Sartre's atomistic sovereign self could not be clearer: we are isolated monads confronting an external social and natural world set off against and in opposition to our free projects. The natural state of human affairs, a la Hobbes, is a war of all against all - a bleak reiteration of an a priori and fundamental human asociality. There are no ties binding the individual to the past or holding him in the present. (p.185)
Sartre is clearly a modern. He holds to the following ideas that I criticise so often at this site:
- an atomised self
- an asocial human nature
- a rejection of a given nature (an "external social and natural world") as a predetermined and therefore limiting imposition on the autonomous individual
Simone de Beauvoir followed Sartre in this line of thought, applying it to the lives of women. If the idea is that we should transcend the "muck" of nature, and be active, transforming, rebelling, appropriating, possessing agents, then the traditional role of women will seem inferior. Not surprisingly, Simone de Beauvoir thought that women should aim to throw off the "tyranny" of biology.
But note in particular this quote:
Human civilisation is male; woman is "the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other".
The logic would seem to be that you get equality by inviting those who have been "othered" as natural, inessential objects into the entity that is active, transforming and appropriating. The aim is for Woman to not be "othered" as a passive and natural entity, but to become part of the active, transforming Man entity.
I'm just throwing out an idea here, but if whites were identified at this time as the transforming civilisational force, then equality would mean inviting "the Other" to become part of this entity. Perhaps this is one possible reason for the exceptionalism applied to white societies - the exceptionalism being that white societies are expected to be open to the Other, with the openness of non-white societies being a matter of indifference.
I think this is a dubious reading of Sartre. It apparently relates to his 'existential' phase, which was relatively short-lived, and gave way to a different engagement with politics. The allegation that he constructed an 'atomised' self is particularly weak. See the chapeter in Being and Nothingness titled 'The existence of others'.
ReplyDeleteThe broader critique of 'human nature' is entirely justified, since this latter concept is invariably invoked to justify some idiotic prejudice or other. Whose 'human nature' ought to serve as a guide to life - the Wahabbist Arab, the ancient Greek, a Russian homosexual, a PNG tribesman, a French libertine, etc.?
Finally, you mention this quote:
Human civilisation is male; woman is "the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other".
I think de Beauvoir is referring to the fact that the default 'voice' in canonical Western literature is male, white, heterosexual, etc. This ought to be reasonably self-evident. For instance, even today, if we talk of somebody being 'in a relationship', one need add no qualifiers to indicate that the relationship is heterosexual, as this is the default position. Qualifiers are only needed if it is not. This is partly what de Beauvoir means when it comes to Woman being Othered - she had hitherto merely been constructed by and for men. None of this line of argument implies hare-brained schemes for equality, or an assault against white males.
Anon, Elshtain replies to your first criticism in a footnote, in which she acknowledges that she has focused on Being and Nothingness, first because of its influence on theories of radical feminism and second because aspects of it remained constant in Sartre's work.
ReplyDeleteYou dismiss the existence of forms of given nature. Anon, we do not create ourselves out of nothing - no matter how convenient such a thought might be for autonomists.
There are, for instance, recognisably masculine and feminine qualities expressed by men and women. They are reproduced across cultures generation after generation.
Science has tended to confirm that there is a physiological basis, rather than a purely social basis, for such differences.
And we do find an expression of a masculine nature by men, and a feminine nature by women, to be admirable - especially aspects of a higher masculine and feminine nature.
Finally, the theory set out by de Beauvoir has more radical implications than you recognise in your comment.
De Beauvoir is an existentialist. She believes that human life gains its meaning subjectively, through an act of the human will in transcending the given conditions of life.
She believes that both nature and society have made men the "active" and therefore the default "human" and meaningful agent in life.
Therefore, to be equal women have to transcend their own femininity. De Beauvoir wrote:
"The quarrel will go on as long as men and women fail to recognise each other as equals; that is to say, as long as femininity is perpetuated as such."
The point of life for de Beauvoir is to exist for oneself. The more we do this, the more human and meaningful our lives become.
Therefore, de Beauvoir looks upon motherhood in negative terms as a hindrance to be transcended. She describes the unborn child as a parasite. She suggests that women are liberated by the menopause to live more fully. She is, in other words, hostile to female biology.
Being and Nothingness, and existentialism more generally were both abandoned by Sartre. Even amongst the French intelligentsia, they had fallen out of fashion by the 50s and 60s ('structuralism' and its variants had come to the fore). Whilst existentialism cannot be said to have had no influence on feminism, it's been fairly marginal. This, along with your previous statements, lead me to suspect that Elshtain is perhaps not the best reader of Sartre.
