Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

12. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

JEFFNER ALLEN* and JO-ANN PILARDI**

I.  BIOGRAPHY*

Since the publication of The Second Sex in 1949 Simone de Beauvoir has been a source of philosophical inspiration for feminists worldwide. Beauvoir was born in Paris, January 2, 1908, the daughter of Fran5oise Brasseur de Beauvoir and Georges de Beauvoir. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Sup6rieure. After completing the agregation in 1923, she taught philosophy in Marseilles, Rouen, and Paris. In 1944 Beauvoir decided to become a full-time writer. Simone de Beauvoir formed many lasting friendships including, most notably, her life-long friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre, the individual who most influenced her ideas and writing. She traveled widely and was particu-larly impressed by her visits to China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the United States of America. She took part in numerous political demon-strations, among which were the opposition to the German occupation of France, to French colonial rule in Algeria, to the war in Vietnam, and to sexism in women’s lives. Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris, April 21, 1986.

II. WORKS*

Beauvoir’s memoires document her life and times in vivid detail. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter contains compelling descriptions of her relationship with ZaZa, her childhood friend, and with Нё1ёпе de Beauvoir, her sister, as well as discussion of her rejection of religion and of the family as institution. The Prime of Life brings forth Beauvoir’s encounter with existentialism, her life with Jean-Paul Sartre, and her own process of becoming a writer. The Force of Circumstance highlights Beauvoir’s

A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Wait he, 261-286.

© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

life during the pre-war and war years, All Said and Done moves from the war to the late sixties, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre marks the years preceding the death of Sartre. A Very Easy Death, written upon the death of her mother, may well be one of Beauvoir’s most enduring essays. Among her highly acclaimed literary works are She Came to Stay, The Blood of Others, All Men are Mortal, The Mandarins, which received the Prix Goncourt, Les Belles Images, and The Woman Destroyed. Beauvoir’s best known theoretical works are The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Second Sex, and The Coming of Age.

Early in her life Beauvoir decided that she wanted to be a writer, and not a philosopher. Philosophy may build great systems that enable one to consider oneself abstractly, from a perspective at once universal and infinite. Philosophical reflection may bring a sense of peaceful calm. Nonetheless, Beauvoir argues, there is but one reality and that reality can be thought only from within the world of living people. Once one is “beneath a real sky” philosophical systems are no longer of use. The “metaphysical novel,” a philosophical literary work that seeks to evoke the living unity and ambiguity of the subjective and the objective, the relative and the absolute, the historical and the eternal is, for Beauvoir, the greatest accomplishment. When developed in an existential context, the metaphysical novel refuses the consolations of abstract evasion and by bringing readers to ourselves - to our loves, our revolts, our desires - it brings us to the concrete difficulties of choice and action.1

Beauvoir’s work sets forth a supple existentialism that honors expe-rience in its fundamental ambiguity and safeguards the world of human experience from objectifying philosophical systems and oppressive political institutions. “Experience” is defined by Beauvoir as the “inward experience of a subject,” the “inwardly-experienced meaning” of our being in the world.2 Lived experience can be communicated from the standpoint of each individual’s uniqueness but it cannot be known as a universal, philosophical concept. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Beauvoir shows her experience, for her, was always ambiguous. As a child she desired to express neutral tints and muted shades, she felt that there might be a gap between word and object, she was wary of the assumption, encouraged by grownups, that the definition of a thing expresses its substance:

Whatever I beheld with my own eyes and every real experience had

to be fitted somehow or other into a rigid category: the myths and

the stereotyped ideas prevailed.3 

In The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir demonstrates how ambiguity belies essentialism and its reduction of lived experience to static, lifeless categories. She proposes an “existential conversion” by which there is effected a shift from Hegelian systematic philosophy to existentialist lived experience. Just as the Husserlian phenomenological reduction prevents dogmatism by suspending affirmation concerning the mode of reality of the external world, whose existence it does not contest, Beauvoir’s existential conversion suspends the will to absolutes, an act by which it makes visible human freedom without suppressing our desires, plans, and passions.4 Through the existential conversion we assume our “fundamental ambiguity” and we grasp the “genuine conditions of our life... our strength to live and our reason for acting.”5

Philosophies prevalent in her time, namely, naturalism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, are studied by Beauvoir and rejected on the grounds that they distance themselves from lived experience and fail to account for the wholeness of human existence. Beauvoir develops instead a critical methodology that articulates the plurality of concrete individuals not as a completed reality, but in its becoming.6 Naturalistic explanations, Beauvoir argues, are inadequate insofar as humanity is not a natural, but a historical phenomenon:

... nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question.7

Human reproduction, although founded in biology, does not necessi-tate sexual differentiation; old age goes beyond history, but is not exclusively a biological fate.8

Psychoanalysis offers a relatively more comprehensive perspective, Beauvoir writes, in that it posits humanity not as natural objects, but as subjects, or lived bodies, who define ourselves through our emotional life. The psychoanalytic rejection of the concept of choice, and its adherence to a criterion of “normality,” or essentialist and prescriptive social custom, gives rise to an inauthentic picture of humanity. The masculine model offered by Freud assumes mistakenly that sexuality is a given. It explains the prestige of the penis by the sovereignty of the father but does not account for the origin of male supremacy. Beauvoir states,

... he understood nothing of what women want. Anyone who wants to work on women has to break completely with Freud.9 

