Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  What woman has not read The Second Sex? What woman hasn’t found it inspiring? Hasn’t as a result, perhaps, become a feminist? Simone de Beauvoir was indeed one of the first women in this century to remind us of the extent of women’s exploitation, and to encourage every woman who had the good fortune to come across her book to feel less isolated and more certain about not being oppressed or letting herself be taken in.17

  But then a couple of pages later we find this:

  To demand equality as women [as Irigaray apparently takes The Second Sex to aspire above all to do] is, it seems to me, a mistaken expression of a real objective. The demand to be equal presupposes a point of comparison. To whom or to what do women want to be equalized? To men? To a salary? To a public office? To what standard? Why not to themselves?

  A rather more thorough analysis of the claims to equality shows that at the level of a superficial cultural critique, they are well founded, but that as a means of liberating women, they are utopian. (12)

  And the essay ends with these lines:

  To respect Simone de Beauvoir is to follow the theoretical and practical work for social justice that she carried out in her own way; it is to maintain the liberating horizons which she opened up for many women, and men … [ellipsis in original, though I am also deleting a sentence here]. It seems to me that her concern for and writings on this subject are a message not to be forgotten. (13–14)

  Here we find a nice expression of what is quite a common take on Beauvoir, namely, that we all ought to be grateful to her given that “in her own way” she strove to achieve social justice and helped many of us become feminists, even though we can now see (thanks, I take it, to writers such as Irigaray) that she didn’t manage to express her real objectives properly and thus left us with a “message” that is in danger of being forgotten.

  The third gesture of condescension, the assumption that the philosophical dimension of The Second Sex is derivable in some terribly uninteresting or self-deluded way from Sartre’s early philosophy, is invited by Beauvoir’s own repeated disavowals of her powers as a philosopher. In chapter 2, I suggest that what Beauvoir means to disavow is at least in part an identification with the conventional understanding of what it is to be a philosopher. But ordinarily her disavowals are taken either flatly or as an ironic sign of her failure to escape sexism in her own self-evaluation. The rejection of Beauvoir’s philosophical originality is particularly stark in the following remarks by feminist philosopher Andrea Nye:

  In Beauvoir’s The second sex [sic], there is always palpably present in each chapter—whether on a woman’s sex life, her professional life, her religiosity, her household duties—the framing metaphysics of the human condition as laid out by Sartre. In her introduction, Beauvoir explicitly positioned herself not as a woman or as a feminist, but as an existentialist.18

  As my discussion of these matters in chapters 3 through 7 confirms, Beauvoir’s debt to Sartre in The Second Sex is undeniable, meaning not only impossible to deny but also unimportant to deny, indeed important to acknowledge and to explore. But to claim as Nye does that Sartre’s existentialism is the “framing metaphysics” of the book is to rule out from the start the idea that anything Beauvoir has to say about women—about which existentialism has to say nothing, or at least nothing that anyone seriously interested in women could confirm—will be of philosophical import.19

  The suggestion that it was her emotional attachment to Sartre that compelled Beauvoir to crib from his philosophy is all over the critical literature and constitutes what I am identifying as the fourth form of condescension to her work. The temptation to this gesture is acknowledged by the contemporary French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff, and her work on Beauvoir is as thought-provoking as it is in part because in her attempt to allow herself the fantasy of giving in to this temptation she actually frees herself of it.20 Briefly, Le Doeuff’s idea is that in The Second Sex Beauvoir transforms existentialism “from the status of a system (necessarily returning back on itself) to that of a point of view oriented to a theoretical intent by being trained on a determinate and partial field of experience.”21 This transformation figures most starkly, on Le Doeuff’s view, in the paradoxical metamorphosis of what she sees as the moralism of Sartre’s existentialism in Being and Nothingness—the insistence on the idea that people are “free” in some deep and important sense regardless of the circumstances of their lives, an insistence epitomized in the concept of bad faith—into a powerful picture of oppression in The Second Sex.