ReplyDeleteAnon, we do not create ourselves out of nothing - no matter how convenient such a thought might be for autonomists.
Nobody seriously makes the claim that humans 'create' themselves ex nihilo. Obviously, culture and context play a role, as does biology, The problems is that you will never be able to reduce humans to biology. I can find plenty of cross-cultural examples of males, for instance, behaving in a 'feminine' manner. Making this behaviour an iron law of nature would be just as illogical as what you and the 'evolutionary psychologists' have done here.
"The quarrel will go on as long as men and women fail to recognise each other as equals; that is to say, as long as femininity is perpetuated as such."
I would argue that this argument, seen properly, is merely a recapitulation of sorts of the old call for universalism. You can trace this argument back to Christianity (i.e. humans must reached a state of grace etc., irrespective of whether they are male or female, slave or freeman).
The call for equality here should be put in its proper context. De Beauviour and Sartre were influences by Hegel, particularly the so-called 'master-slave dialectic'. Without going into all the details, Hegel's position is that the master, vis-a-vis the slave, actually ends up being the dupe. Transpose into gender terms, what this means is that men are actually better off for women to have 'equality'.
Frankly, until reading this website, I had thought that neither Sartre nor De Beauvoir retained any reputation whatsoever in 2009 except that of a sick joke and of breathtaking moral cowardice.
ReplyDeleteWe know now that both writers' claims of a glorious Resistance record during the Second World War were pure fantasies, as explained in Gilbert Joseph's 1991 book UNE SI DOUCE OCCUPATION, referred to by Clive James:
http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/dreaming/kilmartin
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteWhat interests me is existentialism as one expression of an ongoing modernism. De Beauvoir in particular set out the terms of her beliefs in such clear terms that traditionalists can get an insight into what was going on in the minds of Western intellectuals of the time.
Anon
ReplyDeleteI would argue that this argument, seen properly, is merely a recapitulation of sorts of the old call for universalism. You can trace this argument back to Christianity (i.e. humans must reached a state of grace etc., irrespective of whether they are male or female, slave or freeman).
You could add nationality to the list too (from "Greek or Jew...")
Agreed, modernism, though not a form of Christianity, only grew out of the soil of a Christian worldview. You would not find such notions in cultures based on different presuppositions (i.e. look at India, China, The Middle East for a very different view of individual morality vs group identity, gender roles and class.)
Beauvoir, however she may be viewed in Europe, is still well regarded by American feminists at many universities. They have truly internalized her idea that women are regarded as the "other." She certainly expressed "hare brained schemes" for equality. She herself wrote about the radical transformation of Western society that she had in mind: to imitate the Soviet Union. Whether this was based on simply a rebellious spirit, being contrary to established order just to be shocking i.e her idea of 'fully human', or a true admiration for and belief in the merits of the Soviet system I can't say.
Anon, what exactly are you trying to prove here? Do you seriously doubt continuity between today's academes and Sartre and de Beauvoir? And do you really deny that the full realization of the individual's will requires the dissolution of material constraints? Do you really deny that it is modern society's goal to realize the triumph of the individual will?
ReplyDeleteIf so, maybe I can help.
ReplyDeleteLet's look at a quote from a modern scholar, Mollie Blackburn. In her essay, "Disrupting Dichotomies" she quotes Judith Butler and states the following.
"Following [Butler's] lead, I, too, draw from the experiences of queer people to trouble dichotomous notions of gender. Furthermore I challenge literacy scholars...to reject dichotomous notions of gender and sexuality, in favor of a more inclusive conception of who our students are and can be." (Blackburn, Research in the Teaching of English, 2005, issue 4, p. 403)
Now, you state that, "Nobody seriously makes the claim that humans 'create' themselves ex nihilo."
Really? Blackburn certainly argues that children should not define themselves by biological sex, doesn't she? Can you imagine what she'd say about race, ethnicity, ancestry, family, age, weight, or any other number of physical characteristics? What then remains but the will? Is it the will that you believe saves Blackburn from charges of nihilism?
To recap, de Beauvoir wants no femininity so that men=women.
Butler, Blackburn et al want no gender at all so that men=women=queer people.
Which part of this continuity is unclear to you?
Liesel wrote,
ReplyDeleteAgreed, modernism, though not a form of Christianity, only grew out of the soil of a Christian worldview. You would not find such notions in cultures based on different presuppositions (i.e. look at India, China, The Middle East for a very different view of individual morality vs group identity, gender roles and class.)