Historical materialism brings to existential analysis the recognition that humanity makes itself what it is according to its material possi-bilities. A woman is defined not exclusively by her sexuality, but also by the economic organization of the society in which she lives. Beauvoir maintains, however, that historical materialism rejects the concept of choice and therefore can view the subject only as passive. Historical materialism mistakenly infers that the institution of private property, the family, or the division of labor between the sexes, must necessarily have involved the enslavement of women. It reduces women to the capacity for labor and does not consider seriously women’s work in reproduction and childcare.10

Beauvoir’s critique of the competing philosophies of her day offers a theoretical introduction to existentialism; her analysis of myth as political institution takes a major step in the actualization of a world that valorizes lived experience. “Myth” is described by Beauvoir as the universalization and projection by a society of those institutions and values to which it adheres. Unlike “significance,” which is immanent in an object and understood through living experience, myth is a tran-scendent idea that reifies belief and defies experience. Myth would rob individuals of transcendence, namely, their self-defined projects and goals, and would confine individuals to immanence, that is, to inert being.11 The foundation of modern right-wing idealogy is, Beauvoir argues, the myth of “Man,” the abstract Man spoken in the name of all.12 Bourgeois myths of affluence hide the experience of old age, its economic poverty and despair.13 All the myths related to motherhood, the idea of the maternal instinct, the feminine vocation, and marriage, enslave women to the home, to housekeeping, and to their husbands.14 The myth of woman is named by Beauvoir:

Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling caste than the myth of woman: it justifies all privileges and even authorizes their abuse.15

Yet, myth, despite its power, is not destined to an eternal life. To name a myth is already to begin its destruction: “As soon as a single myth is touched, all myths are in danger.”16 Once “the conspiracy of silence” concerning old age is shattered, “everything has to be reconsidered, recast from the very beginning.”17 Destruction of the myth of motherhood, which Beauvoir distinguishes from motherhood itself, would completely transform society.18 Women as free and autonomous beings end the imperialism of consciousness that would posit woman as the Other.19 

Beauvoir’s analysis of myth as institution reflects the ethical character of her existentialism. Her existential ethic takes as its point of departure the understanding that humans are free. The life task of each individual is to assume that freedom, and not to flee from it. Freedom is assumed by a constructive movement, by undertaking projects that serve as a mode of transcendence, that is, acting such that one’s own freedom is achieved by reaching out toward the freedom of others. Transcendence that falls into immanence, or stagnation, is termed by Beauvoir an “absolute evil” which “spells frustration and oppression” if it is inflicted upon an individual and which “represents a moral fault” if an individual consents to it. Freedom also is assumed by a negative movement that rejects oppression for oneself and others.20

Common to both movements for taking up one’s freedom is Dostoyevsky’s maxim, which is quoted by Beauvoir in the opening lines of The Blood of Others, “Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.”21 Such an ethics is individualistic, for it gives to the individual an absolute value and recognizes in the individual alone the power to lay the foundations for its existence. Beauvoir writes:

If each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need for dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.22

Yet Beauvoir’s existential ethic is not solipsistic, for in it each indi-vidual is defined only by relationship to the world and to other individuals. The separation of consciousness can be overcome by friendship, love, and the many human emotions, none of which is given in advance, and each of which is to be made.23

Such an ethics is disquieting because it is demanding. Humanity, the sole source of values, must not follow the lines of least resistance.24 Each individual, as finite, can do only a limited work and that work is never finished. The only politics of value is one in which each individual inscribes actions concretely in the world.25 By refusing the consolations of false idols and of resignation, Beauvoir’s ethics avoids moral pessimism and expresses an optimistic confidence in each individual’s ability to recover the freedom which is its own.26

Beauvoir’s contribution to feminist theory is her situation of woman in an existential context. Beauvoir does not superadd women to an exis-tentialism that has already been set in place by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. 

Rather, the specific quality of the existentialism fashioned by Beauvoir, its emphasis on the ambiguity of lived experience and its methodo-logical and conceptual fluidity, enables women to emerge as the subject of discourse. When asked why she took up the study of women which was to become The Second Sex Beauvoir replied,

Well, it was because I wanted to talk about myself, and because I realized that in order to talk about myself I had to understand the fact that I was a woman.27

Femininity is a cultural formation that is socially imposed on women. It is not a “natural” fact of life. Beauvoir asserts, in what is perhaps the most discussed passage of The Second Sex:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psy-chological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other.2*

“To be a woman” is an instance of the dynamic, Hegelian sense of the verb “to be,” namely, “to have become”:

She [woman] would be quite embarrassed to decide what she is; but this is not because the hidden truth is too vague to be discerned: it is because in this domain there is no truth. An existent is nothing other than what he does; the possible does not extend beyond the real, essence does not precede existence: in pure subjectivity, the human being is not anything. He is to be measured by his acts.29

“Woman,” and “femininity” are used by Beauvoir to refer not to an archetype or changeless essence, but to

... the common basis that underlies every individual feminine exis-tence... in the present state of education and custom.30

Beauvoir rejects prescriptive demands issuing from notions of “woman’s role” and engages a descriptive inquiry whose aim is to deter-mine whether that state of affairs which is woman should continue - a question which she answers with a resounding NO.31 She writes: 

The lot assigned to women in the patriarchate, is in no way a vocation, any more than slavery is the vocation of the slave.32

Woman finds herself in a world where man represents both the positive and the neutral, where she is defined not as an autonomous being, but relative to man and as the negative:

He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other.33

Woman’s situation is not chosen by her,

... “no subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential,” rather, “men compel her to assume the status of the Other.”34

