the metaphysical risk of a freedom that must invent its goals without help’

Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularises it. ‘The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ Aristotle said. ‘We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is what the Genesis story symbolises, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s ‘supernumerary’ bone, in Bossuet’s words. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being.

Freedom is at the core of both Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s philosophies. For Sartre human beings are always free, and in particular free to self-create. If they blame their circumstances for their choices, rather than taking responsibility for them, they are in fact deceiving themselves, they are in ‘bad faith’. Bad faith is self-deception. For him, we always have a choice.

Figure 4 Maurice Henry, Simone de Beauvoir, twentieth century, lithograph.

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 and died in the same city in 1986. She studied philosophy at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). She taught in high schools for a number of years, before concentrating on writing

the view that there is no human nature, no God and no purpose or meaning in life beside those that human beings create for themselves are also Beauvoir’s ideas.

Are we always free to choose one course of action over another, regardless of the situation that we are facing? Many of us would answer ‘no’ to this question. Yet, existentialist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre in particular, think that human beings always have a choice. Existentialists tell us that we are free – but what do they mean? And, if we are all free, won't an individual’s freedom be limited by other people’s freedom? Sartre also says that freedom is not something we enjoy but rather a burden