Today’s Teacher: Simone de Beauvoir (1908 – 1986)
The Teaching
| One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949 |
Who Was Simone de Beauvoir?
Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908, in Paris, into a bourgeois Catholic family that had fallen on hard financial times. Her father, Georges, was a lawyer and amateur actor who prided himself on his intellect and lamented that his eldest daughter had the mind of a son. Her mother, Francoise, was devoutly religious and domestically focused. Between these two poles — her father’s intellectual world, which she was welcome to admire but not fully enter, and her mother’s domestic world, which she was expected to eventually inhabit — Simone de Beauvoir spent her childhood plotting an escape she could not yet name.
She was brilliant from the start and relentless about it. She studied mathematics, literature, and philosophy simultaneously, preparing for the most demanding examinations in the French system. In 1929, at the age of twenty-one, she sat for the aggregation in philosophy — the ferocious competitive examination that determined who would be permitted to teach at the university level. She placed second in all of France. The person who placed first was Jean-Paul Sartre. He was twenty-four and had failed the exam the year before. She had taken it for the first time.
Their meeting that summer became one of the most storied intellectual partnerships — and most debated relationships — in the history of modern thought. They were together, in their fashion, for fifty-one years, until Sartre’s death in 1980. They never married, never lived together permanently, and both maintained other relationships throughout their lives, in accordance with a pact they made at the beginning: they were essential to each other, and they were free. What that pact actually cost each of them, and particularly what it cost de Beauvoir, became one of the more honest themes of her later memoirs.
She taught philosophy in lycees in Marseille, Rouen, and Paris through the 1930s. She wrote. She published her first novel, She Came to Stay, in 1943, drawing on a painful episode in her relationship with Sartre involving a young woman named Olga. She published The Blood of Others in 1945. She co-founded, with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the journal Les Temps Modernes, which became the central organ of French existentialist thought in the postwar years.
Then, in 1949, she published The Second Sex — two dense, astonishing volumes that changed the intellectual history of the twentieth century. She had begun it as a relatively modest project: an examination of what it meant to be a woman, as a prelude to writing her memoirs. What emerged was a work of staggering scope: a philosophical, historical, biological, literary, and psychoanalytic examination of how women had been defined, constrained, mythologized, and limited by a culture that treated the masculine as the universal human norm and the feminine as its deviation. The book was condemned by the Vatican, attacked by communists and conservatives alike, celebrated by women across the world who felt, reading it, that someone had finally named what they had been living inside.
She went on to write The Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954; a four-volume memoir of extraordinary honesty; The Coming of Age, a devastating study of how modern societies treat the elderly; and a final memoir, Adieux, recording Sartre’s decline and death. She traveled to the United States, to China, to Cuba, to Brazil, to the Soviet Union. She marched against the Algerian War. She signed the Manifesto of the 343, publicly declaring that she had had an illegal abortion, at a time when doing so carried real legal risk. She remained, until the end, someone who made her body and her life the site of her convictions.
She died on April 14, 1986, six years after Sartre, of pneumonia. She was buried beside him at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. Her grave, like his, is still visited by people who leave lipstick kisses on the stone. She would have had complicated feelings about this. She was not, by temperament, a monument. She was a person who insisted on remaining in motion, on remaining unfinished, on refusing to let anyone else’s definition of who she was settle into the permanent.
Understanding the Wisdom
“One Is Not Born, But Rather Becomes”
This sentence is one of the most consequential in twentieth-century thought, and it is worth sitting with slowly, because its implications run considerably deeper than the context in which it is most often quoted.
De Beauvoir is making a philosophical claim about the nature of identity itself. The surface argument is about gender: what we call “feminine” is not a biological destiny but a social construction, a set of behaviors, attitudes, and roles that culture imposes and individuals internalize, often without realizing that the process is happening. But the deeper argument is about the nature of the self in general.
She is an existentialist. And the central claim of existentialism — articulated most famously by Sartre but lived most completely by de Beauvoir — is that existence precedes essence. You are not born with a fixed nature that determines what you must be. You exist first, as a bare fact, and then you become — through choices, through circumstances, through the thousand small acts of compliance and resistance that constitute a life — the person you are. The self is not discovered. It is made.
This is simultaneously liberating and vertiginous. Liberating because it means that who you have been does not determine who you can become. The category you were sorted into — by gender, by class, by the expectations of your family and culture — is not your destiny. It is a starting condition that you can, with effort and consciousness, work with, against, around, and beyond.
Vertiginous because it means there is no fixed ground beneath you. No essential self waiting to be uncovered that will tell you, finally, who you really are and what you are really supposed to do. There is only the ongoing act of becoming — which requires constant choice, constant engagement, constant willingness to take responsibility for who you are in the process of being.