Two different explanations for women’s situation are offered by Beauvoir. In The Second Sex she maintains that the imperialism of human consciousness necessitates that consciousness set itself up as subject in opposition to object, as fundamentally hostile to all other consciousness. Grounding her claim in Hegelian phenomenology as developed by Levinas and Levi-Strauss, Beauvoir argues that Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Woman would not exist as second sex

... if human consciousness had not included the original category of the other and an original aspiration to dominate.35

In the early 1960s Beauvoir proposes a materialist explanation of women’s situation. She no longer bases the rejection and oppression of the Other on an antagonistic awareness, but upon an economic expla-nation of scarcity. She notes, however, that this theoretical shift does not modify the argument of The Second Sex,

... that all male ideologies are directed at justifying the oppression of women, and that women are so conditioned by society that they consent to this oppression.36

In 1982 Beauvoir remarked,

I think it is good for thoughts to be shaped by experience; at any rate, that is the path I have always followed.37 

She had dismissed at first Colette Audry’s suggestion that she write a book on women, but after World War II Beauvoir took up that project with vigor.38 Whereas in The Second Sex Beauvoir wrote that women live dispersed among males and lack the concrete means for organizing themselves into a group, some twenty years later she signed the Manifeste des 343 and participated in the French feminist campaign for free abortion. In 1972 she decided that socialism alone would not improve women’s situation. She named herself a militant feminist and joined the women’s liberation movement:

... where they [feminists] do differ from my book is on the practical plane: they refuse to trust in the future; they want to tackle their problems, to take their fate in hand, here and now. This is the point upon which I have changed: I think they are right.39

When reconsidering her work in its entirety, Beauvoir noted,

... when I was young it would have upset me if my books were called “women’s books” and now, on the contrary, I am very happy to think that my books particularly interest women because I feel a solidarity with other women.40

III. PHILOSOPHY OF THE SELF**

1. Background

Beauvoir asserted in her autobiography that the problem of the Other was her issue, a point that can easily be seen in her first two novels, LTnvitee (She Came to Stay) and Le sang des autres (The Blood of Others), as well as in the work she is most famous for, The Second Sex. There she analyzes woman’s situation as that of Other. However, the problem of the Other can be seen as complementary to the problem of self. It is a problem that Beauvoir derived from two sources: (1) Hegel’s conception of the self, where the Other is presented as a negative definition of the self, and (2) Sartre’s interpretation of Husserlian phenomenology, which contrasted the self as “for-itself” and the self as ego.41

The tradition in which Simone de Beauvoir wrote, that of existen-tialism or existential phenomenology (a term she uses occasionally in The Second Sex), does not discuss the self in terms of criteria for personal identity. The emphasis within existentialism, specifically Sartrean exis- 

tentialism with which Beauvoir was allied, is primarily in a discussion of consciousness and its “by-product,” the ego, embarking from the Husserlian tradition. The problematic which this tradition presented involved the distinction of two types of being, “for-itself” and “in-self” (intentional and nonintentional). It is on the axis of intentionality then, rather than identity, reidentification, or individuation that the existen-tialist-phenomenological problematic of the self developed by Sartre and used by Beauvoir turns. It is also intentionality, understood in an active sense as the transcendence of the for-itself, that Beauvoir later changed by her analysis in The Second Sex that woman was a tran-scendence forced to be an immanence by a patriarchal society. Though this compulsion could not ever be totally effective, i.e., woman could never be reduced to a thing, to in-itself, its presence was the central conflict of woman’s life, she claimed.

The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, had claimed that consciousness is always “consciousness of something.”42 The movement of consciousness toward some thing, toward an object that it is aware of, is the structure of consciousness and is what Husserl called “inten-tionality,” the ability of consciousness to “in-tend” toward an object that it perceives. Consciousness “has” acts of intention, either of per-ception or imagination. All else is nonintentional being, what Sartre called “being-in-itself this nonintentional being is the being which things have. By contrast, the term “for-itself,” taken from Hegel, was used by Sartre to indicate consciousness as a being with transcendence, distinguished from in-itself, the being of things, imminent being.43

However, Husserl had thought that a “transcendental ego” was neces-sary to unify and individualize consciousness. Sartre argued in The Transcendence of the Ego that in fact such an element would be foreign to the qualities of consciousness: emptiness, nothingness, and spon-taneity.44 Husserl’s “transcendental ego” might amount to this, but only this, Sartre insisted; consciousness, without content of its own, is an intentional movement but not a content, “for-itself” but not “in-self.” Because it is not a content, has no substance, consciousness is impersonal, “an impersonal spontaneity”; this is to say, specifically, that it doesn’t come out of an “I” or a “self,” if “self” is taken as a person, an ego-formation. There is no ego inhabiting consciousness, and when an ego can be perceived - and Sartre allows that it can - it is, ironically, not the “owner” of consciousness, one which is derived from consciousness, not prior to it. This problematic of the self is the one with which Beauvoir began: self as for-itself vs. self as ego. 

