Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  I could at least have undertaken some study—documented, critical, and perhaps even ingenious—of some limited problem: an author little- or unknown, a point of logic. I wasn’t tempted at all. Chatting with Sartre, taking the measure of his patience, his audacity, made devoting oneself [se donner] to philosophy seem exhilarating—but only if one were bitten by an idea. To expose, develop, judge, collate, criticize the ideas of others—no, I couldn’t see the interest in this. Reading a work of Fink’s [Eugen Fink, perhaps Husserl’s best-known acolyte], I asked myself, “But how does one resign oneself to be the disciple of someone?” I sometimes, later, consented—intermittently—to playing this role.25 But at the outset I had too much intellectual ambition for this to satisfy me. I wanted to communicate what was original in my experience. To succeed at this, I knew that it was toward literature that I must orient myself.26

  In this passage Beauvoir envisions only two possibilities in philosophy. One is “to expose, develop, collate, and criticize the ideas of others.” This is work Beauvoir says she for the most part abjured because she wasn’t interested in being a “disciple.” The other possibility she sees in philosophy is to set out to create a philosophical system, glossed as “concerted delirium,” by which she implies both the exhilaration she mentions in the next paragraph and a certain madness or lunacy. This madness, she claims, goes hand-in-hand with a certain stubbornness, or obstinacy, one that in effect transforms the philosopher’s personal perceptions into universal law. And this stubbornness, in her view, is at odds with what she calls “the feminine condition.”

  We find similar notes struck in a speech Beauvoir delivered in Japan several years after she wrote the passage I have just been discussing:

  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.27

  This passage, like the one quoted before it, was also written well after the publication of The Second Sex; and to understand why “the feminine condition” debars women from philosophical system-building it is necessary to see what The Second Sex understands this condition to be—a central task of chapters 6 and 7 of my book. For now, I want to flag Beauvoir’s explicit identification of Descartes as the author of a “truly great work,” one that, by her definition, “in some sense does away with everything given.” Putting this passage together with the one from Beauvoir’s autobiography, one senses her ambivalence about philosophical system-building. On the one hand, the idea of it is exhilarating and she strongly admires those men, Sartre and Descartes to name two, who have the wherewithal to imagine that their personal views are, or are manifestations of, universal laws. On the other, Beauvoir identifies this wherewithal with obstinacy and madness and suggests not just that it is at odds with “the feminine condition” but even that there is something narcissistically maniacal about the attempt to describe the world afresh, from the ground up, on the mere strength of your own belief in yourself and your ideas.

  Beauvoir’s ambivalence about system-building in philosophy goes a long way, on my view, toward explaining why she does not take on the Meditations directly in The Second Sex. And yet there is a wealth of evidence in the introduction to her book indicating that this is precisely what she wished to do. Once one is on the alert for them, one cannot help but notice any number of striking similarities between the opening moves of Descartes’s and Beauvoir’s texts. Indeed, merely putting the texts side by side reveals remarkable affinities between the two. Here, for example, are the inaugurating lines of the Meditations:

  Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last. But the task looked an enormous one, and I began to wait until I should reach a mature enough age to ensure that no subsequent time of life would be more suitable for tackling such inquiries. This led me to put the project off for so long that I would now be to blame if by pondering over it any further I wasted the time still left for carrying it out. So today I have expressly rid my mind of all worries and arranged for myself a clear stretch of free time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions. (12)

  And here, again, is how The Second Sex begins:

  I have hesitated for a long time to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, above all for women; and it is not new. The querelle du féminisme has caused enough ink to be spilled. At present it is almost over: let’s not talk about it any longer. Yet one does speak about it still. And it doesn’t seem that the voluminous foolishness spouted during the last century has shed much light on the problem. Besides, is there a problem? And what is it? Are there even women? … We don’t know any longer whether women still exist, if they will always exist, if it’s necessary or not to wish for their existence, what place they occupy in this world, what place they should occupy there. (LDS 1:11, TM; see TSS xix)

  In both cases, it is established in the first paragraph that the author has a long-standing interest in the project that is about to be undertaken and that this project has been deferred for a substantial period of time. And both Descartes and (a little later on) Beauvoir recognize that the special circumstances of their lives have prepared them especially well for the investigations they are taking on. Descartes tells us straight away that he has a specific reason for writing the Meditations, namely, a desire to establish a firm foundation for the sciences. This is a reason, notice, that is, as it were, external to the Meditations itself, which is figured as essentially a stepping stone. Descartes also points out that he is well placed now, finally, to undertake this exercise, and he lays out the general conditions required for serious meditation: one must have reached a stage of life at which one has plenty of free time as well as what you might call sufficient psychological space to demolish one’s entire edifice of opinions. Later in her introduction Beauvoir also reveals that what’s driving the writing of The Second Sex is a desire that lies outside the range of the work itself, namely a wish to “define” herself (TSS xxi).28 She argues that the project of posing what she archly calls “the woman question” (TSS xxxii) cannot be undertaken by just any person: the author must be a woman who can “afford the luxury of impartiality”:

