An addendum to “Beauvoir’s Big Mistake” questioning the agonistic Other in its ties to conflict, war, and patriarchy. I’m not sure matriarchy is a solution here, even if I enjoy the idea of it.
“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other” —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
You would be forgiven for assuming that Hegel’s Master and Slave can be mapped onto the categories of Self and Other, and recast as man and woman. Beauvoir herself seems to be doing this math for us, where she casts man as Subject and returns woman as Other. In this short addendum to “Beauvoir’s Big Mistake,” we take a closer look at what the category of Other signifies in Beauvoir’s work.
The capitalized “Other” comes into French philosophy through Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel in the 1930s. Sartre attended those lectures and they influenced his theory of intersubjectivity in Being and Nothingness. In the section entitled “The Look”, we get a voyeuristic account of the encounter: The Self is looking through a keyhole when he realizes that he has been caught peeping. He is filled with shame and becomes self-conscious, perceiving himself being seen. The other person’s gaze is objectifying, and the by-now-familiar-struggle for recognition ensues. Relations between the Self and the Other become an endless struggle over who is subject and who will be turned into an object. Conflict, Sartre writes, is the original meaning of being-with-others (intersubjectivity). The language of objectification, and the story of objectifying the Other in order to establish one’s own subjectivity, seems especially apropos where it comes to the relation between women and men. Objectifying women, men bolster their own agentic sense of Self.
For so many years, Beauvoir was read as copying Sartre’s existentialism, so it makes sense that her theory of woman as man’s Other is read in this way. But Beauvoir doesn’t just take over Sartre’s Other. Rather, she builds her own concept of the Other from several sources: she took the idea that duality and opposition structure human society from Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology; she finds support for the idea that every group sets itself up as the One against the Other from sociologist Marcel Granet and mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil; from Hegel proper, she adopts the narrower claim that every consciousness is hostile to every other consciousness, and that it tries to set itself up as essential against the inessential Other; and finally, although she argues against Levinas in a rather long footnote, the Levinasian idea of the feminine as the Other par excellence is at least there to argue against.
When Beauvoir declares, in the Introduction to The Second Sex, that woman is Other to man, she has laid the groundwork for a richly nuanced conception of the Other that extends beyond philosophy. The Second Sex is interdisciplinary in a way that Sartre’s philosophical works are not. Beauvoir goes through biology, psychoanalysis, historical materialism, history, and myth, and also through women’s letters, diaries, novels, and even clinical case studies. Her breadth is arguably one reason that The Second Sex was initially read as a work of sociology or journalism, and not as philosophy.
In her later work Force of Circumstance (1963), Beauvoir writes that if she were to write The Second Sex again, she would ground the opposition between the One and the Other in economic scarcity and not in an idealist (read, Hegelian) antagonism between two consciousnesses. The idea with “scarcity” begins from the assumption that there is not enough for everyone, and this is the material reality from which competition and conflict begin. Accordingly, man turns woman into his Other not because consciousness is naturally hostile (Hegel), but because men organized production, property, inheritance (continuity through time) under conditions of need (scarcity) and competition. This also means that humans could choose to organize themselves otherwise.
As patriarchies emerge from the rubble of ancient wars, men in Western patriarchies shut women into the private realm of domesticity and make them dependent others. They shut women off from production, property, and inheritance. Women’s otherness, her inferiority, is an economic and historical product, rather than a difference based on structures of consciousness. Western thought is traced back to Classical Greece (5th-4th Century BCE), which is a textbook example of this, and one Beauvoir herself draws on in the history section of The Second Sex. Women were put under seclusion, could not legally own land, conduct legal transactions above a paltry sum capped approximately at the value of a few days’ food for the household. They were told their souls were meant for indoor work, while men were meant for outdoor work.
