by Nancy Bauer
And yet nothing could be more obvious about The Second Sex than the brazenness of its author. Beauvoir is aware of herself both as making claims about the way the world is—claims, that is, to objective truth—and as tethering those claims firmly to her own identity, marking them as specifically hers. It’s this combination of moves, and the way that the texture of Beauvoir’s prose makes them seem deliberate, that opens her, despite my standing claims about her basic humility, to the charge of arrogance. Stanley Cavell has suggested that arrogating the authority to make objective claims when nothing other than your own desire to have a say entitles your words is a hallmark of philosophical work.3 Cavell wants the word arrogation here because the claiming of title to words that on his view is a mark of philosophy inevitably carries with it the danger of appearing to be, not to say being, an act of arrogance. For him, assessing an author’s entitlement to his or her arrogation of authority, testing its apparent arrogance, is itself an act of criticism, or of judgment, that requires a further arrogation of authority and thus a further risk.
The decision not to investigate the appearance of arrogance but instead to take it at face value—to deny, to put it another way, the possibility of a distinction in a given case between arrogation and arrogance—in effect constitutes a rejection of philosophical conversation. Needless to say, this is a rejection that all philosophical writing courts. The tone of authority that permeates philosophical writing can be off-putting, especially if one is not prepared for it. Indeed, the conventions of academic philosophy—for instance, explicitly situating one’s work in an ongoing philosophical debate—often function precisely to attempt to forestall the author’s being caught out as a genuine individual. The author draws a lot of attention to the formal structure of his philosophical procedure: he’s going to defend x-ism against y-ism; he’ll adduce arguments against y-ism; he’ll consider objections to his own arguments, objections the reader can test for himself; and he’s willing to give up x-ism if someone shows he’s made an error in his reasoning. Here, moves are being made to divert the reader from noticing the philosopher’s personal stake in his positions. It’s no surprise, then, that philosophers who abjure these procedures leave themselves even more exposed to the charge of arrogance. Here, one might think, to offer some extreme examples, of Nietzsche, or the young Marx, or the later Wittgenstein. None of these writers attempts to cover up his arrogation of authority by shying away from a tone of authority. Characteristically, this tone of authority so dominates the text that a substantial number of readers judge it to be fundamentally antiphilosophical. This is perhaps at least part of the reason why the likes of Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations have always had to fight for the title of serious philosopher. A central claim of my project is that Beauvoir in her arrogation of authority in The Second Sex belongs in the company of such writers, which means that the degree to which her work is regarded as serious philosophy is bound to remain controversial.
It is no wonder, then, that I am in the minority in reading The Second Sex as issuing from a posture of humility. The apparent implausibility of this reading is compounded by the fact of Beauvoir’s putting herself forward as a test-case instance of the concept “woman,” whatever the word should turn out to connote. For many feminists, claiming to be a representative woman constitutes an act of high treason, and so inescapably of arrogance, since the very notion of representation is seen as entailing a reduction of the wide array of women’s experiences to the narrow scope of one’s own. Criticism of Beauvoir on this front tends to take one of two forms. Less commonly, she is accused of directly mistaking her own life experience, the experience of a white, bourgeois, Western woman, for that of all women.4 More commonly, this criticism involves the charge that Beauvoir in The Second Sex sets herself up as what you might call an Über-woman, who through her own special powers of intellect and will escapes what she herself characterizes as the feminine condition. The charge, then, is that she effectively exempts herself from the category “woman,” exalting herself above her sisters by disassociating herself from them. Typically, this view of Beauvoir’s self-styling in The Second Sex takes the form of accusing her of acting like a man, of, ironically enough, inaugurating the latter-day feminist movement through a dramatic act of “masculinism.”5
In this chapter I want to link this accusation of masculinism to what I see as an uncannily similar one directed by feminist thinkers at the man ordinarily viewed as the founding figure of “modern” Western philosophy, namely, René Descartes. I will suggest that the routine condemnations of Descartes in the feminist philosophical literature overlook what is productively radical about the Cartesian method of doubt. In these aspects, this method, I wish to show, is—not accidentally—exactly that employed by Beauvoir in The Second Sex. This chapter in fact attempts to make good the unusual claim that one of Simone de Beauvoir’s central aspirations in The Second Sex is to rewrite Descartes’s Meditations from the ground up. The pivotal and emblematic move is Beauvoir’s displacement, in effect, of Descartes’s question “What is a man?”—posed in the second meditation directly after the climactic discovery of the cogito ergo sum—by the question “What is a woman?” Beauvoir’s touchstone response to this question, “I am,” is therefore to be read, I suggest, as her version of the Cartesian cogito. My aim is to show how these displacements of the founding moments of modem philosophy constitute both an appropriation of and a fundamental challenge to the philosophical tradition. I argue, specifically, that Beauvoir’s investigations ought to be read as in effect casting doubt on the philosophical priorities of the father of modern philosophy. The power of The Second Sex as the founding document of the second wave of feminism, then, issues in substantial part from Beauvoir’s inaugurating call for a reordering of these priorities—as though we cannot think coherently about what a “man” is, cannot make out a coherent sex-neutral sense of the term, until we address the question of what it means to be, to be called, a woman.
