Although most of us have come to terms politically with the idea of feminist philosophy, there is ample evidence that for the most part neither feminists nor philosophers wish to bestow unqualified intellectual approval on it.1 From the point of view of skeptical feminists, philosophy—with its emphasis on passionless thinking, reason, objectivity, universality, essences, and so forth—apotheosizes a way of encountering the world that is inherently and hopelessly tailored to serve the interests of men and thwart those of women. From the point of view of skeptical philosophers, on the other hand, philosophy’s unimpeachable commitment to open inquiry is incompatible with feminist “theory,” which, in their view, is by definition constrained by a political bottom line. From both sides, then, “feminist philosophy” can look like a contradiction in terms.
And yet philosophers of all stripes tend to turn a blind eye to this appearance of some sort of fundamental tension between feminism and philosophy. No doubt there are honorable reasons for doing so.2 Surely, most decent male philosophers deplore at least the idea of sex inequality and, on the realization that women have been woefully underrepresented in the discipline, are prepared to put aside any qualms they may have about combining philosophy with an “ism.” Then again, to many feminists, modern philosophy, from its inception in the seventeenth century, has predicated itself on a disastrously fateful distinction between mind and body, one that groundlessly guarantees the impertinence of fleshly immanence—and thus of sexual difference—to the great basic questions. The project of at least exploring the possible bearing of the fact of human embodiment on these questions hardly seems to require justification.3 And this project, with its potential to revolutionize philosophy (once again), has dovetailed nicely with a growing sense on both sides of the analytic-continental divide that philosophy in its modern incarnation may have run its course.4
Still, in and of themselves the ubiquity of sexism and the downplaying of the body in the history of modernist thinking do not dissipate the tension inherent in the idea of a feminist philosophy. Surely, philosophers might remedy these ills without adopting a specifically feminist agenda. One needn’t be a feminist to admit that women can do philosophy and that their exclusion from the tradition is, at the very least, regrettable; and any number of empiricists and physicalists have argued strenuously that Descartes and his ilk have gotten the relationship between mind and body wrong. Furthermore, the sorry history of women and philosophy does not obviously call for a redoubled effort on the part of feminists to have a philosophical say. One could argue—and many have argued—that theorizing, far from improving women’s lives, has actually hampered the women’s movement, both by drawing talented women away from a focus on feminist political action and by strengthening the politically enervating idea that to be a feminist requires the adoption of a self-destructively radical ideology. In another context, I would contest both of these arguments. Here, my aim is to draw attention to the curious lack of serious work on the question of how philosophy and feminism are supposed to go together. Just why confronting this tension head-on is evidently a singularly unappealing task is a question the addressing of which would take me too far astray, although I will at least note that the aversion must have something to do with, on the one hand, nonfeminist philosophers’ fear of being branded misogynistic and, on the other, feminist philosophers’ refusal to waste time justifying their undertaking to unsympathetic men.
I have scant tolerance for philosophers, male or female, sympathetic or hostile, who condescend to the idea of feminist philosophy. In my experience, they have rarely read more than one or two (ordinarily infamous) pieces of feminist writing—and that much just to congratulate themselves on their own conventionality. Feminist philosophers ought not waste time addressing the skepticism of their condescending colleagues. But there is a difference between meekly or neurotically organizing one’s work around a fantasy of converting naysayers and engaging in thinking that genuinely needs to be done for its own sake. My view is that it is a grave mistake for feminists to ignore the appearance of some sort of fundamental tension between feminism and philosophy, and the purpose of this chapter is to show why. Briefly, my claim is that once we give the sense of contradiction its due, we see that genuinely feminist philosophical work—or, if you like, genuinely philosophical feminism—not only has the potential to revolutionize philosophy but actually demands a reappraisal, from the ground up, of what it is to be a human—a thinking and sexed—being.
This claim at present has the philosophically disappointing features of being overdramatic and underspecified. But before I try to provide reasons for you to believe it might be true, let me specify briefly here at the outset what I don’t want the claim to imply. I don’t want it to imply that philosophical work by feminists that sidesteps the apparent contradiction between feminism and philosophy—in other words, the bulk of feminist philosophical work—is ultimately valueless. To the contrary, I’m claiming that the value or truth of feminist philosophy is often distorted or otherwise obscured by the specter of the apparent contradiction. The second thing I don’t want my claim to imply—my claim, again, that any marriage, if you will, between feminism and philosophy must be a revolutionary marriage—is that there’s only one way to get hitched. Of course, I will argue both in this chapter and in the remainder of this book that Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex exemplifies the powerful results of allowing the apparent contradiction its due. But if I thought that Beauvoir had exhausted the possibilities for feminist philosophy, or that the self-transformation that I think feminism and philosophy require of one another could be achieved once and for all, then what I have to say in this chapter and indeed in this book as a whole would be of scant philosophical interest. I’m proposing here not only a very general way of doing something that I’m asking you to recognize as productively feminist and productively philosophical but also something like a set of terms for evaluating the effectiveness—if not the value or truth—of feminist philosophical work.
My faith in The Second Sex as a productively feminist philosophical piece of writing may well strike you as anachronistic. Surely, the objection goes, we long ago learned what we could from Simone de Beauvoir and have moved well beyond the confines of her parochial understanding of women’s lives. We all know by now that Beauvoir in The Second Sex elides the concept “woman” with a very specific picture of what it means to be a white, bourgeois female in contemporary Western culture. This charge is ordinarily linked to the observation—sometimes critical, sometimes friendly—that The Second Sex is riddled with contradictions, contradictions of which, it is repeatedly underscored, Beauvoir herself appears to have been profoundly unaware.5 The implication, often, is that at best what The Second Sex offers us is an opportunity to thresh the dross of ethnocentrism, class bias, and racism—not to mention “masculinism”—from the usable kernels of Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s “situation.”
