Here are my favorite quotes from Skye Cleary’s 2022 book, How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment. If you like them, buy the book!
A Rebel for Freedom
So how can you become authentic in Beauvoir’s existential sense? Strive to be a creative rebel with a cause. The cause is freedom itself. To become authentic we must free ourselves from oppression as well as self-imposed chains. We lock ourselves in with patterns of fear, ponchos of anxiety, and the longing to fit in. We put on masks for other people, and we often mask parts of our being from ourselves, parts of ourselves that we’re not entirely comfortable with. Authenticity frees us to remove those masks we use to protect ourselves. It allows us to pursue an open future of our choosing.
When we stand up and put our very being at stake, taking a risk to do what we think is right, we create ourselves—we make ourselves into creative rebels. To take this kind of courageous action—to become these kinds of courageous selves—is exhilarating. But this quest takes effort. We must think twice. Act without automatically accepting other people’s expectations about what we should do. Act with the awareness that we are enmeshed with each other’s lives. Act by taking responsibility for who we become.
Projects
To live authentically, we must transcend our facticity into the future, freely pursuing self-chosen goals, or what Beauvoir often refers to as “projects.” Human existence involves us spontaneously projecting ourselves into the world. We set up goals in our life, and we project ourselves toward them. Projects are activities that bring coherence, meaning, and justification to our lives. Any activity can count as a project—a career, a passion, a hobby, a home, a social or creative work—but to be authentic, these activities need to reflect our own choices and support collective freedom.
The opposite of authenticity is inauthenticity, sometimes called “bad faith,” which (in an existential sense, as opposed to a legal one) means to deny one’s own or others’ freedom. People in bad faith may wish their life were otherwise but do nothing about it, fail to confront the truth of their lives and situations, or deny their responsibility for their actions.
Oppression
There is a tension for each of us between being-for-ourselves and being-for-others: defining ourselves as we wish and realizing others judge us as well. Focusing too much on being-for-yourself is self-centered and other people will very likely find you intolerable. Focusing too much on being-for-others at the expense of being-for-yourself turns you into a doormat, and you risk losing yourself.
Oppression reduces people to being-in-themselves, like the rock, and denies their claim to being-for-themselves. . . .
[When] we oppress another, we treat them as an object to be possessed, consumed, or destroyed, instead of treating them as an authentic subjectivity in themselves. And two, interactions with objects like peaches don’t give me any deep understandings about myself. To begin to understand ourselves, we need other people. Only other freedoms, other subjectivities, can disclose aspects of our being that we can’t see on our own. . . .
To relate authentically to another is to be friendly because it calls for reciprocal acknowledgment of others as subjects, transcending the desire to possess and control one another, continually overcoming the compulsion to make ourselves the center of our own universes, and treating each other with respect and generosity. Authentic relationships, for Beauvoir, are the best things humans can achieve. The risk is that we never know if another person will reciprocate in a relationship, romantic or platonic. While we can’t choose whether other people will cast us as Other, we can choose how we treat other people.
Romance
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote, “Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms.” Authentic loving is about recognizing one another’s freedom, that is, acknowledging and respecting each other as individuals, and supporting one another’s flourishing. Authentic lovers are generous toward each other and the universe. And they transcend together toward shared values and goals.
[. . .]
The soulmate idea is one of the most damning features of our culture’s understanding of romantic love. It suggests we need another person to fulfill us, that there is one particular person who can do that, and that love is destined if we just keep our eyes and apps open. For Beauvoir, looking for love to complete us is bad faith. It’s an escape from taking responsibility for pursuing our own fulfillment. Beauvoir realized she had been falling into this trap in her relationship with Sartre. The realization that she was becoming dependent on him to provide meaning in her life motivated her to write and she started with her novel She Came to Stay.
[. . .]
Beauvoir did not want to be a role model. She said that it’s ridiculous to use her relationship with Sartre as an ideal because people have to figure out their own arrangements and styles. Yet Beauvoir and Sartre did attempt to live their relationship in authentic ways. They prioritized each other within a diversified life of projects and friends. They respected each other’s freedom, they supported each other; together they worked toward ends and values they believed would enrich the universe. They decided using their arrangement for sex would be a cheap use of their freedom, so they “gave” each other the freedom to love others.
[. . .]
Yet, care and generosity are implicit in Beauvoir’s notion of authentic loving. The question is: What would you do for a dear friend in need? If you are sick with a potentially lethal condition and your partner cares for you and brings you soup, that doesn’t mean either of you are violating the other’s freedom. Reciprocity doesn’t demand that you drag yourself out of bed to make your partner soup in return, although it does mean that you would do something similar for them if the situations were reversed. If not, that’s a red flag.
Beauvoir and Sartre spent time apart, met with friends separately as well as together, and had their own activities. Beauvoir, for example, loved to hike but Sartre couldn’t stand the outdoors. Beauvoir was, for a time, financially dependent on Sartre while she wrote one of her books, but she could have found a job if she needed to, and it was part and parcel of their agreement to share everything. She did the same for Sartre when he needed it. Both Beauvoir and Sartre financially supported many of their friends.
[. . .]
Romantic love is complicated, to be sure—it can be hard to know how to start a relationship and with whom. And once a potential partner is found, we can’t know, beyond all doubt, what they are really thinking, what they want out of the relationship, what their intentions are, or how long the relationship might last. It’s understandable that people want to secure it, to create a oneness, to merge into an organic whole like in Aristophanes’s tale.
The challenge is to consider: If we shed the sediment of history and social expectations that cling to us, how would we love? What if we all developed a healthy skepticism of the dogma of traditional relationship scripts and freed ourselves from the impulse to cling to certainty? Some might argue that chaos would ensue, but Beauvoir shows us that the benefit of creating relationships on our own terms would be more authentic relationships and enrichment of the universe. There would be less disappointment about not achieving clichéd ideals, less violence, and less wanting to jump out of windows.
Beauvoir shows us that authentic loving calls lovers to accept uncertainty and separation as the very condition of a relationship. And even better than acceptance is to look for joy in the distance, to welcome and to love the ambiguity, the otherness, and the freedom. The quest for authenticity calls for realizing that a romantic union with an other half is absurd: it calls for loving the ways that the other is different from and separate to us. Authentic loving is not about leaving relationships to fate. Authentic loving is an active engagement, a choice to create a relationship together.
[. . .]
Authentic lovers pursue their personal projects, and also respect and support each other in their individual quests. Being supportive in this sense means tackling the world together and opening up possibilities for each other. Supportiveness is about standing side-by-side instead of head-to-head. Authentic loving is not easy and it is up to each person in a relationship to work it out together—or walk away if need be. But authentic loving is possible and it’s worth it. And, Beauvoir wrote, “Our lot is to take the risk and the anguish. But why should we hope to be at peace?”
Marriage
Marriage, Beauvoir wrote in her teens, is immoral because it locks one’s future being into a definitive course of action. Commitment is a problem, not only because one may be mistaken, but also promising is a voluntary restriction on your freedom. To make a choice that commits your being for the rest of your life is absurd, because how can you commit a future self that will grow and change and may want something or someone else in the future? How can you know when you marry someone if you are still going to be able to tolerate them next week, let alone in thirty years?
Marriage can make people feel fulfilled because it is a concrete realization of two individuals intertwining their lives into one. Love marriages—as opposed to pragmatic ones—are supposed to cultivate tenderness, respect, and intimacy, although it is not the only relationship that can provide these. The institution is supposed to provide insurance against the failure of love because, theoretically, it is a sacred permanent bond in which lovers promise that the relationship will endure even if feelings change. This is why Beauvoir said that conjugal love is not really love, since if it was love, you wouldn’t need the qualification. What’s left, at best, is companionship and cohabitation.
[. . .]
While many women of working-class families have worked tirelessly in the labor force, the narrative of traditional middle- and upper-class heterosexual marriage is that if wives devote themselves to the chaste virtuous role of domestic goddess then happiness and fulfillment will follow. But the fairytale merely serves to encourage women’s passive absorption into the home and bedroom, so that they are better able to service their husband’s wishes.
Beauvoir recognized that this exchange traps everyone, and has formed people’s identities for millennia. Women are subjugated to men and men are subjugated to society because men are channeled into the role of financial provider and pushed to succeed economically. Because women’s work was so rarely paid or appreciated, women’s success in life depended on their husband’s success, and so women were encouraged to catch the best prospect they could, making marriage a relationship founded on manipulation, seduction, and flattery.
[. . .]
The central issue with any kind of marriage is when the commitment pressures people to sacrifice their transcendence. This is the most dangerous aspect of marriage: it can put not only a person’s independence at risk, but also their personhood. Marriage’s monotony and vacuity can be metaphysically mutilating, cramping people’s freedom.
Sex is built deep into the foundations of marriage. Sex was the original justification for marriage. Marriage turns sex into an obligation. The perception that anyone has a duty to provide sex, or a right to take sex, is obscene because it turns bodies into machines. Instead of upsurges of passion, spouses are left with another chore on the never-ending mudslide of duties.
[. . .]
Even when women are independent and the relationship is based on mutual respect, there still can be a gap between marriage and eroticism because the other person is always there, whether you like it or not. There is little space for missing and yearning. It can be lovely to see someone every day and to foster deep familiarity and practical intimacy. But familiarity can just as easily kill emotional and psychological intimacy.
[. . .]
Even if spouses are financially independent, marriage invites participants to take one another for granted. If spouses do love one another it is usually in spite of marriage and not because of it. The problem, as Beauvoir saw it, is that we confuse assuming with loving. To assume a marriage is to live it in its immediacy, that is, unreflectively. Unreflective relationships have little value. You can’t love someone authentically if you don’t have a choice in being with them. The bedrock of most marriages is their consistency, their constancy—which is an anathema to what Beauvoir thought was critical to living an authentic life. Authentic living calls for holding ourselves and the world around us in question, including institutions of marriage as well as governments, policies, laws, and injustices, for example.
[. . .]
One alternative to traditional marriage is a temporary commitment. By this I mean intentionally temporary, not temporary by virtue of divorce. Early in their relationship, Beauvoir and Sartre agreed to a two-year commitment, on a stone bench by the Louvre. While it was neither state-sanctioned nor enforceable, the psychological contract was strong. They wanted intimacy and freedom without the risk of decay into duties and inertia.
Beauvoir had qualms but trusted Sartre and convinced herself not to worry. Beauvoir does not say specifically what those qualms were, although she knew that she could trust Sartre and he would not harm her. She reflected, “With him a proposed scheme was not mere vague talk, but a moment of actuality. If he told me one day to meet him exactly twenty-two months later on the Acropolis, at five o’clock in the afternoon, I could be sure of finding him there then, punctual to the minute.” It mostly worked out for them and, after the two years, they made their commitment permanent, and theirs remained a deeply intimate relationship until the end of their lives.
There are advantages to temporary marriages: it gives people a chance to reassess their relationship regularly, encourages people not to take each other for granted, and creates an opportunity to exit more gracefully than a messy divorce. What about children? Caring, separated parents can be drastically better for children than dysfunctional or toxic married households. Beauvoir pointed out that there are lots of well-cared-for children outside marriage, and lots of poorly cared-for children within marriages.
Many marriages are temporary, so is it not better that we are honest about it up front? Yes, but it takes strength because the idea of temporary marriages foils the sense of security and reassurance that traditional marriage provides. Deadlines for love whittle away security and romance. Relationships are not like gym memberships. People have to wake up and affirm their membership in the relationship every day.