2. Self and Other in Beauvoir's Early Essays

The essay Pyrrhus et Cirias, published in 1944 and still not translated into English, was Beauvoir’s first published philosophical work. After the novel The Blood of Others, it was the second work of what she termed her “moral period.”45 The essay takes its title from a story told by Plutarch of a conversation between Pyrrhus, one of the greatest generals of antiquity, about to embark on a new military campaign, and Cin6as, his trusted lieutenant who advises against the campaign. Beauvoir defends the military man, Pyrrhus, using him as a prototype of the existentialist hero. His military adventurism is a form of activism and is better than indifference or inactivity. The two figures, Pyrrhus and Cineas, become symbols of the active and passive aspects of the for-itself, the human subject. At this stage, Beauvoir used the term “subjectivity” to indicate the active component of the self, that is, the for-itself. The self as for- itself, as subject, is not a thing. Further, by acts, will, etc., by its projection through actions, its transcendence, the self creates a bond with others. Movement toward the other is exemplified in certain choices that one makes to value the other; thus, concretely and specifically, a posteriori, and not abstractly, generally, or a priori, the self finds others valuable because it makes them valuable through its own actions in regard to them.

In this essay, Beauvoir further develops her notion of the human being as for-itself through an argument with Heidegger, specifically against his notion that Dasein (the human being) is “being-toward-death.” Even though Heidegger argues against the notion of human interiority, his “being-toward-death” notion of Dasein carries a claim of interiority or immanence, in regard to the human being.46 For Heidegger, the project, “being-toward-death,” is the only authentic project; this amounts to a definition by limitation of the human being; yet, to delimit it is to deny its transcendence, to fix it into a preassigned mold. Thus, Heidegger’s claim amounts to an assertion that authentic subjectivity is a type of thing- hood, an immanence not a transcendence, and is therefore mistaken.47 But, subjectivity is not immanence; it is transcendence, an engagement in the world. Thus, Beauvoir is rejecting the notion that the human subject can both have transcendence and yet have a kind of “stability” of self through this one particular and overarching project within which all other projects are subsumed and all transcendence enveloped: being-toward- death.

Following Pyrrhus et Cineas, Beauvoir published two novels and a play. Then in 1947, she published her well-known philosophical work, 

The Ethics of Ambiguity. In this work she created an ethics based on the analysis of human existence presented in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.48 In this work she follows the Sartrean distinction between being-for-itself (intentional being, human existence) and being-in-itself. This for-itself is free, i.e., is defined in its core as freedom, and because it is nothing, it is not determined. The freedom that the for-itself has and is moves toward the future, choosing and pursing ideals - “projects.” In so doing, in choosing and pursuing its future projects, the for-itself transcends or surpasses itself; each goal achieved or failed becomes a new point of departure for a new moment of the self. This means that to be a for-itself, a being with transcendence, is already to be free. Beauvoir follows Sartre’s notion that the for-itself is a negativity, “carries nothingness in its heart,” so that this “surpassing” that is the transcendence of the for-itself exists in the mode of negativity.49 Beginning with these basic elements of Sartrean ontology, Beauvoir constructed her ethics.

The for-itself, in that it is a nothingness, a negativity rather than a substance, is marked by a particular characteristic, ambiguity, the central concept of Beauvoir’s ethics. It becomes synonymous with the freedom of the for-itself. Ambiguity functions on several levels for Beauvoir. It is the mark of the human condition. This refers to the existentialist claim that human life is not ever fixed, i.e., has no nature; individuals neither participate in a universal human nature nor have an individual, fixed nature. Human existence is ambiguous - uncertain and undefined. It is in this sense that Beauvoir claims that the for-itself does not “coincide” with itself.50 Echoing Heidegger’s claim that the self is “at a distance” from itself, this is also the claim of a “lack of being” of which Sartre spoke. Here the negativity of the for-itself emerges, since it is nothing, has nature, no content, but is only a distancing, a movement of transcendence.

But this “lack of being” which freedom is can be felt either positively or negatively. Beauvoir describes a set of “archetypes” of human existence: the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man; these can be seen also as stages, so to speak, on the way to the achievement of an ethical life.51 She distinguishes each by the manner in which each experiences the ambiguity of existence. For the nihilist, for example, ambiguity of existence is not experienced positively as freedom or transcendence but is rather seen merely as a lack, so that the nihilist’s challenge to all given values never allows for an acknowledgment of human freedom.52 For the adventurer, by contrast, 

this ambiguity is experienced positively. By the adventurer’s continual and deliberate choice-making and setting of new goals, human freedom is acknowledged. Though neither nihilist nor adventurer accepts nor is resigned to given values, the adventurer knows that beyond the simple and nihilistic refusal of specific “givens” there is the ongoing accep-tance of human freedom itself, as manifested in one’s ongoing choices. But what prevents the archetype of the adventurer, for example, from being the ethical hero points to an important element in Beauvoir’s ethics, and that is that, in Beauvoir’s judgment, adventurism is a form of solipsism. Beauvoirian existentialism, however, insists on the centrality of the me-others bond and is radically nonsolipsistic and radically nonindividualistic, as we shall see.53

The for-itself also desires its own objectification; it wants to be in- itself, a thing, or more completely, “in-itself-for-itself,” i.e., God, as Sartre had put it. But neither the objectification of thinghood nor that of divinity are possible for the for-itself, so this desire is doomed to failure. An additional desire, its desire to disclose being, which is really the intentionality of consciousness, manifests itself. By the disclosure of being, of the world, the for-itself acknowledges its negativity and accepts itself as lack of being. In this movement, its nonsolipsism is apparent.54

Through Beauvoir’s interpretation, this ontological description becomes a moral imperative; the descriptive analysis turns prescriptive in two ways. First, she claims, the self should take up or “assume” its negativity - its distance from itself - and in so doing it assumes its freedom and is ethical; this Beauvoir calls “existentialist conversion.”55 Further, it should seek via choices of values/projects to “ground itself,” to take up its freedom through concrete means.56 To will one’s freedom in concrete ways is to become moral - to accept and not flee from that nothingness that humans are. By contrast, to refuse to accept it, or worse, to hinder the freedom of others is to be immoral.

