Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

  “O ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” These words, which open the second volume of The Second Sex, are without doubt the most famous ever penned in the service of liberating human beings from the constraints imposed upon them by, or that they impose on themselves through, sex difference. One finds them cited everywhere in the literature on sex roles; for feminists, Beauvoir’s famous sentence is no less of a landmark, of no less historical import, than Neil Armstrong’s assessment of the significance of his first steps on the moon. Indeed, the ritualistic intoning of this line has been so common in academic feminism that failing to pay tribute to Beauvoir by quoting it in the first few pages of your feminist theory book is tantamount to forgetting to genuflect on your way into the family pew. Beauvoir’s claim, it’s ordinarily taken for granted, is simply that what English speakers now tend to call “gender” is not a biological fact but rather a “social construct.” Of course, commentators disagree profoundly on the validity and sincerity of Beauvoir’s pronouncement. Some, for example, laud her apparent dismissal of the significance of biology; others claim that it covers up what is in fact her insidious “biologism” throughout The Second Sex.1 In fact the debate that her words have generated is so massive that it’s scarcely an exaggeration to claim that it’s coextensive with feminist theory itself.

  There can be no doubt that Beauvoir was interested in the question of the extent to which the difference between masculinity and femininity can be attributed to biology; and because she insists at various junctures throughout The Second Sex that biology bears on the way that norms of femininity and masculinity develop it is not unreasonable to ask whether her apparent commitment to social constructivism, as emblematized in her famous words, was actually less solid than those words seem to suggest. But what I wish to show in this chapter and the next is that these issues, while important both for Beauvoir and for the feminist debates that her work was to engender, are less philosophically central to The Second Sex than is the seemingly throwaway idea, also expressed in the opening to book 2, that “only the intervention of others can constitute an individual as an Other [un Autre].” This claim, while it appears almost laughably tautological, on closer inspection can be seen to interpret the idea of becoming, as opposed to being born, a woman as the process of becoming an Other, a process the description of which by Beauvoir in The Second Sex constitutes what I characterize as a strikingly original act of philosophical appropriation. And I’m going to argue that it’s easy to miss this act of appropriation precisely because The Second Sex is written in, as it were, two registers: that of the ordinary, or everyday, in which the “situation” of women comes into relief; and that of the philosophical, in which, for Beauvoir, this situation becomes interpretable (if not justifiable). So when, for example, Beauvoir claims at the end of the passage I’ve used as an epigraph to this chapter 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,” she means to be saying both that little girls are forced to exemplify, or are forcibly judged by the standards of, femininity and that this forcing is to be explained in terms of the human ability and propensity to turn other people into “the Other.” While it’s my view that Beauvoir arrived at her ground-breaking understanding of women’s situation through her ground-breaking appropriation of the philosophy of Hegel and Sartre, I argue in this chapter that what distinguishes this act of appropriation is Beauvoir’s grounding of it in her ordinary experience as a woman.

  This means that my preliminary depiction of the relationship between what I am calling the two registers of The Second Sex needs some fine-tuning. It’s not just that the philosophical register allows for an interpretation of the ordinary one (so that Beauvoir’s characterization of the ordinary register would be dependent on the philosophical one); if this were a full enough description of what’s going on in The Second Sex then the fact that the philosophical dimension of the book is as easy to ignore as it is would be practically impossible to explain. What makes it possible to overlook the philosophical dimension of the book is that it is itself beholden to the ordinary register, without which, I am claiming, Beauvoir could not have found and did not find the means to successfully express herself philosophically. Because the philosophical aspirations and achievements of The Second Sex are grounded in Beauvoir’s capacity for describing the ordinary facts and ramifications of sex difference as she has known and studied them, the book sounds ordinary: the sense predominates of its merely describing (albeit polemically) the world we inhabit. But a careful study of what Beauvoir is doing reveals that the relationship in The Second Sex between the ordinary and the theoretical takes the form of, if you will, a dialogue, or perhaps what you might even be willing to call a dialectic, the discovery or founding of which I attempted to describe and account for in chapter 2. Like all dialectics, this one is characterized by a tension between and a propulsion beyond the terms that originally confront one another—in this case, the “ordinary” and the “philosophical”—which means that on my interpretation The Second Sex is aspiring to question the hiatus between these two things and to redefine each in terms of the other. You might describe the accomplishment—and the philosophical difficulty, in more than one sense—of this book as its bringing into sharp relief the ambiguity of the line between the everyday and the philosophical.2

  In Beauvoir’s case the “everyday” or “ordinary” denotes the experience of being a sexed being, which in her case of course means being a woman. This is of course far from the case in Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which, on this particular understanding of what constitutes ordinariness, the dimension of the everyday is entirely absent. As I observed in chapter 5, Beauvoir eventually came to criticize both of these early philosophical works for what she called their “abstractness.” I’m suggesting now that what she’s gesturing at by this word is their not having been grounded in the ordinary. For it certainly is not the case that either book is entirely lacking in references to the material problems of real people. In the Ethics, for example, Beauvoir briefly discusses the predicament of African-American slaves in the antebellum American South, and in Pyrrhus she argues that morality and even freedom itself demand that we actively commit ourselves, in our real lives, to working for “health, knowledge, well-being, law” in order to ensure that the liberty of others “does not consume itself in combating sickness, ignorance, misery” (115). What’s unsatisfying about these works is not exactly that they’re too abstract; rather, the problem is that they manifest a conception of philosophy on which it is fundamentally detachable from the sort of everyday concerns that tend to motivate our interest in the subject. In Pyrrhus and the Ethics, Beauvoir is already aware of her deep interest in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and particularly in the master-slave dialectic. But what she hasn’t yet figured out how to do is account for the power that Hegel’s prose holds on her, the fact of her inevitable return to it every time she picks up her pen to write philosophically.3 What happens in The Second Sex, I wish to argue, is that her growing concern to understand herself, a concern she initially saw as following a trajectory quite separate from that of her philosophical pursuits, came to dovetail—phenomenologically, as it were—with her abiding fascination with Hegel. With her discovery that, to her surprise, the first thing she has to say about herself is the most ordinary thing in the world—that she is a woman—comes the even more surprising, and surprisingly fruitful, revelation that her previous failure to recognize her own investment in this knowledge can be explained by (that is, in terms of)—and, in turn, allows her to explain—her investment in Hegel’s philosophy.

  A major claim in the following analysis of these investments is that Beauvoir does not simply map the master-slave dialectic onto the situation of men and women. Indeed, it will turn out that Hegel provides Beauvoir, through her thinking about just this situation, with a way of contesting to
a certain degree his understanding of reciprocal recognition: what leads to it and what it consists in. On Hegel’s view the encounter with the other immediately provokes in the subjectively self-certain being a desire to be recognized by that other as “for-itself,” as, in other words, a subject. But on Beauvoir’s view this encounter in fact provokes in the subjectively self-certain being (figured for her in the form of the human infant) a desire to be recognized by the other as “in-itself,” as, in other words, an object, a thing. The most important feature of an object for these purposes is that it is static, that it has a fixed place in the world, that it is not in an important sense free. The desire to be an object, Beauvoir finds, takes different forms in men and women. In men it takes the somewhat paradoxical form of wishing to be confirmed as (once and for all time) “for-itself”—as, to employ Sartre’s term for this fantasy, “in-itself-for-itself.” It could be argued that this particular desire, one Beauvoir associates with men, is not terribly at odds with Hegel’s understanding of what the encounter with the other elicits in a subjectively self-certain being. But what is certainly not in Hegel is Beauvoir’s idea that in women, the desire for recognition tends to take the form of renouncing the claim to be being-for-itself. On Beauvoir’s view, as on Hegel’s, the achievement of recognition paradoxically requires the foregoing of one’s desire for it, at least in its initial narcissistic form. What is required instead is an acceptance (what in chapter 5 we saw Beauvoir calling an “assuming”) of one’s own inalienable freedom and that of the other. But unlike Hegel, Beauvoir in a moment of appropriation from Sartre sees this acceptance as requiring an acknowledgment of the power of the other’s judgment—an acknowledgment of the respects in which one is, in fact, inevitably fixed as an object in the other’s Look. In what follows, I show that for Beauvoir the risk required for the consummation of Hegelian reciprocal recognition is the risk of allowing the other to be genuinely other, which is to say the risk of acknowledging a certain freedom from him—or her.

  A QUESTION OF INFLUENCE: HOW TO CONCEPTUALIZE THE HEGELIANISM OF THE SECOND SEX

  While Hegel’s name and terminology are all over The Second Sex, the vast majority of Beauvoir’s commentators find the allusions gratuitous, hokey, or otherwise incidental to the book’s aims and achievements. This way of construing, or, as the case may be, ignoring Hegel’s role in The Second Sex is not, in and of itself, an obvious lapse; Hegel is an equally strong presence in both Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, and yet even I would argue that Beauvoir’s reading of him in these works is not integral to their construction. Indeed, it’s only in the light of what Beauvoir does with Hegel in The Second Sex that, I would argue, her interest in him in the earlier works takes on its own interest. But if one takes seriously what I have argued in chapter 5 are Beauvoir’s philosophical aspirations in the earlier works; if one sees her struggling there not to parrot but to appropriate Sartrean existentialism; and if one reads The Second Sex as though this struggle has not been abandoned or sidetracked or put on hold but, rather, propelled into new territory—if these are one’s bearings, then, I claim, the centrality of her appropriation of Hegel in that work becomes unignorable. And if I’m right in suggesting that Beauvoir’s re-conceptualization of what it is to appropriate the philosophical tradition is perhaps the central philosophical achievement of The Second Sex, then in claiming that Beauvoir genuinely appropriates Hegel and that this appropriation is central to understanding the work as a whole, I am claiming that The Second Sex is not just incidentally but in the main—even in the first place—a philosophical piece of writing.

  To my knowledge, the Swedish philosopher and intellectual historian Eva Lundgren-Gothlin is the only serious reader of The Second Sex to provide an extended interpretation of Hegel’s role in the book and to argue, or at least to imply, that this role is of central importance in understanding what Beauvoir is trying to say about what it is to be a woman.4 It’s important to note that Lundgren-Gothlin parts ways quite sharply with the usual breezy understanding of how we are to understand Hegel’s place in The Second Sex. She claims, in effect, that Beauvoir uses the master-slave dialectic not as a philosophical model of the way things stand between the sexes but as a philosophical foil: rather than simply recalling Hegel’s figures of the master and the slave to dramatize the inequity between men and women, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, Beauvoir is contrasting the position of women with that of the Hegelian slave. Specifically, Beauvoir’s woman differs fundamentally from Hegel’s slave insofar as she never demands recognition from a man and thus fails to “enter into the master-slave dialectic” (73).5 Therefore, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, there is no dialectical tension or movement in the relationship between the sexes, so that woman is fixed in her relation to man as, in Beauvoir’s argot, the “absolute” Other. On Lundgren-Gothlin’s view, what’s of prime significance about Hegel’s influence on Beauvoir in The Second Sex is that it is not mediated, at least in the main, by Sartre’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic.6 Her appeal to the dialectic plays a key role in establishing Beauvoir’s philosophical independence from Sartre, because it is the vehicle of her disagreement with him on the question of whether “mutual recognition” is possible (67). Specifically, Lundgren-Gothlin thinks, Beauvoir rejects Sartre’s view (influenced of course by Hegel) that human relations, and particularly relations between men and women, are marked by a “fundamental theme of conflict” that is “ahistorical and eternal” (67). Instead, Lundgren-Gothlin maintains, Beauvoir “counterbalances” Sartre’s fundamental theme of conflict with the conviction that this conflict can be transcended through Hegelian “reciprocal recognition.”7

  I of course am in agreement with many of Lundgren-Gothlin’s claims about Hegel’s influence on The Second Sex. Certainly, anyone who pays attention to Beauvoir’s allusions to the master-slave dialectic will acknowledge the inevitability of Lundgren-Gothlin’s claim that Beauvoir’s woman, unlike Hegel’s slave, never demands recognition from men. More important, Lundgren-Gothlin is justified in detecting and insisting on the fatefulness of Beauvoir’s disagreement with Sartre about the possibility of reciprocal recognition. Yet while Lundgren-Gothlin’s reading renders Beauvoir’s ideas in a way that, as I will try to show, is far better able to account for her words than most, it still undervalues the originality of Beauvoir’s philosophical achievement and specifically the originality of what I have been calling her appropriation of Hegel. Lundgren-Gothlin sees that it won’t do to try to shoehorn what Beauvoir says about the situation of men and women into Hegel’s master-slave model. Nonetheless Lundgren-Gothlin accounts for the discrepancies between the man-woman and master-slave roles by suggesting that Beauvoir is simply affirming some portions of the dialectic and rejecting others. This fits with the idea that a reasonable enough way of conceptualizing the relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir with respect to their inheritance of Hegel is to see Beauvoir as “counterbalancing” the “fundamental theme of conflict” in Sartre with an endorsement of the possibility of reciprocal recognition. My view is that one cannot adequately appreciate Beauvoir’s relation to Hegel if one construes it simply as one of influence and mediation, nor can one fully appreciate the differences between Sartre and Beauvoir if one conceptualizes Beauvoir’s inheritance of Hegel as counterbalancing that of Sartre. My goal in this chapter is to show that a more subtle understanding of Beauvoir’s way of appropriating Hegel is required in order to fully appreciate its philosophical ramifications, at the level of both method and content.

  INTRODUCING THE MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC IN THE SECOND SEX

  Beauvoir’s first mention of Hegel in The Second Sex occurs in the introduction and follows her famous declaration that while man is “the Subject, he is the Absolute,” woman is “the Other” (xxii):

  The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one always finds a duality, that of the Self (du Même) and the Other. This division
was not originally placed under the sign of the division of the sexes; it does not depend upon any empirical givens. … Otherness [l’altérité] is a fundamental category of human thought. No group ever defines itself as One without at once posing [poser] the Other opposite [en face de] itself. It suffices for three travelers to be put together [réunis] by chance in the same compartment for all the rest of the travelers to become vaguely hostile “others.” For the villager, all not belonging to the village are suspect “others.”8 … These phenomena would be incomprehensible if human reality were exclusively a Mitsein9 based on solidarity and friendship. Things become clear, on the contrary, if following Hegel we discover in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness. The subject poses himself [se pose]10 only in setting himself up in opposition: he sets out to affirm himself as the essential and to constitute the other as inessential, as object.

  However, the other consciousness opposes to his a reciprocal claim. In traveling the native becomes aware with shame [scandale] that there are natives in neighboring countries who regard him in his own right as a stranger. Between villages, clans, nations, classes, there are wars, festivals, markets, treaties, fights that remove the idea of the Other in its absolute sense and thus uncover its relativity. For better or for worse, individuals and groups will inevitably [sont bien obligés] recognize the reciprocity of their relationship. (xxii–xxiii, TM; LDS 1:16–17)