by Nancy Bauer
7. Note that I am not claiming, as Richard Rorty does, that what’s valuable about such an idiom is (just) that it provides for political change. As I said in my discussion of Rorty in chapter 1, I’m all for political change. But the point I’m making here is that, as I read Beauvoir, she is attracted to those texts in the history of philosophy whose terms and concepts allow her to do her own philosophical work. (For the record, let me note again that perhaps no piece of philosophical writing, if I can identify Beauvoir’s magnum opus as such, has had a more massive and positive political impact than The Second Sex.)
8. There is a list of these works in n. 2 of the present chapter.
9. I thereby disappoint Ken Westphal, who is convinced that if I were to do so, I would see how uncannily The Second Sex maps on to Hegel’s Phenomenology.
10. The notes are published under the title Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel. The English translation of the notes was published in 1969 under the title Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.
11. The first volume of Hyppolite’s translation of the Phenomenology was published in 1939; the second in 1941. For more on the history of the reception of Hegel before and during this period, see Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence, especially p. 56; Vincent Descombes, especially chapter 1; and Judith Butler’s Subjects of Desire, especially chapter 2.
12. Being and Nothingness had begun to take shape in 1933–34, a year Sartre spent in Berlin studying the philosophy of Edmund Husserl at the French Institute. In Beauvoir’s notorious version of the story of Sartre’s first encounter with Husserlian phenomenology (in The Prime of Life, the second volume of her autobiography), we find Sartre turning “pale with emotion” as Raymond Aron, himself at the time studying Husserl at the French Institute, sang the master’s praises during a round of drinks: “You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” (112). Beauvoir reports that Sartre instantly went out to the Boulevard Saint-Michel and purchased a copy of Emmanuel Lévinas’s book on Husserl and soon after “took the necessary steps to succeed Aron at the French Institute.”
13. Prime of Life, p. 363.
14. The quotation is from Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence, p. 273, n. 16. For informed speculation on Beauvoir’s interest in Hegel, see Michèle Le Doeuff’s “Simone de Beauvoir: Falling into (Ambiguous) Line.”
15. Unless there is an indication to the contrary, quotations from the Phenomenology are from the Miller translation.
16. The fact that it’s not obvious what Hegel means by “moment” is treated as a philosophical opportunity, as we shall see later, by both Sartre and Beauvoir.
17. It’s tempting for anyone familiar with Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology to read these three moments as “dialectically” related. That is, one might be inclined to read the third moment as a product of the inherent tension between the first two: in primary self-consciousness the “I” is seen as independent and absolute; in secondary self-consciousness it’s seen to be dependent on independent objects; in tertiary self-consciousness this tension is negotiated and resolved. But even if something like this is right, there’s still the question of how to understand, as it were, just who this self-conscious being is and how the dialectic actually plays itself out. These are the interpretive issues that intrigue both Sartre and Beauvoir, albeit in (as I will argue) quite different ways.
18. I am grateful to Frederick Neuhouser for pointing out to me in conversation that my way of rendering this part of the dialectic is somewhat at odds with the—or at least a—standard reading of Hegel, in which the desire for objective self-certainty predates the encounter with the other self-consciousness. On the standard reading, what spurs this desire—or better, perhaps, what determines the form this desire takes—is the history of failure on the part of primary self-consciousness to satisfy its desires permanently. The satisfaction achieved after each individual act of consumption evanesces, which goads primary self-consciousness to desire the ultimate object—one, that is, whose satisfactions would never wane. On the reading I am offering, however (which, again, is the rendering of the dialectic I believe to be most suited to illuminating Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of it), primary self-consciousness does not yearn for anything other than its transient satisfactions until it encounters another self-conscious being. And I might as well confess that I am not sure where in Hegel’s text proponents of the standard reading find evidence for their interpretation. (But see n. 27 below.) I am very grateful for an extremely detailed set of comments on an early version of this chapter from Ken Westphal and hope he will forgive me for persisting in bucking this standard reading of Hegel’s conception of pre–self-conscious desire. (For Westphal’s own detailed views, see his Hegel’s Epistemological Realism.) I am encouraged in my iconoclasm by the highly suggestive work of Bill Bracken on desire and recognition; see his Becoming Subjects.
