Sartre’s decline embodied Beauvoir’s vision of life as ambiguous contingency

Evidence

In any case, if anything demonstrates the truth of Simone de Beauvoir’s vision of human life as an unresolvable, ambiguous drama of freedom and contingency, it is the last years of Sartre. As one traces his decline, one sees a blazing, garrulous figure gradually turn into his own ghost, stripped of vision and to some extent of hearing, of his pipe, his writing, his engagement with the world — and finally, as Wollheim would say, of his phenomenology. All this was out of his control. Yet he never let himself become solidified as a statue: he kept changing his thoughts until the very last moment. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 976

Categorization

• QUESTION: Wollheim’s phrase ‘of his phenomenology’ — worth chasing what Wollheim meant by that quip about Sartre.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre and Beauvoir deliberately lived their philosophy of freedom in their relationship — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 50; Beauvoir functioned as both censor-father and giving-mother in Sartre’s late psychic triangulation — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 154; Beauvoir located an irreducible ambiguity at the heart of the human condition — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 877

Broader Connections

• Sartre and Beauvoir deliberately lived their philosophy of freedom in their relationship #exemplifies (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 50