Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler

Beauvoir and Husserl: An Unorthodox Approach to the Second Sex

125 Beauvoir and Husserl An Unorthodox Approach to the Second Sex Sara Heinämaa in the introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir illuminates the philosophical starting points of her inquiry as follows: as for the present study, i categorically reject the notion of psycho-physiological parallelism, for it is a doctrine whose foundations have long since been thoroughly undermined. . . . i reject also any comparative system that assumes the existence of a natural hierarchy or scale of values—for example, an evolutionary hierarchy. . . . all these dissertations which mingle a vague naturalism with a still more vague ethics or aesthetics are pure verbiage. (Beauvoir 1993, 73; Beauvoir 1987, 66) With these very explicit words Beauvoir breaks away from two frameworks that have structured and overshadowed our theorization of the mind-body relationship since early modernity. on the one hand, she rejects all versions of psycho-physical parallelism, the earlier ontological versions as well as more recent methodological versions;1 on the other hand, she also abandons all varieties of ethical naturalism and its conceptions of good life and human excellence. having surveyed huge numbers of scientific, cosmological, and religious sources (Beauvoir 1997, 244–445; Beauvoir 1981b, 195), Beauvoir came to see that our ethical and political ideas of men and women rest on a premature and prejudged understanding of the human body—an understanding that is limited by dualistic and naturalistic assumptions about the constitution of the world. either mind and body are taken as two separate systems that run their courses independently of one another, or else the mental is theorized as an epiphenomenon or emergent property of physical reality. in both cases, the human body is conceived as one particular type of physiological and biomechanical system, comparable to animal bodies and inanimate objects. as a consequence, ethical and political disputes concerning women, their functions, roles, and positions in human communities, are confined 126 Be au voir anD WeStern t h ouGh t by theories of animality and material nature (see, e.g., Beauvoir 1993, 262–264; Beauvoir 1987, 188–189; cf. heinämaa 2010). Beauvoir completely rejects this approach. for her, woman is not a female animal. Woman’s very being, like the being of man, unites signification and sensibility , consciousness and materiality in a unique way that transcends the present and the past and opens onto a future. She is not defined by the animal prehistory or by the actual conditions of human life, but by her possibilities (Beauvoir 1993, 31, 73; Beauvoir 1987, 28–29, 66). Moreover woman manifests the openness of her being in all her activities and passivities. even in the most “animal” functions of sexuality and reproduction, she displays the singularity and openness of her existence. Beauvoir concludes: to tell the truth, man, like woman, is flesh, and therefore a passivity. . . . and she, like him, in the midst of her carnal fever, is a consenting, a voluntary gift, an activity; they live in their different ways the strange ambiguity of existence made body. (Beauvoir 1991, 658; Beauvoir 1987, 737) i will argue in this chapter that with respect to embodiment one of Beauvoir’s most important philosophical starting points is husserlian phenomenology, which she knew through the works of her contemporary phenomenologists. i will not discuss the historical relations of influence here in detail, since i have discussed them elsewhere (heinämaa 2003b). it is enough to point out that Beauvoir knew classical phenomenological sources well not only because she worked through the early critical commentaries of levinas (1963, 1994), Sartre (1998), and MerleauPonty (1993), published in the 1930s and 1940s, but also because she studied some central husserlian sources independently (heinämaa 2003a, 71–73). instead of an exegetic account of historical relations of influence, however, i will offer a systematic explication of Beauvoir’s existential-phenomenological discourse of feminine embodiment and develop my own interpretation of the significance of her feminist insight. one’S oWn BoDy: “our GraSP uPon the WorlD” While rejecting traditional notions of the mind-body relation, Beauvoir clarifies her approach to embodiment by writing: “however, it is said, in the perspective which i adopt—that of heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty—that if the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp upon the world and an outline of our projects” (Beauvoir, 1993, 73; Beauvoir 1987, 66; translation modified). in this summary sentence, Beauvoir condenses four fundamental claims. first, she argues that we do not experience our bodies as mere things; second...