Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism
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I cannot emphasize this point enough. What interests me about Beauvoir’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic is not just that it puts her in a position to inflect Hegel’s notion of ambiguity, nor that it constitutes a certain kind of challenge to various features of the dialectic. Anyone who knows anything about the history of European philosophy after Hegel can tick off a list of thinkers—including Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Freud—who have explicitly taken the notion of ambiguity and perspectivism (or situatedness) in various fruitful directions. While an ancillary goal of mine is to place Beauvoir squarely in the company of these thinkers (as an equal, not just as a student), my central aim is to show just how the context of her starting her philosophical work in The Second Sex with the question “What is a woman?” makes a fateful difference both in the way she writes and in the philosophical conclusions she reaches. The claim is not that Beauvoir’s work is hands-down superior to that of her male forebears. It is that her work stands as a challenge to all of them insofar as her mindfulness of the bearing of sex difference—and, more particularly, her sense of the significance and mystery of her own womanhood—on the phenomena they explore represents a fundamental challenge both to the past and future of philosophy.
If the distortions of the standard interpretation of Hegel’s influence on The Second Sex are due in part to a failure to see Beauvoir as appropriating Hegel and not just taking advantage of his terminology, they are also associated, not surprisingly, with the presumption, still commonplace, that Beauvoir’s philosophy, such as it is, is profoundly parasitic on Sartre’s.5 In Being and Nothingness Sartre expressly argues that what we can learn from reading, and criticizing, the master-slave dialectic is that to be a full person is to be a subject while to let yourself be an object is to reduce yourself to a mere thing; and no human being is ever both a subject and an object at the same time. Sartre’s aim in his appropriation of Hegel, as I will show in detail in chapter 4, is to argue that the only way to become a subject is to make oneself a subject, and the only way to make oneself a subject is to turn somebody else into an object. For Sartre, then, to be genuinely human is to aspire to mastery; to be the victim of someone else’s achievement of humanity is to be what Sartre, appropriating Hegel, calls a slave. And for him the master-slave situation is unstable only in the sense that whether or not one is a slave is a standing question whose answer at any given moment depends entirely on whether or not one has the personal fortitude in that moment to assert one’s mastery over someone else—that is, as Sartre understands things, the wherewithal to attain the status of being a subject by transforming another person into an object. Every human being, on Sartre’s bleak view, is always, in all times and places, by definition engaged in a struggle for mastery with other human beings.
That Hegel thought this struggle could itself be overcome results, Sartre claims, from his “failure” to follow out the implications of his best intuitions, such as the intuition that being a subject has to do with one’s relationships with other people.6 Implicit in this understanding of Hegel is the view that appropriating another philosopher’s work (as opposed to just offering an interpretation of it) amounts to discerning and correcting his or her errors with an eye toward producing a better, error-free comprehensive theory. This is, of course, a very familiar view of how philosophers can use their interest in other philosophers’ ideas to make their own original contributions to the field. But I am going to argue that this understanding of what philosophical appropriation is and why it is worthwhile is not operative in Beauvoir’s work. For her, I will try to show, the test of whether a philosopher’s work is worthy of appropriation is not whether it is susceptible to correction but whether it provides one with a philosophical idiom, a set of terms and concepts that open up a productive way to do one’s own philosophical work.7 According to this way of understanding philosophical appropriation, whether or not a philosopher’s best intuitions can be brought to cohere into a theory is beside the point. What matters is their raw intuitiveness, which is to say their ability to gain and hold one’s conviction and to spur one’s philosophizing regardless of the specific philosophical questions one finds oneself addressing. Indeed, in Beauvoir’s view, the richness of such intuitions manifests itself in part in the way they provoke one to think in new philosophical contexts—contexts that may well (and, in Beauvoir’s case, do) produce an implicit surpassing (Hegel might say sublating) of the work appropriated. There’s a certain irony in Beauvoir’s holding this view of how to appropriate another philosopher’s work, a view, I’m arguing, that leads Beauvoir to intuitions—intuitions about the nature and significance of sex difference as well as about what philosophical appropriation can look like—that themselves stand waiting to be appropriated. The irony is that Beauvoir, one of the first formally trained woman philosophers in the West, refused Sartre’s understanding of appropriation because she felt that for a woman of her generation to aspire to be recognized by her male colleagues as philosophically “original” (which would amount to the acknowledgment that she had overturned and rebuilt a great figure’s system) was, in a word, preposterous.
This attitude accounts at least in part, I think, for the relative modesty of the aspirations and achievements of those of Beauvoir’s works generally recognized as straightforwardly philosophical, works in which Beauvoir is at pains to position herself as essentially Sartre’s disciple.8 But my interpretation of Beauvoir’s aspirations and achievements in The Second Sex is going to highlight evidence that she was struggling even in her earlier, straightforwardly philosophical texts and particularly in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), written shortly before The Second Sex (1949) to express her disagreements with Sartre and to find a way of producing genuinely original philosophical work. Paradoxically, it took Beauvoir’s investigating something she did not regard as primarily a philosophical topic, namely, the situation of women, to yield her most important contribution to philosophy. Her existential need, as it were, to investigate the nature of inequality between the sexes spawns a genuinely original appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, one in which philosophy’s silence on the fact of this inequality is philosophically redressed.
In the present chapter I offer a rendering of the master-slave dialectic in order to establish a foundation for understanding both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of it. Then in chapter 4 I explore Sartre’s appropriation of the dialectic as evidenced, mainly, in the section of Being and Nothingness called “The Look.” I show that Sartre’s motivation for appropriating Hegel has more to do with his sense of dissatisfaction with the dialectic, his sense that the systematicity of Hegel’s philosophy needs to be shored up, than with his (explicitly averred) recognition of the rich intuitiveness of certain of Hegel’s ideas. I also show how this motivation ironically leads Sartre to put aside parts of the master-slave dialectic that look for all the world as though they might further his overarching aim in Being and Nothingness of showing human beings to be radically, existentially free. In chapter 5 I track what I argue is Beauvoir’s attempt in her early, pre-Second Sex philosophical work to express her philosophical difference from Sartre, in part through struggling to articulate her fascination with Hegel’s dialectic. Finally, in chapters 6 and 7 I look at Beauvoir’s appropriation of the dialectic in The Second Sex, focusing on the shift in her philosophizing from the early work. I attempt to chronicle the rich intuitions yielded by Beauvoir’s domestication of the dialectic in the context of sex difference, a domestication made possible by her perception of the richness of Hegel’s own idiom. And I focus on what I read as Beauvoir’s highly intuitive suggestion that our inclination to recognize each other as belonging to one or the other of two basic types of human beings (man and woman) can be seen as a wish to ward off the exacting demands of our inherent ambiguity.
THE MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC: A BEAUVOIRIAN RENDERING
The rendering of the master-slave dialectic that I’m about to offer has a very specific purpose:
to provide the necessary foundation for making sense of my understanding of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of it, where making sense of my understanding of Sartre’s appropriation is in turn preparatory for making sense of my understanding of Beauvoir’s appropriation of Sartre. My claim in all of this, the claim on which the viability of this project rests, is that Simone de Beauvoir is worth taking seriously as an independent philosophical thinker, where the word “independent” is meant to signal the originality and importance of her appropriation of the ideas and concepts she has inherited from the philosophical tradition. My analysis rests, further, on the claim that the history of philosophy can plausibly be characterized as the history of such appropriations, so that the question of what counts, or ought to count, as original and important work in the discipline—of which attempts at appropriation themselves perennially invite further (perennially inviting) appropriations—is also at least implicitly under investigation in this work. That Hegel’s writing counts as such is confirmed, or reconfirmed, I’m claiming, by the powerful appropriation of his work that we find in Beauvoir. But to support this claim there’s no need for me to provide an independent appropriation of the master-slave dialectic. Indeed it would be beside the point for me to attempt to do so. Therefore, in what follows I make no effort, for example, to locate the dialectic within the frame of the Phenomenology of Spirit, let alone the wider body of Hegel’s work.9 I further set aside questions that any genuine appropriation of Hegel’s text would need to address: To whom does the dialectic apply? Is it to be taken as a picture of human nature in general? Is it an allegory, a piece of history, an illustration? My goal is to render Hegel so that Beauvoir’s answers to questions such as these come to seem philosophically pressing.
I have been helped in this rendering by Alexandre Kojève’s famous series of lectures on the Phenomenology, delivered in Paris between 1933 and 1939, students’ notes from which were published in 1947 (i.e., two years before the appearance of Le Deuxième Sexe).10 The first chapter, “In Place of an Introduction,” which comprises Kojève’s translation of the dialectic and various elaborations of the text, has been especially useful. Kojève’s influence as a reader of Hegel on Paris intellectuals from the 1930s at least through the 1950s is impossible to overestimate. No one thinking about Hegel during those years could possibly avoid having to take account of his interpretations. Indeed, Sartre and Beauvoir were typical of Parisian intellectuals in their lack of pre-Kojèvian experience with the Phenomenology. Paris before Kojève ignored the book not only because it was not published in French until Jean Hyppolite’s translation appeared at the tail end of Kojève’s lecture series but also because no prominent French scholar before Kojève and Hyppolite had taken an interest in it.11 It is therefore not as odd as it might appear that Sartre’s own interest in phenomenology in fact predated his reading of Hegel’s book by several years; by the time Sartre first encountered the Phenomenology, his own Being and Nothingness—the subtitle of which is A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology—was nearly complete.12
Beauvoir apparently “discovered” the Phenomenology in 1940, during a time when notes from Kojève’s lectures were beginning to be published and when Sartre was detained in Germany as a prisoner of war. She first mentions Hegel to Sartre in a letter dated July 11, 1940: “You know, Hegel’s horribly difficult, but also extremely interesting. You must know him—it’s akin to your own philosophy of nothingness. I’m enjoying reading him and thinking precisely about expounding him to you” (Letters to Sartre 314). At the time that she began reading Hegel seriously (at the Bibliothèque National every afternoon from two to five)13 Beauvoir was working on what was to become her first published novel, L’invitée, the epigraph to which is a famous line from the master-slave dialectic: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.” The timing of all these events makes it practically impossible to imagine that Beauvoir was unfamiliar with Kojève’s work on Hegel. Eva Lundgren-Gothlin reports that when she interviewed Beauvoir at the end of her life, Beauvoir denied having attended Kojève’s seminars—which makes sense, given that she apparently did not begin reading the Phenomenology until the year after these seminars ended. “But,” Lundgren-Gothlin quotes Beauvoir as saying, “I had read what Kojève had written and it had interested me a great deal. Particularly interesting was what he had written about the master and slave dialectic.”14 It was a persistent sense of this interest of Beauvoir’s in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel that sent me back to Kojève’s lectures. Kojève’s influence on the way I’m about to render Hegel’s dialectic shows up most directly in my decision at various junctures to use his interpretations of the text instead of stricter translations of the Phenomenology.
What moves both Sartre and Beauvoir to appropriate the dialectic, which comprises paragraphs 178 through 196 of the Phenomenology (section A of part 4), is the conception of human self-consciousness they see Hegel articulating in these passages, a conception driven by two basic intuitions: first, that the full flowering of human self-consciousness is not, as it were, automatic but instead is the result of a process; and, second, that this process necessitates that human beings recognize each other as capable of this full flowering.15 In a prologue to the dialectic, Hegel foreshadows what he calls the three “moments” of self-consciousness, which for the sake of explanation I’ll identify as “primary,” “secondary,” and “tertiary” (see para. 176).16 Primary self-consciousness is, roughly speaking, a simple sense of oneself as a discrete being over and against the rest of the world—independent from what in Hegel’s terms is “other” (para. 186). The independent “I” that is the object of primary self-consciousness takes account of what is “other” only insofar as it has the potential to satisfy the desires primary self-consciousness finds itself experiencing. For primary self-consciousness, says Hegel, “its essence and absolute object is ‘I’”; and what is “other” is regarded as “unessential” (para. 186). Secondary self-consciousness is marked by the realization that the very existence of the “I” is irrevocably dependent on the existence of independent objects, since the “I,” after all (self-consciousness understands in this moment) is nothing other than what Hegel calls “Desire” (for these objects). This realization of the dependence of the “I” on what appears now to be independent of it raises for secondary self-consciousness a worry that in fact it is the “I” that might be unessential—might be, that is, an “other,” at least from the point of view of the independent object. In this secondary moment of self-consciousness, therefore, self-consciousness perceives a clash between its conception of the “I” as essential (the central conception of primary self-consciousness) and its conception of the “I” as merely “other.” Tertiary self-consciousness is marked by a harmonious unification of these two conceptions of the “I,” when, as Hegel puts it, “the unity of [a being] in its otherness becomes explicit for it” (para. 177). For Sartre and Beauvoir, the significance of the master-slave dialectic lies in great part in the intuitiveness of Hegel’s idea that genuinely human self-consciousness is not a given but is, rather, something that needs to be achieved in the form of a person’s developing and negotiating a sense of being split.17
For Hegel this sense of being split is closely tied to two conceptual dichotomies, that between subject and object and that between subjectivity and objectivity. Since these dichotomies are central to both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s conceptions of the person, it’s important for my purposes to show how these pairs of terms come into play in Hegel’s picture of self-consciousness. To this end, it will help to refigure the differences among the moments of self-consciousness in terms of what Hegel calls “certainty” of oneself (see, e.g., para. 186). Hegel associates genuinely human self-consciousness with “objective” self-certainty and the two previous moments with “subjective” self-certainty. Subjective self-certainty is a sense of oneself as a being whose “essence and absolute object is ‘I’” (para. 186). A being subjectively certain of itself decisively dis
tinguishes itself from the rest of the world, from what is “other,” and it regards the collection of objects that constitute what is “other” solely in terms of their usefulness or lack thereof in fulfilling the given desires of the “I,” such as desires for food, shelter, and sex. Its life consists in attempting to satisfy these desires, and this is why the “absolute” object for it is its own desiring self. This makes it sound as though any being that is subjectively certain of itself, insofar as it tries to satisfy the desires of itself as absolute object, counts as a “subject.” But it’s crucial to Hegel’s view and to Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriation of it to block this inference. This is because all of them define a subject as a being who acts; and action, they claim, is something that goes beyond mere attempts at fulfilling one’s desires as one finds them. Genuine action, for Hegel, Sartre, and Beauvoir, entails deliberately—self-consciously—undertaking to transcend one’s given desires by assigning oneself a project the fulfillment of which necessitates the subordination of those desires. So a subjectively self-certain being is not, and is not aware of itself as, a subject; rather, this being is certain of itself merely insofar as it takes the “I” and its desires to be absolutely valuable. The subjectively self-certain being is, to put it the way Hegel does, sure of itself as “being-for-itself” (Fürsichsein para. 186).