Beauvoir viewed philosophy as a lens on lived experience, not systematic construction.

Evidence

I think that it’s very bad to suppress the philosophical aspect because while I say that I’m not a philosopher in the sense that I’m not the creator of a system… . When I put philosophy into my books it’s because that’s a way for me to view the world and I can’t allow them to eliminate that way of viewing the world, that dimension of my approach to women, as Mr. Parshley has done. I’m altogether against the principle of gaps, omissions, condensations which have the eff ect, among other things of suppressing the whole philosophical aspect of the book. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 330

Categorization

• DEFINE: Primary-source statement of Beauvoir’s own conception of philosophy as world-viewing dimension rather than system-building.
• XREF: Connects to her phenomenological roots and the Beauvoir-as-philosopher rehabilitation literature. — connects to: Existentialists drew on lived experience that philosophy itself had structured. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 99; Beauvoir saw individual lived experience as irreducibly singular and uncommunicable — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 985; Beauvoir’s autobiography records lived experience more vividly than her philosophical works do — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1030 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Existentialism holds that philosophy grows out of concrete lived experience #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 54
• Philosophy gains interest when cast as a lived biography #exemplifies (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 105
• Beauvoir’s philosophy centers on how constraint and freedom shape our becoming #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1027