Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  Butler’s response to the worry that her theory takes the wind out of feminist sails turns on a metaphysical picture of our concepts—particularly those concepts of ours concerning sex difference—as thoroughly the product of social convention and therefore, in principle, thoroughly malleable. Now, this is a view that Butler derives in large part from her reading of Jacques Lacan’s reading of Freud, in which Lacan argues, as Butler does, that the human subject is thoroughly constituted by and through her culture. But Lacan, invoking Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth, complicates this picture in a way that Butler doesn’t: he stresses how ambivalent we are bound to be about subverting the very structures through which we come into existence—in this case, our conceptual structures, our language. On Lacan’s view, nothing less is jeopardized in a wish for subversion of these structures than our connectedness to the world. This is a consequence of Butler’s view that she, especially in her prescriptive moments, seems constantly to want to underplay. She doesn’t adequately acknowledge the substantive, real-world risk for a feminist in the idea of ceasing to fight on behalf of “women” in favor of abjuring the straightforward use of this term and limiting one’s activism to subversive gestures on the order of filling one’s closet with gender-dissonant clothes. Not surprisingly, one result of Butler’s work has been to provoke a feminist backlash against it on precisely these grounds. It’s better to put your philosophy on the line, feminists such as the philosopher Susan Bordo contend, than to endanger everything you’ve worked for as a feminist.25

  The reason that a Butleresque philosophy of sex and gender isn’t a promising candidate for resolving our apparent contradiction is that in conceiving of itself as a purely metaphysical inquiry it from the outset is paradoxically forced to deny the experience that gives rise to feminism—namely, the sense of being oppressed because you are something called a woman. Let me try to make this point in as clear a way as I can. The problem for someone who wants to conduct an investigation into the nature of sex difference that is at once philosophical and feminist is to figure out how to do so without denying the social fact of sex difference. You have to be able at one and the same time to question what a woman is and to identify yourself as a woman—or, as the case may be, as a man. You have to operate simultaneously at the level of our ordinary concepts—the level, after all, on which feminism situates itself—and at the level of philosophy, where these ordinary concepts are put in question. This is something that none of the candidates for a viable feminist philosophy that I’ve just considered do. Characteristically, work identifying itself as feminist philosophy is work that is peppered with moments of feminism and moments of philosophy, but not moments that are at one and the same time feminist and philosophical.

  Now, it may strike you that by definition a moment can’t be both feminist in an everyday sense and philosophical at the same time—that the everyday is to be delimited, if you will, as exactly that which isn’t philosophy. But I’m suggesting that this paradox has to be overcome in order for there to be a genuine resolution to the apparent contradiction in the concept of feminist philosophy. And we’re now at a point at which it’s possible for me to begin to indicate why I find a potential candidate for this resolution in, of all places, what is often called the founding text of the contemporary feminist movement, namely Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It’s my view that this book, in its willingness to keep in play a certain natural relationship—I mean, a relationship that arises naturally as we sexed beings think about sex difference—between the everyday and the metaphysical is a paradigmatic example of the possibility of genuine feminist philosophy. And I want to conclude this chapter by laying out the groundwork for my claim, which will be developed especially in chapters 2 and 7, that this negotiation of the everyday and the philosophical is one of the great achievements of The Second Sex, one of the achievements that accounts for its undisputed power in galvanizing the fight against sex-based oppression.

  BEAUVOIR AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

  We get a glimpse of Beauvoir’s willingness to keep what I have called a certain natural relationship between the everyday and the metaphysical in play in the early pages of the introduction to The Second Sex, particularly at the following juncture. Beauvoir writes:

  If her female function does not suffice to define woman, if we refuse also to explain her by “the eternal feminine” and if nevertheless we admit that, at least for the time being, there are women on the earth, we then have to ask the question: what is a woman?

  The very posing of the problem immediately suggests to me a first response. It is significant that I pose it. A man would never have the idea of writing a book on the singular situation that men occupy in humanity. If I want to define myself, I am obliged first off to declare: “I am a woman”; this truth is the background against which all further assertions will stand out. (TSS xxi, TM; LDS 1:13–14)26

  Here we see Beauvoir launching her inquiry by posing what appears to be a metaphysical question—What is a woman?—and then immediately suggesting an everyday answer: I am. This places a certain limit on what is going to count as an acceptable philosophical response to the question: it must account for Beauvoir’s own identity as a woman. But notice that this limit does not come from Beauvoir’s politics—indeed, many counterculture feminists were embarrassed that Beauvoir did not call herself a feminist until the late 1960s, decades after the publication of The Second Sex had played a key role in launching the feminist movement. Rather, the limit on what will count as an answer to the philosophical question “What is a woman?” comes from our everyday criteria in using this word. That is to say, it’s not a political position but, rather, her everyday experience, her experience as a woman, her finding herself bound to identify herself as what the word “woman” names, whatever it names, that constrains Beauvoir’s philosophical investigation.

