by Nancy Bauer
Descartes identifies the first and, arguably, most critical of his contemporaries’ wrongheaded preconceived opinions on the very first page of the first meditation: “All that up to the present I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses.” This rock-bottom tenet of medieval Aristotelianism, Descartes believes, cannot survive the scrutiny of “good sense.” He wants to get his readers to see that human beings do not conceptualize the world solely or primarily by virtue of their sense experience, that is, solely by the way the world bombards their sensory organs. Rather, Cartesian meditation reveals that human beings are creatures who bring a rational perspective to the world. And indeed the success of the Meditations as a philosophical document hinges on the truth of Descartes’s faith that this rational perspective is available to every person, that anyone who engages in the deep experiment in thinking modeled by the Meditations will discover at the foundation of his or her mind the same basic indubitable beliefs. Descartes is banking on each serious meditator’s experiencing the inexorability, the indubitability, of certain fundamental philosophical propositions.18
On the view of Descartes that I’m trying to sketch out, human minds contain certain fundamental intuitions, albeit buried under layers of dogmatic teaching and prejudice, that are the same from person to person. And it is these shared intuitions that underpin the conception of objectivity that Descartes advocates. Objectivity, he suggests, is not simply to be contrasted with something you might call subjectivity, that is, personal opinion; instead, objectivity can be seen as a form of subjectivity, a form that is by definition to be found in all thinkers.19 This conception of objectivity competes not with models of what I suppose Bordo would call attachment but, rather, with prejudice, with blind reliance on other people’s thinking, with kowtowing to the received order. Objectivity explains how thinking people can come to agree with one another through separate acts of thinking on the part of each individual. And this, surely, is an idea that ought to be congenial to feminists, who seek to ensure that diverse women and men can learn to treat each other respectfully and fairly.
I am claiming, contra Bordo, that Descartes wishes to “detach” not from “the cosmos” or some other mother imago but from the constrictions of received opinion. At the same time, I want to account for Bordo’s sense of the philosophical fatefulness of Descartes’s writings and, specifically, for her sense that there is something fundamentally hostile to women in this work. On my reading of Descartes, the source of Bordo’s consternation is Descartes’s revolutionary insistence that philosophical progress demands the isolation of the meditator. The solitude of the figure of the meditator is a symbol not only of the possibility of independent thinking, of real philosophy, but also of the conditions under which this philosophy can be done. In the material that prefaces the Meditations, Descartes famously stresses, first, that the experiment in deep thinking that constitutes the book is to be undertaken only once in a lifetime and, second, that those who wish to follow him in undertaking this experiment must “withdraw their minds from the senses and from all preconceived opinion” (8). At the beginning of the first meditation, the meditator specifies that he is finally prepared to undertake the task at hand—that of doubting all of his beliefs—not only because he has “a clear stretch of free time” but also because he is “quite alone” (12). But this isolation is not just a physical precondition for doing philosophy. For Descartes it is also metaphysically basic—indeed, it turns out to be the foundation of each person’s connection with the rest of the world.
In order to elucidate the fundamental role that metaphysical isolation plays in Descartes’s philosophy, I need to take a few lines to review the familiar details of the first meditation. In so doing, I cannot stress enough, I will not be weighing in on those features of Descartes’s magnum opus that a proper interpretation of the book would be obliged to address. I will not, for example, draw attention to the enormous, even decisive role that his work on the nature of mathematics, and particular of geometry, plays in his understanding of what he is doing. I will say nothing about the role that God plays in the Meditations—even, especially retrospectively, in the first meditation, which is structured around the suspension of certain, but not all, ontotheological tenets. I will ignore aspects of the Meditations as important as these because my main goal in this chapter is simply to suggest a certain way of understanding Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship to the philosophical tradition. I wish to show that there is much exciting and potentially productive work to be done in exploring this relationship in the particular cases of Descartes and, as I will be claiming in later chapters, of Hegel—not to mention, potentially, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and even Sartre.
Let us begin, then, with Descartes’s announcement at the beginning of meditation 1 that the point of the work is to purge his mind of what he calls the fundamental “falsehoods” on which he fears the “edifice” of his beliefs has been built.20 The point of doing this is to clear the way for finding and establishing genuine scientific truths. Descartes informs us that he has “put the project off” for a long time because “the task looked an enormous one” and he needed to make sure that he had “rid [his] mind of all worries and arranged for [him]self a clear stretch of free time.” Now that these conditions have been met, Descartes says, “I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.” But since attempting to destroy his opinions one by one might well prove “an endless task,” Descartes says he will instead attempt to undermine the foundations of the whole edifice of his beliefs. This he takes himself to succeed in doing by supposing, first, that he is dreaming and, then, that “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.”21 He imagines that what he has taken to be experience of the actual world is in fact nothing but the dreams that the evil demon has planted in him. He further imagines that the demon has interfered with his powers of thought such that he “go[es] wrong every time [he adds] two and three or count[s] the sides of a square, or in some even simpler matter, if that is imaginable.”
