Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.) — Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence

321 published claims from this book.

• A revisionist scholarly movement now challenges conventional Sartre-Beauvoir influence narratives
• A single free person cannot generate genuinely moral values.
• Affectivity is inseparable from materiality in Sartrean perception
• Alienation in reproduction paradoxically reveals consciousness-body union for women
• Ambiguity is Merleau-Ponty’s concept, not Sartre’s or Beauvoir’s
• Anne’s hope collapses as Pascal offers pity instead of reciprocal desire
• Anne’s self-harm reads as a bid for solitude, not an attempted suicide
• Apparent justifications that deny freedom are empty countersense, leaving only unjustified preferences.
• Appealing to transcendent values secretly denies one’s own freedom as the source of normativity.
• Attribution of shared ideas was decided on gender without evidence
• Authentic freedom, not biology, validates maternity in Beauvoir’s ethics
• Bad faith is a permanent risk rooted in consciousness’s double nature.
• Beauvoir alone fused ambiguity with bad faith as a single conceptual pair.
• Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual friendship decayed from public amicability into rivalry
• Beauvoir and Sartre co-founded Les Temps modernes with Merleau-Ponty in 1945
• Beauvoir and Sartre pioneered the contingent-affairs arrangement against bourgeois convention
• Beauvoir and Sartre related intellectually as equal partners, not rivals
• Beauvoir and Sartre share a tradition separating being from rationality
• Beauvoir and Sartre shared intellectual property through mutual biographical borrowing
• Beauvoir appropriated Hegel’s master-slave dialectic before Sartre did
• Beauvoir argued women become Other through history, not by nature
• Beauvoir argues even solitary creative work requires other free beings to carry it forward.
• Beauvoir argues women’s oppression exceeds Hegel’s Slave because they never transcend immanence
• Beauvoir concealed her philosophical work to hide Sartre’s borrowings from it.
• Beauvoir defines immanence as repetitive domestic labor that produces nothing new.
• Beauvoir deliberately concealed cases where she led Sartre intellectually
• Beauvoir designed her story collection with cross-story continuity Sartre lacked.
• Beauvoir distinguishes inborn ontological freedom from willed freedom that facticity can eviscerate
• Beauvoir distinguishes women’s authentic appeal from mere supplication within patriarchal categories
• Beauvoir diverges from early Sartre by allowing reflective endorsement to justify specific values.
• Beauvoir diverges from Sartre by excusing the oppressed from willing freedom
• Beauvoir extended Merleau-Ponty by recognizing masculinity as a gendered situation too
• Beauvoir found authentic heterosexual reciprocity modeled in Malraux’s fiction
• Beauvoir founded her ethics on willing effective freedom for all others
• Beauvoir functioned as both censor-father and giving-mother in Sartre’s late psychic triangulation
• Beauvoir grounds anguish in forced choice without external justification
• Beauvoir grounds politics in a double alterity through self-otherness
• Beauvoir grounds selfhood in the Other’s gaze where Sartre denies such dependency
• Beauvoir held that every Self-Other duality inevitably breeds conflict
• Beauvoir held that freedom remains irrepressible even under slavery and torture
• Beauvoir holds Others as essential, challenging Sartre’s ontological individualism
• Beauvoir holds that both sexes are simultaneously passive flesh and active freedom.
• Beauvoir holds that ethical freedom is realized through constructive worldly action
• Beauvoir holds that individual freedom is realized only through being directed at other existences
• Beauvoir holds that no social order precedes the political order
• Beauvoir holds that Other-encounter need not end in conflict but can achieve authentic ambiguity.
• Beauvoir holds that sexual difference gains meaning only within the social realm
• Beauvoir influenced Sartre broadly but failed on the sexed nature of embodiment
• Beauvoir innovated by pairing Hegel’s immanence with transcendence only in The Second Sex
• Beauvoir internalized blame when Sartre failed to reciprocate her emotional abandonment.
• Beauvoir introduced Sartre to American writers Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Hemingway.
• Beauvoir later judged her early ethics too individualistic and abstract
• Beauvoir later judged her Hegelian framework in The Second Sex too idealistic.
