by Nancy Bauer
9. I will just step over the not irrelevant fact that Rorty is trying to convince us of the need to prophesy in a new idiom by deploying arguments in the old.
10. MacKinnon’s most systematic treatment of sexual harassment is to be found in her book Sexual Harassment of Working Women.
11. I want to pass along Hilary Putnam’s observation that an especially interesting instance of such reconception is to be found in Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life.
12. Rorty, p. 236, quoting MacKinnon in Feminism Unmodified, p. 126.
13. “Feminists and Philosophy,” p. 59.
14. In addition to Nussbaum, feminist philosophers who take the view that, to put the point in its mildest form, it’s far too early to abandon traditional philosophical methods in favor of specifically feminist strategies include Louise Antony, Helen Longino, and Charlotte Witt, all of whom have articles in the volume of essays that occasions Nussbaum’s New York Review piece (A Mind of One’s Own, edited by Antony and Witt). This is not to imply, of course, that such thinkers would second Nussbaum’s view in her New York Review of Books article; indeed, Antony and Witt are the editors of the volume under review, although Nussbaum excludes their papers (and Longino’s) from her attack.
15. I thank both Bill Bracken and Ken Westphal for, independently, helping me put this point this way.
16. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, pp. 263–264. My attention was drawn to this passage by Michèle Le Doeuff, who quotes it on pp. 189–190 of her “Women and Philosophy.”
17. See, e.g., Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman; Maria C. Lugones and Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You!”; bell hooks, Talking Back; Jean Walton, “Re-placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse”; Judith Okely, Simone de Beauvoir; and Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures.
18. There is a huge literature on “essentialism” in feminist philosophy and, of course, in philosophy in general. The term “essentialism” (as well as it’s alter ego “antiessentialism” and its close cousin “social construction”) is not used in any clearly consistent way in feminist debates. I will use the term “essentialism” as I have specified above: to refer to the idea that there is some philosophically pertinent feature that binds all women and makes them different from men.
19. Gilligan’s most influential book is In a Different Voice.
20. See, e.g., Lorraine Code’s What Can She Know? and Susan Bordo’s “Feminist Skepticism and the ‘Maleness’ of Philosophy.”
21. In chapter 2 of this project, I will look at Simone de Beauvoir’s diagnosis, or what I read as her diagnosis, of why it is hard to do, why it is hard to talk about “the woman question,” as it was termed in her day, without making metaphysical claims right and left.
22. My goal here is not, of course, to provide a careful explication or evaluation of Butler’s views. This means, regrettably, that there will be no room in my brief consideration of Butler to discuss the enormously important galvanizing effect she has had in, particularly, queer studies. What I have to say about Butler will be limited here to how her work helps us assess the viability as feminist philosophy of something we might call philosophy of sex and gender.
23. For a thought-provoking discussion of Butler’s baffling decision to, as it were, deconstruct rather than ignore the “sex/gender distinction,” as it has been called since the publication of Gayle Rubin’s watershed essay “The Traffic in Women,” see Moi, What Is a Woman?, pp. 30–59.
24. See especially chapter 8, “Critically Queer.” See also Butler’s response to the criticism that her thinking has the paradoxical effect of undercutting the idea that “women” are oppressed in “Response to Bordo’s ‘Feminist Skepticism and the “Maleness” of Philosophy’”; and see also the following note.
25. See, e.g., Bordo, “Feminist Skepticism and the ‘Maleness’ of Philosophy.” The Butler article cited in the previous note is a rejoinder to this essay.
26. The translation of the last clause is Toril Moi’s. The French reads: “cette verité constitue le fond sur lequel s’enlèvera toute autre affirmation.”
27. From “Une interview de Simone de Beauvoir par Madeleine Chapsal” in Francis and Gontier, p. 385. My translation. For more on Beauvoir’s use of the word “situation” (situation in French), see chapters 5 through 7.
28. La Force des Choses, 1:257. My translation.
2. I AM A WOMAN, THEREFROM I THINK: THE SECOND SEX AND THE MEDITATIONS
1. Francis and Gontier, p. 471. My translation. This is part of a speech Beauvoir delivered in Japan in 1966. An English translation of this speech appears under the title “Women and Creativity” in French Feminist Thought, edited by Toril Moi, pp. 17–32.
2. The French reads: “Un grand cri rageur, la révolte d’une âme blessée, ils l’auraient accueilli avec une condescendance émue; ne me pardonnant pas mon objectivité, [mes lecteurs masculins] feignaient de ne pas y croire. Par exemple, je m’en pris à une phrase de Claude Mauriac parce qu’elle illustrait l’arrogance du premier sexe: ‘m’en veut-elle?’ s’est-il demandé. De rien: je n’en voulais qu’aux mots que je citais” (La Force des Choses 1:263–264).
3. See, e.g., A Pitch of Philosophy, especially chapter 1, “Philosophy and the Arrogation of Voice.”
4. This accusation drives, for example, Elizabeth Spelman’s “Simone de Beauvoir and Women: Just Who Does She Think ‘We’ Is?”
5. Toril Moi, whose command of the secondary literature on Beauvoir is unparalleled, reports that “the great majority of American feminists criticize Beauvoir for being male-identified in some way or other, and for failing to appreciate the virtues of women” (Simone de Beauvoir 182). In fact, despite a consensus that The Second Sex is the founding document of modern feminism, any number of commentators have criticized its depiction of women. The British writer Stevie Smith, for example, said of Beauvoir in an early review of the English translation of the book: “She has written an enormous book about women and it is soon clear that she does not like them, nor does she like being a woman” (602–603; this remark is quoted in Deirdre Bair’s introduction to the 1989 Vintage edition of The Second Sex, p. xiv). Mary Evans, a British sociologist and author of a well-known study on Beauvoir, now more than a dozen years old, has written that “whilst de Beauvoir claims that much of her work is concerned with the overall condition of women, she turns away from many of the issues which are central to women’s lives” (Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin 395). The idea that Beauvoir exalts men above women is also to be found in an influential book on feminist philosophy by Jean Grimshaw; see her Philosophy and Feminist Thinking, pp. 45–46.
6. In highlighting this important role that the female body plays in The Second Sex, I mean to take issue directly with those of Beauvoir’s contemporary readers who claim that Beauvoir undervalues women’s bodies, although I do not elaborate on this challenge here. For a different way of defending Beauvoir along these lines, see Debra Bergoffen’s argument in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir that the central philosophical achievement of The Second Sex is a reexamination and revalorization of sexual reciprocity. See also Moi’s powerful argument in What Is a Woman? (59–83) for the claim that Beauvoir’s understanding of the body as a “situation” is central to her achievements in The Second Sex. (In chapter 4 I briefly touch on Sartre’s use of this term and in chapters 5 through 7 I discuss its metamorphosis in Beauvoir’s writing from her early philosophical works through The Second Sex.)
7. Examples of feminist philosophers who are critical of Descartes, in addition to Susan Bordo, whose work I’m about to address, include Catharine MacKinnon (see especially chapter 5 of Toward a Feminist Theory of the State), Hilary Rose in Love, Power, and Knowledge, Jane Flax in “Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious,” and Genevieve Lloyd (see especially The Man of Reason, pp. 39–50).
8. Bordo’s essay, published in 1986, was distilled from a late draft of a larger project, published in book form the following year under the title
The Flight to Objectivity.
9. In painting this picture Bordo relies particularly heavily on the work of historian Owen Barfield.
10. The classic texts here are Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering and Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur. In using the words “in our culture” I mean simply to gesture at the fact that Chodorow and Dinnerstein take themselves not to be talking about immutable processes but about what happens to boys under certain social configurations.
11. “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought,” 444. Bordo borrows the phrase “drama of parturition” from José Ortega y Gasset’s Man and Crisis.
12. And why not the “female” anymore? The cosmos from which Renaissance man was separated is identified by Bordo as female. In what sense if any was it feminine? Why do men recreate the world as “masculine” and not as male? Bordo does not address these sorts of distinctions.
13. Here I do not mean to be implying that Descartes saw philosophy in these terms; this is, rather, a claim about Descartes’s legacy.
14. Bob Scharff, in commenting on an early version of this material, nicely summed up Bordo’s approach to Descartes in identifying it as uncritically “diagnostic” and pointing out its essential aversion to taking Descartes’s experience seriously (i.e., to a phenomenological approach to the Meditations).
15. For the biographical material in these paragraphs I am relying on chapter 1 of Bernard Williams’s Descartes. For Descartes’s correspondence with Elizabeth of Bohemia, see Andrea Nye, ed., The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to René Descartes.
16. For instance in the third meditation, on p. 27.
17. The question of what “able” is supposed to mean here is addressed later in this chapter.
18. Hatfield puts Descartes’s aspirations this way: “He was hoping to help the reader discover, through the process of meditation, a source of impersonal, objective judgments that lies hidden in the intellect. The meditator is to sift through his own experience until he arrives at that which compels assent, and thereby to discover what lies behind the possibility of universal agreement in such subject matters as mathematics and logic” (69–70).
19. As I shall argue at the end of chapter 7, Beauvoir’s conception of objectivity is remarkably close to the one I have attributed to Descartes. In the present chapter I am doing the groundwork to show that this resemblance is not just a mere coincidence. I should observe, however, pace correspondence with Bob Scharff, that this formal claim—the claim that objectivity can be seen as a form of subjectivity—leaves open the question not only of what subjectivity is (and here Beauvoir and Descartes will scarcely agree) but also of what sorts of things thinkers can or are likely to come to agree or disagree about.
20. The lines I’m about to cite are from the first and second meditations, pp. 12–23.
21. I am of course compressing the chain of reasoning in meditation 1 here, since the relationship between the dreaming and evil-demon arguments (and how they get overturned as the Meditations proceeds) is not directly relevant to my aims here.
22. The view that historians of philosophy have sorely underestimated the importance of the wax example in establishing Descartes’s interest in arguing for the epistemological primacy of the intellect over the imagination and the senses is made vivid and compelling in the work of John Carriero. See “The Second Meditation and the Essence of Mind.”
23. See chapter 3, especially n. 12, for more on Sartre’s interest as a young philosopher in Husserl’s work.
24. In the new wave of critical literature on Beauvoir that has appeared in the last ten years or so, one finds essay after essay aiming to position her philosophy pretty much exclusively in relation to that of Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. A common view is that Beauvoir is far less philosophically dependent on Sartre and much more indebted to Husserl or Merleau-Ponty than has been assumed. The proliferation of this view is understandable, given the astonishingly small amount of philosophical attention that Beauvoir’s writings were paid until the 1990s. My position, which it is a central goal of this project to express and support, is that identifying Beauvoir’s philosophical forebears and comrades is of less import than articulating her way of appropriating other philosophers’ work—a method, I claim, that develops from Beauvoir’s making her womanhood the subject of a philosophical investigation in The Second Sex.
25. For Sartre, of course. For more on Beauvoir’s attempts to play Sartre’s disciple, see chapter 5.
26. La Force de l’Age, pp. 253–254. My translation. This passage is to be found in the English translation of this book, The Prime of Life, on p. 178.
27. “La Femme et la Création,” in Francis and Gontier, p. 471. My translation. An English translation of this speech appears in Moi, French Feminist Thought, under the title “Women and Creativity”; the passage I quote here is to be found on pp. 28–29.
28. See chapter 1 for a more sustained discussion of this declaration.
29. Beauvoir makes the same point in a somewhat different way in the third volume of her autobiography: “Far from suffering from my femininity, I have, on the contrary, from the age of twenty on, accumulated the advantages of both sexes; after She Came to Stay, those around me treated me both as a writer, their peer in the masculine world, and as a woman; this was particularly noticeable in America; at the parties I went to, the wives all got together and talked to each other while I talked to the men, who nevertheless behaved toward me with greater courtesy than they did toward the members of their own sex. I was encouraged to write The Second Sex precisely because of this privileged position” (The Force of Circumstance 189).
30. I am hugely indebted to Stanley Cavell for helping me to word my intuitions in this section of this chapter. A central suggestion of his was that I anchor what follows in this discussion with the idea of Beauvoir’s question replacing or displacing that of Descartes. In suggesting a relationship between Beauvoir’s question and Descartes’s, I am fully mindful of the very different roles these questions play for each thinker. My goal is to use the displacement of Descartes’s question with Beauvoir’s as an emblem of her inheritance of and challenge to certain features of his—and thus the male mainstream’s—way of doing philosophy.
31. Treatise, p. 269.
32. See especially part 4, “Skepticism and the Problem of Others,” e.g., p. 437: “I said there is no general, everyday alternative to skepticism concerning other minds. Now I will say: I live my skepticism.”
33. I thank Bob Scharff for a detailed and very helpful set of comments on an early version of this chapter.
3. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY: A RENDERING OF HEGEL’S MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC
1. Beauvoir was the ninth woman—and the youngest person—ever to pass the French agrégation (the equivalent of achieving a Ph.D. in philosophy). For a discussion of the significance of these facts see chapter 2 of Toril Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir. See also Beauvoir’s own account of her becoming an accredited philosopher in the fourth book of her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.
2. I discuss Beauvoir’s denials that she had the wherewithal to do philosophy at greater length in chapter 2. In her lifetime Beauvoir published four more or less straightforwardly philosophical books, two of which (L’Existentialisme et la Sagesse des Nations [1948] and Privilèges (also published under the title Faut-il brûler Sade?[1955]) are collections of essays. Of Beauvoir’s two extended straightforwardly philosophical works, the more famous in this country, perhaps because it’s the only one of the four books fully translated into English, is The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947); the other is Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944). The Ethics and Pyrrhus are the focus of chapter 5.
3. The charge that Beauvoir lacked philosophical originality is almost always linked to her loyalty to Jean-Paul Sartre. The question of Beauvoir’s philosophical originality is one of the themes under discussion in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Margaret Simons, a collection of critical es
says mostly by philosophers. See my review of this volume in the feminist philosophical journal Hypatia.
4. Mary Evans, for example, criticizes Beauvoir for her “uncritical belief in what she describes as rationality, her negation and denial of various forms of female experience, and her tacit assumption that paid work and contraception are two keys to the absolute freedom of womankind,” all of which suggest that Beauvoir stands for “a set of values that place a major importance on living like a childless, rather singular, employed man” (in Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin, pp. 56–57). I discuss the issue of Beauvoir’s supposed “masculinism” in chapter 2.
5. One of the readers engaged by Columbia University Press to evaluate the manuscript of this book took me to task for my “continuous references to the arguments that Beauvoir is a mere echo of Sartre and to the claims that Beauvoir is not doing philosophy,” which, it was claimed, “dates the manuscript” since “these debates are no longer current.” This reader suggested that instead of situating myself “as someone who is saving Beauvoir from these attacks,” I should “acknowledge that Beauvoir has already been saved; that she has successfully been reclaimed by philosophers.” This is something that I cannot acknowledge, however, because of my sense both that the vast majority of philosophers, male and female, feminist and otherwise, continue not to take Beauvoir seriously and that this failure has to do at least in part with something internal to Beauvoir’s writing, so that the question of her status as a philosopher—like the question of the philosophical status of the writings of Nietzsche, or of the later Wittgenstein—will perpetually be an issue: a genuine appreciation of her philosophical significance will require continued fresh acts of appropriation of her work. It follows that I do not see myself as someone who is saving Beauvoir from attacks, although of course I find these attacks both regrettable and ungrounded—if not surprising.
6. Sartre refers to “Hegel’s failure” on, for example, p. 338 of Being and Nothingness. I discuss his use of this term at greater length in chapter 4.