by Nancy Bauer
Indeed, even as early as Pyrrhus et Cinéas, Beauvoir wants to go further than this. Not only on her view might the Other’s response decisively discourage or encourage me in what I go on to do; the responses of others are positively necessary for me to keep acting. This is because it’s the fact of others’ reactions to me, reactions that, phenomenologically speaking, I cannot help but be affected by, that forces me not to simply rest content with any one of my actions. The fact of others, to borrow Rousseau’s language in The Social Contract, is what, on Beauvoir’s view, forces me to be free. And this is true regardless of the tenor or shape of the Other’s response. Suppose, for example, that another person expresses disgust at what I do. I might, of course, stop doing it. But even if I make a conscious decision not to allow the Other’s response to “get to me,” my future behavior will be altered. I might no longer do what I did within the range of the disgusted person. Or I might find I get a peculiar and remarkable frisson of sadistic pleasure from her disgust, so that I seek to recreate it. Regardless: I will find myself responding, somehow, to the response of the Other. It’s this counterresponse that denies (if not disabuses me of) the fantasy that something like the rest Pyrrhus ultimately aims for is just around the corner, just one act away. As long as there are other people on the earth, I cannot and will not rest. For the Beauvoir of Pyrrhus et Cinéas, I think, morality consists in “assuming” this fact for oneself.
And yet Beauvoir seems unable to say anywhere in the book what this “assuming” is actually supposed to look like. Do I try to predict the Other’s reaction when I act? (This seems decidedly too consequentialist for Beauvoir’s tastes.) Or is it that I’m supposed to take responsibility for my actions ex post facto? But then what would this “taking responsibility” look like, exactly? These are important questions, and it is an important fact about Pyrrhus et Cinéas that it doesn’t appear to have the resources to answer them, important not just in evaluating the book as an independent object but in tracing a trajectory from it to The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which, as we shall see below, the concept of “assuming” begins to take a clearer shape, and finally to The Second Sex, in which Beauvoir gives herself the resources to develop the intuition behind the idea of “assuming” into a fullblown picture. But just as important, I think, is Beauvoir’s new angle on Sartre’s picture, an angle that reveals that a condition of my freedom, or at least of my being forced to exercise my freedom, is that the Other also be free. Put otherwise, the Other’s freedom is to be seen as not just a threat to my subjectivity but a necessary condition of its being regularly exercised. That there is something positive about the Other’s freedom is a possibility never raised by the Sartre of Being and Nothingness. That Beauvoir thinks we might see it this way is a function of her figuring my actions not as attempts to freeze the Other, along with his threats, in my world, but as “calls” or “appeals” (appels) (see, e.g., pp. 109, 113).15 For her, everything I do counts as an invitation to the Other to respond, not just as an object but, far more important, as a fellow subject. Beauvoir does not say flat out in Pyrrhus et Cinéas that my “appeals” are appeals to beings I can recognize in my subjectivity as subjects themselves. Instead, she faithfully recites such Sartrean maxims as this: “Other men exist only as objects; I alone take hold of myself in my intimacy and my liberty: a subject” (94). But I am arguing that Beauvoir implies that this maxim is inaccurate as it stands in insisting, in myriad ways, that “my essential need is … to have free men opposite me” (96), to appeal to persons who are naturally inclined to hear and react to the calls I issue, reactions that in their turn constitute appeals to me in my subjectivity.16
But what do I mean when I say that Sartre’s conception of how I can experience the Other’s subjectivity is inaccurate “as it stands”? Why isn’t it just flat-out false by Beauvoir’s lights? We get something of an answer if we put Beauvoir’s conception of action as call or appeal next to the straightforwardly Sartrean idea that in acting I am turning the other into an object, an idea that, as I’ve just documented, Beauvoir explicitly intones in Pyrrhus et Cinéas. Are these two ideas obviously incompatible? They are only if one denies that another person can be, for me or for herself, simultaneously an object and a subject. But suppose that this is false. Suppose that in asserting my subjectivity in the world, that is, in acting, I engender or found, as it were, not one type of object but two: the first, of course, is the Other-as-object; the second—a second unacknowledged by Sartre—is whatever situation results from my action. And indeed this idea of situations as in effect objects created by action is, I think, what Beauvoir intends by her use of Sartre’s term “situation” when she claims that “each of my acts in falling in the world creates for [the Other] a new situation.” This situation does not strike the Other as something that just incidentally results from my actions; it’s something that the Other, the Other as subject, automatically, phenomenologically, regards as mine.17 The situations I create by my actions automatically become, in other words, phenomena open to and even inviting her judgment. The idea here is that my acting, while it may have the immediate consequence of figuring another person both in my eyes and hers as an object, also produces an incarnation of myself as object incarnated in the situation I create. Insofar as what I do becomes an object of the Other’s judgment, it in fact is an invitation, a call, not just generally to the Other but specifically to her in her subjectivity, to her as she is “for-herself.” In this way, to act is both to treat the Other as an object and to issue an appeal to her as a subject. It is also to force myself on the world as both a subject—an actor—and an object, that is, that “situation” created by my action in which I am necessarily represented and, at least for the moment, fixed.
There are at least three ways in which my acting, insofar as it is construed as an expression of my existence, of myself as I figure myself to be for-myself, is an inherently risky business. Beauvoir can be credited with having recognized all three of these sorts of risks in Pyrrhus et Cinéas, even if she does not give equal regard to all three. One risk, the one to which Beauvoir seems to pay the least amount of attention, is that if my appealing to the subjectivity of the Other must take the form of my objectifying myself, through the creation of a situation that will be recognized as mine, or even as me, then in acting I automatically risk misjudgment. In order to avoid this exposure of ourselves, something Beauvoir calls our “completely staking” ourselves (107), we often either attempt to please the Other—that is, we kowtow to the conventional—or else we profess contempt for all but those people who are receptive to the situations we create. But both of these responses, Beauvoir insists, are signs of cowardice, which insofar as it involves an abrogation of one’s freedom, an attempt to achieve a state of eternal rest (a death-in-life), is taken by her to be a moral fault. Of contempt, for example, she writes,
It would be convenient to be able to use contempt like a weapon: one would try to do so often. A child, a young man esteemed by his entourage, chooses not to confront an unfamiliar judgment; he shuts himself up in his sphere and in order not to run any risk disarms in advance the opinion of the rest of the world; he walks in life with a sure step: whoever condemns him condemns himself. But in so doing he renounces his liberty. To be free is to throw oneself into the world without calculation, without stake; it’s to define oneself as completely staked … whereas the overly prudent man must take care not to found a project other than that which valorizes those who valorize him. (107)
But Beauvoir does not spend much time in this book—and how could she, given its overriding purpose?—exploring the ramifications of the self-objectification that, she implies, is a necessary consequence of the exercise of subjectivity that both she and Sartre so strongly advocate. It is not until The Second Sex, I’m going to argue, that she finds a way of exploring this consequence head-on.
The two other risks I undertake in exercising my subjectivity, two to which Beauvoir devotes considerably more words than the first, have to do
with her understanding of genuine acting—that is, the complete staking of oneself—as requiring the undertaking of certain daunting political commitments. This requirement drops right out of what Beauvoir sees as the conditions that must be in place for genuine action to be possible. The first is, as she puts it, that I “be allowed to call” (113), where “allowed” means, literally, politically permitted to speak. “I will fight, then,” declares Beauvoir, “against those who would like to stifle my voice, prevent me from expressing myself” (113). The second, closely related requirement is that other human beings be free both to hear and respond to my appeal. Thus my own existential freedom demands that I fight for the political freedom of others. Beauvoir writes,
The sick person who exhausts himself fighting against his sickness, the slave against slavery, doesn’t worry about poetry or astronomy or the perfection of aviation; they first need health, law, security, the free disposition of themselves. … I demand [ Je demande] for men health, knowledge, well-being, law, so that their liberty does not consume itself in combating sickness, ignorance, misery. (114, 115)
It is true that fighting to cure disease is not necessarily a political act. But I think that Beauvoir mentions the sick person and the slave in one breath because she is imagining that the fight to cure disease takes place not only on the clinical level but also at the political level, where decisions are made about how to allocate resources. For Beauvoir our responsibility to care for each other extends beyond the ways we are able to minister to one another personally, although these are necessary too. What she is trying to account for is our hesitancy to throw ourselves into the world, to stake ourselves completely, to own up to our freedom, to act. And she is trying to explore the idea that we are fearful of just how much of the world we will, in principle and in fact, have to take on in order to achieve something we can authentically recognize as subjectivity.
I said earlier that in her understanding of the relationship between self and other Beauvoir can be seen to be more indebted to Hegel in key respects than to Sartre. That Hegel is on Beauvoir’s mind is clear from the fact that she drops his name more often (in this book in which few names are dropped) than that of any other philosopher, including Sartre. Virtually all of the handful of instances in which she mentions Hegel are polemical, and I will look explicitly at one of them in a moment. But I bring in Hegel at this particular point because I want to claim that he is in the background of Beauvoir’s discussion of political “struggle” as an absolute, even metaphysically absolute, moral necessity. I want to demonstrate this by looking at the following remarkable passage from the final pages of Pyrrhus et Cinéas:
We are condemned to failure because we are condemned to violence. We are condemned to violence because man is divided and opposed to himself, because men are separated and opposed to one another: by violence one will make of the child a man, of the horde a society. To renounce the struggle [la lutte] would be to renounce transcendence, renounce being. And yet no success will erase the absolute scandal of each singular failure. (117)
Because there are only certain social conditions under which I and others can be free to make our own appeals and to acknowledge those of others, I must be prepared, Beauvoir is arguing, to fight for these conditions. And I must be prepared for the possibility that this fight will require the perpetration of violence, the physical harming of other people. But this is not the type of violence to which Beauvoir claims I am condemned. Rather, in speaking of our being condemned to violence Beauvoir is referring to the fact that waging war against those who would curtail the freedom of others or even of themselves requires that I treat those people as objects, specifically as objects of my contempt, as beings-in-themselves whose judgments of me I cannot “assume” but must instead be at pains to avoid and repel. I fight against the Other in, as Beauvoir puts it, his “facticity”; but “precisely in choosing to act on this facticity, I renounce taking the Other as a liberty and restrict proportionately the possibilities for expansion of my own being; for the man against whom I do violence is not my peer, and I need men to be my peers” (116). And yet I undertake to do violence to others precisely in the name of liberty. This is why I am, as Beauvoir puts it above, “condemned to failure”: I cannot free one person without doing violence to another. And this is nothing less than an “absolute scandal.”
