Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  Here, from the outset, Beauvoir claims that we don’t even know what women are, let alone whether they exist or whether or how their existence is problematic.6 If this is the case, then Beauvoir’s inquiry cannot begin with properly feminist aspirations—that is, with a desire to advocate on behalf of women. Instead, her work originates in what is posed as a philosophical question: What is a woman? And it is at least conceivable that her response to this question will not count as feminist.

  But why exactly do I take it that Beauvoir’s question is to count as philosophical? For starters, it seems patent that the thoughts that lead up to it make it impossible to take it as a straight question, a question that somehow reveals in itself or its context the shape of the answer for which it calls, as do questions such as “What is a table saw?” (asked by a customer at a woodworking store) or “Where is Brunei?” (asked by a child of a parent as they watch the nightly news) or “What causes tides?” (asked by a vacationer of a friend during a stroll on the beach). Beauvoir’s question arises in the context of her chronicling a certain perversion in conversations about women: people can’t seem to stop engaging in the querelle du féminisme, even though it irritates them and even though it has produced nothing but foolishness.7 The explanation for this unfortunate situation, Beauvoir suggests in the first paragraph of The Second Sex, has to do with confusion over what is meant by the word “woman” in these discussions, confusion so deep that one is tempted to question whether women really exist.

  But this is a curious claim. For Beauvoir herself seems offhandedly to affirm the existence of women just a sentence or two before she explicitly questions it. “The subject is irritating, above all for women,” she writes. Notice that Beauvoir says “women” flat out where she could have said “people who identify themselves as women” or “people we call ‘women’” or even “females.” That she doesn’t employ a substitute must be seen as deliberate, given the concerns of these opening lines. I take her here to be drawing a distinction between our ordinary uses of the word “woman,” a word we use every day as unproblematically as we commonly use any other word, such as “table” or “chair” or “man,” and our use of the word in discussions about women, that is, about women as a type. When she says, “The subject is irritating, above all for women,” no question is likely to arise about what the word “woman” means (although, of course, one might wonder why Beauvoir claims that the subject is more irritating for women than for men). The trouble comes when we find ourselves making claims into which we import ideas about the essence of woman.

  One can see here echoes of philosophical concerns about what happens when our words pass from ordinary to metaphysical use. Consider, for example, what Wittgenstein says at section 116 of Philosophical Investigations:

  When philosophers use a word—“knowledge,” “being,” “object,” “I,” “proposition,” “name”—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?—

  What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

  Wittgenstein here seems primarily to be worried about the tendency of people who explicitly think of themselves as philosophers to bring undue metaphysical pressure to bear on language. But Beauvoir seems to be suggesting that the trespassing also occurs among nonphilosophers in discussions concerning what it means to be a woman. There is a sense, in other words, in which our metaphysical pronouncements about women naturally arise from within ordinary contexts. We ordinarily are not tempted, in our discussions of chairs and tables, to worry about their essence. But this is because we are essentially comfortable with the role that tables and chairs play in our lives; we do not worry that sitting on a table or laying out a hand of solitaire on the seat of a chair constitutes a violation of our understanding of what a table or a chair is. But this is not the case when it comes to our discussions of women. In very ordinary situations we find ourselves suddenly waxing metaphysical, as when, for instance, we begin by discussing the question of the role of women in the military and end up claiming that “women are fundamentally no different from men.” We seem to be confronted by a dilemma: if we find that what we naturally identify as women are treated in systematically troubling ways, then we will want to talk about what to do about this situation; yet these discussions will easily slide into metaphysical excursus that produces “voluminous foolishness.”

  By using the words “easily slide” here, I am sidestepping a problem that I bring into a greater degree of focus in chapters 1 and especially 2, namely, how to identify the particular features of the dissatisfaction that underlies the move from the ordinary to the metaphysical in certain conversations about “woman.”8 In these early chapters I investigate the idea that this dissatisfaction is particular—that is, that it has certain features that are different from the features of the sort of dissatisfaction that leads a professional philosopher to the point at which it seems that our ordinary objects are not “real” or are otherwise beyond our full grasp. It may also be different from the sort of dissatisfaction that underlies the push to the metaphysical in discussions that do not take place in “officially” philosophical contexts, such as everyday conversations about ethics or works of art. One might say that I am interested in an anatomy of the species of skepticism that arises in discussions about “women.” In chapter 2, I compare this skepticism with the philosophical skepticism so vividly developed in the founding document of modern philosophy, namely, of course, Descartes’s Meditations. I argue that Cartesian skepticism goes hand-in-hand with Descartes’s revolutionary relocation of the source of philosophical authority from institutions and texts to the individual human mind. And I suggest that Beauvoir capitalizes on her own sense of herself as a woman to effect a further transformation in what it means to be an individual human being, so that the skepticism of hers about the existence of “women” that goes hand-in-hand with this transformation can be seen as a revolutionary inheritance from and thus challenge to that of Descartes. This inheritance and challenge is emblematized for me in Beauvoir’s early posing of the question “What is a woman?” which I claim means to break into the tradition of philosophy at the moment, directly after his discovery of the cogito in the second meditation, that Descartes asks, “What is a man?”