  For Beauvoir, then, no answer to the metaphysical question “What is a woman?” will suffice that does not acknowledge the origins of this question in her ordinary sense of herself as, in the first instance, before all else, a woman. In response to a question asked ten years after the publication of The Second Sex about how she came to write this book, Beauvoir said,

  The idea of The Second Sex came to me very late. Men or women, I thought that each could handle their own problems by themselves; I wasn’t aware that femininity is a situation. I wrote three novels, some essays, without worrying myself about my condition as a woman. One day, I had a desire to explain myself to myself. I began to reflect and I became aware with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was this: I am a woman.27

  And in the autobiography Beauvoir felt able to begin writing upon completion of the part of her investigation into womanhood that became The Second Sex, she puts the impetus for conducting this investigation this way: “I said how this book was conceived: almost fortuitously. Wanting to speak about myself, I realized that it was necessary for me to describe the feminine condition.”28 Because Beauvoir’s philosophical inquiry into the question of sex is tethered from the start to her desire to understand her everyday identity as a woman, any evolution of this question into a different one—let’s say, a purely metaphysical one—is, at least, checked. It’s as if she’s keeping the investigation on track by insisting on its existential as well as its philosophical import—and, wishing to flag my impatience with accounts of Beauvoir’s achievement that see it as derivative of that of Jean-Paul Sartre, I’m deliberately putting a spin on the word “existential” to mark Beauvoir’s investment of herself in her work.

  This is not to suggest, however, that there are particular responses to Beauvoir’s question, responses that will look like some of those I’ve considered here, that are ruled out in advance. It’s perfectly possible, for example, that in the course of her investigation Beauvoir might be overcome, like Butler, by a sense that “women” don’t in some deep sense exist. But this will not present itself as simply an abstract philosophical discovery, deduced from a fixed
picture of our relationship to our concepts. Instead, it will present itself as a concrete discovery about Beauvoir’s own life. “What is a woman?” she asks in the passage I quoted from the introduction to The Second Sex. Her answer is that she is, if anything is. This means that part of the investigation into the question of what a woman is will be an investigation of what it is to claim to be a woman, to claim to be, to put it in a more pedantic way, an instance of a general concept. But it also means that this investigation will have to answer to this particular claim to be a woman, made by this particular woman. In philosophizing as she does, Beauvoir is laying her own identity on the line, not just by evincing a willingness for philosophy to effect a transformation of this identity, but more important, by offering nothing less than herself as the object of a philosophical investigation. By personalizing the philosophical question of sex difference in this way, Beauvoir is able to avoid the terms of the essentialism/antiessentialism debate. She doesn’t ask, Is there an essential similarity among women and an essential difference between the sexes?—but rather, What is to be made of the fact that I’m a woman?

  I am claiming that this is both a feminist and a philosophical question. On my reading of The Second Sex, the way Beauvoir takes up this question is to begin by showing that we don’t find an answer to it in the history of thought, a history the artifacts of which have of course been produced almost exclusively by men. She then goes on neither to use nor to reject these artifacts, these philosophical theses and methods and tools but, rather, to appropriate them in the service of an investigation that is irreducibly personal as well as philosophical. What this appropriation looks like is a main concern of mine in chapters 3 through 7, but I want here, at this early juncture, to sketch out what I mean in using this word. A central example is Beauvoir’s reworking of the concept of the “Other,” a term previously deployed by the likes of Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, and Sartre. Beauvoir explores the question of what it means for her to labor intellectually under conditions in which the various conceptualizations of this term in the work of these philosophers—her own partner not excluded—seem invariably to consign beings of her own sex to the position of the “Other,” a position in which one is figured merely as an object of use or of fascination to some genuine subject, a subject that seems, always, to be sexed male. Through something like the Cartesian cogito—“I’m thinking about being consigned to the status of an object; therefore, I can’t, ontologically be just an object”—Beauvoir deduces that to the extent she, and, therefore, other women, nonetheless think of themselves as Other, as not fully human, it must be because they employ their agency in part in the service of accepting this status. But why do women do this? In addressing herself to this question, Beauvoir investigates the grounds on which Hegel, for one, reaccents the concept of the slave, one of the manifestations that the Other takes in his work, so that the position of the slave is seen in certain critical respects to be more desirable, at least from a progressive point of view, than the position of what he calls the master. And then Beauvoir herself reinflects this positive conception of the slave along the lines of her own sexed experience, thus in effect following out Judith Butler’s strategies without making use of anything like Butler’s untethered metaphysics. Beauvoir’s way of reaccenting concepts in response to her own experience as a sexed being, a major strategy in what I call her recounting of woman, provides a model that, I claim, is at one and the same time feminist and philosophical.

