Woman is well placed to describe society, the world, the epoch to which she belongs, but only up to a certain point. Truly great works are those that put the world entirely in question. Now that woman doesn’t do. She will critique, she will contest in detail; but to put the world completely into question one must feel oneself to be profoundly responsible for the world. Now she isn’t to the extent that it’s a world of men; she doesn’t take charge in the way the great artist does. She doesn’t radically contest the world, and this is why in the history of humanity there isn’t a woman who has created a great religious or philosophical system, or even a truly great ideology; for that, what’s necessary is in some sense to do away with everything that’s given [faire table rase de tout le donné]—as Descartes did away with all knowledge—and to start afresh. Well, woman, by reason of her condition, isn’t in a position to do that.
—Simone de Beauvoir, “La Femme et la Création”1
I shall be glad to reveal in this discourse what paths I have followed, and to represent my life in it as if in a picture, so that everyone may judge it for himself; and thus, learning from public response the opinions held of it, I shall add a new manner of self-instruction to those I am accustomed to using.
—René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
A wild cry of rage, the revolt of a wounded soul—that they could have accepted with a moved and pitying condescension; since they could not pardon me my objectivity, [my masculine readers] feigned a disbelief in it. For example I will take a phrase of Claude Mauriac’s which perfectly illustrates the arrogance of the First Sex. “What has she got against me?” he wanted to know. Nothing; I had nothing against anything except the words I was quoting.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstance, vol. 12
Suppose that we take seriously Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that a mark of (male) arrogance is the refusal to acknowledge that someone’s words are uttered on, or from, the side of objectivity. Then to accuse someone of arrogance is to suggest that he or she is unjustly seizing the authority to judge the authority of another person’s words. But what is to count as a just claim to the authority to do this judging? Does Beauvoir wish to contradict herself when she speaks of her objectivity in The Second Sex and implies that it is fueled by what she has against the words she is quoting—which means, I take it, not just the quotations in it, but all of its words, none of which are inherently hers? The issue is not just whether and when someone has a right to don the mantle of objectivity—or refuse it to another person; it’s also a question of what it is to try to decide this issue by helping yourself to the very words that have been used to deny you this right.
As I suggested at the end of chapter 1, Beauvoir’s seizing of authority in The Second Sex takes the form of her claiming to be a representative woman. In this chapter I’m going to investigate this claim. I want to show that Beauvoir means by this gesture to be putting herself forward as no worse nor, crucially, better an instance of the concept than any other woman. In answering “I am” to the question “What is a woman?” she means not to distinguish herself but, to the contrary, to count herself as a woman. Here we have an understanding of what it is for a person to claim to represent others that is characterized not by arrogance but by a certain humility—a certain abrogation of the significance of one’s own singularity. This notion of representation, characterized by humility, is, I’m going to argue, in direct contrast to the notion explicitly or implicitly employed in the work of many (male) philosophers, who tacitly or openly claim to be better specimens of genuine humanity—specifically, more objective, more rational, and therefore less brutish and animalistic, than, at the least, their nonphilosopher fellows. I take Beauvoir in The Second Sex to be countering this sort of philosophical arrogance by grounding the authority to speak objectively in an inaugurating act of humility.
And yet nothing could be more obvious about The Second Sex than the brazenness of its author. Beauvoir is aware of herself both as making claims about the way the world is—claims, that is, to objective truth—and as tethering those claims firmly to her own identity, marking them as specifically hers. It’s this combination of moves, and the way that the texture of Beauvoir’s prose makes them seem deliberate, that opens her, despite my standing claims about her basic humility, to the charge of arrogance. Stanley Cavell has suggested that arrogating the authority to make objective claims when nothing other than your own desire to have a say entitles your words is a hallmark of philosophical work.3 Cavell wants the word arrogation here because the claiming of title to words that on his view is a mark of philosophy inevitably carries with it the danger of appearing to be, not to say being, an act of arrogance. For him, assessing an author’s entitlement to his or her arrogation of authority, testing its apparent arrogance, is itself an act of criticism, or of judgment, that requires a further arrogation of authority and thus a further risk.
The decision not to investigate the appearance of arrogance but instead to take it at face value—to deny, to put it another way, the possibility of a distinction in a given case between arrogation and arrogance—in effect constitutes a rejection of philosophical conversation. Needless to say, this is a rejection that all philosophical writing courts. The tone of authority that permeates philosophical writing can be off-putting, especially if one is not prepared for it. Indeed, the conventions of academic philosophy—for instance, explicitly situating one’s work in an ongoing philosophical debate—often function precisely to attempt to forestall the author’s being caught out as a genuine individual. The author draws a lot of attention to the formal structure of his philosophical procedure: he’s going to defend x-ism against y-ism; he’ll adduce arguments against y-ism; he’ll consider objections to his own arguments, objections the reader can test for himself; and he’s willing to give up x-ism if someone shows he’s made an error in his reasoning. Here, moves are being made to divert the reader from noticing the philosopher’s personal stake in his positions. It’s no surprise, then, that philosophers who abjure these procedures leave themselves even more exposed to the charge of arrogance. Here, one might think, to offer some extreme examples, of Nietzsche, or the young Marx, or the later Wittgenstein. None of these writers attempts to cover up his arrogation of authority by shying away from a tone of authority. Characteristically, this tone of authority so dominates the text that a substantial number of readers judge it to be fundamentally antiphilosophical. This is perhaps at least part of the reason why the likes of Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations have always had to fight for the title of serious philosopher. A central claim of my project is that Beauvoir in her arrogation of authority in The Second Sex belongs in the company of such writers, which means that the degree to which her work is regarded as serious philosophy is bound to remain controversial.
It is no wonder, then, that I am in the minority in reading The Second Sex as issuing from a posture of humility. The apparent implausibility of this reading is compounded by the fact of Beauvoir’s putting herself forward as a test-case instance of the concept “woman,” whatever the word should turn out to connote. For many feminists, claiming to be a representative woman constitutes an act of high treason, and so inescapably of arrogance, since the very notion of representation is seen as entailing a reduction of the wide array of women’s experiences to the narrow scope of one’s own. Criticism of Beauvoir on this front tends to take one of two forms. Less commonly, she is accused of directly mistaking her own life experience, the experience of a white, bourgeois, Western woman, for that of all women.4 More commonly, this criticism involves the charge that Beauvoir in The Second Sex sets herself up as what you might call an Über-woman, who through her own special powers of intellect and will escapes what she herself characterizes as the feminine condition. The charge, then, is that she effectively exempts herself from the category “woman,” exalting herself above her sisters by disassociating herself from them. Typically, this view of Beauvoir’s self-styling in The Second Sex takes the form of accusing her of acting like a man, of, ironically enough, inaugurating the latter-day feminist movement through a dramatic act of “masculinism.”5
In this chapter I want to link this accusation of masculinism to what I see as an uncannily similar one directed by feminist thinkers at the man ordinarily viewed as the founding figure of “modern” Western philosophy, namely, René Descartes. I will suggest that the routine condemnations of Descartes in the feminist philosophical literature overlook what is productively radical about the Cartesian method of doubt. In these aspects, this method, I wish to show, is—not accidentally—exactly that employed by Beauvoir in The Second Sex. This chapter in fact attempts to make good the unusual claim that one of Simone de Beauvoir’s central aspirations in The Second Sex is to rewrite Descartes’s Meditations from the ground up. The pivotal and emblematic move is Beauvoir’s displacement, in effect, of Descartes’s question “What is a man?”—posed in the second meditation directly after the climactic discovery of the cogito ergo sum—by the question “What is a woman?” Beauvoir’s touchstone response to this question, “I am,” is therefore to be read, I suggest, as her version of the Cartesian cogito. My aim is to show how these displacements of the founding moments of modem philosophy constitute both an appropriation of and a fundamental challenge to the philosophical tradition. I argue, specifically, that Beauvoir’s investigations ought to be read as in effect casting doubt on the philosophical priorities of the father of modern philosophy. The power of The Second Sex as the founding document of the second wave of feminism, then, issues in substantial part from Beauvoir’s inaugurating call for a reordering of these priorities—as though we cannot think coherently about what a “man” is, cannot make out a coherent sex-neutral sense of the term, until we address the question of what it means to be, to be called, a woman.