  One occasionally sees Descartes mentioned in revisionist discussions of Beauvoir. But ordinarily the mention occurs in a sort of historical reductio of influence that moves, for example, from Beauvoir to Sartre to his teacher Husserl to Descartes via Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations.9 This is to be expected, given that most philosophers who find themselves taking an interest in Beauvoir are steeped in the so-called continental tradition of philosophy and are therefore extremely knowledgeable—certainly, far more than I—about the development of various trajectories of thought within the history of modern philosophy. (Indeed, a continental philosopher is just as likely to have read Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity as The Second Sex [more likely, perhaps], whereas, having been trained in the Anglo-American “analytic” tradition, I can’t recall if I had heard of the Ethics before my burgeoning interest in The Second Sex led me to it.) It is no wonder that for such philosophers the task of criticism when it comes to The Second Sex is situating Beauvoir in relation to other philosophical figures—and, given the standing view of Beauvoir’s relationship with her lifelong companion, both philosophical and otherwise, particularly over and against Sartre. But what piqued my interest in Beauvoir, and what continues to pique it, is not where she fits in the progression of philosophy as a discipline but how the occasion of her writing about women, and specifically about herself as a woman, opened up new ways for her to appropriate the philosophical tradition. In Beauvoir’s writing, the emancipation of women, an emancipation that on her view can come to full flower only in the wake of a certain transformation in the human being, is linked with a certain transformation in the conventional understanding—both con
tinental and analytic—about how to inherit the tradition of philosophy. On my reading of The Second Sex, this linking is most apparent in Beauvoir’s appropriations of Descartes and of Hegel, the latter taking place in the context of her appropriation of the work of Sartre; and it is in the spirit of illuminating this linking that my own attempts to situate Beauvoir with respect to these three other philosophers takes place.

  I intend these transformations and linkages to be under scrutiny throughout this project. But the concept of appropriation, and of course particularly what I take to be Beauvoir’s concept, is explored most thoroughly in the case of her inheritance of certain stretches of Hegel’s thought, which is the subject of chapters 3 through 7. My basic claim is that Beauvoir’s thinking about sex difference is transformed by and in turn transforms the so-called master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, enabling Beauvoir to produce powerful pictures both of the consequences of our various investments in sex difference and gender identity and of the possibilities for genuinely productive philosophical criticism.10 My strategy is to throw this achievement into relief by comparing Beauvoir’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic in The Second Sex first with Sartre’s appropriation of it in Being and Nothingness and then with her own attempts to express her investment in it in her earlier philosophical works, including The Ethics of Ambiguity. In chapter 3, I offer a rendering of the dialectic with an eye toward providing a background against which to place Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of it. In chapter 4, I argue that in Being and Nothingness we find an appropriation of the dialectic that is governed by the standard conception of what it is to take one’s place in the tradition of philosophy. On this conception, the business of philosophical criticism is to build new systems on the wreckage of old ones, starting with a threshing of the old elements into foundational truths and fatal errors. I argue that Sartre’s allegiance to this conception of philosophy forces him to overlook certain key elements in Hegel’s dialectic, elements that, even by Sartre’s own standards, he ought to have found himself interested in. And I set the stage for examining Beauvoir’s own method of philosophical appropriation, developed, I claim, in The Second Sex, in which the main goal is not to “get it right” but, rather, to understand the attractions and powers of philosophical abstraction as they bear on one’s everyday life.

  In chapter 5, I look at two of Beauvoir’s early pieces of philosophical writing, one, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, rather obscure, and the other, The Ethics of Ambiguity, relatively well known. Both books are generally dismissed as second-rate attempts to defend Sartre against those critics of Being and Nothingness who accused existentialism of being a form of nihilism. Revisionist readers of Beauvoir are wont to observe that her defense of Sartre often takes the form of rather stark disagreement with him. While I do not contest these readings, my central purpose in looking at both books is to track Beauvoir’s pre-Second Sex efforts to articulate her own interest in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. I argue that although we can see Beauvoir struggling in these works to express her sense of the potential fruitfulness of the dialectic, not to say of Sartre’s inheritance of it, she lacks the existential context at this stage in her history to appropriate it in the genuinely original and productive way that, I argue in chapters 6 and 7, one finds it taken up in The Second Sex. In these chapters, I attend very closely to this act of appropriation, showing exactly how Beauvoir’s aspirations to write about being a woman are inextricably intertwined with her discovery of what I argue is both her own philosophical voice and a model for doing philosophical work that lies waiting to be appropriated by both feminists and philosophers.

  That no attention has been paid to this model is in part, of course, a consequence of the fact that Beauvoir has been all but neglected as a philosophical figure. I can’t imagine anyone doubting that part of the reason for this neglect is the simple fact of her having been a woman. (Can we name a woman philosopher whose work has been sufficiently acknowledged? Can we specify the significance of being a woman philosopher?—which is to ask, Do we know what it means to be a woman philosophizing? That we find resources in The Second Sex to begin thinking about these issues is, to my mind, only one of its great—neglected—achievements.) But my assessment of the importance of The Second Sex as a work of philosophy depends on the idea that the risk of (philosophical) neglect is internal to what Beauvoir is doing in this book. What I mean, exactly, by “internal” is under study in various ways throughout this project. Here, I merely desire to express my conviction that the philosophical neglect of this book is a phenomenon that anyone who wishes to take it as a serious work of philosophy is obliged to address.

  The philosophical neglect of The Second Sex is related, I think, to another feature (or nonfeature, as the case may be) of the critical reception of Beauvoir by any number of feminists and other readers—namely its tone, which, despite universal acknowledgment of Beauvoir’s leading role in provoking the world to confront the scandal of systematic sexism, is very often one of heavy condescension, even among her most ardent admirers. Given my sense of the reasons behind the neglect, I suggest that the condescension is not simply gratuitous either, that it, too, calls out for investigation. But while the meaning of the concept of “neglect” is obvious enough, that of “condescension” is not. So rather than simply defer an investigation of the concept, I want here to spend some time specifying what I mean in invoking it.11 I begin simply by acknowledging the sheer difficulty of getting through The Second Sex. It is a long book—so long, in fact, that its American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, insisted that the translator cut what turned out to be more than 10 percent of its original one-thousand-plus pages.12 But lots of books are long. What makes The Second Sex hard has to do particularly with both what Beauvoir has to write and how she writes it. Elizabeth Hardwick, in an early—and thoroughly mixed—review, had this to say about the experience of getting through what she called (in a virtuoso display of backhanded praise) “this madly sensible and brilliantly obscure tome on women”:

  The more one sinks into this very long book, turning page after page, the more clearly it seems to lack a subject with reasonable limitations and concreteness, a subject on which offered illustrations may wear some air of finality and conviction. The theme of the work is that women are not simply “women,” but are, like men, in the fullest sense human beings. Yet one cannot easily write the history of people! This point may appear trivial; nevertheless, to take on this glorious and fantastic book is not like reading at all—from the first to the last sentence one has the sensation of playing some breathlessly exciting and finally exhausting game. You gasp and strain and remember; you point out and deny and agree, trying always to find some way of taking hold, of confining, defining, and understanding.13

  Hardwick’s impression jibes with the fact that Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex extremely quickly, over a period of two-and-a-half years during which she also spent weeks and months on other work.14 And the book feels rough and ready, as if it flew off the pen of an author bursting with words.

  But the fact that not every i and t are dotted and crossed cannot account for the disquieting frequency of gestures of condescension toward this book and its author. The ubiquity of this feature of the secondary literature is under study in the third chapter of Toril Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir.15 On Moi’s view, condescension to Beauvoir is a product of “patriarchal ideology” (92), which she sees as fundamentally hostile to the idea of the intellectual woman (and, a fortiori, the idea of a woman philosopher). With the aim not of doubting the quality of Beauvoir’s work but instead of “discredit[ing] Beauvoir as a speaker,” her critics “want to convey a picture of a childlike creature, unconscious of the effects of her own discourse” (52). Moi cites example after example to support the idea that Beauvoir has repeatedly been a victim of flat-out sexism.16 But I wonder whether there isn’t something more specific in Beauvoir’s writing that arouses the temptations to patronization to which her critics succumb. The follo
wing five common gestures of condescension toward Beauvoir strike me as responses to a particular writer and her work:

  1. a conception of Beauvoir as the mother of modern feminism, a figure who founded a movement, the inaugural text of which consists mostly of insights that have been surpassed by others’ later acts of writing;

  2. a view of The Second Sex as a book that is eye-opening but not radical (where often the complaint is that Beauvoir uses men as the standard against which women ought to be measured);

  3. an identification of the philosophical dimension of The Second Sex as consisting in nothing other than warmed-over Sartrean existentialism;

  4. a linking of what are taken to be the shortcomings of The Second Sex with biographical facts about Beauvoir, particularly her relationship with Sartre; and

  5. an understanding of numerous features of Beauvoir’s book, sometimes her shortcomings and quite often her achievements, as products of the writing of which she is unconscious.

  Luce Irigaray is perhaps the most famous commentator to offer a gushing homage to Beauvoir and follow it up with the suggestion that The Second Sex is fundamentally inadequate (thereby exemplifying gestures one and two above, those most frequently encountered, often in the introductory moves in feminist work that ultimately does not concern itself in any sustained way with Beauvoir’s writing). Here’s how Irigaray’s short essay “A Personal Note: Equal or Different?” begins: