MATERNITY AS NEGOTIATING MUTUAL TRANSCENDENCE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Without failure, no ethics. For a being who, from the outset, is an exact coincidence with himself, a perfect plenitude, the notion “ought to be” [devoir être] would not make sense. One does not propose ethics to a god. It is impossible to propose one to man if he is defined as nature, as given. . . . This means that there can be an “ought to be” [devoir être] only for a being who, according to the existentialist definition, questions himself within his being.
—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, “INTRODUCTION TO AN ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY”
Beauvoir finds that our ethical life is inherently tragic and full of insoluble contradictions. Neither the meaning of our existence nor our ethical standing is assured at any moment. The liberation of others from mechanisms of oppression is the precondition for their freedom, and the freedom of others is the precondition for ours. But these same freedoms are in conflict with one another. We depend on others, but we cannot count on their generosity or collaboration. Beauvoir finds that it is precisely because of our inability to achieve self-coincidence that it makes sense to have an ethics. This lack is vulnerability to others and to a future that always remains unknown. Each time we struggle to overcome who we have been and what we have accomplished, we create a new position to be surpassed. Though many of our strivings are ultimately futile, they are also precisely the manner in which we become present to our existence.1 Our efforts on behalf of ourselves and others are the thrust of ethical life; and the alternative to acknowledging their potential failure is inauthenticity—the denial of my own and/or the other’s freedom and/or limitations.
The failure to coincide with oneself is more than an inability to achieve one’s self-serving goals—to acquire wealth, academic degrees, fame, and so on. It also indicates the impossibility of caring for others and liberating them completely—to answer every time they call, to be present to all of their hopes and pains, to rescue them from every crisis. More than any other person, this is what a mother is expected to do for her children; thus ethical failure is a constant threat to her. Beauvoir richly describes the ways in which motherhood amplifies the painful tensions of ethical life and leads to an attitude of ambivalence toward one’s children. Indeed, we find that maternal ambivalence is an ethical “failure” in the positive sense that it has for Beauvoir. It is a failure to deny the openness of the future, to ignore the needs and values of others, to plow through to one’s ends without regard for their full consequences, and to adhere to abstract principles that may be inappropriate to the circumstances at hand. Maternal ambivalence is a robust exemplar of the contradictions of our ethical life.
Maternity is a unique ethical condition, but it brings into sharp relief the pattern of interdependence that is relevant to all human relationships. It highlights how tragic ethical failure can be. It is not always possible to work for the good of all; even mothers must sometimes sacrifice the freedom or care of one for another. The acknowledgment that someone will be (even temporarily) neglected or abandoned requires that we continue to question the validity of our projects and the costs of achieving them.
INTERSUBJECTIVE AMBIGUITY AND EXISTENTIAL MORALITY
Our freedoms support each other like the stones in an arch . . .
—BEAUVOIR, “PYRRHUS AND CINEAS”
Beauvoir’s philosophical ethical project, including “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (1944), “Moral Idealism and Political Realism” (1945),” Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity” (1946), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948) and The Second Sex (1949), calls for us to “assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of our genuine conditions that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.”2 She indicates the many contradictions at the heart of human existence, acknowledges the conflicts both within ourselves and in our relationships, and demands that we act from out of the knowledge of this ambiguity rather than its denial. While it may be possible to willfully ignore the human condition, Beauvoir demonstrates that if one exercises her freedom then she will continually confront ambiguity. For Beauvoir the realization of freedom is transcendence—exceeding who one is in the present and who one was in the past through engaging in projects that change the future in a direction she values. The desire for transcendence prevents our complacency, our contentment with past achievements.3 A project completed becomes a past to surpass. Yet the exercise of freedom is not just the glorious, uninhibited expression of free will. In taking action one is faced with disruptive questions about the boundaries between oneself and others and the implications of one’s actions for them.4 Works of transcendence bring to light the highly constrained nature of human freedom; it arises within a context of interdependence. “Man can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men. . . . I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth.”5
There are a number of ways that the exercise of one’s freedom depends on others. For one, we require others to give our projects (and thus ourselves) validity and solidity. According to Beauvoir, we are like children who rush to their parents for approval of our every creation.6 It is not enough that our works please us individually; we want them to have an intersubjective importance. What is the point of a great painting or poem that no one sees? Even the works of Vincent van Gogh, who was relatively solitary in his lifetime, are incomplete until others engaged with them. Still, we need more than just appreciators of our works, we also need collaborators. Everything from creating a more efficient bureaucracy to liberating Paris from the Nazis involves cooperation with others. Where would van Gogh be without the financial and emotional support of his brother Theo? What is more, if the full realization of our projects is in their impact on the future, then we rely on others to continue them beyond our lifetimes. The continuation of Beauvoir scholarship and the offering of courses in feminist phenomenology mean that the realization of Beauvoir’s transcendence continues to our present day. Of course, there is no guarantee, even if others take up our project, that it will continue in the spirit we intend: case in point, Parshley’s infamous translation of The Second Sex. As Beauvoir writes: “An action thrown into the world is not propagated infinitely like the wave in classical physics. . . . The action does not stop the instant we accomplish it. It escapes us toward a future, where it is immediately grasped again by foreign consciousness. It is never a blind constraint for the other but a given to be surpassed, and the other surpasses it, not I.”7 Although we cannot control or predict the continued impact of our works, without the investments of others, our efforts would not even make a ripple.8 “Thus, we see that no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others.”9
The investment of others in my projects requires that they voluntarily share the values that I wish to assert. Others can be enslaved to build a pyramid, but, once the whip stops cracking, what is to prevent them from robbing the tomb? The long-standing value of my projects requires that others not be compelled by force or necessity to join my cause. They must have adequate health care, food, shelter, and security so that their lives are not consumed with bare survival.10 This is one reason why we have an interest in the well-being of others. To oppress others would be to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of our own freedom. If others are not free, I have no colleagues, comrades, or allies and my projects will lead a short life.11 For that reason she states: “To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.”12 Our own freedom depends on the welfare of others.
If this concern for the other seems egoistic, it’s important to remember that for Beauvoir the self is not pregiven. Our transcendent projects are the essence of our existence. Since we depend on others for their realization, we have a most fundamental need for other people. “It is because my subjectivity is not inertia, folding in on itself, separation, but, on the contrary, movement toward the other that the difference between me and the other is abolished, and I can call the other mine.”13 It would be a solipsistic error to think that any project, from constructing a house to building a fortune, is merely the distinction of an individual. It is also an attachment with the others who are involved. Paradoxically, any individuality is founded through intertwining with others, and as the other becomes mine, I have responsibility for her. “Is this kind of ethics individualistic or not? Yes, if one means by that it accords to the individual an absolute value and that it recognizes in him alone the power of laying the foundations of his own existence. . . . But it is not solipsistic, since the individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others.”14
For Beauvoir, each person’s entanglement in the web of human relations is an existential fact, preexisting the willing of one’s freedom. Others are necessary to one’s ethical freedom, but they are also integral to one’s natural freedom. Natural freedom—the possibility for transcendence initiated by others’ objectification of oneself and one’s rebellion against this objectification—is the kind of freedom we cannot escape. This is the idea of freedom shared by Sartre in Being and Nothingness that “every man is free, that there is no way of his not being free.”15 For example, Beauvoir claims that the victim of torture is free in the natural sense; she may still assume an attitude of compliance, forgiveness, or rebellion. Clearly, this notion of freedom attends less to the constraining power of situation than ethical freedom does, even though it acknowledges the importance of the existence of others. For Beauvoir, without the other’s objectifying viewpoint, one would be trapped in immanence: “It is the existence of other men that wrests each man from his immanence and enables him to accomplish himself as transcendence, as flight toward the object, as a project.”16 For Beauvoir, this objectification precedes our morally free acts.
Beauvoir believes that natural freedom is consistent with ethical freedom, even though it sets up a conflict in which subjects try to assert themselves over and against each other: “But this foreign freedom, which confirms my freedom, also enters into conflict with it: this is the tragedy of the unhappy consciousness; each consciousness seeks to posit itself alone as sovereign subject. Each one tries to accomplish itself by reducing the other to slavery.”17 The existences of others, who attempt to overpower me, judge me, or treat me as a means to their ends, places my identity continually under threat. The struggle against this reification is an original impetus to realize my freedom. In the context of this ongoing challenge, I seek to reestablish myself by realizing my perspective and values through my actions. For that reason, Beauvoir believes that natural freedom does not suffice for an ethical life; it ought to drive one toward greater accomplishments.
What meaning can there be to will oneself free [ethical freedom], since at the beginning we are free? . . . This objection would mean something only if freedom were a thing or a quality naturally attached to a thing. Then, in effect, one would either have it or not have it. But the fact is that it merges with the very movement of this ambiguous reality which is called existence and which is only by making itself be; to such an extent that it is precisely only by having to be conquered that it gives itself. To will oneself free is to effect the transition from nature to morality by establishing a genuine freedom on the original upsurge of existence.18
The torture victim’s attitude of forgiveness or rebellion is an incomplete response. It is her concrete efforts to eradicate torture, to liberate other victims, or perhaps to take revenge on its perpetrators that fully realize her freedom. Of course, one can be too broken, lazy, cowardly, defeated, or passive to will her freedom and thus fail to recognize the importance of others. However, the existence of our natural freedom means that we will always be confronted by others and the denial of their significance will be a hard-won delusion.
Conflict with others is also inevitable at the practical level for the simple reason that peoples’ desires and interests clash: “I am not dealing with one freedom but with several freedoms. And precisely because they are free, they do not agree among themselves.”19 Since transcendent projects extend beyond oneself, they can impinge on other people. A project that benefits some may devastate others. The dam built on a river provides electricity, but might also ruin fishing downstream. “What is good for different men differs. Working for some often means working against the others. One cannot stop at this tranquil solution: wanting the good of all men. We must define our own good. . . . The respect of the human person in general cannot suffice to guide us because we are dealing with separate and opposed individuals.”20
In spite of the fact that some toes will inevitably be stepped on, Beauvoir declares it a moral error to assert oneself without concern for others, bulldozing through to one’s ends or soaking up the privileges of the oppressor class without regard for the impact on others.21 This is because one’s actions create the circumstances within which others will be either impeded or enabled to act. “What concerns me is the other’s situation, as something founded by me. . . . I am the facticity of his situation.”22 This worry is a central basis for Beauvoir’s “existential morality,” which is given its most mature expression in The Second Sex.23
Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing toward other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion toward an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degradation of existence into “in-itself,” of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil.24
The key existential good is an ever-reaching freedom upon an open future of possibilities. The existential ethic, the realization of one’s freedom, consists in striving to exceed that which one currently is, to achieve transcendence through engaging in projects—meaningful work that affirms one’s own perspective, values, and creativity. The individual who surrenders to her objectification and immanence, who quits striving toward the creative possibilities available to her, has failed morally. In addition, a moral society, institution, or person creates greater opportunities for human beings’ ingenuity, expansiveness, and potential. When restrictions are imposed on the individual that foreclose her opportunities, she is “frustrated and oppressed.” And Beauvoir maintains that it is unqualifiedly immoral to destroy another’s ability to live toward her own ends: “Whatever the problems raised for [man], the setbacks that he will have to assume, and the difficulties with which he will have to struggle, he must reject oppression at any cost.”25
Ultimately, this means that we owe others more than a policy of noninterference; we owe them our vigorous effort toward their liberation. Beauvoir maintains that it is insufficient to grant that the other has ontological freedom. The enslaved, impoverished or colonized person is severely limited by his situation; opportunities for the practical realization of freedom differ tremendously for the child born in an American suburb and one raised in a Brazilian favela. The concept of ontological freedom is largely blind to these differences. To remain ignorant of such inequalities is disingenuous, to deny the importance of situation and leave the marginalized to their own struggle is to remain complicit with their oppressors. Often, any tool with which an oppressed person might have attacked the civilization that subjugates him has been confiscated: “having been kept in a state of servitude and ignorance, they have no means of breaking the ceiling which is stretched over their heads.”26 To be politically detached is simply another way of siding with whomever is strongest at the time.27 Beauvoir insists that caring for the oppressed should not merely be a form of detached paternalistic charity. Since the other’s freedom is integral to one’s own, it is everyone’s cause. “It is this interdependence which explains why oppression is possible and why it is hateful.”28
Although at first it may seem to contradict her emphasis on interpersonal strife and individual freedom, Beauvoir holds generosity as the highest human achievement: “The conflict can be overcome by the free recognition of each individual in the other, each one positing both itself and the other as object and as subject in a reciprocal movement. But friendship and generosity, which accomplish this recognition of freedoms concretely, are not easy virtues; they are undoubtedly man’s highest accomplishment; this is where he is in truth: but this truth is a struggle endlessly begun, endlessly abolished; it demands that man surpass himself at each instant.”29 This notion of generosity involves an enlightened recognition of the others’ and one’s own simultaneous objectivity and subjectivity, which one must continually labor to maintain. This generosity is not at odds with personal liberty; it is precisely the recognition of the other’s freedom. Thus the greatest generosity would be to advocate for the other’s concrete freedom, to be a platform for her transcendence: “A lucid generosity is what should guide our actions. We will assume our own choices and posit as our ends the situations that will be new points of departure for others. But we must not delude ourselves with the hope that we can do anything for others.”30 The best we can do for another is to put him in a position of being capable of striving in the direction he wills.
