Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  The transformation from having a sense of oneself simply as being-for-self to a more human mode of self-consciousness requires the confirmation, on Hegel’s view, of the truth of one’s subjective self-certainty, which is to say that it requires objective self-certainty. Objective certainty of oneself is that consciousness of oneself that one achieves only by staking a claim to be being-for-self and having the truth of that claim confirmed. Before I articulate my understanding of what Hegel takes this confirmation—and thus “objectivity” and “truth”—to consist in, I want to point out that the very staking of such a claim counts, on Hegel’s view, as a transcendence of one’s given self. This is because the desire to stake this claim is, according to him, not a given desire—where a “given” desire is one that a being has independent of its self-consciousness (of what Beauvoir and Sartre would call “reflection”)—but, rather, one that, as a product of the being’s self-consciousness, transcends, or goes beyond, the being’s given desires. Since transcending one’s given desires counts for Hegel as acting and since by his definition a being who acts is a subject, a being that stakes a claim to be being-for-itself transforms itself into a subject regardless of whether the staking of the claim turns out to be successful or not—regardless, that is, of whether or not objective self-certainty is actually achieved.

  Now, crucially for Hegel, the eliciting of the desire for objective self-certainty, this transcendent desire that leads to the transformation of a being into a genuine subject, unconditionally necessitates that the being encounter—literally meet up with—another self-conscious being. Here we have one of the most philosophically original and intuitively forceful of Hegel’s moves in the dialectic, the moment in which he insists that full self-consciousness cannot be achieved, or even aspired to, in the absence of engagement with another self-consciousness. The idea that one’s consciousness of oneself is intimately linked with one’s relationships with others plays a central role in the thought of both Sartre and Beauvoir, albeit, as I shall argue, in decisively different ways.18 For Hegel the encounter with another self-conscious being is the necessary goad to a quest for objective self-certainty, for it is only in the presence of another that a being comes to feel the inadequacy—the merely subjective nature—of its own sense of self. Upon encountering another, the subjectively self-certain being, says Hegel,

  is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth. For it would have truth only if its own being-for-self had confronted it as an independent object, or, what is the same thing, if the object had presented itself as this pure self-certainty. (para. 186)

  What I take Hegel to mean when he says that a being’s subjective self-certainty would have truth (i.e., would also be objective) “only if its own being-for-self had confronted it as an independent object” or, equivalently, “if the object had presented itself as this pure self-certainty” is that this encounter reveals to the being the essential privacy of its own sense of itself, which implies that what is necessary for the dissipation of its doubting of this sense and thus its coming to the third moment of self-consciousness is something like its subjecting itself to the conditions of publicity. The need for this subjection would be obviated only if the other being somehow automatically manifested the doubter’s being-for-itself as a (public) object.

  The possibility, raised and then immediately dropped by Hegel, that one’s being-for-self might somehow automatically manifest itself in another being—the possibility, to put it another way, that the mere presence of the other could spontaneously confirm the truth of one’s self-certainty—plays an important role in both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of the master-slave dialectic. For Sartre this possibility appears in the form of an implicit wish on the part of the subjectively self-certain being that the “other” could be an exact mirror image of himself.19 On Sartre’s view, nothing less than the fulfillment of this impossible wish could suffice to overcome for the subjectively self-certain being the sense of itself as split that is engendered by encountering another self-conscious being. This means that sensing oneself to be split is, for Sartre, an inescapable part of being a socialized human being. For Beauvoir, on the other hand, relinquishing the wish for the other to be, as it were, exactly like oneself—cultivating a willingness to subject oneself to what is genuinely other—opens up a way to see, paradoxically, that the other is, figuratively speaking, essentially like oneself (i.e., is a human being), insofar as he or she is capable of accepting himself or herself as split (or, more precisely, “ambiguous”). Beauvoir equates risking a certain investment in one’s privacy (figured as a wish to automatically be transparent to oneself and others) with a commitment to objectivity, a commitment she regards as demanding an acceptance of oneself as ambiguous and one that she takes to be a prerequisite of any morally productive form of human self-consciousness.20