The Other and the Self
De Beauvoir’s analysis of how women had been defined as the Other — the second sex, the deviation from the male norm, the mirror in which men confirmed their own centrality — is the core of The Second Sex. But the philosophical mechanism she is describing is not limited to gender. It is the mechanism by which any group that holds power maintains it: by defining itself as the universal, the normal, the human, and defining everyone else as the particular, the deviant, the less-than-fully-human.
Her insight has a personal dimension that goes beyond sociology. Each of us carries, internalized, versions of the voices that defined us early — parents, teachers, culture, the particular community in which we formed our first sense of who we were. Those voices told us what kind of person we were, what we were capable of, what was appropriate for someone like us to want. Most of us spend decades acting from those definitions without examining them.
De Beauvoir’s teaching is the invitation to examine them. To ask, of every limitation you take as given: is this actually mine? Did I choose it? Does it reflect my genuine encounter with my own capacities and desires, or does it reflect someone else’s definition of what someone like me is permitted to be?
This is not a call to narcissism or the fantasy of a self constructed entirely from scratch, free of all influence. De Beauvoir was too clear-eyed for that. She understood that we are always situated — in bodies, in histories, in relationships, in structures of power that we did not choose and cannot simply think our way out of. The freedom she is pointing to is not absolute. It is the freedom of consciousness: the capacity to see your situation clearly, to understand the forces shaping you, and to act with intention within and against those forces rather than simply reproducing them unconsciously.
Becoming as a Daily Practice
The practical implication of de Beauvoir’s teaching is this: you are not finished. The person you are today is not the final version. The identity you have been carrying — the story of your capabilities, your limitations, your proper place in the world — is not a discovered truth. It is a position you have arrived at through a specific history, and it is open to revision.
This is not a comfortable teaching. It would be easier to believe that you are what you are, fixed and given, and that the work is simply to accept it. De Beauvoir refuses this comfort. She insists that the refusal to become — the choice to stay inside the definition you were handed rather than to engage actively with the question of who you are — is itself a choice, and one with consequences. She calls this bad faith: the pretense that you have no choice when you do, the flight from freedom into the false security of a fixed identity.
The alternative — which she lived, imperfectly and with enormous energy and cost, for her entire adult life — is the ongoing project of becoming. Of treating your life not as a fate to be accepted but as a work to be made. Of bringing the same seriousness to the question of who you are and who you are becoming that you would bring to any work that genuinely matters to you.
| The Test Identify one thing you believe about yourself that you received from outside — from family, culture, an early experience — and have carried without examination. Ask: is this actually mine? Does it reflect my genuine encounter with my own capacities, or does it reflect someone else’s definition of what someone like me is allowed to be? |
How to Practice This Wisdom Today
1. Morning Becoming Practice (10 minutes)
De Beauvoir began each morning with her work — she was famously disciplined, writing for hours before the social and intellectual life of Paris claimed the rest of her day. The morning was the time she was most fully herself, before the roles and the relationships and the obligations of the day began accumulating. Before your day makes its demands, try this:
1. Bring to mind one area of your life where you feel stuck in a definition — a story about what you are capable of, what you are permitted to want, what kind of person you are. Write it down plainly: “I am someone who…”
2. Ask, with genuine curiosity: where did this come from? Whose voice is this? When did it arrive?
3. Ask the de Beauvoir question: is this a fact about my nature, or is it a position I have arrived at through a specific history that could, in principle, be different?
4. Set one intention for the day: today, I will act as if one thing I believe about my limitations is provisional rather than permanent. I will act from the person I am becoming, not only from the person I have been.
De Beauvoir understood that consciousness precedes change. You cannot become differently until you see clearly how you are currently becoming. The morning practice is the moment of seeing.
2. Noticing Bad Faith (Throughout the Day)
Bad faith, for de Beauvoir and Sartre, is the most common human self-deception: the pretense that you have no choice when you do. It shows up in the language of necessity — “I have to,” “I can’t,” “that’s just the way I am,” “someone like me doesn’t.” It shows up in the deference to external authority that allows you to avoid taking responsibility for your own choices.
Today, notice every time you use the language of necessity about something that is actually a choice:
• “I have to” — Do you? Or have you chosen this, and is there a reason the choice feels important to acknowledge?
• “I can’t” — Or do you mean you have chosen not to, or that doing so would cost more than you are currently willing to pay? Both are legitimate. Both are more honest.
• “That’s just who I am” — Perhaps. Or perhaps this is who you have become through a specific history, and you are choosing, moment by moment, to continue becoming this rather than something else.