Though the individual subject is sovereign and unique, an absolute, the sovereignty of the subject can be “disturbed” in two ways. Both disturbances have to do with the existence of other people, as themselves subjects and as part of a collectivity of human beings. First, the subject can also be an object for others.57 Second, the subject, though it is an individual, is also a “mitsein,” a being-with-others. The radical individuality of the subject in Beauvoir’s ethics is combined throughout with a notion that the individual exists within a collectivity.58 Thus the freedom of the for-itself is at once also being-for-others.59

Combining these two “disturbances” of subjectivity, Beauvoir makes 

an argument that is a radical addition to the existential-phenomeno-logical ontology of Sartre that she began with, that is, the me-other relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.60 She begins with the axiom that human subjectivity, the for-itself, is active, moving toward a project. Thus, subjectivity is the starting point of every project, and subjectivity by definition is a surpassing of itself, a tran-scendence. But, she adds to the Sartrean ontology two important notions: subjectivity needs justification and it receives justification in the existence of other human beings. A weakness is that she does not provide serious arguments for these points, but merely declares them. Her conclusion and “irreducible truth” is that the relation between one’s self and others is an indissoluble one.61 Since self and other are bound together ontologically, the willing of my own freedom, i.e., the for-itself’s affirmatively taking on its own freedom, becomes the willing of the freedom of others.62 Thus, the ontological claim has merged with a moral one: the ethics of ambiguity require that the for-itself will the disclosure of being which it is, but which it may, in a positively moral attitude, will. This willing of the disclosure of being is the willing of freedom, of transcendence.63 This willing of freedom is a willing of the freedom of others as well as my own.

In the existentialist problematic called upon by The Ethics of Ambiguity, the transcendence of the for-itself is tempered with its facticity. An ontological system which rejects determinism and which virtually equates the human being with freedom, as did Sartrean exis-tentialism, must make at least some concession to the hindrances or resistances which freedom encounters. These factors provide a “coeffi-cient of adversity” to the freedom of the for-itself.64 They include: one’s place, one’s body, one’s past, general environment, other human beings, and one’s death.65

In Beauvoir’s famous claim that “ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity...,” Beauvoir meant to incorporate political issues into her existentialist ethics, an incorporation seen in several of her novels as well.66 Those forces which deny human freedom also attempt to turn the human being into mere facticity. Such “parties of oppression” who perform this reduction of others to immanence, to pure facticity, use that very reduction to claim that those they oppress are only facticity, only immanence, to validate the torture or destruction they perform against them.67 In making this point, Beauvoir uses the victims of the Holocaust as well as colonialism in Algeria as examples of those who are victimized by tyrannical attempts to reduce the for-itself to an in-self, 

to reduce human existence to its facticity and ignore its freedom. The oppressor, intent on turning transcendence into mere immanence, possesses the only freedom not deserving of respect. In asserting its own transcendence, it violently forces others into immanence.

In two articles that appeared in 1948 in Existentialisme et la sagesse des nations, a work consisting of four essays, Beauvoir was at pains to defend existentialism, and to emphasize the importance of the for-itself, a term she used interchangeably with “subjectivity.”68 In the title essay, her explanation revolves around the difference between philosophies (and psychologies) of immanence and those of transcendence. Considering the self, the “me,” or ego, to be a thinglike construction of philosophies of immanence, Beauvoir maintains that, for existentialism, it no longer exists.69 The self and the for-itself, the subject, are mutually exclusive. Existentialism’s claim of the importance of subjectivity is equated with the definition of the human being as transcendence. The self as for- itself, subject, not the self as ego, is “engagement in the world, movement toward the Other”; in contrast, the self posited by philosophies of immanence is one to whom all actions and feelings of the human being turn back. In this latter view, no active subject appears, but a “self,” (moi) as object in the world, and from this object one’s behavior stems. Indeed, this immanent self has needs which are to be satisfied; in fact, one may rationalize that its demands may swallow up one’s freedom.70

Within that same work, in the essay “Litterature et metaphysique,” she connects this central importance of subjectivity within the existentialist school to the use of literary forms, in particular the “metaphysical novel,” a form which, at this point in her development, she had employed three times, in L’Invitee, Le sang des autres, and Tous les hommes sont mortel CAll Men Are Mortal). The connection between the existentialist notion of subjectivity (which is part of “existentialist metaphysics”) and literature derives from the importance of presenting metaphysics in a “singular and temporal form,” i.e., a novel, the specific, living, concrete experience as opposed to the generalizations and abstractions of classical metaphysics.71 At this point, Beauvoir interpreted existentialism as a philosophy which indisputably denies the self, i.e., the self as “me” or ego, by affirming subjectivity.