Recent Beauvoir scholarship agrees that, for Beauvoir, human relations are marked by mutual affirmation and reciprocity; freedom is always relational.31 For example, Barbara Andrew claims that “recognition of the others’ freedom is the only acceptable moral attitude or attunement towards the world.”32 She aligns this view with care ethics: “recognition of the other’s freedom is a response to the ethical needs of those others as well as one’s own ethical needs, and thus is a form of care.”33 Andrew minimizes the importance of interpersonal conflict to Beauvoir’s philosophy: “[Beauvoir] does not see a necessary struggle or a need to destroy the other to establish one’s own subjectivity. . . . Transcendence occurs only through reaching out to others.”34
Numerous scholars agree that Beauvoir’s work has been interpreted falsely as an elaboration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. When her work is considered on its own merits, they think, it becomes clear that for Beauvoir human relationships are not primarily characterized by struggle, that negation of the other is not fundamental for her as it is for Sartre. Ursula Tidd argues this point: “In terms of the Sartrean account of the structure of consciousness—that it entails a double negation: the Self negates itself as not the Other, and negates the Other as object to be transcended—Beauvoir accepts the first negation but not the second. In her account of consciousness, the Other cannot be a mere object of consciousness to be transcended; the Other is already incorporated within the Self’s transcendental movement.”35 Fedrika Scarth also attributes the conflictual model to Sartre. She states that “[Beauvoir’s ethics] is driven by her insistence, contra Sartre, that ethical relationships with others are possible and that relating to others ethically will require the acceptance of our ambiguity as situated and embodied subjects.”36 Julie Ward draws the same conclusion from Beauvoir’s autobiographical work. Ward thinks that harmonious relationships between female friends are Beauvoir’s ideal model:
Among female friends, Beauvoir feels recognized and importantly, preserved, whereas with her male love-objects, she experiences a loss of self. So, the early diary not only shows that Beauvoir possesses a positive notion of being seen by the other but also that the model of this positive relation to another is evident in some of Beauvoir’s female friendships. For Beauvoir, it is precisely with Zaza and Hélène that being with the other is a comfort, not a conflict, and provides continuity, not disruption, to being a subject.37
In “Teaching Sartre About Freedom,” Sonia Kruks argues that these ideas align Beauvoir more with Merleau-Ponty than Sartre: “There is for Merleau-Ponty, unlike Sartre, an undifferentiated or ‘general’ being, a ‘primordial layer at which both things and ideas come into being,’ which is ‘anterior to the ideas of subject and object’ and in which each of us participates as embodied existence. It is through this common participation that we escape the solipsism implied in the Cartesian cogito—a solipsism still lurking in Being and Nothingness.”38
As it should be obvious by now, contemporary Beauvoir scholarship is strongly motivated to distinguish Beauvoir as a philosopher in her own right, apart from Sartre. Kate and Edward Fullbrook’s Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend is often credited with spearheading this effort. The Fullbrooks argue that many of Sartre’s insights from Being and Nothingness originate in his reading of Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay. Margaret Simons also makes this claim and supports it with research on Beauvoir’s diaries that reveal the variety and chronology of her intellectual influences and origination of her ideas.39
In many cases Beauvoir scholars are attempting to retrieve her from critics of her pessimism toward maternity. These detractors believe that Beauvoir describes maternity in negative terms because she appropriates a Sartrean repulsion toward the female body and a one-sidedly conflictridden (Sartrean and Hegelian) account of consciousness.40 For example, Genevieve Lloyd critiques Beauvoir’s account of the female body as “an intrinsic obstacle to transcendence. . . . Underlying de Beauvoir’s descriptions of female biology is the original Hegelian opposition between the individuality of self-consciousness and the inchoate generality of life.”41 Lloyd believes that, for Beauvoir, the female body and its accompanying role must be transcended to achieve authenticity and freedom.42 Similarly, regarding Beauvoir’s decision to write books instead of have children, Alice Jardin claims: “Beauvoir’s decision not to have children in the world might be seen as but an acting out of her complete denial of the maternal, of her refusal of the maternal body’s most intimate influences upon her own body and body of work.”43
In response to this critique of Beauvoir, some supporters “creatively reinterpret” her views deemphasizing the importance of conflict.44 According to Scarth, Beauvoir’s highly conflictual picture of pregnancy is a “rhetorical strategy” designed to overturn the patriarchal myths of pregnant women as passive vessels.45 For Scarth, Beauvoir’s talk of alien invaders and parasites illuminates the transgression of boundaries in pregnancy as “an intense experience of otherness within.”46 Scarth further states: “Beauvoir’s language is excessive, in the sense that many women probably would not recognize themselves and their experience of maternity in it; it is unfamiliar, strange, and disturbing.”47
In The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities, Debra Bergoffen tries to rescue Beauvoir in a similar manner. She claims that Beauvoir and Irigaray have similar ends in mind, although they go about it differently: “Where Beauvoir turns to the model of the generous man and the generous mother and to the phenomenon of the gift to explore the possibilities of immanence, subjective ambiguity/undecidability, and the couple, Irigaray turns to the pregnant body.”48 Along with Irigaray, Bergoffen thinks that the pregnant woman is engaged in an ethical relation originating in the body’s response, that the pregnant body recognizes the fetus as a “gift of generosity, abundance and plenitude to which nothing is owed,”49 and that this bodily response is also the source of the intentional generosity of the mother. “[Beauvoir] does not seem to realize that the maternal body has already expressed [the desire for the happiness of the other].”50 According to Bergoffen, Beauvoir overlooks the inherent generosity of the maternal body and thereby fails to realize the potential in her own work: “Whether Beauvoir has been taken in by a patriarchal imagery which divests pregnancy of its activity or is overreacting to patriarchy’s distorting ‘religion of maternity,’ the effect is the same, she misses the radical implications of her affirmations of the erotic body.”51
Bergoffen implies that there is a unidirectional causality between the pregnant mind and body—that the pregnant body’s generosity inclines the mother herself toward generosity, but that the body’s response is unaffected by the mother’s existent feelings. However, as I discuss in chapter 4, on Levinas, I am skeptical of the idea that maternal munificence originates in the responses of the maternal body. Too little is known about the relationship between the pregnant body and mind. It could be that the body’s reaction to pregnancy is already affected by the mother’s attitude toward it. For example, in “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy,” Caroline Lundquist notes that in denied pregnancies the “normal symptoms” of pregnancy, such as weight gain and morning sickness, are suppressed or reduced. This seems to imply that the mother’s conscious acknowledgment of her pregnancy is necessary in order for it to take its typical course. In addition, denied fetuses are frequently underweight. This is an extraordinary finding since, as Lundquist also notes, the human female is unique in that when resources are limited, her body will direct them toward the fetus first. This means an unwanted fetus cannot be deliberately starved; the mother’s body will be deprived first. Yet in denied pregnancy the fetus often will be deprived of vital nutrients, even when there are enough for both. While no simple conclusions can be drawn from these facts, I think it is safe to say that they complicate any easy assumptions about the generosity of the maternal body.
