Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism Read online

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR,

  PHILOSOPHY, & FEMINISM

  GENDER AND CULTURE

  CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN & NANCY K. MILLER, EDITORS

  GENDER AND CULTURE

  A series of Columbia University Press

  Edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller

  IN DORA’S CASE: FREUD, HYSTERIA, FEMINISM

  Edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane

  BREAKING THE CHAIN: WOMEN, THEORY, AND FRENCH REALIST FICTION

  Naomi Schor

  BETWEEN MEN: ENGLISH LITERATURE AND MALE HOMOSOCIAL DESIRE

  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  ROMANTIC IMPRISONMENT: WOMEN AND OTHER GLORIFIED OUTCASTS

  Nina Auerbach

  THE POETICS OF GENDER

  Edited by Nancy K. Miller

  READING WOMAN: ESSAYS IN FEMINIST CRITICISM

  Mary Jacobus

  HONEY-MAD WOMEN: EMANCIPATORY STRATEGIES IN WOMEN’S WRITING

  Patricia Yaeger

  SUBJECT TO CHANGE: READING FEMINIST WRITING

  Nancy K. Miller

  THINKING THROUGH THE BODY

  Jane Gallop

  GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY

  Joan Wallach Scott

  THE DIALOGIC AND DIFFERENCE: “AN/OTHER WOMAN” IN VIRGINIA WOOLF AND CHRISTA WOLF

  Anne Herrmann

  PLOTTING WOMEN: GENDER AND REPRESENTATION IN MEXICO

  Jean Franco

  INSPIRITING INFLUENCES: TRADITION, REVISION, AND AFRO-AMERICAN WOMEN’S NOVELS

  Michael Awkward

  HAMLET’S MOTHER AND OTHER WOMEN

  Carolyn G. Heilbrun

  RAPE AND REPRESENTATION

  Edited by Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver

  SHIFTING SCENES: INTERVIEWS ON WOMEN, WRITING, AND POLITICS IN POST-68 FRANCE

  Edited by Alice A. Jardine and Anne M. Menke

  TENDER GEOGRAPHIES: WOMEN AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NOVEL IN FRANCE

  Joan DeJean

  MODERN FEMINISMS: POLITICAL, LITERARY, CULTURAL

  Maggie Humm

  UNBECOMING WOMEN: BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE NOVEL OF DEVELOPMENT

  Susan Fraiman

  THE APPARITIONAL LESBIAN: FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND MODERN CULTURE

  Terry Castle

  GEORGE SAND AND IDEALISM

  Naomi Schor

  BECOMING A HEROINE: READING ABOUT WOMEN IN NOVELS

  Rachel M. Brownstein

  NOMADIC SUBJECTS: EMBODIMENT AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEORY

  Rosi Braidotti

  ENGAGING WITH IRIGARAY: FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY AND MODERN EUROPEAN THOUGHT

  Edited by Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford

  A CERTAIN AGE: REFLECTING ON MENOPAUSE

  Edited by Joanna Goldsworthy

  MOTHERS IN LAW: FEMINIST THEORY AND THE LEGAL REGULATION OF MOTHERHOOD

  Edited by Martha Albertson Fineman and Isabelle Karpin

  CRITICAL CONDITION: FEMINISM AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

  Susan Gubar

  FEMINIST CONSEQUENCES: THEORY FOR THE NEW CENTURY

  Edited by Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka

  GENDER AND CULTURE READERS

  MODERN FEMINISMS: POLITICAL, LITERARY, CULTURAL

  Edited by Maggie Humm

  FEMINISM AND SEXUALITY: A READER

  Edited by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott

  WRITING ON THE BODY: FEMALE EMBODIMENT AND FEMINIST THEORY

  Edited by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR,

  PHILOSOPHY, & FEMINISM

  NANCY BAUER

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW YORK

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW YORK

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2001 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-52917-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bauer, Nancy, 1960–

  Simone de Beauvoir, philosophy, and feminism / Nancy Bauer.

  p. cm.—(Gender and culture)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0–231–11664–0 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 0–231–11665–9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908– . Deuxième sexe. 2. Feminist theory. 3. Feminism. I. Title. II. Series.

