Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 to Georges de Beauvoir and Francoise Brasseur. 1 Her father was raised in a rich family that drew him to the right on the political scale. 1 He was a strong atheist and pushed this on Beauvoir and her sister. 1 Her mother on the other hand was a devout Catholic, and that along with her weak and rather submissive personality (something that manifests itself in the fact that she grew up in a time before first wave feminism), polarized her and Beauvoir.
Her father fed her intellectual side, providing her with abundant works of literature and encouraging her to read and write from an early age. Beauvoir was very religious as a kid, which was likely a result of her primary education in catholic schools and her mother’s influence, but at 14 she started to become more of a skeptic, ultimately ending in the decision that there is no God. 1 This was near the end of WWI, when her family lost a lot of their old money, and she experienced poverty for the first time.
She remained an atheist until her death. After the tumultuous war period all countries tried their best to reconstruct the gold standard system in a hope to stabilize prices of goods, restore trade that had been brought almost to a standstill, and to boost the economy. 2 However, this attempt failed to meet expectations, and her father, being an investor, lost a lot of money. Her rejection of religion was soon followed by her decision to pursue and teach philosophy. In 1932, Beauvoir moved to the Lycee Jeanne d’Arc in Rouen where she taught philosophy and advanced literature classes.
There she was quite often confronted by parents, other teachers and her superiors for her overt feminism and for her pacifism. 2 In 1940 the Nazis occupied Paris and in 1941 Beauvoir was dismissed from her teaching post by the Nazi government. She keenly observed the effects of World War II on Europe, and began exploring what believed to be a great problem of the someone’s “social and political engagement with his or her time. “2 She was dismissed from teaching again in 1943. The occupation began the selfdescribed “moral period” of her career. Socio-political/Philosophical Although she was only involved in the Resistance from an intellectual standpoint, Beauvoir’s political work developed through the 1940’s. She helped create the leftist journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945, editing and contributing articles including, “Moral Idealism and Political Realism,” “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom,” and in 1946, “Eye for an Eye. ” 2 In 1947 she wrote an article called Literature and Metaphysics.
This is where her work and Simone Weil’s starts to converge, with her venture into Weil’s realm of metaphysics most likely leading her to write The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947. 2 Although she was never fully satisfied with this work, it remains one of the best of an existentialist ethics. Simone Weil Simone Weil was born in February 1903 and died early in August 1943, from tuberculosis. Her family history had a prominent trait of intellectual aptitude. Her father, Bernard Weil was a physician and her mother, Selma Weil, came from a rich Jewish business family.
As a child Selma wanted to become a doctor, but her father did not support her decision, and so she fought for the best possible education for her children, especially Weil. 3 Having grown up with a strong female influence, it is understandable that she would not have a strong inclination towards feminism, as she saw no problems for women growing up. Weil felt strongly about food and gave up sugar at an age of six, as it wasn’t provided to French soldiers in the war. She maintained this attitude throughout her life, starving herself for causes she believed in.
This contributed to the fact her suffering from sinusitis, severe headaches and poor physical health, and, owing to malnutrition, she suffered from what she called “mystical experiences” making her, unlike Beauvoir, a big believer in mysticism and the world beyond most’s definition of reality. 3 Religion also had great influence on her, having converted to catholicism later in her life. Like Beauvoir, shes lived during the Russian Revolution and the fall of old political orders such as the the Hapsburg and Austro-Hungarian Empires. It was also the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Even though Europe was not as badly affected as the US, hunger was still prevalent and work conditions were often bad. Weil was also briefly involved in the Spanish Civil war – a precursor to WWII, when Forces of the Republic splintered between the Anarchists, the Marxists, and the Nationalists. Fascists, with the help of the German Nazi government, acquired a taste for murdering civilians. 3 During the Spanish Civil war deliberately dropping bombs on civilians from planes was still deeply shocking, especially for Weil due to her temperament and upbringing.
That said, what Weil did not experience is as important as what she did. She and her family fled France in 1942. Unlike Simone de beauvoir Weil only knew the occupation of France second hand, and in 1943 she died. She died before the liberation of the first concentration camp. She probably knew terrible things were happening to the Jewish population, as she came from a Jewish family but until the liberation of the first camp there were no images and no one outside knew how truly terrible the situation was. Weil’s death in 1943 meant that she never saw that final demonstration of inhumanity the atomic bomb, while Beauvoir did.
One similarity they share, however is that they actually went to the same, school. Despite their differences Beauvoir wrote a very interesting anecdote in her book Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter: “She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up; A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world. I managed to get near her one day.
I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. Tretorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped. ” Philosophy These aspects of her times can help us better understand and read her philosophy. For Weil this backdrop gave rise to work on the nature of force.
Also it gave rise to a great amount of writing on the nature of “la travaille” – particularly on the relationship between the ordinary worker and the industrialisation of france. There is much speculation as to what she might have written had she have survived. Simone Weil’s philosophy is broadly described as a form of transcendentalism, which is a form of metaphysics. Plato is the best known transcendentalist: he said that the ultimate good resided in ‘pure forms’ which were not everyday objects or acts we are familiar with but in the way that we interact with each other in the space beyond sense experience.
Transcendental views of good typically have some view to the effect that without an ultimate end all values are unjustified. She is also influenced by immanuel Kant: Kant’s transcendentalism is vast and very complex, but she simplified it in way that made it a bit easier to understand while maintaining its depth. Two quotes of hers are important in understanding her philosophy: “Obligations alone remain independent of conditions. They belong to a realm situated above all conditions, because it is situated above this world. ” 6 “A man left alone in the world would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations. “