Even if reciprocity and generosity are paramount to Beauvoir’s ethics, this is insufficient cause to eliminate the strong emphasis she also places on conflict. In The Second Sex, for example, Beauvoir often gives voice to the importance of interpersonal struggles: “Once the subject attempts to assert himself, the other, who limits and denies him, is nonetheless necessary for him: he attains himself only through the reality that he is not. That is why man’s life is never plenitude and rest, it is lack and movement, it is combat.”52 While initially recognizing the ambiguity of our human relations, many scholars ultimately side with only one aspect; the calling to be ethical is affirmed, but the central importance of conflict is denied. However, for Beauvoir, the reason why generosity is so laudable is not because it is necessarily common or prudent, but because it also works against one’s own interests: “To will oneself free is also to will others free. This will is not an abstract formula. It points out to each person the concrete action to be achieved. But others are separate even opposed, and the man of good will sees concrete and difficult problems arising in relations with them.”53 The contradictory nature of this dilemma should not to be diminished.
It is especially troubling that Beauvoir scholars take recourse to the mother-child relationship to deny the importance of interpersonal conflict. Beauvoir’s descriptions of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are not a mere rhetorical strategy. On the contrary, she considers the real threat to women’s freedom that childbearing and rearing presents and considers motherhood as a concrete illustration of her theory. Scarth’s assertion that Beauvoir’s account of maternity is excessive, that most women would not recognize themselves in it, is simply untrue. While some women may not feel this way, many do feel as though they are “at war” with their children and have used similarly strong language to describe their experiences. In attempting to make Beauvoir’s characterization of motherhood more palatable, Beauvoir’s supporters reject her great insights into the intersubjective and ethical lives of mothers.
As I will demonstrate in the next section, this oversight is a serious error. Beauvoir’s characterization of the mother-child relationship is a vivid, and at times raw, example of her philosophy of intersubjective ambiguity. Beauvoir realizes mothers often find themselves in violent opposition to their children, whose well-being is also essential to them. Contrary to scholars such as Scarth and Bergoffen, I argue that Beauvoir offers an accurate depiction of the conflicts central to the maternal condition. Mothers who strive simultaneously for their own freedom and the liberation of their children often face tragic choices. As such, it is clearly an ethical situation, possibly even paradigmatic within an ethics of ambiguity. To minimize the importance of conflict in her account of motherhood is not just to misunderstand Beauvoir on this one count but to iron out the paradoxical nature of her ethics of ambiguity.
THE EXISTENTIAL AND ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MOTHERHOOD
Beauvoir’s ethics is very useful to considering the complexities of motherhood. As described in chapter 3, mothers often experience dramatic losses of self, a newfound passivity and vulnerability, and clashes between their freedom and the needs of their children. Considering Beauvoir’s account of maternity in light of her philosophy, we find that she provides a means of understanding these difficulties in a positive light. Beauvoir’s supposed antinatalism highlights an existentially significant paradox in motherhood—motherhood can simultaneously hold a woman back due to its demands and physical impairments as well as open her to her own authentic becoming. Ultimately, the mother’s ethical “failure”—her ongoing struggle to meet the conflicting, yet interdependent, needs for care and freedom of both self and other—can contribute to both their flourishing. Nevertheless there is a tragic element to ethics, that sometimes the needs of everyone cannot be met. No amount of generosity or good intention can overcome this fact. And mothers, because they are typically responsible for the life and death of their children, especially cannot escape this reality.
The ambiguity of our intersubjective existence comes into sharp relief in the experiences of pregnancy and mothering. As Iris Young famously notes in “Pregnant Embodiment,” to share one’s body is to share one’s self.54 Many mothers and pregnant women report that their sense of self is no longer simply singular. They oscillate between defining themselves as an individual person to experiencing a sense of coconstitutionality with their child or fetus. According to Beauvoir, this ambiguity and the ambivalent feelings it gives rise to are not even escaped by the woman who has an abortion: “This intervention she demands is one she often rejects in her own heart. She is divided inside herself. It might appear that her spontaneous desire is to keep this child whose birth she is preventing; even if she does not positively want this motherhood, she feels ill at ease with the ambiguity of the act she is about to perform. . . . In addition to women who think they tried to kill a living thing, there are women many who feel they have mutilated a part of themselves.”55 In fact, women’s experiences of abortions vary, and this is no doubt deeply influenced by their situation. Nevertheless, the fact that many women experience their abortions with these mixed feelings indicates that it is not easy to escape a sense of coconstitutionality with one’s fetus or child.
In The Second Sex, speaking against a tradition that romanticizes the mother-child relationship, Beauvoir emphasizes the negative aspects of this ambiguity. She describes motherhood as immersing women into immanence and characterizes the fetus as a hostile invader who threatens the mother’s life and freedom. She claims that the nausea, dizziness, diarrhea, constipation, and other common problems associated with pregnancy are largely psychosomatic—expressing the conflict between woman’s own interests and those of the fetus.56 She writes:
But pregnancy is above all a drama playing itself out in the woman between her and herself. She experiences it both as an enrichment and a mutilation; the fetus is part of her body, and it is a parasite exploiting her; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it; it encapsulates the whole future, and in carrying it, she feels as vast as the world; but this very richness annihilates her, she has the impression of not being anything else. A new existence is going to manifest itself and justify her own existence, she is proud of it; but she also feels like the plaything of obscure forces, she is tossed about, assaulted. What is unique about the pregnant woman is that at the very moment her body transcends itself, it is grasped as immanent: it withdraws into itself in nausea and discomfort; it no longer exists for itself alone and then becomes bigger than it has ever been. The transcendence of an artisan or a man of action is driven by subjectivity, but for the future mother the opposition between subject and object disappears; she and this child who swells in her form an ambivalent couple that life submerges; snared by nature, she is plant and animal, a collection of colloids, an incubator, an egg.57
According to Beauvoir, motherhood, and especially pregnancy, sap a woman’s energy, often forcing her to give up her independent projects in order to serve another’s needs. The mother feels the tremendous weight of responsibility for another, the force of another making itself through her in ways she cannot control, and alienation from her body and former life. In pregnancy the mother and child are immersed together in processes of nature, and the woman does not necessarily welcome her newfound vulnerability. Many of the ways in which the child is made, and the mother remade, cannot be willed. This is not to say that they are merely passive instruments of nature, but that the pains, illnesses, and dangers of pregnancy, plus the surprising changes in her body, make a new dimension of the passivity that we all experience especially evident. Although some find Beauvoir’s views to be harsh, they do resonate with other women’s accounts, as I explain in chapter 3. Beauvoir understands a pregnant woman or mother’s negative feelings toward her fetus or child is not merely the emotional reaction of a woman under increased pressures and strains; it is an insightful comprehension of her existential condition.
Nevertheless, in an interview with Margaret Simons, when asked if she thought motherhood was a negative activity, Beauvoir stated:
No, I didn’t say that exactly. I said that there could be a human relation, even a completely interesting and privileged relation between mother and child but that, in many cases, it was on the order of narcissism or tyranny or something like that. But I didn’t say that motherhood in itself was always something to be condemned, no, I didn’t say that. No, something that has dangers, but obviously, any human adventure has its dangers, such as love or anything. I didn’t say that motherhood was something negative.58
It is true that Beauvoir did not fully denigrate maternity. In this passage family life is described as a possible venue for transcendence: “[Some people] have been able to realize their freedom; they have given it a content without disavowing it. They have engaged themselves, without losing themselves, in political action, in intellectual or artistic research, in family or social life.”59 For Beauvoir, it is not the specific content of one’s projects that mark them as works of freedom, but the manner of going about them. Even those who undertake great political or artistic projects may be surrendering to a false seriousness and immanence if they consider the values toward which they work to be absolute: “By virtue of the fact that he refuses to recognize that he is freely establishing the value of the end he sets up, the serious man makes himself the slave of that end. He forgets that every goal is at the same time a point of departure and that human freedom is the ultimate, the unique end which man should destine himself.”60 If one works toward the “unique end” of freedom, regardless of the setting, one affirms transcendence.
In fact, at times Beauvoir seems positively optimistic about the prospects of motherhood. In The Second Sex she says: “These examples all prove that there is no such thing as maternal ‘instinct’: the word does not in any case apply to the human species. The mother’s attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it. It is, as we have seen, extremely variable. But the fact is that if circumstances are not positively unfavorable, the mother will find herself enriched by a child.”61 Yet it is important to note Beauvoir’s insistence that a mother’s attitude is a response to her situation. This can account, in part, for some of her negative evaluations of motherhood’s impact on women. Throughout The Second Sex, Beauvoir places great emphasis on the oppressive circumstances in which women find themselves. For example, Beauvoir discusses the hypocrisy around abortion in France in the 1940s. The subject was taboo, even though, she claims, “in France every year there are as many abortions as births.”62 It was made illegal because it was considered dangerous, though when conducted by a knowledgeable specialist it was much safer than back-alley abortions. In addition, Beauvoir notes that “the same society so determined to defend the rights of the fetus shows no interest in children after they are born.”63 Once born, children were considered the sole responsibility and property of their parents, regardless of the abuses and neglect suffered as a result.64
The situation of mothers today remains very difficult to navigate. According to Sharon Lerner’s The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly nation, 16 percent of families with the lowest incomes get less than two weeks paid vacation and sick leave, and only 59 percent of those in the highest income bracket get that much time paid time off; 71 percent of the poorest working adults cannot take off sick leave for sick children; 34 percent of those in the highest income bracket have the same problem. Families below the poverty line spend a quarter of their income on childcare.65 And the birth of a baby is the primary cause of a poverty spell for American families.66
Conditions such as these place women in the position of making impossible decisions. Consider one example described by Lerner. Gina St. Aubin is a married mother of three and formerly worked as a victim’s advocate. After her oldest son was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, childcare became an issue. Her first sitter quit and the second was fired after admitting to frequently leaving the baby out of earshot when he cried. A qualified caregiver would cost as much as her own salary, so St Aubin quit her job. The increasing costs of medical care, gas, food, and clothing caused further financial strain. Lerner writes:
Gina started to panic. She had already cut back on almost everything she could. The family dressed in secondhand clothes. They hadn’t renewed their zoo pass and didn’t buy any birthday presents or cards. Rather than making a plate for herself at mealtimes and risking the possibility of wasting food, she usually ate the children’s leftovers. [Her son] even stopped participating in the Special Olympics because St. Aubin felt they couldn’t afford his entry fee. Finally she decided to cut back on her son’s therapies, several of which were not covered by insurance. Although she fears that his prospects will dwindle as a result, it had come to those out-of-pocket costs or the mortgage. . . . Facing the bleakest economy in decades, many families are grappling with similarly unimaginable choices: childcare or food? Tuition or nursing home payment? Rent or medicine? The collapse of the housing market, combined with widespread job loss and the skyrocketing costs of food, gas, and other such essentials, has made the reality of many American families that much harsher.67
Facing choices as stark as these, a woman’s concerns for her own flourishing are pushed beyond the back burner right off the stove entirely.
Beauvoir asserts that the mother’s own well-being is, in fact, important, but, insofar as her welfare is intertwined with her children’s, discerning the good requires a complex calculus. Moreover, sometimes the decision regards not only the good of the mother versus the good of the child but between multiple children. This was the case for one mother featured on MTV’s recent documentary No Easy Decision. Markai, the teenage mother of an infant under one, finds herself pregnant after misunderstanding the proper use of her birth control. Believing that she could not follow through with giving her child up for adoption, she faces the decision of having an abortion or raising the new baby. Markai and the baby’s father, James, have just reached a level of financial stability that allows them to have their own apartment. Having both suffered poverty while growing up, their key concern is that, if they keep the second pregnancy, the daughter they already have will suffer. They decide that having an abortion is the responsible solution. However, this decision is made with regret. The day after the abortion they struggle with what to call the terminated pregnancy. They find it upsetting to call it a baby, but the solution offered by the counselor at the abortion clinic—calling it “a little bunch of cells”—feels painfully inadequate. Pointing tearfully to their daughter, Markai says “Nothing but a bunch of cells can turn out just like her.” This example shows that the good of mother, child, and the rest of the family cannot be divorced from one another. What would be the ethical failure here? To keep the pregnancy or to abort it? In either case, the family suffers. Both Markai and Gina St. Aubin confront the tragic face of ethical failure. They recognize that, whatever their decision, someone will suffer. They are left with figuring out who will be neglected and how much, facing their inability to be infinitely responsible for others.
According to Levinas’ philosophy, an abortion could never be ethically justified, because one’s responsibility for the other is infinite. But infinite responsibility is an unsupportable fantasy. To deny that, in some cases, someone’s well-being will be sacrificed is just bad faith. It denies both the realities of human limitation and freedom. As the existentialism truism affirms: choosing not to choose is still a choice. In Markai’s case, choosing not to choose would mean opting for a financially intolerable situation. In Gina’s situation it would mean losing her house. In fact, in order to care for their children, mothers must recognize their limitations. This is why it is not paradoxical for a woman to claim (as many do) that having an abortion is a mothering decision, not shirking their responsibility. In chapter 3 we saw that Judith Arcana argues for this view in her essay “Abortion Is a Motherhood Issue.” This perspective is also affirmed in No Easy Decision. Following the documentary portion of the show, there is an interview with Markai and two other young women (who do not have children) who have had abortions. They each claim that having an abortion is acknowledging, not evading, their responsibilities. One of the women states: “The decision to terminate my pregnancy was a parenting decision. It was a parenting choice and I feel like that dialogue is not out there at all. People assume that if you have an abortion it’s because you are denying the fact that you are a parent, but it’s not. It’s not at all.”68 These women agreed that in their circumstances, having an abortion was the most responsible option. Beauvoir agrees that making an ethical choice sometimes, unfortunately, involves leaving one person’s needs aside. To deny this fact, as Levinas does, is to evade the true gravity of our choices.
If Beauvoir seems ambivalent about motherhood’s potential, I maintain that this is the appropriate attitude, given its potentials to initiate both growth and devastation. Beauvoir is apparently aware of the contradictions of her own position: “As the meaning of pregnancy is thus ambiguous, it is natural for the woman’s attitude to be ambivalent as well”;69 “pregnancy and motherhood are experienced in different ways depending on whether they take place in revolt, resignation, satisfaction or enthusiasm.”70 It is not that some mothers are satisfied and some are resigned, that some revolt and some are enthusiastic. As we read on, we find that Beauvoir appreciates that an individual woman may experience motherhood in most or all of these manners. She may feel fulfilled at times and revolt at others:
One must keep in mind that the decisions and feelings the young mother expresses do not always correspond to her deep desires. An unwed mother can be overwhelmed in material terms by the burden suddenly imposed on her, be openly distressed by it, and yet find in the child the satisfaction of secretly harbored dreams; inversely, a young married woman who joyfully and proudly welcomes her pregnancy can fear it in silence, hate it with obsessions, fantasies, and infantile memories that she refuses to recognize.71
The mother expresses her ambivalence in contradictory fantasies about the child’s future. He may be a hero, a monster, or a little bit of each.
For mothers, as for anyone, Beauvoir arguees that the recognition of her ambiguous condition is the measure of her authenticity. In parenting, the alternatives to this honest assessment are inauthentic denial of one’s own independent needs or an oppressive attitude toward one’s child. Devotion is one form of this self-delusion and seriousness that Beauvoir finds especially odious:
Let’s suppose the other needed me and that his existence had an absolute value. Then my being is justified since I am for a being whose existence is justified. I am released from both the risk and the anguish. By positing an absolute end before me, I have abdicated my freedom; questions are no longer posed; I no longer want to be anything but a response to that appeal which requires me. The master is hungry and thirsty; the devoted slave desires only to be the dish that he prepares and the glass of water that he brings to appease the hunger and thirst; he makes himself into a docile instrument. . . . Many men, and even more women, wish for such a rest: let us devote ourselves.72
The utter dependency of children combined with the cultural belief that women are naturally responsible for them conspire to yoke mothers to their children. Indeed, maternal devotion is the most culturally glorified escape from freedom for women. It provides a false release from the risks of having one’s own projects and facing their potential failure and futility. For a mother to surrender her transcendence to the care of a child is immoral, in Beauvoir’s terms, even if the mother thinks she is doing it for the good of her child. Taking up an attitude of devotion exacerbates mothers’ resentment toward their children, clouding their ability to parent effectively. Recall from chapter 3 that Freud proposed that an excess of devotion was actually repressed ambivalence:
Every psychoanalyst knows how infallibly this anxious excess of tenderness can be resolved even under the most improbable circumstances, as for instance, when it appears between mother and child, or in the case of affectionate married people. Applied to the treatment of privileged persons this theory of an ambivalent feeling would reveal that their veneration, their very deification, is opposed in the unconscious by an intense hostile tendency, so that, as we had expected, the situation of an ambivalent feeling is here realized.73
Freud believes that mothers who display a disproportionate amount of fondness for their children do so as a reaction formation to conceal their hatred. Repressed hostility will still find its expression, even if the person who experiences it does not recognize it as such. Beauvoir noticed the conjoined attitudes of self-abnegation and bitterness in her own mother, the only cure for which was being on her deathbed. Beauvoir writes: “No question of renunciation or sacrifice any more: her first duty was to get better and so to look after herself; giving herself up to her own wishes and her own pleasures with no holding back, she was at last freed from resentment.”74
On this point as well, Beauvoir’s attitude is rightly in opposition to Levinas, who thinks that bowing to the other is the solution to ethical conflicts. Levinas proposes that the other should always win out, no matter the cost to oneself, but, as Beauvoir points out, there is a moral cost to this solution. Even when a mother loves her child as deeply as Levinas predicts, this does not mediate the validity of conflicting interests. Mothers do have a more or less individuated sense of self that existed before the birth of the child and that exists not only to serve but also to flourish in and of itself. The person who is denied such opportunities becomes unable to help others thrive. Beauvoir safeguards the importance of caring for both the self and the other and shows how complex this effort really is. When the needs of self and other are intertwined as well as in conflict, to propose Levinas’s solution—infinite responsibility for the other—is overly simplistic.
Beauvoir categorically refuses the idealization of maternal self-immolation, revealing its sinister potential. This argument is illustrated in “Throwing the Book,” Sara Levine’s essay about her mother-in-law’s devotion to her son. As Beauvoir predicts, the devoted mother clings to her child’s dependence as the source of her own meaning. As a result, she cannot see her son beyond his babyhood: “The woman holds a storehouse of anecdotes about the man I love, anecdotes I longed to hear until I realized all the stories took place before he turned three. Not a single nickname has been allowed to grow stale, though on my first visit to the Cotwold cottage, I observed that ‘our best boy,’ our ‘Small,’ routinely bumped his head on the bedroom ceiling, having grown to six-foot-two.”75 In spite of having moved several times, Levine’s mother-in-law kept her son’s baby dishes in the cabinet and his first Wellies on the doormat. Levine describes a turn in her husband’s baby book in which her mother-in-law begins to write from the baby’s point of view. “Right after she acknowledges the challenges of raising a baby, almost as if it were too difficult to negotiate the tensions between I and he, she throws over the vexed I and begins to write the book as if she were the baby herself. . . . Reading this was like watching a woman get swallowed alive.”76 Later in the essay Levine discusses the oppressive tone of the baby book received as a gift for her own daughter. It encouraged her to give easy meaning to the “welter of feelings and sensations” she experienced, from her “big honking mother love” to “the very information (ambivalence, conflict, the seeds of a storyteller’s art) that, my mother-in-law instinctively understood, a baby book is obliged to purge.”77 Levine finds that even a seemingly harmless artifact, such as a baby book, encourages women to repress the realities of motherhood and deny their own perspective. “Unfortunately, as I saw my handwriting loop across that paper, a part of me that I liked—the independent thinker part—seemed to sicken and die.”78 Mothers are surrounded by propaganda—from diaper commercials to childcare manuals—that encourages them to focus on trivialities and vague sentimentalities, to cling to their children’s dependence as their source of meaning, and ultimately to lose themselves in maternal devotion.