A particularly negative version of this view of Beauvoir is memorably expressed in Elizabeth Spelman’s merciless attack on The Second Sex in her book Inessential Woman. Beauvoir, Spelman claims, runs roughshod over “the populations she contrasts to ‘women’” and under some conditions certain females count as “women,” others don’t. (68)
doesn’t reflect on what her own theoretical perspective strongly suggests and what her own language mirrors: namely, that different females are constructed into different kinds of “women”; that
If there is any merit in this charge—and, given the range of distinguished readers of Beauvoir who at least sympathize with Spelman’s sense that Beauvoir’s text teeters precipitously on an unstable foundation of contradictions, there must be—then it is no wonder that you will not find The Second Sex front and center on the desks of most third-wave feminist philosophers. We third-wavers are in the challenging (in a stingy mood, you might even say self-contradictory) position of wishing to do philosophy—that is, at some level or other to make generalizations about the way things are with women—but we wish to do it precisely without making generalizations about The Way Things Are With Women. That is to say, we wish to make some generalizations, only not the kind that philosophers have traditionally made.
It seems to me that the only way for this sort of position to make sense is for us to realize that what it calls for is not merely new philosophical methods and strategies but in fact a serious rethinking of what philosophy is—of what counts as generalization or universalization and of what features of generalization and universalization do the work that philosophical work has traditionally done, whatever that work on inspection turns out to be. What I want to claim here is that, ironically enough, perhaps the central achievement of The Second Sex—an achievement, by the way, of which I think Beauvoir was very much aware—is precisely this rethinking of what philosophy is; thus there’s no better way that I know of for us third-wave feminist philosophers to figure out how to take particular individual and community characteristics seriously in our work than to understand what Beauvoir is doing in The Second Sex.
In holding this view I am not denying or overlooking the moments in the book that other philosophers have conceptualized primarily in terms of the notion of “contradiction.” Rather, I wish to account for these moments by rethinking what exactly it is that The Second Sex achieves at the level (in my view, its primary level) of advancing our understanding of what philosophy can and ought to aspire to be. In the chapters that follow I work out in detail the claim that Beauvoir’s landmark book on women constitutes nothing less than a challenge to philosophy to transform itself, internally and from the ground up. I also trace the astonishing power that The Second Sex has had as a feminist and humanist document precisely to Beauvoir’s calling for and forging of this new conception of philosophy. Here, my goal is simply to motivate the idea that we third-wave feminists have set a task for ourselves that requires our forging a new conception of philosophy and to indicate why Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is a promising place to begin our search.
I’m going to proceed by sketching and evaluating four well-known types of attempts to bring feminism and philosophy together. It’s going to turn out that all of these attempts fail with respect to the task of accounting for the apparent contradiction between feminism and philosophy: they are sometimes feminist and sometimes philosophical but never both simultaneously. This failure casts a pall over the very idea of feminist philosophy and tends to obscure the virtues of the work it marks; important feminist insights are overshadowed by the specter of the apparent contradiction. It is therefore important to understand what is causing the failure to resolve the contradiction in each case. I will suggest that the reason that feminism and philosophy tend never quite to coincide in these types of attempts is not because the very concept of “feminist philosophy” is in fact hopelessly oxymoronic. Rather, the problem is that most feminists are working with and within certain standard conceptions of philosophy that simply lack the resources to yield a decent account of the basic meaning and significance of sexuality and sex difference, as well as of the ramifications of these basic dimensions of human life. If feminists are to do what is genuinely recognizable as philosophy, it must be because we are convinced that theorizing at a relatively high level of abstraction will improve the lot of women (and, many of us would say, of men). The task is to figure out a way to work at this level of abstraction without either forgetting our social and political goals or attempting to fashion our polemical manifestos out of philosophical whole cloth.6
When I use the word “philosophy” I mean to be speaking (more or less following Wittgenstein, I imagine) about an activity marked by a certain subliming of the ordinary—by a certain transformation of everyday concerns into metaphysical ones.7 While this activity has its rewards, it also has its pitfalls, for when we do philosophy we often find that we have become untethered from our moorings, from the everyday concerns that propelled us to philosophize in the first place, and that we are lost. If we are gentleman philosophers, if for all intents and purposes we have all the time in the world for contemplation, this untethering is unfortunate. But when we are doing feminist philosophy—when there is an urgency to the everyday questions we are asking—the untethering is nothing short of disastrous. The challenge for those of us who wish to do feminist philosophy, then, is to see whether we can come up with a new way of doing philosophy, one that is rigorous and generalized enough really to count as philosophy but that at the same time is tethered in the right way to the sorts of everyday, real-life problems of sexism that are the raison d’être of feminism.
Each example of feminist philosophy I’m going to discuss exemplifies one of four broad ways of conceiving how feminist concerns and philosophical methods and ideas are supposed to fit together:
1. Feminism can use preexisting philosophical tools to justify certain feminist political positions.
2. Feminism can make philosophy more rigorous by exposing sexist blind spots in its history and in contemporary philosophical practice.
3. Feminism can provide a unique (woman-oriented or pro-woman) stance from which to address traditional or at least relatively traditional philosophical questions. This approach is ordinarily called “feminist standpoint” philosophy.
4. Feminism can provide us with a new metaphysical conception of the person, one whose mission is to yield an account of the distinctions or apparent distinctions between human males and females and whose discoveries will ramify throughout philosophy, from epistemology to ethics, philosophy of mind to—even, some claim—logic.
In real life, these four categories sometimes overlap, of course. But for purposes of clarity, I’m going to treat them separately here. I will then begin to indicate, in anticipation of the detailed work I do in the rest of this book, why and how Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical strategy represents a powerful alternative to the four I survey here.
