Simone de Beauvoir

Ursula Tidd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134503339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking work has transformed the way we think about gender and identity. Without her 1949 text The Second Sex, gender theory as we know it today would be unthinkable. A leading figure in French existentialism, Beauvoir's concepts of 'becoming woman' and of woman as 'Other' are among the most influential ideas in feminist enquiry and debate.
This book guides the reader through the main areas of Simone de Beauvoir's thought, including:
*existentialism and ethics
*gender studies and feminism
*literature and autobiography
*sexuality, the body and ageing
Drawing upon Beauvoir's literary and theoretical texts, this is the ideal introduction to her thought for students on a range of courses including literature, cultural studies, gender, philosophy and modern languages.

KEY IDEAS

1

EXISTENTIALISM

Simone de Beauvoir is often associated with the strand of atheistic existentialism which developed in France during the Second World War and found its expression in philosophical texts as well as in prose fiction, drama, music and the visual arts of the period. As well as providing part of the philosophical context for The Second Sex and Old Age, existentialism informs Beauvoir's literary practice. It is important, then, that we examine the basic notions associated with French atheistic existentialism before turning to other aspects of her work. This chapter also begins to explore Beauvoir's interpretation and ethical critique of existentialist philosophy.

Initially, Beauvoir claimed that she and Sartre did not understand what ‘existentialism’ meant! Commenting on the reception of her second novel, The Blood of Others, in 1945, Beauvoir writes in her autobiography:

It was labelled not only a ‘Resistance novel’ but also an ‘Existentialist novel’. Henceforth this label was to be affixed automatically to any work by Sartre or myself. […] Sartre had refused to allow Gabriel Marcel to apply this adjective to him: ‘My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don't even know what “Existentialism” is.’ I shared his irritation. I had written my novel before I had even encountered the term ‘Existentialist’; my inspiration came from my own experience, not from a system. But our protests were in vain. In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it for our own purposes.

(FC: 45–46)

EXISTENTIALISM

What is existentialism? The term is sometimes used narrowly in connection with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre; however, it refers more generally to the work of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers, such as Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and Simone de Beauvoir. Most of these thinkers rejected the ‘existentialist’ label and preferred to describe their work as ‘existential philosophy’ or as ‘a philosophy of existence’. If existentialism could be summarised in three words, they might be ‘freedom’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘authenticity’. Existentialists claim that human beings have no predetermined purpose or essence laid down by God or nature. They are responsible for creating their lives according to their own values — and not by following the ‘herd’ — by reflecting clearly on their situation and relationships and by acting authentically.

The origins of existentialism can be traced far back into the history of philosophy in its rejection of essentialism or the notion that human beings have an inner nature or essence. However, French atheistic existentialism, as it is represented in Beauvoir's thought, is the result of a complex and partial synthesis of several philosophers' ideas, the first of these being Hegel. Indeed, modern existentialism originated in the nineteenth century as a reaction, initiated by Kierkegaard, to the abstract rationalism of Hegel's philosophy.

HEGEL

Hegel's philosophy was the central philosophical influence on the thought of the German Communist thinkers, Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and has had a huge influence in philosophy, history and politics. Hegel was a German idealist philosopher who published four major works in his lifetime: Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), described by Marx as ‘the true birthplace and secret of Hegel's philosophy’; Science of Logic (1812–1816); Encyclopedia (1817, 1827, 1830) and Philosophy of Right (1821), although, as we shall see, it was his Phenomenology of Spirit which had the greatest influence on Beauvoir's thought.

Hegel was interested in how we achieve knowledge of what we call ‘reality’. He argued in Phenomenology of Spirit that this ‘spirit’, or self-consciousness, travels on its way through various stages of consciousness on its quest for absolute knowledge. This journey involves a fitful progression from error to enlightenment to greater self-knowledge — a bit of a metaphor for life really! Hegel viewed history as the realisation of this spirit of freedom, which proceeds through the three dialectical phases of thesis, antithesis and synthesis towards reason.

Judith Butler, a highly influential theorist in contemporary gender studies, has described Hegel's travelling self-consciousness as a cartoon figure, always encountering obstacles and difficulties and having to pick itself up, dust itself down and start again (Butler 1987: 21). What stops this spirit, or self-consciousness, abandoning its quest is desire — first, to overcome the obstacles encountered and, second, to achieve ultimate self-knowledge. But the spirit can only know itself through another self-consciousness, which will be sacrificed to the spirit's search. Indeed, Hegel thought that historical development or dialectical change can only occur through a confrontation between self-consciousnesses.

