Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism
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On Sartre’s view, to experience the certainty of the Other’s subjectivity—of, this means for Sartre, the Other’s humanity (at least in his sense of the word)—comes at the high ontological cost of relinquishing one’s own subjectivity. But it also comes at a high epistemological cost: in Sartre’s picture, as I’ve already suggested, there is room neither for “objectivity” in any standard sense of the term nor for the idea that our judgments can be measured in terms of “warrant” or “truth.” My judgments are “true” only in some sort of instrumental sense of the word, insofar, specifically, as they free me from the Other’s Look. And the Other’s judgments are “true” only in the sense and to the extent that they are part of a world the weight of which his Look has placed on my shoulders. By the time I am entrapped by the Look, imprisoned in the world of the Other, it is too late to ask questions about warrant. We can speak of another person’s judgment of me as warranted only to indicate that the judgment has, as it were, hit home: reduced me to a state of shame, pinned me like a butterfly to his picture of me. There is, to put it another way, no epistemic court of appeal in Sartre’s picture.
I have been arguing that Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic turns on the idea that the way human beings relate to one another is suffused with a species of narcissism and of paranoia and that these features of Sartre’s picture have their roots in his investment in philosophical skepticism about the possibility of what is conventionally called “objectivity.” Strictly speaking, one might hesitate to call Sartre’s view “skeptical.” Sartre never claims that I can’t know the “real” world, even though he does deny that there’s anything like a god’s-eye point of view from which we can describe this world, and even though the way the world is, on his view, undergoes a sea change according to whether I see myself as a subject or an object in it. That I can know the world and the certain presence in it (or at its limits) of a being like myself in all relevant respects (e.g., whatever you might mean by a “human” being) is in fact a rock-bottom truth for the early Sartre. What makes his philosophy skeptical, then, is not some garden-variety species of Cartesian doubt. It’s that the only way to be truly human, on his way of figuring things, is to deny the existence of the Other and his (version of the) world. To be a Sartrean subject requires that I overcome what is all too plainly and painfully for me the fact of the Other’s existence. I must will a radical separation between myself and the Other, and I must abandon any investment I have in the idea of our genuinely sharing a world. So it turns out, perversely enough, that to be a Sartrean subject I actually am obliged to will what the traditional skeptic fears.
What prompted Sartre to work up such a severely attenuated view of what human beings can be for each other? No doubt a thorough response to this question would demand attention to Sartre’s own “situation” as a young philosopher, psychologically, socially, and even geopolitically. But here I am interested in exploring the possibility that we can make some headway on this question simply by looking at Sartre’s conception of what philosophy is supposed to be. Let’s start with something that is obvious to anyone who reads Being and Nothingness, which is that one of Sartre’s aims in the book is to carve out a niche for himself in the history of the subject by constructing his own system of philosophy. This aspiration is evident in Sartre’s explicit positioning of himself in relation to two sets of philosophical figures. One set is that of contemporary phenomenologists (or so-called phenomenologists, since Sartre sees all efforts prior to his own to develop an authentic phenomenology to have fallen short), most notably Husserl and Heidegger. The other set of figures in relation to which Sartre positions himself comprises those thinkers he takes to be of most importance in the history of philosophy, including Leibniz and Spinoza but more significantly Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. His positioning in relation to all of these figures characteristically takes the form of announcing where each went astray in his thinking and, specifically, of showing how his system ultimately fails to remain true to the most important insights upon which it is grounded. In discussing Hegel, for example, Sartre praises him for his “brilliant intuition” that I
depend on the Other in my being. I am, he said, a being for-itself which is for-itself only through another. Therefore the Other penetrates me to the heart. I can not doubt him without doubting myself. (321)
What Sartre likes about this intuition is that “Hegel has posed the question of the being of consciousness” and is therefore concerned with “reality” (322; my emphasis) not just with what a human being can know of reality. But Sartre immediately goes on to criticize Hegel for what he sees as an abandonment of this pure concern with “being” and an adherence to an idealist position in which the question of what exists and the question of what a human being can know are conflated. Specifically, Sartre claims that for Hegel knowledge “is still the measure of being,” so that in the master-slave dialectic, for example, to know that the other sees me as an object implies that I am an object and to be an object as such is to know that I am one. For Sartre this conflation between being and knowing eventually produces something he calls “Hegel’s failure” (338).
