One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny explains the figure that the human female assumes in society; it is the whole of civilization that creates this product, intermediate between male and eunuch, that we call feminine. Only the intervention of others can constitute an individual as an Other [un Autre]. Insofar as the child exists for itself [pour soi], he or she is unable to grasp himself or herself [se saisir] as sexually differentiated. … If, well before puberty and sometimes even from early infancy [the girl] seems to us to be already sexually specified, this is not because mysterious instincts directly doom her to passivity, coquetry, maternity; it’s that the intervention of others in the life of the child is almost primordial and that from her earliest years her vocation is imperiously forced upon her [insuffler].
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
“O ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” These words, which open the second volume of The Second Sex, are without doubt the most famous ever penned in the service of liberating human beings from the constraints imposed upon them by, or that they impose on themselves through, sex difference. One finds them cited everywhere in the literature on sex roles; for feminists, Beauvoir’s famous sentence is no less of a landmark, of no less historical import, than Neil Armstrong’s assessment of the significance of his first steps on the moon. Indeed, the ritualistic intoning of this line has been so common in academic feminism that failing to pay tribute to Beauvoir by quoting it in the first few pages of your feminist theory book is tantamount to forgetting to genuflect on your way into the family pew. Beauvoir’s claim, it’s ordinarily taken for granted, is simply that what English speakers now tend to call “gender” is not a biological fact but rather a “social construct.” Of course, commentators disagree profoundly on the validity and sincerity of Beauvoir’s pronouncement. Some, for example, laud her apparent dismissal of the significance of biology; others claim that it covers up what is in fact her insidious “biologism” throughout The Second Sex.1 In fact the debate that her words have generated is so massive that it’s scarcely an exaggeration to claim that it’s coextensive with feminist theory itself.
There can be no doubt that Beauvoir was interested in the question of the extent to which the difference between masculinity and femininity can be attributed to biology; and because she insists at various junctures throughout The Second Sex that biology bears on the way that norms of femininity and masculinity develop it is not unreasonable to ask whether her apparent commitment to social constructivism, as emblematized in her famous words, was actually less solid than those words seem to suggest. But what I wish to show in this chapter and the next is that these issues, while important both for Beauvoir and for the feminist debates that her work was to engender, are less philosophically central to The Second Sex than is the seemingly throwaway idea, also expressed in the opening to book 2, that “only the intervention of others can constitute an individual as an Other [un Autre].” This claim, while it appears almost laughably tautological, on closer inspection can be seen to interpret the idea of becoming, as opposed to being born, a woman as the process of becoming an Other, a process the description of which by Beauvoir in The Second Sex constitutes what I characterize as a strikingly original act of philosophical appropriation. And I’m going to argue that it’s easy to miss this act of appropriation precisely because The Second Sex is written in, as it were, two registers: that of the ordinary, or everyday, in which the “situation” of women comes into relief; and that of the philosophical, in which, for Beauvoir, this situation becomes interpretable (if not justifiable). So when, for example, Beauvoir claims at the end of the passage I’ve used as an epigraph to this chapter that “the intervention of others in the life of the child is almost primordial and that from her earliest years her vocation is imperiously forced upon her,” she means to be saying both that little girls are forced to exemplify, or are forcibly judged by the standards of, femininity and that this forcing is to be explained in terms of the human ability and propensity to turn other people into “the Other.” While it’s my view that Beauvoir arrived at her ground-breaking understanding of women’s situation through her ground-breaking appropriation of the philosophy of Hegel and Sartre, I argue in this chapter that what distinguishes this act of appropriation is Beauvoir’s grounding of it in her ordinary experience as a woman.
This means that my preliminary depiction of the relationship between what I am calling the two registers of The Second Sex needs some fine-tuning. It’s not just that the philosophical register allows for an interpretation of the ordinary one (so that Beauvoir’s characterization of the ordinary register would be dependent on the philosophical one); if this were a full enough description of what’s going on in The Second Sex then the fact that the philosophical dimension of the book is as easy to ignore as it is would be practically impossible to explain. What makes it possible to overlook the philosophical dimension of the book is that it is itself beholden to the ordinary register, without which, I am claiming, Beauvoir could not have found and did not find the means to successfully express herself philosophically. Because the philosophical aspirations and achievements of The Second Sex are grounded in Beauvoir’s capacity for describing the ordinary facts and ramifications of sex difference as she has known and studied them, the book sounds ordinary: the sense predominates of its merely describing (albeit polemically) the world we inhabit. But a careful study of what Beauvoir is doing reveals that the relationship in The Second Sex between the ordinary and the theoretical takes the form of, if you will, a dialogue, or perhaps what you might even be willing to call a dialectic, the discovery or founding of which I attempted to describe and account for in chapter 2. Like all dialectics, this one is characterized by a tension between and a propulsion beyond the terms that originally confront one another—in this case, the “ordinary” and the “philosophical”—which means that on my interpretation The Second Sex is aspiring to question the hiatus between these two things and to redefine each in terms of the other. You might describe the accomplishment—and the philosophical difficulty, in more than one sense—of this book as its bringing into sharp relief the ambiguity of the line between the everyday and the philosophical.2
In Beauvoir’s case the “everyday” or “ordinary” denotes the experience of being a sexed being, which in her case of course means being a woman. This is of course far from the case in Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which, on this particular understanding of what constitutes ordinariness, the dimension of the everyday is entirely absent. As I observed in chapter 5, Beauvoir eventually came to criticize both of these early philosophical works for what she called their “abstractness.” I’m suggesting now that what she’s gesturing at by this word is their not having been grounded in the ordinary. For it certainly is not the case that either book is entirely lacking in references to the material problems of real people. In the Ethics, for example, Beauvoir briefly discusses the predicament of African-American slaves in the antebellum American South, and in Pyrrhus she argues that morality and even freedom itself demand that we actively commit ourselves, in our real lives, to working for “health, knowledge, well-being, law” in order to ensure that the liberty of others “does not consume itself in combating sickness, ignorance, misery” (115). What’s unsatisfying about these works is not exactly that they’re too abstract; rather, the problem is that they manifest a conception of philosophy on which it is fundamentally detachable from the sort of everyday concerns that tend to motivate our interest in the subject. In Pyrrhus and the Ethics, Beauvoir is already aware of her deep interest in Hegel’s Phenomenology, and particularly in the master-slave dialectic. But what she hasn’t yet figured out how to do is account for the power that Hegel’s prose holds on her, the fact of her inevitable return to it every time she picks up her pen to write philosophically.3 What happens in The Second Sex, I wish to argue, is that her growing concern to understand herself, a concern she initially saw as following a trajectory quite separate from that of her philosophical pursuits, came to dovetail—phenomenologically, as it were—with her abiding fascination with Hegel. With her discovery that, to her surprise, the first thing she has to say about herself is the most ordinary thing in the world—that she is a woman—comes the even more surprising, and surprisingly fruitful, revelation that her previous failure to recognize her own investment in this knowledge can be explained by (that is, in terms of)—and, in turn, allows her to explain—her investment in Hegel’s philosophy.