• Beauvoir may have misread Sartre through Merleau-Ponty’s interpretive lens
• Beauvoir may have steered Merleau-Ponty toward the body-subject concept
• Beauvoir placed second to Sartre forever setting their precedence
• Beauvoir pushes embodied consciousness further than Merleau-Ponty into gendered phenomenology
• Beauvoir read English with ease while Sartre did not, shaping her distinctive style.
• Beauvoir reframed Sartre’s alienating male Look as a reciprocal female gaze
• Beauvoir rejected Kantian ethics for presupposing a closed voluntarist circularity
• Beauvoir rejected Kantian respect as an inadequate moral guide
• Beauvoir rejected the roman à clé reading of The Mandarins
• Beauvoir rejects both Kantian duty and Marxist necessity as decision grounds
• Beauvoir rejects conflict as the paradigmatic model of human relationships
• Beauvoir relocates meaning-creation from solitary consciousness to shared human practices
• Beauvoir renders Henri’s newspaper as his own lived world, not just his property
• Beauvoir repurposed Dos Passos’s technique into satirical social critique of the Catholic bourgeoisie
• Beauvoir repurposes the Hegelian dialectic to analyze women’s historic oppression
• Beauvoir resented Merleau-Ponty for not seeing Sartre moving toward her views and his
• Beauvoir saw Benny Lévy as her rival for Sartre’s intellectual ear
• Beauvoir saw motherhood as a threat to a woman’s integrity
• Beauvoir saw Sartre and Merleau-Ponty diverging on the subject by 1945
• Beauvoir scholarship’s one-way influence narrative is strategically motivated
• Beauvoir shifted bad faith from individual psychoanalysis to collective politics
• Beauvoir studies contests her subordination to Sartre as a mere follower
• Beauvoir supplied the politics Sartre’s account of the look lacked
• Beauvoir synthesized Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, exceeding both, to write the Second Sex
• Beauvoir transformed phenomenological thought by exposing its patriarchal biases
• Beauvoir treated alterity as philosophically central while Sartre handled it classically.
• Beauvoir treated the dialectic as a self-transformative process
• Beauvoir viewed her work and Sartre’s as one combined intellectual enterprise
• Beauvoir viewed philosophy as a lens on lived experience, not systematic construction.
• Beauvoir wove people from her own life into her fiction barely disguised
• Beauvoir wrote Pyrrhus and Cinéas to reconcile Sartrean freedom with her own situation-based views
• Beauvoir wrote Zaza’s death in fiction before learning the true cause
• Beauvoir’s ‘abandon’ means mutual giving, not mindless self-loss.
• Beauvoir’s ‘becomes’ means both passive construction and active self-making
• Beauvoir’s ‘Woman in Love’ chapter tacitly endorses Nietzsche’s androcentric view of love
• Beauvoir’s 1930s story collection remained unpublished until 1979
• Beauvoir’s account of the body is phenomenological, not biological or constructivist.
• Beauvoir’s bad faith is social and structural, unlike Sartre’s individual account.
• Beauvoir’s concept of sexual difference derives from Merleau-Ponty, not Sartre.
• Beauvoir’s concept of transcendence developed independently from Sartre’s, not from borrowing
• Beauvoir’s concept of transcendence evolves from Sartre’s metaphysics toward an active Hegelian sense
• Beauvoir’s deconstructive rereading of Hegel deploys Derridean différance
• Beauvoir’s early ethics treats freedom as necessarily directed toward others
• Beauvoir’s early fiction portrays self-deception as a failure to let reality penetrate consciousness
• Beauvoir’s early novel Anne lay unpublished from 1937 until 1979
• Beauvoir’s early worldview framed freedom as surrender to gratuitous miracles
• Beauvoir’s embodiment views diverged from Sartre’s from the start
• Beauvoir’s ethic of treating others as freedoms parallels Kant’s humanity formula
• Beauvoir’s ethical freedom departs from Sartre’s ontological freedom to make morality possible
• Beauvoir’s ethics derive moral obligations from interdependent transcendence
• Beauvoir’s fiction punished female ambition with isolation and forced marriage.