3. Self and Other in The Second Sex

In her autobiography, relating the beginnings of the intellectual project that resulted in The Second Sex, Beauvoir tells us that she wanted to write 

about herself but realized that the first question to come up was, “What has it meant to me to be a woman?” She then turned to the project that became The Second Sex. Later, discussing the book’s reception, Beauvoir said that upon its publication she became the object of sarcastic attack, her sexuality publicly impugned, her morality questioned, her person- hood supposedly “humiliated” by her writing, attacked by those she would have expected and by those she never expected. She was flabbergasted at the strength of opposition the book unleashed and at the personal nature of the attacks.72

Published in two volumes in French, the entire work is initiated with an Introduction, a classic in its own right by now, and ends with a Conclusion, and each volume is organized into parts: four in the first volume and three in the second volume. Within these parts, Beauvoir uses a number of theoretical approaches. She mixes theories of human psychological development with theories of historical materialism, anthropological theory, existentialism, phenomenology, and Hegelianism.

In the Introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir says that her per-spective is that of existentialist ethics: “every subject plays its part... through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out toward other liberties.73

Though the notion of the self in The Second Sex follows closely in some respects that within the earlier Ethics of Ambiguity, there are important additions. The for-itself is a free, surpassing, transcendent being, a subjectivity which exists through projects and which is distinguished from being-in-itself. This being-in-itself is an individual and as such is sovereign, autonomous and unique.

The fundamental problem posed in The Second Sex touches directly on the issue of the for-itself; woman, being human, is a subject. She is being-for-itself. Thus, she is a sovereign, a unique individual, and she carries the “essential” quality that all subjectivity carries. Her being is freedom in the mode of negativity, in the mode of transcending. But woman’s situation makes her “inessential.” The for-itself has been divided according to gender. In the language of The Ethics of Ambiguity, the freedom has been abridged, and facticity has been encouraged by “parties of oppression” who maintain woman in a perpetual situation of oppression. Woman, being human, is a subject, i.e., a free and autonomous existent with the ability to make choices. Yet, this transcendence in woman is burdened with a situation which requires her to be a nonsubject, a nonautonomous existent. Compelled into immanence by men, 

treated as an object, in fact, forced to live out the status of Other to consciousness, women are ontologically trapped.

The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject - who always regards the self as the essential - and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment?74

Beauvoir analyzed woman’s situation as one in which a for-itself is forced to be nonintentional being, an in-itself, a nonsubject. This for- itself has been automatically and perpetually demeaned to the status of an in-itself. This equation of maleness with transcendence and female-ness with immanence is one that runs throughout patriarchy, Beauvoir claims.

Scholars have noted that, in order to use existentialism in The Second Sex, Beauvoir had to overcome certain aspects of it that were limitations to her project.75 The book mixes a great deal of empirical data with the freedom of the for-itself to the oppression of women and hence places great emphasis on woman’s situation and condition. As a spokesperson for a philosophy which focused on the individual and the freedom of the individual, she ran the risk of being accused of validating determinism, which runs counter to the existentialist notion of the human being, particularly the early form of Sartrean existentialism;

.. man is free, man is freedom,” Sartre had written in “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” in 1946.76

Yet, with this background of a philosophy of radical freedom Beauvoir maintains nevertheless, in the Introduction to The Second Sex, that women do not assert themselves as subjects because women lack the concrete means for doing so. She continues this throughout with an analysis that insists on the enforced condition of immanence, or facticity, to women by “man the subject.” By claiming that such conditions exist, and that they are part of a situation of coercion which is external to women’s own choices - what she would have called the work of “the parties of oppression” in the Ethics of Ambiguity - Beauvoir shifts the weight of subjectivity, this subjectivity of the female, toward the pole of determinism. In so doing, she greatly weakens the existentialist ontology that she herself continues to call upon through the book.77 While Sartre had emphasized, in analyzing the facticity of the for-itself, that it was always accompanied by freedom, Beauvoir emphasized that for women the freedom was always accompanied by facticity, because the patriar- 

chal system encouraged women’s immanence and discouraged their transcendence.

The Second Sex is a work which is certainly existentialist in approach and by announcement, yet Beauvoir combined other theories with existentialism, primarily Hegelianism and structuralism. This is obvious in the Introduction, in which Beauvoir sets out the theoretical foundations for the work, and it continues throughout at numerous junctures in the main text. In an important paragraph in the Introduction, Beauvoir adds Hegelian categories to Levi-Straussian structuralism. The contrasts of duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, asserted by Levi-Strauss to be fundamental to all social reality, make no sense, she claims, because they provide no explanation for the negativity often apparent in human relations. One must add to these structures the “fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness” which consciousness itself contains; according to Hegel, “the subject can be posed only in being opposed - he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.”78 The Husserlian/Sartrean notion of consciousness as intentionality, a neutral zone, is ignored here for the Hegelian one, i.e., that consciousness operates within a contest between two poles, where each pole is a combatant across a battlefield.79 This is close to Sartre’s discussion of relations with others in Being and Nothingness which he defines as strongly conflictual along the lines of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, that dialectic which the French existentialists so appreciated.

According to Beauvoir’s brand of Hegelianism, it is due to the “impe-rialism of human consciousness” that a “one,” a subject, becomes “other.” Such a claim of a “universal” to human consciousness, and especially the strongly-worded description of this phenomenon that she provides, cannot be deduced from phenomenology, e.g., Heidegger’s mitsein.

