Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  Both the Adventurer and the Passionate Man, on Beauvoir’s view, “assume [their] subjectivity positively” (63), but both fail to reach moral perfection because they refuse to see that the promotion of their own freedom necessarily enjoins them to promote the freedom of other people as well. The Adventurer “is the one who remains indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert his own existence without taking into account that of others” (61). And for the Passionate Man, to whom “only the object of his passion appears real and full” (66), the freedom of others is beside the point. This is true even—perhaps especially—if the object of the Passionate Man’s passion is another person, for in his desire to eliminate the distance between himself and this object the Passionate Man desires the other person to be an object and not a free being. This means that the Passionate Man is to be compared with Sartre’s description of the person in love in Being and Nothingness.26 But whereas Sartre denies the possibility of genuine love—of the sort of love that actually can promote the freedom of the Other—Beauvoir argues in the Ethics that “a conversion can start at the heart of passion itself” (66, TM; French 93), a conversion marked by the Passionate Man’s acceptance of the radical otherness of the Other. She writes,

  It is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the Other is revealed as an Other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his Otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes. Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all conflation. (67, TM; French 94)

  There is a sense, then, in which Beauvoir wants to say that genuine love is an expression of the highest of moral laws: when I love another person genuinely, I both exercise my existential freedom and evince the highest respect for the freedom of the Other, on which, I understand, my own freedom rests (since, à la Hegel, my acknowledgment of the Other’s subjectivity is a condition of my own self-understanding as a subject).

  What has dropped out of the picture in Beauvoir’s employment of a series of types as a way to flesh out existentialist laws of morality is the insistence, so prevalent in Pyrrhus et Cinéas, of the need for violence. This need will return in the third and final section of the Ethics. But I want to suggest at this juncture that it is absent in Beauvoir’s presentation of the types because she is experimenting with what she recognized to be a species of Hegelian dialectics. In her depiction of the way the various types segue into one another, Beauvoir suggests that each contains a contradiction that tends to propel it beyond itself, so that the pressure, to take one example, for a Nihilist to become an Adventurer can be characterized as entirely internal, that is, entirely dialectical in the Hegelian sense of the word. In the dialectical movement from Nihilist to Adventurer, the Nihilist’s lack of commitment to particular goals is, to employ Hegel’s notoriously complex concept, sublated (where “sublate” is the English stand-in for the German aufheben): negated in some important sense (as evidenced in the Adventurer’s commitment to various goals) and yet at the same time taken up and preserved (as evidenced in his or her refusal to take these goals seriously, especially insofar as they affect other people).

  I highlight this feature of Beauvoir’s Ethics because I take it as evidence that in this book she ought to be seen as struggling to find a way to account for her persistent sense of the pertinence of Hegel to the project of trying to develop an existentialist ethics. In the halfdozen direct appeals to his work in this section of the book, he is depicted exclusively as a figure of authority. But in the remainder of the book, the part in which the motif of violence returns, Hegel comes in for the kind of severe criticism to which Beauvoir also subjects him in Pyrrhus.27 In attempting as it were to mimic Hegel’s dialectic, Beauvoir fails on her own terms to appropriate his work in a way that is faithful to both her interest in and dissatisfactions with it. This accounts for the uncharacteristic upbeat note on which Beauvoir ends the second section of the Ethics, in her rosy idealization of love as the highest moral moment: here she indulges in precisely that optimism which she so severely distrusts in Hegel’s Phenomenology. In expressing suspicion about the sincerity of this moment (a sincerity that, I take it, is something upon which Debra Bergoffen is depending in the way she draws a line from the Ethics to what she calls a “philosophy of the erotic” in The Second Sex), I do not want to suggest (indeed, I will argue to the contrary) that Beauvoir’s sense of the possibilities for human interrelationship are as constrained as Sartre’s are. It’s just that I find I cannot believe in this particular expression of her belief in the possibility of human community.

  That Beauvoir is not ultimately as sanguine at she appears to be at the end of the second section of the Ethics becomes obvious in the third section of the book, which begins with a subsection called “The Aesthetic Attitude.” Here she disparages the person who in effect “claims to have no other relation with the world than that of detached contemplation,” the person who sees all human “situations” as metaphysically equivalent and who ignores their details in his or her recounting of the human condition (74). But of course the person Beauvoir is describing is precisely herself in the second section of the Ethics. While she does not explicitly identify a certain type of philosopher or style of philosophizing as exemplifying the aesthetic attitude—instead, she describes its appearance in “the artist”—this type or style, a type or style I have argued governs Beauvoir’s approach in the second section of the book, is identified in the third section as a quintessential manifestation of bad faith. Genuinely to will freedom, for oneself and others, Beauvoir insists at the end of “The Aesthetic Attitude,” is to pay careful attention to the “situations” in which one finds oneself and others and, further, to rank them according to the degree to which they promote human freedom. And yet the notion of “situation” has played no role whatsoever in what I’ve portrayed as Beauvoir’s mimicry of Hegelian dialectic in the second section of the Ethics.

  Indeed, “The Aesthetic Attitude” seems to pick up where the first section of the book leaves off, with the following cryptic remark:

  It can be seen that, on the one hand, freedom can always save itself, for it is realized as a disclosure of existence through its very failures, and it can again confirm itself by a death freely chosen. But, on the other hand, the situations which it discloses through its project toward itself do not appear as equivalents. It regards as privileged situations those which permit it to realize itself as indefinite movement. (32)

  Here again we see Beauvoir insisting that one can rank situations, using freedom as a metric. The idea that what’s important is freedom in some real-life sense, and not just as abstract metaphysical notion, is an idea that is new to the Ethics. We do not find it in Pyrrhus et Cinéas, where, we may recall, Beauvoir exactly expresses Sartre’s point of view on this subject in boldly proclaiming that “you can throw a man in prison, leave him there, cut off his arms, lend him wings; but his liberty remains infinite in every case” (86). In the Ethics she takes what looks like a diametrically opposite view, severely criticizing the aesthete for pretending that “men are always disclosing being, in Buchenwald as well as in the blue isles of the Pacific, in hovels as well as in palaces” (74). But this view is in fact not all that far from the position she took in Pyrrhus, for even in the earlier book Beauvoir was trying to show that certain people lack the conditions all human beings need to have in place in order to exercise their (metaphysical) freedom. These conditions, to repeat, are that each person be able to issue a call, or appeal, to others and that these others be in a position to respond to this call. The difference between Pyrrhus and parts 2 and 3 of the Ethics is that in the Ethics Beauvoir is beginning to explore the idea that certain “situations” are systematically bereft of these conditions. In Pyrrhus Beauvoir implies that each person’s “situation” is exactly as idiosyncratic as that person is—that a person’s “situation” is no more than a description of a person’s unique circumstances. But in the Ethics Beauvoir seems to be struggling to mo
ve to the point of view that there are certain types of situations—for example, the situation of being a prisoner at Buchenwald, or of living in a hovel, or of being royalty—types that are not unique to a single person. This is to say that she is beginning to want to say that we can talk meaningfully of groups of people and of local commonalties and that we can perhaps even rank these groups according to the degree to which these local commonalties promote or impede the freedom of their members. While she still wants to deny that there is such a thing as universal commonality—and this is something that she will steadfastly deny for the rest of her life—she is beginning, to put it plainly, to provide herself with the means to develop a philosophical conception of oppression.

  I have never seen any reader of Beauvoir, even serious readers of the caliber of Le Doeuff and Bergoffen, make anything of the fact that Beauvoir’s most extended depiction of the conditions and limits of oppression in the Ethics makes explicit reference to the “situation” of women.28 Because I find this very long paragraph crucial in framing not only the difference between the Ethics and Being and Nothingness but even more tellingly between the Ethics and The Second Sex, I’m going to quote it in its entirety:

  There are beings whose life slips by in an infantile world because, having been kept in a state of servitude and ignorance, they have no means of breaking the ceiling which is stretched over their heads. Like the child, they can exercise their freedom, but only within this universe which has been set up before them, without them. This is the case, for example, of slaves, who have not raised themselves to the consciousness of their slavery. The southern planters were not altogether in the wrong in considering the Negroes who docilely submitted to their paternalism as “grown-up children.” To the extent that they respected the world of the whites the situation of the black slaves was exactly an infantile situation. This is also the situation of women in many civilizations; they can only submit to the laws, the gods, the customs, and the truths created by the males. Even today in western countries, among women who have not had in their work an apprenticeship of freedom, there are still many who take shelter in the shadow of men; they adopt without discussion the opinions and values recognized by their husband or their lover, and that allows them to develop childish qualities which are forbidden to adults because they are based on a feeling of irresponsibility. If what is called women’s futility often has so much charm and grace, if it sometimes has a genuinely moving character, it is because it manifests a pure and gratuitous taste for existence, like the games of children; it is the absence of the serious. The unfortunate thing is that in many cases this thoughtlessness, this gaiety, these charming inventions imply a deep complicity with the world of men which they seem so graciously to be contesting, and it is a mistake to be astonished, once the structure which shelters them seems to be in danger, to see sensitive, ingenuous, and light-minded women show themselves more harsh, harder, and even more furious or cruel than their masters. It is then that we discover the difference which distinguishes them from an actual child: the child’s situation is imposed upon him, whereas the woman (I mean the western woman of today) chooses it or at least consents to it. Ignorance and error are facts as inescapable as prison walls. The Negro slave of the eighteenth century, the Mohammedan woman enclosed in a harem have no instrument, be it in thought or by astonishment or anger, which permits them to attack the civilization which oppresses them. Their behavior is defined and can be judged only within this given situation, and it is possible that in this situation, limited like every human situation, they realize a perfect assertion of their freedom. But once there appears a possibility of liberation, it is resignation of freedom not to exploit the possibility, a resignation which implies bad faith and which is a positive fault. (37–38, TM; Pour une Moralité 54–56)

  Here we find the first expression of an idea that is fundamental to The Second Sex, namely that being a woman constitutes a “situation.” But we also see Beauvoir hesitating to invest herself fully in this idea. On the one hand, she wants to say that slaves and “women of many civilizations” lack the means of “breaking the ceiling which is stretched over their heads.” On the other hand, she wants to say that even in situations of oppression people can “realize a perfect assertion of their freedom,” albeit only if we adjust our standards of perfection according to the constraints of the situation. Here we see a disturbing retreat into the familiar Sartrean insistence on the radical limitlessness of human (metaphysical) freedom.29 And a second kind of hesitation pervades this paragraph: Beauvoir can’t seem to figure out where to draw the line in deciding which slaves and women are responsible for their “situations” and which are not. The African-American slaves of the eighteenth century are said to be unable “to attack the civilization which oppresses them,” as are Muslim harem women. But “slaves who have not raised themselves to the consciousness of their slavery” are said both to lack the means of changing their situation and to be responsible for this situation insofar as they “docilely submitted to their paternalism” and “respected the world of the whites.” Similarly, Beauvoir holds “the woman (I mean the western woman of today)” responsible for her situation because she “chooses it or at least consents to it.” In the Ethics, despite her burgeoning sense of the importance of human “situations,” Beauvoir has not provided herself with the resources to ask questions about what could count as (to use her examples) submission, respect, choice, and consent under situations of oppression. She is without the means to investigate those situations in which the weight of oppression so crushes a person that talk of responsibility becomes perverse.

  Beauvoir lacks the means for this investigation at this point in her philosophical life because she is attempting to write from within Sartre’s engagement with the subject, an engagement marked by a high degree of what Beauvoir identifies (albeit retrospectively) as “abstractness” and by a degree of nihilism that she cannot rationalize without contradicting herself. By the time she comes to write the Ethics, which she is to finish just before she conceives of writing The Second Sex, Beauvoir is already gripped by many of what will turn out to be the guiding intuitions of the latter book. In this earlier work, the intuitions are always expressed in universal, abstract form and are almost invariably disturbingly vague or self-contradictory. Take, for example, the idea that we have to “assume” our ambiguity, just as in Pyrrhus we are exhorted to “assume” our acts, vis-à-vis their effects on other people. Here, I think, “assuming” is supposed to play something like the role that recognition plays in the master-slave dialectic: it’s something we need to do in order to be fully human. But there’s a reason that Beauvoir’s “assuming” seems worrisomely vague while Hegel’s “recognition” seems merely to stand in need of interpretation. While it’s not exactly obvious to readers of the Phenomenology what “recognition” is supposed to consist in, that’s because Hegel’s concept is, and is meant to be, purely abstract. But when Beauvoir appeals to the notion of “assuming” one’s ambiguity or one’s acts, she does so in the context of attempting to forge an ethics that abjures all reference to abstract notions (except, of course, “freedom”). So she seems obliged to fill out the notion of “assuming” in a concrete way, which, given her allegiance to Sartre’s highly abstract way of proceeding, she cannot do.

  What’s ironic about this allegiance is that it seems to fly in the face of precisely that intuition that seems to be motivating Beauvoir to attempt to extend and defend Sartre’s system on an ethical front.30 This is what Beauvoir expresses as the idea that one must attempt to “justify” one’s choices as a free being without attempting to flee one’s freedom. Consider in this light Beauvoir’s warning in Pyrrhus against the temptation to try to achieve self-justification by dedicating oneself body and soul to the rescue of another person. She asks us, recall, to suppose

  that the other needs me; suppose that his existence possesses an absolute value: then I am justified in existing since I exist for a being whose existence is justified. I
am delivered from risk, from anguish; in posing before me an absolute end I abdicate my liberty. No question is posed any longer. I no longer want to be anything but a response to this call that needs me. (70)

  Might this be read as a description of Beauvoir’s own way of responding to Sartre’s sense of being beleaguered by critics who pounced on him for the ethical nihilism his views in Being and Nothingness appear very strongly to suggest? If so, then it seems that, to put things in the terms that Beauvoir herself uses in Pyrrhus and the Ethics, we can describe what happens in these early books as her failing to respond as a subject to Sartre’s “call,” to “assume” her own “ambiguity” and to let Sartre “assume” his acts. It will turn out, in The Second Sex, that understanding what this is supposed to mean is no harder, and no easier, than understanding how one becomes a person who is not expected to set her own agenda in the world—how, in other words, one becomes a woman.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Second Sex and the Master-Slave Dialectic

  One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny explains the figure that the human female assumes in society; it is the whole of civilization that creates this product, intermediate between male and eunuch, that we call feminine. Only the intervention of others can constitute an individual as an Other [un Autre]. Insofar as the child exists for itself [pour soi], he or she is unable to grasp himself or herself [se saisir] as sexually differentiated. … If, well before puberty and sometimes even from early infancy [the girl] seems to us to be already sexually specified, this is not because mysterious instincts directly doom her to passivity, coquetry, maternity; it’s that the intervention of others in the life of the child is almost primordial and that from her earliest years her vocation is imperiously forced upon her [insuffler].