Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism
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my facticity [that is, my being-an-object, a status that is created and of which I become aware as a result of the Look] is saved. It is no longer this unthinkable and insurmountable given which I am fleeing; it is that for which the Other freely makes himself exist; it is as an end which he has given to himself. I have infected him with my facticity, but as it is in the form of freedom that he has been infected with it, he refers it back to me as a facticity taken up and consented to. He is the foundation of it in order that it may be his end. (483)
And Sartre notes that
up to this point our description would fall into line with Hegel’s famous description of the Master and Slave relation. What the Hegelian Master is for the Slave, the lover wants to be for the beloved. But the analogy stops here, for with Hegel the Master demands the Slave’s freedom only laterally and, so to speak, implicitly, while the lover wants the beloved’s freedom first and foremost. In this sense if I am to be loved by the Other, this means that I am to be freely chosen as beloved. (482).
Here, Sartre figures love as the lover’s desire for the Other to consign his freedom—to dedicate his subjectivity—to the lover. But just as the master’s fantasy of what the slave can give him turns out to be self-contradictory, so, it seems Sartre is suggesting, what the lover desires of the Other is incoherent. The project of making myself loved by the Other is doomed to failure.
The hopelessness of love, at least on Sartre’s construal of the concept, becomes obvious when we try to work out the dialectic between self and Other inaugurated by the lover’s fantasy. Let’s suppose that I desire that you dedicate your freedom to me—that, in Sartre’s argot, you “love” me. What I want is for you to expend all of your freedom as a subject to making the radical, transcendent choice to love me. But if you expend all of your freedom, then you will no longer be a genuine subject and thus, paradoxically, will be unable to love me in the way I want to be loved—namely, as the ultimate object of your adoration.6 Furthermore, by definition your love for me will take the form of your wanting me to make you into my ultimate object. But this requires that I want you to regard me as a subject, in which case, once again, I won’t be an object for you, let alone an ultimate object. The fantasy behind an investment in the idea of love, according to Sartre, thus turns on an impossible wish to forego one’s own subjectivity in favor of identifying with that of an Other: a wish that, alas, requires simultaneously that I own my subjectivity and deny that of the other. It’s the wish that you make me into an object precisely by figuring me as a subject. So the minute you fall in love with me, you disappoint me.7
The failure of love as a project also implies the impossibility of my becoming simultaneously an object and a subject for myself. If I really could identify with the Other’s freedom—if myself-as-object were constituted by it (if the Look were one of pure Sartrean love), then I would in effect become simultaneously both a subject and an object. This would have enormous epistemological consequences, Sartre claims, for if I as for-itself (subject) could regard myself as in-itself (object), then I wouldn’t need the Other to reveal myself (as object) to myself (as subject) or to reveal myself (as subject) through returning the Look. Since from the point of view of the self these revelations are what the self-Other relationship is all about, it follows that if one could succeed in identifying with the Other’s freedom then one would in effect “be other to oneself” (476), thereby obviating the need for a real-life, flesh-and-blood Other. But this, like genuine love (à la Sartre), turns out to be impossible. Regardless of the tenor of my relationships with other people—regardless of whether I love or hate or admire or dislike or am fascinated or repelled by them—on Sartre’s understanding, I am at any given time either a subject or an object but never both. I am a subject when I am acting (including when I am deliberately looking at another being); I am an object under the pressure of the gaze of the Other. Sartre’s picture of the human being turns on the idea that the human being is endlessly capable of finding himself, on an instant’s notice, a stranger to himself. And yet it is absolutely crucial to Sartre’s picture that this becoming a stranger to oneself is never necessary, not in any instant. This is because for Sartre my gazing at the Other is always possible, under any circumstances. Put in another, perhaps more familiarly Sartrean way, my freedom as a subject is never in principle curtailed.
Sartre was willing to take this extreme view to the farthest lengths: writing at a time when Hitler’s abominable treatment of Jews was well known to European intellectuals, even if the extent of the atrocities he was authorizing had yet to be fully revealed, Sartre found himself able to remark,
A Jew is not a Jew first in order to be subsequently ashamed or proud; it is his pride of being a Jew, his shame, or his indifference which will reveal to him his being-a-Jew; and this being-a-Jew is nothing outside the free manner of adopting it. (677)
Sartre wants to say that to be a Jew consists wholly in the way I respond to the Other’s fixing me in his gaze as a Jew. In this sense, I am radically free to decide whether and how I am a Jew—or anything else for that matter. To put the point in more contemporary terms, for Sartre the question of a person’s identity turns wholly, at least at the end of the day, on his construal of that identity. To be sure, in the section of Being and Nothingness on “Bad Faith,” Sartre does suggest that we often succumb to the temptation to construe our identities in bad faith.8 I might refuse (to employ a clichéd but therefore familiar enough example) to admit that my repeated bouts of drunkenness add up to my being an alcoholic; or I might, swinging to the other end of the spectrum of bad faith, claim that my being an alcoholic is a fundamental, unchangeable part of my identity. But in any event my situation is the situation it is not because of any simple fact of the matter (say, my cultural or ethnic heritage) nor because of any other person’s construal of my identity but always because of my own freedom of consciousness. The abdication of this freedom can come only at the hands of my exercising it in the service of allowing an Other to objectify me. And its employment must entail my willingness to make the Other into an object in what we both recognize to be my world. The fantasy that either of us can be subject and object at the same time is the same one that propels Hegel’s proto-master and protoslave to their effete, lopsided relationship.