  The scrupulousness with which Le Doeuff both acknowledges and attempts to undo her temptation to dismiss parts of The Second Sex—her determination to account in as many words as it takes for her sustained interest in the book, despite her simultaneous reservations about it—evinces a stake in her writing about Beauvoir that confirms my own interest in the book as an object of philosophical study. Again, it seems to me not accidental that the subject of more than half of Le Doeuff’s book Hipparchia’s Choice, subtitled “An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc.”—the joke is of course that there’s a series here, as though we know anything serial or systematic about the relationship between “women” and “philosophy”—is Beauvoir. But Le Doeuff is still convinced that Beauvoir’s attachment to Sartre comes at the cost of availing herself of a direct, unmediated relationship to philosophy. Here, Le Doeuff judges Beauvoir to have taken her place in a long line of women whose aspirations to philosophy have been inseparable from their libidinous devotion to particular male philosophers:22

  The ethics underlying Beauvoir’s thought are not hard to identify since she says herself that her point of view is that of existentialist morality. The Second Sex is also a labour of love, and as a wedding gift she brings a singular confirmation of the validity of Sartrism: your thought makes possible an understanding of women’s condition, your philosophy sets me on the road to my emancipation—your truth will make me free.

  Here we find a stereotype in philosophical liaisons. Since the days of Antiquity, women have been admitted into the field of philosophy chiefly when they took on the role of the loving admirer: we can call this the “Heloise complex” [after the lover of Peter Abelard]. (Hipparchia’s Choice 59–60)

  Here again a critic sees Beauvoir’s commitments and perspectives as standing without need of interpretation, wishing to take at face value her (awfully few and far between) overt expressions of indebtedness to Sartre, largely on the basis of what is known about her extraphilosophical commitments. But suppose that Le Doeuff is exactly right about all this. Then the question of exactly what’s wrong with these commitments remains. One way of putting this question is this: Why, in Beauvoir’s hands, must we still see it as Sartre’s truth?

  In criticizing the idea that Beauvoir’s achievements are somehow second-hand or otherwise not to be credited exclusively to her—the idea that she is unconscious of the force, infelicitous as well as happy, of her work—Toril Moi suggests that it is Beauvoir’s self-presentation as an intellectual woman that galls her readers. But that it may be something more specific—and general—about Beauvoir’s writing that gives the impression that she’s not fully or at least adequately on top of what she’s doing is evidenced by the fact that even Moi has been inclined on occasion, especially in her earlier work on Beauvoir, to indulge in gestures that resemble those she deplores. Consider the following two quotations from an early discussion by Moi of Beauvoir’s use of the concept of alienation in The Second Sex:

  Beauvoir’s account of the girl’s alienation transforms and extends her own highly reified initial concept of alienation: rather unwittingly, I think, Beauvoir here manages to challenge the limitations of her original point of departure (“Ambiguity and Alienation” 107–108; my emphasis).

  While there are strong biographical reasons [not specified further] for her misjudgment on this point, rhetorically speaking, the main source of Beauvoir’s idealization of the penis would seem to be metaphorical (ibid. 109; my emphasis).23

>   Here we see both a reluctance to assign Beauvoir full credit for a philosophical achievement as well as an appeal to what Moi calls “biographical reasons” in explanation of what is identified as a philosophical shortcoming. On my view, the temptation to both of these gestures has to do with Beauvoir’s self-presentation not as an intellectual woman in general but as a woman philosopher.24

  I address the threat posed by Beauvoir’s philosophizing as a woman (whatever that turns out to mean) more fully in chapter 2, where I also relate the critical condescension I have been chronicling to the charge that her writerly voice in The Second Sex is off-puttingly arrogant. But I wish to plant the idea, early on, that this condescension constitutes at bottom an avoidance of something in Beauvoir’s work, a warding off, specifically, of the difficulty, both intellectual and, let us say, spiritual, of the project she is asking us to undertake in thinking seriously—thinking philosophically—about the question of what a woman is. To ask this question seriously, regardless of whether one is a man or a woman, turns out to be no less foundation-shaking than to ask the epistemological question that inaugurates Descartes’s Meditations. It seems preposterous that Beauvoir sets out to rebuild our sense of who we are by putting herself at the foundation of an answer to her question: what will ground the investigation is her declaration that there can be no better answer to it than “I am.” Surely this mundane response cannot be the basis of a genuine philosophical investigation, let alone a revolutionary work. But surely we will not want to decide this question until we have made sure that we have given this woman her say.

  CHAPTER 1

  Is Feminist Philosophy a Contradiction in Terms? First Philosophy, The Second Sex, and the Third Wave

  Although most of us have come to terms politically with the idea of feminist philosophy, there is ample evidence that for the most part neither feminists nor philosophers wish to bestow unqualified intellectual approval on it.1 From the point of view of skeptical feminists, philosophy—with its emphasis on passionless thinking, reason, objectivity, universality, essences, and so forth—apotheosizes a way of encountering the world that is inherently and hopelessly tailored to serve the interests of men and thwart those of women. From the point of view of skeptical philosophers, on the other hand, philosophy’s unimpeachable commitment to open inquiry is incompatible with feminist “theory,” which, in their view, is by definition constrained by a political bottom line. From both sides, then, “feminist philosophy” can look like a contradiction in terms.

  And yet philosophers of all stripes tend to turn a blind eye to this appearance of some sort of fundamental tension between feminism and philosophy. No doubt there are honorable reasons for doing so.2 Surely, most decent male philosophers deplore at least the idea of sex inequality and, on the realization that women have been woefully underrepresented in the discipline, are prepared to put aside any qualms they may have about combining philosophy with an “ism.” Then again, to many feminists, modern philosophy, from its inception in the seventeenth century, has predicated itself on a disastrously fateful distinction between mind and body, one that groundlessly guarantees the impertinence of fleshly immanence—and thus of sexual difference—to the great basic questions. The project of at least exploring the possible bearing of the fact of human embodiment on these questions hardly seems to require justification.3 And this project, with its potential to revolutionize philosophy (once again), has dovetailed nicely with a growing sense on both sides of the analytic-continental divide that philosophy in its modern incarnation may have run its course.4

  Still, in and of themselves the ubiquity of sexism and the downplaying of the body in the history of modernist thinking do not dissipate the tension inherent in the idea of a feminist philosophy. Surely, philosophers might remedy these ills without adopting a specifically feminist agenda. One needn’t be a feminist to admit that women can do philosophy and that their exclusion from the tradition is, at the very least, regrettable; and any number of empiricists and physicalists have argued strenuously that Descartes and his ilk have gotten the relationship between mind and body wrong. Furthermore, the sorry history of women and philosophy does not obviously call for a redoubled effort on the part of feminists to have a philosophical say. One could argue—and many have argued—that theorizing, far from improving women’s lives, has actually hampered the women’s movement, both by drawing talented women away from a focus on feminist political action and by strengthening the politically enervating idea that to be a feminist requires the adoption of a self-destructively radical ideology. In another context, I would contest both of these arguments. Here, my aim is to draw attention to the curious lack of serious work on the question of how philosophy and feminism are supposed to go together. Just why confronting this tension head-on is evidently a singularly unappealing task is a question the addressing of which would take me too far astray, although I will at least note that the aversion must have something to do with, on the one hand, nonfeminist philosophers’ fear of being branded misogynistic and, on the other, feminist philosophers’ refusal to waste time justifying their undertaking to unsympathetic men.

  I have scant tolerance for philosophers, male or female, sympathetic or hostile, who condescend to the idea of feminist philosophy. In my experience, they have rarely read more than one or two (ordinarily infamous) pieces of feminist writing—and that much just to congratulate themselves on their own conventionality. Feminist philosophers ought not waste time addressing the skepticism of their condescending colleagues. But there is a difference between meekly or neurotically organizing one’s work around a fantasy of converting naysayers and engaging in thinking that genuinely needs to be done for its own sake. My view is that it is a grave mistake for feminists to ignore the appearance of some sort of fundamental tension between feminism and philosophy, and the purpose of this chapter is to show why. Briefly, my claim is that once we give the sense of contradiction its due, we see that genuinely feminist philosophical work—or, if you like, genuinely philosophical feminism—not only has the potential to revolutionize philosophy but actually demands a reappraisal, from the ground up, of what it is to be a human—a thinking and sexed—being.

  This claim at present has the philosophically disappointing features of being overdramatic and underspecified. But before I try to provide reasons for you to believe it might be true, let me specify briefly here at the outset what I don’t want the claim to imply. I don’t want it to imply that philosophical work by feminists that sidesteps the apparent contradiction between feminism and philosophy—in other words, the bulk of feminist philosophical work—is ultimately valueless. To the contrary, I’m claiming that the value or truth of feminist philosophy is often distorted or otherwise obscured by the specter of the apparent contradiction. The second thing I don’t want my claim to imply—my claim, again, that any marriage, if you will, between feminism and philosophy must be a revolutionary marriage—is that there’s only one way to get hitched. Of course, I will argue both in this chapter and in the remainder of this book that Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex exemplifies the powerful results of allowing the apparent contradiction its due. But if I thought that Beauvoir had exhausted the possibilities for feminist philosophy, or that the self-transformation that I think feminism and philosophy require of one another could be achieved once and for all, then what I have to say in this chapter and indeed in this book as a whole would be of scant philosophical interest. I’m proposing here not only a very general way of doing something that I’m asking you to recognize as productively feminist and productively philosophical but also something like a set of terms for evaluating the effectiveness—if not the value or truth—of feminist philosophical work.

  My faith in The Second Sex as a productively feminist philosophical piece of writing may well strike you as anachronistic. Surely, the objection goes, we long ago learned what we could from Simone de Beauvoir and have moved well beyond the confines of her parochial understanding of women’s lives. We all know b
y now that Beauvoir in The Second Sex elides the concept “woman” with a very specific picture of what it means to be a white, bourgeois female in contemporary Western culture. This charge is ordinarily linked to the observation—sometimes critical, sometimes friendly—that The Second Sex is riddled with contradictions, contradictions of which, it is repeatedly underscored, Beauvoir herself appears to have been profoundly unaware.5 The implication, often, is that at best what The Second Sex offers us is an opportunity to thresh the dross of ethnocentrism, class bias, and racism—not to mention “masculinism”—from the usable kernels of Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s “situation.”

  A particularly negative version of this view of Beauvoir is memorably expressed in Elizabeth Spelman’s merciless attack on The Second Sex in her book Inessential Woman. Beauvoir, Spelman claims, runs roughshod over “the populations she contrasts to ‘women’” and under some conditions certain females count as “women,” others don’t. (68)

  doesn’t reflect on what her own theoretical perspective strongly suggests and what her own language mirrors: namely, that different females are constructed into different kinds of “women”; that

  If there is any merit in this charge—and, given the range of distinguished readers of Beauvoir who at least sympathize with Spelman’s sense that Beauvoir’s text teeters precipitously on an unstable foundation of contradictions, there must be—then it is no wonder that you will not find The Second Sex front and center on the desks of most third-wave feminist philosophers. We third-wavers are in the challenging (in a stingy mood, you might even say self-contradictory) position of wishing to do philosophy—that is, at some level or other to make generalizations about the way things are with women—but we wish to do it precisely without making generalizations about The Way Things Are With Women. That is to say, we wish to make some generalizations, only not the kind that philosophers have traditionally made.