Beauvoir’s autobiography is itself a sustained work of phenomenology

Evidence

This theme guides The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity, and it also runs through her multi-volumed autobiography, where she depicts herself and Sartre and countless friends and colleagues as they think, act, quarrel, meet, separate, have tantrums and passions, and generally respond to their world. Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs make her one of the twentieth century’s greatest intellectual chroniclers, as well as one of its most diligent phenomenologists. Page by page, she observes her experience, expresses her astonishment at being alive, pays attention to people and indulges her appetite for everything she encounters. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1028

Categorization

• CANDY: Beauvoir’s sprawling memoirs count as one of the 20th century’s great phenomenologies — a delightful reframing of autobiography as philosophical method.
• XREF: connects to: Beauvoir’s autobiography records lived experience more vividly than her philosophical works do — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1030