Abstract
The pivotal theme of Simone de Beauvoir’s magnum opus, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), is the idea that woman in relation to man has positioned herself secondarily in the lifeworld as the Other of man since the ancient times and further that this secondary position of women in the social order is imposed by the force of the patriarchal atmosphere rather than the feminine characteristics. This paper interprets the details of this argumentation by referring to Beauvoir’s addressing the issue of how to reply to the question: What is a woman? And an appropriate answer to this question will lead one to seeking the task of resolving the ultimate problem of her feminist discourse: Why is woman the Other? In this regard the point Beauvoir makes here it is that the Otherness or inferiority of woman is not naturally given or inherently found in the female sex rather it has been the process of historical unfolding that enabled man to treat woman as a secondary being and woman became convinced with that subordinate role in the making of human tradition. The two words that Beauvoir finds most significant for her existentialist-feminist interpretation of the male and the female statures in human tradition are transcendence and immanence. Men have always been free to transcend their limitations in terms of involving themselves in the progressive life projects whereas women have never been so free to act their own in the life projects instead they find themselves imprisoned in their immanence—the overall factual givenness of their being in the world. If woman submits to her immanence, she will do so in bad faith, as she is a free individual who cannot only make herself free from this immanence, but she can also project herself through her future endeavors by transcending her facticity.
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Notes
- 1.
Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (Middlesex: Penguin, 1963), 12.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Sartre did not totally abandon his commitments to Marxism though this notebook entry reflects such meanings. Beauvoir on the same page clarifies about their confusion regarding the meanings of socialism and liberty: “Yet in ’41, when [Sartre] was forming a Resistance group, the two words he brought together for its baptism were: socialism and liberty. The war had effected a decisive conversion.” See Ibid.
- 4.
It reflects their old romance with Marxism and their perpetual detestation for capitalism. Beauvoir in the second volume of her autobiography recalls those memories of their youthful days when they were to dream of the ruining of capitalism. She says: “We counted on events turning out according to our wishes without any need for us to mix in them personally. In this respect our attitude was characteristic of that general euphoria affecting the French Left during the autumn of 1929. Peace seemed finally assured: the expansion of the German Nazi party was a mere fringe phenomenon, without any serious significance. It would not be long before colonialism folded up: Gandhi’s campaign in India and the Communist agitation in French Indo-China were proof enough of that. Moreover the whole capitalist world was, at that time, being shaken by a crisis of the utmost gravity; and this encouraged the assumption that capitalism as such had had its day. We felt that we were already living in that Golden Age which for us constituted the secret truth of History and the revelation of which remained History’s final and exclusive objective.” See Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 18.
- 5.
Beauvoir explains their attitude referring to the influences they experienced at that time through reading both Heidegger and Saint-Exupéry who taught them the ‘meanings came into the world only by the activity of man, practice superseded contemplation.’ Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 13.
- 6.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1972), 47.
- 7.
Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 20.
- 8.
This clarification is not of Beauvoir’s rather of Sartre’s. Actually, certain Marxists at that time were criticizing Sartre for being influenced by Heidegger and so gone astray being a Marxist. Francis Ponge who ran cultural section of Les Lettres françaises told Sartre and Beauvoir about a huge number of articles against Sartre that he was receiving for publication. When he published some of those articles, Sartre was to reply ‘with a Mise au point (Definition of Terms).’ This clarification is a part of that reply to the Marxists. On this see Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 16.
- 9.
Ibid., 21.
- 10.
Ibid., 45–46. On another occasion Beauvoir expresses her unqualified faith in life experience as the most important trait of the art of writing. She said: “I want to write: I want to put down phrases on paper, to take elements from my life and turn them into words.” She further clarifies her ambition as an author more precisely: “I shall never be able to give myself to art excepting as a means of protecting my life.” On this see Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 26.
- 11.