If the original relation between man and his fellow was exclusively a relation of friendship, we could not account for any type of enslave-ment; but no, this phenomenon is a result of the imperialism of the human consciousness, seeking always to exercise its sovereignty in objective fashion... Human Consciousness... included the original category of the Other and an original aspiration to dominate the Other...80

Thus, Hegel is mixed here with history and anthropology; the oppres-sion of woman is due to the characteristic nature of consciousness, to its drive to “other-ize” an other consciousness. Never could woman’s 

physical weakness nor indeed any empirical fact be reason enough for such oppression. What stands behind empirical, historical oppression is the very nature of consciousness, which is conflictual. Yet, Hegel’s notion of consciousness undergoes a bizarre change, as Beauvoir created her own theory. The Hegelian dialectic, with its opposing poles of subject- object, helps her describe the objectification of woman into a nonself, a nonsubject, and nonessential being. But Hegel’s dialectic permitted the subject and object status to move from one person to another person. Because of her analysis that consciousness is gendered, the Hegelian dialectic freezes, in male-female relations. No movement to subject status is possible for woman. “How is it, then,... reciprocity has not been recognized between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential...?81

Underlying and locking up the reciprocal movement of Hegel’s dialectic lies, according to Beauvoir’s analysis, the unmoving structure of patriarchy, a foundation whereby males hold all significant power - familial, religious, and political, and whereby the subject-self, if female, is a nonsubject, a secondary, relative being, an other. By so stressing the otherness of woman in The Second Sex, Beauvoir qualifies both the existentialist perspective of subjectivity and the Hegelian perspective of reciprocity, i.e., no longer a “freedom,” the for-itself as woman is Other, absolute Other, and, thus, never self. The simplicity of the distinction between the for-itself and the in-itself from The Ethics of Ambiguity has now been greatly complicated. In The Second Sex, moving on from Sartrean existentialism and with the help of Hegel and Levi- Strauss, Beauvoir uncovers a “plot” in all history, we might say, to objectify a for-itself - woman. Unlike other oppressed groups, woman under the situation of patriarchy has been systematically forced into an object, the category being that of otherness - into “the brutish life” of things.82

Woman is caught in a situation of oppression. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir established that oppression is the denial of freedom, and freedom is the being of the for-itself; therefore, oppression is the denial of one’s being. Thus, female-for-itself can’t transcend, due not to an internal problem, for example, bad faith - Sartre’s famous case - but to external conditions. Such an “evil,” Beauvoir claims, is either a moral fault, if the subject consents, or it is an oppression, if the subject is constrained by others. It is this point that makes Beauvoir claim that woman is doomed to immorality, for the same reason, nearly, that Mary Wollstonecraft claimed that woman was doomed to immorality, yet, the 

moral fault was not hers but man’s, due to his limitation of her oppor-tunities and his oppression of her.83

The constraints which woman suffers due to social and cultural oppression is a denial of choice, i.e., her own projects, through which the self transcends itself. To be woman is to be other, but it is also still to be subject, even given the subjection under which this particular subjectivity usually functions, for this is never total enough to force the for-itself to give up transcendence.84 The result is immanence rather than transcendence, the being of the en-soi, not the pour-soi. Such is woman’s “drama,” her conflict. And if she manages to overcome external male- imposed constraints, she is caught in internal conflict, because insofar as she succeeds, she defeats her feminine self, as a subject-self.85 An autonomous existence for woman conflicts with woman’s “objective self,”

i.  e., as Other, for to be feminine is to be nonautonomous passive.86

This conflict in incarnated in the body. Within the existential phe-nomenological perspective where The Second Sex is written, the body which the subject is, is not a thing; its existence is never merely factual.

... if the body is not a thing, it is a situation, as viewed in the per-spective I am adopting - that of Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: it is the instrument of our grasp upon the world..,87

Directly related to the for-itself’s existence-as-body is the body as sexual, erotic existence. The contradiction which meets a female-self, in that her success as self means the realization of transcendence, or subjectivity, and at the same time means her failure as a female (other/object), also meets the female-self in sexual experience, but doubly so. According to Beauvoir, erotic experience itself intensely reveals the ambiguity of the for-itself, both as subject and object for another. But the female self begins by feeling itself as object. Hence, its subject status is twice in question in sexuality.

Taking account of The Second Sex from one perspective, that of exis-tentialist philosophy, one might say that Beauvoir’s notion of the self becomes flawed, philosophically, because of the emphasis she places upon “situation” in that work. Reflecting on those twin existentialist notions so fundamental to Sartrean philosophy, freedom and facticity, one can say that whereas the existentialist philosophy in The Ethics of Ambiguity stressed the use of one’s freedom and the respect of the freedom of others as the core of morality, the philosophy of The Second Sex stresses facticity and shows that, in the historical, sociological, and 

cultural long view which traditional existentialism avoided taking with its stress on the individual subject, but which Beauvoir does take in The Second Sex, the “situation” of a certain group, women, is so impressed upon the individual as to hamper or prevent the use of freedom, the individual’s transcendence of their facticity. To say as she does in the Introduction to Book II of The Second Sex, “It is not our concern here to proclaim eternal verities, but rather to describe the common basis that underlies every individual feminine existence,” is to radically undercut the notion of freedom relative to “every individual feminine existence,” since through that common basis woman is “confined.”88 It is also to radically change the focus of the analysis of human existence that existentialist philosophy had made from Kierkegaard to Sartre.

Yet, a general analysis of the commonalities of any group of individual existents does not make the use of existentialist categories impossible, by any means, though it does change the emphasis of the analysis. Each individual human being experiences facticity, according to Sartre in Being and Nothingness, whether or not one calls this being “confined.” The innovation represented by The Second Sex is twofold: not only is the analysis on the facticity, but individual facticity does not remain individual; it is generalized - genderized - since Beauvoir describes the common basis of the lives of all women, a basis provided by education and custom. In addition, though the existentialism and empiricism in The Second Sex can never be consolidated into a perfectly coherent argument, this basic “impurity” of approach doesn’t prevent the book from having been enormously useful in the arena of public discourse as a progressive force.

