by Nancy Bauer
20. For Sartre’s polemic against Freud and his attempt to develop an alternative psychoanalysis, see, e.g., Existential Psychoanalysis and also pp. 727ff. of Being and Nothingness (section 2 [ “‘Doing’ and ‘Having’: Possession”] of chapter 2 [“Doing and Having”] of part 4 [“Having, Doing, and Being”]).
21. Sartre explicitly makes such a connection between the Look and the cogito. See, e.g., p. 376: “What the cogito reveals to us here is just factual necessity: it is found—and this is indisputable—that our being along with its being-for-itself is also for-others; the being which is revealed to the reflective consciousness is for-itself-for-others. The Cartesian cogito only makes an affirmation of the absolute truth of a fact—that of my existence. In the same way the cogito, a little expanded as we are using it here, reveals to us as a fact the existence of the Other and my existence for the Other.”
22. The idea that we ought to take seriously Descartes’s fear of madness and to link it with his expression of skepticism is articulated and studied throughout Stanley Cavell’s philosophical work. See e.g., “Being Odd, Getting Even” and part 2 of The Claim of Reason.
23. In another context, in fact, I would be inclined to flesh out this claim by contrasting the abstract inexorability of Being and Nothingness with the political grounding of certain of Sartre’s later pieces of writing. I would like to imagine, of course, that the shift I’m positing in Sartre’s understanding of how to do philosophy had much to do with his appreciation of Beauvoir’s philosophical achievements in The Second Sex.
5. READING BEAUVOIR READING HEGEL: PYRRHUS ET CINÉAS AND THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY
1. Robert D. Cottrell in his book on Beauvoir provides another example of this reading. What he calls “the two slender postulates” on which the “mammoth edifice” that is The Second Sex rests “are enunciated in the introduction and are derived from concepts elaborated by Sartre in L’Etre et le Néant, a book to which Beauvoir frequently refers as if to a sacred text whose validity and authority no right thinking person could question. ‘The perspective I am adopting,’ she announces at the end of the introduction, ‘is that of existentialist ethics’” (95).
2. It is of course true that Sartre often alludes in Being and Nothingness to the fundamental absurdity of our lives. This implies that the idea that we are not “justified” is at the heart of his philosophy. But my point is that Sartre is not interested in the problem, as it were, of justification; and he certainly does not make justification a central issue in his early work. Beauvoir, on the other hand, is centrally concerned with this problem in both Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity. (My thanks to Ken Westphal for encouraging me to address this matter here.)
3. Toril Moi also interprets Beauvoir’s use of the term “existentialist ethics” as signaling Beauvoir’s investment in her own earlier works, particularly The Ethics of Ambiguity. See Simone de Beauvoir, pp. 148–150ff.
4. Céline T. Léon, in “Beauvoir’s Woman,” for example, argues that “not only does Beauvoir take her cues directly from Sartre’s nauseous distaste of a world whose grasp eludes him, but she indirectly accepts as given the binarities [sic] of Oedipal culture—man/woman, activity/passivity, culture/nature. Notwithstanding all protestations to the contrary, her desire remains based on a lack, a stasis, and she never moves away from the cultural stereotypes she attacks” (145–146).
5. For essays tracing Beauvoir’s thought to that of Husserl, see Karen Vintges, “The Second Sex and Philosophy,” and Eleanore Holveck, “Can a Woman Be a Philosopher?” For those tracing her thought to Merleau-Ponty’s, see Sonia Kruks, “Simone de Beauvoir” and Kristana Arp, “Beauvoir’s Concept of Bodily Alienation.” I discuss the tendency to link Beauvoir’s name with those of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in a somewhat different light in chapter 2.
6. Le Doeuff, “Simone de Beauvoir: Falling into (Ambiguous) Line,” p. 64. All Le Doeuff quotations in this section are from this source. In a recent book whose relative popularity reveals just how much work remains to be done in the difficult task of judging the relationship of The Second Sex to the work of Sartre, Kate and Edward Fullbrook write from the bafflingly illogical stance that a condition of Beauvoir’s being an original thinker must be her having invented Sartrean existentialism; and they try to show how all the important points from Sartre’s one-thousand-page book are captured in the first sixteen pages of L’Invitée, from which they claim Sartre shamelessly stole on his leaves from the war.
7. See La Force des Choses, 1:98; see Force of Circumstance, 1:67. Quoted in Le Doeuff, “Simone de Beauvoir: Falling into (Ambiguous) Line,” p. 64.
8. Bergoffen, “Out from Under: Beauvoir’s Philosophy of the Erotic,” p. 185. All quotations of Bergoffen in this section are from this source. This material is developed in Bergoffen’s book The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir.
9. I discuss Bergoffen’s understanding of Beauvoir’s work in The Second Sex as a “philosophy of the erotic” in somewhat more depth in chapter 7.
10. I thank Frederick Neuhouser, as well as Steven Affeldt, Bill Bracken, Bill Bristow, Paul Franks, Arata Hamawaki, and Katalin Makkai for the excellent suggestions they gave me for the improvement of this chapter.
11. All translations are my own. This opening exchange between Pyrrhus and Cineas is from p. 10.
12. It is tempting to see the Beauvoir of Pyrrhus et Cinéas as in effect attempting to act out this very fantasy vis-à-vis Sartre. That Beauvoir would have been horrified at this possibility is one measure of the philosophical shortcomings of Pyrrhus et Cinéas, which I will characterize below in rather different terms.
13. See, e.g., the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, especially the second section.
14. I agree with Eva Lundgren-Gothlin (over and against Sara Heinämaa, for one), that The Second Sex is deeply indebted to Being and Time, although of course I have not made Beauvoir’s relationship to Heidegger a central subject of this book. See Lundgren-Gothlin’s “Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Phenomenology and Philosophy of History in Le Deuxième Sexe” and my “Being-with as Being-against: Heidegger Meets Hegel in The Second Sex.”
15. The concept of the appel is a central one for Heidegger, particularly in Being and Time. In unpublished work, Lundgren-Gothlin has written suggestively about the notion of the call or the appeal as Beauvoir uses it in The Second Sex. As Moi has pointed out to me in private correspondence, Sartre recurs to the concept of the appel in his book Qu’est-ce que la Littérature (What Is Literature?) published in 1948, i.e., at the time Beauvoir was working on The Second Sex. Here, in marked distinction to his conceptualization of the ontology of human relations, Sartre claims that “to write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language. … The writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of the work.” I have more to say about the congruity between Sartre’s understanding of writing as something of a conversation and Beauvoir’s understanding of reciprocity (including the reciprocity between a writer and reader) at the end of chapter 7.
16. After reading a draft of this chapter, Paul Franks and Bill Bristow reported to me their sense of a remarkable affinity between Beauvoir’s conception of our actions as “appeals” to the Other and Fichte’s understanding of human action as “summons” or “invitation.” Franks in particular suggested that it’s as though Fichte is being rediscovered through Beauvoir via Sartre via Hegel.
17. Obviously, some situations that I have a hand in bringing about will not be, or be seen as, mine. But one needn’t take on the hoary topic of intentionality in action, or even of responsibility, in order to appreciate the basic point I’m attributing to Beauvoir here: that human beings are sensitive to the way in which the things they do are subject to the objectifying judgment of other people.
18. This is also Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel. See, e.g., his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the first volume of Eith
er-Or, the first part of Stages on Life’s Way, and Fear and Trembling.
19. Of course, a work’s unraveling of itself needn’t take the form of a certain self-accusation; I, for one, read both J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as hugely philosophically productive exercises in reductio ad absurdum. But in both of these instances, I would argue, the undoing of a certain kind of philosophy is meant to have a therapeutic effect, as if to drop scales from our eyes. No reader of Pyrrhus, however, would make such a claim on its behalf.
20. See the later parts of this chapter as well as chapter 6 for a discussion of this self-criticism.
21. The only one of these essays ever published in English is “Œil pour Œil,” which appeared under the title “Eye for Eye” in the journal Politics in 1947. See Francis and Gontier for an excellent annotated bibliography of Beauvoir’s writings through 1979.