But, as Descartes frequently notes, persisting in this demonfantasy is “an arduous undertaking,” for he is plagued by what he calls “a kind of laziness,” one that allows his “habitual opinions” to “keep coming back” and “capture” his belief, “which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom.” In the famous passage that ends the first meditation, Descartes writes,
I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up, and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. In the same way, I happily slide back into my old opinions and dread being shaken out of them, for fear that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to toil not in the light, but amid the inextricable darkness of the problems I have now raised.
Even when, at the beginning of the second meditation, the meditator finds himself caught up in the mood of Doubt, as though in a whirlpool that won’t let him get his footing, he finds himself tempted by what he has called laziness. “How do I know,” he asks, “that there is not something else which does not allow even the slightest occasion for doubt?” Surely, he cannot doubt the existence of God, since he is hypothesizing that an evil deity has filled his head with falsehoods. But of course it’s possible that he himself may be “the author of these thoughts.” In that case, then, he must exist. But he has convinced himself that his beliefs that he has a body and that his body has senses that provide him at least under ideal circumstances with reliable impressions of a world outside his body are false. So then, “Does it now follow that I too do not exist?” It does not, says Descartes, in the climactic passage of the Meditations. For the very fact that the doubt is his, that to deny that it is he who is denying his own belie
fs would inevitably be to will himself to act, shows that he must exist, even if his train of thought is hopelessly led astray every time by a malicious demon. “So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”
It turns out that this “I” is essentially “a thing that thinks.” This may seem to follow from the cogito itself, but in the wax example that takes up most of the remainder of the second meditation it becomes clear that Descartes is trying to establish, in direct contradistinction to the reigning Aristotelian paradigm, that human beings’ relatedness to the world depends fundamentally on the intellect and not on the senses or on what Descartes calls “the imagination.”22 “I know now,” says Descartes at the end of the second meditation,
that even bodies [like the body of wax the meditator has been contemplating] are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood; and in view of this I know plainly that I can achieve an easier and more evident perception of my own mind than of anything else.
In meditations 3 through 6, of course, Descartes in effect attempts to rebuild the rest of his world, starting with God and ending with his own body, on the foundation of the cogito. While not every reader of the Meditations in the past 350 years has judged this endeavor a failure, it is as scandalous a fact as any about philosophy that Descartes’s legacy to the subject was to turn it into an essentially skeptical enterprise.
I want to suggest, however, that this legacy ought to be seen not so much as the product of Descartes’s manifest failure to bring the rest of the world back along with his own mind but more fundamentally as a corollary to his reconception of the philosophical enterprise. The skepticism that infuses the Meditations is established not by some weakness of its post-cogito arguments (although of course this weakness reinforces the skepticism) but on the very idea that a human being’s connectedness with the world rests at bottom on what goes on in his head, on his thinking. I am not, in Descartes’s picture, simply one thing, albeit a thinking thing, among many in the world. Rather, I am the basis of a picture of the world that is fundamentally dependent on what goes on in my mind. In other words, the corollary to Descartes’s conviction that the individual human mind is in itself the best source of philosophical authority comes at the cost of a certain solipsism, a certain metaphysical solitude. And notice that this is not essentially a logical deduction from first principles but what would come to be called a phenomenological discovery. I learn that I am fundamentally the basis of my own experience from taking stock of a certain course of my own thought. The picture that founds modern philosophy is thus one in which the very procedures of the discipline figure the thinker as beginning from a position in which he is profoundly, metaphysically, alone.
