Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  8. In order to get to the part of this paragraph I am most interested in highlighting, I am here deleting two or three more of Beauvoir’s examples of how people have regarded the “foreign,” “different,” “native,” etc., as “others,” as well as an appeal to Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

  9. This is Heidegger’s signature term for the idea, to put it crudely, that a basic fact about what it is to be a human being is that one is “with” other human beings. Beauvoir’s investment in the concept of Mitsein, which appears repeatedly throughout The Second Sex demands further study from those who care about their work. Lundgren-Gothlin, in “Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Phenomenology,” makes a valuable start on this project; she argues that Beauvoir’s concept of ambiguity turns on her appropriation of Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein and of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit). See also my “Being-with as Being-against: Heidegger Meets Hegel in The Second Sex.”

  10. The verb se poser, which I’m rendering “to pose,” is the French cognate of the German sich setzen, ordinarily translated in English as “self-positing.” Sich setzen is the term coined by Fichte—and appropriated by Hegel—to describe the distinctive activity of subjectivity. This implies that one of the questions about what it is to “pose” as a subject is a question about how Beauvoir’s se poser is to be read against Hegel’s sich setzen. I am grateful to Frederick Neuhouser for alerting me to this implication, which is obviously centrally relevant to my project of exploring Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s writing.

  11. I am for the moment postponing certain obvious questions here, among them those about what it is to “pose” as a subject, how claims to recognition are lodged, and what recognition and reciprocity look like.

  12. Beauvoir uses the lowercase (“other”) to denote the nonabsolute or relative other and the uppercase (“Other”) to denote the absolute other—i.e., to denote woman.

  13. See, e.g., Lundgren-Gothlin’s argument on pp. 71–74 of Sex and Existence.

  14. In a note to this passage (276, n. 7), Lundgren-Gothlin provides a list of scholars who argue that in The Second Sex Beauvoir suggests that woman plays slave to man’s master. There is plenty of evidence in The Second Sex for Lundgren-Gothlin’s claim that Beauvoir characterizes women as acknowledging men’s claims for recognition without a struggle. One need look no further than the beginning of part 3 of the first book of The Second Sex, entitled “Myths,” in which, as Lundgren-Gothlin puts it, “the basic elements of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in Kojève’s interpretation are recapitulated” (69). It is in these pages, for example, that Beauvoir warns that “to assimilate the woman to the slave is an error. There were women among the slaves, but there have always been women who are free, that is to say, invested with a religious and social dignity. They accepted the sovereignty of the man and he did not feel threatened (menacé) by a revolt that could transform him in his turn into an object. The woman thus appeared as the inessential who never turns back (retourne) into the essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity” (141, TM; LDS 1:239).

  15. The reference to “existentialist ethics” occurs on p. xxxiv; the other quotation, the translation of which I have modified, on p. xxxv (LDS 1:31). I discuss Beauvoir’s use of the phrase “existentialist ethics” in chapter 5.

  16. A number of Beauvoir’s critics in recent years have vigorously denied that her depiction of these variations is adequate, and they have faulted her, specifically, for what they regard as her white, middle-class, Eurocentric bias, a bias they say casts serious doubts on her claim that we can talk about a single and singular “woman’s” situation. This criticism rests largely on an underinterpreted—that is, insufficiently philosophical—conception of what Beauvoir means by “situation.” If you take the view that in surveying women’s lives from prehistory to the present Beauvoir aspires (and must aspire) to prove via empirical evidence that all cultures have certain concrete elements in common, then of course she will appear not only exclusionary (since needless to say she doesn’t discuss all cultures) but even a bit mad—which may be why this criticism is frequently linked with the suggestion that Beauvoir is in some fundamental way out of control of her writing in this text. Again, if you imagine that her bearings are largely empirical, you will be exercised by book 2 of The Second Sex, in which Beauvoir takes a more finegrained look at women’s (present-day) lived experience; you will say—and it is often said by her critics—that Beauvoir leaves out certain kinds of experience and particularly the experience of poor women and women of color. For the record, my view, which it is not my purpose to document here, is that given that The Second Sex was written fifty years ago Beauvoir is almost unbelievably sensitive to the variety of experiences that women have had throughout history. But, again, if you construe her as trying to make an empirical point about similarities among women’s lives, then you predestine yourself to find what she’s doing inadequate—as you would find the Meditations seriously problematic if you thought that Descartes were trying to doubt all of his knowledge through empirical means alone, on a case-by-case basis. A representative instance of the kind of criticism of Beauvoir I’ve been contesting in this paragraph is to be found in Spelman’s “Simone de Beauvoir and Women.”

