6533
words
for Gendering
Western Philosophy, editor Karen J. Warren
by
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul
Sartre struggled for the whole of their philosophical careers against one of
modern western philosophy’s most pervasive concepts, the Cartesian notion of
self. This essay will show the
considerable part that gender, especially Beauvoir’s position as a woman in 20th-century
René Descartes began his famous metaphysical deliberations (Discourse on Method, 1637; Mediations, 1641) at an historical crossroads. It was a time when secularized conceptions of the self were undermining religious ones, thereby destroying the certainty about one’s self and place in the world that had been a common birthright in the West for centuries. Caught up in this historical flux, Descartes suffered what today we would call existential despair. Even his own existence fell for him within “the sphere of the doubtful”. He resolved to regain his lost certainty of self. For this he invented a philosophical method.
I thought it necessary . . . to
reject as if utterly false anything in which I could discover the least grounds
for doubt, so that I could find out if I was left with anything at all which
was absolutely indubitable. [Discourse on Method, part IV]
What became so significant for the history of
philosophy and eventually for the philosophical ambitions of Beauvoir and
Sartre was that Descartes counted as doubtable anything revealed by our senses
and, astonishingly, the existence of his own body.
I shall consider myself as having
no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing
myself to possess all these things . . . [First Meditation (Haldane and Ross,
p. 19)]
Only his existence as an
incorporeal thinking being survived his program of radical doubt. “I am thinking, therefore I exist.”
Descartes’ conception of himself as disembodied
initiated the idea of a thinker/observer who is completely detached, existing
independently of time, place and other human beings. “I am a substance”, he wrote in A Discourse on Method (Part IV), “the
whole nature or essence of which is to think, and which for its existence does
not need any place or depend on any material thing.” This phantom of perfect non-gendered
self-consciousness and independence was reified by succeeding generations to
become the intellectual ideal of Western society. Even British empiricism, contrary sometimes
to popular belief, founded itself on Descartes’ notion of a completely
autonomous self, separate from place, time, materiality and society, and
therefore self-identical over time.1
Through the centuries the inward-looking line of thought
begun by Descartes became a worldly and pervasive force in society. The Cartesian view of human reality, both in
The commitment to “intrasubjective philosophy” initiated by Descartes was renewed with the advent of the Analytical movement at the beginning of the 20th century. In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), effectively the movement’s manifesto, Bertrand Russell cajoles and enjoins fellow philosophers to embrace Cartesian fundamentals. He calls for recruits who
will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices . . . [and who] will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense-organs distort as much as they reveal. [Russell (1912) 1967, p. 93]
Russell’s notion of the ideal philosopher, which was and remains so extraordinarily influential, helps us to understand and appreciate Simone de Beauvoir because she in effect defined herself as its antithesis.2 She rejected the Cartesian disembodied, ahistorical and intrasubjective, and thus noumenal self both as her ultimate unit of analysis and as the supposed basis of her performance as a philosopher. From her recently discovered early diaries we know that in her student days Beauvoir had already settled upon her radical approach.
The philosophical precocity displayed in Beauvoir’s student diaries, especially her commitment to the philosopher’s life and her dogged determination to think through philosophy’s big questions for herself, is impressive. Reading her diaries exhilarates, first because they drawn us into this young woman’s extreme, almost preternatural passion for life and second because we see already emerging some of the originality of not only Beauvoir’s mature philosophical thought but also Sartre’s. She dedicates herself to developing “my philosophical ideas” and going “deeper into the problems that have appealed to me . . .” (p. 95) We also see developing her method, the intermingling of the personal with the philosophical, done with a logical hardheadedness that even the young Descartes or the mature Hume might have envied. And just as Descartes’ method of eliminating from philosophical consideration all aspects of himself that were not certain and fixed had the consequence of defining a permissible field of inquiry, so also are Beauvoir’s philosophical method and concerns inextricably intertwined.