Beauvoir and Sartre mutually published this periodical as an organ of existentialism. Its first number appeared in October 1945. The title of the journal was inspired by the Chaplin film—Modern Times. The editorial committee was comprised of Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Merleau-Ponty, Albert Ollivier, Jean Paulhan, Sartre and Beauvoir. See Ibid., 22. This magazine was to play the major role in making Existentialism a worldwide movement in culture and literature; this new ideology of liberation and individualism was projected by Sartre and Beauvoir right from the first number of this periodical. While writing its preface he showed how that new ideology would dwell ‘not only on responsibility in literature, but on the concept of each man as a totality. By implication, not solely in France and its citizens, but people everywhere were to be the concern of the new existentialist periodical. This program [had] been carried out by the magazine to such a degree that literature [had] never attained the importance accorded to political, economic, and sociological matters, both in France and abroad.’ On this see Kenneth Cornall, Les Temps Modernes: Peep Sights Across the Atlantic, in Yale French Studies: Foray through Existentialism (No. 16: Winter 1955), 24–28.
- 12.
Ibid., 46.
- 13.
Ibid., 47.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid., 48.
- 16.
Ibid., 54.
- 17.
Ibid., 55.
- 18.
Actually Beauvoir cites from Sartre’s work, Les Communistes at la paix (1952). His exact words are: “Coming from the middle classes, we tried to bridge the gap between the intellectual petite bourgeoisie and the Communist intellectuals.” See Ibid., 15.
- 19.
In this part of the article, we shall take the “Introduction” to Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989) as a reference and guide, submitting its principal theses to our interpretation. We shall give the other references, if any, accordingly.
- 20.
Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 54.
- 21.
Lévinas thinks that the feminine represents an absolute caricature of the otherness (altérité) as the contrariness of the masculine, ‘this contrariness being in no wise affected by any relation between it and its correlative and thus remaining absolutely other. Sex is not a certain specific difference … no more is the sexual difference a mere contradiction … Nor does this difference lie in the duality of two complementary terms imply a pre-existing whole … Otherness reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.’ See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, n. 3 on p. xxii.
- 22.
Beauvoir’s argument is in opposition to that of Gadamer’s. The latter while construing his hermeneutics of tradition, argues that the tradition is not a dead past rather a living continuity, a flow of ‘effective-history’ that not only encompasses the past but also the relevant present. So the functionality of human consciousness cannot in any way transcend the process of history and tradition, on the contrary it is continued through the very process. On Gadamer’s theory of tradition see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), trans. G. Barden and W. G. (New York: Crossroad, 1975) specifically Part II.
- 23.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 3.
- 24.
Beauvoir explains the Heideggerian dictum with reference to Sartre’s L’ Être et le néant. On this see Ibid., 7.
- 25.
Ibid., 34–35.
- 26.
There are many places in Freud’s account of femininity where his reader gets that impression that the discourse of femininity he is developing is lopsidedly oriented as subsidiary to that of masculinity. For instance while describing libido he explicitly says: “There is only one libido, which serves both the masculine and the feminine sexual functions. To itself we cannot assign any sex; if, following the conventional equation of activity and masculinity, we are inclined to describe it as masculine, we must not forget that it covers trends with a passive aim. Furthermore, it is our impression that more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function, and that—to speak teleologically—Nature takes less careful account of its [that function’s] demands than in the case of masculinity. And the reason for this may lie—thinking once again teleologically—in the fact that the accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent independent of women’s consent.” On this see Sigmund Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 576–599.
- 27.
Ibid., 62–63.
- 28.
Ibid., 64.
- 29.
Gadamer’s notion of effective historical consciousness justifying the inevitable involvement of human self with tradition while producing act is simply antagonistic as compared to Sartre’s notion of absolute individuality that Beauvoir takes for granted in construing woman as an existent. Sartre categorically says: “No factual state whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of society, the psychological “state,” etc.) is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way determine by itself what is not… Under no circumstances can the past in any way by itself produce an act.” See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 435–436.
- 30.
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 64–65.
- 31.
We refer here to these meanings of negative and positive freedom as expounded by Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In the negative concept of liberty Berlin conceives of freedom of a person who is free ‘to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes’ with his act of liberty. ‘Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others.’ In case of one’s being positively free one becomes autonomous in the sense that one is ‘a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for one’s own choices and able to explain them by references to one’s own ideas and purposes.’ On this see Two Concepts of Liberty, in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 118–172.