Have you ever read Karl Heim? He was a German, turn of the century (last century) theologian who saw this coming way before the time of de Beauvoir and Sartre.
He said that what makes Christianity unique is its separation between the Creator and the created. All other religions (Judaism and Islam excepted) conflate them, that is boil down to pantheism. Atheist materialism and pantheism both allow man godlike status: the former by erasing God, the latter by absorbing Him.
Heim argues that man wants to escape mortality and become god-like. Well, since Christianity made pantheism unthinkable to Westerners, the rebel's only real option was materialism. Conversely, because pantheism made divinity part of the self in non-Western cultures, materialism was unthinkable to them. Hence, the uniqueness of Western secularism.
It's an interesting argument. I'm still reading to find out what he has to say about ancient Judaism and Islam.
I make two claims here, firstly, that Sartre and de Beauvoir have been misrepresented here to a considerable extent, and secondly, that insofar as they are accurately represented at all, many of their key points have not been grasped. I should add that I'm not a huge fan of either write, but I have read 'B+N' and 'The Second Sex', and I'm happy to cite passages in defence of my points.
ReplyDeleteThere are at least two reasons why conservatives might wish to re-assess their views on the existentialists. Firstly, existentialists deny that women/blacks/the poor etc., have some inherent, ongoing victim status. Sarte and de Beauvoir don't deny that these actors are important or influential, but argue that a person living in 'good faith' cannot, in the last resort, pin their life onto these categories. I'd have thought that conservatives would have some sympathy for this view.
Secondly, existentialism's radical insistence on free will is, ironically, far more compatible with Christianity and 'traditional' morality than most other philosophies. Abolish free will (by way of structuralism, psychoanalysis, marxism, or whatever), and you no longer have conservative morality.
As to specific points:
We know now that both writers' claims of a glorious Resistance record during the Second World War were pure fantasies
As opposed to all those 'conservatives' who opposed the Vichy regime..Oh...wait...
Agreed, modernism, though not a form of Christianity, only grew out of the soil of a Christian worldview.
I agree that there is something Pauline in the push to universalism. I think there may be some legitimate arguments as to other traditions also striving for some degree of universalism.
Do you seriously doubt continuity between today's academes and Sartre and de Beauvoir?
Absolutely. Comparing de Beauvoir to Butler is like comparing Tom Paine to Lenin. As I said earlier, existentialism fell out of favour among the French by the 50s and 60s, by which time Sartre himself had abandoned it. I see no evidence that Butler and other US feminists are working in the tradition of de Beauvoir - many of their reference points are the so-called 'poststructuralists', not existentialists.
This is sheer bone-headed imbecility, Bartholomew. Sartre and de Beauvoir explicitly and repeatedly argued against this very point, which is precisely why existentialism was incompatible with radical political practice (i.e. it sought to 'transcend' in and through existing conditions, rather than change said conditions altogether).
Children do, in fact, define themselves by sexual difference. It's one of the first things they learn. None of this proves the idiotic tenets of evolutionary psychology. Secondly, the other characteristics you mention need not be definitional for anybody. There's an old psych experiment, wherein people are segregated according to eye colour. Such a segregation is no less arbitrary than that which you highlight above.
Of course. There isn't such a thing, strictly speaking, as the 'individual will'. 'Modern society' is quite happy for individuals to define themselves by petty choices vis-a-vis consumption and identity politics (and you conservatives are included among this lot) but fights tooth and nail against any kind of structural change.
Anon wrote,
ReplyDeleteThis is sheer bone-headed imbecility, Bartholomew. Sartre and de Beauvoir explicitly and repeatedly argued against this very point, which is precisely why existentialism was incompatible with radical political practice...
There is no reason to be uncivil. I have provided quotes from modern-day academes which are remarkably similar in both meaning and purpose to those of de Beauvoir. That is, I have backed my claim of continuity up with hard, cold evidence.
Your turn.
Also, Anon wrote,
ReplyDeleteSecondly, the other characteristics you mention need not be definitional for anybody.
You are referring here to the other bodily characteristics I mentioned.
Are you saying then that the body has no inherent meaning? What does have meaning, then in your view?
If you say the will, you'll note that that is the same answer that de Beauvoir has given, and it is the same answer which Blackburn gives. How exactly do you explain this remarkable coincidence?
Finally, your general point that existentialism and traditional Christianity are compatible via free will is inapt. Traditional Christianity holds that free will is simply a trait of man (among others, material and non-material) which he can use both well and badly. That is, traditional Christianity subordinates free will to a higher set of principles. Is this what you find compatible with existentialism?