While the choice to live and love together is ideally a free and ongoing one, there are a number of structural factors and agreements that can be made to ensure the longevity of these choices. Eighteenth-century French feminist, playwright, and abolitionist Olympe de Gouges—whom Beauvoir held up as one of the few feminist icons in history—claimed “Marriage is the tomb of trust and love.” In an attempt to save trust and love from marriage, Gouges advocated for voluntary unions in which each partner has equal responsibility and rights in property, inheritance, and children.
Habits and Aging
This phenomenon is one of the reasons, Beauvoir suggested, that older people tend toward conservatism: having less time to live means they are less interested in new and uncertain situations. Old habits become one of the internal dimensions of the practico-inert. Routines can be reassuring, providing a kind of security. Patterns in life give people a sense of who they are. Habits can protect people from anxiety about the future because routines promise that tomorrow will be just like today. This repetition becomes comforting as the days toward death draw ever nearer.
Habits are also like reflexes: they help jog people’s memories before they have to think hard or to ask what they should do. Routines can give people a sense of control over their lives, lifting them from the bog of stagnation. Habits can take on a kind of poetry that revives the past. Consider Japanese tea ceremonies that become a ritualistic artform, or the practice of raking sand in a Zen garden as meditation. Everyday habits can bring a similar sense of peace and reassurance.
Nevertheless, there are dangers in venerating habits. An obsession with them fosters curmudgeonly and sclerotic behavior, and these actions tyrannize others who feel obliged to conform to the older person’s wishes. An overreliance on habits can also turn a person into a warm corpse, merely going through the motions of life but not living in any meaningful way.
Beauvoir described the existential challenge for older people: “To move forward he must perpetually be tearing himself free from a past that holds him with an ever-tighter grasp: his advance is slow.” This is not to say that advance is impossible. Julia Child wrote her first cookbook at fifty. Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book at age sixty-five. Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses started painting at age seventy-eight and became a celebrated artist in the last decades of her life.
Despite the tragic ending of All Men Are Mortal, Beauvoir’s challenge to us is to recognize that the risks of action inject life with danger and desire. Action brings with it the possibility of death, making life infinitely precious. Our limited time creates anguish but also urgency—the urgency to engage in life.
Immortality would be like an insurance policy: it wouldn’t matter how badly you screw up, you’ll always be able to do it all over again. A safety net would whisk away the risk of actions, but also whisk away the potential rewards of our choices—irrevocable, precious, inviolable. This is why it is better to learn to love our mortality.
Authentic mysticism
While there is no doubt that Saint Teresa achieved incredible success, there’s a fine line between what Beauvoir sees as the authentic mysticism of Teresa and cultish fanaticism. Abuse, manipulation, or emotional blackmail would violate the conditions for authenticity. But here’s the thing: Saint Teresa encouraged her readers to think for themselves. Teresa believed that evil lurks in unreflective reasoning, impulsive behavior, and dull-wittedness, so she encouraged people to pray in ways that are authentic for the person doing the praying. In a strikingly existential passage, she also advises people never to forget their own nothingness, to vigilantly watch out for the wily devilish vipers of self-deception, and always to be open to learning, introspection, self-knowledge, and humility.
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…Saint Catherine’s sentiment was similar when she suggested that with a fervency that stretches toward authenticity, one can transform the world for the better, and which may involve destruction: “If you are what you ought to be, you will set fire to all Italy”—and beyond. When Saint Catherine channeled her energy toward what she felt called to do—when she launched herself into caring for the poor, teaching, and counseling the papacy—she felt fulfilled.
Family and friendship
…Beauvoir was selective as to whom she spent time with: less family and more friends (although not less Sartre), reiterating the oft-misquoted mantra, “Blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” You cannot choose your biological family but you can choose your logical family, that is, the people you surround yourself with. That might mean distancing yourself from toxic people who put you down in destructively critical ways—especially if it is under the guise of love, duty, or being cruel to be kind.
[. . .]
