Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  This set of circumstances and of discoveries leads each participant to imagine that the way to obtain the truth of its self-certainty is to kill the other not literally but figuratively—in Hegel’s terms to negate the other insofar as it is being-for-itself. Each being sets out to consign the other to the status of existing purely for the victor, of being purely and absolutely “other.” Each wishes, in Hegel’s idiom, to become the “master” and to make the other his “slave.”25 In this solution, the victor destroys himself as other, insofar as his otherness is a by-product of the loser’s (now destroyed) being-for-self; the winner is no longer “other” in the eyes of the slave but has instead become “the one” (not Hegel’s term, incidentally, but Beauvoir’s). In effect, the winner negotiates his sense of the inevitability of his being split not by living within this split but instead by attempting to cut the difference between being a subject and being an object cleanly between himself and the slave: he tries to see himself as the pure subject, enabled—mediated—in this role by the fact of the slave’s being the pure object. The slave’s willingness to play this role, a willingness produced by his being defeated by the master, suffices to confirm, the master imagines, the truth of his self-certainty.

  In order for one of the participants to achieve the status of master and for the other to be relegated to the status of his slave, Hegel implies later in the dialectic, it is necessary for the latter to become resigned during the life-and-death struggle to the fear of death. In other words, the slave-to-be becomes a slave not (just) because the would-be master is stronger or otherwise puts him in a position in which his life is threatened but because he allows his fear of death to get the better of his desire to vanquish the would-be master. In order to understand this resignation, it’s necessary to look first at the situation of the master and the slave after the struggle. This may be why Hegel saves his explanation of the resignation for paragraph 193, while he discusses the master-slave relationship in paragraphs 190 through 192. It’s as though during the struggle the future slave has a premonition about this relationship and sees that the position of slave, while materially (physically and psychologically) loathsome, is morally advantageous.26

  Hegel’s strategy in depicting the master-slave relationship is to consider how both parties interact with the things that constitute the objects of the master’s desire. The way that the slave acknowledges the “for-itself” status of the master is by serving the master, by obtaining for the master the objects of his desire. The objects the slave obtains for the master are representative of the very ones the slave ultimately refused to forswear in the life-and-death struggle. In so refusing, the slave has shown himself to be “chained,” as Hegel puts it, to the object-world, to thingness. The master, on the other hand, has shown himself to be willing to give up this world. He thus possesses an immediate relationship to the object in the form of distance from and power over it; and since the slave has enslaved himself to the object the master can be seen through a sort of syllogism to rule over the slave through (the mediation of) the object (para. 190). On the other hand, the master can be seen to mediate his relationship with the object through his (immediate) relationship with the slave. He achieves the satisfaction of destroying the object (that is, literally or figuratively consuming it to satisfy his own desire), a satisfaction he saw he could not obtain with respect to the other participant in the life-and-death struggle, because the slave works on the object and prepares it for the master’s enjoyment.

  In both of these mediated relationships (master-object-slave and master-slave-object), Hegel observes, the slave “is expressly something unessential, both by his working on the thing, and by his dependence on a specific existence” (para. 191). In foregoing a negating relationship over the world of things (since he only works on things and doesn’t himself consume them or at least control his own consumption of them) and thus a “for-self” relationship with these things, the slave in effect abdicates his being-for-self. Before the life-and-death struggle, both he and the master-to-be had an absolutely unmediated relationship with the world of objects. But now, his relationship to this world is mediated for the slave in every important respect by the master. And to the extent that the relationship remains unmediated (for example, in the slave’s consumption of food), it is one in which the slave’s being-for-self is of absolutely no consequence. But, cataclysmically, this implies that the master has failed to achieve the sort of recognition he needs, that is, recognition freely granted by another being-for-itself. Here’s how Hegel puts the situation at the end of paragraph 192:

  The object in which the lord [Miller’s word for “master”] has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action.

  The truth that is confirmed for the master is that there exists a consciousness, that of the slave, that is in its essence not essential. But this, Hegel observes in paragraph 193, is an “external” truth, a truth, that is, that concerns not the master’s consciousness but the slave’s. One would expect, then, that the truth that is revealed to the slave is similarly external, namely the truth of being-for-itself (as manifested in the figure of the master). Yet Hegel claims that on inspection the truth of self-consciousness as being-for-itself turns out, paradoxically, to be an internal truth—that is, a truth pertaining to the slave’s own life.

  For the slave, Hegel says in paragraph 194, “the autonomous consciousness existing for itself” is “the truth …, which, however, for it, does not yet exist in it” (Kojève’s translation 21). In other words, the slave sees the master’s autonomous consciousness as the truth, although he himself does not recognize this autonomy as characteristic of his own self-consciousness. Yet, says Hegel, it is in fact the case that this truth is in the slave, albeit in a form that he himself may not recognize. For in the fight with the master, the slavish self-consciousness, in Hegel’s words

  has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. (para. 194)

  During this moment of intense dread, this “absolute melting away of everything stable,” this “unmanning” experienced by the slave during the fight to the death, he becomes pure being-for-itself, since everything given in him is undone. And this is why the truth of self-consciousness is in actuality in the slave as well as for him (i.e., evident in the form of the master). Here is Kojève’s way of putting the slave’s experience of absolute negativity:

  In his mortal terror he understood (without noticing it) that a given, fixed, and stable condition, even though it be the Master’s, cannot exhaust the possibilities of human existence. He “understood” the “vanity” of the given conditions of existence. He did not want to bind himself to the Master’s condition, nor does he bind himself to his condition as a Slave. There is nothing fixed in him. He is ready for change; in his very being, he is change, transcendence, transformation, “education”; he is historical becoming at his origin, in his essence, in his very existence. (22)

  Furthermore, the slave in effect reenacts something like the moment of disruption of what’s fixed with every act of labor he performs: he transforms the objects on which he works, thereby transcending them. The master, on the other hand, has a fixed relationship to the objects the slave presents to him: he merely consumes or otherwise destroys them. To quote Kojève again, “The Slave, in transforming the given World by his work, transcends the given and what is given by that given in himself; hence, he goes beyond himself, and also goes beyond the Master who is tied to the given which, not working, he leaves intact” (23).

  It is through work, in fact, that, acco
rding to Hegel, the slave “becomes conscious of what he truly is” (para. 195). While the master’s relationship to the object, being one exclusively of consumption, or destruction, “lacks the side of objectivity and permanence,” the slave’s relationship to the object, being one of preserving it albeit through a transforming act of labor, is “permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence” (para. 195).27 The slave transforms the object through his own activity, activity that the object itself manifests through its transformed state. What he does counts as activity—that is, something done by an actor—because in not consuming the object the slave must “check” (Hegel’s hemmen) or “repress” (Kojève’s refouler) his immediate desire to do so in favor of transcending it (and thus transcending himself, raw desires and all, as he stands). And because this activity is a manifestation of the slave’s being-for-itself—of his being essentially, that is, an actor (at least in part)—the slave through work makes available to himself objective confirmation of exactly what he was seeking through the life-and-death struggle with the master.28 Although this confirmation was in theory available during that struggle—when, of course, he experienced the absolute dread that caused him to surrender to the would-be master—it is only through work, Hegel says, that the slave is able to see that being-for-self is his essential nature. On Kojève’s interpretation,

  Only in and by work does man finally become aware of the significance, the value, and the necessity of his experience of fearing absolute power, incarnated for him in the Master. Only after having worked for the Master does he understand the necessity of the fight between Master and Slave and the value of the risk and terror that it implies. (23)

  And again:

  This work liberates the Slave from the terror that tied him to given Nature and to his own innate animal nature. It is by work in the Master’s service performed in terror that the Slave frees himself from the terror that enslaved him to the Master. (26)

  Just as the experience of mortal terror alone is enough only to establish the truth of the slave’s humanity but not to make him aware of himself as such, so the experience of work alone, in the absence of this moment of terror, is insufficient for producing genuinely human self-consciousness (para. 196). This is because the moment of terror transforms the slave’s relationship to the natural world überhaupt: the world becomes not merely “other,” not merely a collection of objects that may or may not elicit his desire as given but something that explicitly is not his, something to which his relationship can only be one of transformation and not of consumption or destruction. In the absence of the experience of this moment of terror, a person might work on an object before consuming it (or, of course, discarding it); but this work is in service merely of his desires as they stand. Thus, the moment of terror—which, of course, leads directly to the slave’s binding himself to the master—effectively allows the slave to see the world, through his being forced only to work on it, as something that he can transform.

  This is an insight that is blocked in Sartre’s incomplete appropriation of the dialectic by his attending only to the significance of the moment of terror, the moment in which the self becomes aware of the world as expressly not its own. But for Hegel the dialectic ends only with the observation about the relationship between the moment of terror and the phenomenological significance of work, an observation that looms large in Beauvoir’s appropriation. Famously, it appears at this juncture of the Phenomenology that for Hegel the production of genuinely human self-consciousness—of the sense of oneself as, from the point of view of truth, a being whose destiny is “not to be what it is … and to be (that is, to become) what it is not” (Kojève 5)—requires something Hegel calls enslavement to others (the German is Knechtschaft).29 Now it’s a question, of course, what form this “enslavement” actually takes (if any) in real life. Kojève, for one, seems to see the master-slave situation as primarily a moment in human history, something, therefore, that’s somehow behind us. (Exactly what “a moment in human history” might amount to—a social configuration? part of the mythological past? something we go through as children?—is not, of course, my question, at least not in this context.) But what’s distinctive (although not unique) about Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s understanding of Knechtschaft is that it is something that human beings across history not only must experience as individuals in order to achieve something like genuinely human self-consciousness but also must struggle with on a daily basis.

  And yet it’s possible to cut the difference between Sartre and Beauvoir, I’m going to argue, precisely along the different lines they draw around the concept of Knechtschaft. For Sartre, to anticipate, Knechtschaft is to be understood as enslavement in a fairly straightforward sense: it requires the absolute surrendering of the self, of one’s status as a subject, to the other. For Sartre, at least the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, the threat of Knechtschaft in this bleak sense pollutes every human interaction: every human interaction manifests a master-slave construction. Hence the emblematic line from the end of his play No Exit: “Hell is—other people!” (45). Needing to exercise vigilance in our efforts to avoid enslavement by enslaving others, human beings on Sartre’s picture of things cannot, as it were, get beyond the life-and-death struggle in the Phenomenology. Our position as beings who wish for the confirmation of our humanity to be an essentially private matter is fixed ontologically.

  For Beauvoir, quite to the contrary, Knechtschaft is to be seen primarily in its enabling aspect, as what leads us, as it were, to bring ourselves to ourselves as human beings; and here Miller’s translation of the German word not as “enslavement” but as “bondage” is more in tune with the note Beauvoir wishes to strike in her interpretation of the idea. For her, appreciating the fact that mastery—our very subjectivity—is achieved only through an acceptance of our bondage to and with one another, through, that is, our willingness to subject ourselves as ambiguous beings to something she calls “objectivity,” is the key to achieving the fullest flowering of human self-consciousness.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Conditions of Hell: Sartre on Hegel

  At the end of his play No Exit, written directly after Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre famously has the protagonist, Garcin, come to the scandalous conclusion that “hell is other people!” Although as his thinking progressed Sartre was increasingly at pains to distinguish Garcin’s outburst from his own considered opinion on the role other people play in an individual’s life, I want to argue here that in both content and tone the line accurately emblematizes his appropriation in Being and Nothingness of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. For Sartre, the dialectic is to be interpreted as allegorizing the general nature of interaction among human beings, showing it to be structured by narcissism, paranoia, and skepticism, states he takes to be characteristic of genuinely human self-consciousness. The guiding purpose of this demonstration, again, is to fill in a background against which the philosophical originality of Simone de Beauvoir’s appropriations of Hegel and Sartre will stand in relief. What I want to make obvious are certain profound differences from Sartre’s views in her conceptions of, for example, what constitutes a subject, what objectivity is and whether and how it is possible, and how genuinely human self-consciousness is to be achieved. These differences arise precisely within Beauvoir’s appropriation of Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel—within, that is, her own interpretation of Sartre—which is why understanding Beauvoir’s take on Hegel requires knowing something about Sartre’s.

  For this purpose, I am going to focus on the well-known section of Being and Nothingness called “The Look,” in which Sartre sets up a scenario around which his appropriation of the master-slave dialectic can be seen to coalesce. The scenario begins with Sartre’s asking us to imagine “that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole” (347). We must imagine, he stresses, that he is not thinking about his crouching at the door; he is simply doing it.
In Sartre’s terminology, his consciousness in this moment is to be seen as “non-thetic” or “unreflective” (347). This type of consciousness, Sartre says,

  sticks to my acts, it is my acts; and my acts are commanded only by the ends to be attained and by the instruments to be employed. My attitude, for example, has no “outside”; it is a pure process of relating the instrument (the keyhole) to the end to be attained (the spectacle to be seen), a pure mode of losing myself in the world, of causing myself to be drunk in by things as ink is by a blotter. (348)

  With the idea of unreflective consciousness, Sartre appropriates Hegel’s primary moment of self-consciousness, a moment characterized in the Phenomenology, as I suggested in chapter 3, by a being’s preoccupation with fulfilling his desires as they stand, by a sense of himself as discrete only insofar as he sees the rest of the world in terms of its potential for filling these desires. For Sartre, then, this moment of consciousness is to be taken not as historical (either for the species or for an individual) but as an ever-available option for human beings: a person’s consciousness counts as non-thetic whenever she is unreflectively doing something, whenever she is “lost in the world.”1 Notice, too, that Sartre implicitly interprets the idea of desires as they stand to include any desires whose ends are sought unreflectively, even if they originated in some previous act or process of reflection. This would imply that what distinguishes a desire-as-it-stands from a transcendent desire is not, as in Hegel, whether the desire is a product of reflection but whether this reflection controls the desire—whether, to put it another way, the desire is acted upon deliberately. This understanding of the early moment of self-consciousness, seeing it as part of the here-and-now and emphasizing the role of deliberation in what is to count as action (and thus as transcendence), is one of Sartre’s contributions to Beauvoir’s way of appropriating the master-slave dialectic.