by Nancy Bauer
If we take seriously her investment in the idea that reciprocal recognition requires a ceaseless struggle of some sort, then we get a somewhat clearer sense of why Beauvoir claims that human beings put such a high premium on achieving a state of rest. It’s not, or not exactly, as Lundgren-Gothlin claims above, that men wish to “achieve confirmation without engaging in dialectics,” if this means that they are loathe to undertake the fight to the death. What on my reading they—and women—desire is a state of stasis, of rest, in which recognition has been achieved once and for all (where, for the time being, what “recognition” consists in must also remain vague). Human beings cannot achieve permanent recognition in their interaction with things, with instances of being that are not human, because things are not capable of recognizing them at all. And they cannot achieve permanent recognition in their interaction with other human beings because with other human beings recognition is never permanent; it involves a ceaseless struggle. What women do for men, Beauvoir claims, is provide them with a sense—albeit a false one—of having achieved recognition once and for all, of finding what she calls “rest in restlessness.” Women do this by serving as something “intermediary” between a thing and a human being: by virtue of being what Beauvoir calls “a consciousness” a woman is capable of the act of recognition; but this very act of recognition is seen as manifesting the sort of power that a thing has—that is, a power that is in principle continuously vulnerable to exploitation or consumption.
I say that women “serve” as something intermediary because Beauvoir never suggests that women are this intermediary entity. Woman is a conscious being, she says; but it merely “seems possible to possess her in the flesh” (my emphasis). That women’s status as intermediary must be illusory—that men who figure women as thinglike in the relevant respects or women who figure themselves this way are at best deluding themselves and at worst indulging in, if you will, bad faith—follows from the idea that recognition (whatever it turns out to look like exactly, on Beauvoir’s view) is fundamentally not some quality or power people inherently have or mechanically manufacture but the product of deliberate action on the part of a free and conscious being.
So when Beauvoir says that through women men find the means to escape “from the implacable dialectic of master and slave that has its source in the reciprocity of liberties,” what she is saying, on my reading, is that men and women have settled into a relationship in which the man labors under the illusion that the woman is continuously (always, seamlessly) recognizing him and thus continuously providing him with a sort of peace—something that, as a free, conscious being, she in fact by definition cannot do—while the woman poses as a being not in need of being recognized in return—that is, as something that she is not. Now, Lundgren-Gothlin claims that Beauvoir wants to say that “the man is the master, the essential consciousness in relation to woman” but that “the woman is not a slave in relation to him” (72). This implies that the man has staked a claim to recognition. But has he, according to Beauvoir? Lundgren-Gothlin is careful never to suggest that the man has demanded recognition from woman; indeed she implies that he has not staked such a claim when she characterizes him as “[nurturing] the hope of achieving confirmation without engaging in this kind of dialectics” (71). But when she says that “it is males who are confirmed as human, as self-consciousness, in relation to other males” she strongly implies, first, that men have demanded recognition from one another and, second, that through this man-to-man dialectic men somehow put themselves in the position of becoming the masters of women. But how could this happen? If neither women nor men demand recognition from one another, then how does the man end up being the woman’s master while the woman somehow escapes being his slave? I’m trying to argue here that unless Beauvoir is saying the men actually demand recognition from women—a position that neither I nor apparently Lundgren-Gothlin finds articulated anywhere in The Second Sex—then men are no more in a position to become women’s masters, per se, than women are to become men’s masters.
On both my reading of The Second Sex, and especially of this long passage that launches the “Myths” section in book 1, and on Lundgren-Gothlin’s reading, there’s no evidence that Beauvoir wishes simply to map the situation between men and women onto the master-slave dialectic. The question, then, is what Beauvoir does wish to do. Lundgren-Gothlin’s implicit answer is that Beauvoir wishes to map only some of the master-slave dialectic onto Beauvoir’s depiction of the relationship between the sexes. So, for example, she claims, you can show that in Beauvoir’s picture men are in effect Hegelian masters. But other features of the dialectic—such as the would-be slave’s staking of a reciprocal demand for recognition from the would-be master before the fight to the death—are absent from Beauvoir’s account, which, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, explains why the relationship between man and woman is “more absolute, and non-dialectical, and it explains why women is the absolute Other” (72). Somehow, on this reading, men get to be masters, but nondialectically so, since women don’t get to be slaves—that is, since there is no dialectic to begin with.
Lundgren-Gothlin is certainly not without apparent evidence for her way of understanding Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel. Consider the following passage she cites from the “History” section of book 1 of The Second Sex:
Certain passages of the dialectic by which Hegel defines the relation of master to slave apply much better to the relation of man to woman. The privilege of the master, he says, comes from his affirmation of Spirit as against Life through the fact that he risks his own life; but in fact the conquered slave has known the same risk. Whereas woman is basically [originellement] an existent who gives Life [la Vie; Beauvoir’s emphasis] and does not risk her life; between the male and her there has never been any combat [combat]. Hegel’s definition applies particularly well [singulièrement] to her. “The other [consciousness] is the dependent consciousness for whom the essential reality is the animal life.” (TSS 64, TM; LDS 1:114; brackets around “consciousness” in Beauvoir’s text)
On Lundgren-Gothlin’s reading, when Beauvoir says that certain passages of the master-slave dialectic “apply much better to the relation of man to woman” than to that of master and slave, she is referring only “to the first phase of the dialectic, where the master has proved himself as pure self-consciousness by not having set life up as supreme.”26 This first phase, Lundgren-Gothlin says, is for Beauvoir “an excellent illustration of the relationship between the sexes,” a relationship in which men show themselves capable of risking life (and thus deserving recognition) and women merely embrace life. But Beauvoir on Lundgren-Gothlin’s interpretation in effect ignores the “second phase” of the dialectic, in which the slave “has taken a step away from the animal, a step he fulfils [sic] through his labour in the service of his master”; the woman, in her failure to work—in her capacity as a giver of life, rather than a worker—evidently fails to progress to this phase.
But there’s something odd about this conceptualization of the relationship between what Beauvoir is saying about man and woman, on the one hand, and the master-slave dialectic, on the other. If I understand Lundgren-Gothlin correctly, the first phase of the dialectic comprises the moments up until the master has shown himself willing to risk his life and the slave has shown himself fearful of doing so—that is, the moments up until one self-consciousness becomes the master and the other the slave. But of course in choosing to undertake the fight to the death, the slave has by definition chosen to risk his life; that he eventually loses heart does not mean that he never had it or aspired to have it. The difference between the slave and Beauvoir’s woman—the reason that certain passages of the dialectic apply much better to the relation of man and woman than to that of master and slave—is that the woman never risks her life at the hands of the man by laying a claim to recognition that would require a fight to the death with him. Indeed, Beauvoir implies that the woman in her commitment to being a life-giver (i.e., to having babies
), is enamored of Life as an abstract concept and refuses to see herself as someone standing in need of recognition who might risk her particular, concrete life. But this is as much as to say that what goes on between Hegel’s master and slave is very different—from the start—from what goes on between Beauvoir’s man and woman. I’m claiming, then, that to say that the first phase of the master-slave dialect is an excellent illustration of the relationship between the sexes is to mischaracterize the nature of Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel.
I am suggesting, further, that Beauvoir is balking at Hegel’s declaration (at the end of para. 189 of the Phenomenology) that for the slave “the essential reality is the animal type of life.” What brings her to the point of balking at this, I think, is her discovery, a discovery made in the context of investigating the meaning of her own womanhood, that Hegel’s description of the slave is uncannily applicable not in fact to Hegelian slaves but to women. Since her work on The Second Sex has led her to the view that “woman is basically an existent who gives Life,” she is poised to recognize woman in Hegel’s description of that being whose “essential reality is the animal type of life.”27 Furthermore, in surveying the history—both ontogenetic and phylogenetic—of women Beauvoir has found that she cannot identify moments at which women have evinced something that could count as a Hegelian willingness to risk their lives, which means that, as Lundgren-Gothlin emphasizes, one cannot simply assimilate women to Hegelian slaves. And then in looking back over the parts of the dialectic that precede the slave’s capitulation to the master—that is, the parts that precede Hegel’s defining the slave as a being whose “essential reality is the animal type of life”—Beauvoir is in a position to notice something about the importance of the risking of life that recedes in the Hegelian dialectic as soon as the slave backs out of the fight to the death: that to be willing to risk your life, however temporarily, is in and of itself to generate evidence that you are not a mere thing. What Hegel gives Beauvoir the means to do is to identify “risking your life” as that which ensures that your “essential reality” is not “the animal type of life.” And then the task for her becomes specifying what it would mean for a woman, as a woman, to risk her life in relation to a man.
In order to lay the ground for this specification, I want to close this chapter by looking carefully at another passage from the “History” section of The Second Sex, one in which Beauvoir once again is obviously gesturing somehow at the master-slave dialectic. She is, more specifically, appealing to the dialectic while undertaking to trace the origins of the oppression of women; and at the point the passage begins she has arrived at a discussion of the inauguration of slavery during the bronze and iron ages, an inauguration made possible by the invention of the tool:
Man wished to exhaust the new possibilities opened up by the new techniques: he called in [ fait appel à] a servile labor force, he reduced his fellow man [son semblable] to slavery. The work of the slaves being much more effective than what woman could furnish, she lost the economic role she had played [a role Beauvoir has previously depicted] in the tribe. And in his relationship with the slave the master found a much more radical confirmation of his sovereignty than in the attenuated [mitigée] authority he exercised over woman. Being venerated and feared [redoutée]28 for her fecundity, being other than man and participating in the disquieting character of the other, woman held man in a certain dependence on her, while being at the same time dependent upon him; the reciprocity of the master-slave relation actually existed for her, and by it she escaped slavery. But the slave was protected by no taboo. He was nothing but a man in servitude, not different but inferior: the dialectical play [le jeu dialectique] of his relation to his master was to take centuries to come into existence. (78, TM; LDS 1:131)
What strikes Lundgren-Gothlin about this passage is that here again Beauvoir “sees a particular phase of the [master-slave] dialectic as actually reflecting the relationship between the sexes better than the one between master and slave.”29 The phase to which Lundgren-Gothlin is referring is the postfight moment in which the parties, while in fact mutually dependent on one another, are conscious only of the slave’s dependence upon the master. What they, and especially the master, fail to see is that the master is also dependent on the slave, insofar as the master needs both the slave’s labor and his recognition (however worthless that recognition may in fact be, given the nonhuman status to which the slave has been reduced in both parties’ eyes). Lundgren-Gothlin reads Beauvoir as claiming that between men and women, “mutual dependence has been actual from the very outset.” By “actual,” I take Lundgren-Gothlin to mean that both men and women have always been aware of the fact of their mutual dependence: both realize that woman is, presumably, economically dependent on man, while man has depended on woman for, as Lundgren-Gothlin puts it “confirmation of his sovereignty.” Thus, once again, we are to read Beauvoir as using the master-slave dialectic to “illustrate” what she wants to say about men and women.
It seems to me, however, that Beauvoir is doing something more, and considerably more important, than simply illustrating her point via an allusion to Hegel. What Lundgren-Gothlin has in effect written out of the passage is its historicity, and in particular Beauvoir’s implicit—and striking—claim that woman has not always been the (absolute) Other for man. Indeed, what’s especially fascinating about the passage is that in it Beauvoir is claiming that the historical development of slavery produced a drastic change in relations between men and women. Before this development, these relations manifested something Beauvoir calls “the reciprocity of the master-slave relation,” a reciprocity she connects with a certain (historically specific) manifestation of women’s “otherness.” It’s of the highest importance that this is “other” with a small “o.”30 For woman to be “other” to man is for her to appear different in the sense that the traveler regards the natives (and the natives regard the traveler) as “other.” This is the category of the “other” that, Beauvoir claims, is fundamental to consciousness; for two people to be “other” to one another not only does not preclude a certain reciprocity but is in fact necessary for it, insofar as it is precisely the relativity of otherness that inevitably engenders this reciprocity. To be an “Other” in Beauvoir’s idiom, on the other hand, implies the impossibility of this sort of reciprocity with the “One”; it is to be perceived as absolutely metaphysically inferior—as, for example, fundamentally an object as opposed to a subject. The idea, if I understand Beauvoir correctly, is that before the inauguration of the institution of slavery, women were regarded as being in a critical respect different from men and that because of this difference men’s authority over women was limited.
And how were women at that time perceived to be different? Recall that Beauvoir describes these women as “being venerated and feared [by men] for [their] fecundity” and as protected by a taboo. The taboo that protected woman, that made her appear (relatively) “other,” invested her with a certain power over man, a power that caused him to experience his dependence on her in the form of fear and veneration. On my reading of Beauvoir, she wants to say that before the invention of the tool, which means before the “invention” of slavery, men and women were reciprocally dependent on one another in essentially the same way that the master and the slave are in Hegel’s dialectic: the dependence, while “reciprocal,” is not symmetrical; and one party clearly benefits more from the relationship than the other, at least in an everyday, material sense. What distinguished the venerated woman from Hegel’s slave was the simple fact that the man who venerated her, unlike Hegel’s master, recognized his dependence on her—and, of course, he did so precisely through his veneration and awe of her and his belief in the taboo that protected her. Because the person who was consigned to use his tools was not held in such high regard by the man once he became a master—because the man failed to recognize his dependence on his worker—this person, precisely as in Hegel’s dialectic, became the master’s slave. Thus Beauvoir
is suggesting that before the invention of the tool woman, while man’s other, was not his slave because, exactly unlike Hegel’s master, man conceptualized her otherness not as absolute inferiority but as difference. This means, that from the outset the woman experienced a certain form of reciprocity, albeit not a perfect one, without having to “risk her life” in the way that the slave—both Hegel’s slave and the Bronze-Age one Beauvoir is discussing—did. The slave (in both cases), on the other hand, was figured by all concerned as someone whose very service to his master served as decisive proof of his inferiority. You might say, looking at matters from Beauvoir’s point of view, that both the historical and Hegelian slaves were initially regarded by themselves and their masters, however delusionally, as (absolute) Others—which is to say, if one runs the logic all the way through, as post–Bronze-Age women. In this historical case, the lack of any external pressure to dispel the delusion meant that “the dialectical play of [the historical slave’s] relation to his master was to take centuries to come into existence.”