Beauvoir claims that maternal devotion does not end well for mother or child. The mother’s surrender and despotism go hand in hand: “many so called devotions . . . are in truth tyrannies.”79 If the mother loses her sense of herself as an individual, then she will develop a need for the child to depend on her in order to maintain her identity. To Beauvoir, the self-sacrificing mother becomes like a nurse who resents the patient that gets well.80 She may work to keep the child dependent; denying him what is needed to realize his potential and to respond to a future that remains unknown. “And in practice raising a child as one cultivates a plant which one does not consult about its needs is very different from considering it as a freedom to whom the future must be opened. Thus we can set up point number one: the good of an individual or group of individuals requires that it be taken as an absolute end of our action; but we are not authorized to decide upon this end a priori.”81 A plant strives toward light and water, and the way a particular plant will strive can be known in advance, but a child’s ends cannot be known in advance. “The mother can have her reasons for wanting a child, but she cannot give to this other—who tomorrow is going to be—his own raisons d’ être; she engenders him in the generality of his body, not in the specificity of his existence.”82
On this topic, her views seem to be in agreement with Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics. He states that, in order to be an authentic parent, one must “consider . . . everyday emancipation as the real end . . . as freedom, [the child] ought to be recognized for himself.”83 The authentic parent gives the child a concrete sense of her freedom and eventually makes herself, as caretaker, obsolete. This does not mean that the authentic parent overlooks the child’s need for protection and nurturance. In “Sartre, Embodied Minds, Authenticity, and Childhood,” Adrian Mirvish provides a helpful illustration of how parents negotiate between protecting the child in her fragility and encouraging the free pursuit of her own projects. When the parent teaches the child to ride a bicycle, at first he hangs onto it while she gets the feeling of it. Eventually, however, when the child seems ready, the parent must let go.84 As Beauvoir insists, a parent cannot control who a child becomes: “To bring a child into the world is not to found him.”85 “I bring a child into the world; if he becomes a criminal, I am not an evildoer.”86 Though one may be deeply invested in another’s freedom and well-being, another person’s life cannot justifiably be one’s own project.
Ideally, the mother gives the child a concrete sense of her freedom. As a healthy child develops, every milestone achieved is a step toward a more independent existence. According to Beauvoir, one can only be a point of departure for another, a platform for her transcendence. “I never create anything for the other except points of departure. . . . I am not the one who founds the other; I am only the instrument upon which the other founds himself. He alone makes himself be by transcending my gifts.”87 “And that is exactly what makes for the touching character of maternal love, properly understood.”88 This moving maternal love requires the maintenance of the mother’s own individuality, provision for her needs, and meaningful work beyond the care of her children:
In a properly organized society where the child would in great part be taken care of by the group, where the mother would be cared for and helped, motherhood would absolutely not be incompatible with women’s work. . . . It is the woman who has the richest personal life who will give the most to her child and who will ask for the least, she who acquires real human values through effort and struggle will be the most fit to bring up children. If too often today a woman has a hard time reconciling the interests of her children with a profession that demands long hours away from home and all her strength, it is because, on the one hand, woman’s work is still too often a kind of slavery; on the other hand, no effort has been made to ensure children’s health, care, and education outside the home. This is social neglect: but it is solipsism to justify it by pretending that a law was written in heaven or in the bowels of the earth that requires that the mother and child belong to each other exclusively; this mutual belonging in reality only constitutes a double and harmful oppression.89
Beauvoir argues that given proper support women can have both satisfying family life and careers, but the social neglect of mothers continues. For example, in the United States, women do twice as much housework as men, many women are forced by their employers to choose between working more than full time and quitting their jobs entirely, and single women with children earn fifty-six cents of every dollar that married men make.90 Only one in seven of the fifteen million children who qualified for federally funded subsidized childcare in 2000 received it.91 Women who are attempting to do it all, in spite of these conditions, are simply worn out. There is what Lerner calls “an epidemic of exhaustion” among mothers “sweeping through cubicle, cluttered kitchens, and child-care centers around the country. Call these women the maxed-out generation, if you like; victims of a family-unfriendly nation; or simply ‘hosed.’”92 For most mothers, a “rich personal life” is but a flight of the imagination. Thus, if Beauvoir infrequently addresses the elevating potential of motherhood, this is in keeping with her emphasis on the importance of social, political, and material context. She rightly points out that, with conditions as they are, having children threatens a woman’s well-being in all respects.
Beauvoir’s emphasis on a situated ethics is a critical improvement, especially over Levinas. As mentioned in chapter 5, Merleau-Ponty briefly notes the importance of a mother’s context in her responses to her child. For Levinas, however, one’s responsibility for the other is infinite regardless of social location. In contrast, Beauvoir considers our ethical responses as they are positioned in larger circumstances, especially with regard to maternal responsibility: “The mother’s relation with her children is defined within the overall context of her life; it depends on her relations with her husband, her past, her occupations, herself; it is a fatal and absurd error to claim to see a child as a panacea. . . . The young woman must be in a psychological, moral, and material situation that allows her to bear the responsibility; if not, the consequences will be disastrous.”93 Given our interdependence, Beauvoir articulates how the burden of ethical life should not rest solely on the shoulders of the individual. As she demonstrates, the inherently conflicted nature of the mother-child relationship is exacerbated by insufficient social support. Given the contemporary constraints faced by mothers, they need a way to understand the feelings and impulses they are most ashamed of beyond the discourse of individual moral failure or success.
The double binds of mothering can lead to homicidal and/or suicidal depression and acts of violent retribution or neglect. Maternal aggression, a phenomenon that is much more common than recognized, is often a sign that the mother is in need of physical and psychological distance. The desire to pull back, to reclaim one’s bodily boundaries, can be an appropriate and productive move toward separation on the mother’s part.94 Her need for independence guards against a potentially consuming intimacy. As Adrienne Rich writes, mothers find the need to “struggle from that one-to-one intensity into new realization, or reaffirmation, of her being-unto-herself. . . . The mother has to wean herself from the infant and the infant from herself. In psychologies of child-rearing the emphasis is placed on ‘letting the child go’ for the child’s sake. But the mother needs to let it go as much or more for her own . . . it is not enough to let our children go; we need selves of our own to return to.”95
Beauvoir rightly thinks that whether or not a mother is ethical in the existential sense depends both on her situation and how she takes it up. In a society that alternately romanticizes and condemns mothers, it is a brave overcoming of cultural denial to recognize the duality of maternal experience. For this reason, maternal ambivalence, though painful, is a psychological and ethical achievement. As Rozsika Parker writes: “the mother’s achievement of ambivalence—the awareness of her co-existing love and hate for the [child]—can promote a sense of concern and responsibility towards, and differentiation of self from, the [child]. Maternal ambivalence signifies the mother’s capacity to know herself and to tolerate traits in herself she may consider less than admirable—and to hold a more complete image of her baby. Accordingly, idealization and/or denigration of self and, by extension, her baby, diminish.”96
The potential of motherhood to enrich comes from the fact that others can keep us from “hardening in the absurdity of facticity.”97 A mother’s identity may have been based primarily on her own achievements, actions, and qualities before she had children, but, to the extent that she cares for her child’s well-being, this is no longer true. For a loving mother, her sense of self, groundedness, and well-being are, at least in part, dependent on meeting the needs of her child. In such cases, one who obstructs her self-determination is also integral to her. Though one is never fully transparent to oneself, self-alienation is dramatic when one is in symbiotic relation to one’s saboteur. Beauvoir believes in the transformative power of disturbances to one’s self-concept. And, indeed, there is an abundance of recent motherhood memoirs describing how the experience of motherhood changed a woman for the better. In a recent review of a number of these autobiographies, Kristin Kovacic writes: “In each book, it takes a lot of time, a lot of therapy, and a baby, to get to full maturity.”98 Mothering inspires many women to take charge of their own lives for the first time. In two examples, From Beer to Maternity by Maggie Lamond Simone and Lit by May Karr, motherhood helps the mother, a chronic drunk, to get sober. But as Kovacic notes, it is not mothering alone that does the trick. Motherhood inspires these women to find meaningful projects of their own.
