Simone de Beauvoir: Irrepressible Freedom

At a young age, she asked herself, “Why bother?” Her answer turns our assumptions about freedom, rights, kindness and violence on their heads.

Simone de Bauvoir’s philosophical writings, beginning with Pyrrhus and Cineas, examines how the relations between people structures their understanding of the world. Painting: La Chambre Rouge, by Félix Vallotton, 1898 (Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons).

We have thoughts, feelings, hopes and desires. We also can be treated as statistics, objects or obstacles.

The tension between these facts about us is at the heart of Simone De Beauvoir’s lifelong philosophical project. This tension was described by Beauvoir as “ambiguity”.

Beauvoir was an Existentialist, believing that there is no natural, essential or true self — nobody has a pre-defined purpose set out for them. Human beings instead create their own identities and values through the actions that they undertake.

In other words, there is no essence to what you are, waiting to be discovered. What you are is what you do and what is done to you.

As Beauvoir put it, “a man is something else besides what he is at this moment.”

In Existentialist terms, human beings are a mix of “facticity” and “transcendence.”

Facticity is what is basically true of us at any given moment — a collection of facts that describe us. When and where we were born, our eye colour, that we can drive a car, the…