philosophy.
 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AS A
FEMINIST.
 Simone de Beauvoir is a feminist icon. She didn’t just write the
feminist book, she wrote the movement’s bible, The Second Sex.
She was an engaged intellectual who combined philosophical and
literary productivity with real-world political action that led to
lasting legislative change. Her life has inspired generations of
women seeking independence, and this was largely attributed to
her unconventional relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre, which seemed like a love that didn’t come at the cost of
her freedom or professional success.
 Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men,
and thus can choose to elevate themselves, moving beyond the
"immanence" to which they were previously resigned and
reaching "transcendence", a position in which one takes
responsibility for oneself and the world, where one chooses one's
freedom.
 Simone de Beauvoir revealed herself as a woman of
formidable courage and integrity, whose life
supported her thesis: the basic options of an individual
must be made on the premises of an equal vocation for
man and woman founded on a common structure of
their being, independent of their sexuality.
 she claimed that the desire to feel that one’s existence
is “justified” affects women differently than men,
because women are expected to justify their existence
by loving others. She argued that becoming a woman
was difficult in distinctive ways, because history,
literature, psychoanalysis and biology presented
women with incompatible myths of femininity instead
of encouraging them to become free, fallible and fully
human.
 PRIZES.
 Prix Goncourt , 1954
 Jerusalem Prize, 1975
 Austrian State Prize for European Literature,
1978
 NOTABLE IDEAS.
 “Ethics of Ambiguity”
 Feminist Ethics
 Existential feminism
THANK YOU