In her Diaries, Beauvoir, like Descartes in his Meditations, is foremostly concerned with the nature of her self. But she moves in the opposite direction from Descartes, seeking to bring back into philosophical illumination all those aspects of the human self blanked out by his radical reduction. This means examining the human self as an entity that exists not in seclusion but in-the-world. Philosophical tradition as commonly conveyed then did not support such a project. That did not stop Beauvoir in 1927, still a teenager, from committing herself to this pursuit. Attracted to works by Henri Bergson and Gottfried Leibniz (an unlikely pairing), she culled ideas from them which when combined with her own formed the first foundation of what became the basis of her and others mature thought. We should, therefore, look closely at the diaries of this girl-woman because, regardless of what prejudice may say, they document a series of mental events important in shaping 20th century Continental philosophy.
Already in her 1926 diary, Beauvoir, age 18, began to
identify and formulate the problem of the Other, which
in various forms became the preeminent philosophical concern and focus of both
her and Sartre’s philosophical careers.
In terms of the role of gender, it is particularly interesting to
observe how Beauvoir came to this philosophical interest and arrived at her own
formulation of the problem. It concerns
the peculiar epistemological nature of her diaries. They are characterized by
three primary dimensions. Firstly, they
are fine examples of a late teenage girl’s diaries, one of the oldest and
commonest of all literary genres. You find in Beauvoir’s diaries accounts of
heartthrob, self-doubt and general mental tumult. Secondly, her diaries are examples of a
serious philosophy student’s journal, not a common genre but one with pedigree. It calls for the student to write down his or
her bright ideas, usually gleamed from lectures. The third dimension of Beauvoir’s
diary-writing does the most improbable thing: it links the first two and not,
as you might expect, by applying philosophical ideas to an analysis of personal
experiences. The link works in the
opposite direction. This is Beauvoir’s
innovation as a diarist and accounts in the main for her student diaries’
philosophical originality. She describes
her experiences at coping, or not, with life’s contingencies and then,
sometimes over a period of weeks or months, distills from then general
philosophical questions and insights.
For example, consider how Beauvoir came to her formulation of the problem of
the self and the other. Early in her
1926 diary she considers how one must serve both one’s self and others, the one
posing the temptation of egoism, the other the temptation of self-abnegation.
She writes: “[It’s] very difficult, because turning in on oneself readily turns
into egoism; while on the other hand, when one goes out of oneself, it’s indeed
rare that one does not go too far and that one is not diminished. What I’m, proposing is to achieve this
equilibrium” (CA26 1). This reflective
musing, based on her own in-the-world experience, shows a
certain wisdom but without rising above the level of advice dispensed by
a good professional counselor. Later in
the same year’s diary, however, she translates her empirical observation into a
bold and anti-Cartesian philosophical proposition. She makes an ontological distinction between
“two parts in my existence: one for others [pour autrui],” “the links that
unite me with all beings,” and another “part for myself [pour moi-mème]” (CA26
53).
One cannot help but notice the similarity between Beauvoir’s and Descartes’s predicaments that led them to radical philosophical reflection. She also faced an existential crisis. Hers arose from her loss of her childhood faith in God and from the development of her critical consciousness:
"What has this
year brought me intellectually? a serious philosophical formation that has . . . sharpened
my critical spirit, alas! . . . I have everywhere noted only
our powerlessness to establish anything in the realm of knowledge as in that of
ethics" (Beauvoir 1927, 11).
The frustrated yearning for an absolute justification for
her life, threatens her, as it did Descartes, with despair. But her response is the opposite of his: she
chooses the phenomenal world in preference to the noumenal one. Moreover, she fails to find being anchored to
a self in her consciousness. "These
miserable efforts for being!" she writes in her diary entry for
"I know myself
that there is only one problem and that it does not have a solution, because
perhaps it has no sense. . . : I would like to believe in something-- to
encounter total exigency-- to justify life; in brief, I would like God. Once this is said, I will not forget it. But knowing that this unattainable noumenal
world exists where alone could be explained to me why I live, in the phenomenal
world (which is not for all that so negligible), I will construct my life. I will take myself as an
end" (p. 62).