The other invites one to see oneself from an outside perspective, from the point of view of their needs and desires. Mothers inhabit a powerful tension between their self-identities and the force of the child’s and society’s views of her. At many turns women are invited to instrumentalize themselves for the care of others. Should she resist that pull, she will acquire an identity that exists in authentic ambiguity. Where women expect to have an independent identity and yet, as mothers, are fundamentally intertwined with their children, there may be no way to avoid feeling torn.
—SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY
For Beauvoir, a successful ethical life means that one strives toward one’s own transcendence and contributes to the opportunities of others.99 She believes that we are meant to reach beyond our limitations and thus we will often fall short of what we want to be. We require the liberation of others to succeed, but this is far from guaranteed. Caring for other people will often drain us of the energy to pursue our own projects, and when we do manage to help them we may fail to fully liberate them. Those who have opportunities for free action will often not support my own projects, but rather assert their values and desires in opposition to mine. Likewise, since everyone’s interests are not the same, those projects of mine that do reach fruition are likely to impede some people, even if they aid others. To top it off, these conflicts with others are both fundamental to and frustrate my own freedom. As Beauvoir sees it, failure is entwined in the braid of ethical life.
Beauvoir makes clear the importance of acknowledging our limitations in “Moral Idealism and Political Realism.” In this essay she describes the problems with political action, which she conceives as one kind of transcendent action. Political action is tricky because in changing the world to benefit some, others are likely to get hurt. The moral idealist and political realist wish to deny the significance of these facts; both make an absolute object of their ends, which allows them to deny the sacrifices of their causes. This recognition of the possibility for misjudgment in one’s ethical and political life is paramount. We must acknowledge our actions entail risks that no absolute authority can safely justify: “This means that the political man cannot avoid making decisions or choices; things will not give him ready-made answers, neither on the level of being nor on the level of values. In each new situation he must question himself anew about his ends, and he must choose and justify them without assistance. But it is precisely in this free engagement that morality resides.”100 Beauvoir requires that we continue to question the validity of our projects and the costs of achieving them. The likelihood of ethical failure does not mean that our existence is absurd and meaningless, but it does indicate that life’s significance is not pregiven. “Ethics is not the ensemble of constituted values and principles; it is the constituting movement through which values and principles are posited; it is the movement that an authentically moral man must reproduce himself.”101 The meaning of life must be striven toward and asserted, but also interrogated and justified. To this end, a certain amount of self-doubt is essential.
The fact that we do not achieve moral perfection means that we must continue to strive, and for an existential ethics this is certainly a good thing. Beauvoir rejoices at the tension between failure and success in “Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity” as bringing one in touch with a central truth of the human experience. She merrily declares, “I delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession.”102 In this case she focuses on the impossibility of complete self-determination as “delicious torment, cruel happiness, blessed torture.”103 Nevertheless, a bit of self-deception accompanies her happiness in this early work. As she later finds, the disappointment of failing oneself and others cannot be salved. She writes more intimately of the failure to be completely there for a beloved other in A Very Easy Death—the chronicle of her mother’s last days. In this work the nettles sting cruelly, not sweetly. She writes: “When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets . . . you feel that she should have had more room in your life—all the room, if need be. You snatch yourself away from this wildness: she was only one among many. But since you never do all you might for anyone—not even within the arguable limits that you have set yourself—you have plenty of room left for self-reproach.”104
Our moral obligations to others are weighty, sometimes to the point of becoming oppressive. For numerous reasons this is even more strongly the case in a mother’s relationship to her children—the economic situation of mothers is often so bleak, their responsibility is nearly complete (as the obligation to care for children is insufficiently shared), and the consequences of their actions can make the difference between the life and death of another person. The interconnection between the interests of the self and other is typically a core feature of the mother-child relationship. Yet, because the neediness of children can be so overwhelming, conflicts of interest are even more prominent and inevitable than in any other kind of relationship. Thus the possibility of grave moral failure is a real and terrifying prospect to mothers. The unique features of this relationship mean opportunities for regret are perhaps more numerous than in any other kind. She finds herself continually under question. Perhaps this is why Adrienne Rich once said that “guilt, guilt, guilt” is the mother’s real G-spot.
The denial of pre-established ideals requires that one attend to the particular situation. For example, some think that a mother should always attend her child’s needs before her own, but life is rarely that simple. Many women who think that they would never have an abortion find themselves in circumstances in which they can not sustain a child’s life or provide for her flourishing. Sometimes it is necessary to secure one’s own oxygen mask before others. And sometimes “saving” one child might mean aborting the life of another. Assuming we can know the right thing to do in advance is a denial of the unpredictable nature of the future and the needs and desires of other individuals. That is why parents often find unsolicited childcare advice from friends, relatives, and strangers to be so obnoxious. What works for one baby and family does not always work for another. When left to cry himself to sleep, one baby learns to self-soothe while another cries until he vomits. For this reason, Beauvoir refuses to give her readers advice: “It will be said that these considerations remain quite abstract. What must be done practically? Which action is good? Which is bad? To ask such a question is also to fall into naïve abstraction. We don’t ask the physicist, ‘Which hypotheses are true?’ Nor the artist, ‘By what procedures does one produce a work whose beauty is guaranteed?’ Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods.”105
Beauvoir helps to make clear that even the most generous mother will rightfully feel a conflict between her child’s needs and desires and her own. Since there is no guarantee that children will recognize their mothers as independent of them and having needs of their own, it may be necessary and appropriate for the mother to assert her interests against those of the child. While a sense of mutuality may motivate the desire to nurture, dispute forces recognition of interpersonal divergence. One’s child, no matter how beloved, is also radically Other, with discrepant goals, experiences, and sometimes even values. A mother’s self-coincidence is unsettled by unclear boundaries between herself and her child. Yet the inability to gain full self-certainty is a good failure insofar as it opens a gap for ethical self-questioning. Phenomenologically the conflict between mother and child is there. Recognizing this clash is the beginning of negotiating mutual transcendence—the only kind of transcendence that is really possible.