Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism
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To be human, according to this passage—to have a truly human consciousness—is to harbor “a fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness.” One conceptualizes oneself—claims oneself to be—a subject only by “constituting the other as inessential, as object.” However, the other, in his own self-conceptualization, sets up an exactly reciprocal claim, one in which of course he is a subject and the other is figured as object. And this very counterclaim reveals, inexorably, the essential relativity of the sort of otherness Beauvoir is describing.11
But then how could women be “the absolute Other” vis-à-vis men?12 Here is how Beauvoir puts the question, and a start on an answer, in the introduction to The Second Sex:
How, then, is it that between the sexes this reciprocity has not been posed, that one of the terms can be affirmed as the sole essential, denying all relativity in relation to its correlative, defining it as pure otherness? Why don’t women contest male sovereignty? No subject poses himself immediately and spontaneously as the inessential; it’s not the Other who in defining herself [se définissant] as the Other defines the One: the Other is posed as the Other by the One posing himself as the One. But for the turning back [retournement] of the Other to the One not to take place, the Other must submit to this alien point of view. Whence in the woman comes this submission? (xxiii–xxiv, TM; LDS 1:17)
According to Lundgren-Gothlin, Beauvoir’s view is that women have failed to enter a competing claim to recognition in the wake of their being objectified by men.13 Because women fail to enter this claim, men are unlikely to be struck by the relativity of woman’s otherness; hence there is slim chance for the sort of reciprocity that becomes unavoidable, according to Beauvoir, when both parties demand recognition. Thus, men demand recognition; women fail to demand it in return; and women as a result are oppressed as absolute Other. Lundgren-Gothlin is arguing that Beauvoir shows how the master-slave dialectic in effect misfires when it comes to relationships between men and women: men get the ball rolling by lodging claims to recognition, but women then simply capitulate, allowing men to be masters instead of countering their claims to recognition and thereby inaugurating a struggle that will end in some state of reciprocal recognition. Lundgren-Gothlin’s main claim about how to interpret the influence of Hegel on Beauvoir is epitomized in the following paragraph:
I am therefore claiming, in contrast to other scholars, that while Beauvoir uses the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to explain the origins of oppression, she does not locate man as master and woman as slave in this dialectic. Instead, woman is seen as not participating in the process of recognition, a fact that explains the unique nature of her oppression. Although the man is the master, the essential consciousness in relation to woman, the woman is not a slave in relation to him. This makes their relationship more absolute, and non-dialectical, and it explains why woman is the absolute Other. (72)14
What I’m going to contest in the remainder of this chapter is the implication that the man, “the master,” as Lundgren-Gothlin calls him, can be located within the terms of Hegel’s dialectic any more easily than the woman can. My view is that Lundgren-Gothlin’s understanding of Beauvoir’s relationship to Hegel—while far superior to any other I have seen and compelling on any number of fronts—continues the tradition of underestimating Beauvoir’s powers of philosophical appropriation and reads the man-woman relationship as it is analyzed in The Second Sex as though it were essentially analogous with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic rather than transformative of it. Beauvoir, on my view, is not simply gesturing at the master-slave dialectic as a source of inspiration for and illumination of her own view. Rather, she wants what she has to say about women to contest, on philosophically internal ground, the generic picture of human relations we get in the dialectic—a picture so gripping that it had occupied, in one way shape or form, virtually every European philosopher in the hundred years between Hegel and Sartre. As in the case of her appropriation of Descartes, Beauvoir is once again both accounting for the power of a paradigmatic moment in the history of a certain tradition in philosophy and suggesting that this power is bought precisely at the expense of ignoring the experience of people—of philosophers—like her: of women.
BEAUVOIR’S APPROPRIATION OF HEGEL IN BOOK 1 OF THE SECOND SEX
At the very end of the introduction to The Second Sex, directly after she has announced that her perspective in the book will be one of “existentialist ethics,” Beauvoir poses a series of what she calls “fundamental questions on which we would like to throw some light.”15 “Now, what in a singular manner defines the situation of woman,” she says,
is that, being like every other human being an autonomous liberty, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men make her assume herself as the Other [lui imposent de s’assumer contre l’Autre]: they attempt to fix her as an object and doom her to immanence insofar as her transcendence is to be perpetually transcended by another consciousness that is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman is this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, who always poses himself or herself [se pose] as the essential, and the exigencies of a situation that constitutes her as inessential. How in the feminine condition can a woman become a human being? What roads are open to her? Which culminate in impasses? How can independence be rediscovered at the heart of dependence? What circumstances limit the liberty of woman and which can she surpass? (xxxv, TM; LDS 1:31–32)
These questions, Beauvoir goes on to say, would not make sense if we were to suppose that woman’s lot were inalterably determined by, for example, physiology, psychology, or economic forces. Thus, her goal in part 1 of book 1, entitled “Destiny,” is to show that in fact woman has no unalterable, fixed destiny: nothing predetermines her situation, and no discipline or theory—not biology, not psychoanalysis, not historical materialism—has convincingly explained it. In part 2 of book 1, entitled “History,” Beauvoir tries to show that nonetheless there really is something that can plausibly be called the situation of women, despite wide variations in women’s concrete circumstances across cultures and across time, from the prehistoric era through the present day.16 “The world has always belonged to men,” she says in the first line of the “History” section, even though “none of the reasons that have been proposed to explain this fact has struck us as sufficient” (61, TM; LDS 1:109). In reviewing certain salient moments in history, Beauvoir then suggests, we will be able to get a complex picture of how the “hierarchy of the sexes” was established, where this way of understanding women’s situation, it is implied, is going to be different from the sort that proposes to trace the hierarchy of male over female to some brute fact about human biology, psychology, or socio-economic need. The problem, Beauvoir reminds us, stems from—which is not to say is synonymous with—what she in the introduction calls “the fundamental hostility” that consciousness harbors toward the (fundamental category of the) “other”:
We have already proposed [posé] that when two human types [catégories] are face to face, each wants to impose upon the other its sovereignty. If both are able to hold out against [soutenir] this claim, there is created between them whether in hostility or in friendship, always in tension, a relationship of reciprocity. If one of the two is privileged, it will get the better of the other and will work to maintain the other’s oppression. It’s therefore understandable that man would have the will [volonté] to dominate woman: but what privilege permits him to carry out this will? (61, TM; LDS 1:109)17
It is the historical development of what she is calling the “privilege” of men that Beauvoir then attempts to illuminate in the remainder of the “History” section.
Thus we arrive at the “Myths” section—part 3—of The Second Sex, which begins with a long, exceptionally elliptical and dense passage that is pivotal to understanding Beauvoir’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic.18 The passage begins with a summary of Beauvoir’s conclusions from part 2:
History has shown us that men
have always kept in their hands all concrete powers. Since the earliest patriarchal times they have judged it useful to maintain woman in a state of dependence. Their codes are established against her, and thus she has been concretely constituted as the Other.
The passage then continues with a series of claims that are obviously intimately related to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic:
This condition served the economic interests of males, but it also suited their ontological and moral claims [prétentions]. Once the subject seeks to assert himself [s’affirmer], the Other who limits him and denies him is nevertheless necessary to him: he doesn’t attain himself except through this reality that he is not. This is why the life of the human being [l’homme] is never plenitude and rest: it is lack and movement; it is struggle [lutte].
The one apparently un-Hegelian feature of this paragraph is its last sentence: “This is why the life of the human being is never plenitude and rest: it is lack and movement; it is struggle.” The idea of a ceaseless struggle is not a part of the Phenomenology, in which the master-slave dialectic is only a stage in the journey of Geist. Indeed, this idea seems out of place in the paragraph in which we find it, a paragraph in which Beauvoir is presumably sketching out an answer to the question of why men’s “maintaining woman in a state of dependence” has had not only economic but also “moral and ontological” advantages. The basic idea here is that the subject, man in this case, needs an absolute Other, a role the woman has historically played for him, in order to “attain” himself in the wake of his “asserting” of himself. But it isn’t at all clear, at least at this juncture, how this conception of the relationship between subject and Other implies or is otherwise connected to the idea that “the life of the human being is never plenitude and rest.” Why isn’t men’s dominance over women stable?
Getting a start on an answer to this question requires looking at more of the passage.
Opposite himself man [l’homme] encounters Nature.19 He has a hold on her; he attempts to appropriate her.20 But she cannot satisfy him. Either she materializes [se réaliser] only as a purely abstract opposition—she is an obstacle and remains a stranger; or she submits passively to man’s desire and allows herself to be assimilated by him—he possesses her only in consuming her, that is to say in destroying her. In both these cases, he remains alone. He is alone when he touches a rock, alone when he digests a piece of fruit. There is no presence of the other unless the other is himself present to himself: that is to say that true alterity is that of a consciousness separate from mine and identical to itself.
It is the existence of other men that tears each man from his immanence and that permits him to fulfill [accomplir] the truth of his being, to fulfill himself as transcendence, as escape toward the object, as project. But this strange liberty that confirms my liberty enters also into conflict with it: this is the tragedy of the unhappy consciousness.21 Each consciousness aspires to pose itself as sole sovereign subject. Each attempts to fulfill itself by reducing the other to slavery. But the slave in work and in fear experiences himself also as essential and, through a dialectical turning-back [retournement], it is the master who appears as the inessential. The drama [of the master-slave relationship] can be surmounted by the free recognition of each individual in the other [en l’autre], each posing himself and the other at the same time as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement [my emphasis].
I take it as absolutely critical that Beauvoir does not characterize “free recognition” here (or elsewhere) as requiring that each individual in the dialectic identify himself and the other merely as subjects. What is strikingly original about the way Beauvoir is rendering what is recognizably a version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the long passage I have been examining is that she believes that a person must acknowledge himself and the other as objects as well as subjects in order for reciprocal recognition to be achieved.22 That Hegelian reciprocity demands that beings mutually recognize one another as subjects is right on the surface of the concept. Indeed, what philosophers in Hegel’s wake have disputed is precisely whether and how our acknowledgment of each other as subjects is possible. But Beauvoir is to my knowledge wholly original in her figuring reciprocal recognition as requiring the acknowledgment of one’s own and the other’s essential nature as objects as well as subjects. Beauvoir goes on to hint at the origin of the difficulties in achieving this sort of reciprocity:
But friendship and generosity, which concretely realize this recognition of liberties, are not easy virtues. They are assuredly the highest accomplishment of the human being; it’s thus that he achieves [se trouve] his truth. But this truth is that of a struggle ceaselessly sketched out [ébauchée], ceaselessly abolished. It requires that a human being at each instant master himself [se surmonte].23
What exactly does this ceaseless self-mastery require? Against what or whom must the human being constantly struggle in order for reciprocal or “free” recognition to take place? Beauvoir appears to go on to suggest that is has to do with undertaking a quintessentially Sartrean task—one that she describes in what she calls “another language,” a language that, not surprisingly, sounds awfully Sartrean—namely, the task of renouncing being in favor of assuming one’s existence:
One might say also, in another language, that man attains an authentically moral attitude when he renounces being to assume his existence. By this conversion [conversion], he also renounces all possession, since possession is a mode of seeking being. But the conversion through which he attains true wisdom is never done. It is necessary to do it ceaselessly; it demands a constant tension. So much so that, incapable of fulfilling himself [s’accomplir] in solitude, man in his relationships with his fellows [semblables] is ceaselessly in danger: his life is a difficult enterprise the success of which is never assured.
What’s odd about this restatement of what recognition requires is the tension between its superficial party-line Sartreanism, if you will, and its deeper divergence from the basic tenets of Being and Nothingness. The idea, for example, that man ought to “renounce being to assume existence” is most certainly borrowed from Sartre, as is the idea that possessing things is merely a mode of seeking being.24 Then there is the idea that in one’s relationships with other people one is “ceaselessly in danger”; this is a prime instance of what I have been calling the bleakness of the Sartrean view. But what’s entirely lacking in Sartre is the idea that one can attain something called “an authentically moral attitude” and that one can do this only by something Beauvoir calls “conversion.” On my reading, these distinctly Heideggerian-sounding concepts radically alter the Gestalt, if you will, of this paragraph, a paragraph otherwise apparently pieced together from textbook Sartrean positions, so that it becomes a question what the nature of the conflict and the danger and tension that Beauvoir envisions are, rather than a cliché.
That there is something unusual going on here—that we are not just getting Sartre warmed-over—becomes obvious when we look at the next (and last) section of this long passage. It starts with a familiar enough set of ideas:25
But he [l’homme; the human being] does not like difficulty. He is afraid of danger. He aspires, contradictorily, to life and to repose, to existence and to being. He well knows that “restlessness of the spirit” [l’inquiétude de l’esprit] is the price [rançon] of his development, that his distance from the object is the price of his presence to himself. But he dreams of rest in restlessness [de quiétude dans l’inquiétude] and of a plenitude that would be opaque but would nevertheless inhabit consciousness.
But then we get the following startling claim:
This dream incarnated is precisely woman. She is the wished-for intermediary between nature, which is foreign to man, and the fellow [semblable] who is too identical to him. She opposes to him neither the enemy silence of nature nor the hard demand [exigence] of a reciprocal recognition. By a unique privilege she is a consciousness; and yet it seems possible to possess her in her flesh. Thanks to h
er, there is a means of escaping from the implacable dialectic of master and slave that has its source in the reciprocity of liberties [la réciprocité des libertés].
Now, on Lundgren-Gothlin’s view the key clause here is the one in which Beauvoir claims that woman does not “oppose” to man “the hard demand of a reciprocal recognition”:
Female human beings do not seek recognition; it is males who are confirmed as human, as self-consciousness, in relation to other males, males who become either masters or slaves. Beauvoir is saying here that man, in the relationship to woman, nurtures the hope of achieving confirmation without engaging in this kind of dialectics; logically, therefore, woman has not engaged in a struggle for recognition, and thus neither has become essential nor has had her self-consciousness confirmed. In other words, she remains at a more animal level. Woman has not raised a reciprocal demand for recognition. (71–72)
But this doesn’t seem quite right. For Beauvoir nowhere says or implies that women do not seek recognition from other women, which means, according to Lundgren-Gothlin’s own logic, that Beauvoir does not deny that women may be “confirmed as human, as self-consciousness” in relation to other women, that they may become “either masters or slaves.” There is no reason, then, to assume that woman “remains at a more animal level” than man. Furthermore, by interpreting the idea that the demand for reciprocal recognition is “hard” as implying that what’s difficult about it is just the lodging of it (however hard that lodging may turn out on Beauvoir’s view to be), Lundgren-Gothlin draws attention away from the idea that the master-slave dialectic, in Beauvoir’s words, is “implacable”—that is, that it requires constant effort even after the demands for recognition have been lodged. Lundgren-Gothlin thus closes off the possibility that for Beauvoir what’s exacting about reciprocal recognition is not lodging the demand that inaugurates it but the incessant struggle—and we have yet to establish whether and how this is to be figured primarily as a struggle against the other or to master oneself—that’s required to maintain it. What I mean to suggest here is that what’s “hard” about the demand might not be the lodging of it, per se, but as it were the maintenance of it, the continuance of it in the face of the ceaseless struggle that this continuance itself demands.