An Appeal to Reopen the Question of Influence

Abstract

Since my paper is focused rather narrowly on a single issue, I would like to preface it with some personal remarks in appreciation of Hazel Barnes and her contribution to philosophy. We are perhaps most indebted to Hazel Barnes for first bringing existentialism to the United States. Her translation of Being and Nothingness was a labor of love. Engaging with it critically, she made Sartrean existentialism her own. She also provided an important female presence in the field. For young women in the 1960s studying philosophy in all-male philosophy departments, the name of Hazel Barnes on the cover of Being and Nothingness was often the only woman's name ever encountered. But for many of us, our debt to Hazel Barnes is more personal. Her warm and generous response to appeals for letters in support of tenure or grant applications is legendary. So when I began the work of co-editing a six volume series of Beauvoir's philosophical texts in English translation, I naturally wrote to Hazel Barnes inviting her to serve as a consultant to the project. She agreed, to my great relief, and replied to my first query about the translation of a particular phrase with a two-page letter that left me and the young translator charmed, and utterly convinced by Hazel's argument. Hazel Barnes was also one of the first (after Merleau-Ponty in 1945) to offer a sustained philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's 1943 metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay. In the otherwise depressing history of philosophical commentary on Beauvoir, a history marked by contemptuous dismissal and cavalier mistranslation and misrepresentation of Beauvoir's work, Hazel Barnes's 1959 essay Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility stands out. In her analysis of She Came to Stay Barnes calls the similarity between Beauvoir's novel and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, both published in 1943, "too striking to be coincidence." Although Barnes "feels" that "the inspiration of the book was simply de Beauvoir's decision to show how Sartre's abstract principles could be made to work out in `real life,"' Barnes does not allow her feeling to close off the question of influence. In a footnote, Barnes adds: "I do not at all preclude the possibility that de Beauvoir has contributed to the formation of Sartre's philosophy. I suspect that his debt to her is considerable. All I mean in the present instance is that the novel serves as documentation for the theory, regardless of who had which idea first" (Barnes 1959, 121-22). Other scholars have rarely been as careful regarding the possibility of Beauvoir's philosophical influence on Sartre. With no philosophical texts by Beauvoir pre-dating her relationship with Sartre, and thus no sure means of determining "who had which idea first," most scholars have simply assumed that Beauvoir was Sartre's philosophical follower, a view encouraged by Beauvoir in her autobiographies and interviews from the 1960s until the end of her life. But, as we know, Beauvoir's autobiographies and interviews are often deceptive. Barnes's analysis of Beauvoir's posthumously published letters and journals from 1939-1941 concludes: "there is blatant evidence that . . . [Beauvoir] lied . . . in at least one important instance, to us, her public." The lie in question concerns Beauvoir's heterosexuality: "Beauvoir, more than once and unequivocally, stated to interviewers that she had never had erotic relations with a woman." But Beauvoir's "own written words" in the posthumously published journals and correspondence detail her erotic relationships with women. Barnes concludes that "Beauvoir was obviously bisexual" and that her denials were meant to protect the women close to her from a homophobic society (Barnes 1991b, 13, 16, 17). My own research on another of Beauvoir's journals has uncovered evidence that she lied to us in at least one other important instance. This time the lie concerns Beauvoir's involvement in philosophy. Beauvoir stated more than once and unequivocally that she was not a philosopher, that she did not do philosophy, and that she could not have influenced Sartre's philosophy (for example, see Simons and Benjamin [1979]). …