In my comparison of the Meditations and The Second Sex, I focus on the paramount role that philosophical skepticism plays in the work of each text. While Descartes’s doubting of all of his opinions is legendary, one simply doesn’t find commentators acknowledging the philosophical significance of Beauvoir’s stark expression of doubt about whether women exist. The sense of herself as a woman that lies at the heart of Beauvoir’s inquiry is not a sense that is from the first, or at any point, in principle or in practice unassailable. One can see Beauvoir’s work as an inquiry into the meaning and validity of this sense—that is, an investigation into whether and how “women” exist. Her inquiry need be no more dogmatic, therefore, than that of Descartes, who in the Meditations is in effect launching just such an investigation into the meaning and validity of his sense of the world. In exploring the parallel between Beauvoir’s skepticism and that of Descartes, I argue that Beauvoir interprets the metaphysical solitude that forms the basis of Descartes’s epistemological solipsism as an inevitable cost of his revolutionary, and laudable, relocation of philosophical authority from powerful people and institutions to the individual human mind. And I show how her appropriation of this alarming consequence of Descartes’s method leads her to develop a powerful philosophical picture of the nature of sex difference.
Beauvoir’s appropriation of Descartes begins in her desire to explore the possibility of philosophizing as a woman. Because for Beauvoir to be called a “woman” is to have a female body, she cannot begin to understand what a human being is the way Descartes does in the second meditation: by laying aside the possibility that he is, fundamentally, a “mechanical structure of limbs” (Descartes 1986).6 Furthermore, since her inquiry is rooted in a sense of herself as being an instance of the generic concept “woman,” Beauvoir avoids a certain Cartesian threat of solipsism from the start: to call herself a woman is to start with the idea that there are other beings like her—that is, other beings who are called, or call themselves, women. I say a “certain” threat of solipsism is avoided since it is not clear, at least not yet, what the ontological or epistemological ramifications of this fact will be. That she is not the only woman does not of course rule out the possibility that Beauvoir, even insofar as she is or takes herself to be a woman, will experience a profound, Cartesian sense of metaphysical isolation. What I mean to claim on the strength of this observation of Beauvoir’s starting point is only that it would bring her to a different place of isolation, as it were, from that at which Descartes arrives in the course of the Meditations. In my bolder moments, I think of her as in essence rewriting the Meditations from the point of view of someone who finds herself unable to doubt her existence as an embodied person in a world of other embodied people, a point of view that is in principle open to all people but one that those who are not systematically oppressed on the basis of the appearance of their bodies—that is, their superficial social identities—may have the luxury not to take up.
FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY CONTRA DESCARTES
As the “father” of modern philosophy, Descartes is a favorite target of feminist criticism (and not just in philosophy), and his ideas have been attacked from any number of feminist angles, the most common, perhaps, involving suspicion of his signature belief in a fundamental split between the mind and the body and other so-called dualisms.7 It would of course take me too far afield to try to piece together some sort of overview of feminist concerns about Descartes. But I do need to get a picture of his “masculinism” on the table in order to support my claim that it’s no coincidence that both he and Beauvoir are often indicted by feminists on this front. A representative enough critique of Descartes’s masculinism is to be found in a well-known essay by the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought.”8 In this essay Bordo tries to make out the case that the masculinism she sees all over modern philosophy has its roots in certain key moves made by Descartes, particularly in his magnum opus, the Meditations. More specifically, Bordo sees Descartes in this work as developing a concept of objectivity that encodes basic “masculine” values. She aims to show how and why this masculinist concept of objectivity developed.
Relying on historical research by other scholars, Bordo claims that in medieval times people explicitly conceptualized the cosmos as female and felt fundamentally at one with nature, nestled comfortably, as it were, in her womb.9 The medievals, Bordo claims, saw no sharp distinction between themselves and the rest of the “female” world. But during the transition to the Renaissance, as Bordo describes it, the culture experienced a “kind of protracted birth” (448); for reasons that she does not make entirely clear, people felt pushed out of the womb and underwent the trauma, on a grand scale, of separation from Mother Nature. In describing this trauma, Bordo appeals to the work of feminist object-relations theorists, such as Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, who claim that individual males in our culture characteristically undergo just such a traumatic separation from their mothers because of the culture’s demands that boys establish a space in which to shore up and demonstrate their masculinity, figured as sharply differentiated from the femininity of the mother.10 Bordo suggestively asks, “May not such a process reverberate, too, on the cultural level?” (445). On her view, the second step in the social “drama of parturition” that she is describing takes the form of Renaissance man’s engineering something like a rebirth of himself, this time on his own terms, as a sort of defense against being pushed from the mother-cosmos.11
Descartes’s contribution to this process, Bordo claims, was to insist on an absolutely sharp line between the person, or what she often calls “the subject,” and the rest of the world, what she calls “the object.” For Bordo, this line epitomizes the legacy of Cartesian objectivity, which on her view turns on a “differentiation between subject and object, between self and the world.” It entails, she continues, using Descartes’s own language, a “clear and distinct” sense of what she calls “the boundaries of the self” (449). Descartes’s allegiance to objectivity, his “objectivism,” is essentially “a defensive response to … separation anxiety” marked by a flight from what she here calls not the female but the feminine (441). This flight from the feminine takes the form of a “re-birthing and re-imaging of knowledge and the world as masculine” (441). “Here,” Bordo notes, “‘masculine’ describes not a biological category but a cognitive style, an epistemological stance. Its key term is detachment: from the emotional life, from the particularities of time and place, from personal quirks, prejudices, and interests, and most centrally, from the object itself” (451). And she concludes that “clearly, the (unmythologizing) articulation of ‘the feminine’—and its potential contribution to ethics, epistemology, science, education, and politics—is one of the most important movements of the twentieth century” (456).
