Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  But it’s perhaps even more telling that her understanding of the significance of the master’s use of language is seriously at odds with the Sartrean picture that she has set out to defend. For what Beauvoir implies in her appropriation of Hegel’s description of master-slave relations is that to regard another person at whom you are Looking (say, in the form of speaking to this person) as merely an object is itself an act of bad faith. And yet on Sartre’s view, regarding the Other as a pure object is part and parcel of what the Look is. It’s hard to overestimate the depth of the conflict between Sartre and Beauvoir on this point. For Sartre, my only weapon against the Other’s Look is to Look back; the only way to avoid being an object in the Other’s world is to make him an object in mine. But Beauvoir is in effect arguing that at least insofar as it involves language, as most human interactions do, the Look in fact can be seen to constitute an acknowledgment of the Other’s subjectivity and that denying this by imagining that I have simply objectified the Other through my Look is squarely an act of bad faith—which is of course to imply that Sartre himself, in his description of the Look in Being and Nothingness, is acting in bad faith.

  That Beauvoir evidently does not see that her appropriation of Hegel in Pyrrhus et Cinéas is in fact severely at odds with precisely those notions of Sartre’s that she’s trying to defend is, I think, also a function of her not having found her voice in philosophy, not having found a way to do her work. This may be why in her allusions to the master-slave dialectic she avoids addressing Hegel’s own insistence on the salvific power of work—of transforming what’s given into something that represents one’s subjectivity. Indeed, I’m going to argue that it’s Beauvoir’s refusal to construe her own writing as a form of work, to (in her terms) assume it as work, that allows her to figure it as a “mere” defense of Sartre. One of the features that secures the singularity of The Second Sex is the way that Beauvoir conveys the idea of her writing as work, and of work as integrally related to issues of subjectivity and objectivity, and therefore (given who Beauvoir is) of ontology and epistemology and morality, in practically every sentence of the book.

  A dozen or so years after the publication of The Second Sex had made her internationally renowned on her own merits, Beauvoir came both to recognize and to lament the abstractness of her early works, from Pyrrhus through L’Existentialisme et la Sagesse des Nations to The Ethics of Ambiguity. She writes of her disgust with this feature of her early work in the third installment of her autobiography, The Force of Circumstance (La Force des Choses, published in 1963, when she was fifty-five years old). These are the passages from which Michèle Le Doeuff draws evidence for the idea that Beauvoir’s pre–Second Sex philosophical works amount to little more than an unfortunate detour. But it’s important to see that what Beauvoir is explicitly dissatisfied with in her early works is not their existentialist or Sartrean character but, again, the abstractness of her approach. Of the four essays that constitute L’Existentialisme et la Sagesse des Nations, for example, Beauvoir writes,

  I find nothing surprising … in my concern with moral questions. What I find hard to understand is the idealism that blemishes these essays. In reality, men defined themselves for me by their bodies, their needs, their work; I set no form, no value above the individual of flesh and blood. … In Œil pour Œil, I justified the purges after the Liberation without ever using the one solid argument: these mercenaries, these murderers, these torturers must be killed, not to prove that man is free, but to make sure they don’t do it again; for one Brice liquidated, how many lives would have been spared! I was—like Sartre—insufficiently liberated from the ideologies of my class; at the very moment I was rejecting them, I was still using their language to do so. That language has become hateful to me because, as I now know, to look for the reasons why one should not stamp on a man’s face is to accept stamping on it. (Force of Circumstance 68; see La Force des Choses 99–100)

  And in explanation of her saying of The Ethics of Ambiguity that “of all my books, that is the one that today irritates me the most,” Beauvoir writes,

  The fact remains that on the whole I went to a great deal of trouble to present inaccurately a problem to which I then offered a solution quite as hollow as the Kantian maxims. My descriptions of the nihilist, the adventurer, the esthete, obviously influenced by those of Hegel, are even more arbitrary and abstract than his, since they are not even linked together by a historical development; the attitudes I examine are explained by objective conditions; I limited myself to isolating their moral significance to such an extent that my portraits are not situated on any level of reality. I was in error when I thought I could define a morality independent of a social context. I could write an historical novel without having a philosophy of history, but not construct a theory of action. (Force of Circumstance 67; see La Force des Choses 1:99)

  In the section that follows I want to show why and how Beauvoir’s self-criticism here is integral to her own understanding of the philosophical achievements of The Second Sex. I also want to continue to argue that this charge of abstractness is related to Beauvoir’s understanding of herself in her early philosophical works as in the main defending Sartrean existentialism against its critics. But what’s most important to me in the pages that follow is to continue to show why and how Beauvoir could not find a way to say what she wanted to say—and therefore, in effect, did not know exactly what she wanted to say—in the context of trying to write an abstract philosophical essay.

  THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY

  In 1945, two years after the resoundingly successful publication of Being and Nothingness and in the wake of the liberation of France from several years of Nazi occupation, Jean-Paul Sartre founded Les Temps modernes, a monthly journal on whose editorial board he and Beauvoir were to serve for the rest of their lives. In the early days the journal not surprisingly took a decidedly existentialist stance, and it is in her articles in its first issues that we find Beauvoir more explicitly at pains than anywhere else in her body of work to defend Sartre against his critics. Between October 1945 and April 1946 Beauvoir published four such pieces in Les Temps modernes: “Idéalisme moral et Réalisme politique” (“Moral Idealism and Political Realism”); “L’Existentialisme et la Sagesse des Nations” (“Existentialism and the Wisdom of Nations”); “Œil pour Œil” (“An Eye for an Eye”); and “Littérature et Métaphysique” (“Literature and Metaphysics”).21 These essays were collected in a single volume and published as L’Existentialisme et la Sagesse des Nations in 1948. Perhaps because Les Temps modernes gave Beauvoir the security of knowing that anything she wrote would be published, the four essays that this book comprises are considerably less original and considerably more defensive in tone than Pyrrhus et Cinéas. It may be for this reason that lists of Beauvoir’s philosophical writings often exclude this collection; at the end of her life, Beauvoir herself, in a conversation with a biographer, does not mention it in response to the question of “which of her works she considered the important starting point for any interpretation and evaluation of her oeuvre.”22 For my purposes it is telling that the first pieces of writing Beauvoir mentions in response to this question are not The Second Sex and her autobiography or novels but Pyrrhus et Cinéas and her only other book-length philosophical essay, The Ethics of Ambiguity. While it would be rash to put much stock in this remark, I take it as another piece of evidence that in her reference to “existentialist ethics” in the introduction to The Second Sex Beauvoir is alluding to both of them. But the best evidence for the idea that these works are integral to understanding Beauvoir’s aims and achievements in The Second Sex can only be mustered, of course, through actual discussions of them. I turn, then, to The Ethics of Ambiguity.

  Like Pyrrhus et Cinéas and L’Existentialisme et la Sagesse des Nations, The Ethics of Ambiguity—which began life in the form of two long essays published in Les Temps modernes in 1947—has its roots in Beauvoir’s wish to explain existentialism to its critics. But there’s a
marked difference in The Ethics of Ambiguity: in this work Beauvoir seems everywhere aware that what she is doing goes beyond and may even conflict with Sartre’s philosophy. In another interview with biographer Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir calls the book “a frivolous, insignificant thing, not worthy of attention”: “She attributed its inadequacy to the fact that ‘it’s neither one thing nor the other. It’s supposed to be a defense of Existentialism and a definition of morality, but at the time I wrote it I was too conscious of myself to think objectively’” (Bair 321). In the pages that follow I’m going to suggest that what Beauvoir means here by thinking “objectively” is thinking abstractly. Thus this criticism of The Ethics of Ambiguity—a book, let’s remember, that Beauvoir nonetheless recommended as a starting point in understanding her life’s work—would be linked with the criticism she makes of it in The Force of Circumstance, namely, that it is hopelessly abstract. This means, further, that for Beauvoir, being too conscious of oneself to think objectively is not necessarily a fatal shortcoming. Rather, I’m taking Beauvoir’s curious remark to suggest that the flaws of The Ethics of Ambiguity stem from a clash between her state of self-consciousness and her sense that the only way to write philosophically must be to write “abstractly.” This would imply that the great achievement of The Second Sex, to the extent that it succeeds as a work of philosophy, lies in Beauvoir’s finding a nonabstract and yet recognizably philosophical mode of self-conscious expression.