Beauvoir’s notion of the self operates in both the traditions of exis-tentialism and phenomenology. She, herself, seemed unaware of the questionable meldings that were required to join these two schools; in this she was not alone. For existentialist philosophy, there is a subject; subjectivity is central. In fact, truth itself is equated with a subjectivity (the early figures, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche bear this out best). The self (le moi) doesn’t exist; it is part of the baggage of philosophies of immanence which claim human existence has the status of the en-soi, immanence, not transcendence. To claim selfhood is to claim thing- hood. Beauvoir’s essays of the later forties explain and defend existentialism, this philosophy of subjectivity. This position was held by others as well, for example, Gabriel Marcel, who also distinguished the subject from the empirical, determined “I.”89

By contrast, for phenomenology, the self, as the I, ego, does exist, 

but only as a product of consciousness. But the status of subjectivity is questionable. Herbert Spiegelberg’s interpretation is that the “older” phenomenological movement (i.e., pre-Husserl) was actually “antisub-jectivistic,” an emphasis later changed to some extent by Husserl and elaborated upon by Sartre.90

In Beauvoir’s essay, “Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme,” the problems of the coexistence of existentialism and phenomenology become apparent. Beauvoir categorically rejects Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Sartrean philosophy, a reading which she labels a “flagrant” falsification, because it claims that Sartrism is a “philosophy of the subject.”91 In her rejection of Merleau-Ponty’s “Sartrism,” she clarifies the boundaries between existentialism and phenomenology.

Not Sartrism but “Pseudo-Sartrism” is a “philosophy of the subject,”

i.  e., a philosophy that mistakenly equates “consciousness” with “subject,” that emphasizes the importance of the subject over the world and others, whereas “true Sartrism” is a philosophy of consciousness, not of the subject. Pseudo-Sartrism assumes that there is a “sense” given or imposed on things by a “decree” of consciousness, that the world and the things of the world hold no meaning other than what consciousness provides to them. In addition, it holds the existence of the Other as unimportant, because the Other is seen as just another object under the “gaze” of the subject. In Sartrean ontology correctly understood, consciousness equals the pure, immediate presence to self; it is “for-itself,” while the “subject” is the “ego,” the “scu,” the self. Consciousness is immediate presence to itself (a soi).

This self, the ego, is a “transcendent” being, thus, it appears as an object to and for consciousness, i.e., it is intended, not intending. Consciousness, on the other hand, is immediate presence to self (a soi)\ it is, or carries, the mechanism of intentionality. The self is not within consciousness, but in the “distance,” as object. Differently stated, this assertion claims that one’s consciousness is immediate presence to self, whereas one’s subjectivity, the existence of oneself as a subject, requires mediation. The subject and the world reciprocally disclose each other.92

Merleau-Ponty’s conception of Sartrean consciousness was that it is coconstitutive of meaning, an actual opposite and coequal to the world, in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, “coexistensive to the world.” The self is that immanence, that totality, which the for-itself lacks. Merleau-Ponty had claimed that Sartre felt that the subject held a “mastery,” a sovereignty, over the world, rather than a partnership with it. In refuting this, Beauvoir insisted that the subject is not within consciousness but is an 

object to it. The subject is a “transcendent” and not a “transcendental.” This would also mean that it is an object that can be surpassed, tran-scended, through the freedom of consciousness. One is “stuck” with one’s consciousness, but not with one’s subjectivity, not with one’s selfness.

In essence, in this piece Beauvoir is claiming that Merleau-Ponty set up a straw man in his attack on Sartre. He and Sartre agree, as does she, on the secondary importance of the subject, on the nonoriginary nature of it, and on the coequal status of the world and consciousness.93

IV. CONCLUSION**

Although she is commonly judged to be one of the foremost exponents of French existentialism, Beauvoir’s own philosophical creativity has been overshadowed by her connection to Sartre. She was partially responsible for that; at numerous places in her autobiography, she denied her own philosophical creativity and her interest in philosophy as her life’s work and insisted on Sartre’s philosophical preeminence over her. She also took up the defense of his ideas on more than one occasion, as in “Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme,” once describing it as a job that “any Sartrean” could have done. Many scholars, biographers, and critics of her work interpret her in that manner. Others, feminist scholars in particular, have tried to establish a claim of her philosophical autonomy from Sartre’s thought, in spite of Beauvoir’s own assertions. It is too soon after her death (and his) to attempt substantially objective judgments on the extent of her philosophical originality and autonomy from Sartre, or on the influence of her thinking upon his; this latter is a point of view on Beauvoir which most of her biographers and scholars have ignored. Thus, the Beauvoir scholar is faced with what might be called Beauvoir’s “Sartrean exterior,” particularly in her specifically philosophical writings.

That Beauvoir went beyond Sartrean philosophy, particularly in her Ethics of Ambiguity and in The Second Sex is clear. And though they are not the subject of this essay, the reader interested in Beauvoir would do well to study also her novels and autobiography for two reasons: first, because Beauvoir defined herself as a writer primarily, and second, because as many of the French existentialists did, she used literary genres to convey her philosophical analyses. Finally, her book, The Coming of Age, should be investigated. In that work she presented a study of aging 

and the elderly that is analogous to the study of woman in The Second Sex, by creating a theory founded in her own unique blend of empiri-cism and existentialism.