Being and Nothingness culminates Sartre’s early philosophy rather than beginning with Beauvoir’s manuscript

Evidence

In his correspondence to Beauvoir, his reference to Françoise’s “obsessive fear” as the basis for a theory of temporality (QMW, 61; LC, 77) is again framed in reference to his own work: it in no way refl ects an appropriation of the Hegelian dialectical temporality that underpins the structure of She Came to Stay. In this sense, at least, although it certainly could be argued that Beauvoir’s novel inspired Sartre to begin to formulate a theory of temporality, we should not accuse Sartre of some sort of blatant plagiarism. Clearly, the “theory” of temporality glimpsed by Sartre in She Came to Stay is reformulated in terms of his earlier work begun in Th e Transcendence of the Ego and fully developed in Being and Nothingness as the brusque upsurge of consciousness that continually negates the past in its fl ight toward the future. I have previously argued, in fact, that She Came to Stay off ers a parody and critique of Sartre’s theory of temporality as analyzed in Being and Nothingness. … In this respect, I would argue that Being and Nothingness represents the culmination of his early period of philosophy rather than a radically new departure that began with his reading of Beauvoir’s manuscript during February 1940. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 244

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the historiographical claim that Beauvoir’s influence on Sartre’s temporality has been overstated — that reading She Came to Stay as inspiring a radically new Sartrean theory mislocates its real standing as culmination of early work.
• XREF: connects to: The Fullbrooks credit Beauvoir with the philosophy of Being and Nothingness — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 47; Scholars reduce Beauvoir’s existentialism to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 400