STRATEGY 1: APPLIED FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
Not surprisingly, many feminists have engaged in philosophical argument to justify certain political positions. I’m thinking here mainly of a certain style of work on social issues primarily affecting women, such as birth control, abortion, the family, sexual discrimination and harassment, and rape.8 In this sort of work, philosophy is to serve as the handmaiden of feminism: one raids one’s philosophical toolbox to work up arguments to fortify feminist stances. I don’t mean to be unfair here; I am claiming neither that all work in “feminist ethics” conceives of philosophy this way, nor that there is anything inherently wrong with using philosophy to fortify feminist stances. Again, my goal is to show why this particular strategy fails to dispel the air of contradiction around the idea of feminist philosophy. The problem with what I’ll call the applied-ethics approach to feminist philosophy, at least from the perspective of what is motivating my inquiry, is that there is no inherent relationship between one’s commitment to philosophy and one’s commitment to feminism. There is no guarantee either that traditional philosophical analysis will produce results that coincide with one’s experience of sexism or that a commitment to seeing this experience as specifically an experience of something called sexism is compatible with the rigorous application of traditional philosophical methods of analysis. There’s no guaranteeing, in other words, that philosophy will give you the “right” feminist answer or that the right feminist answer will be recognizably philosophical. And when philosophy does yield the right feminist answer, it’s going to be a coincidence.
Furthermore, even when we happen upon such a coincidence it’s not at all clear that the result will actually matter in the real world. This is a point that Richard Rorty made in a 1990 Tanner lecture called “Feminism and Pragmatism.” Like feminist and other philosophers who do applied ethics, Rorty conceives of philosophy as consisting in a set of conceptual tools. But he thinks that these tools are essentially useless for feminists, who need to remember, he says, that they are not just tinkering with the current social order but are engaged in a utopian movement for social and political change. From the point of view of feminism, Rorty argues, the only thing that matters is how and how much things change. It doesn’t matter how we get there. In particular, it doesn’t matter whether we do philosophy or not. Indeed, Rorty argues quite forcefully that the best way to get things to change is not to waste time trying to provide philosophical arguments that change is necessary. This is because what’s transfixing sexist people is not that they are lacking arguments, per se, for feminist views but that their own sexist views of the world are deeply entrenched. Rorty’s position is that this entrenchment is in large part the product of the way we currently speak about the world, including the way we currently construct philosophical arguments. So what’s needed to overturn sexism is the creation of conditions under which what Rorty calls a “new idiom” is likely to emerge. This new idiom, this new way of speaking, is going to be the product not of group efforts but, rather, of inspired individuals, whom Rorty calls “prophets.” The prophet on Rorty’s definition “get[s] people to feel indifference or satisfaction where they once recoiled, and revulsion and rage where they once felt indifference or resignation”; s/he “change[s] instinctive emotional reactions” by engendering “new language which will facilitate new reactions” (“Feminism and Pragmatism” 232).9
Rorty is thinking here of people such as the feminist legal scholar and activist Catharine MacKinnon, whose development of the notion of “sexual harassment,” for example, has indeed led to dramatic changes in the terms in which woman have been able to think and speak about certain noxious behaviors on the part of their employers and teachers.10 MacKinnon is also notorious for her provocative way of putting things, as when she unabashedly declares in her most systematic work of feminist theory that “[f]or many women, [sexual intercourse] is a rape” (Toward a Feminist Theory of the State 111). On Rorty’s view, MacKinnon in such instances evinces a prophetlike willingness to risk sounding crazy to the mainstream in the service of trying to provide feminists with a genuinely powerful way of changing things.
If you agree that philosophy is just a set of tools used to construct arguments, then it’s going to be hard to counter Rorty’s pessimism about philosophy’s usefulness for feminism. Surely Rorty is right to imagine that a powerful voice speaking in a powerful new idiom is more likely to bring about feminist change in the world than a bunch of dry philosophical arguments. If you imagine, as Rorty does, that philosophy is fundamentally a set of conceptual tools, then I challenge you to say how or why Rorty is wrong to insist that the only task for philosophy—a task he apparently takes himself to be performing—is “to clear the road for prophets and poets, to make intellectual life a bit simpler and safer for those who have visions of new communities” (240) and “to drag outdated philosophy out of the way of those who are displaying unusual courage and imagination” (256, n. 26). Can it be denied that, from the point of view of results, flashy rhetoric will practically always triumph over pedantic argumentation? Hasn’t philosophy been on the defensive about this ever since Socrates? (Then again, hasn’t the defense, ever since Socrates, tended to consist in reconceiving of philosophy precisely as something other than a set of conceptual tools?11)
Although his unflinching admiration for the goals of feminism as articulated by some of its most radical academic proponents—an admiration vehemently expressed in a Tanner Lecture, no less—is, to say the least, impressive, Rorty’s paternalistically advising feminists to stay away from philosophy, as though knowingly guarding his little sisters from the advances of his best friend—from another himself, to borrow Aristotle’s term—strikes me as suspicious. The suspicion is heightened by the fact that Rorty’s argument is couched in what Nancy Fraser has nicely called a “a marriage proposal”—specifically, an extended plea for feminists to abandon traditional “universalistic” philosophy in favor of accepting the services of those he calls “we pragmatists,” men who he suggests are happy to stay at home and do the philosophical housework while the visionary feminist women they wish to support practice crying out in the wilderness (Fraser 259–260).
But why think of philosophy as a set of conceptual tools, as Rorty and certain applied-ethics feminist philosophers do? Why can’t philosophy be, for example, a form of what Rorty calls prophecy? This is a way of asking why Rorty can’t see Catharine MacKinnon, his paradigmatic feminist prophet, as tapping into power that is recognizably philosophical precisely at certain high rhetorical moments in her work. For example, in the middle of his essay Rorty scolds MacKinnon for defining feminism as the belief “that women are human beings in truth but not in social reality.”12 The problem here, on Rorty’s view, is that MacKinnon is appealing to some metaphysical notion of “truth.” This is problematic for Rorty for at least two reasons. First, MacKinnon seems to lower herself, as it were, to the level of metaphysical debate, a level on which, Rorty famously contends, there is a lot of blather about the way things are “in truth,” which obscures the fact that the way things are is merely a matter of the way we choose to describe them. Second, for MacKinnon to indulge in the language of metaphysics obscures, on Rorty’s view, the rhetorical radicality of her point, which would be better expressed, presumably, by the stark declaration that “women are not human beings.”
