by Nancy Bauer
Now, what is required of a good judge is what Beauvoir calls “impartiality,” something that she identifies as a luxury. This is her way of identifying philosophy itself—which, at least since Descartes, has prided itself on its impartiality—as something that is, for women, at any rate, a luxury. Some fortunate women, she is saying, are in an overall position, an overall situation, to be impartial—to do philosophy; and when she adds that “we even feel the necessity to do so” she is suggesting that women in such a situation actually feel something like called to philosophy—that is, they feel that their philosophizing, given their situations, is called for. In Beauvoir’s case, it is her philosophical training—or, more specifically, the material conditions afforded her in part because of and through this training—that distinguishes her particular situation from that of women who are less favorably placed to write a book like The Second Sex. As an agrégée in Philosophy (that is, someone with the highest possible certification, equivalent to that required for a doctorate, in the subject), Beauvoir was guaranteed a position in the French secondary-school system for the rest of her life, which meant that unlike the vast majority of women in her day she could count on lifelong financial independence.16 But more than this: Beauvoir’s achievement allowed her to belong, as something like a peer, and to be recognized as belonging to a circle of similarly achieving men—I mean not only the author of the hugely influential Being and Nothingness and his cohort but also the historical circle of men preoccupied with philosophical problems.17 But of course this admission did not erase the fact of Beauvoir’s being a woman. Despite her being in a position to indulge the luxury of her “detachment,” she writes, she and others like her “know the feminine world more intimately that men because we have our roots there. We grasp more immediately what the fact of being female means for a human being, and we are more concerned to know it” (xxxiii–xxxiv, TM; LDS 1:29–30).
I am suggesting, in effect, that Beauvoir is declaring herself to be well placed to pose the questions she is posing in The Second Sex because her situation comprises that of “being” a woman and that of “being” a philosopher, where this is to be understood as a declaration of a certain sense of being split—or, if you like, ambiguous. And on her analysis of what it is to “be” a woman, in which one’s being an individual is at odds with one’s biological destiny, the implication is that her existence as a woman philosopher is, as it were, doubly ambiguous. That this situation has its advantages, its own economy of fertility, is attested to by the very existence of The Second Sex. (That it has its disadvantages is, I would argue, what accounts for that existence.) If Beauvoir accuses both men and women of attempting to avoid recognizing that women, like men, are fundamentally “for-themselves,” she is able to articulate this claim only from within her own sense of being split, of being, specifically, a woman philosopher. She needs, to put it another way, the resources of both her philosophical powers and her experience as a woman to understand why human beings oppress one another and allow themselves to be oppressed on the basis of their sex. This is not to say that a man (or a differently placed woman, for that matter) could not have arrived at something like Beauvoir’s picture of the situation between men and women. It is to suggest how Beauvoir herself came to require a reconceptualization of the line between the ordinary and the philosophical that most people are inclined not to question.
In The Second Sex Beauvoir comes to be able to articulate Hegel’s achievement in the master-slave dialectic—an achievement the full implications of which, she at least implicitly suggests, it was not open to Hegel himself to recognize—as one of showing the human being’s sense of herself in the world to be a function of her “being-for-others.” That human beings, on Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel, harbor a “fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness” is not some brute fact about how people are hard-wired; rather, the experience of freedom, when it takes the form of a sense of the loss of the world, inclines people to attempt to objectify themselves in the eyes of others, to try to attain steadfast connections with the world by asking others to affirm that one “is,” for all times and places, whatever it is one fancies oneself to be. (This would mean that the “fundamental hostility” that Beauvoir says we all bear against each other need not take an overt, frankly hostile form.) In certain situations—notably, that of men vis-à-vis women—the attempt to get the other to objectify you is driven by a desire to affirm that you are essentially a free being, that is, the desire that drives the beings in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. In other situations—notably, that of women vis-à-vis men—the attempt to get the other to objectify you is driven by a desire to affirm that you are essentially not a free being.
And when these attempts are made by man and woman vis-à-vis one another, they do not take the form of demands or claims. (I am therefore arguing, contra Lundgren-Gothlin, that neither men nor women “demand” recognition from one another.) This is because women are already poised, for the reasons I’ve discussed above, reasons having to do with their experience as little girls, to reflect back to men what they wish to see of themselves; and men are already poised for the same sorts of reasons to treat women as the mirrors they have good reason to wish them to be. In their relationships with one another, then, neither men nor women risk their lives. “In [woman’s] eyes,” Beauvoir writes, “man incarnates the Other, as she does for the man; but this Other seems to her to be on the plane of the essential, and with reference to him she sees herself as the inessential” (329). For both men and women then, man is a subject, is in-himself for-himself, and woman is an object, pure in-itself. And there is nothing internal to their relationship that has the power to make the bad faith of their conceptions of themselves (insofar as they are men and women) intolerable—no contradiction capable of making the relationship productively dialectical.
But this is not to imply that, even given the way things now stand between Man and Woman, an individual man and an individual woman cannot have a relationship characterized by what Beauvoir has identified as the hallmarks of “reciprocal recognition,” namely, friendship and generosity. In particular, as Debra Bergoffen has stressed, Beauvoir suggests that such a relationship may be achieved in an erotic context.18 At the end of a chapter called “Sexual Initiation,” part of the first section of the second book of The Second Sex, after trying to show that her first heterosexual experience is often a disastrous experience for a young woman, Beauvoir writes that the “normal and happy flowering of feminine eroticism” requires that
woman succeed in surmounting her passivity and in establishing with her partner a relationship of reciprocity. The asymmetry of male and female eroticism creates insoluble problems as long as there is a battle of the sexes. They can easily be solved [se trancher] when the woman feels in the man at the same time desire and respect. If he desires her in her flesh all the while recognizing her liberty, she finds herself [se retrouve] the essential at the moment at which she makes herself an object; she remains free in the submission to which she consents. Thus, the lovers can know, each in his or her manner, a common jouissance. Pleasure is felt by each partner as being his or her own, all the while having its source in the other. The words receive and give exchange their senses: joy is gratitude, pleasure, tenderness. Under a concrete and carnal form reciprocal recognition of the self and the other is accomplished in the sharpest consciousness of the other and of the self. (401, TM; LDS 2:189)
Bergoffen places the highest importance on this passage because she reads it as evidence that a central achievement of The Second Sex is Beauvoir’s development of a “philosophy of the erotic.” But on my reading what’s most important about this passage is that, for starters, it confirms that Beauvoir in contradistinction to Sartre believes that reciprocal recognition is possible and that it can take the form of (at least) carnal love. More important, this passage reveals that what is required for reciprocal recognition on Beauvoir’s view is the willingness and the wherewithal to make oneself both su
bject and object in the other’s eyes. This is an absolutely crucial point. If I am right in reading Beauvoir this way, it means that she is not making the point she’s widely believed to make, namely, that men are subjects and women are objects and that women’s “liberation” requires that women become subjects (often read to mean that men are the standard to which women have to rise). Rather, I am arguing, Beauvoir is claiming that both women and men must learn how to be simultaneously both subjects and objects.
But how are we to do this? We have seen already that the way boys and men attempt to become in-itself-for-itself requires a certain persistent self-deception. We have also seen that, on Beauvoir’s analysis, women are tempted by incentives not to desire their own subjectivity. In the passage I’ve just quoted, Beauvoir seems to be suggesting that under the right conditions erotic love can induce both men and women to act toward each other in good faith. These conditions, Beauvoir specifies in what follows this passage, are constituted by the specifics of an individual woman’s situation as well as by “her social and economic situation as a whole” (402). But why erotic love, exactly? Beauvoir’s answer is that “the erotic experience is one of those that discloses to human beings in the most poignant way the ambiguity of their condition. In it they experience themselves as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as subject” (402, TM; LDS 2:190). Bergoffen as I understand her reads Beauvoir here to be declaring that erotic love provides us with the paradigm for the achievement of recognition between men and women. On my reading, Beauvoir’s point is that even under the current circumstances, when men and women are systematically encouraged to shirk their existential freedom, erotic love with a person of the opposite sex can, under the right conditions, encourage them to assume it. This point depends on a claim the status of which, I take it, is itself ambiguous: that in the best instances of erotic love human beings find themselves capable of bearing up under, or even reveling in, the experience of their own ambiguity.19 I claim that the status of this claim is itself ambiguous because it seems to me to be based on an authority that is not properly philosophical (not something that could be, or could obviously be, backed up by an argument) and not properly empirical (not something based on some psychological or sociological study). Rather, it is the product of the authority Beauvoir finds herself able to arrogate to herself as a woman philosophizing.
That certain experiences of heterosexual erotic love provide glimpses of what reciprocal recognition between men and women could look like is further affirmed by Beauvoir’s suggesting in the same context that what is required is that each lover, and particularly the woman, claim his or her “dignity as a transcendent and free subject, all the while assuming his or her carnal condition.” And this, she warns, “is a difficult enterprise, full of risk” (402, TM; LDS 2:190). I read this to be specifying a way for men and women to risk their lives with one another—that is, to undertake what I have argued Beauvoir deems necessary for a dialectic between men and women to inaugurate itself. On this interpretation, to risk one’s life according to Beauvoir is equivalent to assuming one’s freedom. More specifically, it is to do so in the context of accepting one’s own ambiguity, that is, accepting the fact that even as one lacks a stable connection with the world one is bound to find oneself fixed in the eyes of the other. This is something that in Beauvoir’s view both men and women have failed to do, at least vis-à-vis one another. And it is here that women actually can be seen to have an advantage over men, as Hegel’s slave at a certain juncture can be seen to have an advantage over the master. As Beauvoir’s writes,
It is for the woman that this conflict [between flesh and spirit, self and other] takes on the most dramatic character because she grasps herself at first as an object, because she doesn’t immediately find in pleasure a sure autonomy. … But the difficulty of the situation itself protects her against the mystifications to which the male falls prey [se laisser prendre]. He is the ready dupe of the fallacious privileges that are involved in his aggressive role and the satisfied solitude of his orgasm. He hesitates to recognize himself fully as flesh. The woman has a more authentic experience. (402, TM; LDS 2:190–191)
I read Beauvoir here to be suggesting that the man in a heterosexual erotic relationship, like Hegel’s master, has reasons to protect himself from the truth of his situation—from, in this case, his reliance on the woman’s subjectivity for his own sense of himself. The woman, like the slave, on the other hand, has less to risk and more to gain under these circumstances. Like the slave, she is in a better position to see the truth.
Unlike Bergoffen, however, I do not think that Beauvoir believes that women in erotic relationships with men, even under the best circumstances, are likely to see the truth. Indeed, in the closing lines of the chapter on amorousness toward the end of book 2 of The Second Sex, Beauvoir limns a vision of what she calls “authentic love” as though human beings have yet to experience it:
Authentic love would be founded on the reciprocal recognition of two liberties. Each of the lovers would experience himself, then, as himself and as the other. Neither would abdicate his transcendence; neither would mutilate himself. Both would disclose [dévoileraient] together values and ends in the world. For the one and the other, love would be revelation of himself through the gift of self and the enrichment of the world. (667, TM; LDS 2:579)
One way to read this passage is in juxtaposition with one in which we have seen Beauvoir articulating what is required for a person to achieve insight about himself or herself:
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. 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 or she achieves [se trouve] his or her truth. But this truth is that of a struggle ceaselessly sketched out [ebauchée], ceaselessly abolished. It requires that a human being at each instant master herself [se surmonte]. (140, TM; LDS 1:238)
In this second passage, which, again, is part of the long rendering of Hegel that inaugurates the “Myths” section of book 1 of The Second Sex, Beauvoir claims, first, that mutual recognition requires that each individual pose both himself or herself and the other individual as object and as subject. This “posing” (or, to use the English translation of Fichte’s word, “positing”) of oneself and the other, something that Beauvoir claims provides each person with her or his “truth,” in turn is said to require the virtues of friendship and generosity. And finally the attainment of these virtues according to Beauvoir requires a ceaseless struggle to master oneself. One way of putting what strikes me as problematic about Bergoffen’s reading of Beauvoir is that this idea of a ceaseless struggle seems to have dropped out.
I asked in chapter 6 what this struggle might look like. Beauvoir’s analysis of men and women suggests that it takes the form of battling your desire to shirk your freedom, a desire Beauvoir suggests takes the form of a wish to enslave yourself to a fixed picture of who you are and how you are connected with the world. This is a desire, Beauvoir claims, that culture itself, as it is incarnated in particular men and women, works ceaselessly to cultivate. So perhaps the “ceaseless struggle” to which Beauvoir refers is, after all, to take place at least in part on the sociopolitical battlefield. One can imagine Beauvoir suggesting—as numerous feminists in her wake have done—that what’s necessary for men and women to systematically treat each other in the spirit of friendship and generosity is that we transform our social practices—the way we parent our children, for example, or the way we decide what’s true and false.20 Indeed, in the conclusion to The Second Sex Beauvoir does claim that for women’s situation to change, there must be changes in “laws, institutions, customs, public opinion, and the whole social context” (725). It is especially crucial, she argues, that women’s economic condit
ion, and in particular their opportunities as workers, be improved; until such improvement brings about “the moral, social, cultural, and other consequences that it promises and requires,” Beauvoir says flatly, “the new woman cannot appear” (725). This is at least in part because Beauvoir, again, on my reading, appropriating Hegel, believes that coming to see oneself in all good faith as a subject requires that one do something productive in the world, that one act and create.
One could argue—and many critics of Beauvoir have—that taking care of a home and bearing and raising children constitutes productive work, so that in her implication that genuine work takes place only in the public sphere Beauvoir is once again betraying her “masculinism.” But I submit that Beauvoir’s problem with homemaking is not that it is intrinsically any less or more productive or satisfying than any other kind of work but that given women’s situation as it stands it is not recognized as such. Women do not, for example, receive monetary compensation for housework. While it is true that homemakers are characteristically supported economically by their “providers,” the money the man brings into the household, even if he does give the woman a certain amount of leeway with it, is never directly or explicitly tied to the woman’s labor, per se. When a married couple divorces, it is not a foregone legal or moral conclusion that the male wage-earner ought to continue to compensate the female homemaker for her household labors, now that he is no longer living under the same roof with her. (Alimony, when it is granted, is never identified as compensation for housework, per se.) Economically, as many feminists have observed in the last thirty years, the work women do in the home is invisible. In his articulation of the master-slave dialectic, Hegel claims that because the slave is doing productive work—work, interestingly enough, that, given Hegel’s description of it looks for all the world like what we call housework—and because the slave has experienced the fear of death, he (unlike the master) is in a position to see the truth of himself as for-himself. Beauvoir’s view seems to be that one only comes to be in this position if the sort of work that one does is recognized as genuine work by the culture in which one labors—as that of Hegel’s slave, like that of Beauvoir’s woman, is not. But for “slave’s work” or “women’s work” to be recognized as genuinely creative labor, the slave/woman will have to be recognized as a genuinely creative being—as, that is, a subject. This means, effectively, that for the slave/woman’s productive work to have the power (along with the fear of death) to move the dialectic along, recognition of herself as for-itself must already have taken place. But if this is the case, then it’s hard to see how improvement of women’s economic condition could inaugurate the right kind of change in her situation, since it looks as though this change is itself necessary for the improvement of women’s economic condition.