Abstract
This chapter begins with a phenomenological reading of the awakening of a woman to her cognitive and non-cognitive capacities; traditional imagery elucidates the nature of “the lived body”, which is thought to exist as a kind of post-Kantian a priori, whose flesh knits human bodies together within a world. This body is a synthetic form capable of creating unity out of multiple sensations, but also capable of generating differentiations in its relation to a world. Granted the lived body, how does the body-subject lose confidence in her own capability? A doubt or weakness is something portrayed in traditional myths about Eve and similarly in twentieth-century portraits of the young Simone de Beauvoir. Each capable subject can imagine herself in the bodily situation of Eve: awakened to the incarnate modalities of our existence we discover the possibilities of “transcendence incarnate.” We appear to be given abilities for transcendence; and yet the ambiguity of transcendence within a fleshy, bodily existence suggests a loss of what is, in phenomenological terms, “originally” ours. The chapter demonstrates that what makes a particular person a woman has at a certain historical moment and within a western philosophical tradition also marked her as, in Beauvoir’s terms, “the second sex.” The gendered variations which distinguish confidence as a personal and social phenomenon indicate that neither women nor men are as we might be. The chapter concludes by advocating a transformation of this negative reality into something positive for transcendence incarnate: new ethical confidence in the abilities of capable subjects.
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Notes
- 1.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, pp. x–xvi).
- 2.
Hersch (1985, p. 27); quoted by Le Doeuff (2003, p. 67) (emphasis added). The depiction of Eve about which Le Doeuff and Hersch speak derives from the twelfth-century sculptor Gislebert (also known as Gislebertus) whose “la tentation d’ Eve” was a linteau constructed above the north door on the early twelfth-century cathedral at St-Lazare in Autun, France; however, this sculpted depiction of Eve is no longer part of the cathedral but in the Musée Rolin in Autun.
- 3.
I am indebted to Paul Ricoeur’s last writings on “capability” but am still trying to work out exactly where to locate this idea: is it “pre-personal” in Merleau-Ponty sense of the adjective? “Capability” seems to be a metaphysical notion in Ricoeur, especially since informed by Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Spinoza’s Ethics, grounding his discussions of “selfhood” and the “I” abilities, including “I can speak, I can narrate, I can act” see Ricoeur (2007, 76 f.); cf. Ricoeur (1992, pp. 10–23 and 298–317).
- 4.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. xv; cf. 250).
- 5.
de Beauvoir (1989).
- 6.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, pp. 158–160, n94, 257 f. and 403–425).
- 7.
Ricoeur (2007, pp. 76–77).
- 8.
Mulhall (2005, pp. 6–15).
- 9.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. xv and 180–182).
- 10.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 250). For very significant and sympathetic feminist readings of Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, see Heinämaa (2003, pp. 66–86) and Langer in Card (Ed.) (2003, pp. 87–109); and Kruks (2006, pp. 25–48) (but some of the other essays in this volume are much less sympathetic to Merleau-Ponty).
- 11.
Ricoeur’s notion of “captivity” goes back to his early work in Ricoeur (1969, pp. 4–10, 152, 237); cf. Kant (1996); and Anderson (1993, pp. 82–93, 102–112). Ricoeur’s last work in which he develops an account of the capable human subject is clearly Kantian but also Spinozist (!) rather than Sartrean. Crucially Ricoeur does not think that captivity eclipses the fundamental condition of human autonomy; even if autonomy remains both “a condition” and “a task” (Ricoeur’s terms) one’s capability remain. Captivity makes us vulnerable and inclined to evil, but does not destroy the capability which renders us human and responsible; see Ricoeur (2007 pp. 51–52, 65, 74–84). Compare Ricoeur’s account to Mulhall (2005, p. 9).
- 12.
Beauvoir (1976, p. 17); cf. Merleau-Ponty (2002, p. 241).
- 13.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, pp. 250–257).
- 14.
I aim to explore Kantian questions concerning “the a priori” further by reading Dufrenne (2009).
- 15.
Kant (1933, pp. 297–300) (A293–8; B349–55).
- 16.
Kant (1933, B xxviii).
- 17.
Kant (1933, pp. 364–366, 377–378 (A401–3, B422).
- 18.
Merleau-Ponty (2002, pp. 71–73).
- 19.
Ibid. (p. 72). This question to Merleau-Ponty may have a partial answer at least in Ricoeur’s grounding of “selfhood” in Spinoza’s Ethics; see Ricoeur (1992, 315–317).
- 20.
Kant (1933, pp. 152–153) (B131–3).
- 21.
ibid. (pp. 136–137, 154–155) (A108; cf. B135).
- 22.
Ibid. (pp. 152–153) (B 131–2).
- 23.
Ibid. (pp. 153–155) (B132–5)
- 24.
Cf. Ricoeur (1992, pp. 240–296).
- 25.
Kant (1933, pp. 364–366, 377–378) (A401–2, B422).
- 26.
For a feminist critique of Kant’s transcendental subject, see Battersby (1998, pp. 61–80). For feminist criticism of Merleau-Ponty, see Le Doeuff (2003, pp. 79–85); and Kruks (2006).
- 27.
Anderson (2004, pp. 87–102). For a more sustained work on the ethics of knowing, see Fricker (2007).
- 28.
Ricoeur (2007, pp. 2, 39, 47–52).
- 29.
Anderson (1998, pp. 189–230).
- 30.
Le Doeuff (2003, pp. 67–68).
- 31.
Kant (1933, especially pp. 166–169) (B153–8).
- 32.
Le Doeuff explains that she is in part reliant on Bachelard’s conception of the imaginary, yet her own originality moves beyond Bachelard on the relation of the imaginary to conceptual thinking, see Le Doeuff (2002, pp. 2–7 f.).
- 33.
Le Doeuff (2003, pp. 33–39, 67–68).
- 34.
For an especially lucid response, which brings in the idea of the capable human subject (homo capax), to the contestations generated by placing Ricoeur’s work on narrative identity in various concrete contexts, see Ricoeur (1997, pp. xxxix–1).
- 35.
Ricoeur (2007, p. 83).
- 36.
To be fair, consider Merleau-Ponty (1968); and Irigaray (1993, pp. 151–185) cf. Butler (2006).
- 37.
Ricoeur (2007, p. 83). This idea could be sharply contrasted to the position found in Levinas (1991, p. 76).
- 38.
The social positioning of gender matters: if a woman begins as the Other, and then, is overwhelmed by others where/when does she find her own subject position? Ethical confidence would not necessarily be given to Levinas’ ironic host-hostage on whom infinite demands are place: what has to be acknowledged as confused in this picture is that the subject and the other do not start from neutral, pre-personal positions, but from the personal and social locatedness of gender and other social-material hierarchies; cf. Translator’s Introduction, Otherwise than Being, pp. xvii–xviii.
- 39.
Young (2005, p. 45); this chapter was first presented at the Mid-West Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) in October 1977, and first published Young 1990. For a more recent attempt to revise Young’s phenomenological model of reading gendered confidence, by focusing on the cultivation of the lived body’s motility and spatiality to transcend gender-limits, see Chisholm (2008, pp. 9–40).
- 40.
Beauvoir (1963, p. 344).
- 41.
Le Doeuff (2006, p. 136); cf. Beauvoir (1963, p. 344).
- 42.
Beauvoir (1963, p. 344); emphasis added; cf. (2006, p. 136 f.); Moi (1994, pp. 15–37); Fricker (2003, pp. 216–217). For further discussion of Beauvoir and epistemic injustice as generated by a lack of confidence, see Fricker (2007, pp. 50–1 f.). Also on epistemic credibility in the context of racial and gender issues, see Alcoff (2000, pp. 250–253). Alcoff is also insightful on the ways in which historical and cultural practices are learnt—by head and heart.
- 43.
Le Doeuff (2006, p. 191).
- 44.
Beauvoir (1976, p. 10).
- 45.
Le Doeuff (2006, p. 136). However different, both Socrates and Descartes would agree: not knowing in pursuit of knowledge, or uncertainty in pursuit of certainty, comes closer to the attitude necessary for becoming a true philosopher.
- 46.
Nevertheless, Le Doeuff finds hope in the confident “I can” of the lived body in rejecting sexist objectifications of female bodies; in turn, Descartes’ indubitable looks like overconfidence which ignores its dependence—lack; he requires another to ensure his connection to other bodies, even his own, to other minds and the world(s) exhibits hope in agreeing that the awakened body of Eve symbolises how a woman can recognize her original desire for knowledge, awaken to her listening and to a pleasant surprise in the discovery of her own ideas and in the pursuit of genuine (self)-learning. The awakened bodies of women should not be forgotten or replaced by the rigid, immanent en-soi who was Sartre’s other—or the objectified body of the heterosexual gaze. Cf. Le Doeuff (2003, pp. 79–82); Fricker (2007, p. 49).
- 47.
Fricker (2003, pp. 217–218); Cf. Fricker (2007, pp. 50 f.).
- 48.
Fricker (2003, p. 218).
- 49.
But note that the Sartre-Beauvoir paradigm is only one possible account of gender in philosophy—and Sartre’s account of transcendence and immanence is not the only or the worst manifestation of gender-bias in philosophy. In fact, there is a sense in which Sartre’s assumptions concerning the strength of transcendence are not typical of much western understandings of masculine bodily and cognitive strength: Sartre’s negative view of the body (especially his own) has him devaluing physical immanence (en-soi), and instead he finds strength in a creative form of transcendence (pour-soi) which virtually denies bodily strength.
- 50.
Beauvoir (1976, p. 17); see p. 6 above.
- 51.
Anderson (1998, pp. 228–230).
- 52.
And yet Paul Fiddes (in Chapter 17) offers a highly significant reading of the site where the semiotic chora in Kristeva constitutes a place for transformation within the subject and so culture. Fiddes argues that “the body” is the site of both continuity and change.
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Anderson, P.S. (2009). The Lived Body, Gender and Confidence. In: Anderson, P. (eds) New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6833-1_11
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