What Rorty fails to see is that for MacKinnon, a woman, to declare that she both is and is not a human being seems patently of philosophical interest. Her declaration raises questions about what it means to claim that one is not treated as a human being, about what it is to identify oneself as a human being while the culture denies you this status, about what it is to use speech in order to observe that you aren’t acknowledged as a speaking being. It is precisely these sorts of questions—questions, I’m claiming, that philosophy ought to recognize as falling within its purview—that a viable feminist philosophy must provide the space to pose. But in order to see what I’m talking about, you have to be open to the possibility of a less impoverished conception of philosophy than Rorty has. To the extent that I share Rorty’s enthusiasm for MacKinnon, it is precisely because her work provides glimpses of what a richer conception of philosophy might look like. And yet these moments are embedded in writing that sees itself as radically refusing philosophy. An example of this refusal is to be found in MacKinnon’s insistence on the foundational truth of some of her most controversial ideas. “Objectivity,” she flatly declares, for example, “is the epistemological stance of which objectification [of women] is the social process” (Toward a Feminist Theory of the State 114). Such sentences implicitly convey a refusal of philosophy, which makes MacKinnon’s writing in general a poor candidate for resolving our apparent contradiction.
STRATEGY 2: ROOTING OUT PHILOSOPHICAL SEXISM
In her blunt refusal even to consider the viability for women of any philosophical notion of objectivity, MacKinnon exposes herself to the wrath of Martha Nussbaum, who in an infamous 1994 essay in The New York Review of Books limns what for us will be a second strategy, one closely related to the first, for doing feminist philosophy. The purpose of Nussbaum’s essay is to launch a polemic against feminists who question the usefulness of traditional philosophy for feminism and to claim, moreover, that feminists must use traditional philosophical methods to fight sexism. According to Nussbaum the entrenchment of sexism in our culture is ensured by what she calls “convention” and “habit,” and its extirpation requires fighting these things with the weapon that’s most effective against them, namely, with what she calls reason. “The appeal to reason and objectivity,” she says, “amounts to a request that the observer refuse to be intimidated by habit, and look for cogent arguments based on evidence that has been carefully sifted for bias.”13 If habit is in part responsible for sexism, and if reason is our best weapon against habit, then it follows that philosophy as we know it is not only useful for feminism but absolutely essential to it. In her essay, which in large part takes the form of a polemic against feminists who question the usefulness of traditional philosophy for feminism, Nussbaum goes so far as to claim that the rejection by feminists of traditional philosophical methods “is a perilous theoretical position for feminists, and leaves them without the resources to make a convincing radical critique of unjust societies” (62).
These resources, she claims, are to be found in doing philosophy exactly the way it has always been done, only better. As she puts it near the conclusion of her essay,
Doing feminist philosophy is not really something different from doing philosophy. … To do feminist philosophy is simply to get on with the tough work of theorizing in a rigorous and thoroughgoing way, but without the blind spots, the ignorance of fact, and the moral obtuseness that have characterized much philosophical thought about women and sex and the family and ethics in the male-dominated academy. (62)14
I take it that no one would claim that the purging from philosophy of blind spots, ignorance of fact, and moral obtuseness would be a bad thing. But in defining feminist philosophy as that which is supposed to do the purging, Nussbaum begs at least three questions. First, she doesn’t say what it is about feminism that should or could give us cause to imagine its practitioners to be less prone to blind spots, ignorance of fact, and moral obtuseness than anyone else. In fact in the early pages of her essay, she herself excoriates exactly these traits in those philosophically trained feminists whose work she deplores, namely, those feminists who question the value-neutrality of philosophy’s commitment to things such as reason and objectivity. But of course these feminist philosophers come in for Nussbaum’s contempt precisely in attempting to provide a corrective to the blind spots, ignorance of fact, and moral obtuseness one finds running through traditional philosophical work. They just see these blind spots, etc., in a different, more fundamental, place from the place in which Nussbaum sees them. Nussbaum herself seems blinded to Kant’s insight that philosophy can criticize itself, and at the deepest levels, and still be deeply philosophical. And she also seems blind to the taking up of this idea by Hegel and then by Marx, both of whom saw that certain people in certain positions—masters, for example, or capitalists—might be systematically blinded to the truth, so that their scanning their worldviews for mistakes would never suffice to reveal the basic injustice of their power.15
This leads to the second question that Nussbaum begs, namely, the question of just how deep male bias in philosophy goes. It’s apparently basic to her conception of philosophy that the sexism in it is merely superficial, merely the product of blind spots and so forth that we, or at least feminists, are now in a position to correct. You might say that Nussbaum’s view assumes that we need not bring reason to bear on the possibility of blind spots with regard to what we call reason. But this is exactly the picture of philosophy that many feminists, wishing at least to explore the possibility that sexism is somehow fundamentally a part of philosophical practice as we know it, contest. If we stipulate that feminist philosophy is to be essentially no different from philosophy per se, then we seem to leave no room for this sort of exploration.
In begging the question of the depth of sexism in philosophy, Nussbaum also can be seen as begging a closely related third question, namely that of how we are to distinguish hopelessly problematic blind spots, ignorance of fact, and moral obtuseness from more remediable failings. To clarify what I’m getting at here, I’m going to consider an example from Hegel, not because I wish to single him out as more or less sexist than any other philosopher but because I think this example draws attention to the potential interest for feminists in making distinctions between deep and superficial instances of sexism. Let me turn, then, to some unfortunate lines of Hegel’s, lines found in the addition to paragraph 166 of The Philosophy of Right:
Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy, and certain forms of artistic production. Women may have happy ideas, taste, and elegance, but they cannot attain to the ideal.
