Anyone interested in inaugurating an investigation from the inside into the nature of philosophy’s relationship with women must be sensitive to the possibility that her very starting points or methods are part of the problem. The question is how to conduct a genuinely philosophical investigation into the nature of sex bias in philosophy—that is, an investigation that does not take its own immunity from such bias for granted. I’m going to claim in the course of the next five chapters that Simone de Beauvoir provides an answer to this question. In her work, I want to argue, we find not only the rudiments of a viable internal investigation of philosophical sexism but also a strong argument for the idea that the possibility of radical critique, critique driven by aspirations not just to correct but even to transform the discipline, is closed to anyone who refuses to work from the inside. For Beauvoir, to do philosophy is to appropriate the tradition—that is to say, at least, the text, problems, and methods—of philosophy; and to refuse to appropriate the tradition is to refuse philosophy itself. Her work manifests the belief that to do philosophy well one must be braced for the possibility that one’s very attempt to appropriate the tradition may ultimately land one outside it. But it’s also Beauvoir’s view that the aspiration to appropriate the philosophical tradition demands an openness to the possibility that one’s inquiry will issue in a radical critique, that it will call for a sea-change in philosophers’ understanding of what they do, or ought to do.
The prospect that philosophical work might lead her to discover that the discipline could not accommodate her demands of it might well have been particularly unsettling for Beauvoir, one of the first women actually accredited in the field.1 There is in fact a mountain of evidence suggesting that she was daunted by philosophy: most pertinently, first, her repeated denials that she had the wherewithal for it, despite her excellent formal training, and, second, the fact that the preponderance of her published work is not philosophical, at least in any straightforward sense.2 But I’m interested in this chapter in providing what you might call counterevidence to the view, widely accepted even among her admirers, that Beauvoir, though a success as an “intellectual,” did not aspire to, let alone achieve, philosophical originality in her work.3 It’s my view, in fact, that her very worries about whether she was suited for philosophy (and vice versa) led her to find a fresh way of appropriating the tradition, a way of redirecting it from the inside, which itself lies waiting to be appropriated. I am going to propose that Beauvoir’s work provides an important and severely underappreciated model for a feminist intervention in, and appropriation of, the philosophical tradition.
Specifically, I’m going to focus on Beauvoir’s appropriation in The Second Sex of the so-called master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, an appropriation that takes place in the light of her dissatisfactions with Sartre’s taking-up of the dialectic in Being and Nothingness. There is no doubt that in many respects the Beauvoir of The Second Sex is indebted to Sartre’s early work, particularly in her appropriation of many of the technical terms of Being and Nothingness (most of which, however, are themselves appropriations from earlier figures, prominently among them Hegel and Heidegger): “self,” “other,” “subject,” “object,” “authenticity,” “being-in-itself,” “being-for-itself,” “being-for-others,” and (Sartre’s signature concept) “bad faith.” Indeed, any study of Beauvoir’s work that neglects her indebtedness to Sartre will be seriously distorted. But I argue here that in taking up Sartre’s terminology Beauvoir decisively establishes her own kink in the history of philosophy, a kink, to repeat, that can be seen to provide a model for a new kind of feminist intervention in the discipline.
Beauvoir’s philosophical achievement in her appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic is marked by what I call her “domestication” of the dialectic in the context of her exploration of sex difference. That Beauvoir makes reference to the dialectic throughout The Second Sex and that she uses some of its terms in developing her conception of relations between the sexes are facts that lie right on the surface of the text. The master, evidently, is supposed to correlate somehow with the man; the slave, the woman. Most readers of Beauvoir have been inclined to imagine that she’s borrowing these terms “master” and “slave” from Hegel for what is ultimately a nonphilosophical purpose: to dramatize the simplistic idea that men have all the power in the world and women must do their bidding. But if we take seriously the hypothesis that The Second Sex counts as a genuine philosophical appropriation of the master-slave dialectic, a genuine furtherance of philosophy, then this superficial reading comes to look decidedly inadequate. This is because for Hegel, and for Beauvoir in following him, the position of the master is not superior to that of the slave in every respect: morally, on Hegel’s view, it is the slave, and not the master, who is in a position to aspire to the kind of life a human being is capable of living and ought to aspire to live. Indeed, the ethical attenuation of the master’s position is precisely what makes the relationship between the master and the slave fundamentally unstable and thus advances the dialectical movement of The Phenomenology of Spirit. In appropriating the master-slave dialectic Beauvoir means to suggest that to the extent that they are systematically oppressed on the basis of their sex women are particularly well placed to achieve what might be called genuine humanity. A basic task of The Second Sex, then, is to show how the context of exploring sex difference both calls for and informs, as it were, the master-slave dialectic.
The simplistic reading, as I am calling it, of Hegel’s influence on The Second Sex also fails to attend to the way Beauvoir takes up the idea that, contrary to appearances, both the master and the slave are ontologically split, or as both Hegel and Beauvoir put it, “ambiguous,” as between being what they both call “subjects” and “objects.” On the surface of things, it may look as though the master, or the man, is figured as a pure subject and the slave, or the woman, as a pure object. But in fact, according to both Hegel and Beauvoir, this appearance is deceptive; both the master/man and the slave/woman are properly seen as, simultaneously, both subjects and objects. And for both, coming to recognize and accept oneself in one’s ambiguity is the necessary precondition of the moral life. This interpretation of Beauvoir’s view goes against the grain of the standard interpretation, which is that men are subjects and women are objects and that ending the oppression of women requires that they become subjects (a reigning idea in the early days of the current wave of feminism). Those who interpret Beauvoir as making these claims have in recent years criticized her heavily for holding up man as the standard of what a fully realized human being looks like and suggesting, in effect, that women as they stand are inferior to men, and they ought to try to emulate them.4 In stark contrast to this understanding of Beauvoir’s position, I interpret her as suggesting, once again with Hegel in view, that aspiring to be a fully realized human being requires that a person, man or woman, develop a consciousness of himself or herself as inevitably—and simultaneously—both a subject and object. I emphasize the notion of simultaneity here because, as I will argue at length in chapter 4, Beauvoir’s belief that human beings are always both subjects and objects at the same time is directly at odds with Sartre’s understanding of what it is to be a person. Further, I want to relate the conception of ambiguity Beauvoir inherits from Hegel to the implicit critique of Descartes’s mind-body split that, I argued in chapter 2, is at the heart of Beauvoir’s ambitions and achievements in The Second Sex. For Beauvoir, to philosophize from the fact of one’s experience as a sexed being is to be unable to accept the sorts of splits that characterize both Descartes’s and Sartre’s most memorable works. But it’s also to require a genuine reworking of the Hegelian notion of ambiguity, one motivated by Beauvoir’s giving a face—and a body—to the master, and to the slave.