Bordo’s use of quotation marks around “the feminine” in this last quotation is a signal of her caution, not to say her uneasiness, in using this concept. One of her concerns is evidently to avoid “mythologizing”; but I suspect that she is also hedging against feminist critiques of the idea that there is some monolithic thing called “the feminine” to be articulated.12 In calling for this articulation in the closing lines of her essay, Bordo seems to be advocating a “cognitive style” or “epistemological stance” in which our various detachments are overcome. (Why, again, this is supposed to be a feminine—or even a female—style or stance is something Bordo doesn’t say.) In the second-to-last sentence of her paper, she refers to the “limitations” of what she calls the “historical identification of rationality and intelligence with the masculine modes of detachment, distance, and clarity.” I imagine that what she wants to signify by these words is her sense—a sense that I think is common to most feminist critics of Descartes and that I will spell out in somewhat more detail below—that something important about human experience, or at least women’s experience, gets lost in the Cartesian picture.
DESCARTES’S SOLIPSISTIC LEGACY
Although I claim that Beauvoir in The Second Sex means to issue a fundamental philosophical challenge to Descartes’s way of proceeding in the Meditations, I am no less interested in showing that her challenge is internal to this way of proceeding and, thus, to modern philosophy. For Beauvoir, following directly in Descartes’s footsteps, to do philosophy is inevitably to grapple with the threat of solipsism.13 For Bordo, this threat is a direct result of Descartes’s paradigmatic rejection of Mother Nature and his investment in refashioning her according to the terms of the new science of the seventeenth century.14 But Beauvoir’s challenge to Descartes stems, I think, not from her distrust of his motives but, rather, from her admiration for his revolutionary relocation of the source of philosophical authority. For her, the threat of solipsism is to be seen as the cost not of masculinism but of a conception of philosophy as critical and dynamic.
To understand the significance of this conception of philosophy for Beauvoir, we need to bear in mind just how radical a shift in the enterprise Descartes’s writings represented. For the vast majority of medieval and pre-Cartesian philosophers, philosophy was a mode of inquiry in which one used forms of logical argument, mostly developed by Aristotle, to apply received doctrine, mostly scripture and Aristotelian texts, to everyday observations and experiments. This meant, of course, that a person who wished to read a philosophical work had to be highly educated—had to know the Bible, for example, as well as the thought of neo-Aristotelian philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, whose writings dominated the subject for most of the Renaissance. And of course, in order to be educated in the Europe of Descartes’s time, you had to be a man of a certain class. That meant that the practice of philosophy was fundamentally elitist.
Medieval philosophy ends at Descartes’s doorstep because he reconceived the subject as something that appealed to the authority not of preexisting doctrine or texts but of the human mind alone. In all of his works, Descartes emphasizes that the rational intellect is to be found in all human minds. Indeed, he thought that the reason that some human minds weren’t philosophical minds was that they were in effect polluted by dogmatic teaching, which he believed blocked the mind’s inherent power to think. To do philosophy, he believed, one must purge one’s mind of these bad teachings in order to make room for what he called “good sense.” The Discourse on the Method begins famously with the words, “Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world. … The power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men” (111).
By “all men,” we have very good evidence to believe, Descartes meant to include those men who traditionally lacked access to formal education. For example, we know that he taught mathematics to his own servant and that he strongly and vocally approved of teaching the arts and sciences to the artisan class. Whether in averring that “all men” share alike in the capacity for reason Descartes meant to include women is perhaps controversial, although he obviously thought that women such as his longtime correspondent Elizabeth of Bohemia and Queen Christina of Sweden, who summoned him to her court in order to receive philosophical instruction, were more than capable of more than following his thought. As further proof of Descartes’s sincerity, we have the fact that he wrote most of his books in the French vernacular.15
The Meditations, however, was an exception to this practice. It was originally written in Latin, since Descartes wanted to make sure that the clergy would read the book and thus, perhaps, change their minds about how philosophy ought to be done. Because this is Descartes’s goal, the strategy of the Meditations is to try to get his readers to free their minds of the prejudicial teaching that has been hammered into them, in order that they might be guided by their own reason and specifically by what Descartes calls “the natural light.”16 Because his strategy is to disinter good sense from layers of shibboleths, it takes the form not of a treatise but, rather, of a series of meditations. One philosophizes not by taking in the teachings of a pedant but by following the example of the meditator and attempting to think for oneself. Gary Hatfield, in his illuminating essay “The Senses and the Fleshless Eye,” observes that in the Meditations Descartes is in effect transforming from within the preexisting medieval genre of the meditation: where the old-style meditations asked you to contemplate the great, given truths, so as to strengthen your will to act in accordance with them, Descartes asks you to suspend your belief in such truths in order to free your mind for genuinely philosophical contemplation. In the preface to the Meditations he says, “I would not urge anyone to read this book except those who are able and willing to meditate seriously with me, and to withdraw their minds from the senses and from all preconceived opinions” (8).17 Genuinely philosophical meditation, Descartes attempts to show, reveals that fundamental to being human is the ability to think for oneself.
Descartes identifies the first and, arguably, most critical of his contemporaries’ wrongheaded preconceived opinions on the very first page of the first meditation: “All that up to the present I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses.” This rock-bottom tenet of medieval Aristotelianism, Descartes believes, cannot survive the scrutiny of “good sense.” He wants to get his readers to see that human beings do not conceptualize the world solely or primarily by virtue of their sense experience, that is, solely by the way the world bombards their sensory organs. Rather, Cartesian meditation reveals that human beings are creatures who bring a rational perspective to the world. And indeed the success of the Meditations as a philosophical document hinges on the truth of Descartes’s faith that this rational perspective is available to every person, that anyone who engages in the deep experiment in thinking modeled by the Meditations will discover at the foundation of his or her mind the same basic indubitable beliefs. Descartes is banking on each serious meditator’s experiencing the inexorability, the indubitability, of certain fundamental philosophical propositions.18
On the view of Descartes that I’m trying to sketch out, human minds contain certain fundamental intuitions, albeit buried under layers of dogmatic teaching and prejudice, that are the same from person to person. And it is these shared intuitions that underpin the conception of objectivity that Descartes advocates. Objectivity, he suggests, is not simply to be contrasted with something you might call subjectivity, that is, personal opinion; instead, objectivity can be seen as a form of subjectivity, a form that is by definition to be found in all thinkers.19 This conception of objectivity competes not with models of what I suppose Bordo would call attachment but, rather, with prejudice, with blind reliance on other people’s thinking, with kowtowing to the received order. Objectivity explains how thinking people can come to agree with one another through separate acts of thinking on the part of each individual. And this, surely, is an idea that ought to be congenial to feminists, who seek to ensure that diverse women and men can learn to treat each other respectfully and fairly.