At the very end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre claims that his ontology “releases to us the ethical meaning of various human projects” (796), which, considered merely in and of themselves, “are equivalent” and “are all on principle doomed to failure” precisely because they all involve human beings’ attempts to be subjects and objects at the same time—or, to put it in Sartre’s idiom, to effect “a synthetic fusion of the in-itself with the for-itself” (797). The only ethically worthy human actions are those done in the spirit of radical freedom. But since Being and Nothingness rests on the idea that everything human beings do is by definition done from radical freedom, it’s not at all clear either what exactly Sartre is exhorting us to do in the final pages of the book or how his exhortations relate to moral philosophy as traditionally understood. Notoriously, the last sentence of Being and Nothingness promises to explore this sort of question “in a future work” (798)—a work that Sartre ultimately considered a failure and did not publish.9
While it is not directly germane to my project to pursue the question of Sartre and ethics very far, it is pertinent to note that what Sartre at the end of Being and Nothingness is vigorously denying is possible—the attempt to become at once subject and object—is precisely the moment of reciprocal recognition in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. At this moment, which never transpires during the actual Hegelian dialectic but remains a human aspiration at the end of this section of the Phenomenology, I am acknowledged as a subject by another subject. This act of recognition of course necessitates (as Hegel’s master learns only too late) that I acknowledge that the Other, as capable of recognizing me, is, indeed, a subject. Thus my being recognized demands my recognition of the Other; and t
his mutual recognition consists in our identifying the objects of our perceptions as subjects. In Sartre’s idiom, recognition demands that my Look enable you in your being-for-self, and vice versa. Notice, too, that our confirmation of each other’s subjectivity has to count, at least on Hegel’s understanding of what recognition is, as confirmation of the objectivity of each person’s status as a subject. But all of this is ontologically impossible, on Sartre’s view. To “recognize” another person is to confer the Look on him; and to confer the Look on him is to turn him into an object. In this case, “objectivity” will consist exclusively in my subjectivity. The only way the Other can become a subject for me is if I allow him to turn me, in my shame, into an object, in which case “objectivity” becomes his subjectivity.10 But my living under the shaming gaze of the Other, just one among the many objects of his world, is intolerable. Thus, I am ontologically impelled to fight his Look with mine. Human existence, on Sartre’s view, consists in the fight to the death, all the time, and with everyone with whom I come into contact.
Sartre’s considered view of what human beings can be for one another is exceedingly bleak. Were the present study primarily an exploration of his early work, I would spend far more time adducing evidence to show just how grim his vision is. However, since my primary purpose is to make a case for the idea that there is something worth looking at in Simone de Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and that this appropriation takes place in part via (or at least in the wake of) Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel’s text, I want now to spend some time looking at one of the less implausible tenets upon which, I claim, Sartre’s extreme view in Being and Nothingness rests. This is Sartre’s belief that there is something not only ontologically impossible but also morally problematic about the very desire for recognition. On Sartre’s conception, the desire to be recognized by the Other amounts to the wish that the Other be a mirror image of oneself. That is, he sees the desire for recognition as inescapably and hopelessly narcissistic.
This narcissistic dimension of the desire for recognition is right on the surface of his play No Exit (Huis clos), written directly after Being and Nothingness.11 As No Exit opens, a man, the “valet,” is escorting a second man, Garcin, into a drawing room. We are given to understand that Garcin is to reside in this room for an indefinite period of time. After asking the valet some questions about the conditions of his stay—questions revealing that something unusual is going on, since the two discuss the fact that Garcin will not ever sleep again, that the lights will perpetually be on, and so forth—Garcin is left alone in the room, door locked. He panics and tries to resummon the valet, to no success. Moments later, the valet reenters the room, bringing with him another resident, Inès. She is followed shortly thereafter by a second woman, Estelle. For the rest of the play the three are left to one another’s devices behind the locked door. Fairly early on in their colloquy, it becomes clear to us that they are, or at least they think they are, in hell. Each of them confesses to having committed a deed that, in his or her own mind and in the minds of the other two, is heinous: Garcin has brazenly cheated on his wife and has deserted the military; Inès has alienated her cousin’s wife from the cousin and then seduced the wife merely for the fun of it; Estelle, having become pregnant with her lover’s baby, has killed the newborn. And all three are dead as a result of these acts: Garcin has been shot for desertion; Inès has been gassed in a murder-suicide by the cousin’s wife; Estelle dies of pneumonia, presumably caught as she drowned her child in a lake. Slowly the three are given to understand that there is no “torturer” in hell, as they expected there would be; instead, they are each other’s torturers. Although each of them at various moments attempts not to play this role and appeals to the two others to join him or her, it becomes increasingly apparent that these attempts are doomed. Each insight into their condition initially appears to bring some hope of cooperation, of mutual recognition, but this moment inevitably segues into a fresh polarization of two against one or each against each, a renewed, mutually hostile and fixating destabilization of what had looked to be a potentially liberating and transcendent step. The play thus ends as follows:
INÈS: So here we are, forever. [laughs]
ESTELLE [with a peal of laughter]: Forever. My God, how funny! Forever.
GARCIN [looks at the two women, and joins in the laughter]: For ever, and ever, and ever.
[They slump onto their respective sofas. A long silence. Their laughter dies away and they gaze at each other]
GARCIN: Well, well, let’s get on with it (46).12
That Hegel’s master-slave dialectic itself plays a role in this play is not obvious from the plot summary I’ve just given. But there is evidence of the connection in the actual words spoken by Garcin, Inès, and Estelle. Let’s begin with those of Garcin. At the beginning of the play, when he is just beginning to appreciate the hellishness of his predicament, he suggests to Inès and Estelle that the solution to their situation is
easy enough; each of us stays put in his or her corner and takes no notice of the others. You here, you here, and I there. Like soldiers at our posts. Also, we mustn’t speak. Not one word. … And that way we—we’ll work out our salvation. Looking into ourselves, never raising our heads. (17–18)
Although both Inès and Estelle agree to this plan, Estelle quickly, if absentmindedly, thwarts it by asking Garcin if he has a mirror. When he ignores her, Inès fishes through her handbag for her pocket-mirror and then angrily realizes that it has been taken from her “at the entrance.” Momentarily, Estelle begins to look as though she’s about to faint. When Inès asks her what’s wrong, she says, “When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much.” This, I take it, is a fairly straightforward announcement of her desire for some sort of objective confirmation of herself, of the truth of the existence of “I.” Sartre here uses the mirror, or mirror-gazing, as a synecdoche: it stands for an association, and perhaps even a conflation, of the desire for recognition with a certain species of narcissism. For Sartre the desire for recognition is a wish for another human being to reflect back to you a fixed image of yourself, an image reduced to what you take to be your most flattering aspect (in Estelle’s case, her beauty).
But because one human being never straightforwardly reflects an image of another, because this image is always refracted through the lens of the image-giver’s subjectivity—through, you might say, the image-giver’s own reflection (in the sense of thinking), the quest for recognition is ultimately doomed to failure. This interpretation of the scene under consideration is confirmed in the subsequent exchange between Inès and Estelle. In response to Estelle’s panic at her lack of access to a mirror, Inès says coyly, “Suppose I try to be your glass?” At first, this appears to be nothing other than a figurative suggestion. It soon becomes clear, however, that Inès is feigning to offer Estelle what she wants: she’s literally offering the use of her eyeballs as a looking glass. But just as the rounded surface of the eye distorts those images it reflects—often by making what’s perfectly ordinary look monstrously disfigured—so the eye in its function as an instrument of sight has the power to transfigure the Other, as the following exchange makes clear:
ESTELLE: Oh, I’m there! But so tiny I can’t see myself properly.
INÈS: But I can. Every inch of you. Now ask me questions. I’ll be as candid as any looking-glass (20).
The eye here is both a literal object and a metonymic symbol for the Other: from the point of view of the narcissistic recognition-seeker, the Other’s eye both as an object of reflection (as mirroring) and as an instrument of a subject of reflection (as thinking) is hopelessly distorting. One of the idiosyncrasies of the hell that Sartre has created in this play is that the eyes of the condemned are condemned never to shut, even for blinking. “You can’t imagine how refreshing it is,” Garcin says to the valet of blinking. “Four thousand little rests per hour. Four
thousand little evasions!” (5–6, translation modified).13
What’s being evaded, of course, is the Look of the Other. In No Exit the power of the Look to determine and reveal the truth of who you are is dramatized in two climactic speeches of Inès’s, directed at Garcin:
You are a coward, Garcin, a coward because I will it. I will it—do you hear?—I will it! And yet, just look at me, see how weak I am, just a breath; I am nothing but the look that sees you, this formless thought that thinks you. (44, translation modified)
I see you, I see you; by myself I’m a crowd, the crowd. Garcin, do you hear it?—Coward (lâche)! Coward! Coward! Coward! You flee from me in vain; I’ll not let you go (lâcherai). (45, translation modified)
It’s important to understand that on Sartre’s view Garcin is a coward not merely because Inès says he is but because, in his shame, he recognizes himself in her description. Moreover, his response to this sense of shame is simply to rail against it, instead of attempting to do something (something Sartre might call asserting himself as for-itself) that might transform him into a person who does not recognize himself in Inès’s words. These words prove doubly galling to Garcin because they identify his reaction to his own sense of shame as itself shameful, itself cowardly. Garcin insists in the wake of Inès’s Look that he was not cowardly—that, indeed, until the moment of his desertion from the military he had consistently “courted danger.” Inès, speaking here for Sartre, calls Garcin’s rationalizations a “dream.” The following exchange ensues: