Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism
Page 18
It rests with her male and female readers of today to say whether they subscribe to this judgment, which for me testifies finally to the taste of ashes left by a book written on the side or against the grain of that which one had begun to elaborate oneself. To say it straight out: Why did she have to get involved in this existentialism business, when, from July 1940, she held the thread that would lead her directly from She Came to Stay to The Second Sex?” (64)
For Debra Bergoffen, the answer to this question is that “this existentialism business” is integral to Beauvoir’s work. As Bergoffen sees it, “The Second Sex develops, in the sense of making concrete, the themes of The Ethics of Ambiguity.” It therefore “sets The Ethics of Ambiguity in new directions.”8 And the Ethics itself, Bergoffen argues, ought to be seen as developing, within a fundamentally existentialist framework, Husserl’s conception of intentionality, especially in relation to “the other” and as articulated in the Cartesian Meditations. And yet ultimately, on Bergoffen’s view, The Second Sex pushes past the Ethics insofar as it develops something Bergoffen calls a “philosophy of the erotic.” Specifically, Bergoffen tries to show, in The Second Sex Beauvoir “work[s] through the more radical implications of Husserl’s ideas of intentionality” (185) to show how erotic relationships allow human beings to transcend themselves in a way that “embraces the otherness of the other” (89). Her philosophy of the erotic thus opens up possibilities of human relatedness that Sartrean existentialism cannot entertain.9
My own view is that while both Le Doeuff and Bergoffen are picking up on genuine tendencies in Beauvoir’s early writing, they each ultimately mischaracterize both the nature of Beauvoir’s philosophical originality and her relationship to other philosophers. For Le Doeuff, Beauvoir’s early philosophical writing is just watered-down Sartrean existentialism and is unrelated to the decidedly un-Sartrean Second Sex, whose most direct philosophical forebear is Hegel. For Bergoffen, The Second Sex is the capstone in Beauvoir’s project to take not Being and Nothingness but Husserl’s philosophy in a decisively important new direction. In my view, Beauvoir is struggling to appropriate intuitions she has picked up from Hegel and Sartre and Husserl (not to mention Merleau-Ponty) from the earliest work on. But it is not until she comes to write The Second Sex that she finds a satisfying, genuinely original way to do so. In the pre–Second Sex material, I am going to argue in this chapter, Beauvoir has not found her philosophical voice. She cannot articulate clearly why she finds herself attracted to the thinkers whose works inspire her to write. For this reason, the early works are marked by a certain vagueness, an imprecision of thought that disqualifies them, on my view, contra Bergoffen, from serious independent philosophical consideration. But this is not, contra Le Doeuff, because they constitute some sort of detour from Beauvoir’s “real” work. Rather, it’s because Beauvoir’s philosophical sympathies do not change so drastically over time that a retrospective look at this early material helps one pinpoint exactly what it is about The Second Sex that is philosophically important. It turns out that the way Beauvoir learns to appropriate the work of others—a way, as I will argue, she does not discover until she is motivated to write The Second Sex—is her most decided original contribution not only to philosophy but also to feminism.
This chapter proceeds as follows. First, in agreement with Le Doeuff, I characterize Beauvoir in her three earliest philosophical works as writing essentially from within the shadow of Sartre’s system, although I show, now in agreement with Bergoffen, that her motivation stems as much from her dissatisfaction with the ethical implications (and silences) of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as it does from her zeal for the book. I indicate how from the earliest of these works Beauvoir is trying to express a certain strong disagreement with Sartre’s views, a disagreement to which she alludes in slipping that unexpected distinction between bad faith and genuine oppression into the introduction to The Second Sex. Finally, I suggest (contrary to both Le Doeuff and Bergoffen) that with The Second Sex Beauvoir’s earlier philosophical works are not so much put aside or continued or gone beyond but directly transcended in a sense that Beauvoir herself, exploring her understanding of conceptions of transcendence in both Sartre and Hegel, attempts both to thematize and to act out.10
PYRRHUS ET CINÉAS
In all of her philosophical works that precede The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir is always, and often explicitly, at pains to correct what she saw as misapprehensions about existentialism that began to proliferate after the publication of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. What I’m claiming she identified as misapprehensions are the familiar charges leveled against Sartre’s philosophy, now and then: that it is solipsistic, nihilistic, amoral (if not immoral), pessimistic, and so on. Of course it’s impossible to say anything definitive about why Beauvoir took this task upon herself, although given what is known about her close personal relationship to Sartre it would be preposterous not to suppose that it stems in part from some sort of brute desire to defend him. But what I’d like to suggest in the next few pages is that the anxiety Beauvoir clearly felt on Sartre’s behalf is at least in part motivated by her sense that in Being and Nothingness he did not provide the resources to answer some of his harshest critics. It’s not clear to me whether she believed that this was a superficial problem—that is, that Sartre hadn’t explicitly drawn out the countervailing points he needed to make—or that Being and Nothingness was more fundamentally vulnerable. What is clear—and here I am relying on the credibility of the interpretation of Sartre’s views I offered in chapter 4—is that the views Beauvoir expresses in Sartre’s defense often do not jibe with what’s in Being and Nothingness. Regardless of what she believed herself to be doing, in order to answer Sartre’s critics Beauvoir paradoxically had to move increasingly far away from exactly those of his views that she was undertaking to defend. The process of living out this paradox—a paradox that was a function, to be explicit, of her subscribing to a familiar conception of philosophy driven by certain familiar standards of failure and success—helped prepare Beauvoir for discovering a new way of relating to philosophy and thus a new way of being a philosopher.
In Pyrrhus et Cinéas, the first of the works in which she undertakes to defend Sartre, Beauvoir sets out to show how existentialism can counter the view that it is a nihilism according to which no human activity is more worth doing than any other. This is a charge, as I observed in chapter 4, that Sartre invites when he claims at the very end of Being and Nothingness that “all human activities are equivalent … and that all are on principle doomed to failure.” Thus, he infamously continues, “it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations” (797). Beauvoir uses one of Plutarch’s exchanges between the warrior Pyrrhus and his comrade Cineas to frame her understanding of what’s at stake in the charge that existentialism is a nihilism:
“We are going, first, to bring Greece to its knees,” [Pyrrhus] said.
“And then?” asked Cineas.
“We are going to Asia to conquer Asia Minor and Arabia.”
“And then?”
“We are going to the Indies.”
“And after the Indies?”
“Ah!” said Pyrrhus, “then I’m going to rest.”
“Then why,” asked Cineas, “don’t you just rest straight off?”11
What’s the use of doing something over and over again, especially something that’s going to produce untold pain and destruction, if all you’re going to do with yourself in the long run, all you’re looking forward to, really, is rest? Why do anything?
As a start on an answer Beauvoir appeals to one of the more famous aphorisms of Voltaire’s Candide: “One must cultivate one’s garden” (11). But which is my garden? For Beauvoir this question constitutes a variation on the disciples’ “Who is my neighbor?” (12), and she finds Christ’s answer compelling:
When the disciples asked Christ, “Who is my neighbor?” Christ did not respond with a list. He told the parable of t
he good Samaritan. The neighbor of the man abandoned on the road was the one who covered him with his coat and came to his aid: one is not the neighbor of anyone, one makes another a neighbor through an act. (17)
What Beauvoir likes about Christ’s response is that it suggests that there is no set answer to a question such as “Who is my neighbor?” or “Which is my garden?” Following Sartre, Beauvoir subscribes to the idea that we do not discover our neighbors, or gardens; rather, we forge them through our actions. This of course still leaves the question of what sorts of actions we ought to perform. Why make one particular person as opposed to another your neighbor? A familiar answer, an answer in fact suggested by the parable of the Good Samaritan, is that we ought to become neighbors to those who need our help. But Beauvoir thinks that there’s often a danger in selecting our neighbors this way, a danger that has to do with how one conceives of the person in need. “Let us suppose,” Beauvoir fantasizes for us,
that the other needs me; suppose that his existence possesses an absolute value: then I am justified in existing since I exist for a being whose existence is justified. I am delivered from risk, from anguish; in posing before me an absolute end I abdicate my liberty. No question is posed any longer. I no longer want to be anything but a response to this call that needs me. (70)12
Here we find the familiar existentialist warning that we must not “abdicate” our “liberty” under the guise of doing something good—a quintessential form of bad faith. But this warning depends on certain notions that Beauvoir leaves in decidedly vague form. First, there’s the idea that “[the other’s] existence possesses an absolute value.” It may help to imagine that Beauvoir is alluding here to the Kantian view that rationality demands that we regard and treat other rational beings as ends-in-themselves.13 The problem with so conceiving of others, evidently, is that it allows me to imagine that I’ve “justified” my existence once and for all. This notion of “justification,” which looms large in Pyrrhus et Cinéas, is also less than transparent. But Beauvoir seems to find it necessary in her attempt to rescue Sartre’s metaphysics from the charge of nihilism. If, contra Sartre, it makes sense to speak of my having a garden, of my having reasons to choose to do something rather than another thing, then some sort of question about justification is going to arise.
But if this idea of justification is going to jibe with Sartre’s basic picture of the human being as radically free, metaphysically speaking, then it’s going to be impossible to justify myself once and for all. I’m going to be continually in the position of having to choose, continually dogged by “anguish” and “risk.” For both Sartre and the early Beauvoir, this is simply a brute metaphysical fact. To devote myself to another human being because I imagine that he or she is an “absolute end” is to abdicate my freedom of choice, and fantasizing that there is something morally good about this sort of devotion is therefore a quintessential expression of “bad faith.” Beauvoir’s basic position in Pyrrhus et Cinéas thus far is that I do have a garden (as opposed to some sort of haphazard collection of plants)—I do have reasons to decide to do some things and not others and to aim at a certain order in my life—but that the question of what my garden, or who my neighbor, is can never be settled once and for all. So then we are still left with the question of what counts as “justification” for my actions, and of how I know or decide that something I do is or was or will be justified. Again: how am I to forge my garden? More than two-thirds of the way into Pyrrhus, Beauvoir has yet to answer the question she posed for herself at the beginning. What she has established is only that, according to existentialism, one cannot—ever, under any circumstances—escape one’s own freedom and thus one’s responsibility for one’s own existence. Her insistence on the real-life importance of this stark metaphysical position is as extreme as Sartre’s in Being and Nothingness, as we see in the following two passages:
A man cannot ever abdicate his liberty; when he feigns to renounce it, he does nothing but mask it, and mask it freely. The slave who obeys chooses to obey and his choice must be renewed at each instant. (72)
You can throw a man in prison, leave him there, cut off his arms, lend him wings; but his liberty remains infinite in every case. The automobile and the airplane do not change anything with regard to our liberty, and neither do the chains of the slave. (86)
The idea that all human beings are forced by the fact of their unimpeachable metaphysical liberty to select and cultivate one garden or another, the idea that Beauvoir has been at pains to elaborate and defend for almost all of Pyrrhus et Cinéas, is pure Sartre. But of course this idea does not in and of itself provide the resources for Pyrrhus to give Cinéas a compelling answer. It doesn’t justify Pyrrhus’ choice of one sort of life over another. And yet showing that existentialism can come to Pyrrhus’ assistance here was precisely Beauvoir’s goal in writing this defense of Sartre’s system.
Ultimately, in the last quarter of the book or so, Beauvoir does undertake to provide Pyrrhus with a way of answering Cineas. But she does so by characterizing the relationship between a self and what she calls, of course following Being and Nothingness, “the Other” in a way that is not at all obviously Sartrean. Indeed, I’m going to argue that even in this stage of her philosophical development, when she takes herself to be little more than Sartre’s philosophical handmaiden, Beauvoir is more indebted to Hegel’s way of understanding self and other than she is to that of Sartre. Regardless of how one decides the question of Hegel’s influence on Beauvoir, one cannot deny that her thought veers decidedly from Sartre’s in the suggestion she explores near the end of the book that for a person to act, to assume her subjectivity, to exist as opposed to merely being (to employ the existentialist jargon) one must “assume” one’s acts, insofar as they create a new situation for the Other:
A first analysis of my relationships with the Other has led me to this result: the Other asks nothing of me; he is not an emptiness that I have to fill. I can discover in him no ready-made justification of myself. [So far, so Sartrean. But then:] And yet each of my acts in falling in the world creates for him a new situation. I must assume these acts. (90)
What does it mean to say that I must “assume” my acts, acts that create for the Other a new “situation” as they “fall in the world”? Again, Beauvoir’s unbridled use of existentialist, or existentialist-sounding jargon, sometimes her own (“assume”), sometimes Sartre’s (“situation”) and sometimes other philosophers’ (“falling in the world,” which has its origins in Heidegger’s Being and Time) does nothing to clarify her thought.14 It might sound as though she is suggesting that I have some sort of metaphysical, preordained duty to the Other to take responsibility for the “situations” I create for him. Leaving aside for the moment the question of what Beauvoir means by “situation” here, and just how a “situation” could be “for” the Other, I think we can safely infer that this understanding of what she means by “assume” is incorrect. Hers is decidedly not a Kantian view in this respect, as Beauvoir is frequently wont to observe: “The mistake of Kantian morality,” she says, “is to have attempted to make an abstraction of our own presence in the world and to result in abstract formulas” (91). So if there’s no hidden abstract formula here, then what could Beauvoir be saying when she demands that I “assume” my acts?
The answer turns, I think, on Beauvoir’s way of interpreting Sartre’s understanding of what the Other person can be for me. Now, for Sartre, recall, there is a fight for subjectivity between the Other and me. I act; the Other acts; and at any given moment whoever is not acting becomes a mere object in the other person’s world. So for Sartre what’s important to me about the Other is purely that he is capable, via the Look, of turning me into an object. (My turning him into an object is of course regarded by Sartre as something like a defensive act; it’s not that I actively desire him to be an object; rather, his being so is a condition of my own subjectivity.) But what Beauvoir pays attention to is not just the question of what my phenomen
ological status is at any given moment but also how the Other’s response to me, as a being whose very Otherness consists in his having revealed his capacity for subjectivity by Looking at me, influences my choice of what to do. What is of interest to Beauvoir, in other words, is that what I decide to do, how I find and cultivate my garden, is necessarily conditioned by how the Other responds to me.
To see how this is supposed to work, we need only return to Sartre’s keyhole example. Here I am, squatting by the door. If you don’t happen by, I continue to spy. But then, suddenly, there you are. You are Looking at me. For Sartre’s purposes, what’s important at this juncture is that I have now become an object in your world and can only recover by Looking at you. But to Beauvoir what’s most important is that your catching me in the act shapes my further behavior. I get up and look guilty. Or I—deliberately—ignore you and continue peering through the door. Whatever I do inevitably constitutes a response to your Look. Of course, my doing something that counts as a “response” does not require that I encounter another subjectivity. If the electricity fails, I may be provoked to stand up and grope my way back to the kitchen. But this sort of response differs from my response to the acts of another person because when I respond to a mere objective change in my circumstances I need not worry that those circumstances will respond in kind. As I stumble along the hallway in the darkness, I do not expect the electricity to go back on or to stay off as a result. But when I decide to ignore you and continue peering through the doorway, I know that you may intrude on me again, that my digging in my heels creates a new “situation” for you, to which you are going in one way or another to respond, perhaps so as to alter the course of my project once again. In emphasizing the Other’s way of influencing not my phenomenological status but my future course of action, Beauvoir suggests that the Other’s presence in my life is more than just a threat to my subjectivity: at least as important for her, it’s a spur to my course of action.