by Nancy Bauer
In posing the question of what a woman is, Beauvoir is not jettisoning her experience as a woman: this is experience in and on the basis of which she finds that what she is here calling her subjectivity is bound at crucial moments to be erased. Rather, Beauvoir is asking what it means to be called a woman, to be treated like a woman, to think of yourself as a woman, to find, suddenly and often, that your subjectivity, your personhood, has evanesced and that you are—you feel like—nothing more than a representative of your sex.
These are questions, I have claimed, that for Beauvoir are firmly rooted at the level of the ordinary, the level at which she finds herself declaring “I am” to her question. But this appeal to the ordinary, notice, is forced by Descartes’s metaphysical subliming of the question “What is a man?”; that is, Beauvoir’s rejoinder “What is a woman?” and the range of questions it entails must, after the Cartesian revolution in philosophy, be posed in an “ordinary” space that is created by the metaphysical. This means that her investigation, launched at the level of, or perhaps on behalf of, the ordinary, can engage Descartes’s only dialectically, only, in other words, by managing to move between and thereby transform the registers of the ordinary and the metaphysical. To hear Beauvoir’s questions, questions arising from Descartes’s nonacknowledgment of her ordinary experience, as philosophical questions is to find yourself unable to adopt, at least at the outset, what I have been calling the stance of Cartesian skepticism, of metaphysical isolation. It’s of the first importance that Beauvoir’s rejection of this stance does not come in the form of some abstract, purely intellectually motivated polemic but rather stems, again, from an ordinary fact—indeed, what she in effect tells us is the ordinary and therefore the unavoidable fact—about her own life. Beauvoir is not just rejecting Descartes’s investigation out of hand, not just kicking the stone that Samuel Johnson kicked in order to “prove” to philosophy that the world in fact really does exist. Rather, she is declaring that, being in the first instance a woman, she has no access, or, better, no obvious or immediate access, to Descartes’s stance of metaphysical isolation. Beauvoir’s “I am” strikes me as a rebuke to Descartes not because Beauvoir sees “detachment” as fundamentally masculinist but because Descartes, in claiming to be in the first instance merely a gender-neutral man, does not see her—that is, does not see woman, or more specifically, that a woman, or at least a woman such as Beauvoir, a woman who (to her surprise, remember) finds her gender philosophically unavoidable, cannot deny that she is “that structure of limbs which is called a human body” (Descartes 1985, 18). For Beauvoir to identify herself from the start as a woman, to offer herself up as a representative example of a woman, is to declare that the ontological status of the world cannot be a question for her, that she cannot be a philosopher in a certain sense of the word, at least until she comes to understand what it means to be—to be called, and to call herself—a woman.
This is to imply that Descartes’s skepticism is something of a luxury. At the end of book 1 of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume famously chronicles the schism between the world of his study, in which the vividness of the philosophical skepticism he conjures so confounds him that he feels himself to be “in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty,” and the world in which “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends,” a world in which his speculations “appear so cold, and strain’d and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”31 Hume’s skepticism comes alive for him only within the confines of his study, when he has the luxury of Descartes’s “clear stretch of time” to be alone and thinking. But in displacing Descartes’s question and attempting to work dialectically between the everyday and the metaphysical, Beauvoir is rejecting this kind of a flat difference between the two registers. She underscores that there is no place, or at least no specific or well-defined place, in which a woman overcome by the question “What is a woman?” can go to find the kind of relief that Hume describes. There is no place, in other words, in which a woman is no longer a woman (which is not the same as saying that there is no place in which a woman might forget, and for extended periods of time, that she is). Indeed, as Virginia Woolf so perfectly put it, the issue for women is not leaving but finding “a room of one’s own”—where here, of course, I am imagining, as I imagine Woolf did, too, that the room must be psychological, not to say spiritual or philosophical, as well as physical. And here is a place to note, as Beauvoir goes on to do at some length in Book 2 of The Second Sex, that under various inflections of the concept “woman”—“wife,” say, and especially, “mother”—the absence of opportunities for solitude can become positively menacing.
The point is not, I hope it is clear, that all men are in a position of luxury, material, philosophical, or otherwise. The point is that the skepticism Beauvoir chronicles and acts out in The Second Sex is one that women live, not just in some Humean study but all the time, or at least potentially all the time, in this “male world.” In The Claim of Reason Stanley Cavell identifies the place that skepticism is lived (as opposed, I might put it, to being merely thought, intellectualized) as in our relation to others, to what philosophers (perhaps over-intellectualizing the matter) like to call “other minds.”32 Cavell turns the traditional priority within modern philosophy of “external-world” and “other-minds” skepticism around: it is the case of skepticism with respect to others, he wants to show, that is more fundamental. And this is one way of articulating Beauvoir’s brief against Descartes (which is to emphasize, again, that the brief is supposed to be internal to philosophy, even if one of its issues is where the boundaries of philosophy lie). For Beauvoir, the question of how to tether herself to a world, to the world, cannot be answered apart from finding the room in this world, a world whose inhabitants’ judgment of her as (merely) a “woman” threatens to suffocate her, to pose it.
I want to say more at this juncture about the worry that Beauvoir’s acknowledgment of the importance of sex difference threatens to cast her investigation out of the realm of the philosophical, at least insofar as that realm is still defined by the boundaries of the Meditations. A hugely important legacy of Descartes’s work is his drawing of a sharp line (the same line that is so dramatically re-sketched by Hume) between the realm of everyday life and the realm of the metaphysical, that is to say of philosophy. The drawing of this line is at least in part a result of Descartes’s vision of philosophy as something that can be done by each human mind, regardless of a person’s particular circumstances, where, again, each human mind is supposed to be imbued with the same powers of rationality and therefore the same potential for grounding philosophical authority as any other. A notorious consequence of the sharp line between the everyday and the metaphysical, at least as I have described it, is of course the so-called “mind-body” split. Now, in identifying sex difference as a starting point for a philosophical investigation, Beauvoir is implicitly denying that, as a woman, she can think within the confines of this split. For it is of course the fact of human embodiment that supports the practice of identifying ourselves and others as male and female, masculine and feminine, men and women. This is not to say that Beauvoir thinks we ought to be sanguine in our understanding of the relationship between thought and the body; to the contrary, this is exactly the sort of issue that she’s undertaking to examine in her work. That this issue is a philosophical issue, so that posing it in the context of finding herself unable to work with or within or around the idea of a mind-body split does not in fact debar Beauvoir’s work from the realm of the philosophical has to do, I wish to argue, with its being an instance of her interest in establishing what I have been referring to as a dialectic in The Second Sex between the everyday and the philosophical.
The medium of this dialectic is the very concept “woman.” A philosophical investigation of this concept is bound to appeal to ordinary ex
perience. And yet what creates the very idea of “ordinary” experience—that is, experience that is not philosophical—is exactly the sort of metaphysics we see Descartes in essence inventing in the Meditations, that is, exactly the sort of metaphysics that I have been arguing a person who sees herself as in the first instance a woman will find beyond her grasp (ontologically, as it were, of course; not intellectually). This is to say—isn’t it?—that the line between the metaphysical and the ordinary blurs in the concept “woman.” This fact in and of itself constitutes a philosophical opportunity, but it also complicates the already complicated question of where the authority to exploit this opportunity is to come from. I have claimed that Beauvoir’s method in The Second Sex constitutes an inheritance of the Cartesian method of meditation, in which the source of philosophical authority is explicitly the meditating reader. This means that an inquiry into the concept “woman” is inevitably going to demand that the reader bring his or her own experience with this concept, which, of course, will be everyday experience, to bear on the investigation. This demand surfaces, however, not in the form of a direct appeal, as it does in the preface to the Meditations, but instead in the form of Beauvoir’s claim to be a representative woman. What Beauvoir wishes to do through this claim is to provoke the reader into checking her or his experience against her or his own sense of what being a woman comes to (so that the strategy here is rather more Socratic, if you will, than Cartesian). But then of course it’s precisely the meaning of our everyday experience with the concept “woman”—with, that is, the experience of being or of experiencing women—that is under investigation in The Second Sex and is shown in the light of the history of women, and of modern philosophy, to require a re-thinking. So the way that what I’m calling a dialectic in The Second Sex between the everyday and the philosophical works is that our ordinary understanding of ourselves is revealed to us, through the author’s arrogation of authority, to stand in need of a philosophical investigation that must appeal to this ordinary understanding in order to proceed.
It is no wonder, then, that this arrogation of authority feels to many readers like a display of arrogance. I suggested earlier that Beauvoir’s arrogation of authority, her courting of the charge of arrogance, puts her in the company of certain men who have had to fight for the title of philosopher, men such as Marx and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. So it should not be surprising that her drawing attention to herself as a (representative) woman, in addition to provoking the reader to follow her in thinking philosophically about sex difference, also has the effect of putting the philosophical possibilities of The Second Sex in doubt. Then there is the fact that Beauvoir herself insists that as a woman she is not in a position to challenge the world from the ground up, that the feminine condition is such that she lacks the stubbornness to imagine that her own ideas might be universal laws. But I have been arguing that in launching her investigation by claiming to be a representative woman, Beauvoir is in essence proposing that her own experience of the world is in various respects, respects having to do with her sex, universal. If you take it that Beauvoir knows from the start what these respects are, then you may well regard her claim as narrow-minded and arrogant, just as you may well lack a taste for The Passions of the Soul or The Critique of Dialectical Reason. But if you read her to be attempting to forge a way of investigating her experience, of genuinely exploring her discovery that the first thing she has to say about herself is that she is a woman, a discovery by a philosopher that has formed the foundations of exactly no previous inquiry in the history of philosophy, then perhaps you will be inclined to view The Second Sex as a truly great work.33
CHAPTER 3
The Truth of Self-Certainty: A Rendering of Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic
Anyone interested in inaugurating an investigation from the inside into the nature of philosophy’s relationship with women must be sensitive to the possibility that her very starting points or methods are part of the problem. The question is how to conduct a genuinely philosophical investigation into the nature of sex bias in philosophy—that is, an investigation that does not take its own immunity from such bias for granted. I’m going to claim in the course of the next five chapters that Simone de Beauvoir provides an answer to this question. In her work, I want to argue, we find not only the rudiments of a viable internal investigation of philosophical sexism but also a strong argument for the idea that the possibility of radical critique, critique driven by aspirations not just to correct but even to transform the discipline, is closed to anyone who refuses to work from the inside. For Beauvoir, to do philosophy is to appropriate the tradition—that is to say, at least, the text, problems, and methods—of philosophy; and to refuse to appropriate the tradition is to refuse philosophy itself. Her work manifests the belief that to do philosophy well one must be braced for the possibility that one’s very attempt to appropriate the tradition may ultimately land one outside it. But it’s also Beauvoir’s view that the aspiration to appropriate the philosophical tradition demands an openness to the possibility that one’s inquiry will issue in a radical critique, that it will call for a sea-change in philosophers’ understanding of what they do, or ought to do.
The prospect that philosophical work might lead her to discover that the discipline could not accommodate her demands of it might well have been particularly unsettling for Beauvoir, one of the first women actually accredited in the field.1 There is in fact a mountain of evidence suggesting that she was daunted by philosophy: most pertinently, first, her repeated denials that she had the wherewithal for it, despite her excellent formal training, and, second, the fact that the preponderance of her published work is not philosophical, at least in any straightforward sense.2 But I’m interested in this chapter in providing what you might call counterevidence to the view, widely accepted even among her admirers, that Beauvoir, though a success as an “intellectual,” did not aspire to, let alone achieve, philosophical originality in her work.3 It’s my view, in fact, that her very worries about whether she was suited for philosophy (and vice versa) led her to find a fresh way of appropriating the tradition, a way of redirecting it from the inside, which itself lies waiting to be appropriated. I am going to propose that Beauvoir’s work provides an important and severely underappreciated model for a feminist intervention in, and appropriation of, the philosophical tradition.
Specifically, I’m going to focus on Beauvoir’s appropriation in The Second Sex of the so-called master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, an appropriation that takes place in the light of her dissatisfactions with Sartre’s taking-up of the dialectic in Being and Nothingness. There is no doubt that in many respects the Beauvoir of The Second Sex is indebted to Sartre’s early work, particularly in her appropriation of many of the technical terms of Being and Nothingness (most of which, however, are themselves appropriations from earlier figures, prominently among them Hegel and Heidegger): “self,” “other,” “subject,” “object,” “authenticity,” “being-in-itself,” “being-for-itself,” “being-for-others,” and (Sartre’s signature concept) “bad faith.” Indeed, any study of Beauvoir’s work that neglects her indebtedness to Sartre will be seriously distorted. But I argue here that in taking up Sartre’s terminology Beauvoir decisively establishes her own kink in the history of philosophy, a kink, to repeat, that can be seen to provide a model for a new kind of feminist intervention in the discipline.
Beauvoir’s philosophical achievement in her appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is marked by what I call her “domestication” of the dialectic in the context of her exploration of sex difference. That Beauvoir makes reference to the dialectic throughout The Second Sex and that she uses some of its terms in developing her conception of relations between the sexes are facts that lie right on the surface of the text. The master, evidently, is supposed to correlate somehow with the man; the slave, the woman. Most readers of Beauvoir have been inclined to imagine that she’s borrowing these terms “master” and �
��slave” from Hegel for what is ultimately a nonphilosophical purpose: to dramatize the simplistic idea that men have all the power in the world and women must do their bidding. But if we take seriously the hypothesis that The Second Sex counts as a genuine philosophical appropriation of the master-slave dialectic, a genuine furtherance of philosophy, then this superficial reading comes to look decidedly inadequate. This is because for Hegel, and for Beauvoir in following him, the position of the master is not superior to that of the slave in every respect: morally, on Hegel’s view, it is the slave, and not the master, who is in a position to aspire to the kind of life a human being is capable of living and ought to aspire to live. Indeed, the ethical attenuation of the master’s position is precisely what makes the relationship between the master and the slave fundamentally unstable and thus advances the dialectical movement of The Phenomenology of Spirit. In appropriating the master-slave dialectic Beauvoir means to suggest that to the extent that they are systematically oppressed on the basis of their sex women are particularly well placed to achieve what might be called genuine humanity. A basic task of The Second Sex, then, is to show how the context of exploring sex difference both calls for and informs, as it were, the master-slave dialectic.
The simplistic reading, as I am calling it, of Hegel’s influence on The Second Sex also fails to attend to the way Beauvoir takes up the idea that, contrary to appearances, both the master and the slave are ontologically split, or as both Hegel and Beauvoir put it, “ambiguous,” as between being what they both call “subjects” and “objects.” On the surface of things, it may look as though the master, or the man, is figured as a pure subject and the slave, or the woman, as a pure object. But in fact, according to both Hegel and Beauvoir, this appearance is deceptive; both the master/man and the slave/woman are properly seen as, simultaneously, both subjects and objects. And for both, coming to recognize and accept oneself in one’s ambiguity is the necessary precondition of the moral life. This interpretation of Beauvoir’s view goes against the grain of the standard interpretation, which is that men are subjects and women are objects and that ending the oppression of women requires that they become subjects (a reigning idea in the early days of the current wave of feminism). Those who interpret Beauvoir as making these claims have in recent years criticized her heavily for holding up man as the standard of what a fully realized human being looks like and suggesting, in effect, that women as they stand are inferior to men, and they ought to try to emulate them.4 In stark contrast to this understanding of Beauvoir’s position, I interpret her as suggesting, once again with Hegel in view, that aspiring to be a fully realized human being requires that a person, man or woman, develop a consciousness of himself or herself as inevitably—and simultaneously—both a subject and object. I emphasize the notion of simultaneity here because, as I will argue at length in chapter 4, Beauvoir’s belief that human beings are always both subjects and objects at the same time is directly at odds with Sartre’s understanding of what it is to be a person. Further, I want to relate the conception of ambiguity Beauvoir inherits from Hegel to the implicit critique of Descartes’s mind-body split that, I argued in chapter 2, is at the heart of Beauvoir’s ambitions and achievements in The Second Sex. For Beauvoir, to philosophize from the fact of one’s experience as a sexed being is to be unable to accept the sorts of splits that characterize both Descartes’s and Sartre’s most memorable works. But it’s also to require a genuine reworking of the Hegelian notion of ambiguity, one motivated by Beauvoir’s giving a face—and a body—to the master, and to the slave.