We can think of her remarks on violence as Beauvoir’s interpretation, at this early stage in her thinking, of Hegel’s understanding of the cost of subjectivity. But perhaps “interpretation” is the wrong concept here, since Beauvoir explicitly understands herself to be working against Hegel in her remarks on this subject. What bothers her about Hegel’s understanding of what subjectivity requires is that he doesn’t acknowledge the cost that subjectivity actually demands in the real world, the violence that is, paradoxically, an absolute moral necessity. She accuses both Hegel and Kant of an “optimism” (117) borne of a denial of what concrete individuals are forced to do in the name of living out their existential freedom. The charge, then, is that Hegel’s depiction of the “fight to the death” is, in a word, too abstract. “It’s not a matter, as Hegel believes, of making people recognize in me the pure abstract form of the me,” claims Beauvoir; “it’s my being in the world that I intend to save, insofar as it realizes itself in my acts, my works, my life” (96).
Beauvoir’s charge against Hegel, put simply, is that his philosophy, in its abstraction, is massively in bad faith.18 What Beauvoir doesn’t see here—but will by the time she comes to write The Second Sex—is that her gripe is not just against Hegel, or even Hegel and Kant, but against a certain conception of philosophy. Indeed, she doesn’t see that her own writing in this book is subject to the same criticism to which she subjects Hegel. While she does express what might turn out to be an important sort of dissatisfaction with a certain familiar set of philosophical ambitions and methods, she ironically works from just these ambitions and methods and therefore can appear to be engaging in a massive reductio ad absurdum to make the point that they ought to be abandoned. The abstractness of her own work would thus constitute a form of self-incrimination.19 This is precisely the criticism that Beauvoir herself would launch at this early work after having written The Second Sex.20
Beauvoir’s broadside against Hegel belies her obvious interest in appropriating the master-slave dialectic to help defend Sartre against his critics. What Beauvoir wants from Hegel’s work is a way of articulating the idea that rationalizing the curtailment of another person’s freedom, something we can all recognize as morally unsavory, is a paramount act of bad faith, so that there is a natural link to be seen between Sartre’s concept and an ordinary moral notion. Here is what she has to say about the master’s refusal to acknowledge the humanity of the slave and thus the horror of enslavement:
Despite taboos, prejudice, and his willful blindness, the master knows that he must speak to the slave. One cannot speak except to human beings. Language is an appeal to the liberty of the Other, since the sign is not a sign unless it’s grasped by a consciousness. The master senses on himself the look of the slave. As soon as he’s looked at, it is he who is the object [here there is a reference to the section of Being and Nothingness called “The Look”]: he is a cruel or timid tyrant, resolute or hesitant. If he tries to transcend this transcendence, thinking, “These are the thoughts of a mere slave,” he knows that the slave also transcends this thought. And in the fight that unfolds here the liberty of the slave is recognized by the master even as he opposes it. All men are free, and as soon as we interact with them we feel their liberty. (104–105)
Here we see Beauvoir using Sartre’s idea of the Look to explain why the master’s regarding the slave as ontologically inferior to himself is in bad faith. Because the slave is a human being, he is, at least in principle, just as able to Look at the master as the master is to Look at him. And when the slave does Look at the master (as a “cruel or timid tyrant, resolute or hesitant”), the master responds automatically, ontol
ogically; presumably, he feels what Sartre calls shame or pride. In this moment, the master has become an object in the slave’s world. If he tries to deny this moment, then he is in bad faith. His only “authentic” response is to fight back, by returning the Look and thus objectifying the slave. Notice that Beauvoir, in accord with Sartre’s way of understanding human relationships, identifies this return of the Look by the master as the beginning of a (or, a new) fight.
But of course Beauvoir is doing more in this quotation than simply pointing out that Sartre’s notion of the Look shows master-slave relations between human beings to be in bad faith. In revisiting the Hegelian fight-to-the-death, Beauvoir notices not only that the slave, as a human being, inherently has the power to turn the master into the Other but also that the master in his very issuing of orders to the slave, in his very attempt to objectify him, must appeal to his liberty. This is because he issues his orders in language, which, as he well knows but in bad faith denies, is comprehensible only to a being who is capable of grasping the signs he makes, that is, to what Hegel and Sartre and Beauvoir wish to call a subject (a being who acts on the world, in this case by judging the meaning of the master’s signs). Paradoxically, in order for him to be able to treat the slave as a slave, then, the master needs the slave to be free. In identifying language as the source of the contradiction, Beauvoir specifies a way to understand the terrible tension to which Hegel alludes, as the master-slave dialectic begins to push beyond itself, between the conditions under which the master assumes mastery and the very notion of what it is to be a master.