A major claim in the following analysis of these investments is that Beauvoir does not simply map the master-slave dialectic onto the situation of men and women. Indeed, it will turn out that Hegel provides Beauvoir, through her thinking about just this situation, with a way of contesting to a certain degree his understanding of reciprocal recognition: what leads to it and what it consists in. On Hegel’s view the encounter with the other immediately provokes in the subjectively self-certain being a desire to be recognized by that other as “for-itself,” as, in other words, a subject. But on Beauvoir’s view this encounter in fact provokes in the subjectively self-certain being (figured for her in the form of the human infant) a desire to be recognized by the other as “in-itself,” as, in other words, an object, a thing. The most important feature of an object for these purposes is that it is static, that it has a fixed place in the world, that it is not in an important sense free. The desire to be an object, Beauvoir finds, takes different forms in men and women. In men it takes the somewhat paradoxical form of wishing to be confirmed as (once and for all time) “for-itself”—as, to employ Sartre’s term for this fantasy, “in-itself-for-itself.” It could be argued that this particular desire, one Beauvoir associates with men, is not terribly at odds with Hegel’s understanding of what the encounter with the other elicits in a subjectively self-certain being. But what is certainly not in Hegel is Beauvoir’s idea that in women, the desire for recognition tends to take the form of renouncing the claim to be being-for-itself. On Beauvoir’s view, as on Hegel’s, the achievement of recognition paradoxically requires the foregoing of one’s desire for it, at least in its initial narcissistic form. What is required instead is an acceptance (what in chapter 5 we saw Beauvoir calling an “assuming”) of one’s own inalienable freedom and that of the other. But unlike Hegel, Beauvoir in a moment of appropriation from Sartre sees this acceptance as requiring an acknowledgment of the power of the other’s judgment—an acknowledgment of the respects in which one is, in fact, inevitably fixed as an object in the other’s Look. In what follows, I show that for Beauvoir the risk required for the consummation of Hegelian reciprocal recognition is the risk of allowing the other to be genuinely other, which is to say the risk of acknowledging a certain freedom from him—or her.
A QUESTION OF INFLUENCE: HOW TO CONCEPTUALIZE THE HEGELIANISM OF THE SECOND SEX
While Hegel’s name and terminology are all over The Second Sex, the vast majority of Beauvoir’s commentators find the allusions gratuitous, hokey, or otherwise incidental to the book’s aims and achievements. This way of construing, or, as the case may be, ignoring Hegel’s role in The Second Sex is not, in and of itself, an obvious lapse; Hegel is an equally strong presence in both Pyrrhus et Cinéas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, and yet even I would argue that Beauvoir’s reading of him in these works is not integral to their construction. Indeed, it’s only in the light of what Beauvoir does with Hegel in The Second Sex that, I would argue, her interest in him in the earlier works takes on its own interest. But if one takes seriously what I have argued in chapter 5 are Beauvoir’s philosophical aspirations in the earlier works; if one sees her struggling there not to parrot but to appropriate Sartrean existentialism; and if one reads The Second Sex as though this struggle has not been abandoned or sidetracked or put on hold but, rather, propelled into new territory—if these are one’s bearings, then, I claim, the centrality of her appropriation of Hegel in that work becomes unignorable. And if I’m right in suggesting that Beauvoir’s re-conceptualization of what it is to appropriate the philosophical tradition is perhaps the central philosophical achievement of The Second Sex, then in claiming that Beauvoir genuinely appropriates Hegel and that this appropriation is central to understanding the work as a whole, I am claiming that The Second Sex is not just incidentally but in the main—even in the first place—a philosophical piece of writing.