The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions. Women are educated—who knows how?—as it were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion.16
I trust I am not alone in having felt obliged on more than one occasion to provide a serious response to a disillusioned student who demands to know why or how we should read the writing of someone capable of penning such words as these. One response is that we can read this writing to see if it gives us the means to understand the cause and significance of its own offensive moments. That is, we can try to see if the author’s philosophy itself provides a standard against which to judge his or her own shortcomings. Now, I predict that it is in fact possible to articulate such a standard in the case of Hegel, and specifically in the picture we get in The Phenomenology of Spirit of the human subject as an entity constantly forced to recognize unbearable existential contradictions between its general picture of the world and its particular beliefs. In Hegel’s case, to give a sketch of my grounds for making this prediction, there is a contradiction between his general account of what a human being can aspire to be, an account that in no way, at least in principle, excludes women, and his specific judgment in this passage that women are systematically incapable of genuinely thinking. There is a contradiction, to put the matter another way, between Hegel’s general picture of the human as self-contradictory and his specific exclusion of women from the possibility of genuinely thinking—from, as it were, having opportunities to contradict themselves. And since Hegel’s overall project is to make claims about the structure and evolution of human rationality—what thinking is, what its standards are, what it can aspire to be—then to assess Hegel by his own lights is to ask whether these claims stand in need of being surpassed, or “sublated,” to use Hegel’s word. To the extent that Hegel’s understanding of rationality shares features with other influential conceptions of rationality it turns out that to evaluate it, even by his lights, is to ask whether the philosophical concept of “rationality” is inherently problematic. That is, it requires a willingness to bring the nature of the standards of philosophy into question. Now, it’s of course true that Nussbaum, who thinks that feminist philosophy ought to be the same as regular philosophy, only better, would endorse the general idea of purging philosophy of Hegel’s sexism. But I’m arguing that it’s hard to see how she could justify any specific project of the sort I’ve sketched, given that she bluntly refuses up front to bring basic philosophical standards into question.
STRATEGY 3: FEMINIST STANDPOINT PHILOSOPHY
I have suggested that Nussbaum might herself be blinded to the Hegelian insight that some people, by virtue of their social position, might be systematically blinded to the truth. This insight, especially in its Marxist form, is behind the idea that feminist philosophers ought to be working from something called a “feminist standpoint.” Feminist standpoint philosophy proceeds from the twin assumptions that perfect objectivity is impossible and that we feminist philosophers therefore must strive consciously to develop and work from a coherent conception of what is to count as a specifically feminist subjectivity—a stance that will involve more or less radical intellectual repositionings. This stance, it is claimed, will, paradoxically, be more objective, in the sense of providing a better vista on the true state of affairs, than any male or masculinist stance. Of course, unsympathetic male philosophers may be tempted to dismiss the open partiality of a feminist standpoint as blatantly antiphilosophical. But it’s at least plausible that declaring up front where you’re coming from and who you’re fighting against will reduce the incidence of bias in your work—instances such as the passage from Hegel I have just quoted—and will thus enhance its scrupulousness.
Some feminist standpoint philosophers, however, claim not only that their work is more scrupulous than that of traditional philosophers, but even that it is better positioned for providing a true description of the way things stand. This claim derives from Marx’s distinction (itself, interestingly enough, derived from a distinction of Hegel’s) between the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, whose self-interest blinds them to the truth, and the standpoint of the proletariat, who are structurally in a better position to see things as they really are. One of the earliest advocates of feminist standpoint philosophy was the philosopher Nancy Hartsock, who in an influential early article (written in the 1970s) suggests that
like the lives of proletarians according to Marxian theory, women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point which can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy. (Hartsock 284)
Whether or not one finds Marx’s claims about the proletariat convincing, and whether or not one buys the idea that the only alternative to disavowing one’s partiality is to proceed from it, Hartsock’s use of Marx’s model to justify privileging a feminist philosophical standpoint raises certain very difficult questions. What, for example, is to count as a “feminist” standpoint? Who decides? How can we tell the difference between an appropriately partial standpoint and one that is inappropriately so? When do we know that the feminist standpoint is no longer necessary, which is to ask, are there special circumstances under which such a standpoint is necessary and others under which it is not? Is feminist philosophy, taking the guise of feminist standpoint philosophy, just a stopgap measure? Even if we could answer these questions, one might be dubious about Hartsock’s claim that “women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy.” Do women’s lives have enough in common with one another to allow us to make claims about a privileged vantage point they make available? Is this vantage point more privileged than the vantage point of certain men oppressed by the culture, for example, men of color or gay men? Why privilege something called the “feminist” standpoint, if indeed it makes sense to talk about such a standpoint, more than that of any other movement of oppressed peoples?
The skepticism about the possibility of a “feminist” standpoint that these sorts of questions raise has been voiced, of course, by those philosophers, male and female, conservative and feminist, who find the idea of a specifically feminist philosophy incoherent or otherwise deeply objectionable. But objections along these lines have also been lodged by certain critics internal to feminist theory who believe that it is dominated by privileged white academics insidiously claiming to speak for women of all colors and classes.17 Both sets of skeptics, however different their motivations, call into question the grounding intuition of feminist standpoint philosophy, namely, the sense that there’s a philosophically fundamental and important distinction between (all) women and (all) men. What’s objectionable, though, is not the idea that women’s experiences might differ from those of men, or even the claim that they might differ in systematic and specifiable ways. The objection, rather, is to the idea that these differences are philosophically pertinent. Any differences between the sexes, according to both types of feminist standpoint skeptics, are to be explored (or dismissed) as artifacts of culture, phenomena to be studied by activists or politicians or anthropologists or sociologists or literary critics or psychologists. The objection, then, is not necessarily to feminism, per se, but to the idea of a specifically “feminist” philosophy. And specifically, the problem is that any such philosophy worth the name—that is, philosophy that is not just social science in disguise—is bound to endorse some sort of metaphysical claim about essential differences between the sexes. That is, it is bound to be—to use the term common in feminist circles—essentialist.18 And if you hold an essentialist view of sex difference, then you open yourself to just the sort of hopelessly vexing questions that, I have been claiming, antistandpoint critics often launch, and from both sides, at feminist philosophy.
