Sartre saw Beauvoir’s amazement as authentic philosophy yet philosophically poor

Evidence

Sartre envied her this quality. He tried to work himself up into the same state, looking at a table and repeating, ‘It’s a table, it’s a table’ until, he said, ‘a shy thrill appeared that I’d christen joy’. But he had to force himself. It did not wash over him as it did Beauvoir. Sartre considered her talent for amazement at once the most ‘authentic’ kind of philosophy and a form of ‘philosophical poverty’, meaning perhaps that it did not lead anywhere and was insufficiently developed and conceptualised. He added, in a phrase that reflects his Heidegger-reading at the time, ‘it’s the moment at which the question transforms the questioner’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 361

Categorization

• XREF: The table experiment and ‘the moment at which the question transforms the questioner’ connects to Heidegger’s questioning and to Husserl’s return to the things themselves — a nice tension between phenomenological wonder and systematic philosophy. — connects to: Sartre ranked Beauvoir as more authentic than himself, an assessment beyond mere admiration — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 33; Beauvoir’s fiction arose from amazement when reality stops being taken for granted — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 360; Beauvoir’s autobiography records lived experience more vividly than her philosophical works do — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1030

Broader Connections

• Sartre ranked Beauvoir as more authentic than himself, an assessment beyond mere admiration #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 33