Continental
Simone De Beauvoir:
Engaged in resistance against German occupation. All the French authors went to the same school and so they all know each other.
Inspired by Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl.
Also wrote many novels. Was very close to Sartre.
Important participant in second wave feminism. Intertwines feminism and existentialism.
2nd Sex:
critical reflexion on the ’situation’ of women in Western society.
Philosophical perspectives: sartrean existentialism & post-hegelian continental tradition in general.
She puts emphasis on the female body being fundamentally different from the male body. She thinks there is an anatomic condition that is proper to women, and as long as the organic condition of the female body is not recognised in society as an obstacle to the realisation of the subject of women, we will not be able to improve the situation of women.
It is a fundamentally different take compared with Butler who rather tries to make the body disappear in a system of power and language that configures the body.
She really argues for the female condition as intrinsically different from male existence.
Usually the body as it is experienced, and the natural organic body, is not a core topic of existentialist philosophy. They are more interested in the lofty non-material ideas. The feminism of Beauvoir gives great importance to incarnation.
She is Sartrean but less speculative and metaphysical. There is a lot of dialectic between the movement of conscious and the world and how consciousness negates itself. There is no intellectual acrobatism in Beauvoir. She is more down to earth.
She was also influenced by Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel.
”man is commonly used to designate human beings in general, whereas comparatively speaking woman only carries a limited meaning”.
If we talk about man as the signifier of humanity as a whole, we use the masculine signifier. The male and female terms are not symmetrically used. As such, the masculine is presented as the absolute human type, wheras woman is the other.
The whole of the identificatory process lies on the masculine side. The female is not defined in itself. It is only a sort of residual that allows her to identify herself.
”In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.”
She is not rational, strong, intellectual, etc.
It is a definition without reciprocity. If it was also reciprocal there would be positive definitions on the female side and negative ones on the male side.
”She is defined and differentiated with referens to man and not he with referens to her; she is the incidiental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the absolute – she is the other.”
Man does not recognise himself in the female. He defines himself intrinsically, wheras the woman has to first gaze upon the man, and then deviate her view to understand herself as the negative of man.
This is in turn accompanied by a power imbalance between the genders. This is why we have such a strange definition of womanhood. We therefore end up with a stereotyped female identity.
Gender identities are purely cultural. What is a gender identity here? It means the way we believe a woman or man has to compart themselv, act, desire, feel and experience. All this that relates to the self, that we believe to be, are a cultural determination of something that is a substratum of our being, the physical apparatus, our body.
”One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilisation 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”.
She is not fully a human being as according to the enlightenment, only intermediate between male and eunuch. She is something less than a fully fledged developed man. She is not a non-subject, but not a subject either.
Existence for Beauvoir is the capacity to project oneself beyond the concrete situation (sartrean definition).
Consciousness, or existence, as Sartre conflates deliberately in Being and Nothingness. It is a reflection on the substance of consciousness on the one hand, and being on the other hand. Consciousness is the pure negation of itself and being. And the truth of consciousness and our existence, expresses itself in the negation of itself, everything that it is and everything that is around it. That means that in order to exist authentically, a term from Heidegger, one has to be ready for the instant. For Heidegger this means the ability to revoke everything in order to start it all anew. Always ready to extract onself from the throwness of the world, the world one has adopted by doing as everyone else does, and being able to reinvent oneself anew, facing ultimate death of everything that has been established, the ultimate negation. It means to extract oneself from every worldly context. Sartre says this is how consciousness works, and as said conflates heideggerian existential philosophy, with consciousness. Understanding being as the contrary to nothingness is completely irrational for Heidegger. For Sartre it is facticity, a certain positivity that resists our attempt to renew ourselves, to negate what is around us. Existence, aka consciousness, is the capacity to go beyond a certain given setting, a situation. In French philosophy they stop thinking about the world, but rather about the situation we’re in. They become closer to sociology and farther away from metaphysics. By talking about the situation, Sartre, Camus and MP want to adress that our existence is not merely related to a world, but also to a community or a political situation that urges you to act or react. They linked Heidegger’s authenticity with the capacity to revalue oneself against the german occupation. The notion of situation has to be understood from this military context.
The French intellectuals had a big resistance to accepting that Heidegger was a nazi from beginning to end. There are the black notebooks of Heidegger where he tries to develop a connection between his politics and his philosophy…
Projecting oneself is always being one step ahead of oneself. One is not in the here and now, and this is what existence does constantly in time and temporality. The extention of one’s consciousness to a moment that is not yet there. This is the dialectics between being and nothingness. It is a lot more important what is not, than what is.
Inauthentic existences hand themselves over to the present.
The body in existential philosophy has several meanings and dimensions like being a tool with which we are helped to realise our place in the world. It is the first instrument of the expression of our transcendence. It is a being and a solidity that sometimes weighs upon us heavily. We feel our body as a kind of obstacle. So the body intrinsically has a kind of ambiguous constitution. A kind of two-fold dimension in which we do not experience it as an extension of our existence. But the body is also something that has its own life, and sometimes the life of the body comes to an end, with consciousness still negates everything, but it does so weakly, lacking a body to drive it.
The female body is something that is experienced as an alien thing (an object) to which they are subjected. This comes from being objectified as the reproductive function.
The female expresses itself to the detriment of the existence. There are headaches, pain, tiredness in a period, that reduce the transcendence of women. The body is intrinsically different and creates constant obstacles that put a break to transcendence. Pregnancy does the same but much longer.