  Already a number of us have never had to perceive our femininity as a constraint (gêne) or an obstacle. Many problems seem to us more essential than those that concern us in particular. This detachment even allows us to hope that our attitude will be objective. Still, we know the female world more intimately than do men because we have our roots in it. We sense more immediately what the fact of being female signifies for a human being, and we concern ourselves more with knowing (LDS 1:29–30, TM; TSS xxxiii–xxxiv).29

  Most critically, from the outset both Descartes and Beauvoir make it clear that their projects are undertaken in the spirit of some kind of skepticism. Descartes will doubt all of his opinions; Beauvoir will doubt whether women exist. Both authors also recog
nize from the beginning that their doubt is likely to strike the reader as excessive. Descartes observes that he cannot doubt all of his opinions simply on the grounds that his senses occasionally deceive him:

  How could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to madmen, whose brains are so damaged by the persistent vapours of melancholia that they firmly maintain that they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass. (13)

  Beauvoir, as we have seen, warns that most talk about women constitutes “voluminous nonsense.” But in a matter of paragraphs both Descartes and Beauvoir provide good reason for us to consider the possibility that we don’t have a firm claim on what we thought we knew. In Beauvoir’s case, various pat (and even not so pat) definitions of “woman” are provided, and each is shown to be problematic: “But conceptualism has lost ground” (TSS xx); “But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine” (TSS xx). In Descartes’s case, the dreaming and evil-demon hypotheses prove difficult to dismiss. So early on Descartes feels himself licensed to doubt that he himself exists, while Beauvoir attempts to earn the right to doubt that women exist, which, since she herself is nominally, at least, a woman, turns out also to be some form of doubting her own existence. Both the question “Do I really know anything?” and the question “What is a woman?” are peculiar: it’s not at all obvious how to go about answering either of them or indeed what would count as an answer to either one. This is because the obvious responses manifestly won’t be pertinent, given the context in which the question is being asked. Descartes asks his question about knowledge after taking himself to show that what ordinarily looks like knowledge has yet to prove worthy of the name. And Beauvoir asks her question about women after showing that the usual answers to her question—having to do with femaleness, “the eternal feminine,” and so on—are insufficient. In both cases, it is argued at the outset that we lack a clear understanding of a concept we use all the time. To the extent that these texts continue to move us, it appears that, despite the production of many other texts on these subjects, we still feel we lack this understanding. That both texts continue to be read in the wake of these further texts is another feature they share.

  Finally, there is the matter of both Descartes’s and Beauvoir’s conceiving of their work in terms of building upon foundations, foundations that in both cases prove deeply personal. In Descartes’s case, of course, it will turn out that what undergirds the entire structure of his knowledge is the indubitable fact of his own existence, something revealed to him in every act of thinking. And in Beauvoir’s case, it is the fact of her own identity that is supposed to serve as the foundation of an answer to the question: What is a woman? Immediately after directly posing this question in the introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir declares, “I am a woman,” and she declares that “this truth is the background against which all further assertions will stand out.” In both cases, of course, the idiosyncrasies of the authors have nothing to do with the basis upon which they offer themselves as the foundations of their work. Rather, both Descartes and Beauvoir invite the reader to make the same sort of claim. This means that the fact that both authors identify themselves as well positioned to undertake the investigations they undertake is not supposed to imply that they are somehow superior objects of investigation. To the contrary: just as the power of the cogito depends entirely on the “I” who comes to see the indubitability of his existence, so the power of Beauvoir’s response to the question “What is a woman?” depends entirely on the “I” experiencing the indubitability of … not her sex, exactly, but let’s say her sex-identity, a sense of being what is called a woman.

  Here, of course, there is a rather sharp disjunction with the Meditations. In principle, your sex doesn’t matter when you’re reading Descartes: the “I” of the cogito is not sex-sensitive. But if I’m correct in taking Beauvoir’s “I am a woman” to be her understanding of the foundation of any understanding of what a woman is, then of course it’s going to matter quite a bit whether you find yourself able to make that claim. I do not think that Beauvoir here desires to limit her readership to women. It’s not even that a man cannot ask the question “What is a woman?”; it’s that to ask this question, a question that is supposed to be irreducibly personal, must constitute for him the asking of a question about his own sex-identity, namely the question “What is a man?” Now, this is precisely the question that Descartes asks in the second meditation, albeit only after he has taken himself to have established the fact of his own existence beyond the shadow of a doubt. But of course in his case this question is supposed to be anything but sex-specific—even though his first pass at an answer is that to be a man is to have “a face, hands, arms and the whole mechanical structure of limbs which can be seen in a corpse, and which I called the body” (17). Descartes’s “What is a man?” is a version of the familiar age-old philosophical, not to say religious question. And this “man” is ordinarily assumed to be unproblematically sex-neutral. But it is as though Beauvoir is suggesting that the question about woman must somehow be asked prior to the question about man, as though we don’t know how to take the word “man” in the question “What is a man?” or in the history of philosophy or for that matter in history in general until we ask what a woman is. I mean to claim, in other words, that Beauvoir’s question “What is a woman?” replaces or perhaps displaces Descartes’s “What is a man?”30

  I have claimed that part of the Cartesian legacy that ought to be congenial to feminists, including critics of Descartes such as Bordo, is his revolutionary relocation of philosophical authority from external individuals and institutions to each human mind. But I have also suggested that the cost of this authority is a certain metaphysical solitude, one that is the basis of an epistemological solipsism, which, I conjectured, is a more specific way of naming what Bordo regards as the masculinist “detachment” in Descartes’s philosophy. Now, if I have been successful in attempting to draw lines of affinity between the Meditations and The Second Sex, particularly as regards the stance of skepticism and the appeal to the reader to constitute the “I” of some sort of cogito, then we ought to find something in Beauvoir’s work that parallels or answers to the sense of detachment, of solitude and solipsism, in Descartes’s achievement. Here is where it matters that the foundation of Beauvoir’s assertions is not some profoundly isolated “I” but, rather, the fact that she is what is called a woman. This fact is her first response to the question “What is a woman?,” a question the posing of which, I am arguing, explicitly constitutes a rejection of the priority of Descartes’s “What is a man?,” showing this question, by comparison, to be far less straightforward, far less unambiguously sex-neutral, than it looks in the light of Descartes’s way of posing and responding to it. “I am a thing that thinks,” begins Descartes’s answer; but this start on a response is very different, in form as well as content, from Beauvoir’s stark “I am.” Descartes’s identification of himself as a thinking thing is a direct result of his reasoning out that he, a representative man, is not, at least not in the first instance, his body. This is as much as to say that he is not, at least not in the first instance, a man—in, of course, the sex-specific sense of the word. Descartes’s refusal of this identity is precisely the move in the Meditations that Beauvoir implicitly rejects. The rejection is implicit in her identifying herself as the foundation of an answer to the question “What is a woman?”; to make this declaration is at once to draw attention to what are for her two necessary starting points in her investigation: first, that she is embodied, and, second, that this embodiment is significant, that she answers, to put it particularly, to the name “woman.”

  To declare “I am” in response to the question “What is a woman?” ought not be seen, however, as a way of attempting to push the question out of the skeptical space that the Cartesian question I clai
m it replaces occupied. What this “I am” means is no less a metaphysical mystery than the question itself. Beauvoir’s answer simply puts a face, or perhaps we should say a body, on the question. But she is able to personalize the investigation this way by virtue of the fact—a fact she finds unavoidable—that her body counts as the body of a woman. That is to say that in Beauvoir’s displacement of Descartes’s question there is integrally an appeal to a world of other people—the very people (herself included) who count her as a woman. What is implicitly rejected, this means, is Descartes’s stance of metaphysical isolation, which of course I have been arguing is a way of specifying what Bordo means in using the notion of “detachment.” But this does not mean that what Beauvoir is opposing to this stance is some stance of metaphysical attachment. It’s not, in other words, that she presumes to contest Descartes, at least here, on philosophical ground. Rather, what Beauvoir finds unavoidable, at the very outset of her work, is the ordinary fact of her finding and taking herself to be, in the first instance, a being whose identity is at root (in some sense that it will be an object of The Second Sex to spell out) public. The problem, after all, with being a “woman” is being treated as such by other people (and perhaps internalizing this treatment, so that your sense of yourself is shaped by it). In the introduction to The Second Sex, just after she asks what a woman is and declares herself, insofar as she is a woman, to represent the foundation of an answer, Beauvoir writes,

  I am sometimes vexed during abstract discussions to hear men say to me, “You think thus and such because you are a woman.” But I know that my only defense would be to respond, “I think it because it is true,” thereby eliminating my subjectivity. It would be out of the question to reply, “And you think the contrary because you are a man”; for it is understood that the fact of being a man isn’t a singularity. A man is in the right in being man: it’s woman who is in the wrong. (LDS 1:14, TM; TSS xxi)