To my knowledge, the Swedish philosopher and intellectual historian Eva Lundgren-Gothlin is the only serious reader of The Second Sex to provide an extended interpretation of Hegel’s role in the book and to argue, or at least to imply, that this role is of central importance in understanding what Beauvoir is trying to say about what it is to be a woman.4 It’s important to note that Lundgren-Gothlin parts ways quite sharply with the usual breezy understanding of how we are to understand Hegel’s place in The Second Sex. She claims, in effect, that Beauvoir uses the master-slave dialectic not as a philosophical model of the way things stand between the sexes but as a philosophical foil: rather than simply recalling Hegel’s figures of the master and the slave to dramatize the inequity between men and women, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, Beauvoir is contrasting the position of women with that of the Hegelian slave. Specifically, Beauvoir’s woman differs fundamentally from Hegel’s slave insofar as she never demands recognition from a man and thus fails to “enter into the master-slave dialectic” (73).5 Therefore, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, there is no dialectical tension or movement in the relationship between the sexes, so that woman is fixed in her relation to man as, in Beauvoir’s argot, the “absolute” Other. On Lundgren-Gothlin’s view, what’s of prime significance about Hegel’s influence on Beauvoir in The Second Sex is that it is not mediated, at least in the main, by Sartre’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic.6 Her appeal to the dialectic plays a key role in establishing Beauvoir’s philosophical independence from Sartre, because it is the vehicle of her disagreement with him on the question of whether “mutual recognition” is possible (67). Specifically, Lundgren-Gothlin thinks, Beauvoir rejects Sartre’s view (influenced of course by Hegel) that human relations, and particularly relations between men and women, are marked by a “fundamental theme of conflict” that is “ahistorical and eternal” (67). Instead, Lundgren-Gothlin maintains, Beauvoir “counterbalances” Sartre’s fundamental theme of conflict with the conviction that this conflict can be transcended through Hegelian “reciprocal recognition.”7
I of course am in agreement with many of Lundgren-Gothlin’s claims about Hegel’s influence on The Second Sex. Certainly, anyone who pays attention to Beauvoir’s allusions to the master-slave dialectic will acknowledge the inevitability of Lundgren-Gothlin’s claim that Beauvoir’s woman, unlike Hegel’s slave, never demands recognition from men. More important, Lundgren-Gothlin is justified in detecting and insisting on the fatefulness of Beauvoir’s disagreement with Sartre about the possibility of reciprocal recognition. Yet while Lundgren-Gothlin’s reading renders Beauvoir’s ideas in a way that, as I will try to show, is far better able to account for her words than most, it still undervalues the originality of Beauvoir’s philosophical achievement and specifically the originality of what I have been calling her appropriation of Hegel. Lundgren-Gothlin sees that it won’t do to try to shoehorn what Beauvoir says about the situation of men and women into Hegel’s master-slave model. Nonetheless Lundgren-Gothlin accounts for the discrepancies between the man-woman and master-slave roles by suggesting that Beauvoir is simply affirming some portions of the dialectic and rejecting others. This fits with the idea that a reasonable enough way of conceptualizing the relationship between Sartre and Beauvoir with respect to their inheritance of Hegel is to see Beauvoir as “counterbalancing” the “fundamental theme of conflict” in Sartre with an endorsement of the possibility of reciprocal recognition. My view is that one cannot adequately appreciate Beauvoir’s relation to Hegel if one construes it simply as one of influence and mediation, nor can one fully appreciate the differences between Sartre and Beauvoir if one conceptualizes Beauvoir’s inheritance of Hegel as counterbalancing that of Sartre. My goal in this chapter is to show that a more subtle understanding of Beauvoir’s way of appropriating Hegel is required in order to fully appreciate its philosophical ramifications, at the level of both method and content.
INTRODUCING THE MASTER-SLAVE DIALECTIC IN THE SECOND SEX
Beauvoir’s first mention of Hegel in The Second Sex occurs in the introduction and follows her famous declaration that while man is “the Subject, he is the Absolute,” woman is “the Other” (xxii):
The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one always finds a duality, that of the Self (du Même) and the Other. This division was not originally placed under the sign of the division of the sexes; it does not depend upon any empirical givens. … Otherness [l’altérité] is a fundamental category of human thought. No group ever defines itself as One without at once posing [poser] the Other opposite [en face de] itself. It suffices for three travelers to be put together [réunis] by chance in the same compartment for all the rest of the travelers to become vaguely hostile “others.” For the villager, all not belonging to the village are suspect “others.”8 … These phenomena would be incomprehensible if human reality were exclusively a Mitsein9 based on solidarity and friendship. Things become clear, on the contrary, if following Hegel we discover in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness. The subject poses himself [se pose]10 only in setting himself up in opposition: he sets out to affirm himself as the essential and to constitute the other as inessential, as object.
However, the other consciousness opposes to his a reciprocal claim. In traveling the native becomes aware with shame [scandale] that there are natives in neighboring countries who regard him in his own right as a stranger. Between villages, clans, nations, classes, there are wars, festivals, markets, treaties, fights that remove the idea of the Other in its absolute sense and thus uncover its relativity. For better or for worse, individuals and groups will inevitably [sont bien obligés] recognize the reciprocity of their relationship. (xxii–xxiii, TM; LDS 1:16–17)
To be human, according to this passage—to have a truly human consciousness—is to harbor “a fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness.” One conceptualizes oneself—claims oneself to be—a subject only by “constituting the other as inessential, as object.” However, the other, in his own self-conceptualization, sets up an exactly reciprocal claim, one in which of course he is a subject and the other is figured as object. And this very counterclaim reveals, inexorably, the essential relativity of the sort of otherness Beauvoir is describing.11
But then how could women be “the absolute Other” vis-à-vis men?12 Here is how Beauvoir puts the question, and a start on an answer, in the introduction to The Second Sex:
How, then, is it that between the sexes this reciprocity has not been posed, that one of the terms can be affirmed as the sole essential, denying all relativity in relation to its correlative, defining it as pure otherness? Why don’t women contest male sovereignty? No subject poses himself immediately and spontaneously as the inessential; it’s not the Other who in defining herself [se définissant] as the Other defines the One: the Other is posed as the Other by the One posing himself as the One. But for the turning back [retournement] of the Other to the One not to take place, the Other must submit to this alien point of view. Whence in the woman comes this submission? (xxiii–xxiv, TM; LDS 1:17)
According to Lundgren-Gothlin, Beauvoir’s view is that women have failed to enter a competing claim to recognition in the wake of their being objectified by men.13 Because women fail to enter this claim, men are unlikely to be struck by the relativity of woman’s otherness; hence there is slim chance for the sort of reciprocity that becomes unavoidable, according to Beauvoir, when both parties demand recognition. Thus, men demand recognition; women fail to demand it in return; and women as a result are oppressed as absolute Other. Lundgren-Gothlin is arguing that Beauvoir shows how the master-slave dialectic in effect misfires when it comes to relationships between men and women: men get the ball rolling by lodging claims to recognition, but women then simply capitulate, allowing men to be masters instead of countering their claims to recognition and thereby inaugurating a struggle that will end in some state of reciprocal recognition. Lundgren-Gothlin’s main claim about how to interpret the influence of Hegel on Beauvoir is epitomized in the following paragraph:
I am therefore claiming, in contrast to other scholars, that while Beauvoir uses the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to explain the origins of oppression, she does not locate man as master and woman as slave in this dialectic. Instead, woman is seen as not participating in the process of recognition, a fact that explains the unique nature of her oppression. Although the man is the master, the essential consciousness in relation to woman, the woman is not a slave in relation to him. This makes their relationship more absolute, and non-dialectical, and it explains why woman is the absolute Other. (72)14
What I’m going to contest in the remainder of this chapter is the implication that the man, “the master,” as Lundgren-Gothlin calls him, can be located within the terms of Hegel’s dialectic any more easily than the woman can. My view is that Lundgren-Gothlin’s understanding of Beauvoir’s relationship to Hegel—while far superior to any other I have seen and compelling on any number of fronts—continues the tradition of underestimating Beauvoir’s powers of philosophical appropriation and reads the man-woman relationship as it is analyzed in The Second Sex as though it were essentially analogous with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic rather than transformative of it. Beauvoir, on my view, is not simply gesturing at the master-slave dialectic as a source of inspiration for and illumination of her own view. Rather, she wants what she has to say about women to contest, on philosophically internal ground, the generic picture of human relations we get in the dialectic—a picture so gripping that it had occupied, in one way shape or form, virtually every European philosopher in the hundred years between Hegel and Sartre. As in the case of her appropriation of Descartes, Beauvoir is once again both accounting for the power of a paradigmatic moment in the history of a certain tradition in philosophy and suggesting that this power is bought precisely at the expense of ignoring the experience of people—of philosophers—like her: of women.
