Simone de Beauvoir, between Hegel and Heidegger; from Wartime Diary, yet another volume of diaries, beyond the four published in her lifetime (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, and All Said and Done) and the posthumously published Diary of a Philosophy Student and Adieux.

She’s tired of crying and headaches, dragging herself from one day to the next, feeling “a vague desire to take hold of myself again and find myself in the metaphysical solitude of my youth.” She’s up to her neck in incessant, insistent images. We lose her for more than a month, and then, starting in January 1941 -- a breakthrough.

“…The metaphysical tragedy of a fascism -- it is not just a matter of stifling an expression but of absolutely denying a certain being, a matter, really, of confusing the human with its animal, biological aspect. And according to the other idea of Heidegger that the human species and I are the same thing, it’s really I that am at stake. After reading a ridiculous and despicable issue of the NRF (New French Review), I experienced this to the extent of feeling anguished. I am far from the Hegelian point of view that was so helpful to me in August. I have become conscious again of my individuality and of the metaphysical being that is opposed to this historical infinity where Hegel optimistically dilutes all things…. I have vertigo… I understand what was wanting in our antihumanism.”

She can’t decide between Hegel and Heidegger. (“Why would my individual destiny be so precious if consciousness can transcend itself?... At times it seems to me that the Hegelian-Marxist universal point of view deprives life of all meaning. Then again I think that perhaps individuality as such has no meaning and that wanting to give it one is a delusion. The idea of personal salvation -- but why that idea?”) The not-yet-finished She Came to Stay “rests on a philosophical attitude that is already no longer mine.” It’s kind of puerile. Her next novel will be about “the individual situation, its moral significance and its relation to the social.” In her brutal, sudden solitude, she has broken out of her solipsistic loop forever. She’ll be writing about the “rationalization of the world by happiness,” about historicity, about the search for conciliation and “temptation to merge with the universal (for example, when returning to Paris in June, when Germany has won) -- then conquering individual existence again,” about relationships between people, about the mutual recognition of consciousness.

  ¶ 1:48 PM