This is not about guilt or relentless self-interrogation. It is about clarity. De Beauvoir believed that honest language — language that acknowledges choice where choice exists — is itself a form of freedom. The person who says “I choose not to” rather than “I can’t” has already taken one step toward the life they are actually making.
3. The Expansion Practice (When You Hit a Ceiling)
One of de Beauvoir’s central observations in The Second Sex was that the limitations women experienced were not primarily about capability — they were about the internalization of someone else’s ceiling. Women had been told, for so long and in so many ways, that certain territories were not for them, that the telling had become invisible. The ceiling felt like the sky.
Today, when you hit a ceiling — a moment when you think “this isn’t for me” or “I’m not the kind of person who” — run this practice:
5. Name the ceiling. What exactly are you telling yourself you cannot do, have, be, or pursue?
6. Trace its origin. Where did this particular ceiling come from? Whose voice, whose assessment, whose definition of who you are does it carry?
7. Ask the expansion question: If this ceiling were not a fact about my nature but a position I arrived at through a specific history — what becomes possible?
8. Take one action from the expanded possibility.Small is fine. The point is to act from the larger understanding rather than the smaller one.
4. Evening Reflection: The Becoming Review (15 minutes)
De Beauvoir’s memoirs — four volumes covering her entire adult life — are exercises in this kind of retrospective honesty. She did not write to justify herself. She wrote to see herself clearly. Before sleep:
• Where today did I act from the person I am becoming — rather than only from the person I have been?
• Where did I speak the language of necessity when I meant the language of choice?
• Was there a moment when I encountered a ceiling and treated it as sky? What would it look like to treat it as a ceiling instead?
• What is one thing I am in the process of becoming that I have not yet fully acknowledged, even to myself?
A Modern Application: The Career That Chose You
Let’s bring de Beauvoir’s teaching into one of the most consequential places it can land: the work you do, and whether you chose it or were chosen by it.
The Unchosen Becoming
Most people arrive at their careers through a combination of early aptitude, family expectation, circumstance, and the path of least resistance. You were good at numbers, so you studied accounting. Your family expected you to continue the business. A job opened at the right moment and you took it and stayed. The career accumulated around you the way a city grows — gradually, without a single decision that determined everything, until one day you look up and find yourself deep inside a life you cannot fully remember choosing.
This is not bad faith, necessarily. De Beauvoir understood that we are always situated — that complete freedom from circumstance is a fantasy, not a philosophy. But the question she would press is: have you ever actually examined this? Have you ever brought the same rigor to the question of what work you want to give your life to that you bring to, say, a significant financial decision or a health concern?
Or have you simply become — drifting into a definition of yourself as this kind of worker, this kind of professional, this kind of creative person or non-creative person — without the examining that would make the becoming genuinely yours?
The de Beauvoir Examination
De Beauvoir did not tell people to abandon their lives and start over. She was too philosophically serious for that kind of romanticism. What she offered was the examination — the turning of honest consciousness on the life you are actually living, so that whatever you continue to do, you do it as a choice rather than a fate.
Try this with your work:
• What drew you here originally? Not the official story — what actually drew you? What were you hoping for? What need were you meeting?
• What do you love about it? Specifically. Not in the way you would describe it to someone else, but what you actually feel when the work is going well.
• What has accumulated that you would not choose? The obligations, the identity, the limitations that have settled around the work like sediment — which of them are genuinely yours and which arrived without a decision?
• What are you becoming through this work?What kind of person does this work make you, day by day? Is that the person you want to be?
These questions do not require you to quit anything. They require you to see clearly — and seeing clearly is the first act of genuine becoming.
The Deeper Philosophy
Existentialism and the Weight of Freedom
De Beauvoir was an existentialist, but she was always a more socially and ethically grounded existentialist than Sartre. Where Sartre’s early existentialism emphasized the radical freedom of the individual — the dizzying absence of any fixed human nature — de Beauvoir insisted on situating that freedom in the concrete conditions of actual human lives. Freedom is real, she argued, but it is always freedom in a situation. The person who ignores their situation is not more free; they are less honest.
Her ethical philosophy, developed most fully in The Ethics of Ambiguity, argues that genuine freedom requires the freedom of others. You cannot fully realize your own freedom while ignoring or actively suppressing the freedom of the people around you. The expansion of one person’s capacity to become is connected to the expansion of everyone’s. This is the philosophical root of her feminism — not simply the argument that women deserve equal treatment, but the deeper argument that a world in which half of humanity is defined as Other and constrained accordingly is a world in which freedom itself is impoverished for everyone.
The Ethics of Ambiguity
De Beauvoir’s ethical masterwork, published in 1947, takes seriously what most ethical systems try to resolve: the fundamental ambiguity of the human condition. We are simultaneously free and situated, mortal and meaning-making, individual and thoroughly dependent on others. Most philosophies try to resolve this ambiguity — to land on one side or the other, to emphasize either freedom or determinism, either the individual or the collective.
De Beauvoir refuses the resolution. She insists on holding both sides simultaneously. We are genuinely free and genuinely constrained. The work of a human life is not to escape the ambiguity but to live it honestly — to act with full responsibility for the choices that are actually yours, while acknowledging with equal honesty the forces that shaped and continue to shape you.
This is harder than either pure freedom or pure determinism. It requires the constant effort of seeing clearly — seeing where you have genuine agency, exercising it fully, and seeing where you are shaped by forces beyond your control, engaging them with awareness rather than either surrender or denial.
The Memoir as Philosophy
De Beauvoir’s four-volume memoir — Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, and All Said and Done — is one of the great philosophical projects of the twentieth century, though it is rarely described that way. She brought to the examination of her own life the same rigorous, unflinching honesty she brought to every intellectual project. She documented her complicities, her failures, her moments of bad faith. She wrote about the pact with Sartre without romanticizing it. She wrote about aging, about the body’s changes, about the gap between the life she had imagined and the life she had actually lived.
The memoir was, for her, the practice of becoming in writing — the ongoing effort to see herself and her world clearly enough to be genuinely responsible to both. She did not write to justify herself or to create a flattering record. She wrote because the examined life, even and especially when the examination is uncomfortable, is the only kind worth claiming as fully one’s own.
De Beauvoir and the Tradition She Extended
De Beauvoir inherited existentialism from Sartre and transformed it. She took a philosophy that, in its early Sartrean form, could tend toward the abstract and the solipsistic, and grounded it in the concrete realities of bodies, relationships, and social structures. She showed that you cannot think seriously about freedom without thinking seriously about who gets to exercise it and under what conditions.
Her influence runs through second-wave feminism — Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, bears clear marks of The Second Sex, though Friedan was ambivalent about acknowledging the debt. Her influence runs through contemporary feminist philosophy, through theories of gender and social construction, through the broad recognition — now almost common sense, though it was radical in 1949 — that the categories we use to understand human identity are historical and contingent rather than natural and fixed.
She also stands in a line of women philosophers who have been systematically undervalued relative to their male contemporaries: Hypatia, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch. In de Beauvoir’s case, the undervaluation took a specific form — her work was often described as the popularization or application of Sartre’s ideas rather than as an original philosophical contribution in its own right. Recent scholarship has dismantled this picture thoroughly. The philosophical framework of The Second Sex is distinctly hers. The ethical philosophy of The Ethics of Ambiguity preceded and in important ways surpassed Sartre’s own ethical thinking. She was not his student. She was his equal, and in some respects his teacher.
Your Practice for Today
| Today’s Practice: Name One Becoming Identify one area of your life where you have been drifting into a definition rather than choosing one. Not to change it immediately — but to see it clearly. To acknowledge: this is a position I have arrived at through a specific history. It is open, in principle, to revision. What becomes possible when you hold it that way? |
Morning (10 minutes):
• Write one sentence: “I am someone who…” — a belief about your capabilities or limitations that you carry without examination.
• Ask: whose voice is this? When did it arrive?
• Ask: is this a fact about my nature, or a position I arrived at through a specific history?
• Set one intention: today, I act from the person I am becoming.
Throughout the day:
• Notice every time you use the language of necessity — “I have to,” “I can’t,” “that’s just who I am” — and ask whether you mean the language of choice.
• When you hit a ceiling, trace its origin. Ask whether it is sky or ceiling.
• When you make a choice, own it as a choice. Even small ones.
Evening (15 minutes):
• Where today did I act from the person I am becoming rather than only the person I have been?
• Where did I mistake a ceiling for sky?
• What am I in the process of becoming that I have not yet fully acknowledged?
• What one thing will I choose — consciously, with full ownership — tomorrow?
De Beauvoir’s promise: The life you are living is not the only one available to you. The person you have been is the raw material of the person you are becoming — not its limit. The categories you were sorted into, the ceilings you have accepted, the definitions you have carried without examination — none of them are facts about your nature. They are positions you have arrived at through a specific history. And history, unlike nature, is open to revision.
Essential Reading: Dive Deeper into Simone de Beauvoir
Primary Sources:
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier) — The complete, unabridged translation, published in 2010, that finally made available in English the full text de Beauvoir wrote. The introduction and the final chapter are the philosophical core. The middle sections — on history, mythology, formation, and lived experience — are the substance. Read in pieces if the whole is too large at first, but return to it.
• The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Bernard Frechtman) — Her philosophical masterwork, and more accessible than The Second Sex. A clear, rigorous argument for an ethics grounded in freedom, situated responsibility, and the recognition that human ambiguity is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited honestly.
• Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir — The first volume of her memoir, covering her childhood and the years leading up to her meeting with Sartre. One of the great accounts of intellectual awakening and the cost of becoming yourself against the expectations of your world.
• The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir — The second memoir volume, covering the 1930s and the war years. The most cinematically alive of the four volumes — Paris, the Occupation, the emergence of existentialism, the great friendships and the great complications.
Accessible Introductions:
• Becoming Beauvoir: A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick— The best recent biography, drawing on previously unavailable letters and diaries to present a de Beauvoir who is richer, more conflicted, and more philosophically original than the version Sartre’s shadow had allowed. Essential for understanding her as a thinker rather than as a companion.
• Beauvoir in a Bikini by Vanessa Springora — A sharp, literary introduction to de Beauvoir’s life and thought, written with the kind of engaged intelligence that makes philosophy feel alive.
• The Usborne Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir by Kate Kirkpatrick — A shorter, more accessible entry point into her ideas for readers coming to her for the first time.
On the Broader Tradition:
• Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre — The clearest single statement of the existentialist position de Beauvoir inherited, extended, and in important ways corrected. Short enough to read in an afternoon. The philosophical background to everything de Beauvoir built.
• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan — The American feminist text that brought many of de Beauvoir’s arguments to a mass audience in 1963. Read alongside The Second Sex to see how the ideas traveled and what they became.
• Philosophical Writings by Hannah Arendt — De Beauvoir’s great contemporary and philosophical counterpart. Arendt approached many of the same questions — freedom, identity, the political — from a different angle. Reading them together is one of the most rewarding pairings in twentieth-century philosophy.
Closing Reflection
Simone de Beauvoir graduated first in her class in philosophy at the Sorbonne and second in France in the aggregation — second only to Sartre, who was older and taking the exam a second time. She was twenty-one. She had done this while reading everything, writing constantly, navigating a family that did not know what to do with a daughter who refused to become what they had planned for her.
She spent the next sixty years becoming — publicly, rigorously, sometimes painfully, always with the full force of her intelligence turned on the question of what it meant to live as a free person in an unfree world. She was wrong about things, sometimes badly wrong, and she examined those wrongnesses in print. She was right about things that changed the world, and she did not soften them to make them easier to accept.
The sentence that opens today’s teaching has been quoted so many times that it has become a kind of wallpaper — present everywhere, seen nowhere. Read it again: one is not born, but rather becomes. Everything she wrote, everything she lived, everything she argued and demonstrated and suffered through is contained in that sentence. You are not a fixed thing that was delivered into the world complete. You are a process. A making. An ongoing act of becoming that does not stop until you do.
| I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.— Simone de Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student, 1926–27 |
She wrote that at eighteen. She was not boasting. She was recognizing, with the terrifying clarity of a very young person who has just understood something true, that the work of becoming herself was going to fall, ultimately, to her. That no one else would do it for her. That the life she wanted to live was one she was going to have to make.
She made it. Imperfectly, fully, with the kind of aliveness that is only available to someone who has stopped waiting to be given permission.
One is not born, but rather becomes. The becoming is yours. It is already underway. The only question — the one de Beauvoir pressed with her whole life — is whether you are doing it consciously, with full ownership of the choices it contains, or whether you are simply letting it happen to you and calling it fate.
Today is a good day to choose. That is enough. It has always been enough.
Reflection Questions
Take a moment to journal or contemplate:
• De Beauvoir argues that who we are is not born but made — through choices, circumstances, and the thousand small acts of compliance and resistance that constitute a life. Looking at who you are today: which parts of this person did you actively choose, and which parts arrived through drift, default, or someone else’s definition?
• She describes bad faith as the pretense that you have no choice when you do — the flight from freedom into the false security of a fixed identity. Where in your life are you currently speaking the language of necessity when you mean the language of choice?
• The ceiling or the sky: think of one thing you believe you cannot do, have, or become. Trace it honestly — is this a fact about your nature, or a position arrived at through a specific history? What becomes possible if you treat it as the latter?
• De Beauvoir spent her life becoming — publicly, rigorously, without waiting for permission. What are you in the process of becoming right now that you have not yet fully claimed as your own direction, your own project, your own?
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