by Nancy Bauer
So then: What is necessary for a change in women’s situation? Beauvoir claims, again in the conclusion to The Second Sex, that oppression itself puts pressure on existing social structures to evolve. In the case of the oppression of women by men, Beauvoir says, this pressure can take either of two forms. The first form is to be found in circumstances in which the oppression of women is crushing. In such circumstances, Beauvoir suggests, individual women at various times will find that they cannot bear their imprisonment in their immanence. A woman in such circumstances will rebel by attempting to bring her jailer, the man, into her immanent space so that the prison “will be confounded with the world and she will suffer no longer from being enclosed in it” (717, TM; LDS 2:644). The man, of course, will resist, thereby creating what Beauvoir calls “a state of war” (717). And because the man is more powerful than the woman, he is likely to win the battle. But there is a second way that oppression puts pressure on social structures to change, a way Beauvoir claims is dominant “today,” when there are chinks in the prison walls and women are able to see the advantages of being actors in the world. Now, “instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavors to escape from one; she no longer seeks to drag him into the realms of immanence but to emerge, herself, into the light of transcendence” (717). Men feel this desire for emancipation as a threat to their sovereignty, Beauvoir says, which forces women to take “an aggressive attitude” (717). Consequently, “two transcendences confront each other [s’affronter]; instead of mutually recognizing one another, each liberty wants to dominate the other” (718, TM; LDS 2:645).
Here, I submit, we find an allusion to the Hegelian “fight to the death” as well as to Sartre’s appropriation of this moment in Hegel—that is, specifically, to Sartre’s identification of the desire to dominate the other as fundamental to all human relationships. But Beauvoir in effect rejects Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel when she claims that the confrontation that oppression under certain circumstances puts into play actually takes place within each person. She writes, toward the end of the conclusion of The Second Sex,
In these combats in which they believe themselves to be confronting each other, it’s against himself that each one battles, projecting into his partner this part of himself that he repudiates. Instead of living the ambiguity of his condition, each tries to force the other to bear the abjection of it and to reserve for himself its honor. If, however, both would assume the ambiguity with a lucid modesty, correlative to an authentic pride, they would meet each other as fellows [semblables] and would live the erotic drama in friendship. (728, TM; LDS 2:658)
So instead of accepting Sartre’s idea that the struggle against the other is both inevitable and interminable, Beauvoir is claiming that men and women can get beyond it if they can come to see, and to accept, that they are “projecting” a part of themselves onto the other. Specifically, in accordance with the reading of Beauvoir I have been laying out in this chapter, I think she is claiming that what a person projects onto the other is his or her own sense of not having a fixed relationship with the world—of, to put the point positively, being free. In the encounter with the other I am tempted to see not myself but the other as free: free, in particular, to turn me into an object. I am further tempted to try to get the other to use this freedom to make of me an object whose fixed relationship with the world is the one I covet for myself, whether that be, paradoxically enough, a relationship of freedom (as in the case of men) or of bondage (as in the case of women). Regarding the other solely in terms of how he or she fixes me in his or her gaze is, of course, a way of understanding what Freud means by narcissism. This means that on Beauvoir’s view what is necessary in order to go beyond Sartre’s picture is the recognition and foregoing of a certain temptation to narcissism.
Beauvoir’s rejection of Sartre’s bleak picture of human relations turns on seeing the encounter with the other not as inevitably condemning one to an interminable struggle with the other but as an opportunity to grasp two important truths: about oneself, namely, that one is fundamentally “ambiguous”; and about the other, specifically, that he or she is not just a mirror. The idea that there is an opportunity here is absent in Sartre, but it plays an important role in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Hegel, you may recall, claims that in the encounter between two subjectively self-certain self-consciousnesses, a being initially does not “see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self” (para. 179). And what a being sees in the other’s eyes, Hegel says, is itself as other, so that the encounter with the other is what in fact reveals to the self (what, as I claimed in chapter 3, both he and Beauvoir call) its ambiguity (as between being for-itself and in-itself). In the master-slave dialectic, this sense of ambiguity is unbearable, and it is what drives the self to struggle against the other for mastery. What is desired on Hegel’s view, again, is that the other recognize you as being essentially “for-yourself.” But on Beauvoir’s view, I am arguing, this is simply one form that the temptation to narcissism can take—and, in the case of men’s relationships with women, characteristically takes. For her, merely getting the other to confirm that you are “for-yourself” does not count as genuine recognition; and she further believes, as I have argued above, that this confirmation is often granted (that is, women grant it to men) in the absence of any “demand” for it, per se. What is required, on Beauvoir’s view, for genuine recognition to occur is that a person “assume” his or her ambiguity, which is at the same time to allow the other his or her otherness. The first step in this process has to be a willingness to see and accept that the struggle with the other is in fact a cover for the struggle within oneself—the struggle, that is, against one’s own sense of being ambiguous, which I have characterized as being fueled by a fear of one’s freedom, understood as entailing a loss of a sense of a secure relationship to the world.
This insight and acceptance requires, first and foremost, that a person stop warding off the truth of the other’s genuine otherness. For the locus of the struggle to shift from your encounter with the other to your encounter with yourself—for you to see that your most fundamental nemesis, as it were, is not in fact the other but, rather, yourself—you have to come to recognize the other as something more than his or her gaze.21 I am suggesting here, this means, that on Beauvoir’s view my recognition of the other (where this, I am now specifying, is to be understood as my recognizing the genuine otherness of the other) is not only necessary to but is even the first step in my getting the other to recognize me. But what is what I am calling “recognizing the genuine otherness of the other” supposed to look like? Beauvoir does not say much about this, at least not directly. It follows from my analysis of her appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, however, that at least a part of recognizing the otherness of the other would have to consist in foregoing the attempt to manipulate the other person’s judgment of me—foregoing, in other words, the demand that the other recognize me solely as I wish to be recognized. But to forego this demand is to make room for the other’s free judgment of me, so that foregoing the demand can be characterized as inviting this free judgment.
How to do this? I want to suggest that even though Beauvoir doesn’t address this question explicitly, she provides a powerful response to it in the form of The Second Sex itself. This is a book that Beauvoir finds herself having to compose, let us recall, in order to be able to, as she puts it, write about herself. She finds, to her astonishment, that the first thing that she has to say about herself is that she is a woman, and that she does not know what this means—that is, what it means to declare yourself to be a woman as well as what it means to discover that this is the first thing that you have to say about yourself. The Second Sex can therefore be read as a record of this woman’s preparation for recollecting or recounting herself. What’s remarkable is that this preparation does not take place in private. Beauvoir finds that in order to say anything specific about who she is, she must first recount woman to (other)
women, and to men. In doing this she is not taking, or even pretending to take, the vantage point of an expert. She’s writing as a woman (even as she is exploring what this could mean). Her authority stands or falls entirely on her authorship, so that to publicize the words that make up The Second Sex is inevitably to stake claims solely on the basis of this authorship, these words.
In effect, I am suggesting, in having everything rest on the reception of her authorship, Beauvoir is staking herself. And it is this staking of herself, through her words, that is to count as an answer to the question of how genuine mutual recognition is to be achieved. Beauvoir offers herself as the object of other people’s judgments in inviting them to take up and evaluate her words. This is to say that not just any old words will do; Beauvoir’s words are “fighting words” in the sense that they are intended to provoke the judgments of her readers. But these words are equally offered as an expression of her subjectivity, which means that in and through them she is making an attempt to constitute herself as “for-herself.” The enterprise of writing, when carried out in good faith, can thus be seen as a certain kind of risk-taking: when you write from the heart, as it were, then you express yourself as a subject (a creator, an actor) precisely by taking the risk of turning yourself into an object of the other’s judgment.
I am suggesting that in her authorship of The Second Sex Beauvoir, far from setting out to petrify the “other” in order to shore up some private sense of herself, as Sartre suggests in Being and Nothingness we inevitably do in our relationships with others, is offering up her writing as an invitation to the other to express himself or herself as a subject, as a judge of her words.22 In turn, this judgment, if again it is put forth publicly and in good faith, will constitute both an expression of the other’s subjectivity (which, à la Sartre, Beauvoir will experience as such to the extent that the critic’s words move her, one way or another) and an object of Beauvoir’s further judgment, of her own (further) criticism. This, then, is a picture of the Hegelian struggle for recognition as taking place at the highest reaches of human conversa-tion.23 Mutual recognition is to be found, it follows, not in some definitive words that the other can pronounce on your behalf but in the very willingness to continue talking. This means that in a sense recognition is never final, never complete. At the very least, it is withdrawn the moment the conversation breaks down.
For Beauvoir the idea of inviting the best kind of human conversation, by subjecting oneself to criticism, is linked with the idea of pleasure, in much the same way that erotic fantasies of give-and-take are so associated. On my reading of Beauvoir, the pleasure imagined or experienced in conversation is not a goal, exactly, of that conversation but, rather, a mark of its success.24 Often, as Beauvoir certainly knew, the pleasures of conversation are to be had at the cost of enormous pain: the pain of misunderstandings, of failure to find the words one needs, of discursive impasses, of vulnerability, of inadequacy, of self-loathing, of anger. Needless to say, it is a feature of human conversation that it can derail at any moment—and in actuality of course does, and all the time. All of a sudden, or slowly, over time, I might find that I don’t know or understand you the way I thought I did, or you me—or each of us ourselves. We can’t pin each other, or sometimes even ourselves, down. This is because the struggle to keep the conversation going is the struggle to come to terms with the fact that what it means to be a human being is that neither my nor the other’s relationship to the world is ever fixed, both because human beings inherently are not simply objects and because we are constantly exposed to the (varying) judgmental eyes of different others. To continue the conversation requires foregoing precisely the sort of narcissism that Sartre depicts so cannily in No Exit, a narcissism that demands that I find mirrored in your judgments of me a static image of myself in which I can take pride. On Sartre’s view, of course, this narcissism is what drives my very encounter with the Other, so that the fight-to-the-death, the struggle, is essentially between my narcissism and yours. But on Beauvoir’s view the essential struggle is with myself: I struggle to let go of a fixed picture of myself, to risk letting the other teach me who I am. To the extent we can allow the other to play such a role, our various failures of conversation are to be seen as moments revealing a certain truth, moments in which we come to grips with the fantasies we customarily construct as a way of avoiding confrontation with the fact of our ambiguity. The idea of exposing our fantasies to ourselves in our struggles with ourselves is a major motif throughout The Second Sex.
This is also a picture, then, of a world in which something other than Sartre’s solipsistic sort of objectivity is possible. Recall that for Sartre, “objectivity” can consist only in the state of feeling oneself trapped, thinglike, in the Other’s Look—a state, I argued in chapter 4, characterized by narcissism and paranoia. On Sartre’s view, in order to be a human being, I must will what the skeptic fears: that you and I be radically separate and that it be impossible for us genuinely to share a world. But on Beauvoir’s view, what marks us as human, as capable of subjectivity, is our risking ourselves (as in-itself, as it were) in order to create a world for ourselves with others. For her, then, to be objective is to undertake this risk. We do so by investing ourselves in language, in employing the signs we share publicly, in taking responsibility for co-authoring the world. As I put it toward the end of chapter 3, this investment demands foregoing another, namely, the investment in one’s privacy (figured as a wish to automatically be transparent to oneself and others), a foregoing Beauvoir regards as demanding an acceptance of oneself as ambiguous and one that she takes to be a prerequisite of any morally productive form of human self-consciousness. In her case it is the very act of writing a book such as The Second Sex that constitutes Beauvoir’s willingness for publicity and specifically for attempting to forge a world in which an ethical form of cohabitation between men and women is possible.
The difference between this world and the world in which we now live, Beauvoir suggests, will be that men and women, males and females, find themselves in situations in which the temptation to privacy, to narcissism and distrust and skepticism, is outweighed by the temptation to what she calls friendship and generosity. Crucially, forging a genuinely new world will probably demand a drastic change in the material circumstances of many people. It’s hard to take an interest in authoring the world if it is simply crushing you.25 But even under conditions of widespread plenty, people will always wish for what Beauvoir calls rest, for an escape from the unceasing demands of self-scrutiny and self-exposure. These demands, she shows in The Second Sex, are the demands of morality. They are demands that we recognize the divisiveness we produce through our obsession with dividing ourselves into categories, such as sex, and that we recognize this divisiveness itself as stemming from our wish to avoid the fact of our fundamental ambiguity, an ambiguity that is both the condition of and the stumbling block to our being able to inhabit a world together. Beauvoir had this concept, or at least this word, ambiguity from early on in her writing career. But it took her being overcome by a sense of her own ambiguity, the contradiction she felt between the sense of herself as a potential author of an autobiography and as what is called a woman, to find her voice with the concept philosophically. Why she found conducting a philosophical investigation of this sense of ambiguity unavoidable is perhaps, in the end, simply a matter of her tastes and passions. Personally, I like to think it was women’s intuition.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: RECOUNTING WOMEN