I cannot emphasize this point enough. What interests me about Beauvoir’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic is not just that it puts her in a position to inflect Hegel’s notion of ambiguity, nor that it constitutes a certain kind of challenge to various features of the dialectic. Anyone who knows anything about the history of European philosophy after Hegel can tick off a list of thinkers—including Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Freud—who have explicitly taken the notion of ambiguity and perspectivism (or situatedness) in various fruitful directions. While an ancillary goal of mine is to place Beauvoir squarely in the company of these thinkers (as an equal, not just as a student), my central aim is to show just how the context of her starting her philosophical work in The Second Sex with the question “What is a woman?” makes a fateful difference both in the way she writes and in the philosophical conclusions she reaches. The claim is not that Beauvoir’s work is hands-down superior to that of her male forebears. It is that her work stands as a challenge to all of them insofar as her mindfulness of the bearing of sex difference—and, more particularly, her sense of the significance and mystery of her own womanhood—on the phenomena they explore represents a fundamental challenge both to the past and future of philosophy.
If the distortions of the standard interpretation of Hegel’s influence on The Second Sex are due in part to a failure to see Beauvoir as appropriating Hegel and not just taking advantage of his terminology, they are also associated, not surprisingly, with the presumption, still commonplace, that Beauvoir’s philosophy, such as it is, is profoundly parasitic on Sartre’s.5 In Being and Nothingness Sartre expressly argues that what we can learn from reading, and criticizing, the master-slave dialectic is that to be a full person is to be a subject while to let yourself be an object is to reduce yourself to a mere thing; and no human being is ever both a subject and an object at the same time. Sartre’s aim in his appropriation of Hegel, as I will show in detail in chapter 4, is to argue that the only way to become a subject is to make oneself a subject, and the only way to make oneself a subject is to turn somebody else into an object. For Sartre, then, to be genuinely human is to aspire to mastery; to be the victim of someone else’s achievement of humanity is to be what Sartre, appropriating Hegel, calls a slave. And for him the master-slave situation is unstable only in the sense that whether or not one is a slave is a standing question whose answer at any given moment depends entirely on whether or not one has the personal fortitude in that moment to assert one’s mastery over someone else—that is, as Sartre understands things, the wherewithal to attain the status of being a subject by transforming another person into an object. Every human being, on Sartre’s bleak view, is always, in all times and places, by definition engaged in a struggle for mastery with other human beings.
That Hegel thought this struggle could itself be overcome results, Sartre claims, from his “failure” to follow out the implications of his best intuitions, such as the intuition that being a subject has to do with one’s relationships with other people.6 Implicit in this understanding of Hegel is the view that appropriating another philosopher’s work (as opposed to just offering an interpretation of it) amounts to discerning and correcting his or her errors with an eye toward producing a better, error-free comprehensive theory. This is, of course, a very familiar view of how philosophers can use their interest in other philosophers’ ideas to make their own original contributions to the field. But I am going to argue that this understanding of what philosophical appropriation is and why it is worthwhile is not operative in Beauvoir’s work. For her, I will try to show, the test of whether a philosopher’s work is worthy of appropriation is not whether it is susceptible to correction but whether it provides one with a philosophical idiom, a set of terms and concepts that open up a productive way to do one’s own philosophical work.7 According to this way of understanding philosophical appropriation, whether or not a philosopher’s best intuitions can be brought to cohere into a theory is beside the point. What matters is their raw intuitiveness, which is to say their ability to gain and hold one’s conviction and to spur one’s philosophizing regardless of the specific philosophical questions one finds oneself addressing. Indeed, in Beauvoir’s view, the richness of such intuitions manifests itself in part in the way they provoke one to think in new philosophical contexts—contexts that may well (and, in Beauvoir’s case, do) produce an implicit surpassing (Hegel might say sublating) of the work appropriated. There’s a certain irony in Beauvoir’s holding this view of how to appropriate another philosopher’s work, a view, I’m arguing, that leads Beauvoir to intuitions—intuitions about the nature and significance of sex difference as well as about what philosophical appropriation can look like—that themselves stand waiting to be appropriated. The irony is that Beauvoir, one of the first formally trained woman philosophers in the West, refused Sartre’s understanding of appropriation because she felt that for a woman of her generation to aspire to be recognized by her male colleagues as philosophically “original” (which would amount to the acknowledgment that she had overturned and rebuilt a great figure’s system) was, in a word, preposterous.
This attitude accounts at least in part, I think, for the relative modesty of the aspirations and achievements of those of Beauvoir’s works generally recognized as straightforwardly philosophical, works in which Beauvoir is at pains to position herself as essentially Sartre’s disciple.8 But my interpretation of Beauvoir’s aspirations and achievements in The Second Sex is going to highlight evidence that she was struggling even in her earlier, straightforwardly philosophical texts and particularly in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), written shortly before The Second Sex (1949) to express her disagreements with Sartre and to find a way of producing genuinely original philosophical work. Paradoxically, it took Beauvoir’s investigating something she did not regard as primarily a philosophical topic, namely, the situation of women, to yield her most important contribution to philosophy. Her existential need, as it were, to investigate the nature of inequality between the sexes spawns a genuinely original appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, one in which philosophy’s silence on the fact of this inequality is philosophically redressed.
In the present chapter I offer a rendering of the master-slave dialectic in order to establish a foundation for understanding both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of it. Then in chapter 4 I explore Sartre’s appropriation of the dialectic as evidenced, mainly, in the section of Being and Nothingness called “The Look.” I show that Sartre’s motivation for appropriating Hegel has more to do with his sense of dissatisfaction with the dialectic, his sense that the systematicity of Hegel’s philosophy needs to be shored up, than with his (explicitly averred) recognition of the rich intuitiveness of certain of Hegel’s ideas. I also show how this motivation ironically leads Sartre to put aside parts of the master-slave dialectic that look for all the world as though they might further his overarching aim in Being and Nothingness of showing human beings to be radically, existentially free. In chapter 5 I track what I argue is Beauvoir’s attempt in her early, pre-Second Sex philosophical work to express her philosophical difference from Sartre, in part through struggling to articulate her fascination with Hegel’s dialectic. Finally, in chapters 6 and 7 I look at Beauvoir’s appropriation of the dialectic in The Second Sex, focusing on the shift in her philosophizing from the early work. I attempt to chronicle the rich intuitions yielded by Beauvoir’s domestication of the dialectic in the context of sex difference, a domestication made possible by her perception of the richness of Hegel’s own idiom. And I focus on what I read as Beauvoir’s highly intuitive suggestion that our inclination to recognize each other as belonging to one or the other of two basic types of human beings (man and woman) can be seen as a wish to ward off the exacting demands of our inherent ambiguity.
THE MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC: A BEAUVOIRIAN RENDERING
The rendering of the master-slave dialectic that I’m about to offer has a very specific purpose: to provide the necessary foundation for making sense of my understanding of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of it, where making sense of my understanding of Sartre’s appropriation is in turn preparatory for making sense of my understanding of Beauvoir’s appropriation of Sartre. My claim in all of this, the claim on which the viability of this project rests, is that Simone de Beauvoir is worth taking seriously as an independent philosophical thinker, where the word “independent” is meant to signal the originality and importance of her appropriation of the ideas and concepts she has inherited from the philosophical tradition. My analysis rests, further, on the claim that the history of philosophy can plausibly be characterized as the history of such appropriations, so that the question of what counts, or ought to count, as original and important work in the discipline—of which attempts at appropriation themselves perennially invite further (perennially inviting) appropriations—is also at least implicitly under investigation in this work. That Hegel’s writing counts as such is confirmed, or reconfirmed, I’m claiming, by the powerful appropriation of his work that we find in Beauvoir. But to support this claim there’s no need for me to provide an independent appropriation of the master-slave dialectic. Indeed it would be beside the point for me to attempt to do so. Therefore, in what follows I make no effort, for example, to locate the dialectic within the frame of the Phenomenology of Spirit, let alone the wider body of Hegel’s work.9 I further set aside questions that any genuine appropriation of Hegel’s text would need to address: To whom does the dialectic apply? Is it to be taken as a picture of human nature in general? Is it an allegory, a piece of history, an illustration? My goal is to render Hegel so that Beauvoir’s answers to questions such as these come to seem philosophically pressing.
I have been helped in this rendering by Alexandre Kojève’s famous series of lectures on the Phenomenology, delivered in Paris between 1933 and 1939, students’ notes from which were published in 1947 (i.e., two years before the appearance of Le Deuxième Sexe).10 The first chapter, “In Place of an Introduction,” which comprises Kojève’s translation of the dialectic and various elaborations of the text, has been especially useful. Kojève’s influence as a reader of Hegel on Paris intellectuals from the 1930s at least through the 1950s is impossible to overestimate. No one thinking about Hegel during those years could possibly avoid having to take account of his interpretations. Indeed, Sartre and Beauvoir were typical of Parisian intellectuals in their lack of pre-Kojèvian experience with the Phenomenology. Paris before Kojève ignored the book not only because it was not published in French until Jean Hyppolite’s translation appeared at the tail end of Kojève’s lecture series but also because no prominent French scholar before Kojève and Hyppolite had taken an interest in it.11 It is therefore not as odd as it might appear that Sartre’s own interest in phenomenology in fact predated his reading of Hegel’s book by several years; by the time Sartre first encountered the Phenomenology, his own Being and Nothingness—the subtitle of which is A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology—was nearly complete.12
Beauvoir apparently “discovered” the Phenomenology in 1940, during a time when notes from Kojève’s lectures were beginning to be published and when Sartre was detained in Germany as a prisoner of war. She first mentions Hegel to Sartre in a letter dated July 11, 1940: “You know, Hegel’s horribly difficult, but also extremely interesting. You must know him—it’s akin to your own philosophy of nothingness. I’m enjoying reading him and thinking precisely about expounding him to you” (Letters to Sartre 314). At the time that she began reading Hegel seriously (at the Bibliothèque National every afternoon from two to five)13 Beauvoir was working on what was to become her first published novel, L’invitée, the epigraph to which is a famous line from the master-slave dialectic: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.” The timing of all these events makes it practically impossible to imagine that Beauvoir was unfamiliar with Kojève’s work on Hegel. Eva Lundgren-Gothlin reports that when she interviewed Beauvoir at the end of her life, Beauvoir denied having attended Kojève’s seminars—which makes sense, given that she apparently did not begin reading the Phenomenology until the year after these seminars ended. “But,” Lundgren-Gothlin quotes Beauvoir as saying, “I had read what Kojève had written and it had interested me a great deal. Particularly interesting was what he had written about the master and slave dialectic.”14 It was a persistent sense of this interest of Beauvoir’s in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel that sent me back to Kojève’s lectures. Kojève’s influence on the way I’m about to render Hegel’s dialectic shows up most directly in my decision at various junctures to use his interpretations of the text instead of stricter translations of the Phenomenology.