In my comparison of the Meditations and The Second Sex, I focus on the paramount role that philosophical skepticism plays in the work of each text. While Descartes’s doubting of all of his opinions is legendary, one simply doesn’t find commentators acknowledging the philosophical significance of Beauvoir’s stark expression of doubt about whether women exist. The sense of herself as a woman that lies at the heart of Beauvoir’s inquiry is not a sense that is from the first, or at any point, in principle or in practice unassailable. One can see Beauvoir’s work as an inquiry into the meaning and validity of this sense—that is, an investigation into whether and how “women” exist. Her inquiry need be no more dogmatic, therefore, than that of Descartes, who in the Meditations is in effect launching just such an investigation into the meaning and validity of his sense of the world. In exploring the parallel between Beauvoir’s skepticism and that of Descartes, I argue that Beauvoir interprets the metaphysical solitude that forms the basis of Descartes’s epistemological solipsism as an inevitable cost of his revolutionary, and laudable, relocation of philosophical authority from powerful people and institutions to the individual human mind. And I show how her appropriation of this alarming consequence of Descartes’s method leads her to develop a powerful philosophical picture of the nature of sex difference.
Beauvoir’s appropriation of Descartes begins in her desire to explore the possibility of philosophizing as a woman. Because for Beauvoir to be called a “woman” is to have a female body, she cannot begin to understand what a human being is the way Descartes does in the second meditation: by laying aside the possibility that he is, fundamentally, a “mechanical structure of limbs” (Descartes 1986).6 Furthermore, since her inquiry is rooted in a sense of herself as being an instance of the generic concept “woman,” Beauvoir avoids a certain Cartesian threat of solipsism from the start: to call herself a woman is to start with the idea that there are other beings like her—that is, other beings who are called, or call themselves, women. I say a “certain” t
hreat of solipsism is avoided since it is not clear, at least not yet, what the ontological or epistemological ramifications of this fact will be. That she is not the only woman does not of course rule out the possibility that Beauvoir, even insofar as she is or takes herself to be a woman, will experience a profound, Cartesian sense of metaphysical isolation. What I mean to claim on the strength of this observation of Beauvoir’s starting point is only that it would bring her to a different place of isolation, as it were, from that at which Descartes arrives in the course of the Meditations. In my bolder moments, I think of her as in essence rewriting the Meditations from the point of view of someone who finds herself unable to doubt her existence as an embodied person in a world of other embodied people, a point of view that is in principle open to all people but one that those who are not systematically oppressed on the basis of the appearance of their bodies—that is, their superficial social identities—may have the luxury not to take up.
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY CONTRA DESCARTES
As the “father” of modern philosophy, Descartes is a favorite target of feminist criticism (and not just in philosophy), and his ideas have been attacked from any number of feminist angles, the most common, perhaps, involving suspicion of his signature belief in a fundamental split between the mind and the body and other so-called dualisms.7 It would of course take me too far afield to try to piece together some sort of overview of feminist concerns about Descartes. But I do need to get a picture of his “masculinism” on the table in order to support my claim that it’s no coincidence that both he and Beauvoir are often indicted by feminists on this front. A representative enough critique of Descartes’s masculinism is to be found in a well-known essay by the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought.”8 In this essay Bordo tries to make out the case that the masculinism she sees all over modern philosophy has its roots in certain key moves made by Descartes, particularly in his magnum opus, the Meditations. More specifically, Bordo sees Descartes in this work as developing a concept of objectivity that encodes basic “masculine” values. She aims to show how and why this masculinist concept of objectivity developed.
Relying on historical research by other scholars, Bordo claims that in medieval times people explicitly conceptualized the cosmos as female and felt fundamentally at one with nature, nestled comfortably, as it were, in her womb.9 The medievals, Bordo claims, saw no sharp distinction between themselves and the rest of the “female” world. But during the transition to the Renaissance, as Bordo describes it, the culture experienced a “kind of protracted birth” (448); for reasons that she does not make entirely clear, people felt pushed out of the womb and underwent the trauma, on a grand scale, of separation from Mother Nature. In describing this trauma, Bordo appeals to the work of feminist object-relations theorists, such as Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, who claim that individual males in our culture characteristically undergo just such a traumatic separation from their mothers because of the culture’s demands that boys establish a space in which to shore up and demonstrate their masculinity, figured as sharply differentiated from the femininity of the mother.10 Bordo suggestively asks, “May not such a process reverberate, too, on the cultural level?” (445). On her view, the second step in the social “drama of parturition” that she is describing takes the form of Renaissance man’s engineering something like a rebirth of himself, this time on his own terms, as a sort of defense against being pushed from the mother-cosmos.11
Descartes’s contribution to this process, Bordo claims, was to insist on an absolutely sharp line between the person, or what she often calls “the subject,” and the rest of the world, what she calls “the object.” For Bordo, this line epitomizes the legacy of Cartesian objectivity, which on her view turns on a “differentiation between subject and object, between self and the world.” It entails, she continues, using Descartes’s own language, a “clear and distinct” sense of what she calls “the boundaries of the self” (449). Descartes’s allegiance to objectivity, his “objectivism,” is essentially “a defensive response to … separation anxiety” marked by a flight from what she here calls not the female but the feminine (441). This flight from the feminine takes the form of a “re-birthing and re-imaging of knowledge and the world as masculine” (441). “Here,” Bordo notes, “‘masculine’ describes not a biological category but a cognitive style, an epistemological stance. Its key term is detachment: from the emotional life, from the particularities of time and place, from personal quirks, prejudices, and interests, and most centrally, from the object itself” (451). And she concludes that “clearly, the (unmythologizing) articulation of ‘the feminine’—and its potential contribution to ethics, epistemology, science, education, and politics—is one of the most important movements of the twentieth century” (456).
Bordo’s use of quotation marks around “the feminine” in this last quotation is a signal of her caution, not to say her uneasiness, in using this concept. One of her concerns is evidently to avoid “mythologizing”; but I suspect that she is also hedging against feminist critiques of the idea that there is some monolithic thing called “the feminine” to be articulated.12 In calling for this articulation in the closing lines of her essay, Bordo seems to be advocating a “cognitive style” or “epistemological stance” in which our various detachments are overcome. (Why, again, this is supposed to be a feminine—or even a female—style or stance is something Bordo doesn’t say.) In the second-to-last sentence of her paper, she refers to the “limitations” of what she calls the “historical identification of rationality and intelligence with the masculine modes of detachment, distance, and clarity.” I imagine that what she wants to signify by these words is her sense—a sense that I think is common to most feminist critics of Descartes and that I will spell out in somewhat more detail below—that something important about human experience, or at least women’s experience, gets lost in the Cartesian picture.
DESCARTES’S SOLIPSISTIC LEGACY
Although I claim that Beauvoir in The Second Sex means to issue a fundamental philosophical challenge to Descartes’s way of proceeding in the Meditations, I am no less interested in showing that her challenge is internal to this way of proceeding and, thus, to modern philosophy. For Beauvoir, following directly in Descartes’s footsteps, to do philosophy is inevitably to grapple with the threat of solipsism.13 For Bordo, this threat is a direct result of Descartes’s paradigmatic rejection of Mother Nature and his investment in refashioning her according to the terms of the new science of the seventeenth century.14 But Beauvoir’s challenge to Descartes stems, I think, not from her distrust of his motives but, rather, from her admiration for his revolutionary relocation of the source of philosophical authority. For her, the threat of solipsism is to be seen as the cost not of masculinism but of a conception of philosophy as critical and dynamic.
To understand the significance of this conception of philosophy for Beauvoir, we need to bear in mind just how radical a shift in the enterprise Descartes’s writings represented. For the vast majority of medieval and pre-Cartesian philosophers, philosophy was a mode of inquiry in which one used forms of logical argument, mostly developed by Aristotle, to apply received doctrine, mostly scripture and Aristotelian texts, to everyday observations and experiments. This meant, of course, that a person who wished to read a philosophical work had to be highly educated—had to know the Bible, for example, as well as the thought of neo-Aristotelian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, whose writings dominated the subject for most of the Renaissance. And of course, in order to be educated in the Europe of Descartes’s time, you had to be a man of a certain class. That meant that the practice of philosophy was fundamentally elitist.
Medieval philosophy ends at Descartes’s doorstep because he reconceived the subject as something that appealed to the authority not of preexisting doctrine or texts but of the human mind alone. In all of his works, Descartes emphasizes that the rational intellect is to be found in all human min
ds. Indeed, he thought that the reason that some human minds weren’t philosophical minds was that they were in effect polluted by dogmatic teaching, which he believed blocked the mind’s inherent power to think. To do philosophy, he believed, one must purge one’s mind of these bad teachings in order to make room for what he called “good sense.” The Discourse on the Method begins famously with the words, “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world. … The power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men” (111).
By “all men,” we have very good evidence to believe, Descartes meant to include those men who traditionally lacked access to formal education. For example, we know that he taught mathematics to his own servant and that he strongly and vocally approved of teaching the arts and sciences to the artisan class. Whether in averring that “all men” share alike in the capacity for reason Descartes meant to include women is perhaps controversial, although he obviously thought that women such as his longtime correspondent Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden, who summoned him to her court in order to receive philosophical instruction, were more than capable of more than following his thought. As further proof of Descartes’s sincerity, we have the fact that he wrote most of his books in the French vernacular.15
The Meditations, however, was an exception to this practice. It was originally written in Latin, since Descartes wanted to make sure that the clergy would read the book and thus, perhaps, change their minds about how philosophy ought to be done. Because this is Descartes’s goal, the strategy of the Meditations is to try to get his readers to free their minds of the prejudicial teaching that has been hammered into them, in order that they might be guided by their own reason and specifically by what Descartes calls “the natural light.”16 Because his strategy is to disinter good sense from layers of shibboleths, it takes the form not of a treatise but, rather, of a series of meditations. One philosophizes not by taking in the teachings of a pedant but by following the example of the meditator and attempting to think for oneself. Gary Hatfield, in his illuminating essay “The Senses and the Fleshless Eye,” observes that in the Meditations Descartes is in effect transforming from within the preexisting medieval genre of the meditation: where the old-style meditations asked you to contemplate the great, given truths, so as to strengthen your will to act in accordance with them, Descartes asks you to suspend your belief in such truths in order to free your mind for genuinely philosophical contemplation. In the preface to the Meditations he says, “I would not urge anyone to read this book except those who are able and willing to meditate seriously with me, and to withdraw their minds from the senses and from all preconceived opinions” (8).17 Genuinely philosophical meditation, Descartes attempts to show, reveals that fundamental to being human is the ability to think for oneself.
