Simone de Beauvoir Quotes on Knowledge
Beauvoir's epistemology is articulated across the philosophical Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), the long methodological introduction to The Second Sex (1949), and the philosophical essays of the period. The principal claim is that situated knowledge — knowledge produced from a particular embodied historical and political position — is the only knowledge available to finite human beings, and that the appearance of an unsituated objective standpoint in conventional philosophical writing reflects the privileged position of the male European philosopher rather than a genuinely universal vantage. The Second Sex's analysis of how a particular myth of the eternal feminine has been used to justify women's exclusion from the very discourses through which knowledge of human nature is generated supplies the most sustained working out of the framework.
Quotes
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“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth, and truth rewarded me.”
All Said and Done (1972), p. 16 ISBN 1569249814 -
Attributed to Simone de Beauvoir:
“It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.”
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“The Blood of Others [ Le sang des autres ] (1946)”
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom . -
“Force of Circumstances Vol. III (1963) as translated by Richard Howard (1968) - Excerpt online”
It was said that I refused to grant any value to the maternal instinct and to love . This was not so. I simply asked that women should experience them truthfully and freely, whereas they often use them as excuses and take refuge in them, only to find themselves imprisoned in that refuge when those emotions have dried up in their hearts. I was accused of preaching sexual promiscuity; but at no poin -
“Force of Circumstances Vol. III (1963) as translated by Richard Howard (1968)”
Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness , but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. Psychiatrists have told me that they give The Second Sex to their women patients to read, and not merely to intellectual women but to lower-middle-class women, to office workers and women working in factories. 'Your book was a great help to me. Your book saved me,' are the w -
“Il n'y a pas de mort naturelle: rien de ce qui arrive à l'homme n'est jamais naturel puisque sa présence met le monde en question. Tous les hommes sont mortels: mais pour chaque homme sa mort est un accident et, même s'il la connaît et y consent, une violence indue.”
There is no such thing as a natural death : nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die; but for every man his death is an accident and even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation. | Une Mort Très Douce (1964) translated by Patrick O'Brian as A Very Easy Death (1965) last words