Simone de Beauvoir and the Moral and Historical Meaning of Philosophical Writing

Dialogues with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Jaspers

Abstract

In this article I analyze the value of writing in works of Simone de Beauvoir, in which principles and philosophical categories of analysis are questioned. Amidst cultural problems and world wars, philosophy reveals itself in linguistic turns, redefining, in different theoretical currents, certain expectations, frustrations and temporalized cultural resignifications of concepts and values. On the one hand, philosophy is being delimited by theoretical and hermeneutical turns such as those proposed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, on the other hand, the support of existential principles is modeled on moral and political terms, as elaborated by Karl Jaspers. Under the sign of history, Beauvoir intends to name herself, above all, as a writer, who discovers herself as an existentialist in her own speculations in search of understanding her thoughts and mnemonic records of the ambiguity of the human condition.