I am claiming, contra Bordo, that Descartes wishes to “detach” not from “the cosmos” or some other mother imago but from the constrictions of received opinion. At the same time, I want to account for Bordo’s sense of the philosophical fatefulness of Descartes’s writings and, specifically, for her sense that there is something fundamentally hostile to women in this work. On my reading of Descartes, the source of Bordo’s consternation is Descartes’s revolutionary insistence that philosophical progress demands the isolation of the meditator. The solitude of the figure of the meditator is a symbol not only of the possibility of independent thinking, of real philosophy, but also of the conditions under which this philosophy can be done. In the material that prefaces the Meditations, Descartes famously stresses, first, that the experiment in deep thinking that constitutes the book is to be undertaken only once in a lifetime and, second, that those who wish to follow him in undertaking this experiment must “withdraw their minds from the senses and from all preconceived opinion” (8). At the beginning of the first meditation, the meditator specifies that he is finally prepared to undertake the task at hand—that of doubting all of his beliefs—not only because he has “a clear stretch of free time” but also because he is “quite alone” (12). But this isolation is not just a physical precondition for doing philosophy. For Descartes it is also metaphysically basic—indeed, it turns out to be the foundation of each person’s connection with the rest of the world.
In order to elucidate the fundamental role that metaphysical isolation plays in Descartes’s philosophy, I need to take a few lines to review the familiar details of the first meditation. In so doing, I cannot stress enough, I will not be weighing in on those features of Descartes’s magnum opus that a proper interpretation of the book would be obliged to address. I will not, for example, draw attention to the enormous, even decisive role that his work on the nature of mathematics, and particular of geometry, plays in his understanding of what he is doing. I will say nothing about the role that God plays in the Meditations—even, especially retrospectively, in the first meditation, which is structured around the suspension of certain, but not all, ontotheological tenets. I will ignore aspects of the Meditations as important as these because my main goal in this chapter is simply to suggest a certain way of understanding Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship to the philosophical tradition. I wish to show that there is much exciting and potentially productive work to be done in exploring this relationship in the particular cases of Descartes and, as I will be claiming in later chapters, of Hegel—not to mention, potentially, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and even Sartre.
Let us begin, then, with Descartes’s announcement at the beginning of meditation 1 that the point of the work is to purge his mind of what he calls the fundamental “falsehoods” on which he fears the “edifice” of his beliefs has been built.20 The point of doing this is to clear the way for finding and establishing genuine scientific truths. Descartes informs us that he has “put the project off” for a long time because “the task looked an enormous one” and he needed to make sure that he had “rid [his] mind of all worries and arranged for [him]self a clear stretch of free time.” Now that these conditions have been met, Descartes says, “I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.” But since attempting to destroy his opinions one by one might well prove “an endless task,” Descartes says he will instead attempt to undermine the foundations of the whole edifice of his beliefs. This he takes himself to succeed in doing by supposing, first, that he is dreaming and, then, that “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.”21 He imagines that what he has taken to be experience of the actual world is in fact nothing but the dreams that the evil demon has planted in him. He further imagines that the demon has interfered with his powers of thought such that he “go[es] wrong every time [he adds] two and three or count[s] the sides of a square, or in some even simpler matter, if that is imaginable.”
But, as Descartes frequently notes, persisting in this demonfantasy is “an arduous undertaking,” for he is plagued by what he calls “a kind of laziness,” one that allows his “habitual opinions” to “keep coming back” and “capture” his belief, “which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom.” In the famous passage that ends the first meditation, Descartes writes,
I am like a prisoner who is enjoying an imaginary freedom while asleep; as he begins to suspect that he is asleep, he dreads being woken up, and goes along with the pleasant illusion as long as he can. In the same way, I happily slide back into my old opinions and dread being shaken out of them, for fear that my peaceful sleep may be followed by hard labour when I wake, and that I shall have to toil not in the light, but amid the inextricable darkness of the problems I have now raised.
Even when, at the beginning of the second meditation, the meditator finds himself caught up in the mood of Doubt, as though in a whirlpool that won’t let him get his footing, he finds himself tempted by what he has called laziness. “How do I know,” he asks, “that there is not something else which does not allow even the slightest occasion for doubt?” Surely, he cannot doubt the existence of God, since he is hypothesizing that an evil deity has filled his head with falsehoods. But of course it’s possible that he himself may be “the author of these thoughts.” In that case, then, he must exist. But he has convinced himself that his beliefs that he has a body and that his body has senses that provide him at least under ideal circumstances with reliable impressions of a world outside his body are false. So then, “Does it now follow that I too do not exist?” It does not, says Descartes, in the climactic passage of the Meditations. For the very fact that the doubt is his, that to deny that it is he who is denying his own beliefs would inevitably be to will himself to act, shows that he must exist, even if his train of thought is hopelessly led astray every time by a malicious demon. “So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”
It turns out that this “I” is essentially “a thing that thinks.” This may seem to follow from the cogito itself, but in the wax example that takes up most of the remainder of the second meditation it becomes clear that Descartes is trying to establish, in direct contradistinction to the reigning Aristotelian paradigm, that human beings’ relatedness to the world depends fundamentally on the intellect and not on the senses or on what Descartes calls “the imagination.”22 “I know now,” says Descartes at the end of the second meditation,
that even bodies [like the body of wax the meditator has been contemplating] are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood; and in view of this I know plainly that I can achieve an easier and more evident perception of my own mind than of anything else.
In meditations 3 through 6, of course, Descartes in effect attempts to rebuild the rest of his world, starting with God and ending with his own body, on the foundation of the cogito. While not every reader of the Meditations in the past 350 years has judged this endeavor a failure, it is as scandalous a fact as any about philosophy that Descartes’s legacy to the subject was to turn it into an essentially skeptical enterprise.
I want to suggest, however, that this legacy ought to be seen not so much as the product of Descartes’s manifest failure to bring the rest of the world back along with his own mind but more fundamentally as a corollary to his reconception of the philosophical enterprise. The skepticism that infuses the Meditations is established not by some weakness of its post-cogito arguments (although of course this weakness reinforces the skepticism) but on the very idea that a human being’s connectedness with the world rests at bottom on what goes on in his head, on his thinking. I am not, in Descartes’s picture, simply one thing, albeit a thinking thing, among many in the world. Rather, I am the basis of a picture of the world that is fundamentally dependent on what goes on in my mind. In other words, the corollary to Descartes’s conviction that the individual human mind is in itself the best source of philosophical authority comes at the cost of a certain solipsism, a certain metaphysical solitude. And notice that this is not essentially a logical deduction from first principles but what would come to be called a phenomenological discovery. I learn that I am fundamentally the basis of my own experience from taking stock of a certain course of my own thought. The picture that founds modern philosophy is thus one in which the very procedures of the discipline figure the thinker as beginning from a position in which he is profoundly, metaphysically, alone.