  Like Pyrrhus et Cinéas, The Ethics of Ambiguity turns on the idea—an idea I’ve already argued is seriously at odds with Sartrean existentialism—that (in Sartre’s terms) human beings are never exclusively either “for-themselves” or “in-themselves,” never purely subjects or objects. In Pyrrhus et Cinéas, this idea shows up in Beauvoir’s figuring of the Look, especially when it involves language, as a call or appeal: to issue such an appeal is not just to perform an action as a subject but also to invite the Other’s judgment of me (as an object); and it is to view the Other not just as a piece of my world, an object, but as a being capable of responding to my appeal (as a subject). In the Ethics Beauvoir marks the idea that human beings are never exclusively subjects or objects by the use of the term “ambiguity.” One of the major claims of the book is that most philosophers (and so not just, she implies, Sartre) have incorrectly identified the ambiguity of the human condition as some sort of radical split: as between body and soul, or phenomenon and noumenon, or interiority and exteriority (see, e.g., 7–8). The ethics that issue from this fundamentally distorted picture, claims Beauvoir from the start of the book, always consist in recommending that human beings cleave either to one side or another of the split, so that effectively their goal is to “eliminate” ambiguity (8). Kant, for example, saw a sharp split between reason and inclination; for him, to be ethical is to act purely out of respect for the moral law, which is divined exclusively by and within reason. On Beauvoir’s view, which she sees as fundamentally opposed to that of Kant, the ethical task is to “assume” (as, pace Pyrrhus, she puts it) our ambiguity (see, e.g., 9). And most of her Ethics consists in her attempting to articulate what this assumption looks like.

  One confounding feature of the Ethics is that Beauvoir insists from the beginning that the acknowledgment and assumption of human ambiguity are fundamental to all forms of existentialism, from Kierkegaard on (9–10). Indeed, she goes so far as to claim that ambiguity is the defining feature of the human being as it is described in Being and Nothingness. And yet the first concern of the Ethics is to defend this claim against obvious objections, primarily Sartre’s explicit pessimism in Being and Nothingness about the possibility of any synthesis between the in-itself and the for-itself, a pessimism so pervasive that Beauvoir herself acknowledges that it accounts in large part for Sartre’s failure to produce an ethics of his own (see, e.g., 10–11). Beauvoir sets for herself the contradictory task of vindicating Sartre’s pessimism—a pessimism that looks for all the world as though it flies in the face of the idea that human beings are in any deep sense “ambiguous”—and justifying the idea that ethics consists in “assuming” one’s fundamental ambiguity.

  In attempting to carry out this task she positions her view explicitly against that of Hegel, whom she, on the one hand, commends for trying “to reject none of the aspects of man’s condition and to reconcile them all” and, on the other, criticizes for being too “optimistic” about human beings’ prospects in this endeavor (8). As in Pyrrhus et Cinéas, Beauvoir will link Hegel’s optimism with his commitment to abstraction, in particular to his idea that the history of the human being is essentially the history of Geist (Mind, or Spirit).23 But at the same time she will imply that human beings have reason for optimism—which means for her that they have reason to attempt to be ethical (that is, on her understanding, to try to “assume” their ambiguity). The goal, then, is effectively to detach Hegel’s optimism from his abstractness. This is a goal that, by her own lights, Beauvoir will fail to meet. And I’m trying to suggest that she fails to meet it precisely because she has not yet found a way of exploring these matters that is not itself abstract. In her observation, which I quoted at the end of the Pyrrhus section above, that parts of the Ethics are even more abstract than the parts of Hegel’s writing that serve as a touchstone for this book, Beauvoir does not mention that her own abstractness pales in comparison with that of Sartre. In once again explicitly taking on for herself the task of defending her partner, Beauvoir condemns herself to writing at a certain level of abstraction that, I’m arguing, is going to prevent her from articulating her sense that one can aspire to “assume” one’s ambiguity in a way that is itself neither ambiguous nor overly optimistic.

  The commitment to abstraction that constrains the Ethics is evident in the peculiar way Beauvoir frames her aspirations in this book: “An ethics of ambiguity,” as she defines it, “will be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existants [sic] can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that their singular freedoms can forge laws valid for all” (18). But who ever claimed that people’s being separate from one another precludes from the start the possibility of ethics? Not only have most moral philosophers not found the separateness of individuals an a priori impediment; they have felt the need to construct systems of ethics—to try to forge laws valid for all—precisely because of this fact. What stymies Beauvoir here is her allegiance to Sartre’s way of conceiving the separateness of persons. In his view this separateness is radical: human beings not only have individual consciousnesses and bodies, but these consciousnesses and bodies inherently have absolutely nothing in common with one another (except, of course, insofar as they mutually provoke and antagonize one another through exchanges of the Look). This means that there is nothing in Sartre—Kantian reason, say, or Hegelian Spirit—that can in principle ground a system of morality. The fact of human separateness, to put it another way, is not offset by the existence of some universal metaphysical font of which all human beings across time and place ought to or even can aspire to partake. So since on this view there is nothing like a human essence, “the source of values” has to be “the plurality of concrete, singular men projecting themselves toward their own ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical, as irreducible, as subjectivity itself.”24 This is of course a central plank of Sartre’s existentialist platform, and it rests on the still more fundamental belief that, as Beauvoir puts it, “the meaning of the situation does not impose itself on the consciousness of a passive subject[;] … it surges up only by the disclosure which a free subject effects in his project” (20). So it turns out that Beauvoir in the Ethics wants to show that even though each human individual is unique, not least because each one’s “situation” is unique, groups of human beings can “forge laws valid for all.”

  Given that what Beauvoir wants to produce is an ethics, and given that at this stage in her philosophical life she has no reason to question whether an ethics must implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the possibi
lity or desirability of universal laws, it is not surprising that her aspirations take the form they do. As one would expect from the author of Pyrrhus et Cinéas, the laws that Beauvoir is going to try to generate in the Ethics are those dicta the obeying of which she deems to be necessary to the full exercise of human freedom. So, for example, it’s going to be imperative to respect and promote the freedom of other people (see, e.g., 60). In part 2 of the (four-part) Ethics Beauvoir attempts to bring these laws into relief by describing various types of people who fail to live up to them: the Sub-man, the Serious Man, the Nihilist, the Adventurer, and the Passionate Man25—in order from least to most “ethical.” The tensions inherent in each of these positions tend to push each type into the next category. Thus the Subman, defined as the person who wishes to merge with the realm of things, to cleave purely to the in-itself, is often motivated by fear of an unknown future to become a Serious Man, a person who acknowledges that he is for-itself but who wishes to devote himself as such entirely to absolute ends dictated by convention, so that the for-itself reifies into something thing-like (45–46). In turn, the Serious Man “will always be saying that he is disappointed, for his wish to have the world harden into a thing is belied by the very movement of life” (52); and so the Serious Man may easily become a Nihilist, a person who understands correctly “that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing” but who fails to see that “it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly” (57).