Authentic happiness, Beauvoir suggested, is a particular kind of flourishing that comes from living in harmony with the world. Harmony does not mean quietism; it means embracing our freedom, taking responsibility for our lives, pursuing truth, and creating genuine connections to the world and others.
[. . .]
At the heart of Beauvoir’s idea of authentic happiness is the existential notion that we are constantly torn between being subjects for ourselves and objects for others, between mastering our world and being crushed by it. We cannot dictate the terms of the world around us, we cannot become the omnipotent center of the universe, but we can strive to embrace the ambiguity of these tensions and in-betweens, and to delight in them. This gap—between subject and object, between grasping and bending—is the space of existence. In Beauvoir’s words, “I experience [the gap] as a triumph, not as a defeat. This means that man, in his vain attempt to be God, makes himself exist as man, and if he is satisfied with this existence, he coincides exactly with himself.
Consumerism
Capitalism, Beauvoir wrote, is based on an illusion to make people forget about pursuing authentic justifications for their lives. Capitalism sells endless diversions. The entire marketing industry is dedicated to coming up with ever new strategies to get us to believe that a widget will make us happy, and that we need to continually purchase widgets for maximum happiness.
“One cannot fulfill a man; he is not a vessel that docilely allows itself to be filled up. His condition is to surpass everything given. Once attained, his plenitude falls into the past, leaving that “constant emptiness of the future” … Since man is project, his happiness, like his pleasures, can only be projects.”
[. . .]
Getting things won’t bring happiness because we will always want more. Doing nothing won’t bring happiness because wallowing in immanence is not really existing. Our best possibilities for authentic happiness prevail in embarking on quests toward destinations that stretch our imagination, in the ambiguities that lie in between mastering and succumbing to our world, and in the spaces where we create our essence.
Happiness
In addition to taking control of our lives in a way that’s respectful of others, another path toward authentic happiness is to have a good understanding of our existence. While we can never fully know ourselves, Beauvoir wrote, “Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.”
Self-knowledge can help people to understand their situations, to consider what they want to do in life, to reflect on what they want out of life, and to explore possibilities for happiness. Beauvoir calls for us not to live like Monique, the woman destroyed, but to strive to live in lucidity, without illusions:
“No, really; what I like more than anything is not ardent faith … It is exhausted enthusiasms [élans], searches, desires, especially ideas. It is intelligence and criticism, lassitude, and defeat. It is the beings who cannot let themselves be duped and who struggle to live in spite of their lucidity.”
Rebellion and oppression (round two)
An authentically meaningful life is one that opens out into an endless and immense cosmos. Beauvoir wrote, “The spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill.” Existentialism empowers us to leap out and fill our skies with our projects. But many people are bound in thousands of big and small ways that hold them back from becoming authentic creators of their lives. For Beauvoir, bonds that constrain our freedom are a moral emergency. These bonds constitute oppression.
As long as oppression exists, as long as our wings are clipped, none of us can genuinely fulfill ourselves in a morally authentic sense because, for Beauvoir, our freedom depends on the freedom of others. The goal of existential ethics is to eradicate oppression because, Beauvoir proposed, “Justice can never be created within injustice.”
The authentic response to oppression must be rebellion, meaning social and political struggle against unfair structures. Together we must work to create a new foundation of the world: on freedom instead of domination. Recreating the foundations of the world is in our power. Beauvoir came to believe that this transformation is the “real task of feminism.”
Oppression can exist, and does exist, in all systems. So what do we do? Beauvoir’s answer epitomizes the heart of existentialism: We must act in the midst of uncertainty. We can’t wait until someone comes up with a perfect solution because there is no such thing. We need to start chipping away—sometimes sledgehammering—at changing our systems for the better despite not having all the answers at hand. In The Mandarins, one of Beauvoir’s characters says, “If you wait until you meet absolute perfection before getting involved, you’ll never love anyone and never do anything.” We need to jump in, act, do.