But what’s odd about the essentialism of feminist standpoint philosophy is that most of its proponents are themselves uncomfortable with the idea that women are in some essential, metaphysical sense different from men. They themselves would prefer to endorse the more modest claim, the claim that launched the second wave of feminism thirty or forty years ago, that as far back as we can see human culture has been marked by widespread, systematic oppression of women. In an attempt to disavow what’s problematic about essentialism, many feminist philosophers attempt to construe their work not as alternative to but, rather, as corrective of that of the philosophical tradition. Invoking such “difference feminists” as Carol Gilligan,19 they argue that the philosophical tradition is marked by certain recurrent biases they identify loosely as “masculinist,” biases that need to be corrected, in the name of philosophy’s interest in truth and objectivity, by the consideration of aspects of experience that they identify—again, loosely—as “feminist.”20 This more modest claim is not that all men exhibit these biases or that all women, or even all feminists, share the experiences on the basis of which correctives to these biases are offered. The claim is that certain experiences tend to be part of men’s lives more often than women’s, or vice versa. And its proponents safeguard against the threat of overgeneralization carried by their uses of sex distinctions by cleaving to a philosophical intuition central to feminist standpoint philosophy, which is that attaining truth and objectivity requires that the philosopher acknowledge an inherent dimension of subjectivity in his or her own words. He or she must not assume that his or her own experience as an actor or a knower or a thinker, the experience that informs his or her philosophical practice, is universal. But the problem here is that there is never an account given of why the resulting work ought to count as philosophical work. How can work done from an explicitly subjective point of view count as philosophy? I’m not suggesting that it cannot do so; indeed, I am going to argue, and at some length, that The Second Sex provides a powerful account of how it can. But simply to deny the possibility of objectivity (or, as the case may be, to figure objectivity as nothing but some sort of collection or intersection of subjectivities) is, I would argue, to deny the possibility of philosophy.
Since it is surely too early to deny that the oppression of women might be a subject for philosophy—since, to put it another way, we know comparatively little about the phenomenon of oppression and perhaps even less about what kinds of things count as “subjects” for philosophy—the task has to be to figure out how to talk about this oppression without lapsing into essentialism. This, I think, is surprisingly hard to do.21 For once the terms of the debate have come under the sway of metaphysics, once, that is, you feel obliged to undergird your feminist politics with a philosophical account of the concept “woman,” then there’s no way, or at least no obvious way, back to the level of intuition, back to the sheer sense of feeling oppressed on the basis of your sex. If you try to provide such an account, then invariably there will be a group of women who will deny that your account is accurate. If you say that these dissenters are blind to the truth, you commit the aptly named crime of paternalism. If, on the other hand, you simply deny flat out that you can give a metaphysical account of the concept “woman,” on the grounds that women are not essentially like one another in any respect—a position that, it’s important to notice, entails a commitment to your thinking that the idea of giving such an account is at least coherent—then you leave yourself with a problem about how to justify a politics based on the oppression of women. This is the problem that confronts those opponents of essentialism who are identified in the current jargon as “antiessentialists.” The debate between essentialists and antiessentialists now dominates feminist theory. It’s a skeptical debate over the question, to put it plainly, of whether and in what sense “women” (whatever that term means) exist.
STRATEGY 4: ANTIESSENTIALISM
A watershed moment in the growing tide of sympathy in recent years for antiessentialism (a tide heightened by the increasing obviousness of the problems essentialism was bringing in its wake) was the publication in 1990 of the book Gender Trouble, written by the philosopher Judith Butler, whose influence on the shape of academic feminist philosophy in recent years is hard to overestimate.22 Like many feminists, Butler rejects the idea that our gender norms—what counts normatively as “masculine” or “feminine”—are in any sense natural. But her position goes beyond the now familiar if still contested idea that it’s wrong to suppose that “normal” human females share or ought to share certain particularly “feminine” traits, while “normal” human males share or ought to share particularly “masculine” ones: she also rejects the common view that the division of human beings into two biological sexes is inevitable. Butler contests the very tendency of human beings to conceive of themselves as necessarily either male or female—as, in other words, destined to identify themselves with one or the other pole of an inevitable binary opposition between the two sexes. That there are not two unproblematically discrete biological sexes is suggested to Butler by empirical phenomena such as hermaphrodism, unusual genetic make-ups (for example, people with male genitals and XX chromosomes), medically assisted transsexualism, and so forth. These phenomena, on her view, dramatize the fact that biological sex is essentially like biological hair color: there’s a natural continuum, and how we choose to see that continuum is not determined by anything inherent to it. Thus, there’s nothing called “sex” or “gender” that precedes our own concepts. We don’t apply concepts of maleness and femaleness to some set of qualities that’s already there. Indeed, Butler wants to say that our use of these concepts creates sex and gender, which then insidiously appear to have been there already. And our failure to see that our sex and gender norms are constructed rather than natural—that, for example, there’s no such thing as “woman” apart from our construction of the concept—systematically oppresses all human beings.23
But if the very category “woman” is inherently oppressive, as Butler takes all our references to biological sex to be, then identifying yourself as a woman ought to have the paradoxical effect of reinforcing your—and everyone else’s—systematic oppression. So how, if we are Butlerians, can we coherently base our feminist politics on the fact of our womanhood? Butler urges us to subvert oppressive sex and gender norms by trying to reveal to ourselves how they work both to oppress us and to cover over their own true origins. She also has suggested that it’s perfectly reasonable to “deploy” the concept “woman” strategically in certain political contexts, even if we can’t, by dint of logic, unproblematically use sex and gender terms in our theoretical attempts to overcome the oppression they anchor. Butler recommends that we attempt to subvert these very terms by “citing” them in parody, as she puts it in her book Bodies That Matter,24 rather than obeying them. For example, we can use the word “queer” as an epithet of praise instead of damnation. Or we can undermine the conventional gender signification of our own bodies by dressing them in drag, counting on what Butler calls “the unanticipated resignifiability of highly invested terms” (28)—shock value—to do the subversive work. (Thus we get an echo in this highly metaphysical account of the advice Rorty provides in attempting to convince feminists to sidestep metaphysics—that is, the advice to speak in a new idiom.)