Sartre’s assessment of Hegel as having failed marks his appropriation of the master-slave dialectic as an explicitly polemical one. His treatment of Hegel is typical of his treatment of the other major philosophers whose work he discusses: he sees himself as resuscitating and remaining faithful to these figures’ most brilliant philosophical intuitions, intuitions that, in his view, they themselves have abandoned to the detriment of their own theories. What Sartre is trying to do, to put the matter in very simple terms, is to get it right. The motivation for doing this is just the conviction that other people have ultimately gotten it wrong. This conception of what philosophy is, with its implications of who and what it is for, far from being peculiar to Sartre, has been widespread for centuries. The view is predicated on the assumption that it is important—in some brute, absolute, uncontextualized sense—for human beings to know the answers to the “big” questions. But of course this very assumption implies that our “failure” to do so is in some unspecified sense terribly problematic. The history of philosophy is thus to be seen as a terribly problematic history of failures.
But let’s look more closely. Why is it terribly problematic? Why, in other words, must we have answers for these “big” questions? Why must we even ask ourselves such questions? The standard answer is that we need the kind of knowledge philosophers such as Sartre seek in order to add to or shore up our knowledge of the world, that without posing and answering questions such as those he explores in Being and Nothingness we are epistemically impoverished. There must be some information that we are lacking about ourselves or our world, information that would ultimately provoke some sort of change in our lives (else gaining it would be unimportant). Thus, to the extent that a philosopher’s work is regarded as marked by “failure,” it serves as a painful reminder that there is something of the first importance about how human beings should live that we in principle could but in fact do not know. We are doing something—what that something is remains to be seen—wrong.
Being and Nothingness suggests that what we are doing wrong is imagining that reciprocal relationships with other human beings—that is, relationships of mutual respect, of genuine friendship, of real love—are possible. That they are not is a fundamental truth that previous philosophers have heretofore failed to make manifest. But what are we to do with this truth? Should we stop trying to forge relationships of reciprocity? Should we revel in being constantly at each other’s throats? Clearly, this is not what Sartre had in mind, despite his memorable definition of hell. I would argue, indeed, that his promise of—and failure to complete—an ethics based on his ontology is a sign of his own ambivalence about the position he develops in Being and Nothingness, a position that seems to leave no room at all for a serious moral stance. And my suggestion is that Sartre was led to appropriate Hegel as he does in Being and Nothingness b
ecause he was motivated simply by a desire to get it right and thus gives his writing over to a certain inexorable logic.23 I am not arguing, I hope it is clear, that Sartre has himself failed to do what he set out to do. I am claiming, rather, that Sartre’s attenuated view about what human relationships can be like is at least in part a product of his attenuated view of what philosophy is.
A central goal of mine in the next two chapters is to show not only how Beauvoir’s conception of philosophy differs from that of Sartre but also why this difference is philosophically significant. To the extent that Sartre’s conception is typical, as I have claimed it is, then Beauvoir’s work, to the extent that it’s compelling in its own right, will provide an alternative model for how to write philosophically. In chapter 5 I show how from the beginning Beauvoir was dissatisfied with Sartre’s conclusions in Being and Nothingness even as she struggled to put this dissatisfaction into words. And yet it was not until she came to write The Second Sex that she was able to move away from the standard conception of philosophy and turn from attempting to correct Sartre’s errors, as it were, to finding a way to articulate her own interest in the same Hegelian intuitions that, as I have argued, Sartre saw himself as salvaging from the Phenomenology. This new model for philosophical work, I will argue, results from Beauvoir’s finding herself moved to philosophize from within the context of a specific question—What is a woman?—the addressing of which has specifiable importance to her. In response to her posing of this question, Beauvoir finds herself in the position not of correcting others’ “failures” but of mustering all the resources she knows, including the writings of Hegel. What she produces is therefore not a polemical retheorizing of old problems but instead a constructive recounting, as I call it, of earlier philosophers’ most compelling intuitions.
CHAPTER 5
Reading Beauvoir Reading Hegel: Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity
I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliothèque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
My task in this chapter is to begin to indicate why I believe that it is not until Beauvoir goes through the process of writing The Second Sex that she hits her philosophical stride. Unlike many early readers and critics of The Second Sex, however, I wholeheartedly embrace the view, espoused by most contemporary revisionist readers, that it is ludicrous to see Beauvoir, even in her pre–Second Sex philosophical writings, as simply parroting or in some minimally creative way defending the views of Jean-Paul Sartre. Any serious reader of Beauvoir cannot help but notice that much of what Beauvoir has to say about the second-class status of women and other groups and types of people is not only foreign to but even at odds with the views of at least the early Sartre, whose work is incompatible with any robust conception of oppression.