What moves both Sartre and Beauvoir to appropriate the dialectic, which comprises paragraphs 178 through 196 of the Phenomenology (section A of part 4), is the conception of human self-consciousness they see Hegel articulating in these passages, a conception driven by two basic intuitions: first, that the full flowering of human self-consciousness is not, as it were, automatic but instead is the result of a process; and, second, that this process necessitates that human beings recognize each other as capable of this full flowering.15 In a prologue to the dialectic, Hegel foreshadows what he calls the three “moments” of self-consciousness, which for the sake of explanation I’ll identify as “primary,” “secondary,” and “tertiary” (see para. 176).16 Primary self-consciousness is, roughly speaking, a simple sense of oneself as a discrete being over and against the rest of the world—independent from what in Hegel’s terms is “other” (para. 186). The independent “I” that is the object of primary self-consciousness takes account of what is “other” only insofar as it has the potential to satisfy the desires primary self-consciousness finds itself experiencing. For primary self-consciousness, says Hegel, “its essence and absolute object is ‘I’”; and what is “other” is regarded as “unessential” (para. 186). Secondary self-consciousness is marked by the realization that the very existence of the “I” is irrevocably dependent on the existence of independent objects, since the “I,” after all (self-consciousness understands in this moment) is nothing other than what Hegel calls “Desire” (for these objects). This realization of the dependence of the “I” on what appears now to be independent of it raises for secondary self-consciousness a worry that in fact it is the “I” that might be unessential—might be, that is, an “other,” at least from the point of view of the independent object. In this secondary moment of self-consciousness, therefore, self-consciousness perceives a clash between its conception of the “I” as essential (the central conception of primary self-consciousness) and its conception of the “I” as merely “other.” Tertiary self-consciousness is marked by a harmonious unification of these two conceptions of the “I,” when, as Hegel puts it, “the unity of [a being] in its otherness becomes explicit for it” (para. 177). For Sartre and Beauvoir, the significance of the master-slave dialectic lies in great part in the intuitiveness of Hegel’s idea that genuinely human self-consciousness is not a given but is, rather, something that needs to be achieved in the form of a person’s developing and negotiating a sense of being split.17
For Hegel this sense of being split is closely tied to two conceptual dichotomies, that between subject and object and that between subjectivity and objectivity. Since these dichotomies are central to both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s conceptions of the person, it’s important for my purposes to show how these pairs of terms come into play in Hegel’s picture of self-consciousness. To this end, it will help to refigure the differences among the moments of self-consciousness in terms of what Hegel calls “certainty” of oneself (see, e.g., para. 186). Hegel associates genuinely human self-consciousness with “objective” self-certainty and the two previous moments with “subjective” self-certainty. Subjective self-certainty is a sense of oneself as a being whose “essence and absolute object is ‘I’” (para. 186). A being subjectively certain of itself decisively distinguishes itself from the rest of the world, from what is “other,” and it regards the collection of objects that constitute what is “other” solely in terms of their usefulness or lack thereof in fulfilling the given desires of the “I,” such as desires for food, shelter, and sex. Its life consists in attempting to satisfy these desires, and this is why the “absolute” object for it is its own desiring self. This makes it sound as though any being that is subjectively certain of itself, insofar as it tries to satisfy the desires of itself as absolute object, counts as a “subject.” But it’s crucial to Hegel’s view and to Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriation of it to block this inference. This is because all of them define a subject as a being who acts; and action, they claim, is something that goes beyond mere attempts at fulfilling one’s desires as one finds them. Genuine action, for Hegel, Sartre, and Beauvoir, entails deliberately—self-consciously—undertaking to transcend one’s given desires by assigning oneself a project the fulfillment of which necessitates the subordination of those desires. So a subjectively self-certain being is not, and is not aware of itself as, a subject; rather, this being is certain of itself merely insofar as it takes the “I” and its desires to be absolutely valuable. The subjectively self-certain being is, to put it the way Hegel does, sure of itself as “being-for-itself” (Fürsichsein para. 186).
The transformation from having a sense of oneself simply as being-for-self to a more human mode of self-consciousness requires the confirmation, on Hegel’s view, of the truth of one’s subjective self-certainty, which is to say that it requires objective self-certainty. Objective certainty of oneself is that consciousness of oneself that one achieves only by staking a claim to be being-for-self and having the truth of that claim confirmed. Before I articulate my understanding of what Hegel takes this confirmation—and thus “objectivity” and “truth”—to consist in, I want to point out that the very staking of such a claim counts, on Hegel’s view, as a transcendence of one’s given self. This is because the desire to stake this claim is, according to him, not a given desire—where a “given” desire is one that a being has independent of its self-consciousness (of what Beauvoir and Sartre would call “reflection”)—but, rather, one that, as a product of the being’s self-consciousness, transcends, or goes beyond, the being’s given desires. Since transcending one’s given desires counts for Hegel as acting and since by his definition a being who acts is a subject, a being that stakes a claim to be being-for-itself transforms itself into a subject regardless of whether the staking of the claim turns out to be successful or not—regardless, that is, of whether or not objective self-certainty is actually achieved.