  Hegel puts the problem posed by the encounter with “the other” in a slightly different way earlier in the dialectic, in paragraphs 179 through 181, when he observes that the encounter reveals to a being its own status as an other for the other. He suggests that when a subjectively self-certain being encounters another self-conscious being, it begins to feel itself to be split in a self-contradictory way between, on the one hand, its status for itself as absolute being-for-itself and, on the other hand, its status for the other as merely other. Hegel’s word for this particular manifestation of a sense of being split is of course “ambiguity” (the German Doppelsinnes; see, e.g., para. 180), and it is at the heart of the subjectively self-certain being’s initial response to the encounter with the other. The subjectively self-certain being initially does not, Hegel says, “see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self” (para. 179), figured (in the other’s eyes) as other. The encountered being impresses the subjectively self-certain being only in revealing to it its otherness and, therefore, ambiguity. And it is this very ambiguity that reveals the self-consciousness of the subjectively self-certain being as being-for-itself to be merely subjective and therefore inadequate. It follows in this being’s eyes that resolving its identity crisis requires overcoming this sense of otherness—this particular manifestation of ambiguity. And since its sense of itself as other constitutes the entirety of its perception of the encountered being, it follows that overcoming this sense of itself requires overcoming the encountered being.21

  Before I discuss what this overcoming entails, I want to look briefly at Hegel’s observation in paragraph 180 that the very overcoming of this particular manifestation of ambiguity through the overcoming of the encountered being inevitably produces a second form of ambiguity. The inevitability of this second form of ambiguity turns on the fact that the subjectively self-certain being recognizes itself, albeit as “other,” in the encountered being. This fact implies that its overcoming of the encountered being constitutes the overcoming of itself (as other). In Hegel’s language, through the overcoming “it receives back its own self” (para. 181). But while it is, therefore, no longer split as between its subjectively certain sense of itself and its sense of itself as other—while it is again, as Hegel puts it “equal” to itself—the nature of this apparently unified self remains ambiguous. This is because the newly incorporated part of the self, the part it saw as its own in the encountered being, is by definition no longer “other.” It is part of the self. And yet the self remains split as between its sense of itself as (now) objectively real (as an object) and its new sense of itself as an actor, a subject. In moving from subjective to objective self-certainty through the encountering and overcoming of another being’s sense of itself, the formerly subjectively self-certain being by definition undergoes a transformation the nature of which leaves it with a new, permanent sense of its own ambiguity. Furthermore, the return of the self under its aspect as “other” to the subjectively self-certain being in effect releases the encountered being from the subjectively self-certain being’s fixating—in this day and a
ge we might say “narcissistic”—perception of it. The encountered being, in other words, is no longer perceived by the formerly subjectively self-certain being as an embodiment of its own otherness. And this implies what Hegel in paragraph 181 identifies as a third ambiguity, or perhaps a third form of ambiguity, which concerns the being’s subsequent sense of the other in the wake of its retreat back into itself, a retreat that also transforms the other insofar as it gives that other back, as it were, to itself. The other is now both the being capable of revealing to the subjectively self-certain being its own objective self-certainty and—something else, as yet, at least, unknown. What’s supposed to be ambiguous for the subjectively self-certain being here, as I understand it, is the way these two identities of the other fit together—which is to say that the other being, too, is perceived as split.

  For Beauvoir the relinquishing of a certain form of narcissism in favor of risking an uncertain, unfixed, ambiguous relationship with the other is going to play the role that the suppression of inclination in favor of respecting the moral law plays in Kant. That is, it is the moral moment. For Sartre, quite to the contrary, the inevitable failure of the quest for objective self-certainty—the inevitable failure of the quest to overcome the other, understood as depriving him of the ability to objectify you—entails the impossibility of relinquishing precisely that form of narcissism that Beauvoir regards as impeding the moral moment. Notoriously, it is still a question even for Sartre at the end of Being and Nothingness whether his version of existentialism makes room for something recognizable as genuinely moral relations among human beings. In the last sentence of the book, at the end of a four-page section called “Ethical Implications,” Sartre promises to deliver another book “on the ethical plane” (798), but although he compiled many pages of notes to this end (some of which were published posthumously in 1983 as Cahiers pour une Morale), he did not complete such a work.22

  Hegel’s picture of the encounter with the other is complicated, as he observes in paragraph 182, by the fact that the encountered being must also be a subjectively self-certain being seeking recognition. This is because in order for the encountered being to be for the subjectively self-certain being something more than an object—more than something, that is, that merely either does or does not attract its desire—this being must make manifest its own desire, stake its own claim for recognition. Hegel observes that this situation of mutuality creates a paradox, namely, that

  each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. (para. 184)

  For Hegel it is paradoxically only through the “other” that each subjectively self-certain being can hope to experience the truth of its own self-consciousness; only through the mediation of the other can each being hope to achieve, as Hegel puts it, “this pure abstraction of being-for-self” (para. 186). 23