Philosophically,
this was a doubly radical position to take.
Beauvoir was rejecting not only the Cartesian self, but also Henri
Bergson’s proposed alternative, which was to identify with one’s memories, that
is with one’s past. Thinking of Bergson
in 1927, Beauvoir wrote:
My past is behind me
like a thing gone from me; on which I can no longer act and which I regard with
the eyes of a stranger, a thing in which I have no part at all. (Beauvoir 1927,
18 (April 28))
This
idea that one’s self, that is one’s being, is continually in the making and
thus haunted by a nothingness, became fundamental both to Beauvoir’s and, more
famously, to Sartre’s mature thought (Being
and Nothingness, 1943). Indeed the
idea is invariably attributed to Sartre, but the fact is that Beauvoir in her
diary was in 1927 already talking about “the nothingness of everything human”.
(1927, 160)
Beauvoir’s
phenomenological turn not only set her apart from the modern mainstream
philosophical tradition, but also presented her with new methodological
imperatives and possibilities for doing philosophy. By committing herself to the phenomenal world
in the pursuit of philosophical truth she had to find a way to get beyond the
philosopher’s traditional a
priorism. As we have
described, she was already doing this through her diaries. But a vague suggestion from Henri Bergson
pointed her toward another way of doing philosophy, one through which gender
difference would in time have a profound impact on her and Sartre’s
philosophical careers. In Time and Free Will Bergson gestures at
the possibility of “some bold novelist” (TFW 133) revealing the
phenomenological realities of selfhood masked by philosophical
terminology. The teenage Beauvoir
grabbed hold of and began to flesh-out this idea, declaring her intention to
write philosophy in fictional form:
“I must . . . write
‘essays on life’ which would not be a novel, but philosophy, linking them
together vaguely with a fiction but the thought would be the essential thing,
and I would be searching to find the truth, not to express it, to describe the
search for truth” (CA27 54)
And she knew for which philosophical problems she would search for the truth.
I must rework my
philosophical ideas . . . go deeper into the problems that have appealed to me
. . . The theme is almost always this
opposition of self and other that I felt at beginning to live. (p. 95)
How often in the history of philosophy has there been a philosopher so precocious as Beauvoir? She was only 19, but had already:
· on the basis of her own analysis rejected the standard self of philosophy as well as the one ready-made alternative on offer;
· broadly formulated a new notion of self;
· committed herself to pursuing the reorientation of philosophy from the study of the noumenal world to the phenomenal world;
· set about developing a new philosophical method;
· identified being and nothingness as her central theme;
· settled upon the opposition of self and other as her primary philosophical problem
Also, please note, Beauvoir was still two years away from meeting Sartre. Meanwhile he also read (April 1925, age 20) and took inspiration from Bergson in his first year as a university student. After reading Time and Free Will he opted decisively for philosophy as his line of study, Bergson having shown him the possibility of connecting philosophy with psychology and thus to personal experience. This way of approaching philosophy fitted his prior and continuing intention to become a novelist. (F&F 1993, 28) Thus although Beauvoir and Sartre took the same book both as their starting point for philosophical exploration and as their rationale for connecting philosophy and fiction, they did so for opposite reasons. Sartre initially looked to philosophy as a means for enhancing his fiction, whereas Beauvoir envisioned fiction as her means for developing new philosophy.
Although perhaps initially unaware, Beauvoir’s idea of using fiction as the literary form in which she would do philosophy was profoundly significant to her precisely because she was a woman. Her commitment to give her life to the pursuit of philosophical truth, when interpreted as a career aspiration and placed in the social context of her time and place, was, without her methodological innovation, patently absurd. Philosophers were male. The very idea of a great or original woman thinker was, like a round square, perceived as a non-sequeter. Women did not write philosophy books, or if they did, they were not published as such. Women did however, even if not with the frequency of men, write and publish short stories and novels.