Athenian women did not have citizen rights, and when they were granted a limited citizenship under Pericles’ Law (451BCE), which required citizens to be born of two Athenian citizens, it was a xenophobic move meant to disincentivize Athenian men from marrying and having offspring with strangers from other lands. They were under guardianship of a male throughout their lives (father, then husband, then son), who acted for her in all legal and economic matters. If a man died with only a daughter as heir, she did not inherit, but became a vehicle through which the estate was passed down theoretically to her eventual son. Women’s bodies became conduits for male political and economic relations. Women’s exclusion from property follows directly from that military-agrarian basis for the state — made up of land taken through war, citizenship rights granted to land-owning males, and military service, all bound together as male prerogatives.
The Western view of the Other on which Beauvoir relies is rooted in the rise of patriarchy in Classical Athens. We are used to thinking that war and conflict results from men being in charge, but what if the reverse is (also?) true: war and conflict have produced patriarchal rule as the authoritarian and violent State needed to accumulate and maintain power.
The logic of Athenian patriarchy extends into European settler colonialism. Hegel presents his Phenomenology of Spirit as ahistorical, objective truth, but as I have written elsewhere, he was finishing it in 1806, just after the Haitian Revolution, when European colonialism needed reinforcement. Hegel works up a grand justification for European rule over its colonies and conquests. He takes the antagonism Europeans saw in the colonial encounter as his starting point and then attributes it to the structure of consciousness and intersubjectivity itself. The conflict gets naturalized at the very heart of the humanities. At first Beauvoir takes this on board, and her view of woman as Other embodies the antagonisms of an existential intersubjectivity. Later, she attempts to correct her mistake (insufficiently, me thinks), but by then her work had gotten away from her. The formula of “woman as Other” had taken on a life of its own.
The European, Western approach to intersubjectivity is irrational. There is conflict between humans, to be sure, but that is not all of the story. If we begin from the assumption of conflict and scarcity as the defining characteristics of our human condition, we blind ourselves to the resourcefulness, necessary cooperation, and sheer abundance that surrounds us. The irrationality is in how we seem to have redefined even cooperation in the service of conflict — we cooperate with each other in order to wage better wars. We end up being resourceful in building tech to annihilate and keep “the enemy” Other in its inferiority. In so doing, we become dependent on having that enemy, and even will create one, or more enemies, as needed. The abundance that surrounds us is fodder for interminable conflict and run-away human greed.
We also cover over the origin and source of conflict, which is something more interesting and crucial to who we are: care. It is only because we care passionately, and sometimes violently, that we are led into conflict. I think we have to look at how we care, and where we fail to care about the right things, in the right ways, at the right times, for the right reasons. We could work to increase our capacity for care.
If war and conflict excrete patriarchal rule — and let’s call it authoritarianism, fascism, to distance it from men themselves. Masculinity is a problem, no doubt, but we don’t want to overlook the way that women and femininity participate in, and uphold, patriarchal states.
If war and conflict excrete authoritarianism, shoring up “the opposite” as a countermeasure will only further entrench it. I have seen calls for matriarchy, and I admit to enjoying and entertaining the idea. But what are we going to base that matriarchy on, when the version of woman we know, and collectively hold out, is a problematic underside of masculinity? We could ask, what does masculinity care about, and how?
If war and conflict excrete fascism, creativity and play may loosen the hangman’s knot we are in. Some examples come to mind: extreme collective abuse of gay and gender non-conforming men produces Camp. Theater and humor can tell dangerous truths in fascist states — c.f., Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed in Latin America. We need more humaning. As Naomi Klein told it in her talk to the People’s Assembly of AI livestreamed yesterday, we will need to go in hard on being human, everywhichway.
I have digressed. Beauvoir, and even her critics like Lonzi whom I’ve written about, end up calling for a feminine subject to emerge and to make a claim of subjectivity to counter her Otherness. But these calls have not gone far enough, or gotten us any purchase in the last 75+ years. I feel like us humanists are often too human centered, and therefore cannot see past the corner that cuts across masculinity with its opposite, femininity. Do we really only care about ourselves? Is that a problematic truth? What if we look to our relations to other species? I have two dogs who have taught me more about presence, enjoyment, and patience than most humans. Maybe non-agonistic others are all around us. Why are we so egocentric, so self-oriented?