Butler’s response to the worry that her theory takes the wind out of feminist sails turns on a metaphysical picture of our concepts—particularly those concepts of ours concerning sex difference—as thoroughly the product of social convention and therefore, in principle, thoroughly malleable. Now, this is a view that Butler derives in large part from her reading of Jacques Lacan’s reading of Freud, in which Lacan argues, as Butler does, that the human subject is thoroughly constituted by and through her culture. But Lacan, invoking Freud’s interpretation of the Oedipus myth, complicates this picture in a way that Butler doesn’t: he stresses how ambivalent we are bound to be about subverting the very structures through which we come into existence—in this case, our conceptual structures, our language. On Lacan’s view, nothing less is jeopardized in a wish for subversion of these structures than our connectedness to the world. This is a consequence of Butler’s view that she, especially in her prescriptive moments, seems constantly to want to underplay. She doesn’t adequately acknowledge the substantive, real-world risk for a feminist in the idea of ceasing to fight on behalf of “women” in favor of abjuring the straightforward use of this term and limiting one’s activism to subversive gestures on the order of filling one’s closet with gender-dissonant clothes. Not surprisingly, one result of Butler’s work has been to provoke a feminist backlash against it on precisely these grounds. It’s better to put your philosophy on the line, feminists such as the philosopher Susan Bordo contend, than to endanger everything you’ve worked for as a feminist.25
The reason that a Butleresque philosophy of sex and gender isn’t a promising candidate for resolving our apparent contradiction is that in conceiving of itself as a purely metaphysical inquiry it from the outset is paradoxically forced to deny the experience that gives rise to feminism—namely, the sense of being oppressed because you are something called a woman. Let me try to make this point in as clear a way as I can. The problem for someone who wants to conduct an investigation into the nature of sex difference that is at once philosophical and feminist is to figure out how to do so without denying the social fact of sex difference. You have to be able at one and the same time to question what a woman is and to identify yourself as a woman—or, as the case may be, as a man. You have to operate simultaneously at the level of our ordinary concepts—the level, after all, on which feminism situates itself—and at the level of philosophy, where these ordinary concepts are put in question. This is something that none of the candidates for a viable feminist philosophy that I’ve just considered do. Characteristically, work identifying itself as feminist philosophy is work that is peppered with moments of feminism and moments of philosophy, but not moments that are at one and the same time feminist and philosophical.
Now, it may strike you that by definition a moment can’t be both feminist in an everyday sense and philosophical at the same time—that the everyday is to be delimited, if you will, as exactly that which isn’t philosophy. But I’m suggesting that this paradox has to be overcome in order for there to be a genuine resolution to the apparent contradiction in the concept of feminist philosophy. And we’re now at a point at which it’s possible for me to begin to indicate why I find a potential candidate for this resolution in, of all places, what is often called the founding text of the contemporary feminist movement, namely Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It’s my view that this book, in its willingness to keep in play a certain natural relationship—I mean, a relationship that arises naturally as we sexed beings think about sex difference—between the everyday and the metaphysical is a paradigmatic example of the possibility of genuine feminist philosophy. And I want to conclude this chapter by laying out the groundwork for my claim, which will be developed especially in chapters 2 and 7, that this negotiation of the everyday and the philosophical is one of the great achievements of The Second Sex, one of the achievements that accounts for its undisputed power in galvanizing the fight against sex-based oppression.
BEAUVOIR AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY
We get a glimpse of Beauvoir’s willingness to keep what I have called a certain natural relationship between the everyday and the metaphysical in play in the early pages of the introduction to The Second Sex, particularly at the following juncture. Beauvoir writes:
If her female function does not suffice to define woman, if we refuse also to explain her by “the eternal feminine” and if nevertheless we admit that, at least for the time being, there are women on the earth, we then have to ask the question: what is a woman?
The very posing of the problem immediately suggests to me a first response. It is significant that I pose it. A man would never have the idea of writing a book on the singular situation that men occupy in humanity. If I want to define myself, I am obliged first off to declare: “I am a woman”; this truth is the background against which all further assertions will stand out. (TSS xxi, TM; LDS 1:13–14)26
Here we see Beauvoir launching her inquiry by posing what appears to be a metaphysical question—What is a woman?—and then immediately suggesting an everyday answer: I am. This places a certain limit on what is going to count as an acceptable philosophical response to the question: it must account for Beauvoir’s own identity as a woman. But notice that this limit does not come from Beauvoir’s politics—indeed, many counterculture feminists were embarrassed that Beauvoir did not call herself a feminist until the late 1960s, decades after the publication of The Second Sex had played a key role in launching the feminist movement. Rather, the limit on what will count as an answer to the philosophical question “What is a woman?” comes from our everyday criteria in using this word. That is to say, it’s not a political position but, rather, her everyday experience, her experience as a woman, her finding herself bound to identify herself as what the word “woman” names, whatever it names, that constrains Beauvoir’s philosophical investigation.