Beauvoir and Sartre met in 1929 in the final weeks of their student days, immediately commencing a philosophical dialogue that continued until Sartre’s death in 1980. Soon they became lovers as well as colleagues. In October 1929, on a stone bench in the shadows of the Louvre, they took an oath of mutual allegiance. Their agreement, which allowed them each to have other sexual partners, remained the primary framework for both their lives until Sartre’s death. We mention these personal facts not for their color but because an appreciation of Beauvoir and Sartre’s relationship is essential to understanding their working lives as professional philosophers and thus to how gender in complex ways entered directly and indirectly into the making of their philosophy.
The meeting of Beauvoir and Sartre was the beginning of long
apprenticeships for both of them, especially Beauvoir. She would not break into print until 1943,
yet all the while writing almost continually, turning out a succession of
practice novels and stories, honing her technique. Sartre also scribbled incessantly, essays as
well as fiction. Mercilessly they
critiqued each other’s efforts. During
these years they worked as lycee philosophy teachers, first in the provinces,
later in
Beauvoir continued to be fascinated with the problem of otherness and of the Other. Sartre also had an intellectual interest in other people but, as Beauvoir explained in The Prime of Life, it was mainly psychological whereas hers was attuned to philosophical questions, especially ontological ones. (124-6) His first published work, The Imagination (1936) was mainly a psychological work that does not enter into the sort of questions that fascinated Beauvoir. In fact, throughout the whole of the 1930s, and in retrospect this seems remarkable, Sartre appears not to have shared Beauvoir’s primary philosophical concern.
They did however during these years pursue together other philosophical problems. Most notable of these was how to explain a whole range of human behavior without appealing to the existence of an unconscious, a concept of psychological determinism inconsistent with their emerging notion of human freedom. Instead they attributed these behaviors to a form of self-deceit that they called bad faith. By systematically observing themselves and people around them they identified various types and patterns of self-deceit, gradually building up an ever more powerful system of analysis that became central to their shared philosophy, as well as providing the basis for a non-Freudian branch of psychoanalysis.
By 1930 the question of contingency versus determinism was a fashionable topic in French philosophy, and soon after Sartre finished his formal studies he began a “lengthy, abstract dissertation on contingency”. (PoL, 106) But his first draft left Beauvoir unimpressed. She set about convincing him that he could and should turn his essay into a novel. He agreed and over a period of several years wrote many drafts of what was to become Nausea, the most celebrated on all his novels. Beauvoir read and meticulously critiqued each draft. As she has explained:
I knew exactly what he was after, and I could more nearly put myself in a reader’s place than he could when it came to judging whether he had hit the mark or not. The result was that he invariably took my advice. (PoL, 106)
Nausea was published in 1938 to both instant acclaim and recognition of its philosophical dimension. Subsequently it became part of the cannon of existential philosophy. Arthur Danto, an eminent American analytical philosopher, regards Nausea as Sartre’s second most important philosophical work and begins his excellent book on Sartre’s philosophy as follows:
Sartre’s great philosophical novel, Nausea is a sustained reflection on the relationships and ultimately the discrepancies between the world and our ways of representing it; and each of its major characters is defined through his deep belief that reality has the structures which, he comes to realize, instead belong to the several ways he organizes it. (Danto 1991, p. 5)
The
Methodology of Existentialism
But how, you may ask, is sustained
philosophical reflection possible in a novel?
Consumerist culture encourages us to mistake form for content and thus
confuse the means of expression with the ideas expressed. So to be on safe side, we want to elaborate
further – because it is so crucial to an appreciation of Sartre and Beauvoir as
philosophers and of their working relationship -- how the nature of their
philosophical pursuits enabled and at times required them to write and create
new philosophy by using, in addition to the essay, the novel, the short story
and the diary.