  So how exactly, on Hegel’s account, does one subjectively self-certain being imagine that the other can confirm its sense of itself as pure being-for-itself? Hegel begins to address these questions at the outset of paragraph 187, whose significance, I think, is best brought out through Kojève’s translation:

  The manifestation of the human-individual taken as pure abstraction of Being-for-itself consists in showing itself as being the pure negation of its objective-or-thingish mode-of-being—or, in other words, in showing that to be for oneself, or to be a man [être homme], is not to be bound to any determined existence, not to be bound to the universal isolated-particularity of existence as such, not to be bound to life.24

  What each subjectively self-certain being is seeking in its encounter with another is to resolve its sense of being split by demonstrating that it is essentially being-for-itself and only appears to be a mere object, a mere chunk of being, a mere thing. This is something each being needs to prove to itself as much as to the other, for it’s the way each imagines it can achieve a satisfactory resolution of its sense of being split. Each needs to evince its willingness to destroy itself insofar as it is an object through an indubitable demonstration of what it wishes to be seen as the fact that it is essentially being-for-itself. And since each being’s appearance as an object is tied to its particular embodiment, each being must demonstrate that its embodiment—and therefore its very life—is dispensable. This demonstration therefore must take the form of the being’s resisting the rote demands of the “I” of primary self-consciousness, epitomized by the desire for self-preservation. If the being succeeds in resisting these demands, then it will show itself to be not only essentially being-for-itself but also essentially, existentially, free: free not to slavishly do the bidding of the brute desires of the “I.” It is therefore through this very demonstration that the being will constitute its freedom. As Hegel puts it:

  It is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. (para 187; brackets in the Miller translation)

  This intuition—the intuition that achieving the fullest form of self-consciousness amounts to claiming one’s freedom; that this claim requires a confrontation between self and world; and that all of this is to be part of the notion of being-for-itself, properly understood—this Hegelian intuition plays for Sartre and Beauvoir the role that the extremely rich intuitive notion of the “thing-in-itself” has played for many readers of Kant. That is, it makes Hegel as unavoidable a thinker for them in considering what a human being is as Kant is for philosophers in considering what an object is.

  With the idea that what is required for objective self-certainty is a subjectively self-certain being’s publicly acknowledged demonstration of existential freedom, we arrive at the juncture of the master-slave dialectic at which Hegel insists on the absolute necessity of the notorious “life-and-death struggle,” in which “each [participant] seeks the death of the other” (para. 187). But why must there be a struggle to the death? Why can’t the encountering beings simply acknowledge one another before that point, even, perhaps, from the start? Hegel’s answer is that because the other represents that which threatens the truth of a being’s self-consciousness as being-for-itself—represents for it, that is, its sense of its status as an object—getting rid of the other is the only way to get rid of itself as other. In Hegel’s words, the problem is that what appears to each participant to be its own “essential being” is “present to it in the form of an ‘other,’ it is outside of itself” so that the task is to “rid itself of its self-externality” (para. 187). Thus the life-and-death struggle is born of each participant’s need manifestly to risk its own life (its own status as a mere thing) and to destroy the life of the “other,” of, more precisely, itself as other.

  And yet if one participant succeeds in, literally, killing the other, then it necessarily fails to obtain the truth of its subjective self-consciousness. In its lifelessness—its decisive reduction to the status of mere thinghood—the defeated participant would be manifestly incapable of acknowledging the being-for-itself of the victor. That there is a crucial link between life and self-consciousness is a piece of knowledge that each participant comes to possess only in the course of the struggle against the other; in risking its own life and setting out to kill the other participant in the struggle, as Hegel puts it, “self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” (para. 189). This discovery has at least two implications. First, each participant sees that it must find some other way to destroy its own otherness as manifested in the other participant. But second, and more important, each sees that its initial desire to confirm the truth of itself as unmediated being-for-self—unadulterated free
dom—is unfulfillable. This is true in part because its own embodiment (with its characteristic needs and desires) is absolutely essential to the survival of its self-consciousness; as Hegel puts it, “life is the natural setting of consciousness” (para. 188). But furthermore, the other participant as a self-consciousness, and thus as embodied, is also essential to the subjectively self-certain being’s quest for objective confirmation of the truth of its self-consciousness. What each participant comes to see, to put the idea in simpler terms, is that it needs the other.