BEAUVOIR’S CARTESIANISM
I don’t expect my characterization of the legacy of the Meditations to be uncontroversial. Husserl, for one, takes himself to be defeating the idea that the price of Cartesianism is epistemological solipsism. In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl tries to show that when you set out à la Descartes to rebuild the world from your own mind outward, you end up (if, of course, you do things properly) with the world, and not just some personal version of it. This is because when you think about yourself, you always think about yourself as situated in a world. In his Paris Lectures, Husserl writes, “To the extent that I apprehend myself as a natural human being, I presuppose having apprehended a spatial reality …; I have conceived of myself as being in space, in which I consequently have an outside of myself!” (32, emphasis in original). And I can have knowledge that other people exist since “I experience the world not as my own private world, but as an intersubjective world, one that is given to all human beings and which contains objects accessible to all” (34). But arguments such as these, no matter how successful, cannot defeat the point that the picture of philosophy we get in Descartes, the picture that founds modern philosophy, is one in which the very procedures of the discipline (procedures that I have suggested are in a certain basic respect congenial to the practice of feminism) figure the thinker as beginning from a position in which he is profoundly, metaphysically alone. In fact, that Husserl is forced to address “the problem of the external world” and “the problem of other minds,” far from contesting this point, is evidence for it.
Just as Husserl, as the title Cartesian Meditations indicates, regarded himself as in effect rewriting Descartes’s magnum opus in an attempt to ensure that the world as we know it really does come back at the end of the philosopher’s labors, and just as this very work, as I have been arguing, reinforced the skeptical structure of Descartes’s starting point and procedures, so Jean-Paul Sartre, in his early Transcendence of the Ego and a little later in Being and Nothingness (subtitled A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology) regarded himself as in effect rewriting Husserl—and in so doing inadvertently carried on the skeptical tradition of modern philosophy.23 On the early Sartre’s view, which I render in some depth in chapters 3 and especially 4, consciousness is again the starting point, only now the moral of the story is not that the world is returned to the philosopher in the wake of his activities but that the idea of a single world is philosophically naive. For Sartre, breaking out of the metaphysical privacy that inaugurates Descartes’s project is impossible. I make these bare-bones claims about Sartre, and about Husserl, not to single them out as more or less Descartes’s heirs than any other philosophers in the modern era but because their ideas are the ideas that filled the philosophical air breathed by Simone de Beauvoir.24 As a Frenchwoman, and even more as a companion of Sartre’s, Beauvoir ought to have been even more inclined than the average modern philosopher to position her philosophical work in relation to that of Descartes. But even this set of circumstances is scant preparation for my claim that the author of The Second Sex, no less than the author of the Cartesian Meditations, aspires, in effect, to rewrite Descartes’s magnum opus from the ground up.
I hedge this claim with the words “in effect” because Beauvoir herself would never have phrased her aspirations this way. Indeed, throughout her life she repeatedly insinuated in her writings, in interviews, and in her speeches that she had never aspired to be—indeed felt herself incapable of being—a philosopher in the sense that in her view Descartes (or, as she was often at pains to observe, Sartre) was. Ordinarily, these disclaimers are taken as evidence of Beauvoir’s lack of philosophical aspirations and originality. But it’s important to note that what Beauvoir explicitly claims, at least when she talks about this subject at any length, is not that she’s not capable of doing philosophical work but, rather, that she’s not interested in or prepared to do a certain kind of philosophy. Consider, for example, the following passage from the second volume of her autobiography, published about ten years after The Second Sex:
The year before [referring to a year in the mid-1930s, when Beauvoir was several years out of graduate school], I hadn’t written anything. I was absolutely determined to go back to some serious work. But what? Why wasn’t I tempted to try my hand at philosophy? Sartre said that I understood philosophical doctrines, those of Husserl among others, more rapidly and more exactly than he did. Indeed, he tended to interpret them according to his own schemes. It was difficult for him to forget himself and to adopt unreservedly a foreign point of view. In my case I had no resistance to break down. My thought modeled itself immediately around what I was trying to grasp. I didn’t accept it passively: insofar as I adhered to it, I perceived in it lacunae and incoherence, just as I also envisioned possible developments for it. If a theory convinced me, it didn’t remain external to me: it changed my relationship with the world, it colored my experience. In short, I had solid faculties of assimilation and a well-developed critical sense; and philosophy was for me a living reality. It gave me satisfactions that never paled for me.
Yet I did not regard myself as a philosopher: I was well aware that the ease with which I entered into a text came precisely from my lack of inventiveness. In this field, the real creative spirits are so rare that it is otiose to ask why I didn’t try to take my place among them. What’s necessary to explain, rather, is how certain individuals are capable of carrying out this concerted delirium [délire concerté] that is a system and from where they get the stubbornness [entêtement] which lends to their personal perceptions the value of universal law [qui donne à leurs aperçus la valeur de clés universelles]. As I have said before, the feminine condition does not conduce to this species of obstinacy [la condition féminine ne dispose pas à ce genre d’obstination].
I could at least have undertaken some study—documented, critical, and perhaps even ingenious—of some limited problem: an author little- or unknown, a point of logic. I wasn’t tempted at all. Chatting with Sartre, taking the measure of his patience, his audacity, made devoting oneself [se donner] to philosophy seem exhilarating—but only if one were bitten by an idea. To expose, develop, judge, collate, criticize the ideas of others—no, I couldn’t see the interest in this. Reading a work of Fink’s [Eugen Fink, perhaps Husserl’s best-known acolyte], I asked myself, “But how does one resign oneself to be the disciple of someone?” I sometimes, later, consented—intermittently—to playing this role.25 But at the outset I had too much intellectual ambition for this to satisfy me. I wanted to communicate what was original in my experience. To succeed at this, I knew that it was toward literature that I must orient myself.26
In this passage Beauvoir envisions only two possibilities in philosophy. One is “to expose, develop, collate, and criticize the ideas of others.” This is work Beauvoir says she for the most part abjured because she wasn’t interested in being a “disciple.” The other possibility she sees in philosophy is to set out to create a philosophical system, glossed as “concerted delirium,” by which she implies both the exhilaration she mentions in the next paragraph and a certain madness or lunacy. This madness, she claims, goes hand-in-hand with a certain stubbornness, or obstinacy, one that in effect transforms the philosopher’s personal perceptions into universal law. And this stubbornness, in her view, is at odds with what she calls “the feminine condition.”
We find similar notes struck in a speech Beauvoir delivered in Japan several years after she wrote the passage I have just been discussing:
Woman is well placed to describe society, the world, the epoch to which she belongs, but only up to a certain point. Truly great works are those that put the world entirely in question. Now that woman doesn’t do. She will critique, she will contest in detail; but to put the world completely into question one must feel oneself to be profoundly responsible for the world. Now she isn’t to the extent that it’s a world of men; she doesn’t take charge in the way the great artist does. She doesn’t radically contest the world, and this is why in the history of humanity there isn’t a woman who has created a great religious or philosophical system, or even a truly great ideology; for that, what’s necessary is in some sense to do away with everything that’s given [ faire table rase de tout le donné]—as Descartes did away with all knowledge—and to start afresh. Well, woman, by reason of her condition, isn’t in a position to do that.27
This passage, like the one quoted before it, was also written well after the publication of The Second Sex; and to understand why “the feminine condition” debars women from philosophical system-building it is necessary to see what The Second Sex understands this condition to be—a central task of chapters 6 and 7 of my book. For now, I want to flag Beauvoir’s explicit identification of Descartes as the author of a “truly great work,” one that, by her definition, “in some sense does away with everything given.” Putting this passage together with the one from Beauvoir’s autobiography, one senses her ambivalence about philosophical system-building. On the one hand, the idea of it is exhilarating and she strongly admires those men, Sartre and Descartes to name two, who have the wherewithal to imagine that their personal views are, or are manifestations of, universal laws. On the other, Beauvoir identifies this wherewithal with obstinacy and madness and suggests not just that it is at odds with “the feminine condition” but even that there is something narcissistically maniacal about the attempt to describe the world afresh, from the ground up, on the mere strength of your own belief in yourself and your ideas.
Beauvoir’s ambivalence about system-building in philosophy goes a long way, on my view, toward explaining why she does not take on the Meditations directly in The Second Sex. And yet there is a wealth of evidence in the introduction to her book indicating that this is precisely what she wished to do. Once one is on the alert for them, one cannot help but notice any number of striking similarities between the opening moves of Descartes’s and Beauvoir’s texts. Indeed, merely putting the texts side by side reveals remarkable affinities between the two. Here, for example, are the inaugurating lines of the Meditations:
Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last. But the task looked an enormous one, and I began to wait until I should reach a mature enough age to ensure that no subsequent time of life would be more suitable for tackling such inquiries. This led me to put the project off for so long that I would now be to blame if by pondering over it any further I wasted the time still left for carrying it out. So today I have expressly rid my mind of all worries and arranged for myself a clear stretch of free time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions. (12)
And here, again, is how The Second Sex begins:
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? … 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. (LDS 1:11, TM; see TSS xix)
In both cases, it is established in the first paragraph that the author has a long-standing interest in the project that is about to be undertaken and that this project has been deferred for a substantial period of time. And both Descartes and (a little later on) Beauvoir recognize that the special circumstances of their lives have prepared them especially well for the investigations they are taking on. Descartes tells us straight away that he has a specific reason for writing the Meditations, namely, a desire to establish a firm foundation for the sciences. This is a reason, notice, that is, as it were, external to the Meditations itself, which is figured as essentially a stepping stone. Descartes also points out that he is well placed now, finally, to undertake this exercise, and he lays out the general conditions required for serious meditation: one must have reached a stage of life at which one has plenty of free time as well as what you might call sufficient psychological space to demolish one’s entire edifice of opinions. Later in her introduction Beauvoir also reveals that what’s driving the writing of The Second Sex is a desire that lies outside the range of the work itself, namely a wish to “define” herself (TSS xxi).28 She argues that the project of posing what she archly calls “the woman question” (TSS xxxii) cannot be undertaken by just any person: the author must be a woman who can “afford the luxury of impartiality”:
Already a number of us have never had to perceive our femininity as a constraint (gêne) or an obstacle. Many problems seem to us more essential than those that concern us in particular. This detachment even allows us to hope that our attitude will be objective. Still, we know the female world more intimately than do men because we have our roots in it. We sense more immediately what the fact of being female signifies for a human being, and we concern ourselves more with knowing (LDS 1:29–30, TM; TSS xxxiii–xxxiv).29
Most critically, from the outset both Descartes and Beauvoir make it clear that their projects are undertaken in the spirit of some kind of skepticism. Descartes will doubt all of his opinions; Beauvoir will doubt whether women exist. Both authors also recognize from the beginning that their doubt is likely to strike the reader as excessive. Descartes observes that he cannot doubt all of his opinions simply on the grounds that his senses occasionally deceive him:
How could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to madmen, whose brains are so damaged by the persistent vapours of melancholia that they firmly maintain that they are kings when they are paupers, or say they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are pumpkins, or made of glass. (13)
Beauvoir, as we have seen, warns that most talk about women constitutes “voluminous nonsense.” But in a matter of paragraphs both Descartes and Beauvoir provide good reason for us to consider the possibility that we don’t have a firm claim on what we thought we knew. In Beauvoir’s case, various pat (and even not so pat) definitions of “woman” are provided, and each is shown to be problematic: “But conceptualism has lost ground” (TSS xx); “But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine” (TSS xx). In Descartes’s case, the dreaming and evil-demon hypotheses prove difficult to dismiss. So early on Descartes feels himself licensed to doubt that he himself exists, while Beauvoir attempts to earn the right to doubt that women exist, which, since she herself is nominally, at least, a woman, turns out also to be some form of doubting her own existence. Both the question “Do I really know anything?” and the question “What is a woman?” are peculiar: it’s not at all obvious how to go about answering either of them or indeed what would count as an answer to either one. This is because the obvious responses manifestly won’t be pertinent, given the context in which the question is being asked. Descartes asks his question about knowledge after taking himself to show that what ordinarily looks like knowledge has yet to prove worthy of the name. And Beauvoir asks her question about women after showing that the usual answers to her question—having to do with femaleness, “the eternal feminine,” and so on—are insufficient. In both cases, it is argued at the outset that we lack a clear understanding of a concept we use all the time. To the extent that these texts continue to move us, it appears that, despite the production of many other texts on these subjects, we still feel we lack this understanding. That both texts continue to be read in the wake of these further texts is another feature they share.
Finally, there is the matter of both Descartes’s and Beauvoir’s conceiving of their work in terms of building upon foundations, foundations that in both cases prove deeply personal. In Descartes’s case, of course, it will turn out that what undergirds the entire structure of his knowledge is the indubitable fact of his own existence, something revealed to him in every act of thinking. And in Beauvoir’s case, it is the fact of her own identity that is supposed to serve as the foundation of an answer to the question: What is a woman? Immediately after directly posing this question in the introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir declares, “I am a woman,” and she declares that “this truth is the background against which all further assertions will stand out.” In both cases, of course, the idiosyncrasies of the authors have nothing to do with the basis upon which they offer themselves as the foundations of their work. Rather, both Descartes and Beauvoir invite the reader to make the same sort of claim. This means that the fact that both authors identify themselves as well positioned to undertake the investigations they undertake is not supposed to imply that they are somehow superior objects of investigation. To the contrary: just as the power of the cogito depends entirely on the “I” who comes to see the indubitability of his existence, so the power of Beauvoir’s response to the question “What is a woman?” depends entirely on the “I” experiencing the indubitability of … not her sex, exactly, but let’s say her sex-identity, a sense of being what is called a woman.