Now, crucially for Hegel, the eliciting of the desire for objective self-certainty, this transcendent desire that leads to the transformation of a being into a genuine subject, unconditionally necessitates that the being encounter—literally meet up with—another self-conscious being. Here we have one of the most philosophically original and intuitively forceful of Hegel’s moves in the dialectic, the moment in which he insists that full self-consciousness cannot be achieved, or even aspired to, in the absence of engagement with another self-consciousness. The idea that one’s consciousness of oneself is intimately linked with one’s relationships with others plays a central role in the thought of both Sartre and Beauvoir, albeit, as I shall argue, in decisively different ways.18 For Hegel the encounter with another self-conscious being is the necessary goad to a quest for objective self-certainty, for it is only in the presence of another that a being comes to feel the inadequacy—the merely subjective nature—of its own sense of self. Upon encountering another, the subjectively self-certain being, says Hegel,
is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth. For it would have truth only if its own being-for-self had confronted it as an independent object, or, what is the same thing, if the object had presented itself as this pure self-certainty. (para. 186)
What I take Hegel to mean when he says that a being’s subjective self-certainty would have truth (i.e., would also be objective) “only if its own being-for-self had confronted it as an independent object” or, equivalently, “if the object had presented itself as this pure self-certainty” is that this encounter reveals to the being the essential privacy of its own sense of itself, which implies that what is necessary for the dissipation of its doubting of this sense and thus its coming to the third moment of self-consciousness is something like its subjecting itself to the conditions of publicity. The need for this subjection would be obviated only if the other being somehow automatically manifested the doubter’s being-for-itself as a (public) object.
The possibility, raised and then immediately dropped by Hegel, that one’s being-for-self might somehow automatically manifest itself in another being—the possibility, to put it another way, that the mere presence of the other could spontaneously confirm the truth of one’s self-certainty—plays an important role in both Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s appropriations of the master-slave dialectic. For Sartre this possibility appears in the form of an implicit wish on the part of the subjectively self-certain being that the “other” could be an exact mirror image of himself.19 On Sartre’s view, nothing less than the fulfillment of this impossible wish could suffice to overcome for the subjectively self-certain being the sense of itself as split that is engendered by encountering another self-conscious being. This means that sensing oneself to be split is, for Sartre, an inescapable part of being a socialized human being. For Beauvoir, on the other hand, relinquishing the wish for the other to be, as it were, exactly like oneself—cultivating a willingness to subject oneself to what is genuinely other—opens up a way to see, paradoxically, that the other is, figuratively speaking, essentially like oneself (i.e., is a human being), insofar as he or she is capable of accepting himself or herself as split (or, more precisely, “ambiguous”). Beauvoir equates risking a certain investment in one’s privacy (figured as a wish to automatically be transparent to oneself and others) with a commitment to objectivity, a commitment she regards as demanding an acceptance of oneself as ambiguous and one that she takes to be a prerequisite of any morally productive form of human self-consciousness.20
Hegel puts the problem posed by the encounter with “the other” in a slightly different way earlier in the dialectic, in paragraphs 179 through 181, when he observes that the encounter reveals to a being its own status as an other for the other. He suggests that when a subjectively self-certain being encounters another self-conscious being, it begins to feel itself to be split in a self-contradictory way between, on the one hand, its status for itself as absolute being-for-itself and, on the other hand, its status for the other as merely other. Hegel’s word for this particular manifestation of a sense of being split is of course “ambiguity” (the German Doppelsinnes; see, e.g., para. 180), and it is at the heart of the subjectively self-certain being’s initial response to the encounter with the other. The subjectively self-certain being initially does not, Hegel says, “see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self” (para. 179), figured (in the other’s eyes) as other. The encountered being impresses the subjectively self-certain being only in revealing to it its otherness and, therefore, ambiguity. And it is this very ambiguity that reveals the self-consciousness of the subjectively self-certain being as being-for-itself to be merely subjective and therefore inadequate. It follows in this being’s eyes that resolving its identity crisis requires overcoming this sense of otherness—this particular manifestation of ambiguity. And since its sense of itself as other constitutes the entirety of its perception of the encountered being, it follows that overcoming this sense of itself requires overcoming the encountered being.21
Before I discuss what this overcoming entails, I want to look briefly at Hegel’s observation in paragraph 180 that the very overcoming of this particular manifestation of ambiguity through the overcoming of the encountered being inevitably produces a second form of ambiguity. The inevitability of this second form of ambiguity turns on the fact that the subjectively self-certain being recognizes itself, albeit as “other,” in the encountered being. This fact implies that its overcoming of the encountered being constitutes the overcoming of itself (as other). In Hegel’s language, through the overcoming “it receives back its own self” (para. 181). But while it is, therefore, no longer split as between its subjectively certain sense of itself and its sense of itself as other—while it is again, as Hegel puts it “equal” to itself—the nature of this apparently unified self remains ambiguous. This is because the newly incorporated part of the self, the part it saw as its own in the encountered being, is by definition no longer “other.” It is part of the self. And yet the self remains split as between its sense of itself as (now) objectively real (as an object) and its new sense of itself as an actor, a subject. In moving from subjective to objective self-certainty through the encountering and overcoming of another being’s sense of itself, the formerly subjectively self-certain being by definition undergoes a transformation the nature of which leaves it with a new, permanent sense of its own ambiguity. Furthermore, the return of the self under its aspect as “other” to the subjectively self-certain being in effect releases the encountered being from the subjectively self-certain being’s fixating—in this day and age we might say “narcissistic”—perception of it. The encountered being, in other words, is no longer perceived by the formerly subjectively self-certain being as an embodiment of its own otherness. And this implies what Hegel in paragraph 181 identifies as a third ambiguity, or perhaps a third form of ambiguity, which concerns the being’s subsequent sense of the other in the wake of its retreat back into itself, a retreat that also transforms the other insofar as it gives that other back, as it were, to itself. The other is now both the being capable of revealing to the subjectively self-certain being its own objective self-certainty and—something else, as yet, at least, unknown. What’s supposed to be ambiguous for the subjectively self-certain being here, as I understand it, is the way these two identities of the other fit together—which is to say that the other being, too, is perceived as split.