- 32.
The Beauvoirian text on which our interpretation of her concept of woman’s liberation is based is Part VII of The Second Sex. So as far as Beauvoir’s ideas are concerned all paraphrasing and citations in this part of the article to Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 679–715.
- 33.
Beauvoir in this regard refers to a French novel titled Le Numéro 17 that describes the proposal of a woman for the ‘establishment of houses women could resort for “sexual appeasement” through the services of “taxi-boys.” The novelist might not know that such an ‘establishment…formerly existed in San Francisco; the customers were prostitutes, who were highly amused to pay instead of being paid.’ Ibid., 687.
- 34.
Beauvoir here refers to an actual event reported to her by someone about two young women newly arrived at Paris. Both the girls were eager to “see life” in the Metropolis; and under the yoke of that feel they, ‘after a look around at night, invited two attractive Montmartre characters to supper. In the morning they found themselves robbed, beaten up, and threatened with blackmail.’ Ibid.
- 35.
In relation to woman’s bounteous attitude toward her partner, Beauvoir mentions the character of a French novel, Blé en herbe who responding to her partner’s caresses tells him: “I love only beggars and starved people.” The author of the novel elaborates her attitude: “she made haste toward that obscure and narrow region where her pride could believe that the plaint is an avowal of distress and where beggars of her kind drink the illusion of liberality.” Ibid., 689.
- 36.
Consolidating her opinion Beauvoir describes the actual case history of a woman, ‘who had been married several times since she was seventeen and had had several lovers, always with much satisfaction. After having successfully managed an enterprise in the course of which she had men under her direction, she complained of having become frigid. There was formerly a blissful submission that she no longer felt, because she had become accustomed to dominating over males, and so their prestige had vanished.’ Ibid., 691.
- 37.
This is the reason why Beauvoir turned down the marriage proposal by Sartre assuring her that their marriage would remain a mere formality and it would not in any way affect their existentialist way of life. She explains her refusal: “Hitherto we had not even considered the possibility of submitting ourselves to the common customs and observances of our society, and in consequence the notion of getting married had simply not crossed our minds. It offended our principles. There were many points over which we hesitated, but our anarchism was as deep-dyed and aggressive as that of the old libertarians, and stirred us, as it had done them, to withstand any encroachment by society on our private affairs. We were against institutionalism, which seemed incompatible with freedom, and likewise opposed to the bourgeoisie, from which such a concept stemmed. We found it normal to behave in accordance with our convictions, and took the unmarried state for granted.” On this see Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 65–66.
- 38.
In this regard, Beauvoir quotes Marie Bashkirtsev, who writes: “What I desire is liberty to go walking alone, to come and go, to sit on the benches in the Tuileries Gardens. Without that liberty you cannot become a true artist. You believe you can profit by what you see when you are accompanied by someone, when you must wait for your companion, your family! … That is the liberty which is lacking and without which you cannot succeed seriously in being something. Thought is shackled as a result of that stupid and continual constraint…. That is enough to make your wings droop. It is one of the main reasons why there are no women artists.” Beauvoir, The Second Sex., 712.
- 39.
Beauvoir also gives example of Rosa Luxemburg. On account of her being ugly, Luxemburg ‘was never tempted to wallow in the cult of her own image, to make herself object, prey, trap; from her youth, she was wholly spirit and liberty. Ibid., 713.
- 40.
Beauvoir’s dream of a free woman is inspired by Rimbaud’s prophecy that she believes will be fulfilled in the future. In a letter to Pierre Demeny (May 15, 1871), Rimbaud writes: “There shall be poets! When woman’s unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man—hitherto detestable—having let her go, she too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.” Ibid., 715.
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Kiran, N., Afaki, A.R. (2021). Freedom and the Human Positioning in the Lifeworld: The Transcendence-Immanence Contrast in Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Feminism. In: Hornbuckle, C.A., Smith, J.S., Smith, W.S. (eds) Phenomenology of the Object and Human Positioning. Analecta Husserliana, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66437-4_7
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