Beauvoir, remember, in her student days
rejected the idea that philosophers had special universal access to the world,
that, as Russell put it, they could “see as God might see, without a here and now”. Moreover, as working
philosophers, she and Sartre inverted the universalist
presumption. In 1946, Beauvoir published
an essay “Literature and Metaphysics” explaining the philosophical method used
by Sartre in Nausea and herself in She Came to Stay and other works. If the world can be viewed only from a
particular point of view, she argued, then the
philosophical enterprise must begin with particular and concrete descriptions
of subjects’ relations with the world and with other consciousnesses. Beauvoir believes that there is a
metaphysical dimension to everyone’s daily existence and that people’s lives
are full of metaphysical experiences: “one’s presence in the world, for
example, one’s abandonment in the world, one’s freedom, the opacity of things, the resistance of foreign consciousnesses.” “To make” philosophy, she says, is “to be”
philosophical in the sense of sensitizing oneself to these individual
metaphysical experiences and then describing them. If other people recognize these particular
statements as true, then in a manner suggestive of empirical science, they can be
used to generate general statements. For
Beauvoir, and subsequently Sartre, good philosophical practice began not with a priorism but
with accurate descriptions of an individual’s metaphysical relations with the
world, something for which fiction, as Bergson had suggested, was ideally
suited. Beauvoir explains it as follows.
In the real
world the sense of an object is not a concept knowable by pure understanding:
it is the object in that it unveils itself to us in the global relation that we
maintain with it and in that it is action, emotion, sentiment; ones asks of the
novelists to evoke this presence of flesh and bone whose complexity, singular
and infinitely rich, overflows all subjective interpretation. (ML, 105-6)
Mary Warnock, another eminent analytical
philosopher who has found much to admire in existential philosophy, explains
its method like this:
The
methodology of Existentialism . . . consists in a perfectly deliberate and
intentional use of the concrete as a
way of approaching the abstract, the particular
as a way of approaching the general.”
(Warnock, 133)
And:
The
existential philosopher, then, must above all describe the world in such a way that its meanings emerge. He cannot, obviously, describe the world as a
whole. He must take examples in as much
detail as he can, and from these examples his intuition of significance will
become clear. It is plain how close such
a method is to the methods of the novelist, the short-story writer . . .
(Warnock, 136)
She Came to Stay and Being and Nothingness
The ultimate exemplification of the use of fiction as a vehicle for philosophical discovery is Beauvoir’s first published novel, She Came to Stay (1943). Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a conventional philosopher’s essay on which his philosophical reputation in the main rests, was also published in 1943. Beauvoir, however, had drafted her novel before Sartre began his essay. And it could not have been otherwise because She Came to Stay constituted the primary research that lies behind the more abstract Being and Nothingness.
The relation between these two works, both in the process of their creation and in their public reception, is fascinating, complex and heavily influenced by gender. Space does not permit a broad survey of the philosophical content of She Came to Stay, so we will focus on its complex concept of self, before showing how this and other material from Beauvoir’s novel came to be used by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Finally we will consider the part gender played in determining the couple’s division of philosophical labor and the public’s response to these two books.
She Came to Stay
takes place in the bohemian
She Came to Stay shows individuals divided
not between mind and body, but between their situation or, as she calls it,
facticity (aspects which resemble inert objects, for example, the past, social
circumstance, and body-as-object) and elements of freedom, for example,
projects, values, and the body-as-subject.
Its characters fall into bad faith when they fail to co-ordinate these two
dimensions of their reality, that is, when they pretend that they are facticity
without freedom or freedom without facticity.
This split in human being makes self-identity an illusive goal: our
freedom keeps our sense of self, including even how we see our past, from ever
being complete and final. Through her
characters Beauvoir demonstrates that one is always separated from one's
"self" by one's freedom to do, imagine or believe differently. Furthermore, as with all objects of
consciousness, the possible points of view one may adopt toward one's
"self" is unlimited.