BEAUVOIR’S APPROPRIATION OF HEGEL IN BOOK 1 OF THE SECOND SEX
At the very end of the introduction to The Second Sex, directly after she has announced that her perspective in the book will be one of “existentialist ethics,” Beauvoir poses a series of what she calls “fundamental questions on which we would like to throw some light.”15 “Now, what in a singular manner defines the situation of woman,” she says,
is that, being like every other human being an autonomous liberty, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men make her assume herself as the Other [lui imposent de s’assumer contre l’Autre]: they attempt to fix her as an object and doom her to immanence insofar as her transcendence is to be perpetually transcended by another consciousness that is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman is this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, who always poses himself or herself [se pose] as the essential, and the exigencies of a situation that constitutes her as inessential. How in the feminine condition can a woman become a human being? What roads are open to her? Which culminate in impasses? How can independence be rediscovered at the heart of dependence? What circumstances limit the liberty of woman and which can she surpass? (xxxv, TM; LDS 1:31–32)
These questions, Beauvoir goes on to say, would not make sense if we were to suppose that woman’s lot were inalterably determined by, for example, physiology, psychology, or economic forces. Thus, her goal in part 1 of book 1, entitled “Destiny,” is to show that in fact woman has no unalterable, fixed destiny: nothing predetermines her situation, and no discipline or theory—not biology, not psychoanalysis, not historical materialism—has convincingly explained it. In part 2 of book 1, entitled “History,” Beauvoir tries to show that nonetheless there really is something that can plausibly be called the situation of women, despite wide variations in women’s concrete circumstances across cultures and across time, from the prehistoric era through the present day.16 “The world has always belonged to men,” she says in the first line of the “History” section, even though “none of the reasons that have been proposed to explain this fact has struck us as sufficient” (61, TM; LDS 1:109). In reviewing certain salient moments in history, Beauvoir then suggests, we will be able to get a complex picture of how the “hierarchy of the sexes” was established, where this way of understanding women’s situation, it is implied, is going to be different from the sort that proposes to trace the hierarchy of male over female to some brute fact about human biology, psychology, or socio-economic need. The problem, Beauvoir reminds us, stems from—which is not to say is synonymous with—what she in the introduction calls “the fundamental hostility” that consciousness harbors toward the (fundamental category of the) “other”:
We have already proposed [posé] that when two human types [catégories] are face to face, each wants to impose upon the other its sovereignty. If both are able to hold out against [soutenir] this claim, there is created between them whether in hostility or in friendship, always in tension, a relationship of reciprocity. If one of the two is privileged, it will get the better of the other and will work to maintain the other’s oppression. It’s therefore understandable that man would have the will [volonté] to dominate woman: but what privilege permits him to carry out this will? (61, TM; LDS 1:109)17
It is the historical development of what she is calling the “privilege” of men that Beauvoir then attempts to illuminate in the remainder of the “History” section.
Thus we arrive at the “Myths” section—part 3—of The Second Sex, which begins with a long, exceptionally elliptical and dense passage that is pivotal to understanding Beauvoir’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic.18 The passage begins with a summary of Beauvoir’s conclusions from part 2:
History has shown us that men have always kept in their hands all concrete powers. Since the earliest patriarchal times they have judged it useful to maintain woman in a state of dependence. Their codes are established against her, and thus she has been concretely constituted as the Other.
The passage then continues with a series of claims that are obviously intimately related to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic:
This condition served the economic interests of males, but it also suited their ontological and moral claims [prétentions]. Once the subject seeks to assert himself [s’affirmer], the Other who limits him and denies him is nevertheless necessary to him: he doesn’t attain himself except through this reality that he is not. This is why the life of the human being [l’homme] is never plenitude and rest: it is lack and movement; it is struggle [lutte].
The one apparently un-Hegelian feature of this paragraph is its last sentence: “This is why the life of the human being is never plenitude and rest: it is lack and movement; it is struggle.” The idea of a ceaseless struggle is not a part of the Phenomenology, in which the master-slave dialectic is only a stage in the journey of Geist. Indeed, this idea seems out of place in the paragraph in which we find it, a paragraph in which Beauvoir is presumably sketching out an answer to the question of why men’s “maintaining woman in a state of dependence” has had not only economic but also “moral and ontological” advantages. The basic idea here is that the subject, man in this case, needs an absolute Other, a role the woman has historically played for him, in order to “attain” himself in the wake of his “asserting” of himself. But it isn’t at all clear, at least at this juncture, how this conception of the relationship between subject and Other implies or is otherwise connected to the idea that “the life of the human being is never plenitude and rest.” Why isn’t men’s dominance over women stable?
Getting a start on an answer to this question requires looking at more of the passage.
Opposite himself man [l’homme] encounters Nature.19 He has a hold on her; he attempts to appropriate her.20 But she cannot satisfy him. Either she materializes [se réaliser] only as a purely abstract opposition—she is an obstacle and remains a stranger; or she submits passively to man’s desire and allows herself to be assimilated by him—he possesses her only in consuming her, that is to say in destroying her. In both these cases, he remains alone. He is alone when he touches a rock, alone when he digests a piece of fruit. There is no presence of the other unless the other is himself present to himself: that is to say that true alterity is that of a consciousness separate from mine and identical to itself.
It is the existence of other men that tears each man from his immanence and that permits him to fulfill [accomplir] the truth of his being, to fulfill himself as transcendence, as escape toward the object, as project. But this strange liberty that confirms my liberty enters also into conflict with it: this is the tragedy of the unhappy consciousness.21 Each consciousness aspires to pose itself as sole sovereign subject. Each attempts to fulfill itself by reducing the other to slavery. But the slave in work and in fear experiences himself also as essential and, through a dialectical turning-back [retournement], it is the master who appears as the inessential. The drama [of the master-slave relationship] can be surmounted by the free recognition of each individual in the other [en l’autre], each posing himself and the other at the same time as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement [my emphasis].
I take it as absolutely critical that Beauvoir does not characterize “free recognition” here (or elsewhere) as requiring that each individual in the dialectic identify himself and the other merely as subjects. What is strikingly original about the way Beauvoir is rendering what is recognizably a version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the long passage I have been examining is that she believes that a person must acknowledge himself and the other as objects as well as subjects in order for reciprocal recognition to be achieved.22 That Hegelian reciprocity demands that beings mutually recognize one another as subjects is right on the surface of the concept. Indeed, what philosophers in Hegel’s wake have disputed is precisely whether and how our acknowledgment of each other as subjects is possible. But Beauvoir is to my knowledge wholly original in her figuring reciprocal recognition as requiring the acknowledgment of one’s own and the other’s essential nature as objects as well as subjects. Beauvoir goes on to hint at the origin of the difficulties in achieving this sort of reciprocity:
But friendship and generosity, which concretely realize this recognition of liberties, are not easy virtues. They are assuredly the highest accomplishment of the human being; it’s thus that he achieves [se trouve] his truth. But this truth is that of a struggle ceaselessly sketched out [ébauchée], ceaselessly abolished. It requires that a human being at each instant master himself [se surmonte].23
What exactly does this ceaseless self-mastery require? Against what or whom must the human being constantly struggle in order for reciprocal or “free” recognition to take place? Beauvoir appears to go on to suggest that is has to do with undertaking a quintessentially Sartrean task—one that she describes in what she calls “another language,” a language that, not surprisingly, sounds awfully Sartrean—namely, the task of renouncing being in favor of assuming one’s existence:
One might say also, in another language, that man attains an authentically moral attitude when he renounces being to assume his existence. By this conversion [conversion], he also renounces all possession, since possession is a mode of seeking being. But the conversion through which he attains true wisdom is never done. It is necessary to do it ceaselessly; it demands a constant tension. So much so that, incapable of fulfilling himself [s’accomplir] in solitude, man in his relationships with his fellows [semblables] is ceaselessly in danger: his life is a difficult enterprise the success of which is never assured.
What’s odd about this restatement of what recognition requires is the tension between its superficial party-line Sartreanism, if you will, and its deeper divergence from the basic tenets of Being and Nothingness. The idea, for example, that man ought to “renounce being to assume existence” is most certainly borrowed from Sartre, as is the idea that possessing things is merely a mode of seeking being.24 Then there is the idea that in one’s relationships with other people one is “ceaselessly in danger”; this is a prime instance of what I have been calling the bleakness of the Sartrean view. But what’s entirely lacking in Sartre is the idea that one can attain something called “an authentically moral attitude” and that one can do this only by something Beauvoir calls “conversion.” On my reading, these distinctly Heideggerian-sounding concepts radically alter the Gestalt, if you will, of this paragraph, a paragraph otherwise apparently pieced together from textbook Sartrean positions, so that it becomes a question what the nature of the conflict and the danger and tension that Beauvoir envisions are, rather than a cliché.
That there is something unusual going on here—that we are not just getting Sartre warmed-over—becomes obvious when we look at the next (and last) section of this long passage. It starts with a familiar enough set of ideas:25
But he [l’homme; the human being] does not like difficulty. He is afraid of danger. He aspires, contradictorily, to life and to repose, to existence and to being. He well knows that “restlessness of the spirit” [l’inquiétude de l’esprit] is the price [rançon] of his development, that his distance from the object is the price of his presence to himself. But he dreams of rest in restlessness [de quiétude dans l’inquiétude] and of a plenitude that would be opaque but would nevertheless inhabit consciousness.
But then we get the following startling claim:
This dream incarnated is precisely woman. She is the wished-for intermediary between nature, which is foreign to man, and the fellow [semblable] who is too identical to him. She opposes to him neither the enemy silence of nature nor the hard demand [exigence] of a reciprocal recognition. By a unique privilege she is a consciousness; and yet it seems possible to possess her in her flesh. Thanks to her, there is a means of escaping from the implacable dialectic of master and slave that has its source in the reciprocity of liberties [la réciprocité des libertés].
Now, on Lundgren-Gothlin’s view the key clause here is the one in which Beauvoir claims that woman does not “oppose” to man “the hard demand of a reciprocal recognition”:
Female human beings do not seek recognition; it is males who are confirmed as human, as self-consciousness, in relation to other males, males who become either masters or slaves. Beauvoir is saying here that man, in the relationship to woman, nurtures the hope of achieving confirmation without engaging in this kind of dialectics; logically, therefore, woman has not engaged in a struggle for recognition, and thus neither has become essential nor has had her self-consciousness confirmed. In other words, she remains at a more animal level. Woman has not raised a reciprocal demand for recognition. (71–72)
But this doesn’t seem quite right. For Beauvoir nowhere says or implies that women do not seek recognition from other women, which means, according to Lundgren-Gothlin’s own logic, that Beauvoir does not deny that women may be “confirmed as human, as self-consciousness” in relation to other women, that they may become “either masters or slaves.” There is no reason, then, to assume that woman “remains at a more animal level” than man. Furthermore, by interpreting the idea that the demand for reciprocal recognition is “hard” as implying that what’s difficult about it is just the lodging of it (however hard that lodging may turn out on Beauvoir’s view to be), Lundgren-Gothlin draws attention away from the idea that the master-slave dialectic, in Beauvoir’s words, is “implacable”—that is, that it requires constant effort even after the demands for recognition have been lodged. Lundgren-Gothlin thus closes off the possibility that for Beauvoir what’s exacting about reciprocal recognition is not lodging the demand that inaugurates it but the incessant struggle—and we have yet to establish whether and how this is to be figured primarily as a struggle against the other or to master oneself—that’s required to maintain it. What I mean to suggest here is that what’s “hard” about the demand might not be the lodging of it, per se, but as it were the maintenance of it, the continuance of it in the face of the ceaseless struggle that this continuance itself demands.
