DE Weekly: Simone de Beauvoir, Sedimentation, & Blank Slate Theory
Below is an archived email originally sent on December 1, 2025.
Simone de Beauvoir, Sedimentation, & Blank Slate Theory
One of the themes you will see repeated in existentialist texts is that we are born into this world with a radical freedom, “thrown” totally free into life to make whatever we like of it. If there is no inherent meaning to life, the existentialists argue, that means we are free to find and create our own meaning.
How simple is it, though, to create meaning in our lives? Is there anything blocking our path, standing in our way? It turns out, there is.
I’m going to write today about sedimentation. I wrote about sedimentation earlier this year, as I did about the related concept of facticity. I have not, however, fully introduced one of the main proponents of this idea: Simone de Beauvoir.
Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist writer who lived from 1908 to 1986, most famous for her contributions to feminist theory. Her treatise Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) is a classic of that genre, outlining her call to abolish the “myth” of traditional femininity.
De Beauvoir also happened to be a lifelong friend and colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she founded a monthly review called Les Temps modernes, along with fellow contemporary Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
The concept of sedimentation describes the manner in which our choices and actions––coupled with outside forces and influences acting on us both consciously and unconsciously––become ingrained in our lives, shaping our behavior in the future.
This allows us to “act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought.” Through sedimentation, humans become more and more “fixed” over time; it becomes harder to deviate from established behavioral patterns after a point.
De Beauvoir's strain of sedimentation was unique in that she focused mainly on how girls and boys develop goals and values in life based on gendered expectations and inducements forced on them early in life.
According to de Beauvoir, girls and boys would not be all that different nor have different goals and values were they not brought up in an environment being told what they are supposed to do and how they should act.
Realizing that one is being molded through outside influences and shaped into something they might not otherwise have chosen to be is the first step, de Beauvoir posits, to recognizing sedimentation and overcoming it.
It would sound like de Beauvoir’s philosophy is in line with the “blank slate” theory, a theory that suggests humans are born without predetermined behavioral and genetic predispositions, instead being influenced by their environments to become who they are as adults.
You’ve probably heard of the “blank slate” in regards to, say, a death row inmate convicted of murder. Someone might have said about this inmate, “It’s too bad––if only he had had loving parents and a safe home, he might not have ended up like this.”
While that might be true for some cases, the “blank slate” is often at odds with reality. Don’t take it from me, though, take it from the existentialists themselves.
That’s a funny thing about people who write a lot and invent a lot of concepts to explain certain aspects of life: at some point, they are going to contradict themselves.
One of the inconsistencies when it comes to sedimentation is the simultaneous use of and endorsement of facticity by the very same writers.
Facticity refers to the unchangeable details of a person’s existence. These details are unchosen, thus it is suggested they constrain a person’s freedom.
Some such details are genetic makeup, physical attributes, the time and place of your birth, your nationality and, ultimately, the inevitability of your death.
All of these are things you cannot change; you are born with this facticity and can never select your way out of it.
This being the case, there is no such thing as a human born as a blank slate. Each of us has immutable characteristics we could not change even if we wanted to. A good starting point, then, would be to throw out the blank slate altogether.
Can we go as far as to throw out sedimentation with it? I would say, no, not entirely. Sedimentation is a more solid idea and, to some extent, quite a real phenomenon.
The key, I would argue, is finding a happy medium. We have both facticity and sedimentation to wrestle with, but they do not have to be defining factors in our lives. De Beauvoir emphasized that we are simultaneously free and limited, but this is a complexity of life we should accept willingly and not try to escape.
Our biology or social roles pushed on us need not be a burden nor an excuse for inaction. We must still take responsibility for our lives, accepting such limiting factors as simply that.
The reality is that there is a dimension of the human condition that is inherently ambiguous. On some level, we are both free and restricted, both defined by our present, yes, but also by our past.
This is a tension we all have to walk as best we can. There is no escaping it, so we should learn to navigate it effectively.
Freedom always exists. Within facticity, within sedimentation, freedom always exists. Up from these determinants lies the freedom for the creation of one’s self.
That is transcendence: the idea that, despite facticity and sedimentation, we can go beyond our limitations and our past to create a new life.
“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.” ― Simone de Beauvoir
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Happy Thanksgiving! Do like the existentialists and take some time to examine your life and your condition, so that you might understand the meaning and value of your life.
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