Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  It seems to me that the only way for this sort of position to make sense is for us to realize that what it calls for is not merely new philosophical methods and strategies but in fact a serious rethinking of what philosophy is—of what counts as generalization or universalization and of what features of generalization and universalization do the work that philosophical work has traditionally done, whatever that work on inspection turns out to be. What I want to claim here is that, ironically enough, perhaps the central achievement of The Second Sex—an achievement, by the way, of which I think Beauvoir was very much aware—is precisely this rethinking of what philosophy is; thus there’s no better way that I know of for us third-wave feminist philosophers to figure out how to take particular individual and community characteristics seriously in our work than to understand what Beauvoir is doing in The Second Sex.

  In holding this view I am not denying or overlooking the moments in the book that other philosophers have conceptualized primarily in terms of the notion of “contradiction.” Rather, I wish to account for these moments by rethinking what exactly it is that The Second Sex achieves at the level (in my view, its primary level) of advancing our understanding of what philosophy can and ought to aspire to be. In the chapters that follow I work out in detail the claim that Beauvoir’s landmark book on women constitutes nothing less than a challenge to philosophy to transform itself, internally and from the ground up. I also trace the astonishing power that The Second Sex has had as a feminist and humanist document precisely to Beauvoir’s calling for and forging of this new conception of philosophy. Here, my goal is simply to motivate the idea that we third-wave feminists have set a task for ourselves that requires our forging a new conception of philosophy and to indicate why Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is a promising place to begin our search.

  I’m going to proceed by sketching and evaluating four well-known types of attempts to bring feminism and philosophy together. It’s going to turn out that all of these attempts fail with respect to the task of accounting for the apparent contradiction between feminism and philosophy: they are sometimes feminist and sometimes philosophical but never both simultaneously. This failure casts a pall over the very idea of feminist philosophy and tends to obscure the virtues of the work it marks; important feminist insights are overshadowed by the specter of the apparent contradiction. It is therefore important to understand what is causing the failure to resolve the contradiction in each case. I will suggest that the reason that feminism and philosophy tend never quite to coincide in these types of attempts is not because the very concept of “feminist philosophy” is in fact hopelessly oxymoronic. Rather, the problem is that most feminists are working with and within certain standard conceptions of philosophy that simply lack the resources to yield a decent account of the basic meaning and significance of sexuality and sex difference, as well as of the ramifications of these basic dimensions of human life. If feminists are to do what is genuinely recognizable as philosophy, it must be because we are convinced that theorizing at a relatively high level of abstraction will improve the lot of women (and, many of us would say, of men). The task is to figure out a way to work at this level of abstraction without either forgetting our social and political goals or attempting to fashion our polemical manifestos out of philosophical whole cloth.6

  When I use the word “philosophy” I mean to be speaking (more or less following Wittgenstein, I imagine) about an activity marked by a certain subliming of the ordinary—by a certain transformation of everyday concerns into metaphysical ones.7 While this activity has its rewards, it also has its pitfalls, for when we do philosophy we often find that we have become untethered from our moorings, from the everyday concerns that propelled us to philosophize in the first place, and that we are lost. If we are gentleman philosophers, if for all intents and purposes we have all the time in the world for contemplation, this untethering is unfortunate. But when we are doing feminist philosophy—when there is an urgency to the everyday questions we are asking—the untethering is nothing short of disastrous. The challenge for those of us who wish to do feminist philosophy, then, is to see whether we can come up with a new way of doing philosophy, one that is rigorous and generalized enough really to count as philosophy but that at the same time is tethered in the right way to the sorts of everyday, real-life problems of sexism that are the raison d’être of feminism.

  Each example of feminist philosophy I’m going to discuss exemplifies one of four broad ways of conceiving how feminist concerns and philosophical methods and ideas are supposed to fit together:

  1. Feminism can use preexisting philosophical tools to justify certain feminist political positions.

  2. Feminism can make philosophy more rigorous by exposing sexist blind spots in its history and in contemporary philosophical practice.

  3. Feminism can provide a unique (woman-oriented or pro-woman) stance from which to address traditional or at least relatively traditional philosophical questions. This approach is ordinarily called “feminist standpoint” philosophy.

  4. Feminism can provide us with a new metaphysical conception of the person, one whose mission is to yield an account of the distinctions or apparent distinctions between human males and females and whose discoveries will ramify throughout philosophy, from epistemology to ethics, philosophy of mind to—even, some claim—logic.

  In real life, these four categories sometimes overlap, of course. But for purposes of clarity, I’m going to treat them separately here. I will then begin to indicate, in anticipation of the detailed work I do in the rest of this book, why and how Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical strategy represents a powerful alternative to the four I survey here.

  STRATEGY 1: APPLIED FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

  Not surprisingly, many feminists have engaged in philosophical argument to justify certain political positions. I’m thinking here mainly of a certain style of work on social issues primarily affecting women, such as birth control, abortion, the family, sexual discrimination and harassment, and rape.8 In this sort of work, philosophy is to serve as the handmaiden of feminism: one raids one’s philosophical toolbox to work up arguments to fortify feminist stances. I don’t mean to be unfair here; I am claiming neither that all work in “feminist ethics” conceives of philosophy this way, nor that there is anything inherently wrong with using philosophy to fortify feminist stances. Again, my goal is to show why this particular strategy fails to dispel the air of contradiction around the idea of feminist philosophy. The problem with what I’ll call the applied-ethics approach to feminist philosophy, at least from the perspective of what is motivating my inquiry, is that there is no inherent relationship between one’s commitment to philosophy and one’s commitment to feminism. There is no guarantee either that traditional philosophical analysis will produce results that coincide with one’s experience of sexism or that a commitment to seeing this experience as specifically an experience of something called sexism is compatible with the rigorous application of traditional philosophical methods of analysis. There’s no guaranteeing, in other words, that philosophy will give you the “right” feminist answer or that the right feminist answer will be recognizably philosophical. And when philosophy does yield the right feminist answer, it’s going to be a coincidence.

  Furthermore, even when we happen upon such a coincidence it’s not at all clear that the result will actually matter in the real world. This is a point that Richard Rorty made in a 1990 Tanner lecture called “Feminism and Pragmatism.” Like feminist and other philosophers who do applied ethics, Rorty conceives of philosophy as consisting in a set of conceptual tools. But he thinks that these tools are essentially useless for feminists, who need to remember, he says, that they are not just tinkering with the current social order but are engaged in a utopian movement for social and political change. From the point of view of feminism, Rorty argues, the only thing that matters is how and how much things change. It doesn’t matter how we get there. In particular, it doesn’t matter whether we do phi
losophy or not. Indeed, Rorty argues quite forcefully that the best way to get things to change is not to waste time trying to provide philosophical arguments that change is necessary. This is because what’s transfixing sexist people is not that they are lacking arguments, per se, for feminist views but that their own sexist views of the world are deeply entrenched. Rorty’s position is that this entrenchment is in large part the product of the way we currently speak about the world, including the way we currently construct philosophical arguments. So what’s needed to overturn sexism is the creation of conditions under which what Rorty calls a “new idiom” is likely to emerge. This new idiom, this new way of speaking, is going to be the product not of group efforts but, rather, of inspired individuals, whom Rorty calls “prophets.” The prophet on Rorty’s definition “get[s] people to feel indifference or satisfaction where they once recoiled, and revulsion and rage where they once felt indifference or resignation”; s/he “change[s] instinctive emotional reactions” by engendering “new language which will facilitate new reactions” (“Feminism and Pragmatism” 232).9

  Rorty is thinking here of people such as the feminist legal scholar and activist Catharine MacKinnon, whose development of the notion of “sexual harassment,” for example, has indeed led to dramatic changes in the terms in which woman have been able to think and speak about certain noxious behaviors on the part of their employers and teachers.10 MacKinnon is also notorious for her provocative way of putting things, as when she unabashedly declares in her most systematic work of feminist theory that “[f]or many women, [sexual intercourse] is a rape” (Toward a Feminist Theory of the State 111). On Rorty’s view, MacKinnon in such instances evinces a prophetlike willingness to risk sounding crazy to the mainstream in the service of trying to provide feminists with a genuinely powerful way of changing things.

  If you agree that philosophy is just a set of tools used to construct arguments, then it’s going to be hard to counter Rorty’s pessimism about philosophy’s usefulness for feminism. Surely Rorty is right to imagine that a powerful voice speaking in a powerful new idiom is more likely to bring about feminist change in the world than a bunch of dry philosophical arguments. If you imagine, as Rorty does, that philosophy is fundamentally a set of conceptual tools, then I challenge you to say how or why Rorty is wrong to insist that the only task for philosophy—a task he apparently takes himself to be performing—is “to clear the road for prophets and poets, to make intellectual life a bit simpler and safer for those who have visions of new communities” (240) and “to drag outdated philosophy out of the way of those who are displaying unusual courage and imagination” (256, n. 26). Can it be denied that, from the point of view of results, flashy rhetoric will practically always triumph over pedantic argumentation? Hasn’t philosophy been on the defensive about this ever since Socrates? (Then again, hasn’t the defense, ever since Socrates, tended to consist in reconceiving of philosophy precisely as something other than a set of conceptual tools?11)

  Although his unflinching admiration for the goals of feminism as articulated by some of its most radical academic proponents—an admiration vehemently expressed in a Tanner Lecture, no less—is, to say the least, impressive, Rorty’s paternalistically advising feminists to stay away from philosophy, as though knowingly guarding his little sisters from the advances of his best friend—from another himself, to borrow Aristotle’s term—strikes me as suspicious. The suspicion is heightened by the fact that Rorty’s argument is couched in what Nancy Fraser has nicely called a “a marriage proposal”—specifically, an extended plea for feminists to abandon traditional “universalistic” philosophy in favor of accepting the services of those he calls “we pragmatists,” men who he suggests are happy to stay at home and do the philosophical housework while the visionary feminist women they wish to support practice crying out in the wilderness (Fraser 259–260).

  But why think of philosophy as a set of conceptual tools, as Rorty and certain applied-ethics feminist philosophers do? Why can’t philosophy be, for example, a form of what Rorty calls prophecy? This is a way of asking why Rorty can’t see Catharine MacKinnon, his paradigmatic feminist prophet, as tapping into power that is recognizably philosophical precisely at certain high rhetorical moments in her work. For example, in the middle of his essay Rorty scolds MacKinnon for defining feminism as the belief “that women are human beings in truth but not in social reality.”12 The problem here, on Rorty’s view, is that MacKinnon is appealing to some metaphysical notion of “truth.” This is problematic for Rorty for at least two reasons. First, MacKinnon seems to lower herself, as it were, to the level of metaphysical debate, a level on which, Rorty famously contends, there is a lot of blather about the way things are “in truth,” which obscures the fact that the way things are is merely a matter of the way we choose to describe them. Second, for MacKinnon to indulge in the language of metaphysics obscures, on Rorty’s view, the rhetorical radicality of her point, which would be better expressed, presumably, by the stark declaration that “women are not human beings.”

  What Rorty fails to see is that for MacKinnon, a woman, to declare that she both is and is not a human being seems patently of philosophical interest. Her declaration raises questions about what it means to claim that one is not treated as a human being, about what it is to identify oneself as a human being while the culture denies you this status, about what it is to use speech in order to observe that you aren’t acknowledged as a speaking being. It is precisely these sorts of questions—questions, I’m claiming, that philosophy ought to recognize as falling within its purview—that a viable feminist philosophy must provide the space to pose. But in order to see what I’m talking about, you have to be open to the possibility of a less impoverished conception of philosophy than Rorty has. To the extent that I share Rorty’s enthusiasm for MacKinnon, it is precisely because her work provides glimpses of what a richer conception of philosophy might look like. And yet these moments are embedded in writing that sees itself as radically refusing philosophy. An example of this refusal is to be found in MacKinnon’s insistence on the foundational truth of some of her most controversial ideas. “Objectivity,” she flatly declares, for example, “is the epistemological stance of which objectification [of women] is the social process” (Toward a Feminist Theory of the State 114). Such sentences implicitly convey a refusal of philosophy, which makes MacKinnon’s writing in general a poor candidate for resolving our apparent contradiction.

  STRATEGY 2: ROOTING OUT PHILOSOPHICAL SEXISM

  In her blunt refusal even to consider the viability for women of any philosophical notion of objectivity, MacKinnon exposes herself to the wrath of Martha Nussbaum, who in an infamous 1994 essay in The New York Review of Books limns what for us will be a second strategy, one closely related to the first, for doing feminist philosophy. The purpose of Nussbaum’s essay is to launch a polemic against feminists who question the usefulness of traditional philosophy for feminism and to claim, moreover, that feminists must use traditional philosophical methods to fight sexism. According to Nussbaum the entrenchment of sexism in our culture is ensured by what she calls “convention” and “habit,” and its extirpation requires fighting these things with the weapon that’s most effective against them, namely, with what she calls reason. “The appeal to reason and objectivity,” she says, “amounts to a request that the observer refuse to be intimidated by habit, and look for cogent arguments based on evidence that has been carefully sifted for bias.”13 If habit is in part responsible for sexism, and if reason is our best weapon against habit, then it follows that philosophy as we know it is not only useful for feminism but absolutely essential to it. In her essay, which in large part takes the form of a polemic against feminists who question the usefulness of traditional philosophy for feminism, Nussbaum goes so far as to claim that the rejection by feminists of traditional philosophical methods “is a perilous theoretical position for feminists, and leaves them without the resources to make a convincing radical critique of u
njust societies” (62).

  These resources, she claims, are to be found in doing philosophy exactly the way it has always been done, only better. As she puts it near the conclusion of her essay,

  Doing feminist philosophy is not really something different from doing philosophy. … To do feminist philosophy is simply to get on with the tough work of theorizing in a rigorous and thoroughgoing way, but without the blind spots, the ignorance of fact, and the moral obtuseness that have characterized much philosophical thought about women and sex and the family and ethics in the male-dominated academy. (62)14

  I take it that no one would claim that the purging from philosophy of blind spots, ignorance of fact, and moral obtuseness would be a bad thing. But in defining feminist philosophy as that which is supposed to do the purging, Nussbaum begs at least three questions. First, she doesn’t say what it is about feminism that should or could give us cause to imagine its practitioners to be less prone to blind spots, ignorance of fact, and moral obtuseness than anyone else. In fact in the early pages of her essay, she herself excoriates exactly these traits in those philosophically trained feminists whose work she deplores, namely, those feminists who question the value-neutrality of philosophy’s commitment to things such as reason and objectivity. But of course these feminist philosophers come in for Nussbaum’s contempt precisely in attempting to provide a corrective to the blind spots, ignorance of fact, and moral obtuseness one finds running through traditional philosophical work. They just see these blind spots, etc., in a different, more fundamental, place from the place in which Nussbaum sees them. Nussbaum herself seems blinded to Kant’s insight that philosophy can criticize itself, and at the deepest levels, and still be deeply philosophical. And she also seems blind to the taking up of this idea by Hegel and then by Marx, both of whom saw that certain people in certain positions—masters, for example, or capitalists—might be systematically blinded to the truth, so that their scanning their worldviews for mistakes would never suffice to reveal the basic injustice of their power.15