Dialogue with Alexandre Gilbert on Simone de Beauvoir*

*This Dialogue was originally posted, thanks to Alexandre Gilbert, on The Times of Israelblog, 30 September 2017, featuring all four parts. For reading's sake, these questions are reblogged here, now beginning with the very first on David Allison's 'New Nietzsche' and turning, now, to Simone de Beauvoir.

AG ::

2.Would you say Simone de Beauvoir’s feminism was a Nietzscheism ?

BB :: 

Certainly! But at the same time, de Beauvoir was very wide ranging and she, like Sartre and like Merleau-Ponty, was influenced by Husserl and especially Heidegger. Yet Nietzsche’s gift for seeing through overlayers of culture suffuses de Beauvoir — as a scholar with a breadth of reading and focus to match Nietzsche’s own, de Beauvoir draws on antiquity, anthropology, history, literature, political economy in addition to psychology and sociology.  And she almost echoes Nietzsche’s trenchant observation: “It is men who need to be educated better.”  In that spirit, de Beauvoir although her focus was on women never did lose sight of a kind of non- (or better said: not only) Hegelian but Nietzschean dialectic attunement, looking not only at women but at the dynamic with the ‘other.’  This was Nietzsche’s variation on the master-slave dialectic and it foregrounded what de Beauvoir called women’s complicity and the very grave dangers to woman’s being in the world, existentially expressed to be sure, as de Beauvoir, before Hannah Arendt already paid attention to the dynamic of lived life in all the dimensionalities of a human lifetime, from birth to death. 

The American de Beauvoir scholar, Debra Bergoffen captures one aspect of the Nietzschean focus on educating men better, as she remarked on The Hallelujah Effect where I speak of the great Leonard Cohen regarding his often-observed womanizing, to point out that women were not what his focus was about: it was for Cohen as she noted the point I tried to make in my book about a certain tendency to male self-absorption, not ultimately misogynistic because Cohen’s focus was always Cohen.