For Beauvoir, then, no answer to the metaphysical question “What is a woman?” will suffice that does not acknowledge the origins of this question in her ordinary sense of herself as, in the first instance, before all else, a woman. In response to a question asked ten years after the publication of The Second Sex about how she came to write this book, Beauvoir said,
The idea of The Second Sex came to me very late. Men or women, I thought that each could handle their own problems by themselves; I wasn’t aware that femininity is a situation. I wrote three novels, some essays, without worrying myself about my condition as a woman. One day, I had a desire to explain myself to myself. I began to reflect and I became aware with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was this: I am a woman.27
And in the autobiography Beauvoir felt able to begin writing upon completion of the part of her investigation into womanhood that became The Second Sex, she puts the impetus for conducting this investigation this way: “I said how this book was conceived: almost fortuitously. Wanting to speak about myself, I realized that it was necessary for me to describe the feminine condition.”28 Because Beauvoir’s philosophical inquiry into the question of sex is tethered from the start to her desire to understand her everyday identity as a woman, any evolution of this question into a different one—let’s say, a purely metaphysical one—is, at least, checked. It’s as if she’s keeping the investigation on track by insisting on its existential as well as its philosophical import—and, wishing to flag my impatience with accounts of Beauvoir’s achievement that see it as derivative of that of Jean-Paul Sartre, I’m deliberately putting a spin on the word “existential” to mark Beauvoir’s investment of herself in her work.
This is not to suggest, however, that there are particular responses to Beauvoir’s question, responses that will look like some of those I’ve considered here, that are ruled out in advance. It’s perfectly possible, for example, that in the course of her investigation Beauvoir might be overcome, like Butler, by a sense that “women” don’t in some deep sense exist. But this will not present itself as simply an abstract philosophical discovery, deduced from a fixed picture of our relationship to our concepts. Instead, it will present itself as a concrete discovery about Beauvoir’s own life. “What is a woman?” she asks in the passage I quoted from the introduction to The Second Sex. Her answer is that she is, if anything is. This means that part of the investigation into the question of what a woman is will be an investigation of what it is to claim to be a woman, to claim to be, to put it in a more pedantic way, an instance of a general concept. But it also means that this investigation will have to answer to this particular claim to be a woman, made by this particular woman. In philosophizing as she does, Beauvoir is laying her own identity on the line, not just by evincing a willingness for philosophy to effect a transformation of this identity, but more important, by offering nothing less than herself as the object of a philosophical investigation. By personalizing the philosophical question of sex difference in this way, Beauvoir is able to avoid the terms of the essentialism/antiessentialism debate. She doesn’t ask, Is there an essential similarity among women and an essential difference between the sexes?—but rather, What is to be made of the fact that I’m a woman?
I am claiming that this is both a feminist and a philosophical question. On my reading of The Second Sex, the way Beauvoir takes up this question is to begin by showing that we don’t find an answer to it in the history of thought, a history the artifacts of which have of course been produced almost exclusively by men. She then goes on neither to use nor to reject these artifacts, these philosophical theses and methods and tools but, rather, to appropriate them in the service of an investigation that is irreducibly personal as well as philosophical. What this appropriation looks like is a main concern of mine in chapters 3 through 7, but I want here, at this early juncture, to sketch out what I mean in using this word. A central example is Beauvoir’s reworking of the concept of the “Other,” a term previously deployed by the likes of Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan, and Sartre. Beauvoir explores the question of what it means for her to labor intellectually under conditions in which the various conceptualizations of this term in the work of these philosophers—her own partner not excluded—seem invariably to consign beings of her own sex to the position of the “Other,” a position in which one is figured merely as an object of use or of fascination to some genuine subject, a subject that seems, always, to be sexed male. Through something like the Cartesian cogito—“I’m thinking about being consigned to the status of an object; therefore, I can’t, ontologically be just an object”—Beauvoir deduces that to the extent she, and, therefore, other women, nonetheless think of themselves as Other, as not fully human, it must be because they employ their agency in part in the service of accepting this status. But why do women do this? In addressing herself to this question, Beauvoir investigates the grounds on which Hegel, for one, reaccents the concept of the slave, one of the manifestations that the Other takes in his work, so that the position of the slave is seen in certain critical respects to be more desirable, at least from a progressive point of view, than the position of what he calls the master. And then Beauvoir herself reinflects this positive conception of the slave along the lines of her own sexed experience, thus in effect following out Judith Butler’s strategies without making use of anything like Butler’s untethered metaphysics. Beauvoir’s way of reaccenting concepts in response to her own experience as a sexed being, a major strategy in what I call her recounting of woman, provides a model that, I claim, is at one and the same time feminist and philosophical.
This model reconceives of philosophy not as a set of tools or methods or problems or texts or anything else fixed but, rather, as a mode of self-transformation and self-expression that stands or falls at one and the same time on its uniqueness—on, if you will, its originality, or particularity—and on its representativeness: that is, the degree to which its particularity can be taken as an instance of something universal. It serves the interests of feminists insofar as it insists on the rock-bottom importance of the expression of particular voices, something crucial for women if, to hark back to Catharine MacKinnon’s words, they are to become human beings both in truth and in social reality. And from the point of view of philosophy, it offers a way to tether one’s thought to its motivating origins—to keep it from straying away from its own interests. The model happens to come from a text that begot a political movement. Even if that’s not quite an accident, you don’t have to take an interest in feminism in order to take an interest in the model. But if you already have such an interest—let’s say because you’re a woman trying to be a philosopher, and you want to make sense of your hearing the words you are inclined to say echoed back to you by your profession as the words of a woman—then discovering this model might feel, for the first time, like an invitation to speak.
I’m very grateful for the many important suggestions for improving this chapter that I have received from people who listened to an early version of it at Harvard University, Carleton College, Michigan State University, Wellesley College, Loyola University of Chicago, the University of New Hampshire, the University of California at Irvine, Vanderbilt University, and Tufts University, as well as at a meeting of the International Association of Women Philosophers.