If we take seriously her investment in the idea that reciprocal recognition requires a ceaseless struggle of some sort, then we get a somewhat clearer sense of why Beauvoir claims that human beings put such a high premium on achieving a state of rest. It’s not, or not exactly, as Lundgren-Gothlin claims above, that men wish to “achieve confirmation without engaging in dialectics,” if this means that they are loathe to undertake the fight to the death. What on my reading they—and women—desire is a state of stasis, of rest, in which recognition has been achieved once and for all (where, for the time being, what “recognition” consists in must also remain vague). Human beings cannot achieve permanent recognition in their interaction with things, with instances of being that are not human, because things are not capable of recognizing them at all. And they cannot achieve permanent recognition in their interaction with other human beings because with other human beings recognition is never permanent; it involves a ceaseless struggle. What women do for men, Beauvoir claims, is provide them with a sense—albeit a false one—of having achieved recognition once and for all, of finding what she calls “rest in restlessness.” Women do this by serving as something “intermediary” between a thing and a human being: by virtue of being what Beauvoir calls “a consciousness” a woman is capable of the act of recognition; but this very act of recognition is seen as manifesting the sort of power that a thing has—that is, a power that is in principle continuously vulnerable to exploitation or consumption.
I say that women “serve” as something intermediary because Beauvoir never suggests that women are this intermediary entity. Woman is a conscious being, she says; but it merely “seems possible to possess her in the flesh” (my emphasis). That women’s status as intermediary must be illusory—that men who figure women as thinglike in the relevant respects or women who figure themselves this way are at best deluding themselves and at worst indulging in, if you will, bad faith—follows from the idea that recognition (whatever it turns out to look like exactly, on Beauvoir’s view) is fundamentally not some quality or power people inherently have or mechanically manufacture but the product of deliberate action on the part of a free and conscious being.
So when Beauvoir says that through women men find the means to escape “from the implacable dialectic of master and slave that has its source in the reciprocity of liberties,” what she is saying, on my reading, is that men and women have settled into a relationship in which the man labors under the illusion that the woman is continuously (always, seamlessly) recognizing him and thus continuously providing him with a sort of peace—something that, as a free, conscious being, she in fact by definition cannot do—while the woman poses as a being not in need of being recognized in return—that is, as something that she is not. Now, Lundgren-Gothlin claims that Beauvoir wants to say that “the man is the master, the essential consciousness in relation to woman” but that “the woman is not a slave in relation to him” (72). This implies that the man has staked a claim to recognition. But has he, according to Beauvoir? Lundgren-Gothlin is careful never to suggest that the man has demanded recognition from woman; indeed she implies that he has not staked such a claim when she characterizes him as “[nurturing] the hope of achieving confirmation without engaging in this kind of dialectics” (71). But when she says that “it is males who are confirmed as human, as self-consciousness, in relation to other males” she strongly implies, first, that men have demanded recognition from one another and, second, that through this man-to-man dialectic men somehow put themselves in the position of becoming the masters of women. But how could this happen? If neither women nor men demand recognition from one another, then how does the man end up being the woman’s master while the woman somehow escapes being his slave? I’m trying to argue here that unless Beauvoir is saying the men actually demand recognition from women—a position that neither I nor apparently Lundgren-Gothlin finds articulated anywhere in The Second Sex—then men are no more in a position to become women’s masters, per se, than women are to become men’s masters.
On both my reading of The Second Sex, and especially of this long passage that launches the “Myths” section in book 1, and on Lundgren-Gothlin’s reading, there’s no evidence that Beauvoir wishes simply to map the situation between men and women onto the master-slave dialectic. The question, then, is what Beauvoir does wish to do. Lundgren-Gothlin’s implicit answer is that Beauvoir wishes to map only some of the master-slave dialectic onto Beauvoir’s depiction of the relationship between the sexes. So, for example, she claims, you can show that in Beauvoir’s picture men are in effect Hegelian masters. But other features of the dialectic—such as the would-be slave’s staking of a reciprocal demand for recognition from the would-be master before the fight to the death—are absent from Beauvoir’s account, which, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, explains why the relationship between man and woman is “more absolute, and non-dialectical, and it explains why women is the absolute Other” (72). Somehow, on this reading, men get to be masters, but nondialectically so, since women don’t get to be slaves—that is, since there is no dialectic to begin with.
Lundgren-Gothlin is certainly not without apparent evidence for her way of understanding Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel. Consider the following passage she cites from the “History” section of book 1 of The Second Sex:
Certain passages of the dialectic by which Hegel defines the relation of master to slave apply much better to the relation of man to woman. The privilege of the master, he says, comes from his affirmation of Spirit as against Life through the fact that he risks his own life; but in fact the conquered slave has known the same risk. Whereas woman is basically [originellement] an existent who gives Life [la Vie; Beauvoir’s emphasis] and does not risk her life; between the male and her there has never been any combat [combat]. Hegel’s definition applies particularly well [singulièrement] to her. “The other [consciousness] is the dependent consciousness for whom the essential reality is the animal life.” (TSS 64, TM; LDS 1:114; brackets around “consciousness” in Beauvoir’s text)
On Lundgren-Gothlin’s reading, when Beauvoir says that certain passages of the master-slave dialectic “apply much better to the relation of man to woman” than to that of master and slave, she is referring only “to the first phase of the dialectic, where the master has proved himself as pure self-consciousness by not having set life up as supreme.”26 This first phase, Lundgren-Gothlin says, is for Beauvoir “an excellent illustration of the relationship between the sexes,” a relationship in which men show themselves capable of risking life (and thus deserving recognition) and women merely embrace life. But Beauvoir on Lundgren-Gothlin’s interpretation in effect ignores the “second phase” of the dialectic, in which the slave “has taken a step away from the animal, a step he fulfils [sic] through his labour in the service of his master”; the woman, in her failure to work—in her capacity as a giver of life, rather than a worker—evidently fails to progress to this phase.