19. In chapter 4, I will argue that this wish actually governs Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel’s picture of self-consciousness
20. A main goal of chapter 7 is to support this claim.
21. Hegel’s word for what I’m calling “overcoming” is the famous aufheben, often translated as the neologistic word “sublate.” Most famously, the dialectical movement in the Phenomenology transpires according to Hegel via sublation, a process whereby a certain tension (between, say, a general theory and specific facts) is overcome, though the elements in tension are somehow preserved, in transformed form, precisely through this overcoming.
22. In chapters 5 through 7, I demonstrate how Beauvoir, in the wake of this gap, is struggling unsuccessfully in The Ethics of Ambiguity to show how what she identifies as genuinely moral human relationships are possible, a project that gets off the ground, in my view, only in The Second Sex. In any event, the idea that the outcome of the encounter with the other is, at best, ambiguous and that this ambiguity has important moral implications plays a central role in Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel.
23. The paradoxical nature of the mediating role of the other, who provides the only means for the objective confirmation of another being’s being-for-itself precisely through regarding that being as an object, will also predominate in Beauvoir’s (but not Sartre’s) appropriation of the dialectic.
24. Kojève, Introduction, p. 12. This English translation by James Nichols matches Kojève’s French practically word for word.
25. I was tempted in writing what follows to use male pronouns to denote the master and female pronouns to denote the slave for three reasons: (1) for clarity’s sake; (2) because the terms “master” and “slave” are metaphors borrowed by Hegel from actual human relationships, so that calling either figure an “it” at this stage would be jarring—which may be why Hegel begins using the personal pronoun (“he,” exclusively, of course) at this juncture; and (3) to anticipate Beauvoir’s appropriation of the dialectic. At heart, of course, I was faced with the usual problem of how to use third-person pronouns in what was supposed (by me, if not by Hegel) to be a sex-neutral context. But to address this problem by sexing the slave female would be in effect to deny exactly what I claimed in chapter 2 is Beauvoir’s ground-breaking intervention in the philosophical tradition, an intervention, I meant and mean to suggest, that implies that (as I have put it) we cannot understand the word “man”—or masculine pronouns—in philosophy apart from bringing ourselves to address the question of what a woman is. (That I was tempted to overlook my own discovery—to suppose that I knew what I was talking about in judging Hegel’s context “sex-neutral” and that merely making some pronoun switches is enough to render a context sex-neutral is—I hope—a sign of just how hard it is to appropriate the work of Beauvoir.) Therefore, in what follows of my rendering of Hegel (which, again, is supposed to be just a rendering) I use masculine pronouns to denote both the master and the slave.
26. This idea of the morally advantageous position of the slave is, as I’ve already mentioned, i
mportant for Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel. For Sartre, on the other hand, I will claim, what’s of interest in the master-slave dialectic culminates in the idea of a fight to the death between two subjectively self-certain beings, so that he sees no need to concern himself with the dialectic from this point on. This means that for him the question of which position, master or slave, is morally advantageous doesn’t even arise. In stopping before this morally momentous section of the master-slave dialectic—before the most dramatic exercise of freedom—Sartre misses what’s most compelling, even by his own standards, in Hegel’s depiction of a being’s struggle to find a measure of stability in its conception of itself as being-for-itself. I have much more to say about these matters in chapter 4.
27. Perhaps Hegel’s use of the concept of permanence here is what encourages supporters of the standard reading I referred to in n. 18 above.
28. This is of course the moment of the master-slave dialectic that will most excite and exercise the young Marx, who will use it to develop his view that labor is at the heart of our “species-being” and to denounce the abstractness of Hegel’s formulation of this insight. See, e.g., his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” especially the section entitled “Estranged Labor.” (See Tucker, pp. 66–125.)