Unlike René Descartes (1596–1650), a founder of modern philosophy who, in his quest for the foundations of knowledge, presumed that a self-conscious, self-knowing subject (known as ‘the cogito’) was the source and guarantee of knowledge, Hegel argued in the Phenomenology that a self-consciousness cannot exist without the Other.

DIALECTIC

The term ‘dialectic’ refers to a philosophical process and is particularly associated with Hegel, although it has its roots in the works of the Ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. A dialectical movement involves asserting a thesis which is then negated by its antithesis and subsequently resolved in the synthesis, which in turn becomes the next thesis and so on. An example of dialectical thinking might be: Thesis: ‘All dogs chase cats’; Anti-thesis: ‘My dog, who lives in the same house as cats, does not chase cats’; Synthesis/New thesis: ‘Some dogs chase cats’.

Hegel thus introduced the notion of ‘alterity’, or otherness, as the necessary condition for the existence of self-consciousness (Grosz 1989: 3). Each self-consciousness requires the recognition of the Other, then, to achieve self-certainty and this recognition is achieved through the process known as ‘the master—slave dialectic’. This was one of the key concepts in Hegel's system and was especially important for Beauvoir and Sartre. It was also adopted and adapted by Marxism, existentialism and absorbed into much of post-1945 French thought.

THE MASTER—SLAVE DIALECTIC

The master—slave dialectic is a concept which appears in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in his account of self-consciousness (Hegel 1977: 111–119). Self-consciousness is the characteristic which distinguishes human beings from other things in the world. Note here that the German word for self-consciousness, ‘Selbstbewusstsein’, can also mean ‘being self-assured’, so it has a positive meaning (rather than the negative connotations of embarrassment associated with the English word, ‘self-consciousness’). He argues that self-consciousness cannot exist in isolation, for it needs an external object — that is, another self-consciousness — from which it can differentiate itself. I can only be aware of myself if I am aware of something else which is not myself. But this external object, desired by self-consciousness as a means to define itself, is also a threat. Self-consciousness cannot negate or obliterate this external object because, in so doing, it will negate or obliterate the means of its own existence. To achieve confirmation of the certainty of its existence, self-consciousness needs to be recognised as such by another self-consciousness: human beings need to recognise each other as similarly conscious beings in the world to be sure that they exist. So being ‘recognised’ by another human being potentially enables the subject to gain reassurance of the fact of his/her own existence or ontological security, but such recognition can also constitute a threat. Why? When two people meet, they each seek a reflection of themselves in the other. In so doing, one person is objectified or rendered an Other who is then experienced as a threat to the subject. Each self-consciousness tries to display itself as pure ‘being-for-itself’, or pure existence, with no attachment to vulnerable material objects, such as its own body or the body of the Other. A struggle for life or death is embarked upon to demonstrate this lack of attachment to materiality and thus to prove his/her active universality. So the initial mode of engagement between these two self-consciousnesses is not recognition of each other, but conflict, caused by existential fear and need (for recognition). This conflict between self and Other cannot, of course, end in death because such an outcome would destroy all possibility of recognition. So one person gives way, thereby negating his/her independence and positioning him/herself as the ‘slave’ to the independent ‘master’. But the master, despite enjoying the fruits of the slave's labour, does not receive the independent recognition s/he sought from a ‘free’ being because the slave is bound to the material world with no independent consciousness. However, all is not lost for the slave for s/he mediates the master's relationship with the material world. Through this direct connection with the material world, the slave gains a certain satisfaction through his/her labours and consciousness of him/herself and of his/her oppression. The slave therefore objectifies or externalises him/herself through his/her labour and it is this ability to change the material world through his/her own efforts and the slave's fear of death which will ultimately lead to his/her freedom. The master, however, remains condemned to enjoy the fruits of domination while becoming more and more detached from the world, deprived of the recognition that s/he initially sought. The ‘journey’ of the spirit and its passage through the master—slave dialectic is, of course, not to be understood literally! But Hegel's account of the journey of ‘spirit’ describes how subjects or individuals come into being and how they are mutually dependent on each other and their labour in the world for a sense of selfhood. This account can be exemplified in personal and collective relationships — how people, local communities and nation states might recognise that respectful cooperation and mutual ‘give and take’ tends to work better as a model for diplomatic self—Other interaction than attempting to impose one's will and personal desires violently upon others, which tends to lead ultimately to rejection, isolation and possibly, annihilation.

NEO-HEGELIANISM

Neither Beauvoir nor Sartre studied Hegel in depth before 1940. Prior to the 1930s, there was little interest in Hegel in France, partly due to the dominance of the Cartesian and Kantian philosophical traditions (Lundgren-Gothlin 1996: 56). As noted in Chapter 1, Beauvoir trained as a philosopher in the 1920s and was not exposed to the philosophies of Hegel, Husserl or Heidegger at the Sorbonne; yet these philosophers were to prove influential in her later thought. She became acquainted with these thinkers in the 1930s, when a certain synthesis between the ideas of Kierkegaard and the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger was encouraged because existentialism and phenomenology (the study of how things appear to consciousness) were both introduced

KARL MARX (1818–1883)

Karl Marx was a left-wing political philosopher whose analyses of ‘capitalism’ have proved enormously influential across the world in the twentieth century, although his theories have borne little relation to the political regimes and ideologies which claim to be ‘Marxist’. Marx's revolutionary philosophy is, importantly, based on a materialist analysis of society; in other words, an analysis which focuses on the concrete world in which people live and the ways in which social structures and everyday practices contribute to its being an inequitable and oppressive place. Marx focused on the economic organisation of society (the ‘base’) and argued that all aspects of life were, ultimately, explicable through underlying economic relations. Out of the economic ‘base’ grows the ‘superstructure’ (comprising, for example, law, political representation, religion and culture) which sustains that ‘base’. Human behaviour could be explained by the ways in which different social classes have competed against each other for money or for the means of wealth production. Drawing on Hegel's account of the master—slave dialectic and of history as a dialectical process, Marx developed ideas such as the theory of ‘alienated labour’, whereby the worker loses the object of his/her labour to his/her employer who, in profiting from this labour, makes more capital and gains more power over the worker. The solution to such inequities, for Marx, was the abolition of private property and of oppression. The influence of Marx's thought on existential phenomenology can be seen in the latter's emphasis on labour as a fundamental human activity and on the pairing of Hegel's master—slave dialectic with Marx's idea of class struggle (Lundgren-Gothlin 1996: 85). In The Second Sex, as we will see in Chapter 3, Beauvoir uses various Marxist ideas, such as ‘alienation’ and the importance of productive activity for human development and history.

to France at approximately the same time (Lundgren-Gothlin 1996: 133). Furthermore, phenomenology became more widely known at approximately the same time as a revival of interest in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, stimulated by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite who respectively provided existentialist and Marxist interpretations of the text. This neo-Hegelian revival, led by Kojève and Hyppolite, inspired a new generation of French thinkers — including Beauvoir and Sartre — to discover Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and other writings. Hegel's philosophy would acquire a new, radical interpretation, which drew on Marxist theory and existential phenomenology.

Kojève's seminars on Hegel, which took place in Paris between 1933 and 1939, were highly influential and attended by figures such as the sociologist, Raymond Aron (1905–1983), the philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), who later worked with Sartre and Beauvoir at Les Temps Modernes, and the Freudian revisionist psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). All later went on to become major figures in post-war French thought. Simone de Beauvoir probably did not attend these seminars; however, she read Kojève's work on Hegel and was a close friend of Merleau-Ponty at this time. In this way, Beauvoir's interpretation of Hegel was most probably influenced by these Marxist and existentialist readings of Phenomenology of Spirit.

The importance of this neo-Hegelian revival for Beauvoir and her generation was that Kojève placed the question of subjectivity and self-consciousness and the relationship with the Other at the heart of politics and history (Grosz 1989: 5–6). Kojève emphasised the dialectical nature of history as it is produced through struggle and resistance. Subjectivity and self-knowledge were not conceptualised as isolated from the other and the world as in the Cartesian system, but as a product of the self-conscious subject's encounters with the Other, the community and its institutions.

As we will see in more detail in Chapter 3, like Kojève, Beauvoir was especially interested in Hegel's master—slave dialectic, using a quotation from his Phenomenology as the epigraph (‘each consciousness seeks the death of the other’) to her first novel, She Came to Stay — unfortunately omitted in the English translation of the novel.

In The...