  This model reconceives of philosophy not as a set of tools or methods or problems or texts or anything else fixed but, rather, as a mode of self-transformation and self-expression that stands or falls at one and the same time on its uniqueness—on, if you will, its originality, or particularity—and on its representativeness: that is, the degree to which its particularity can be taken as an instance of something universal. It serves the interests of feminists insofar as it insists on the rock-bottom importance of the expression of particular voices, something crucial for women if, to hark back to Catharine MacKinnon’s words, they are to become human beings both in truth and in social reality. And from the point of view of philosophy, it offers a way to tether one’s thought to its motivating origins—to keep it from straying away from its own interests. The model happens to come from a text that begot a political movement. Even if that’s not quite an accident, you don’t have to take an interest in feminism in order to take an interest in the model. But if you already have such an interest—let’s say because you’re a woman trying to be a philosopher, and you want to make sense of your hearing the words you are inclined to say echoed back to you by your profession as the words of a woman—then discovering this model might feel, for the first time, like an invitation to speak.

  I’m very grateful for the many important suggestions for improving this chapter that I have received from people who listened to an early version of it at Harvard University, Carleton College, Michigan State University, Wellesley College, Loyola University of Chicago, the University of New Hampshire, the University of California at Irvine, Vanderbilt University, and Tufts University, as well as at a meeting of the International Association of Women Philosophers.

  CHAPTER 2

  I Am a Woman, Therefrom I Think: The Second Sex and the Meditations

  Woman is well placed to describe society, the world, the epoch to which she belongs, but only up to a certain point. Truly great works are those that put the world entirely in question. Now that woman doesn’t do. She will critique, she will contest in detail; but to put the world completely into question one must feel oneself to be profoundly responsible for the world. Now she isn’t to the extent that it’s a world of men; she doesn’t take charge in the way the great artist does. She doesn’t radically contest the world, and this is why in the history of humanity there isn’t a woman who has created a great religious or philosophical system, or even a truly great ideology; for that, what’s necessary is in some sense to do away with everything that’s given [faire table rase de tout le donné]—as Descartes did away with all knowledge—and to start afresh. Well, woman, by reason of her condition, isn’t in a position to do that.

  —Simone de Beauvoir, “La Femme et la Création”1

  I shall be glad to reveal in this discourse what paths I have followed, and to represent my life in it as if in a picture, so that everyone may judge it for himself; and thus, learning from public response the opinions held of it, I shall add a new manner of self-instruction to those I am accustomed to using.

  —René Descartes, Discourse on the Method

  A wild cry of rage, the revolt of a wounded soul—that they could have accepted with a moved and pitying condescension; since they could not pardon me my objectivity, [my masculine readers] feigned a disbelief in it. For example I will take a phrase of Claude Mauriac’s which perfectly illustrates the arrogance of the First Sex. “What has she got against me?” he wanted to know. Nothing; I had nothing against anything except the words I was quoting.

  —Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstance, vol. 12

  Suppose that we take seriously Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that a mark of (male) arrogance is the refusal to acknowledge that someone’s words are uttered on, or from, the side of objectivity. Then to accuse someone of arrogance is to suggest that he or she is unjustly seizing the authority to judge the authority of another person’s words. But what is to count as a just claim to the authority to do this judging? Does Beauvoir wish to contradict herself when she speaks of her objectivity in The Second Sex and implies that it is fueled by what she has against the words she is quoting—which means, I take it, not just the quotations in it, but all of its words, none of which are inherently hers? The issue is not just whether and when someone has a right to don the mantle of objectivity—or refuse it to another person; it’s also a question of what it is to try to decide this issue by helping yourself to the very words that have been used to deny you this right.

  As I suggested at the end of chapter 1, Beauvoir’s
seizing of authority in The Second Sex takes the form of her claiming to be a representative woman. In this chapter I’m going to investigate this claim. I want to show that Beauvoir means by this gesture to be putting herself forward as no worse nor, crucially, better an instance of the concept than any other woman. In answering “I am” to the question “What is a woman?” she means not to distinguish herself but, to the contrary, to count herself as a woman. Here we have an understanding of what it is for a person to claim to represent others that is characterized not by arrogance but by a certain humility—a certain abrogation of the significance of one’s own singularity. This notion of representation, characterized by humility, is, I’m going to argue, in direct contrast to the notion explicitly or implicitly employed in the work of many (male) philosophers, who tacitly or openly claim to be better specimens of genuine humanity—specifically, more objective, more rational, and therefore less brutish and animalistic, than, at the least, their nonphilosopher fellows. I take Beauvoir in The Second Sex to be countering this sort of philosophical arrogance by grounding the authority to speak objectively in an inaugurating act of humility.