By letting go
of the traditional views of consciousness as disembodied and of the self as a
fixed entity residing in
consciousness and putting in their place the ideas of embodied consciousness
and of the self as an object of
consciousness and an ongoing project, Beauvoir was opening the philosophical
door to the possibility that the self could be fundamentally influenced by
other people. This was part of her
groundwork for solving her “problem of the other” with which as a teenager she
had so passionately begun her philosopher’s life.
But this
problem, which figures so large in She
Came to Stay, was not only a personal and experiential one; it also tied up
with one the oldest problems in philosophy: How do we know that other people
are, like ourselves, conscious beings?
We can observe, "other people from
without, through the shape of words, gestures and faces", but we cannot
observe that they have thoughts and sensations like ourselves. [Beauvoir, 1984
(1943) p. 135] From one’s individual
experience of being conscious one can argue from analogy that other people are
conscious too, but as a philosophical argument this barely makes the grade. Nor does it provide any ontological foundation
for creating a theory of intersubjectivity.
Even those, like Hegel and Heidegger, who might have wished to do so,
could not provide a direct relation between concrete individual
consciousnesses.
But
Beauvoir did and did so by borrowing an old trick from Descartes. His cogito,
“I am thinking, therefore I am,” offers no proof or argument that he
exists. Instead he identifies a
fundamental experience, thinking,
that leads him to believe beyond all doubt that he exists and that is, he
presumes, a part of everyone’s experience.
Similarly, Beauvoir ignored the problem of proving the existence of
other minds, in favour of asking: What universal experience leads us all to believe other people to be conscious
beings like ourselves? She answers
that it is the phenomenological event of experiencing oneself as the object of
another’s look. To be conscious of being
looked at or judged by another person can actually cause a metamorphosis in someone’s consciousness: they are made
aware that they have another self, an objective one which exists only for the Other. In She Came to Stay,
She
Came to Stay is structured in part around six modes of Being-for-Others,
[masochism, love, sadism, hate, desire, and indifference] and provides numerous
illustrations and extensive analysis of each.
For Beauvoir, the philosophical significance of these common experiences
is that they all presume a direct or internal
relation between
consciousnesses. For example, the flush
of embarrassment one undergoes when caught, like Pierre, in an unseemly act is
not founded on an analogy which probabilistically induces the existence of
other consciousnesses, rather it manifests itself instantaneously as the
consequence of a causal relation
internal to their consciousness and the Other's. The person’s embarrassment arises from a
sudden transformation in the mode of their consciousness, from one where they
experienced themself wholly as subject, that is, as the point of view around
which the world is organized, to a mode where they are an object in a world
organized by the Other. This asymmetrical subject/object relation so extensively explored in She Came to Stay provides the
ontological basis of Beauvoir's theory of intersubjectivity, which, when
extended to groups as well as to individuals, provided the analytical framework
of her most famous work, The Second Sex.
Long ago it
was pointed out by the English translator of Being and Nothingness, Hazel Barnes, that
much of its philosophical content is also found in She Came to Stay. For
example Barnes writes:
As with all of de Beauvoir’s early fiction, the reader of She Came to Stay feels that the
inspiration of the book was simply de Beauvoir’s decision to show how Sartre’s
abstract principles could be make to work out in “real life.” (Barnes 1961, 121-22)
But we know
now that the real work sequence between the couple was the reverse of the one
suggested by Barnes. Sartre’s
biographers divide over when Sartre began to write Being and Nothingness. Some
say late July 1940; others say the autumn of 1941. But both these dates come after Beauvoir had
finished the first and most, if not all, of the second draft of She Came to Stay.3
It is also now known that in February 1940 Sartre,
while on leave from the army, closely read Beauvoir’s manuscript. Sartre scholars agree, from a study of the
diaries that he kept in this period (War
Diaries) that his flowering as a philosopher with new ideas took place in
the weeks immediately following his reading of Beauvoir’s novel. (Hoare 1984, x; Hayman 1986, 149; Thompson
1984, 43; Flynn 1992, 215; McBride 1991, 32; Boschetti 1988, 55; Fretz 1992,
70-1, 77)
In
and of itself there is nothing scandalous or indecent about Sartre’s debt to
Beauvoir for so many of the ideas and insights that he wove together in his
great treatise. It merely reflected how
the couple came to work together as philosophers. But it is important, especially in the
context of this book, to appreciate the social origins of their professional
relationship. So to close this essay we are
going to return briefly to Beauvoir’s student days and diaries.
