Excerpt from Introduction: Simone de Beauvior - Who’s she?
Some philosophers think it is irrelevant to read the lives of great thinkers because their ideas can be found in the pages of their work. However interesting or boring the life in question, it belongs in a separate compartment to the philosophy. By contrast, others believe that a person’s work cannot be understood without the life, and that learning about a philosopher’s life is necessary to understand the true meaning of the work. The first, compartmentalizing, approach has the potential pitfall that its ahistoricity can lead to misunderstandings: for example, this way of reading philosophy has led to the misunderstanding that Sartre developed existentialist ethics (even though Beauvior’s work on this subject was written and published first, and Sartre never published his during his lifetime).
The second approach has the potential pitfall that it can result in reducing human beings to effects of external causes. ‘Reductivist’ biographies are frequently guided by a particular agenda that reads into a person’s life rather than letting that life speak for itself. These approaches can be very illuminating, but they can also overshadow the agency of their subjects, portraying them as products of their childhood or class rather than selves they have decided to become.
簡短筆記
讀一個哲學家的主張時，是否應該將其身世和歷史背景一同考慮？兩種不同主張也有其缺陷：忽略歷史背景可能會導致對文本的誤解；但主張必須了解哲學家生平才能理解他/她的思想的話，則意味著他/她的思想無法獨立於其經歷，甚至直接是其經歷所致必然的產物，否定了他/她的有決定成為何種人的意志。