BEAUVOIR’S CARTESIANISM
I don’t expect my characterization of the legacy of the Meditations to be uncontroversial. Husserl, for one, takes himself to be defeating the idea that the price of Cartesianism is epistemological solipsism. In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl tries to show that when you set out à la Descartes to rebuild the world from your own mind outward, you end up (if, of course, you do things properly) with the world, and not just some personal version of it. This is because when you think about yourself, you always think about yourself as situated in a world. In his Paris Lectures, Husserl writes, “To the extent that I apprehend myself as a natural human being, I presuppose having apprehended a spatial reality …; I have conceived of myself as being in space, in which I consequently have an outside of myself!” (32, emphasis in original). And I can have knowledge that other people exist since “I experience the world not as my own private world, but as an intersubjective world, one that is given to all human beings and which contains objects accessible to all” (34). But arguments such as these, no matter how successful, cannot defeat the point that the picture of philosophy we get in Descartes, the picture that founds modern philosophy, is one in which the very procedures of the discipline (procedures that I have suggested are in a certain basic respect congenial to the practice of feminism) figure the thinker as beginning from a position in which he is profoundly, metaphysically alone. In fact, that Husserl is forced to address “the problem of the external world” and “the problem of other minds,” far from contesting this point, is evidence for it.
Just as Husserl, as the title Cartesian Meditations indicates, regarded himself as in effect rewriting Descartes’s magnum opus in an attempt to ensure that the world as we know it really does come back at the end of the philosopher’s labors, and just as this very work, as I have been arguing, reinforced the skeptical structure of Descartes’s starting point and procedures, so Jean-Paul Sartre, in his early Transcendence of the Ego and a little later in Being and Nothingness (subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology) regarded himself as in effect rewriting Husserl—and in so doing inadvertently carried on the skeptical tradition of modern philosophy.23 On the early Sartre’s view, which I render in some depth in chapters 3 and especially 4, consciousness is again the starting point, only now the moral of the story is not that the world is returned to the philosopher in the wake of his activities but that the idea of a single world is philosophically naive. For Sartre, breaking out of the metaphysical privacy that inaugurates Descartes’s project is impossible. I make these bare-bones claims about Sartre, and about Husserl, not to single them out as more or less Descartes’s heirs than any other philosophers in the modern era but because their ideas are the ideas that filled the philosophical air breathed by Simone de Beauvoir.24 As a Frenchwoman, and even more as a companion of Sartre’s, Beauvoir ought to have been even more inclined than the average modern philosopher to position her philosophical work in relation to that of Descartes. But even this set of circumstances is scant preparation for my claim that the author of The Second Sex, no less than the author of the Cartesian Meditations, aspires, in effect, to rewrite Descartes’s magnum opus from the ground up.
I hedge this claim with the words “in effect” because Beauvoir herself would never have phrased her aspirations this way. Indeed, throughout her life she repeatedly insinuated in her writings, in interviews, and in her speeches that she had never aspired to be—indeed felt herself incapable of being—a philosopher in the sense that in her view Descartes (or, as she was often at pains to observe, Sartre) was. Ordinarily, these disclaimers are taken as evidence of Beauvoir’s lack of philosophical aspirations and originality. But it’s important to note that what Beauvoir explicitly claims, at least when she talks about this subject at any length, is not that she’s not capable of doing philosophical work but, rather, that she’s not interested in or prepared to do a certain kind of philosophy. Consider, for example, the following passage from the second volume of her autobiography, published about ten years after The Second Sex:
The year before [referring to a year in the mid-1930s, when Beauvoir was several years out of graduate school], I hadn’t written anything. I was absolutely determined to go back to some serious work. But what? Why wasn’t I tempted to try my hand at philosophy? Sartre said that I understood philosophical doctrines, those of Husserl among others, more rapidly and more exactly than he did. Indeed, he tended to interpret them according to his own schemes. It was difficult for him to forget himself and to adopt unreservedly a foreign point of view. In my case I had no resistance to break down. My thought modeled itself immediately around what I was trying to grasp. I didn’t accept it passively: insofar as I adhered to it, I perceived in it lacunae and incoherence, just as I also envisioned possible developments for it. If a theory convinced me, it didn’t remain external to me: it changed my relationship with the world, it colored my experience. In short, I had solid faculties of assimilation and a well-developed critical sense; and philosophy was for me a living reality. It gave me satisfactions that
never paled for me.
Yet I did not regard myself as a philosopher: I was well aware that the ease with which I entered into a text came precisely from my lack of inventiveness. In this field, the real creative spirits are so rare that it is otiose to ask why I didn’t try to take my place among them. What’s necessary to explain, rather, is how certain individuals are capable of carrying out this concerted delirium [délire concerté] that is a system and from where they get the stubbornness [entêtement] which lends to their personal perceptions the value of universal law [qui donne à leurs aperçus la valeur de clés universelles]. As I have said before, the feminine condition does not conduce to this species of obstinacy [la condition féminine ne dispose pas à ce genre d’obstination].