• Beauvoir’s grasp of Sartre’s philosophy improved across the 1940s and 50s
• Beauvoir’s Henri Perron exists as a freedom suffused by political situation.
• Beauvoir’s interdependence ethic overlaps with Sartre’s own considered view
• Beauvoir’s interdependence thesis is compatible with her irrepressible freedom
• Beauvoir’s moral arguments for willing others’ freedom predate Sartre’s
• Beauvoir’s moral-period essays never portrayed lived political judgment.
• Beauvoir’s moral-period essays were a verbal exorcism of a collapsing world
• Beauvoir’s only route to intellectual prominence was attaching her ideas to influential men
• Beauvoir’s ontological freedom position may not depart significantly from Sartre’s
• Beauvoir’s own early maxims are as abstract as Kant’s imperative
• Beauvoir’s own self-presentation helped keep her in Sartre’s shadow
• Beauvoir’s philosophical essays reached English readers only recently
• Beauvoir’s philosophical standing collapsed dramatically between 1949 and 1986.
• Beauvoir’s philosophy reached English readers years before Sartre’s did.
• Beauvoir’s positive passages on reciprocal love stem from her Algren liaison.
• Beauvoir’s pre-Sartre diaries already contained core existentialist concepts
• Beauvoir’s priestly encounters collapsed her religious faith through humiliation
• Beauvoir’s Second Sex reuses Sartre’s slimy imagery to describe feminine sexuality
• Beauvoir’s self-deprecating claims helped suppress her philosophical influence
• Beauvoir’s situated account of freedom moved Sartre beyond his earlier absolutism
• Beauvoir’s situation concept maps Darwin’s rejection of Lamarckian progress onto the rejection of progressivism.
• Beauvoir’s situational freedom confounds any firm distinction between constituting and being constituted
• Beauvoir’s system-based definition of philosophy would exclude Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
• Beauvoir’s threefold ambiguity defines the human as immanent-transcendent, free-yet-unmade, and conflicted-with-yet-requiring the Other.
• Beauvoir’s transcendence and immanence derive from gendered biology, not Sartrean metaphysics
• Beauvoir’s transcendence concept is largely non-Sartrean, especially in The Second Sex
• Beauvoir’s two freedom claims target Sartre and 1940s misreaders separately
• Being and Nothingness culminates Sartre’s early philosophy rather than beginning with Beauvoir’s manuscript
• Being and Nothingness is an original contribution, not merely derivative of Heidegger.
• Being and Nothingness treats social groupings only as psychological constructs
• Being perceived as an object by another creates communal shame and alienation
• Both Beauvoir and Sartre derived their philosophical theories from lived love affairs
• Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty demanded a transcendental turn in psychoanalysis.
• Cold War bipolarity threatened the autonomy of French intellectual culture
• Decisions against one’s will arise from situational confluence, not rational deliberation
• Decisions are made under irreducible uncertainty that evidence alone cannot resolve
• Denying others’ subjectivity reduces the denier to a thing
• Early Sartre held that consciousness is never self-identical.
• Emancipatory projects can force one to oppress others whose goals one endorses
• Embodiment is the necessary contingent condition anchoring consciousness in the world for Sartre
• Erotic disclosure captures otherness by making us at home in the world
• Existentialist ‘choice’ rhetoric can become a form of torment toward the suffering
• Existentialist philosophy demands literary form to convey embodied lived experience
• Existentialist philosophy values active engaged form over abstract speculation
• Extreme oppression could extinguish ontological freedom while leaving biological life
• Females uniquely experience their own bodies as alienated otherness
• Finding a single historical moment of women’s objectification would not enable their rebellion
• First publication does not establish sole origination of ideas
• For Beauvoir, erotic flourishing requires prior social and economic liberation of women.
• For Beauvoir, freedom, value-creation, and denying Being are one and the same act
• For existentialist ethics, transcendence collapse into immanence is the absolute evil
• For Husserl, no object is experienced as value-free.
• For Sartre a thing’s qualities constitute the thing itself, not subjective additions
• For Sartre all relations with others serve self-protection and self-foundation
• For Sartre the body forms the inescapable background of all consciousness
• For Sartre the body is a willed instrument that consciousness commands
• Free indirect discourse is the literary form most faithful to bad faith.
• Freedom is the small capacity to not fully reproduce one’s conditioning.
• Freedom’s own possibilities rest on the ground of further possibilities
• French backlash against The Second Sex hindered its acceptance as philosophy
• Friendship and generosity constitute the highest ethical human achievement for Beauvoir.
• Healing her mother wound freed Beauvoir for relationships beyond the necessary-contingent dichotomy.
• Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic is a literary motif, not a description of actual slavery
• Hegelian Other-mediation marks the central early Beauvoir-Sartre divide
• Howard Parshley’s flawed translation obscured The Second Sex’s philosophical status
• Human action requires witnessing by other free consciousnesses to retain meaning
• Human fulfillment lies in perpetual surpassing, never in attained rest
• Husserl held that perceived objects actively move, attract, and repel subjects
• Husserl reconciled affective perception with transcendental constitution by positing two levels of activity
• Husserl’s Ideas II circulated in manuscript before its 1952 publication.
• Husserlian constitution differs from Nietzschean construction of reality.
• Immanence is defined by futility, not by repetition or lack of creativity.
• In Being and Nothingness situation was backdrop rather than constituent of freedom
• Individual freedom is grounded in meanings others have already established.
• Influence between Beauvoir and Sartre crisscrossed in three rough developmental stages
• Institutional methods systematically erased Beauvoir and other women from philosophy’s canon
• Intentionality displaces the subject by merging it with the world
• Kruks argues Beauvoir rejected Sartre’s absolute freedom as early as 1940.
• Late-life Sartre endorsed reciprocal mutual self-abandon in love, reversing his earlier stance
• Linking Beauvoir to Merleau-Ponty became a scholarly way to erase Sartre
• Literary plots punish passionate women for breaches of marital convention.
• Literary texts offer firmer ground than philosophy for establishing who influenced whom.
• Marcee’s self-deception resists Sartrean unveiling, an early Beauvoir probe against Sartrean transparency
• Mere biological maintenance cannot justify living; only future-oriented activity can.
• Merleau-Ponty treated Beauvoir’s novel as original and pre-dating Sartre’s work.
• Merleau-Ponty was an illegitimate child of a married professor’s long affair
• Moral and political engagement can drain the creative source that justified it
• Moral blame for failing to will freedom depends on access that oppression can foreclose
• Moral conscience cannot justify political editorial decisions
• Murder provides closure in fiction that real coexistence cannot
• Mutual recognition functions as a promise binding two parties’ freedom
• Mystification makes the oppressed mistake social domination for natural necessity
• Nausea allegorizes Sartre’s repression of desire for self-abandon to his mother
• Neither philosopher wrote on self-abandon to the other between 1949 and 1974
• Only human activity, unlike animal reproduction, can involve genuine projects.
• Others constitute the situation that gives individual freedom its concrete content
• Pascal attributes Anne’s madness to spiritual ardor rather than physical causes.
• Perceptual ambiguity is a necessary, unwilled structure of embodied existence.
• Political action under urgency is a form of bluffing about outcomes
• Political hope can lift personal mood and restore creative capacity
• Postwar Beauvoir reconceived freedom as porous and constrained by situation.
• Practical consciousness is non-reflective and discloses the world as instrumentality
• Pregnancy symptoms and menopause are interpreted as species-resistance by woman
• Primary perception is organized around attraction and repulsion affecting bodily movement
• Recent Beauvoir scholarship works by reversing influence direction and defending her concepts
• Recognizing geopolitics changes the meaning of our actions can shatter one’s sense of existence
• Religious conviction’s bodily seriousness parallels emotion’s physiological accompaniment for Sartre.
• Sartre abandoned reciprocity as unattainable, leaving its realization to Beauvoir.
• Sartre abandons several abstract claims when moving to concrete analysis
• Sartre admitted his pre-1940 journals lacked originality
• Sartre and Beauvoir’s major works follow parallel publication chronologies
• Sartre and Merleau-Ponty both grounded perception in affective rather than theoretical objects
• Sartre asserted no synthesis is possible between experiencing and knowing the Other
• Sartre bases interpersonal conflict on the scarcity of shared worldly resources.
• Sartre defined slavery as dependence on another’s freedom that grounds one’s own being
• Sartre deliberately rejects a resolution to the problem of other minds that Hegel offered
• Sartre denies any phenomenal-noumenal distinction in being
• Sartre derived his account of the vagina as lack from the phenomenology of slime
• Sartre described slime’s yielding softness as its defining trait.
• Sartre drew Achille Bergere’s seduction from Beauvoir’s friend Marie-Ange Lamblin but never admitted it.
• Sartre exemplifies the Lacanian masculine subject repressing attachment to the maternal body
• Sartre explains the sexual act as an attempt to capture the Other’s consciousness
• Sartre grounds all value in an unjustified, self-legitimizing freedom
• Sartre had already rejected absolute freedom before Beauvoir wrote Pyrrhus and Cinéas
• Sartre holds freedom and facticity are ontologically distinct, so situation never limits freedom.
• Sartre holds that being-for-others remains derivative of being-for-itself
• Sartre holds that each consciousness views the world from an exclusive, totalizing perspective.
• Sartre holds that even capitulating to the Other expresses free subjectivity.
• Sartre initially confined flesh to mother-child love and cast it as female submission.
• Sartre introduced gender themes into philosophy before Kant, Husserl, or Heidegger did
• Sartre layered multiple satirical targets into his story, borrowing from Beauvoir
• Sartre never claimed intellectual superiority over Beauvoir, though she promoted his.
• Sartre offers no defense of why existential honesty beats self-deception
• Sartre offers no positive account of resources one provides to another’s freedom
• Sartre only considered generosity in ethics after Beauvoir’s influence
• Sartre politicized perceptual ambiguity by aligning it with Hegelian power and desire.
• Sartre ranked Beauvoir as more authentic than himself, an assessment beyond mere admiration
• Sartre rejected both deontological and consequentialist ethics as too indeterminate
• Sartre rejected Cartesian dualism by treating material givens as meaning-sedimented facticities
• Sartre rejected Hegelian Other-mediation while Beauvoir endorsed it
• Sartre rejects the instrumental body, insisting the lived body is action
• Sartre replaced Freud’s father totem with a mother totem in his final interviews
• Sartre sees the Other’s gaze as falsifying essence-free being
• Sartre ultimately abandoned his early doctrine of absolute freedom
• Sartre was an accomplished playwright with nine plays to his name
• Sartre’s absolute consciousness is bounded by other consciousnesses without being determined
• Sartre’s account of the sex organ as both driving and passive is internally inconsistent.
• Sartre’s analysis of freedom is fragmented and internally inconsistent across Being and Nothingness
• Sartre’s asexual for-itself is covertly masculine in its transcendence
• Sartre’s autobiographical impulse predated Beauvoir’s influence, which merely encouraged it.
• Sartre’s concept of the for-itself projects itself toward objects as lacks.
• Sartre’s concept of the slimy encodes a gendered fear of feminine appropriation
• Sartre’s concepts change meaning across Being and Nothingness due to his Cartesian method
• Sartre’s Concrete Relations with Others section is modeled on Beauvoir’s novel
• Sartre’s denial of ontological being-for-others grounds his hostile intersubjectivity
• Sartre’s ethic of generous love reproduced Heidegger’s dominating rather than liberating solicitude
• Sartre’s fear of Beauvoir’s le trouble made her treat it as shameful
• Sartre’s For-itself is a radicalized version of Plato’s Other.
• Sartre’s freedom is not an attribute but the very existence of consciousness.
• Sartre’s freedom is structurally immune to genuine removal by the Other.
• Sartre’s freedom model subordinates others while Beauvoir’s requires affirming their freedom
• Sartre’s Hegel exposure during Being and Nothingness came mediated through Beauvoir.
• Sartre’s ideal mother figure prefigures his later doctrine of self-abandon to the other.
• Sartre’s intellectual hyperactivity compensated for a repressed incestuous desire toward his mother.
• Sartre’s invented-value ethics lacks the general evaluative power of Kantian universalization
• Sartre’s keyhole example contradicted his own earlier claim that only freedom limits freedom
• Sartre’s late Hope Now ideas emerged from Beauvoir’s notion of reciprocal self-abandon
• Sartre’s literary and philosophical styles diverge sharply, with the philosophical prose being notably sloppy.
• Sartre’s love relationships reveal steady growth toward accepting another’s self-abandon
• Sartre’s No Exit directly rebuts the ending of Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay
• Sartre’s ontology of the slimy derived from personal disgust rather than pure insight
• Sartre’s own bad-faith example presupposes a body-mind dualism his ontology denies
• Sartre’s own writings drift from lived body toward instrumental body
• Sartre’s philosophy forms a total system whose parts cannot be understood in isolation
• Sartre’s philosophy is sexist despite its anti-essentialist framework
• Sartre’s play rehearsals inspired Beauvoir to write her only play
• Sartre’s reading recast Beauvoir’s Hegelian consciousness-world unity into his own lack-and-negation framework
• Sartre’s theory of love makes the body a strategic instrument
• Sartre’s trajectory is continuous evolution, not rupture, shaped by Beauvoir.
• Sartre’s two normal male escapes from embodiment—peer groups and the father—were both barred
• Sartre’s universalized horror of slime is merely his personal phobia.
• Sartre’s War Diary has almost no explicit Hegel references.
• Sartre’s What Is Literature? shifts from the Look to a reciprocity dialectic.
• Sartre’s writer-reader reciprocity mirrors Beauvoir’s happy couple in The Second Sex.
• Sartrean freedom is primal and unmediated unlike Beauvoir’s dialectical consciousness
• Sartrean scholars analyzed Beauvoir’s justification argument more than her own commentators
• Scholars reduce Beauvoir’s existentialism to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
• Self-negation is an active choice, not a passive outcome
• Shame claims the Other’s freedom as one’s own, affirming a unity of being.
• Shame first reveals one’s factical body because the Other’s look falls on embodiment
• Shame precedes reflection and arises from an opaque self-relation
• Situated forces, not external indifference, shape Henri’s political decisions.
• Slime and femininity both symbolize consciousness’s threat of lapsing into in-itself
• Social groups are ternary, not binary, relations among third parties.
• Students resist mutual-responsibility learning because it strips their self-image as passive consumers
• The 1929 agrégation jury judged Beauvoir the more rigorous philosopher of the two
• The 1943-49 period saw Beauvoir publish Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex
• The Beauvoir-Sartre-Merleau-Ponty collaboration broke in 1955
• The body is a neglected, lateral structure that consciousness surpasses and nihilates
• The concept of a needy God is internally contradictory
• The Fullbrooks credit Beauvoir with the philosophy of Being and Nothingness
• The group in Sartre mirrors individual consciousness as an ontological failure
• The inseparability of freedom and power undercuts Sartre’s claim that slaves are free
• The Mandarins marks Beauvoir’s break from early Kantian-inflected moral theory.
• The postwar superpower rivalry threatened to render French intellectual culture irrelevant.
• The proximity of the couple makes disentangling their mutual influence nearly impossible
• The Second Sex is fundamentally ethical and political, not epistemological
• The situation is constituted from Others’ meanings rather than from being itself
• The situation resembles an evolutionary environment structuring adaptation
• The transcendence-immanence polarity is Beauvoir’s distinctive conceptual contribution
• Values are inherited from the social world, not invented from nothing
• Willed and spontaneous feelings are identical because feelings are self-choices
• Women’s emancipation increased male hostility rather than reducing it.
• Women’s isolation from each other blocks recognition that their subjectivity struggles are shared
• Women’s otherness lacks the historical before that enables other groups to rebel
• Women’s shared alienated embodiment grounds political appeal across all differences
• Zaza’s published letters contradict Beauvoir’s version of her friend’s life.