Beauvoir later judged her early ethics too individualistic and abstract

Evidence

However, as Beauvoir herself later commented, her arguments in Pyrrhus et Cinéas still remain too “enmeshed in individualism.” She observes: “An individual, I thought, only receives a human dimension by recognizing the existence of others. Yet, in [Pyrrhus et Cinéas], coexistence appears as a sort of accident that each individual should somehow surmount; each should begin by hammering out his project in isolation, and only then ask the collectivity to validate it.” She goes on to observe: “In truth, society invests me [m’investit] from the day of my birth; it is in the bosom of society, and in my own intimate relationship with it, that I decide who I am to be” (PL, 435; FA, 628–29, my translation). For the later Beauvoir, then, our “coexistence” with others is no longer contingent but rather is integral to the self; and it thus follows that the self, even conceived as a liberté, is always profoundly suff used by its social situation. Because Pyrrhus et Cinéas still lacks such an account of the self, the essay is also, as Beauvoir says more generally of her “moral period” essays, “abstract” (PL, 433). — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 479

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s historiographical question on Beauvoir’s intellectual development: her own retrospective critique supplies evidence for her evolving concept of the socially-embedded self, which precedes and conditions Sartre’s later social turn. — connects to: Beauvoir later disavowed her own ethics of ambiguity for Marxist reasons — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 720; Beauvoir later judged her Hegelian framework in The Second Sex too idealistic. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 281; Beauvoir’s own early maxims are as abstract as Kant’s imperative — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 480 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: The ‘society invests me from the day of my birth’ formulation is worth chasing: when exactly does this socially-constituted self claim appear in her work, and does Sartre ever adopt the same language?

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir’s early ethics treats freedom as necessarily directed toward others #contradicts (0.82) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 76