And yet Beauvoir’s self-presentation almost always appears to reinforce the view that she is merely his disciple. In the climactic moments of the introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir announces that her “perspective” is “that of existentialist ethics” (xxxiv). This line is routinely read as an unmistakable sign of Beauvoir’s allegiance to the Sartrean party line: she’s doing nothing more, philosophically, than applying Sartre’s ready-made theory to what she calls the “situation” of women. The feminist philosopher Andrea Nye, for example, accuses Beauvoir of adopting wholesale “the framing metaphysics of the human condition as laid out by Sartre,” and she is presumably thinking of the above line in claiming that “in her introduction, Beauvoir explicitly positioned herself not as a woman or as a feminist, but as an existentialist” (82).1 Beauvoir herself seems to confirm this interpretation of the line in the existentialist-sounding formulas that follow it:
Every subject concretely poses himself through projects as a transcendence; he achieves liberty only through his perpetual surpassing toward other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion toward an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence there is a degradation of existence into the “in-itself,” of liberty into facticity. (xxxiv–xxxv, TM; LDS 1:31)
There’s no doubt that these lines sound like warmed-over Sartre. But a closer look shows that there’s something else going on here. For one thing, Beauvoir does not say that her perspective is that of existentialism; she says it’s that of existentialist ethics. This might seem like hairsplitting, until one recalls that for the Sartre of Being and Nothingness the question of what counts as an “existentialist ethics” is explicitly left open at the end of the book. This means that he never speaks, as does Beauvoir in the above lines, of the question of what counts as “justification for present existence.”2
Indeed, although Sartre in the 1940s was laboring over the construction of an ethics, a project with which he was never satisfied and that remained unpublished until after his death (as Notebooks for an Ethics), it was Beauvoir who during the same period actually published three books on the subject: Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944; never translated into English in full); Pour une Morale de l’Ambiguïté (1947; published in English as The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1948); and L’Existentialisme et la Sagesse des Nations (1948; various essays available in English). These facts of history indicate that Beauvoir’s announcement in The Second Sex that her perspective is that of existentialist ethics ought to be read not, or not simply, as a declaration of her indebtedness to Sartre but as a suggestion that this book be read in light of her own earlier work.3 That Beauvoir is doing something significantly different from Sartre is also indicated by the sentence that follows the existentialist-sounding formulas: “This downfall [of, to repeat, transcendence into immanence] represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil” (xxxv). The idea that the choice of “immanence” over “transcendence” might be inflicted on a person—that oppression can be, as it were, genuinely oppressive—is entirely absent in the early Sartre. And yet without this idea, the very notion of a “second sex,” that is, a whole group of people who are systematically deemed inferior to another whole group simply by virtue of being female, is incomprehensible.
Because Sartre’s system can’t make sense of much of what’s in The Second Sex, competent critics of the book recognize that in respect of its philosophical dimension Beauvoir’s thought cannot be characterized as exactly identical with that of Sartre. But because her “new” idea—the idea that a failure to achieve transcendence might not be an individual’s fault but rather an effect of systematic oppression—is so alien to Sartre’s way of thinking, such critics virtually always state or imply that Beauvoir’s philosophical outlook is fundamentally incoherent or otherwise disingenuous.4 Alternatively, they try to argue that her greatest philosophical debt is not to Sartre but to another philosopher, characteristically identified as one of Sartre’s role models (ordinarily Husserl) or colleagues (most often Merleau-Ponty).5 It’s as though even her admirers cannot seriously entertain the possibility that Beauvoir’s work is somehow genuinely original. By looking at the history of Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, I begin here to indicate why I think that what’s of most importance in her philosophical relationship to other philosophers is the way she appropriates their work. And I’m going to begin to show why and how I think this kind of appropriation is decisively different from the way Beauvoir “uses” the work of other philosophers in her earlier work, specifically Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity.
That there is important interpretive work to be done on this front is indicated by the fact that two of Beauvoir’s most thorough, sensitive, and serious rea
ders—Debra Bergoffen and Michèle Le Doeuff—are diametrically opposed on the question of how to understand The Second Sex in relation to Beauvoir’s previous philosophical writings. For Le Doeuff, Beauvoir’s three early philosophical books as well as her gestures to existentialist thought in the early pages of The Second Sex ought to be seen as tragic artifacts of her misguided sense of loyalty to Sartre. In Le Doeuff’s view, what really got Beauvoir’s philosophical juices flowing was her self-guided and independent reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology in 1940, during a period in which Sartre was interned in Germany as a prisoner of war. Her reading of Hegel, Le Doeuff claims, guides Beauvoir’s construction of her earliest published novel, L’Invitée, which appeared in 1943, the same year that saw the release of Being and Nothingness. While Beauvoir’s novel, which Le Doeuff sees as containing “the thread that would lead her directly … to The Second Sex,” was well received, Sartre’s book, of course, became the force to be reckoned with on the French philosophical scene.6 Therein followed what Le Doeuff regards as a series of maddening interruptions of Beauvoir’s own true work in the form of her penning apologetics for Sartre’s system, the most egregious (and widely read) of which is The Ethics of Ambiguity. Le Doeuff offers as evidence for this view Beauvoir’s negative assessment in her autobiography of the Ethics: “Of all my books, that is the one that today irritates me the most.”7 Le Doeuff comments: