ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir on the experiential and ontological status of nature in their work. Beauvoir and Sartre were lifelong companions, occasionally romantically, always intellectually. Their story was epic—a true meeting of hearts and minds, collaborators in philosophical, political, and social movements. Beauvoir accepts a formulation of nature as the threatening and alien realm of mystery, contingency, and externality. Beauvoir’s portrayals of the feminine as a marginalized, naturalized subjectivity is a vital addition to and critique of the Sartrean formulation of nature’s threatening otherness or abstract passivity. In 1975, when asked about ecology and class, Sartre declares: “The development of the human species has placed it in conditions that are no longer natural; but it nevertheless retains relations to Nature. Sartre explains that nature appears as a “false organism” because as an undifferentiated totality, it obstinately refuses to satisfy our needs.