Here, of course, there is a rather sharp disjunction with the Meditations. In principle, your sex doesn’t matter when you’re reading Descartes: the “I” of the cogito is not sex-sensitive. But if I’m correct in taking Beauvoir’s “I am a woman” to be her understanding of the foundation of any understanding of what a woman is, then of course it’s going to matter quite a bit whether you find yourself able to make that claim. I do not think that Beauvoir here desires to limit her readership to women. It’s not even that a man cannot ask the question “What is a woman?”; it’s that to ask this question, a question that is supposed to be irreducibly personal, must constitute for him the asking of a question about his own sex-identity, namely the question “What is a man?” Now, this is precisely the question that Descartes asks in the second meditation, albeit only after he has taken himself to have established the fact of his own existence beyond the shadow of a doubt. But of course in his case this question is supposed to be anything but sex-specific—even though his first pass at an answer is that to be a man is to have “a face, hands, arms and the whole mechanical structure of limbs which can be seen in a corpse, and which I called the body” (17). Descartes’s “What is a man?” is a version of the familiar age-old philosophical, not to say religious question. And this “man” is ordinarily assumed to be unproblematically sex-neutral. But it is as though Beauvoir is suggesting that the question about woman must somehow be asked prior to the question about man, as though we don’t know how to take the word “man” in the question “What is a man?” or in the history of philosophy or for that matter in history in general until we ask what a woman is. I mean to claim, in other words, that Beauvoir’s question “What is a woman?” replaces or perhaps displaces Descartes’s “What is a man?”30
I have claimed that part of the Cartesian legacy that ought to be congenial to feminists, including critics of Descartes such as Bordo, is his revolutionary relocation of philosophical authority from external individuals and institutions to each human mind. But I have also suggested that the cost of this authority is a certain metaphysical solitude, one that is the basis of an epistemological solipsism, which, I conjectured, is a more specific way of naming what Bordo regards as the masculinist “detachment” in Descartes’s philosophy. Now, if I have been successful in attempting to draw lines of affinity between the Meditations and The Second Sex, particularly as regards the stance of skepticism and the appeal to the reader to constitute the “I” of some sort of cogito, then we ought to find something in Beauvoir’s work that parallels or answers to the sense of detachment, of solitude and solipsism, in Descartes’s achievement. Here is where it matters that the foundation of Beauvoir’s assertions is not some profoundly isolated “I” but, rather, the fact that she is what is called a woman. This fact is her first response to the question “What is a woman?,” a question the posing of which, I am arguing, explicitly constitutes a rejection of the priority of Descartes’s “What is a man?,” showing this question, by comparison, to be far less straightforward, far less unambiguously sex-neutral, than it looks in the light of Descartes’s way of posing and responding to it. “I am a thing that thinks,” begins Descartes’s answer; but this start on a response is very different, in form as well as content, from Beauvoir’s stark “I am.” Descartes’s identification of himself as a thinking thing is a direct result of his reasoning out that he, a representative man, is not, at least not in the first instance, his body. This is as much as to say that he is not, at least not in the first instance, a man—in, of course, the sex-specific sense of the word. Descartes’s refusal of this identity is precisely the move in the Meditations that Beauvoir implicitly rejects. The rejection is implicit in her identifying herself as the foundation of an answer to the question “What is a woman?”; to make this declaration is at once to draw attention to what are for her two necessary starting points in her investigation: first, that she is embodied, and, second, that this embodiment is significant, that she answers, to put it particularly, to the name “woman.”
To declare “I am” in response to the question “What is a woman?” ought not be seen, however, as a way of attempting to push the question out of the skeptical space that the Cartesian question I claim it replaces occupied. What this “I am” means is no less a metaphysical mystery than the question itself. Beauvoir’s answer simply puts a face, or perhaps we should say a body, on the question. But she is able to personalize the investigation this way by virtue of the fact—a fact she finds unavoidable—that her body counts as the body of a woman. That is to say that in Beauvoir’s displacement of Descartes’s question there is integrally an appeal to a world of other people—the very people (herself included) who count her as a woman. What is implicitly rejected, this means, is Descartes’s stance of metaphysical isolation, which of course I have been arguing is a way of specifying what Bordo means in using the notion of “detachment.” But this does not mean that what Beauvoir is opposing to this stance is some stance of metaphysical attachment. It’s not, in other words, that she presumes to contest Descartes, at least here, on philosophical ground. Rather, what Beauvoir finds unavoidable, at the very outset of her work, is the ordinary fact of her finding and taking herself to be, in the first instance, a being whose identity is at root (in some sense that it will be an object of The Second Sex to spell out) public. The problem, after all, with being a “woman” is being treated as such by other people (and perhaps internalizing this treatment, so that your sense of yourself is shaped by it). In the introduction to The Second Sex, just after she asks what a woman is and declares herself, insofar as she is a woman, to represent the foundation of an answer, Beauvoir writes,
I am sometimes vexed during abstract discussions to hear men say to me, “You think thus and such because you are a woman.” But I know that my only defense would be to respond, “I think it because it is true,” thereby eliminating my subjectivity. It would be out of the question to reply, “And you think the contrary because you are a man”; for it is understood that the fact of being a man isn’t a singularity. A man is in the right in being man: it’s woman who is in the wrong. (LDS 1:14, TM; TSS xxi)
In posing the question of what a woman is, Beauvoir is not jettisoning her experience as a woman: this is experience in and on the basis of which she finds that what she is here calling her subjectivity is bound at crucial moments to be erased. Rather, Beauvoir is asking what it means to be called a woman, to be treated like a woman, to think of yourself as a woman, to find, suddenly and often, that your subjectivity, your personhood, has evanesced and that you are—you feel like—nothing more than a representative of your sex.
These are questions, I have claimed, that for Beauvoir are firmly rooted at the level of the ordinary, the level at which she finds herself declaring “I am” to her question. But this appeal to the ordinary, notice, is forced by Descartes’s metaphysical subliming of the question “What is a man?”; that is, Beauvoir’s rejoinder “What is a woman?” and the range of questions it entails must, after the Cartesian revolution in philosophy, be posed in an “ordinary” space that is created by the metaphysical. This means that her investigation, launched at the level of, or perhaps on behalf of, the ordinary, can engage Descartes’s only dialectically, only, in other words, by managing to move between and thereby transform the registers of the ordinary and the metaphysical. To hear Beauvoir’s questions, questions arising from Descartes’s nonacknowledgment of her ordinary experience, as philosophical questions is to find yourself unable to adopt, at least at the outset, what I have been calling the stance of Cartesian skepticism, of metaphysical isolation. It’s of the first importance that Beauvoir’s rejection of this stance does not come in the form of some abstract, purely intellectually motivated polemic but rather stems, again, from an ordinary fact—indeed, what she in effect tells us is the ordinary and therefore the unavoidable fact—about her own life. Beauvoir is not just rejecting Descartes’s investigation out of hand, not just kicking the stone that Samuel Johnson kicked in order to “prove” to philosophy that the world in fact really does exist. Rather, she is declaring that, being in the first instance a woman, she has no access, or, better, no obvious or immediate access, to Descartes’s stance of metaphysical isolation. Beauvoir’s “I am” strikes me as a rebuke to Descartes not because Beauvoir sees “detachment” as fundamentally masculinist but because Descartes, in claiming to be in the first instance merely a gender-neutral man, does not see her—that is, does not see woman, or more specifically, that a woman, or at least a woman such as Beauvoir, a woman who (to her surprise, remember) finds her gender philosophically unavoidable, cannot deny that she is “that structure of limbs which is called a human body” (Descartes 1985, 18). For Beauvoir to identify herself from the start as a woman, to offer herself up as a representative example of a woman, is to declare that the ontological status of the world cannot be a question for her, that she cannot be a philosopher in a certain sense of the word, at least until she comes to understand what it means to be—to be called, and to call herself—a woman.