Men do not have that. They can fuck around, and don’t have to care about the consequences. They encounter no moment in which a physiological organic structure poses a limit to the desire or appropriation of the world.
An existence strives to realise itself, append itself, and to project itself into new situations beyond what is given. Beauvoir would say that we have the same existence, it’s just the fact that the female situation is much more complicated as it is much more stuck in their body. We are all negating and projecting into the world around us, but in the factual doing of this, we have different situations in doing so. And the situation between men and women is fundamentally different.
What we can change is the cultural interpretation of this nature. The organic situation is often taken as an argument for cultural interpretation of women’s pacivity. Women have to be shy, stay at home and so on. The factuality of the situation of the sex-gendered existence is both organic and cultural, and the cultural component can be changed.
The emphasis lies on a post-world-war philosophy saying that we can change the world and we can change ourselves.
”It is during her periods that she feels her body most painfully as an obscure, alien thing; it is, indeed , the prey of a stubborn and foreign life that each month constructs and then tears down a cardle within it; each month all things are made ready for a child then aborted in the crimson flow. Woman, like man, is her body; but her body is something other than herself.”
Her body is something that cannot be recognised as a prolongation of the subject.
The woman is in an ambivalent subjective position, her transcendence cannot express in the same way as in male subjects and her body actively resists her attempts to transcend her situation.
There is as such an inherent incarnational difference.
The subject is something that is not necessarily incarnated, but something that we take for ourselves. If you subjectify the body you create an anthropological avatar but miss the freedom of the self. Critiques against the enlightenment stresses that we are first and foremost incarnated beings with different skin, sex and hair, and if you try to argue this away by claiming that all are subjects, we are overstepping the fact of the inequalities. We have to first recognise the inequalities that belong to our situational belonging. We have to recognise our condition as being transcending subjects, but also how that subject is incarnated in a concrete factual body.
Now, culture, instead of freeing women from her bodily restriction, validates and reinforces her state of passivity. As such, we find a repression of women through cultural normativity. It repeats the condemnation to passivity. Instead of recognising that the female body has certain restrictions and trying to ameliorate this, society sees it as a fate and a burden that the woman has to accept.
Think about birth control and abortion. These discussions were important for Beauvoir at the time. Because if one has abortion, it clearly ameliorates the situtation of women. It helps the female to be less dependent on an eventual pregnancy.
Also on top of this, culture forces women in the a female stereotype which self-objectivies the woman. She experiences her body as an object, an alien thing, disattached from herself when it does so many strange things. Her body is an object that is attached to her subject. Women are then, in society, transformed into the object of contemplation and adoration of men. Women are condemned to their physical appearance and thus attached to their bodies. Instead of trying to overcome this kind of self-objectivation of the female body, society pushes it further and understands the female existence as an object.
As as consequence, women will experience their existence as being intrinsically bound to their body, that’s all they are, they are their body and nothing else.
This contrasts with the male self-understanding which is less turned towards itself. Men are allowed to be stinky and fat and whatever. Men experience their body only as a side-effect of their existence. The woman’s body is always directed back toward herself. It refers back to her own body. It is a consciousness that develops in the contrary direction of the male consciousness. The female’s attention also is directed towards the world, but in society is turned inwards, towards her own body.
Sartre analysis of the gaze, an important existential and anthropological phenomenon, I realise that I am, insofar that I see other stare at me. This is not something I purely realise when I am going around and doing my projects. There is a self-objectification that is contrary to consciousness as nothing that is mediated by the gaze of the other. A similar analysis is done by Franz Fanon to figure out racially shaped selves.
Butler depicts Beavoir as someone that believes in the difference between sex and gender and that is it. But what is important for Beauvoir is less the difference between sex and gender, what is important for her is much more the emphasis on the female situation and the hinderances that that situation poses for existing. The perspective is entirely different. She wants to show what is the situation, ie. the laying of being both organic and sociocultural.
”In such circumstances the girl seems absolutely passsive; she is married, given in marriage by her parents. Boys get married, they take a wife. Woman is doomed to the continuation of the species and the care of the home – that is to say, to immanence. The fact is that every human existence involves transcendence and immanence at the same time. But she is allowed no direct influence upon the future nor upon the world; she reaches out beyond herself towards the social group only through her husband as intermediary.”
This means for Beavoir, that women are more inclined to self-objectify, to understand her body as an object for the man. The man also experiences immanence, ie. to be restricted to a certain sphere of intimacy, in which our conscious gaze rests within the limits of ourselves, our body and our experiences (thinking about how our body looks). This is consciousness turned towards oneself. Beauvoir only thinks men experience this occasionally.
The interplay between the immanence of the body and the attempt to transcend is special for women. Existence is shaped in a certain way when it is related to a female body. This marks the destiny of female existence.
The factual situation in which you are thrown shapes your capacity of transcendence. The transcendental is shaped by that which is empirically constituted by it. Social determination is possible, but can only operate on the very consciousness that is produced.
Only through self-objectivation can women gain back influence, activity and social power. This is the cliche of manipulation of power through seduction. Women have to make themselves nice little puppets so that they can make men look upon them and be interested in them. Only in self-alienation can women gain freedom. A man has to be dependent on a woman emotionally.
”When man makes of women the other, he may, then, expect her to manifest deep-seated tendencies towards complicity. Thus woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other”.