22. The question was posed by Deirdre Bair. See Simone de Beauvoir, pp. 269–270.
23. See, e.g., pp. 104–105 of Ethics.
24. The Ethics of Ambiguity, pp. 17–18. I will occasionally take the liberty of modifying certain passages in the English translation. In such cases, I will as usual use the abbreviation “TM” to indicate that I have done so, and I will reference the appropriate pages in the original French (in this case, p. 26).
25. I’m using capitalization here, even though neither Beauvoir nor the translator of the Ethics do, to highlight the fact that these categories are supposed to constitute types of people.
26. See chapter 4 for a brief discussion of Sartre’s remarks on love.
27. An example: In trying to show that there are “two ways of surpassing the given,” one amounting to a rebellion against limitations on human freedom and the other constituting a mere change of scenery, Beauvoir says: “Hegel has confused these two movements with the ambiguous term ‘aufheben’; and the whole structure of an optimism which denies failure and death rests on this ambiguity; that is what allows one to regard the future of the world as a continuous and harmonious development; this confusion is the source and also the consequence; it is a perfect epitome of that idealistic and verbose flabbiness with which Marx charged Hegel and to which he opposed a realistic toughness” (84).
28. I recall Vintges’s alluding to Beauvoir’s discussion of women in the Ethics in her Philosophy as Passion, although I cannot now find the exact passage, which failure perhaps confirms my recollection that Vintges, too, finds this discussion not to be particularly noteworthy.
29. It is in a section of Being and Nothingness called “Freedom and Facticity: The Situation” that Sartre implies that “being-a-Jew” is not a situation, that it is, indeed, “nothing outside the free manner of adopting it” (677). (I discuss this remark briefly in chapter 4.) It’s also in this section that he defines the “situation” as something that’s unique from person to person: “There is no absolute point of view which one can adopt so as to compare different situations; each person realizes only one situation—his own” (703). Here are two quotations from the part of Beauvoir’s autobiography in which she discusses certain tensions between Sartre’s views and her own: “I remembered how once I had said to Olga [a close friend of hers and of Sartre’s] that there was no such thing as ‘a Jew,’ there were only human beings: how head-in-the-clouds I had been!” (Prime of Life 366); and “[Sartre and I] discussed certain specific problems, in particular the relationship between ‘situation’ and freedom. I maintained that from the angle of freedom as Sartre defined it … not every situation was equally valid: what sort of transcendence could a woman shut up in a harem achieve? Sartre replied that even such a cloistered existence could be lived in several quite different ways. I stuck to my point for a long time, and in the end made only a token submission. Basically I was right. But to defend my attitude I should have had to abandon the plane of individual, and therefore idealistic, morality on which we had set ourselves” (Prime of Life 346).
30. I am grateful, once again, to Steven Affeldt, Bill Bracken, Bill Bristow, Paul Franks, Arata Hamawaki, and Katalin Makkai for getting me to see the irony in Beauvoir’s allegiance to Sartre in her early philosophical work.
6. THE SECOND SEX AND THE MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC
1. Judith Butler, in “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” credits Beauvoir for inventing the idea of a radical distinction between (biological) sex and (constructed) gender. This credit is not exactly a form of praise. See Moi, What Is a Woman?, pp. 30–57 for a helpful assessment of Butler’s fateful reading of Beauvoir. For essays accusing Beauvoir of an insidious reliance on biology in her definition of womanhood, see, e.g., both Charlene Haddock Seigfried, “Second Sex, Second Thoughts,” and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, “The Female Vagabond and the Male Mind.”