But there’s something odd about this conceptualization of the relationship between what Beauvoir is saying about man and woman, on the one hand, and the master-slave dialectic, on the other. If I understand Lundgren-Gothlin correctly, the first phase of the dialectic comprises the moments up until the master has shown himself willing to risk his life and the slave has shown himself fearful of doing so—that is, the moments up until one self-consciousness becomes the master and the other the slave. But of course in choosing to undertake the fight to the death, the slave has by definition chosen to risk his life; that he eventually loses heart does not mean that he never had it or aspired to have it. The difference between the slave and Beauvoir’s woman—the reason that certain passages of the dialectic apply much better to the relation of man and woman than to that of master and slave—is that the woman never risks her life at the hands of the man by laying a claim to recognition that would require a fight to the death with him. Indeed, Beauvoir implies that the woman in her commitment to being a life-giver (i.e., to having babies), is enamored of Life as an abstract concept and refuses to see herself as someone standing in need of recognition who might risk her particular, concrete life. But this is as much as to say that what goes on between Hegel’s master and slave is very different—from the start—from what goes on between Beauvoir’s man and woman. I’m claiming, then, that to say that the first phase of the master-slave dialect is an excellent illustration of the relationship between the sexes is to mischaracterize the nature of Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel.
I am suggesting, further, that Beauvoir is balking at Hegel’s declaration (at the end of para. 189 of the Phenomenology) that for the slave “the essential reality is the animal type of life.” What brings her to the point of balking at this, I think, is her discovery, a discovery made in the context of investigating the meaning of her own womanhood, that Hegel’s description of the slave is uncannily applicable not in fact to Hegelian slaves but to women. Since her work on The Second Sex has led her to the view that “woman is basically an existent who gives Life,” she is poised to recognize woman in Hegel’s description of that being whose “essential reality is the animal type of life.”27 Furthermore, in surveying the history—both ontogenetic and phylogenetic—of women Beauvoir has found that she cannot identify moments at which women have evinced something that could count as a Hegelian willingness to risk their lives, which means that, as Lundgren-Gothlin emphasizes, one cannot simply assimilate women to Hegelian slaves. And then in looking back over the parts of the dialectic that precede the slave’s capitulation to the master—that is, the parts that precede Hegel’s defining the slave as a being whose “essential reality is the animal type of life”—Beauvoir is in a position to notice something about the importance of the risking of life that recedes in the Hegelian dialectic as soon as the slave backs out of the fight to the death: that to be willing to risk your life, however temporarily, is in and of itself to generate evidence that you are not a mere thing. What Hegel gives Beauvoir the means to do is to identify “risking your life” as that which ensures that your “essential reality” is not “the animal type of life.” And then the task for her becomes specifying what it would mean for a woman, as a woman, to risk her life in relation to a man.
In order to lay the ground for this specification, I want to close this chapter by looking carefully at another passage from the “History” section of The Second Sex, one in which Beauvoir once again is obviously gesturing somehow at the master-slave dialectic. She is, more specifically, appealing to the dialectic while undertaking to trace the origins of the oppression of women; and at the point the passage begins she has arrived at a discussion of the inauguration of slavery during the bronze and iron ages, an inauguration made possible by the invention of the tool:
Man wished to exhaust the new possibilities opened up by the new techniques: he called in [ fait appel à] a servile labor force, he reduced his fellow man [son semblable] to slavery. The work of the slaves being much more effective than what woman could furnish, she lost the economic role she had played [a role Beauvoir has previously depicted] in the tribe. And in his relationship with the slave the master found a much more radical confirmation of his sovereignty than in the attenuated [mitigée] authority he exercised over woman. Being venerated and feared [redoutée]28 for her fecundity, being other than man and participating in the disquieting character of the other, woman held man in a certain dependence on her, while being at the same time dependent upon him; the reciprocity of the master-slave relation actually existed for her, and by it she escaped slavery. But the slave was protected by no taboo. He was nothing but a man in servitude, not different but inferior: the dialectical play [le jeu dialectique] of his relation to his master was to take centuries to come into existence. (78, TM; LDS 1:131)
What strikes Lundgren-Gothlin about this passage is that here again Beauvoir “sees a particular phase of the [master-slave] dialectic as actually reflecting the relationship between the sexes better than the one between master and slave.”29 The phase to which Lundgren-Gothlin is referring is the postfight moment in which the parties, while in fact mutually dependent on one another, are conscious only of the slave’s dependence upon the master. What they, and especially the master, fail to see is that the master is also dependent on the slave, insofar as the master needs both the slave’s labor and his recognition (however worthless that recognition may in fact be, given the nonhuman status to which the slave has been reduced in both parties’ eyes). Lundgren-Gothlin reads Beauvoir as claiming that between men and women, “mutual dependence has been actual from the very outset.” By “actual,” I take Lundgren-Gothlin to mean that both men and women have always been aware of the fact of their mutual dependence: both realize that woman is, presumably, economically dependent on man, while man has depended on woman for, as Lundgren-Gothlin puts it “confirmation of his sovereignty.” Thus, once again, we are to read Beauvoir as using the master-slave dialectic to “illustrate” what she wants to say about men and women.
It seems to me, however, that Beauvoir is doing something more, and considerably more important, than simply illustrating her point via an allusion to Hegel. What Lundgren-Gothlin has in effect written out of the passage is its historicity, and in particular Beauvoir’s implicit—and striking—claim that woman has not always been the (absolute) Other for man. Indeed, what’s especially fascinating about the passage is that in it Beauvoir is claiming that the historical development of slavery produced a drastic change in relations between men and women. Before this development, these relations manifested something Beauvoir calls “the reciprocity of the master-slave relation,” a reciprocity she connects with a certain (historically specific) manifestation of women’s “otherness.” It’s of the highest importance that this is “other” with a small “o.”30 For woman to be “other” to man is for her to appear different in the sense that the traveler regards the natives (and the natives regard the traveler) as “other.” This is the category of the “other” that, Beauvoir claims, is fundamental to consciousness; for two people to be “other” to one another not only does not preclude a certain reciprocity but is in fact necessary for it, insofar as it is precisely the relativity of otherness that inevitably engenders this reciprocity. To be an “Other” in Beauvoir’s idiom, on the other hand, implies the impossibility of this sort of reciprocity with the “One”; it is to be perceived as absolutely metaphysically inferior—as, for example, fundamentally an object as opposed to a subject. The idea, if I understand Beauvoir correctly, is that before the inauguration of the institution of slavery, women were regarded as being in a critical respect different from men and that because of this difference men’s authority over women was limited.
And how were women at that time perceived to be different? Recall that Beauvoir describes these women as “being venerated and feared [by men] for [their] fecundity” and as protected by a taboo. The taboo that protected woman, that made her appear (relatively) “other,” invested her with a certain power over man, a power that caused him to experience his dependence on her in the form of fear and veneration. On my reading of Beauvoir, she wants to say that before the invention of the tool, which means before the “invention” of slavery, men and women were reciprocally dependent on one another in essentially the same way that the master and the slave are in Hegel’s dialectic: the dependence, while “reciprocal,” is not symmetrical; and one party clearly benefits more from the relationship than the other, at least in an everyday, material sense. What distinguished the venerated woman from Hegel’s slave was the simple fact that the man who venerated her, unlike Hegel’s master, recognized his dependence on her—and, of course, he did so precisely through his veneration and awe of her and his belief in the taboo that protected her. Because the person who was consigned to use his tools was not held in such high regard by the man once he became a master—because the man failed to recognize his dependence on his worker—this person, precisely as in Hegel’s dialectic, became the master’s slave. Thus Beauvoir is suggesting that before the invention of the tool woman, while man’s other, was not his slave because, exactly unlike Hegel’s master, man conceptualized her otherness not as absolute inferiority but as difference. This means, that from the outset the woman experienced a certain form of reciprocity, albeit not a perfect one, without having to “risk her life” in the way that the slave—both Hegel’s slave and the Bronze-Age one Beauvoir is discussing—did. The slave (in both cases), on the other hand, was figured by all concerned as someone whose very service to his master served as decisive proof of his inferiority. You might say, looking at matters from Beauvoir’s point of view, that both the historical and Hegelian slaves were initially regarded by themselves and their masters, however delusionally, as (absolute) Others—which is to say, if one runs the logic all the way through, as post–Bronze-Age women. In this historical case, the lack of any external pressure to dispel the delusion meant that “the dialectical play of [the historical slave’s] relation to his master was to take centuries to come into existence.”
I’m arguing, then, that it’s not that Hegel’s prose better “fits” the man-woman relationship than the master-slave one; it’s that Hegel provides Beauvoir with the terms in which to conceive the man-woman relationship and, in turn, to let this conception shed light back on the dialectic itself. Precisely by noticing that the history of man-woman relations does not jibe perfectly with Hegel’s dialectic, Beauvoir finds herself in a philosophically productive position. She sees, for example, that “reciprocity” does not necessarily imply “symmetry”: a relationship can be reciprocal (e.g., two people can be mutually dependent) while grossly asymmetrical (as when a woman is dependent on man for her daily sustenance while man is dependent on woman only insofar as he has a general if marked and persistent fear of her powers of reproduction). I also read Beauvoir as figuring “reciprocity” as something that requires consciousness of whatever form of mutuality is extant. This would mean that on Beauvoir’s understanding of reciprocity the slave and the master in Hegel’s dialectic, while mutually dependent, do not have a reciprocal relationship, per se. For them to achieve reciprocity, I think she is claiming, requires that each become aware of their mutual dependence, something that Beauvoir claims took centuries in the case of historical slaves, so that the dialecticity of the master-slave relationship was, as it were, for a very long time on hold or stalled. In the case of women and men before the Bronze and Iron Ages, on the other hand, man’s and woman’s perceptions of each other as “other” (small “o”) allowed them to enjoy a certain reciprocity, however asymmetrical, apart from a need for either party to risk its life vis-à-vis the other. This would imply, in turn, that a new, symmetrical reciprocity, while requiring acknowledgment of mutual otherness, might come to be in the absence of the sort of fight to the death that is at the center of the master-slave dialectic.
As the “History” section of The Second Sex unfolds, Beauvoir argues that the inauguration of the institution of slavery is what precipitated the change in woman’s status from relative other to absolute Other. She posits that the invention of the tool and tool-driven agricultural practices spurred the development of the institution of private property. The master’s authority over the slave was intertwined with his claim to own the land the slave cultivated for him; and both of these things, Beauvoir argues, “exalted his pride” (78). This pride, she says, was “turned against women,” for the fecundity of the land could now be explained by the labor of the slave on behalf of the master, and thus its magical association with the fecundity of the woman was severed. No longer a venerated “other,” woman became simply another one of man’s possessions, along with his land and his slaves and his children.
And yet, Beauvoir argues, man still feared woman (see, e.g., pp. 79–80). To put the point in Sartrean terms that I imagine would be congenial to Beauvoir, he feared her precisely because his treatment of her as an absolute Other was in massive bad faith: her humanity betrayed itself with her every Look.31 Man’s fear of woman, Beauvoir says, thus came to manifest itself not in the form of veneration or awe—of an acknowledgement of otherness and difference—but in the guise of resentment and hatred, or what we nowadays call misogyny:
Of the ambivalent virtues [vertus] with which she was formerly invested, the evil aspects are now retained: once sacred, she becomes impure. Eve, given to Adam to be his companion, ruined the human race; when they wish to wreak vengeance upon man, the pagan gods invent woman; and it is the first-born of these female creatures, Pandora, who lets loose all the ills from which humanity suffers. The Other—she is passivity confronting activity, diversity that destroys unity, matter as opposed to form, disorder that resists order. Woman is thus dedicated to Evil. (80, TM; LDS 1:134–135)
Here we see Beauvoir adducing familiar myths of Woman as evidence for the depiction of the change in women’s status from other to Other, a change that on my reading she wants to assign to a historically specific moment. In the final section of book 1 of The Second Sex, “Myths”—the section that begins with the long passage from Hegel that I addressed in the first part of the present chapter—Beauvoir chronicles the persistence of figures of misogyny right up through her own era. Is it a coincidence that what launches this section of the book is her appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic? Are we to understand her to be identifying the dialectic as another piece of mythology? Then does she mean to be positing some sort of relationship between mythology and philosophy? And how do mythology and philosophy, whatever their relationship may be, intersect, on her understanding, with the claims she has made about history? What is the philosophical or, particularly, ontological status, to put the question another way, of her claims about the history of the oppression of women? This question—the question of how Beauvoir finds a way, via her appropriation of Hegel, to philosophize about sex difference—will be the focus of the final chapter of this book.