29. The French is esclavage.
4. THE CONDITIONS OF HELL: SARTRE ON HEGEL
1. This way of phrasing things—and it’s not unique in this respect—is no doubt traceable to Heidegger, whose influence on Sartre’s way of appropriating the master-slave dialectic, while central, is also beyond the scope of my project.
2. Why this is so—why “vice” and “curiosity” have dropped out of the picture as motives—is a question I’ll address later in this chapter.
3. I will follow the conventions of Sartre’s translator, Hazel Barnes, in capitalizing his term “Other” and both italicizing and capitalizing his term “Ego.” These conventions will be useful in distinguishing Sartre’s notion of “other” from Hegel’s and his notion of “ego” from Freud’s.
4. Here, of course, Sartre is piggybacking on Heidegger’s conception of authenticity in Being and Time. For more on the relationship between Sartre’s conception of shame and Heidegger’s conception of guilt, see the following note.
5. Anyone familiar with Being and Time will notice Sartre’s pointed indebtedness to Heidegger in this passage, especially in the direct borrowing, so to speak, of the idea that human beings are primordially “fallen.” (Heidegger will go out of his way to deny the association of being fallen with the biblical myth of Adam and Eve—but it is a complicated denial.) What distinguishes Sartre’s view from Heidegger’s is not only his substitution of the concept of shame for Heidegger’s guilt (Schuld) but, more relevantly for my purposes, his insistence that to be “fallen” is not only to be “thrown” à la Being and Time into a particular life situation but also to “need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am.” For Sartre, in effect, every encounter with the Other is an encounter with what Heidegger calls das Man, the “they”: it is not just that I am seduced, as Heidegger puts it, by das Man but that I recognize myself to be the object that I am in the Other’s—any Other’s—eyes. Like Sartre, Beauvoir will resist Heidegger’s efforts to banish the subject-object duality from our ontology. But, as I will argue in chapters 5 through 7, she will in effect make a philosophical career of denying that the Other’s mediating role in my being what I am must take the form of degradation, fixedness, or dependence.
6. While my goal in discussing Sartre’s views in this detail is to contrast the pessimism and even paranoiac qualities of his views with the optimism and hope of Beauvoir’s, it would be perverse of me to fail to acknowledge the interest of much of what Sartre says about love. It strikes me that the paradox Sartre identifies here is a close cousin of the one Groucho Marx hit upon in his old line about not wanting to be a member of any club that would want him as a member; in both instances, a certain familiar horror of suffocation, automatism, and lack of recognition is evoked.
7. Sartre refers on p. 491 to what he calls “the triple destructibility of love.” I have just rehearsed the first and, to my mind, most compelling argument Sartre adduces in support of his view that (what he calls) love “holds … the seeds of its own destruction” (491). This first argument, to be more specific, is the only one that concerns itself with what is internal to Sartre’s depiction of the love relationship. The other two arguments have to do with contingent circumstances, and I’ll therefore just mention them here. The second reason love is bound to fail, Sartre says, is that I am always conscious of the fact that at any moment the Other may stop loving me and may regard me, again, as just another object in his universe. And the third reason that love is unstable as a relation with others (a reason Sartre discusses at some length on pp. 490–491) is that if my lover and I are the object of a third person’s Look then my lover (and myself) are once again instantly fixed as objects, in the eyes of all three of us.
8. See the example of the homosexual (an example any contemporary person of decent sensibilities will now find problematic, to say the least) on pp. 107–108.
9. In 1983, three years after Sartre’s death, his adopted daughter, Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, published two of the twelve Notebooks for an Ethics that Sartre worked on from roughly 1947–48 (not coincidentally, as we shall see, the period during which Beauvoir was beginning to write The Second Sex). For an interesting discussion of the Notebooks in relation to Being and Nothingness, see Thomas Anderson’s Sartre’s Two Ethics, especially chapters 2 through 5.
10. Because the locus of objectivity isn’t always in me, it follows, as Sartre is eager throughout Being and Nothingness to insist, that his picture is not strictly speaking solipsistic, in the way that his teacher Husserl’s system (as articulated in, e.g., Cartesian Meditations) is often thought to be.
11. The other important text of this period is the novel Nausea, in which Sartre explores the epistemological ramifications of his metaphysics. While, as will be seen, these ramifications are far from irrelevant to my purposes, the play No Exit is more pertinent to my central task of trying to understand Sartre’s take on Hegel. The explicit philosophical underpinnings of both of these literary works are amply developed in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s earlier philosophical works, most of which were either polemics against his teacher Husserl’s way of doing phenomenology (especially in Cartesian Meditations) or incipient attempts to lay out a philosophical psychology grounded in a radical rejection of Freud’s idea of the unconscious are, as it were, dialectically incorporated or otherwise sublated in Being and Nothingness. These early works include The Transcendence of the Ego, The Emotions, and The Psychology of Imagination.
12. The English translation of Huis clos (which is an expression meaning “closed door” and is used almost exclusively to refer to “in camera” juridical proceedings) strays rather far from Sartre’s prose in its attempt to make his characters believable to an English-speaking audience. While the drama of the play is magnificently rendered in the English version, the translation’s lack of literalness poses a problem for anyone interested in Sartre’s specific word choices. I therefore modify the translation as needed and indicate when I am so doing. In this passage I make a simple change in punctuation: the translator’s final ellipsis is replaced by Sartre’s period.
13. That the eye is an enormously important symbol for Sartre is evidenced not only in Being and Nothingness, in which, of course, it is the instrument of “the Look,” but also in numerous scenes in No Exit, as when Estelle reminds Garcin, “You will be under my eyes constantly” (77), or Inès accuses Estelle of needing “the desire of a man in the eyes of a man” (84), or Inès taunts Garcin by declaring, “I am nothing but the look that sees you” (91), or Garcin refers to “all these looks that eat me up” (93; all citations from the French and all my translation).
14. There is no doubt that the task of proving that something—specifically, one’
s very sense of oneself—is not a dream is a reference to Descartes in the Meditations. I discuss a further connection between Cartesian skepticism and Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel later in this chapter.
15. My translation of Sartre’s response to a question posed to him in an interview as quoted in Contat and Rybalka, pp. 238–239, and in Noudelmann, pp. 194–196.
16. I would not be displeased were this account also to suggest certain connections between Freud’s work and that of Hegel; but on this front I will pretty much let Freud’s text speak for itself. Moi also finds Freud’s “On Narcissism” useful in understanding what she calls “the primary structuring fantasy” of Being and Nothingness; see Simone de Beauvoir, p. 105.
17. Much has been made, especially in the wake of Jacques Lacan’s readings of Freud’s work (see, e.g., Lacan’s Seminar, book 1, pp. 129–142), of the somewhat confusing use Freud makes in “On Narcissism” of the terms “ego ideal” and “ideal ego,” an example of which is to be found in the passage from “On Narcissism” I’m about to cite. For my purposes, exploring this distinction is beside the point; and for simplicity’s sake I will consistently use the term “ideal ego.”
18. This set of ideas evolves in Freud’s work in the decade or so following “On Narcissism” into the concept of the superego. See, e.g., the second chapter of The Ego and the Id (1923).
19. Freud adds, provocatively enough for my purposes: “The complaints made by paranoiacs also show that at bottom the self-criticism of conscience coincides with the self-observation on which it is based. Thus the activity of the mind which has taken over the function of conscience has also placed itself at the service of internal research, which furnishes philosophy with the material for its intellectual operations. This may have some bearing on the characteristic tendency of paranoiacs to construct speculative systems” (96).