  HQ1190 .B385 2001

  305.42'1—dc21 00-069417

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Designed by Lisa Hamm

  To Anneliese Bauer Cooper

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Recounting Woman

  1. Is Feminist Philosophy a Contradiction in Terms?

  First Philosophy, The Second Sex, and The Third Wave

  2. I Am a Woman, Therefrom I Think:

  The Second Sex and the Meditations

  3. The Truth of Self-Certainty:

  A Rendering of Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic

  4. The Conditions of Hell: Sartre on Hegel

  5. Reading Beauvoir Reading Hegel:

  Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity

  6. The Second Sex and the Master-Slave Dialectic

  7. The Struggle for Self in The Second Sex

  Notes

  References Cited

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The writing contained herein, primitive as it remains in many respects, has been enormously improved by the interventions of those who allowed me to grope publicly toward an appropriation of The Second Sex as well as toward this particular expression of my dissatisfactions concerning the present state of philosophy and, specifically, its relationship to feminism. I am especially grateful to audiences at Michigan State University, the University of New Hampshire, Loyola University of Chicago, the University of California at Irvine, and Vanderbilt University; at conferences in Paris and at Penn State University commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Le Deuxième Sexe; and at various meetings of the International Association of Women Philosophers and of the American Philosophical Association. I also thank Harvard University for a dissertation fellowship that allowed me to finish writing the first draft of this book.

  I received very helpful and extensive comments on large portions of the manuscript from Fred Neuhouser, Ken Westphal, Bob Scharff, and Andy Nathan. Toril Moi has read virtually every word I’ve ever written about Simone de Beauvoir and has been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration. From when I began thinking about Beauvoir as a philosopher, I have been dependent on the path-breaking work and the generous moral support of Peg Simons, Debra Bergoffen, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sara Heinämaa, and especially, Julie Ward and Karen Vintges.

  I feel extremely fortunate to have learned to do philosophy under the tutelage of Hilary Putnam, Fred Neuhouser, Burton Dreben, and, most fatefully, Stanley Cavell. I am also deeply indebted for my philosophical education to Steve Affeldt, Bill Bracken, Bill Bristow, Jim Conant, Alice Crary, Paul Franks, Eli Friedlander, Tim Gould, Arata Hamawaki, David Macarthur, Katalin Makkai, Sanford Shieh, Martin Stone, and Lisa Van Alstyne. I’m grateful, too, for the steadfast support of my friends and colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Tufts University.

  This book could not have been written apart from my feeling sustained by the friendships of Leah Bird, Bonnie Ciambotti, Ellen Cooper, Laura
Fizek, Randy Glassman, Liz Gruber, Lori Kahn, Ingrid Müller, Diane Shufro, Emily T. W. Shuster, and Suzy Wetlaufer. Justina Fadlin and Jennifer Lee know, I hope, that my life would fall apart without them. Finally, I thank my parents, Art and Danita Bauer, and my children, Max and Anneliese Cooper, for their love and forbearance. I dedicate this book to you, Anneliese, in hopes that it can help make sense of a world that strikes me as unfit—but not, I imagine, irremediably so—to contain the likes of you.

  Introduction: Recounting Woman

  What I call something, what I count as something, is a function of how I recount it, tell it.

  —Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

  A man never begins by establishing himself as an individual of a certain sex: his being a man poses no problem.

  —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex1

  Then what kind of problem does being a woman pose? The burden of this book is to show that in formulating this question and enacting answers to it, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex dramatizes the extent to which being a woman poses a philosophical problem—which is to say, a problem for and of philosophy. To say that it is a problem for philosophy is to propose that insofar as philosophy fails to take account of the being of woman it cannot lay claim to the universality for which, by its own lights, it must strive; it lacks the standards, one might say, by which to interpret its own use of the word “man” in the absence of an account of woman. To say that it is a problem of philosophy is to propose that insofar as one fails to explore the bearing of philosophy on the being of woman, one will not be able to give an adequate account of what kind of a problem being a woman poses and, therefore, may close off certain possibilities for addressing this problem. A central achievement of The Second Sex, I want to show, is in the ways it forges connections between the idea of being a woman and the idea of philosophy, ways that bind the overcoming of the problem of being a woman with the overcoming of a certain conception of the philosophical. The ambition of this book is to specify these modes of affiliation.

  While more and more careful readers of The Second Sex are coming to accept the idea that it can bear up under and indeed rewards serious philosophical scrutiny, there is little evidence that the average reader attributes the unmatched power it has had to change the terms in which people view women’s place, or places, in the world as a fundamentally philosophical one. In the last sentence of the introduction Beauvoir claims that her goal is to “describe the world in which woman must live” (TSS xxxv; my emphasis); and, indeed, the book manifestly concerns itself in the main with facts of history, both ancient and contemporary, so that it can appear to constitute more of a sociology of sex difference than a philosophy of it. Moreover, to the extent that Beauvoir sets out to attribute all but the most brute biological distinctions between men and women to the vicissitudes of culture, The Second Sex might be seen as repudiating even the possibility of a genuine philosophy of sex difference. But this can only be the case if we imagine that we already know what culture is, as well as what it means to be a product of culture. That we are misguided in our self-satisfaction with regard to this knowing is, I aim to show, one of the great themes of The Second Sex. By recounting the history of what she calls “civilization,” Beauvoir reveals a certain ignorance of ours not only of it and its conditions but also, since these are the conditions under which humans have been sexed beings, of ourselves. In this respect The Second Sex can be seen to bear an affinity to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, which also resorts to a “history” of human culture as a means of, among other things, preparing us for thinking about inequalities among human beings.2 The recounting of each fact in The Second Sex is, I want to claim, an instance of thinking in service of this preparation.

  In using the word “recounting” here I have in mind Stanley Cavell’s observation, quoted in the epigraph to this introduction, that “what I call something, what I count as something, is a function of how I recount it, tell it.”3 Here Cavell is of course counting, if you will, on the multivocality of the word “recount.” He’s noticing that to tell a story about anything—about a table or a word or a feeling or sex difference—is implicitly to make a claim, or a set of claims, about what that thing is, about what, in other words, is to count as such a thing. Making these claims manifest, discerning from the story what the teller counts as what, is work that recounting by its nature appeals to its audience to perform. Of course, neither the claims nor the interpretation are bound to be philosophical. That they are—or, in the case of interpretation, can be—with respect to The Second Sex has to do with the way Beauvoir inherits the tradition of modern philosophy in her recounting of woman.

  I mean this to be a very specific claim, one that cannot be spelled out apart from a close look at what Beauvoir is doing in The Second Sex. But even before I undertake that work I can be explicit about what the claim is not meant to be saying. I am not proposing, in particular, that what makes The Second Sex (or any other piece of writing) fundamentally a work of philosophy is that it merely avails itself of previous philosophers’ ideas, “using” or “applying” them. If so doing were in and of itself a mark of philosophical originality or significance, then there would be no question, or no important question, regarding the status of Beauvoir’s achievement, given her repeated and explicit use throughout The Second Sex of key concepts from the writings of, for example, Hegel or, even more obviously, Jean-Paul Sartre, her lifelong companion. I do not wish to claim, to hone the point more finely, that because it can be argued that what’s at the heart of Beauvoir’s recounting of woman is indebted in certain critical respects to the thought of, for instance, Marx or Freud or Husserl or Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty or Descartes, it follows that her achievements are fundamentally or importantly philosophical ones. Rather, my claim is that discovering the philosophical import or lack thereof of a piece of writing itself requires an act of philosophical appropriation, one grounded in the reader’s own investments and concerns. The aim of this book is to attempt such an appropriation of The Second Sex.

  In the past several years there has been a heartening renaissance of philosophical interest in Beauvoir, a flowering that has produced extremely useful work tracing sometimes surprising lines of affinity between her writing and that of her philosophical forebears and contemporaries.4 Understandably enough, given the decades-old treatment of Beauvoir as, philosophically speaking, nothing more than her partner’s mouthpiece, it is the concern of most revisionist considerations of her writing to bring her out from under Sartre’s shadow. Such comparisons are not without their interest; indeed, I myself will propose several and dwell on them at some length. But I think that in Beauvoir’s case they are of limited interest. The problem is that studies that ground themselves in comparison proceed as if the occasion of Beauvoir’s writing about women were incidental to the working out of some long-standing set of philosophical preoccupations she inherits from some other thinker or set of thinkers.5 The view I lay out in this book is that if there is something philosophically significant about The Second Sex it’s not going to be the mere fact that Beauvoir uses or even contests other philosophers’ work in it; it’s going to be that this book, a book so influential that it is not an exaggeration to credit it with inciting a worldwide interest in rethinking the question of what counts as a woman—or, better, what a woman is to count as—is a book of philosophy. That it is not generally recognized as such is not, I think, because readers have failed to see that it is filled with philosophical moments, many of which can be shown to use or contest other philosophers’ ideas. Rather, I claim that the reason the philosophical achievements of The Second Sex are under-recognized, to put it mildly, has to do with the development by Beauvoir of a distinct and important way of appropriating the philosophical tradition, a method of appropriation that by its very nature is recognizable, inheritable, only through its being philosophically reappropriated. I argue in what follows that Beauvoir was able to develop this model only in the context of thinking
about women—and of course specifically about being a woman herself. I further argue that the productivity of this thinking, the massive real-life power of The Second Sex as a piece of writing, is itself a product of Beauvoir’s bringing philosophy to bear on her investigation. The guiding task of this project is thus to explore how Beauvoir’s interest in investigating the condition of women both depends on and enables her interest in having a philosophical say.

  Still, in assessing The Second Sex as a work of philosophy one cannot ignore the fact of the book’s evident political commitments. And insofar as a goal of the writing is to ameliorate the condition of a particular group of human beings, namely, of course, in this case, women, then one might want to see it as abrogating any serious philosophical pretensions from the start. As I observe in chapter 1, the very phrase “feminist philosophy” can sound like a contradiction in terms. But I go on to argue in that chapter that the feminism of The Second Sex cannot be understood as its starting point; rather, the book’s feminist effects (where here I use “feminist” loosely to refer to whatever promotes the amelioration of the condition of women or sees itself to take an interest from the first in the interests of women) are the product of an inquiry that roots itself in philosophy. Consider as a start on some evidence the first few lines of the introduction to volume 1, lines that in chapter 2 I compare with the opening of Descartes’s Meditations:

  I have hesitated for a long time to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, above all for women; and it is not new. The querelle du féminisme has caused enough ink to be spilled. At present it is almost over: let’s not talk about it any longer. Yet one does speak about it still. And it doesn’t seem that the voluminous foolishness spouted during the last century has shed much light on the problem. Besides, is there a problem? And what is it? Are there even women? Certainly, the theory of the eternal feminine still counts some adherents; they murmur, “Even in Russia, they [elles] still truly remain women”; but other well-informed people—and sometimes the same ones—sigh, “Woman is losing herself, woman is lost.” We don’t know any longer whether women still exist, if they will always exist, if it’s necessary or not to wish for their existence, what place they occupy in this world, what place they should occupy there. “Where are women?” asked an intermittent magazine recently. But first of all: what is a woman? (LDS 1:11, TM; see TSS xix)