Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  This leads to the second question that Nussbaum begs, namely, the question of just how deep male bias in philosophy goes. It’s apparently basic to her conception of philosophy that the sexism in it is merely superficial, merely the product of blind spots and so forth that we, or at least feminists, are now in a position to correct. You might say that Nussbaum’s view assumes that we need not bring reason to bear on the possibility of blind spots with regard to what we call reason. But this is exactly the picture of philosophy that many feminists, wishing at least to explore the possibility that sexism is somehow fundamentally a part of philosophical practice as we know it, contest. If we stipulate that feminist philosophy is to be essentially no different from philosophy per se, then we seem to leave no room for this sort of exploration.

  In begging the question of the depth of sexism in philosophy, Nussbaum also can be seen as begging a closely related third question, namely that of how we are to distinguish hopelessly problematic blind spots, ignorance of fact, and moral obtuseness from more remediable failings. To clarify what I’m getting at here, I’m going to consider an example from Hegel, not because I wish to single him out as more or less sexist than any other philosopher but because I think this example draws attention to the potential interest for feminists in making distinctions between deep and superficial instances of sexism. Let me turn, then, to some unfortunate lines of Hegel’s, lines found in the addition to paragraph 166 of The Philosophy of Right:

  Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy, and certain forms of artistic production. Women may have happy ideas, taste, and elegance, but they cannot attain to the ideal.

  The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions. Women are educated—who knows how?—as it were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion.16

  I trust I am not alone in having felt obliged on more than one occasion to provide a serious response to a disillusioned student who demands to know why or how we should read the writing of someone capable of penning such words as these. One response is that we can read this writing to see if it gives us the means to understand the cause and significance of its own offensive moments. That is, we can try to see if the author’s philosophy itself provides a standard against which to judge his or her own shortcomings. Now, I predict that it is in fact possible to articulate such a standard in the case of Hegel, and specifically in the picture we get in The Phenomenology of Spirit of the human subject as an entity constantly forced to recognize unbearable existential contradictions between its general picture of the world and its particular beliefs. In Hegel’s case, to give a sketch of my grounds for making this prediction, there is a contradiction between his general account of what a human being can aspire to be, an account that in no way, at least in principle, excludes women, and his specific judgment in this passage that women are systematically incapable of genuinely thinking. There is a contradiction, to put the matter another way, between Hegel’s general picture of the human as self-contradictory and his specific exclusion of women from the possibility of genuinely thinking—from, as it were, having opportunities to contradict themselves. And since Hegel’s overall project is to make claims about the structure and evolution of human rationality—what thinking is, what its standards are, what it can aspire to be—then to assess Hegel by his own lights is to ask whether these claims stand in need of being surpassed, or “sublated,” to use Hegel’s word. To the extent that Hegel’s understanding of rationality shares features with other influential conceptions of rationality it turns out that to evaluate it, even by his lights, is to ask whether the philosophical concept of “rationality” is inherently problematic. That is, it requires a willingness to bring the nature of the standards of philosophy into question. Now, it’s of course true that Nussbaum, who thinks that feminist philosophy ought to be the same as regular philosophy, only better, would endorse the general idea of purging philosophy of Hegel’s sexism. But I’m arguing that it’s hard to see how she could justify any specific project of the sort I’ve sketched, given that she bluntly refuses up front to bring basic philosophical standards into question.

  STRATEGY 3: FEMINIST STANDPOINT PHILOSOPHY

  I have suggested that Nussbaum might herself be blinded to the Hegelian insight that some people, by virtue of their social position, might be systematically blinded to the truth. This insight, especially in its Marxist form, is behind the idea that feminist philosophers ought to be working from something called a “feminist standpoint.” Feminist standpoint philosophy proceeds from the twin assumptions that perfect objectivity is impossible and that we feminist philosophers therefore must strive consciously to develop and work from a coherent conception of what is to count as a specifically feminist subjectivity—a stance that will involve more or less radical intellectual repositionings. This stance, it is claimed, will, paradoxically, be more objective, in the sense of providing a better vista on the true state of affairs, than any male or masculinist stance. Of course, unsympathetic male philosophers may be tempted to dismiss the open partiality of a feminist standpoint as blatantly antiphilosophical. But it’s at least plausible that declaring up front where you’re coming from and who you’re fighting against will reduce the incidence of bias in your work—instances such as the passage from Hegel I have just quoted—and will thus enhance its scrupulousness.

  Some feminist standpoint philosophers, however, claim not only that their work is more scrupulous than that of traditional philosophers, but even that it is better positioned for providing a true description of the way things stand. This claim derives from Marx’s distinction (itself, interestingly enough, derived from a distinction of Hegel’s) between the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, whose self-interest blinds them to the truth, and the standpoint of the proletariat, who are structurally in a better position to see things as they really are. One of the earliest advocates of feminist standpoint philosophy was the philosopher Nancy Hartsock, who in an influential early article (written in the 1970s) suggests that

  like the lives of proletarians according to Marxian theory, women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point which can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy. (Hartsock 284)

  Whether or not one finds Marx’s claims about the proletariat convincing, and whether or not one buys the idea that the only alternative to disavowing one’s partiality is to proceed from it, Hartsock’s use of Marx’s model to justify privileging a feminist philosophical standpoint raises certain very difficult questions. What, for example, is to count as a “feminist” standpoint? Who decides? How can we tell the difference between an appropriately partial standpoint and one that is inappropriately so? When do we know that the feminist standpoint is no longer necessary, which is to ask, are there special circumstances under which such a standpoint is necessary and others under which it is not? Is feminist philosophy, taking the guise of feminist standpoint philosophy, just a stopgap measure? Even if we could answer these questions, one might be dubious about Hartsock’s claim that “women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy.” Do women’s lives have enough in common with one another to allow us to make claims about a privileged vantage point they make available? Is this vantage point more privileged than the vantage point of certain men oppressed by the culture, for example, men of color or gay men? Why pri
vilege something called the “feminist” standpoint, if indeed it makes sense to talk about such a standpoint, more than that of any other movement of oppressed peoples?

  The skepticism about the possibility of a “feminist” standpoint that these sorts of questions raise has been voiced, of course, by those philosophers, male and female, conservative and feminist, who find the idea of a specifically feminist philosophy incoherent or otherwise deeply objectionable. But objections along these lines have also been lodged by certain critics internal to feminist theory who believe that it is dominated by privileged white academics insidiously claiming to speak for women of all colors and classes.17 Both sets of skeptics, however different their motivations, call into question the grounding intuition of feminist standpoint philosophy, namely, the sense that there’s a philosophically fundamental and important distinction between (all) women and (all) men. What’s objectionable, though, is not the idea that women’s experiences might differ from those of men, or even the claim that they might differ in systematic and specifiable ways. The objection, rather, is to the idea that these differences are philosophically pertinent. Any differences between the sexes, according to both types of feminist standpoint skeptics, are to be explored (or dismissed) as artifacts of culture, phenomena to be studied by activists or politicians or anthropologists or sociologists or literary critics or psychologists. The objection, then, is not necessarily to feminism, per se, but to the idea of a specifically “feminist” philosophy. And specifically, the problem is that any such philosophy worth the name—that is, philosophy that is not just social science in disguise—is bound to endorse some sort of metaphysical claim about essential differences between the sexes. That is, it is bound to be—to use the term common in feminist circles—essentialist.18 And if you hold an essentialist view of sex difference, then you open yourself to just the sort of hopelessly vexing questions that, I have been claiming, antistandpoint critics often launch, and from both sides, at feminist philosophy.

  But what’s odd about the essentialism of feminist standpoint philosophy is that most of its proponents are themselves uncomfortable with the idea that women are in some essential, metaphysical sense different from men. They themselves would prefer to endorse the more modest claim, the claim that launched the second wave of feminism thirty or forty years ago, that as far back as we can see human culture has been marked by widespread, systematic oppression of women. In an attempt to disavow what’s problematic about essentialism, many feminist philosophers attempt to construe their work not as alternative to but, rather, as corrective of that of the philosophical tradition. Invoking such “difference feminists” as Carol Gilligan,19 they argue that the philosophical tradition is marked by certain recurrent biases they identify loosely as “masculinist,” biases that need to be corrected, in the name of philosophy’s interest in truth and objectivity, by the consideration of aspects of experience that they identify—again, loosely—as “feminist.”20 This more modest claim is not that all men exhibit these biases or that all women, or even all feminists, share the experiences on the basis of which correctives to these biases are offered. The claim is that certain experiences tend to be part of men’s lives more often than women’s, or vice versa. And its proponents safeguard against the threat of overgeneralization carried by their uses of sex distinctions by cleaving to a philosophical intuition central to feminist standpoint philosophy, which is that attaining truth and objectivity requires that the philosopher acknowledge an inherent dimension of subjectivity in his or her own words. He or she must not assume that his or her own experience as an actor or a knower or a thinker, the experience that informs his or her philosophical practice, is universal. But the problem here is that there is never an account given of why the resulting work ought to count as philosophical work. How can work done from an explicitly subjective point of view count as philosophy? I’m not suggesting that it cannot do so; indeed, I am going to argue, and at some length, that The Second Sex provides a powerful account of how it can. But simply to deny the possibility of objectivity (or, as the case may be, to figure objectivity as nothing but some sort of collection or intersection of subjectivities) is, I would argue, to deny the possibility of philosophy.

  Since it is surely too early to deny that the oppression of women might be a subject for philosophy—since, to put it another way, we know comparatively little about the phenomenon of oppression and perhaps even less about what kinds of things count as “subjects” for philosophy—the task has to be to figure out how to talk about this oppression without lapsing into essentialism. This, I think, is surprisingly hard to do.21 For once the terms of the debate have come under the sway of metaphysics, once, that is, you feel obliged to undergird your feminist politics with a philosophical account of the concept “woman,” then there’s no way, or at least no obvious way, back to the level of intuition, back to the sheer sense of feeling oppressed on the basis of your sex. If you try to provide such an account, then invariably there will be a group of women who will deny that your account is accurate. If you say that these dissenters are blind to the truth, you commit the aptly named crime of paternalism. If, on the other hand, you simply deny flat out that you can give a metaphysical account of the concept “woman,” on the grounds that women are not essentially like one another in any respect—a position that, it’s important to notice, entails a commitment to your thinking that the idea of giving such an account is at least coherent—then you leave yourself with a problem about how to justify a politics based on the oppression of women. This is the problem that confronts those opponents of essentialism who are identified in the current jargon as “antiessentialists.” The debate between essentialists and antiessentialists now dominates feminist theory. It’s a skeptical debate over the question, to put it plainly, of whether and in what sense “women” (whatever that term means) exist.

  STRATEGY 4: ANTIESSENTIALISM

  A watershed moment in the growing tide of sympathy in recent years for antiessentialism (a tide heightened by the increasing obviousness of the problems essentialism was bringing in its wake) was the publication in 1990 of the book Gender Trouble, written by the philosopher Judith Butler, whose influence on the shape of academic feminist philosophy in recent years is hard to overestimate.22 Like many feminists, Butler rejects the idea that our gender norms—what counts normatively as “masculine” or “feminine”—are in any sense natural. But her position goes beyond the now familiar if still contested idea that it’s wrong to suppose that “normal” human females share or ought to share certain particularly “feminine” traits, while “normal” human males share or ought to share particularly “masculine” ones: she also rejects the common view that the division of human beings into two biological sexes is inevitable. Butler contests the very tendency of human beings to conceive of themselves as necessarily either male or female—as, in other words, destined to identify themselves with one or the other pole of an inevitable binary opposition between the two sexes. That there are not two unproblematically discrete biological sexes is suggested to Butler by empirical phenomena such as hermaphrodism, unusual genetic make-ups (for example, people with male genitals and XX chromosomes), medically assisted transsexualism, and so forth. These phenomena, on her view, dramatize the fact that biological sex is essentially like biological hair color: there’s a natural continuum, and how we choose to see that continuum is not determined by anything inherent to it. Thus, there’s nothing called “sex” or “gender” that precedes our own concepts. We don’t apply concepts of maleness and femaleness to some set of qualities that’s already there. Indeed, Butler wants to say that our use of these concepts creates sex and gender, which then insidiously appear to have been there already. And our failure to see that our sex and gender norms are constructed rather than natural—that, for example, there’s no such thing as “woman” apart from our construction of the concept—systematically oppresses all human beings.23

  But if the very category “woman” is inherently o
ppressive, as Butler takes all our references to biological sex to be, then identifying yourself as a woman ought to have the paradoxical effect of reinforcing your—and everyone else’s—systematic oppression. So how, if we are Butlerians, can we coherently base our feminist politics on the fact of our womanhood? Butler urges us to subvert oppressive sex and gender norms by trying to reveal to ourselves how they work both to oppress us and to cover over their own true origins. She also has suggested that it’s perfectly reasonable to “deploy” the concept “woman” strategically in certain political contexts, even if we can’t, by dint of logic, unproblematically use sex and gender terms in our theoretical attempts to overcome the oppression they anchor. Butler recommends that we attempt to subvert these very terms by “citing” them in parody, as she puts it in her book Bodies That Matter,24 rather than obeying them. For example, we can use the word “queer” as an epithet of praise instead of damnation. Or we can undermine the conventional gender signification of our own bodies by dressing them in drag, counting on what Butler calls “the unanticipated resignifiability of highly invested terms” (28)—shock value—to do the subversive work. (Thus we get an echo in this highly metaphysical account of the advice Rorty provides in attempting to convince feminists to sidestep metaphysics—that is, the advice to speak in a new idiom.)