2. Karen Vintges attributes the mass of facts and details in The Second Sex to Beauvoir’s interest in existential phenomenology—that is, to the philosophical methods of (in particular) Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and, of course, Sartre, methods Vintges claims are inspired by what she calls “Hegel’s empirical phenomenology of history” (Philosophy as Passion 142; and see all of chapter 9). Put in simple terms, phenomenologists work from the inside out: they start from their experience and work from it to philosophical insights. Vintges understands Beauvoir in The Second Sex to be starting with women’s experience, particularly her own; “us[ing] elements from the thinking of various philosophers”; and then “systematiz[ing] them into a specific theoretical perspective, a reconciliation of existentialism and ethics” (146). My project might be seen as an attempt to specify what exactly “systematization” and “reconciliation” come to in The Second Sex and why one might find Beauvoir’s method of philosophical appropriation to have its own interest, both feminist and philosophical. (I note here, too, that Vintges and I agree that the standard reading of Beauvoir’s relationship to Hegel, on which she just maps relations between men and women onto the master-slave dialectic is untenable. In Vintges’s words, “Beauvoir’s theory deviates on essential points from the Hegelian system.” Vintges further observes, quite astutely, that the feminist standpoint theory that developed in the wake of The Second Sex has been driven in many of its incarnations by exactly the sort of clichéd Hegelian picture that both she and I fail to find in Beauvoir’s work.)
3. I would argue that Beauvoir’s first published novel, L’Invitée (1943, i.e., six years before the appearance of The Second Sex), also suffers from what I have identified here as a lack of grounding in the ordinary. Beauvoir in effect simply places her central characters, Françoise and Xavière, in a theory-driven, book-long Sartrean-style fight to the death: incredibly, Françoise actually kills Xavière at the end. (The fight that leads to Xavière’s demise is in fact so Sartrean that Kate and Edward Fullbrook were inspired to convince themselves that Beauvoir beat Sartre, who was simultaneously working on Being and Nothingness to the existentialist punch; see their Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.) In a chapter on L’Invitée in her book Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi proposes that “if L’Invitée is a melodramatic novel [as she thinks it is], it is above all because existentialism is a melodramatic philosophy” (99). My slightly different view is that the melodrama of L’Invitée is a product of Beauvoir’s not yet having found a way to square her desire to chronicle the everyday with her investment in the philosophical ideas she is just beginning to explore in her novel—and especially those she inherits from Hegel, who supplies its epigraph: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.” See Moi’s Simone de Beauvoir, chapter 4. For Beauvoir’s own later criticism of the “contrived” nature (in Beauvoir’s words) of L’Invitée, see The Prime of Life, pp. 268–274).
4. This is one of the many places in which the extent of my debt to Toril Moi is difficult to acknowledge adequately. Having come back to The Second Sex for the first time since I had started my philosophical training, I was overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of Hegel f
or Beauvoir but also was disconcerted by the relative paucity of work on the Hegelian aspects of The Second Sex. When Moi learned of my interest in the subject, she asked Eva Lundgren-Gothlin to send me the page proofs for the English translation of Sex and Existence, still at the time available only in Swedish. I found the two chapters Lundgren-Gothlin generously sent me, one called “Hegel and Kojève” and the other “The Master-Slave Dialectic in The Second Sex,” enormously galvanizing, and I am deeply grateful to her for allowing me an advance look at this work. In the time since I began work on the present chapter, not only Sex and Existence but also two other serious philosophical studies of Beauvoir, by Vintges and Bergoffen, have appeared. The latter two books both acknowledge Beauvoir’s interest in Hegel, although his place in her thinking does not play an especially prominent role in either work.
5. In fact, what Lundgren-Gothlin says in spelling out what it means to enter into the dialectic is that women have neither demanded recognition nor participated in work. But on the rendering of Hegel that I provided in chapter 3, participating in work is not a prerequisite, per se, for “entering into” the dialectic, although it is necessary for its progression (and self-surpassing). Still, I agree with Lundgren-Gothlin that part of Beauvoir’s appropriation of the dialectic involves the way in which she construes both the need for women to work and indeed what “work” will mean in this context.
6. Lundgren-Gothlin helpfully cites several examples of critical essays insisting that Beauvoir’s Hegel is Sartre’s and that this is a problem with The Second Sex. See pp. 275–276, n. 2.
7. This idea of reciprocal recognition, while obviously signaling the influence of Hegel is, Lundgren-Gothlin claims, “mediated via the French tradition of Hegelianism, and particularly by the interpretation of Kojève” (67). My rendering of the master-slave dialectic in chapter 3 is of course predicated on the same claim. Lundgren-Gothlin herself provides a rendering of the dialectic in “Hegel and Kojève,” chapter 3 of her book Sex and Existence.