  17. That there is a further specification of what Beauvoir means by “relationship of reciprocity”—namely, the idea that it is something that can be marked by friendship or hostility and that in any event is “always in tension”—will be discussed later in the present chapter.

  18. Not surprisingly, then, Lundgren-Gothlin spends a good deal of time on this passage, as will I. Occasionally, I will discuss variations in our responses to it. The passage is to be found in The Second Sex on pp. 139–141 and in Le Deuxième Sexe in volume 1, on pp. 237–239. Most paragraph breaks are mine; I will signal the exceptions in notes. Beauvoir’s paragraphs in The Second Sex are uncharacteristically long, and they also manifest her (this time characteristic) fondness for connecting lots of clauses with semicolons. (These features alone go a long way in accounting for many readers’ sense of the book as messy and unwieldy, but also “breathlessly exciting,” as Elizabeth Hardwick puts it [49].) In the long quotation that follows, I have transformed most of Beauvoir’s clauses into sentences, and I have inserted paragraph breaks into what is a two-page opening paragraph in the original text.

  19. In French as in English, the word for “man” can be used to denote both sexes. I have chosen to use male pronouns here, both for simplicity’s sake and because in Beauvoir’s view women, insofar as they are women (and what I mean by this will become clearer in the following pages), largely have not participated in the processes Beauvoir is describing.

  20. I should perhaps use the pronoun “it” instead of “her” to denote “Nature”: Beauvoir would use the pronoun elle here regardless of the point she’s trying to make, since the French word for “nature” takes the feminine article. On my interpretation of what Beauvoir is trying to do in this passage this coincidence is fortuitous since, as we shall see shortly, she goes suggest that men harbor fantasies about appropriating women in the wake of the dissatisfaction and disappointment they experience as a result of their failure to appropriate “Nature” successfully.

  21. The phrase “the unhappy consciousness” (which, in a typical instance of the severe shortcomings of the English translation of The Second Sex, is rendered “the unfortunate human consciousness” by the hapless translator Parshley) of course comes right out of Hegel’s Phenomenology. As the master-slave dialectic develops, the slave figure becomes conscious of the conflict between his inherent ontological freedom as a thinking subject (the truth of his being “for-itself”) and his quotidian status as a worker (his tmaterial life as “in-itself”). His consciousness of this conflict produces the “unhappy consciousness,” a state of mind or spirit in which the slave is, in Robert Pippin’s words, “unable to accept the status of its relation to the world and others, and unable to rest conte
nt with its mere ability to demonstrate to itself the unsatisfactory character of its status” (Hegel’s Idealism 165). What Beauvoir is describing, then, is an inner conflict, the origin and resolution of which, as she will shortly suggest, is the encounter between self and other.

  22. Even Lundgren-Gothlin misses this idea; she claims that what Beauvoir says is that reciprocity requires “recognition of one another as subjects in friendship and generosity” (my emphasis).

  23. This astute translation of se surmonte is Lundgren-Gothlin’s.

  24. Too, it ought to be obvious that in the background of this idea lies the Hegelian conception of what’s unsatisfying for self-consciousness about the mere consumption of Nature.

  25. I’m about to quote what constitutes for Beauvoir the second paragraph of the “Myths” section of The Second Sex; this is where she puts the first paragraph break, in other words, of this section. I will here divide this second paragraph into two. For more on my splitting up of Beauvoir’s paragraphs in the long passage I have been examining, see n. 18 above.

  26. Until further notice, all quotations from Lundgren-Gothlin are from p. 74 of her text.

  27. In chapter 7 I explore Beauvoir’s grounds for the claim that woman is basically an existent who gives Life and does not risk her own life.

  28. The verb “redouter,” meaning to fear or dread, carries overtones of awe; one might use it, for example, to speak of fear of one’s boss, or of God.

  29. Quotations from Lundgren-Gothlin in the present paragraph are from p. 75 of Sex and Existence.

  30. Lundgren-Gothlin appears not to be taking account of this fact when she writes that woman “has never been an enslaved equal, but has always been an Other.”

  31. One can intuit that in those centuries in which the master treated the slave as an absolute Other, the slave was also an object of fear for the master. Then the question would become: Why and how did the institution of slavery give way for the most part, while the institution, as it were, of misogyny did not? Addressing this question is a central task of chapter 7 of this book.

  7. THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF IN THE SECOND SEX

  1. Parshley’s translation of these last sentences of the “History” section of book 1 of The Second Sex is particularly egregious. Where Beauvoir claims that woman sees and chooses herself [se choisit] not “en tant qu’elle existe pour soi,” Parshley writes that she does so not “in accordance with her true nature in itself”—which is of course the opposite of what Beauvoir means to say. Then when Beauvoir says that we have to go on to describe the way men have dreamed women because “son être-pour-les-hommes” is important, Parshley writes that what’s crucial is “what-in-men’s-eyes-she-seems-to-be”—thereby obscuring any connection between Beauvoir’s hyphenated phrase and the term “being-for-others.”

  2. By “in significant part” I mean to signal that Beauvoir’s understanding of women’s situation is not confined to those aspects of women’s lives that are determined by their relations to men. She claims, for example, that the body itself is a situation (TSS 36). While I address this claim in the present chapter, it is not my aim to give a full analysis of it. (See Moi, What Is a Woman?, pp. 59–72, and Julie Ward, “Beauvoir’s Two Senses of Body in The Second Sex,” for more sustained discussions.) Let me stress once again that the purpose of this book is to make a case for the idea that feminist and other philosophers have reason to take an interest in Beauvoir’s way of grounding her appropriations of other philosophers’ work in her own experience, and particularly her own experience as a woman. I have tried to fulfill this aim by looking at two of Beauvoir’s forebears whose influence on her is, I think, particularly underappreciated. But I do not mean to imply that my reading of The Second Sex is complete; indeed, for me to claim that it is would be to belie precisely what I find exciting about Beauvoir’s philosophical procedures.

  3. Those who are inclined to accuse Beauvoir of a certain homophobia at this juncture would do well to remember that her concern in The Second Sex is to explore what it means to be a woman and, particularly, how being a woman differs from being a man. At this juncture she is concerning herself with the asymmetry in men’s and women’s roles in reproducing the species and not with sexual experience in general.

  4. Abortion did not become legal in France until 1975; to this day, it is illegal beyond the tenth week of pregnancy. In April 1971, Simone de Beauvoir (along with the writer Marguerite Duras, the actresses Catherine Deneuve and Simone Signoret, and other French celebrities) would sign the so-called “Manifesto of the 343,” which said, “A million women have abortions in France each year. Because they are condemned to secrecy, they are aborted under dangerous conditions. If done under medical control, this operation is one of the simplest. These millions of women have been passed over in silence. I declare that I am one of them, I have had an abortion. Just as we demand free access to birth-control methods, we demand freedom to have abortions.” See Claudine Monteil, Simone de Beauvoir, especially chapter 2, for a fascinating account of the woman’s movement in France during this period.

  5. See, e.g., Evans, chapter 3.

  6. Beauvoir was notorious for her own horror of having and caring for babies. But in interviews, especially toward the end of her life, she was at pains to insist that her own lack of desire to have children did not play a role in her admonishing women to consider carefully the possibility of opting out of motherhood. Tellingly enough, Beauvoir warned that, given the demands placed on mothers in our culture, having children frequently constituted for women a form a slavery. When asked, for example, by Yolanda Patterson in 1985 what advice she would give to women who wanted both to have children and to “maintain their own identity and independence,” Beauvoir said, “One must really follow one’s deepest desires. Otherwise one feels unfulfilled. … But one should be very careful not to become enslaved” (332). And in an interview (one in a famous series) with Alice Schwarzer in 1976 she said, “I think a woman should be on her guard against the trap of motherhood and marriage. Even if she would dearly like to have children, she ought to think seriously about the conditions under which she would have to bring them up, because being a mother these days is real slavery” (73).

  7. Beauvoir’s use of the notion of alienation in this context itself constitutes an appropriation, namely of the work of Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan (and, for that matter, Sigmund Freud). Even though this ought to be obvious to anyone familiar with the writings of these figures, there is work to be done in specifying the terms of this appropriation. This is work that Toril Moi (and, to my knowledge, no one else) has undertaken in the sixth chapter of her Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, which is entitled “Ambiguous Women: Alienation and the Body in The Second Sex.” Like Lundgren-Gothlin, Moi is troubled by what she sees as a pervasive androcentricity in Beauvoir’s understanding of women’s “immanence.” Like me, she argues that Beauvoir’s writing in The Second Sex reflects the splits and contradictions she claims characterize women’s lives, although, as will soon be seen, Moi and I disagree about exactly how these splits and contradictions are reflected. Indeed, readers may well find it useful to compare what I have to say especially on this subject with Moi’s writing on ambiguity and alienation, particularly since I go over much of the ground in The Second Sex that she explored first. Moi writes, “If Beauvoir argues that women under patriarchy are torn by conflict and inner strife, the very texture of her book reveals this to be no less true for herself than for other women. The Second Sex enacts the very contradictions described by Beauvoir; confirming her analysis, her text also undoes it. The deepest paradox of all is that the most powerful antipatriarchal text of the twentieth century reads as if it is written by a dutiful daughter only too eager to please the father” (177). (The first volume of Beauvoir’s autobiography, covering roughly the first two decades of her life—through the beginning of her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre—is entitled Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.)

  Moi traces Beauv
oir’s use of the term “alienation” not to Lacan and Marx, but to Lacan and, plausibly enough, Hegel. She characterizes Beauvoir’s relationship to both figures as one of “free elaboration” (157) or “free development” (159), and she seems to find Beauvoir’s license in both cases problematic. For example, she writes, “To discern the Hegelian influences in Beauvoir’s argument, however, is not to claim that she is being particularly orthodox. Freely developing the themes of recognition and the dialectical triad, Beauvoir entirely forgets that for Hegel, ‘recognition’ presupposes the reciprocal exchange between two subjects” (159). And again: “Attentive readers may already have noticed that her text moves directly from the Lacanian theory of the alienation of the child in the gaze of the other to the rather different idea that boys and girls alienate themselves in their bodies. Unfortunately, Beauvoir makes no attempt to relate Lacan’s view to her own” (163).

  8. The paper she cites is Lacan’s “Les Complexes familiaux dans la Formation de l’Individu.” In her exhaustive history of psychoanalysis during its first one hundred years in France, Elisabeth Roudinesco reports that a year before publishing The Second Sex Beauvoir telephoned Lacan, some five years before he began to conduct the ongoing seminar that would make him famous, and asked him to discuss the possibility of a link between sexual difference (and “female sexuality” in particular) and women’s emancipation. “Flattered, he told her they would need five or six months [the English translation of this passage, amusingly enough, says five or six years] of discussion to clarify the issue. Simone was not inclined to spend that much time listening to Lacan for a work that was already fully documented. She proposed a set of four interviews. He refused” (512). For a reading of Lacan’s conceptualization of infantile desire that dovetails with my reading of Beauvoir’s account, see William Bracken’s Becoming Subjects, especially chapter 4.