France, 1908–1986
Simone de Beauvoir
Existentialist philosopher and writer whose landmark The Second Sex argued that womanhood is made, not born, laying a foundation for modern feminist thought.
Simone de Beauvoir in 2 lines
Every Simone de Beauvoir passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely.”
Where Simone de Beauvoir lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
A parent needs more from you than you have to give.
You are treating the obligation as belonging to a family rather than a volunteer. The danger is waiting for help that no one intends to offer.
Someone who shaped you turns out to have done real harm.
You are declining the comfort of a single verdict. The danger is that a permanent ambivalence becomes a way of never deciding.
A friendship has become something you maintain alone.
You are putting the imbalance where it can be answered. The cost is learning something you cannot un-know.
Contact with a family member costs you more than it gives.
You are refusing to let an accident of birth determine a lifetime of access. The risk is a door closed in a season you will not always be in.
You cannot tell if you are finding yourself or inventing one.
You are taking responsibility for the construction rather than waiting for a discovery. The cost is exhausting work with no resting point.
You spend real effort on how you look and feel foolish about it.
You are examining the audience rather than the act. The danger is analysis that leaves the habit exactly where it was.
You are deciding whether to bring someone into this world.
You are taking seriously that no one asked to be here. The cost is a logic that, followed strictly, ends everything.
Something happened that you did not choose and cannot undo.
You are keeping the question of responsibility open. The danger is a search for blame that outlasts its usefulness.
Lessons that quote Simone de Beauvoir
- Simone de Beauvoir — Becoming, the Other, and situated freedom
Reading Simone de Beauvoir today
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1908–1986, from France — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Simone de Beauvoir is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 2 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Hannah Arendt — Germany & United States, 1906–1975
Argues the same cases
Confucius, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Epictetus, John Stuart Mill, David Hume take positions on the same dilemmas as Simone de Beauvoir, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.