This is to imply that Descartes’s skepticism is something of a luxury. At the end of book 1 of his Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume famously chronicles the schism between the world of his study, in which the vividness of the philosophical skepticism he conjures so confounds him that he feels himself to be “in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty,” and the world in which “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends,” a world in which his speculations “appear so cold, and strain’d and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”31 Hume’s skepticism comes alive for him only within the confines of his study, when he has the luxury of Descartes’s “clear stretch of time” to be alone and thinking. But in displacing Descartes’s question and attempting to work dialectically between the everyday and the metaphysical, Beauvoir is rejecting this kind of a flat difference between the two registers. She underscores that there is no place, or at least no specific or well-defined place, in which a woman overcome by the question “What is a woman?” can go to find the kind of relief that Hume describes. There is no place, in other words, in which a woman is no longer a woman (which is not the same as saying that there is no place in which a woman might forget, and for extended periods of time, that she is). Indeed, as Virginia Woolf so perfectly put it, the issue for women is not leaving but finding “a room of one’s own”—where here, of course, I am imagining, as I imagine Woolf did, too, that the room must be psychological, not to say spiritual or philosophical, as well as physical. And here is a place to note, as Beauvoir goes on to do at some length in Book 2 of The Second Sex, that under various inflections of the concept “woman”—“wife,” say, and especially, “mother”—the absence of opportunities for solitude can become positively menacing.
The point is not, I hope it is clear, that all men are in a position of luxury, material, philosophical, or otherwise. The point is that the skepticism Beauvoir chronicles and acts out in The Second Sex is one that women live, not just in some Humean study but all the time, or at least potentially all the time, in this “male world.” In The Claim of Reason Stanley Cavell identifies the place that skepticism is lived (as opposed, I might put it, to being merely thought, intellectualized) as in our relation to others, to what philosophers (perhaps over-intellectualizing the matter) like to call “other minds.”32 Cavell turns the traditional priority within modern philosophy of “external-world” and “other-minds” skepticism around: it is the case of skepticism with respect to others, he wants to show, that is more fundamental. And this is one way of articulating Beauvoir’s brief against Descartes (which is to emphasize, again, that the brief is supposed to be internal to philosophy, even if one of its issues is where the boundaries of philosophy lie). For Beauvoir, the question of how to tether herself to a world, to the world, cannot be answered apart from finding the room in this world, a world whose inhabitants’ judgment of her as (merely) a “woman” threatens to suffocate her, to pose it.
I want to say more at this juncture about the worry that Beauvoir’s acknowledgment of the importance of sex difference threatens to cast her investigation out of the realm of the philosophical, at least insofar as that realm is still defined by the boundaries of the Meditations. A hugely important legacy of Descartes’s work is his drawing of a sharp line (the same line that is so dramatically re-sketched by Hume) between the realm of everyday life and the realm of the metaphysical, that is to say of philosophy. The drawing of this line is at least in part a result of Descartes’s vision of philosophy as something that can be done by each human mind, regardless of a person’s particular circumstances, where, again, each human mind is supposed to be imbued with the same powers of rationality and therefore the same potential for grounding philosophical authority as any other. A notorious consequence of the sharp line between the everyday and the metaphysical, at least as I have described it, is of course the so-called “mind-body” split. Now, in identifying sex difference as a starting point for a philosophical investigation, Beauvoir is implicitly denying that, as a woman, she can think within the confines of this split. For it is of course the fact of human embodiment that supports the practice of identifying ourselves and others as male and female, masculine and feminine, men and women. This is not to say that Beauvoir thinks we ought to be sanguine in our understanding of the relationship between thought and the body; to the contrary, this is exactly the sort of issue that she’s undertaking to examine in her work. That this issue is a philosophical issue, so that posing it in the context of finding herself unable to work with or within or around the idea of a mind-body split does not in fact debar Beauvoir’s work from the realm of the philosophical has to do, I wish to argue, with its being an instance of her interest in establishing what I have been referring to as a dialectic in The Second Sex between the everyday and the philosophical.
The medium of this dialectic is the very concept “woman.” A philosophical investigation of this concept is bound to appeal to ordinary experience. And yet what creates the very idea of “ordinary” experience—that is, experience that is not philosophical—is exactly the sort of metaphysics we see Descartes in essence inventing in the Meditations, that is, exactly the sort of metaphysics that I have been arguing a person who sees herself as in the first instance a woman will find beyond her grasp (ontologically, as it were, of course; not intellectually). This is to say—isn’t it?—that the line between the metaphysical and the ordinary blurs in the concept “woman.” This fact in and of itself constitutes a philosophical opportunity, but it also complicates the already complicated question of where the authority to exploit this opportunity is to come from. I have claimed that Beauvoir’s method in The Second Sex constitutes an inheritance of the Cartesian method of meditation, in which the source of philosophical authority is explicitly the meditating reader. This means that an inquiry into the concept “woman” is inevitably going to demand that the reader bring his or her own experience with this concept, which, of course, will be everyday experience, to bear on the investigation. This demand surfaces, however, not in the form of a direct appeal, as it does in the preface to the Meditations, but instead in the form of Beauvoir’s claim to be a representative woman. What Beauvoir wishes to do through this claim is to provoke the reader into checking her or his experience against her or his own sense of what being a woman comes to (so that the strategy here is rather more Socratic, if you will, than Cartesian). But then of course it’s precisely the meaning of our everyday experience with the concept “woman”—with, that is, the experience of being or of experiencing women—that is under investigation in The Second Sex and is shown in the light of the history of women, and of modern philosophy, to require a re-thinking. So the way that what I’m calling a dialectic in The Second Sex between the everyday and the philosophical works is that our ordinary understanding of ourselves is revealed to us, through the author’s arrogation of authority, to stand in need of a philosophical investigation that must appeal to this ordinary understanding in order to proceed.
It is no wonder, then, that this arrogation of authority feels to many readers like a display of arrogance. I suggested earlier that Beauvoir’s arrogation of authority, her courting of the charge of arrogance, puts her in the company of certain men who have had to fight for the title of philosopher, men such as Marx and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. So it should not be surprising that her drawing attention to herself as a (representative) woman, in addition to provoking the reader to follow her in thinking philosophically about sex difference, also has the effect of putting the philosophical possibilities of The Second Sex in doubt. Then there is the fact that Beauvoir herself insists that as a woman she is not in a position to challenge the world from the ground up, that the feminine condition is such that she lacks the stubbornness to imagine that her own ideas might be universal laws. But I have been arguing that in launching her investigation by claiming to be a representative woman, Beauvoir is in essence proposing that her own experience of the world is in various respects, respects having to do with her sex, universal. If you take it that Beauvoir knows from the start what these respects are, then you may well regard her claim as narrow-minded and arrogant, just as you may well lack a taste for The Passions of the Soul or The Critique of Dialectical Reason. But if you read her to be attempting to forge a way of investigating her experience, of genuinely exploring her discovery that the first thing she has to say about herself is that she is a woman, a discovery by a philosopher that has formed the foundations of exactly no previous inquiry in the history of philosophy, then perhaps you will be inclined to view The Second Sex as a truly great work.33