Disclaimer: This is an imaginary dialogue featuring Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), a French writer, intellectual, existential philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist.
Philosophical Dialogue
Featuring Simone de Beauvoir
Somewhere in Northern Paris, 1955, Simone de Beauvoir defends her theory of the self and others that she explored in her 1949 work, The Second Sex. Louis, a devout Christian, is unreceptive and wholly inflexible to the suggestion of de Beauvoir’s theory that the ‘self’ is socially constructed and proceeds to argue against her. A third individual, Amandine, is less hostile to de Beauvoir’s philosophy.
Louis: I was left confused and unsettled by the claim in your book, The Second Sex, that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
De Beauvoir: The claim is simple. Women are born human, then through a series of interactions and experiences with the world, develop their femininity and thus become women. Given the assumption there is no human nature, how do you propose women become women?
L: I find that assumption to be a fatal flaw, women are inherently feminine. Their feminine disposition is the divine product of a concoction of hormones and the effeminate essence of their genetic composition. Within her, a baby girl carries the seeds of her femininity that fully express themselves in her fulfilment of her role as a genial and caring woman.
Amandine: May I offer a rebuttal. Much of the ‘feminine disposition’ is taught to young girls, meaning they didn’t have it from birth…
DB: My thoughts exactly. Although, arguably, their entire disposition is socially constructed by the patriarchal expectations of “womanhood”, for example a female child is not born wearing lipstick but learns to. My argument is founded on the notion of intersubjectivity, the concept that we are inextricably linked to other people, their subjectivities and the public world that we all experience. Alike a network of roads. Thus, identity is dependent on and flows from this shared experience.
A: The intersubjective field, as I understand it to be, is the entanglement of different perspectives and shared concepts such as family, gender, race, language and history. The idea of being a woman is just socially conditioned and a woman identifies as feminine, defined as gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity, when she appears to match up to another’s perceived metric of femininity.
DB: Yes, it is one example of cultural preference…
L: May I backtrack to your problematic claim that there is no human nature? If this is true, how do you reconcile the inextricable ‘something’ that we all share and that unites us with God?
DB: I do not believe in God and this is false. Individuals’ identities depend upon a manner of conditions that link them to their surroundings and circumstance. I.e. time, place and civilisation, and not upon the genetic information that constitutes their cells. We are driven by concern for others and the maximisation of our own happiness, one cannot blossom without others and you are invariably anchored to other subjectivities. By subjectivities I refer to the personal conscious experience of others.
L: How does this correspond to gender being a social construct?
DB: In society, male-imposed expectations of women have permeated our experience to the extent that they are taken as innate female nature. Nevertheless, the moment a woman strays from what is expected of them and thinks about herself and her own personal endeavours and intellect, she somehow becomes less of a woman. This fluidity of a woman’s womanliness suggests that it is not a concrete and enduring characteristic, but rather depends on how one is viewed by others.
Throughout their lives, women are expected expresses their love thorough devotion and diligence to their family/community and to become soft and feminine in order to be desired. Women are reduced to passive objects, similar to Buber’s I-It relationship, and are expected to live up to certain standards (of how they look and behave). The majority of times, they do not know differently and trying to be the best subservient ‘woman’ is in their interest as it can help to secure happiness, companionship and so forth.
There was a moment when I thought I was destined to marry and mother the children of a distance cousin. However now I realise my “penchant” for the independent and intellectual. I have thought and read and debated and understood and experienced and it has led me to this realisation.
A: Throughout history, women have been guided “être-en-soi”. Being a woman has been succeeding at love and being desired by the male gaze.
L: Yet, is their biological purpose to be desirable and to bear children…This corresponds to empirical observation of human form, the wide hips, the delicate faces…
DB: If you are asked, tell me something about you? What how would people answer? Most answer with how they fit into the world and interact others. For example, someone might say; I am a mother, grandmother, wife, member of the rotary, I like art, dogs and boot fairs. People commonly identify with the institutions to which they are parts of and how they relate to others in the intersubjective field.
A: What do you mean by ‘becomes’ when you say one becomes a woman? It can be read in two ways, is ‘woman’ a final state that you can fail to reach? Or is being a woman becoming one without end?
DB: I intend to articulate the point that identity is a social construct.
L: I have noticed that in your account, you have missed out cosmology and metaphysics.
DB: Man is here. Metaphysical inquiry is entirely irrelevant to the discussion as it does little to help us to develop ourselves.
A: Dissimilar to Kant’s approach to metaphysics and the self?
DB: Ok so let’s take the example of Kant’s view of the transcendental self.
L: He takes the self to be the activity of consciousness, as a verb not a noun. Firstly, one must understand his two ‘worlds’. The first is the noumenal world, the world as it is in itself and that is fundamentally inaccessible to us in its raw state. We, however, experience the phenomenal world by imposing the concepts of space, time and causality onto the incomprehensible jumble of the noumenal world. The self is the activity of organising and structuring experience to create a unity of perception.
DB: I find the assumption of another world bordering on ridiculous as there is, by definition, no way to confirm it as it lies out of our human experience.
L: May I suggest that the assumptions you make are too sweeping. Firstly, your account relies on the theory of intersubjectivity. Yet for something to enact or to change to occur to something, there must be a something there already. A person does not come into existence as if from a puff of smoke, there are a series of antecedent conditions. This goes to suggest that there is a ‘something’, be it a private self that evolves. Yes, we interact with the world, but there must be something interacting, we are not empty shells, but I have an undeniable stream of consciousness. Moreover, how can you extrapolate with certainty that others have a personal experience like yours?
DB: You have misunderstood the foundation of my argument and of the ideology from which my theory of the self and others flows. Firstly, as opposed from starting the investigation from the perspective of the individual and their private stream of consciousness, I have begun by observing phenomena, human interaction and my experience of the world, as I see this as more integral to our notion of self and others. Your aspirations, dreams, hopes and fears are what drive you and they are intertwined with the external world. What matters is how we can better ourselves and do what serves us.
A: However, I interpret it to be intellectually dishonest to disregard the ‘background’ and metaphysical nature of the world solely as it is difficult to reconcile or understand.
L: What happens to ethics? There is evidently no enduring fact or, as from the existentialist viewpoint, no God, so no universal metric of good and bad.
DB: Well…. It does depend on the existentialist whether God exists of not. Sartre’s existentialism is atheistic whereas Marcel does believe in a God.
L: Nevertheless, you’re arguing that morals aren’t principles or eternal values and ethics are not concrete?
DB: Yes. What is good needs to serve us and satisfy our needs, freedom, happiness and progression and what is evil is what hampers this.
A: How do you approach the subject of love?
DB: Whilst connections between individuals can be consecrated by institution, they can become perverse when the love in the relationships dies and institutional bond keeps husband and wife condemned to one another till death. Freedom and feeling trump institution, in my opinion. It is of utmost importance to think and feel for yourself. Power is a restraint. Women are forced to conform to certain ‘facts’ and myths. Women are doomed to fail at being the perfect women and to embody femininity as when she thinks for herself, she as a worse woman. Instead, females should try to not let oppressive social constructs dictate their lives and instead should be honest with themselves and work for what they find to be best for their development. C’est tout.
Squamlette 