A Division of Labour
Early in her
student days Beauvoir became a close friend and colleague of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, whom she also let study She
Came to Stay long before it was published and who became not only an
existential philosopher like Sartre but also his closest rival. In 1927 Merleau-Ponty came third in the
philosophy exams behind two women, Simone Weil and Beauvoir. Following encounters with him and other male
students who expressed irritation with these results, Beauvoir wrote as follows
in her diary.
And so, my friends, you do not like girls but consider that not only do
they have a reason to satisfy but a heavy heart to restrain – and in that
respect I want to remain a woman, more masculine yet in the brain, more
feminine in sensibility. (Beauvoir 1927,
107)
And
a few pages further on she expands on these thoughts about how gender
differences differentiate her and Merleau-Ponty’s approach to philosophy.
“Aristocrat” he calls me? it’s true. I can’t
get rid of this idea that I am alone, in a world apart, being present at the
other as at a spectacle . . . . Dreams are forbidden him. Ah! As
for me I have riches there that I do not want to get rid of. Drama of my affections, pathos of life. . . .
Certainly, I have a more complicated, more nuanced sensibility than his and a
more exhausting power of love. These
problems that he lives with his brain, I live them with my arms and my legs. .
. . I don’t want to lose all of that. (Beauvoir 1927, 126)
These
words, after the fact, resound with irony because Merleau-Ponty became famous
for practicing philosophy in the phenomenological manner and with the emphasis
on embodiment that Beauvoir was, against him, already advocating and
doing. But 16 years later and now a
convert, he published an article on She
Came to Stay titled “Metaphysics and the Novel”. It includes a cogent explanation of the
significance of Beauvoir’s philosophical method. “Classical metaphysics” he writes, “could
pass for a speciality with which literature had nothing to do because
metaphysics operated on the basis of uncontested rationalism, convinced it
could make the world and human life understood by an arrangement of concepts.”
(1964, p. 27) But, Merleau-Ponty
continues:
Everything changes when a
phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of
explaining the world or of discovering its “conditions of possibility,” but
rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world
which precedes all thought about the
world. After this, whatever is
metaphysical in man cannot be credited to something outside his empirical being
– to God, to Consciousness. Man is
metaphysical in his very being, in his loves, in his hates, in his individual
and collective history. (1964, pp.
27-28)
In
less sophisticated prose, these views, sentiments and passions are found in
Beauvoir’s teenage diaries. As a young
woman she hung on to and extended the nuanced sensibility that as a girl she so
prized. When in maturity Beauvoir
coupled it with her writer’s craft, she, as Merleau-Ponty acclaimed, succeeded
in unveiling pretheoretical layers of experience, in seeing the world as
immediate and thus as metaphysical experience.
As
the years and decades went by, Beauvoir became even more persuaded that her untraditional
and “feminine” way of doing philosophy, if not the only valid way, was in any
case essential for providing real insights upon which system builders, like her
beloved Sartre, could do legitimate work.
She continued to believe that the universalist
presumption of male philosophers was delusory, egomaniacal and only apparently
tenable when claimed from their position of masculine privilege. Likewise, to the end of her life she insisted
on the philosophical relevance of individual human experience. She also, more than once, expressed the view
that system building in philosophy was a form of male madness. But we know that at the very least she did
heavy editing on Being and Nothingness. It must have been immensely satisfying, even
thrilling, for Beauvoir to see her discoveries and ideas incorporated in
“Sartre’s system” and in consequence ingested by intellectuals around the
world.
Beauvoir
and Sartre were bound together not only by immense love but also by a division
of labor. Beauvoir
carried out most of the primary research and its distillation. Together, often in the cafes of
1. True, John Locke (1632-1704) broke with Rationalism by declaring that all our ideas were derived from experience. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690) But he saw knowledge as a product of reason working out the connections between those ideas, and he insisted upon Descartes’ phantom as the agent who carries out this process of reason. Locke made a distinction between “person” and “man”, and, by extension, between personal identity and a man’s identity. The identity of a man, he wrote, is “participation of the same continued life, by constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II. xxvii, 6). But the identity of a person is that of “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason, and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places”. (II. xxvii. 9) Locke’s thinker is not his concept of “man” but rather his Cartesian concept of “person”, who, out of ideas, creates knowledge independently of time, place and society, and who became for British philosophers, no less than for Continentals, their imaginary, ideal persona.
2.
An example of where the Cartesian-Russellian self continues its prominence in
philosophy is John Rawls immensely influential A Theory of Justice (1971).
He explains the foundational presuppositions of his work as follows.
The essential point is that we need an argument showing
which principles, if any, free and equal rational persons would choose . .
. My suggestion is that we think of the
original position as the point of view from which noumenal selves see the world
. . . The description of the original position interprets the point of view of
the noumenal selves, . . . [Rawls 1971,
pp. 255-6]
For
philosophers, this notion that some individuals, nearly always male, possess
the means to “see as God might see”, to attain “the original position” so that
their point of view should then outweigh and invalidate all others holds a
powerful attraction, capable of seducing the best minds, even Bertrand
Russell’s.
3. The documentary evidence for this assertion is voluminous, diverse and incontrovertible. It consists the diaries and of letters of Beauvoir and Sartre during this period, which were not available to scholars when Barnes was writing.
Barnes, Hazel (1961) The Literature of
Possibility: A Study of Humanistic Existentialism.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1943, 1984) She Came to Stay, Trans. Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1946) “Littérature et métaphysique. Les Temps moderne. 1 (7): 1153-63.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1949, 1989) The Second Sex, Trans. H. M. Parshley.
Beauvoir, Simone de (1962) The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green.
Harmondsworth,
Bergson, Henri (1889, 1913) Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson. New Work: Macmillan.
Boschetti, Anna (1988) The
Intellectual
Danto, Arthur C. (1975) Sartre.
Descartes, René (1637, 1965) A Discourse on Method, trans. E. S.
Haldane and G. R. T. Ross.
Descartes, René (1641, 1970) “Mediations
on First Philosophy” trans.
Flynn, Thomas R. (1992) “Sartre and the Poetics of History”, The
Fretz, Leo (1992) “Individuality in Sartre’s Philosophy”, The
Hayman, Ronald (1986) Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre.
Hoare, Quintin (1984) Introduction to War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War by Jean-Paul Sartre, Trans.
Quintin Hoare.
Locke, John (1690, 1993) An essay Concerning Human Understanding,
McBride, William L. (1991) Sartre’s Political Theory.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945) “Le Roman et
la métaphysique. Cahiers
du sud 270.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964) “Metaphysics
and the Novel” in Sense and Non-sense,
trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus.
Rawls, John (1971) A Theory of Justice.
Russell, Bertrand (1912, 1967) The Problems of Philosophy,
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1943, 1956) Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel
Barnes.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1936) L’imagination.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1938 1965) Nausea. Harmondsworth,
Thompson, Kenneth A. (1984) Sartre: Life and Works.
Warnock, Mary (1984) Existentialism.
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