For Beauvoir the relinquishing of a certain form of narcissism in favor of risking an uncertain, unfixed, ambiguous relationship with the other is going to play the role that the suppression of inclination in favor of respecting the moral law plays in Kant. That is, it is the moral moment. For Sartre, quite to the contrary, the inevitable failure of the quest for objective self-certainty—the inevitable failure of the quest to overcome the other, understood as depriving him of the ability to objectify you—entails the impossibility of relinquishing precisely that form of narcissism that Beauvoir regards as impeding the moral moment. Notoriously, it is still a question even for Sartre at the end of Being and Nothingness whether his version of existentialism makes room for something recognizable as genuinely moral relations among human beings. In the last sentence of the book, at the end of a four-page section called “Ethical Implications,” Sartre promises to deliver another book “on the ethical plane” (798), but although he compiled many pages of notes to this end (some of which were published posthumously in 1983 as Cahiers pour une Morale), he did not complete such a work.22
Hegel’s picture of the encounter with the other is complicated, as he observes in paragraph 182, by the fact that the encountered being must also be a subjectively self-certain being seeking recognition. This is because in order for the encountered being to be for the subjectively self-certain being something more than an object—more than something, that is, that merely either does or does not attract its desire—this being must make manifest its own desire, stake its own claim for recognition. Hegel observes that this situation of mutuality creates a paradox, namely, that
each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. (para. 184)
For Hegel it is paradoxically only through the “other” that each subjectively self-certain being can hope to experience the truth of its own self-consciousness; only through the mediation of the other can each being hope to achieve, as Hegel puts it, “this pure abstraction of being-for-self” (para. 186). 23
So how exactly, on Hegel’s account, does one subjectively self-certain being imagine that the other can confirm its sense of itself as pure being-for-itself? Hegel begins to address these questions at the outset of paragraph 187, whose significance, I think, is best brought out through Kojève’s translation:
The manifestation of the human-individual taken as pure abstraction of Being-for-itself consists in showing itself as being the pure negation of its objective-or-thingish mode-of-being—or, in other words, in showing that to be for oneself, or to be a man [être homme], is not to be bound to any determined existence, not to be bound to the universal isolated-particularity of existence as such, not to be bound to life.24
What each subjectively self-certain being is seeking in its encounter with another is to resolve its sense of being split by demonstrating that it is essentially being-for-itself and only appears to be a mere object, a mere chunk of being, a mere thing. This is something each being needs to prove to itself as much as to the other, for it’s the way each imagines it can achieve a satisfactory resolution of its sense of being split. Each needs to evince its willingness to destroy itself insofar as it is an object through an indubitable demonstration of what it wishes to be seen as the fact that it is essentially being-for-itself. And since each being’s appearance as an object is tied to its particular embodiment, each being must demonstrate that its embodiment—and therefore its very life—is dispensable. This demonstration therefore must take the form of the being’s resisting the rote demands of the “I” of primary self-consciousness, epitomized by the desire for self-preservation. If the being succeeds in resisting these demands, then it will show itself to be not only essentially being-for-itself but also essentially, existentially, free: free not to slavishly do the bidding of the brute desires of the “I.” It is therefore through this very demonstration that the being will constitute its freedom. As Hegel puts it:
It is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. (para 187; brackets in the Miller translation)
This intuition—the intuition that achieving the fullest form of self-consciousness amounts to claiming one’s freedom; that this claim requires a confrontation between self and world; and that all of this is to be part of the notion of being-for-itself, properly understood—this Hegelian intuition plays for Sartre and Beauvoir the role that the extremely rich intuitive notion of the “thing-in-itself” has played for many readers of Kant. That is, it makes Hegel as unavoidable a thinker for them in considering what a human being is as Kant is for philosophers in considering what an object is.
With the idea that what is required for objective self-certainty is a subjectively self-certain being’s publicly acknowledged demonstration of existential freedom, we arrive at the juncture of the master-slave dialectic at which Hegel insists on the absolute necessity of the notorious “life-and-death struggle,” in which “each [participant] seeks the death of the other” (para. 187). But why must there be a struggle to the death? Why can’t the encountering beings simply acknowledge one another before that point, even, perhaps, from the start? Hegel’s answer is that because the other represents that which threatens the truth of a being’s self-consciousness as being-for-itself—represents for it, that is, its sense of its status as an object—getting rid of the other is the only way to get rid of itself as other. In Hegel’s words, the problem is that what appears to each participant to be its own “essential being” is “present to it in the form of an ‘other,’ it is outside of itself” so that the task is to “rid itself of its self-externality” (para. 187). Thus the life-and-death struggle is born of each participant’s need manifestly to risk its own life (its own status as a mere thing) and to destroy the life of the “other,” of, more precisely, itself as other.
And yet if one participant succeeds in, literally, killing the other, then it necessarily fails to obtain the truth of its subjective self-consciousness. In its lifelessness—its decisive reduction to the status of mere thinghood—the defeated participant would be manifestly incapable of acknowledging the being-for-itself of the victor. That there is a crucial link between life and self-consciousness is a piece of knowledge that each participant comes to possess only in the course of the struggle against the other; in risking its own life and setting out to kill the other participant in the struggle, as Hegel puts it, “self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” (para. 189). This discovery has at least two implications. First, each participant sees that it must find some other way to destroy its own otherness as manifested in the other participant. But second, and more important, each sees that its initial desire to confirm the truth of itself as unmediated being-for-self—unadulterated freedom—is unfulfillable. This is true in part because its own embodiment (with its characteristic needs and desires) is absolutely essential to the survival of its self-consciousness; as Hegel puts it, “life is the natural setting of consciousness” (para. 188). But furthermore, the other participant as a self-consciousness, and thus as embodied, is also essential to the subjectively self-certain being’s quest for objective confirmation of the truth of its self-consciousness. What each participant comes to see, to put the idea in simpler terms, is that it needs the other.
This set of circumstances and of discoveries leads each participant to imagine that the way to obtain the truth of its self-certainty is to kill the other not literally but figuratively—in Hegel’s terms to negate the other insofar as it is being-for-itself. Each being sets out to consign the other to the status of existing purely for the victor, of being purely and absolutely “other.” Each wishes, in Hegel’s idiom, to become the “master” and to make the other his “slave.”25 In this solution, the victor destroys himself as other, insofar as his otherness is a by-product of the loser’s (now destroyed) being-for-self; the winner is no longer “other” in the eyes of the slave but has instead become “the one” (not Hegel’s term, incidentally, but Beauvoir’s). In effect, the winner negotiates his sense of the inevitability of his being split not by living within this split but instead by attempting to cut the difference between being a subject and being an object cleanly between himself and the slave: he tries to see himself as the pure subject, enabled—mediated—in this role by the fact of the slave’s being the pure object. The slave’s willingness to play this role, a willingness produced by his being defeated by the master, suffices to confirm, the master imagines, the truth of his self-certainty.
In order for one of the participants to achieve the status of master and for the other to be relegated to the status of his slave, Hegel implies later in the dialectic, it is necessary for the latter to become resigned during the life-and-death struggle to the fear of death. In other words, the slave-to-be becomes a slave not (just) because the would-be master is stronger or otherwise puts him in a position in which his life is threatened but because he allows his fear of death to get the better of his desire to vanquish the would-be master. In order to understand this resignation, it’s necessary to look first at the situation of the master and the slave after the struggle. This may be why Hegel saves his explanation of the resignation for paragraph 193, while he discusses the master-slave relationship in paragraphs 190 through 192. It’s as though during the struggle the future slave has a premonition about this relationship and sees that the position of slave, while materially (physically and psychologically) loathsome, is morally advantageous.26
Hegel’s strategy in depicting the master-slave relationship is to consider how both parties interact with the things that constitute the objects of the master’s desire. The way that the slave acknowledges the “for-itself” status of the master is by serving the master, by obtaining for the master the objects of his desire. The objects the slave obtains for the master are representative of the very ones the slave ultimately refused to forswear in the life-and-death struggle. In so refusing, the slave has shown himself to be “chained,” as Hegel puts it, to the object-world, to thingness. The master, on the other hand, has shown himself to be willing to give up this world. He thus possesses an immediate relationship to the object in the form of distance from and power over it; and since the slave has enslaved himself to the object the master can be seen through a sort of syllogism to rule over the slave through (the mediation of) the object (para. 190). On the other hand, the master can be seen to mediate his relationship with the object through his (immediate) relationship with the slave. He achieves the satisfaction of destroying the object (that is, literally or figuratively consuming it to satisfy his own desire), a satisfaction he saw he could not obtain with respect to the other participant in the life-and-death struggle, because the slave works on the object and prepares it for the master’s enjoyment.
In both of these mediated relationships (master-object-slave and master-slave-object), Hegel observes, the slave “is expressly something unessential, both by his working on the thing, and by his dependence on a specific existence” (para. 191). In foregoing a negating relationship over the world of things (since he only works on things and doesn’t himself consume them or at least control his own consumption of them) and thus a “for-self” relationship with these things, the slave in effect abdicates his being-for-self. Before the life-and-death struggle, both he and the master-to-be had an absolutely unmediated relationship with the world of objects. But now, his relationship to this world is mediated for the slave in every important respect by the master. And to the extent that the relationship remains unmediated (for example, in the slave’s consumption of food), it is one in which the slave’s being-for-self is of absolutely no consequence. But, cataclysmically, this implies that the master has failed to achieve the sort of recognition he needs, that is, recognition freely granted by another being-for-itself. Here’s how Hegel puts the situation at the end of paragraph 192:
The object in which the lord [Miller’s word for “master”] has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action.
The truth that is confirmed for the master is that there exists a consciousness, that of the slave, that is in its essence not essential. But this, Hegel observes in paragraph 193, is an “external” truth, a truth, that is, that concerns not the master’s consciousness but the slave’s. One would expect, then, that the truth that is revealed to the slave is similarly external, namely the truth of being-for-itself (as manifested in the figure of the master). Yet Hegel claims that on inspection the truth of self-consciousness as being-for-itself turns out, paradoxically, to be an internal truth—that is, a truth pertaining to the slave’s own life.
For the slave, Hegel says in paragraph 194, “the autonomous consciousness existing for itself” is “the truth …, which, however, for it, does not yet exist in it” (Kojève’s translation 21). In other words, the slave sees the master’s autonomous consciousness as the truth, although he himself does not recognize this autonomy as characteristic of his own self-consciousness. Yet, says Hegel, it is in fact the case that this truth is in the slave, albeit in a form that he himself may not recognize. For in the fight with the master, the slavish self-consciousness, in Hegel’s words
has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. (para. 194)
During this moment of intense dread, this “absolute melting away of everything stable,” this “unmanning” experienced by the slave during the fight to the death, he becomes pure being-for-itself, since everything given in him is undone. And this is why the truth of self-consciousness is in actuality in the slave as well as for him (i.e., evident in the form of the master). Here is Kojève’s way of putting the slave’s experience of absolute negativity:
In his mortal terror he understood (without noticing it) that a given, fixed, and stable condition, even though it be the Master’s, cannot exhaust the possibilities of human existence. He “understood” the “vanity” of the given conditions of existence. He did not want to bind himself to the Master’s condition, nor does he bind himself to his condition as a Slave. There is nothing fixed in him. He is ready for change; in his very being, he is change, transcendence, transformation, “education”; he is historical becoming at his origin, in his essence, in his very existence. (22)
Furthermore, the slave in effect reenacts something like the moment of disruption of what’s fixed with every act of labor he performs: he transforms the objects on which he works, thereby transcending them. The master, on the other hand, has a fixed relationship to the objects the slave presents to him: he merely consumes or otherwise destroys them. To quote Kojève again, “The Slave, in transforming the given World by his work, transcends the given and what is given by that given in himself; hence, he goes beyond himself, and also goes beyond the Master who is tied to the given which, not working, he leaves intact” (23).
It is through work, in fact, that, according to Hegel, the slave “becomes conscious of what he truly is” (para. 195). While the master’s relationship to the object, being one exclusively of consumption, or destruction, “lacks the side of objectivity and permanence,” the slave’s relationship to the object, being one of preserving it albeit through a transforming act of labor, is “permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence” (para. 195).27 The slave transforms the object through his own activity, activity that the object itself manifests through its transformed state. What he does counts as activity—that is, something done by an actor—because in not consuming the object the slave must “check” (Hegel’s hemmen) or “repress” (Kojève’s refouler) his immediate desire to do so in favor of transcending it (and thus transcending himself, raw desires and all, as he stands). And because this activity is a manifestation of the slave’s being-for-itself—of his being essentially, that is, an actor (at least in part)—the slave through work makes available to himself objective confirmation of exactly what he was seeking through the life-and-death struggle with the master.28 Although this confirmation was in theory available during that struggle—when, of course, he experienced the absolute dread that caused him to surrender to the would-be master—it is only through work, Hegel says, that the slave is able to see that being-for-self is his essential nature. On Kojève’s interpretation,
Only in and by work does man finally become aware of the significance, the value, and the necessity of his experience of fearing absolute power, incarnated for him in the Master. Only after having worked for the Master does he understand the necessity of the fight between Master and Slave and the value of the risk and terror that it implies. (23)
And again:
This work liberates the Slave from the terror that tied him to given Nature and to his own innate animal nature. It is by work in the Master’s service performed in terror that the Slave frees himself from the terror that enslaved him to the Master. (26)
Just as the experience of mortal terror alone is enough only to establish the truth of the slave’s humanity but not to make him aware of himself as such, so the experience of work alone, in the absence of this moment of terror, is insufficient for producing genuinely human self-consciousness (para. 196). This is because the moment of terror transforms the slave’s relationship to the natural world überhaupt: the world becomes not merely “other,” not merely a collection of objects that may or may not elicit his desire as given but something that explicitly is not his, something to which his relationship can only be one of transformation and not of consumption or destruction. In the absence of the experience of this moment of terror, a person might work on an object before consuming it (or, of course, discarding it); but this work is in service merely of his desires as they stand. Thus, the moment of terror—which, of course, leads directly to the slave’s binding himself to the master—effectively allows the slave to see the world, through his being forced only to work on it, as something that he can transform.
This is an insight that is blocked in Sartre’s incomplete appropriation of the dialectic by his attending only to the significance of the moment of terror, the moment in which the self becomes aware of the world as expressly not its own. But for Hegel the dialectic ends only with the observation about the relationship between the moment of terror and the phenomenological significance of work, an observation that looms large in Beauvoir’s appropriation. Famously, it appears at this juncture of the Phenomenology that for Hegel the production of genuinely human self-consciousness—of the sense of oneself as, from the point of view of truth, a being whose destiny is “not to be what it is … and to be (that is, to become) what it is not” (Kojève 5)—requires something Hegel calls enslavement to others (the German is Knechtschaft).29 Now it’s a question, of course, what form this “enslavement” actually takes (if any) in real life. Kojève, for one, seems to see the master-slave situation as primarily a moment in human history, something, therefore, that’s somehow behind us. (Exactly what “a moment in human history” might amount to—a social configuration? part of the mythological past? something we go through as children?—is not, of course, my question, at least not in this context.) But what’s distinctive (although not unique) about Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s understanding of Knechtschaft is that it is something that human beings across history not only must experience as individuals in order to achieve something like genuinely human self-consciousness but also must struggle with on a daily basis.
And yet it’s possible to cut the difference between Sartre and Beauvoir, I’m going to argue, precisely along the different lines they draw around the concept of Knechtschaft. For Sartre, to anticipate, Knechtschaft is to be understood as enslavement in a fairly straightforward sense: it requires the absolute surrendering of the self, of one’s status as a subject, to the other. For Sartre, at least the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, the threat of Knechtschaft in this bleak sense pollutes every human interaction: every human interaction manifests a master-slave construction. Hence the emblematic line from the end of his play No Exit: “Hell is—other people!” (45). Needing to exercise vigilance in our efforts to avoid enslavement by enslaving others, human beings on Sartre’s picture of things cannot, as it were, get beyond the life-and-death struggle in the Phenomenology. Our position as beings who wish for the confirmation of our humanity to be an essentially private matter is fixed ontologically.
For Beauvoir, quite to the contrary, Knechtschaft is to be seen primarily in its enabling aspect, as what leads us, as it were, to bring ourselves to ourselves as human beings; and here Miller’s translation of the German word not as “enslavement” but as “bondage” is more in tune with the note Beauvoir wishes to strike in her interpretation of the idea. For her, appreciating the fact that mastery—our very subjectivity—is achieved only through an acceptance of our bondage to and with one another, through, that is, our willingness to subject ourselves as ambiguous beings to something she calls “objectivity,” is the key to achieving the fullest flowering of human self-consciousness.