Requerimientos Edafoclimáticos

In The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir (1963: 359-369) recalls the start of the “moral period” of her writing career:3

It is impossible to assign a particular day, week, or even month to the conversion that took place in me about this time. But there is no doubt that the spring of 1939 marked a watershed in my life. I renounced my individualistic, anti-humanist way of life. I learned the value of solidarity. … History took hold of me, and never let go thereafter; and I threw myself totally and permanently into a life of literature. … Hitherto my sole concern had been to enrich my personal life and learn the art of converting it into words. Little by little I had abandoned the quasi-solipsism and illusory autonomy I cherished as a girl of twenty; though I had come to recognise the fact of other people’s existence, it was still my individual relationships with separate people that mattered most to me, and I still yearned fiercely for happiness. Then, suddenly, History burst over me, and I dissolved into fragments. I woke to find myself scattered over the four quarters of the globe, linked by every nerve in me to each and every individual. All my ideas were turned upside down; even the pursuit of happiness lost its importance.

The onset of World War Two and the Nazi Occupation precipitated among French intellectuals the need to unshackle themselves from the confines of Cartesian and Kantian rationalism and bourgeois individualism. Like her contemporaries, Beauvoir links this conversion, both intellectual and moral, to the revival of interest in Hegel.4 Her initial

atypical woman. What interests her is not how the many ways in which she herself had been oppressed coincides with woman’s general oppression, as Rosi Braidotti (1991: 158) ventures; rather, the extent to which her sense of self does, in fact, not coincide with a general condition. Her concern is this: how it is possible to be an anomaly, to deviate from the norm? I believe what Beauvoir is hinting at when she refers to the origin of The Second Sex, and will become the underlying theme of that text, is the intuition of a gap between a specific woman’s experience of herself and being-a-woman.

3

See Arp (2001: 9-19) for a discussion of the ways in which Beauvoir’s personal situation informs her writing.

4

From The Prime of Life, we can trace the beginning of Beauvoir’s reading of Hegel, in the original German, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, to July 6, 1940, shortly after the capitulation of the French Army at the hands of the Nazis. Beauvoir (1963: 363) writes: “I have embarked upon Hegel’s

reaction to Hegel’s text is buoyant; indeed, his “amplitude of detail dazzled [Beauvoir], and his system as a whole made [her] feel giddy” (372).

In the citation, Beauvoir’s conversion is marked by her vivid portrayal of the displacement and rupture of the Cartesian ego: the pure, naively solipsistic Iis forced to become concretely aware of the indubitable bond between the individual, the social and history.5 Her preoccupation with personal autonomy is replaced with an emphasis on solidarity, intersubjectivity, collectivity. Even the watery imagery suggested by ‘burst’ and ‘dissolved’ is apt considering that fluidity is, as we have seen, one of the recurring themes of Phenomenology of Spirit.

Let us for a moment consider the situation in which Beauvoir subsequently turns away from Hegel. In Occupied France, she was living the life of a survivor.6 She was neither active in the

letters to Sartre, Beauvoir (1991: 326) describes her deciphering of Hegel’s text with the help of Jean Wahl’s Le Malheur de la conscience dans la Philosophie de Hegel, only to come to the conclusion that “he [Wahl] makes clear at length how he understands nothing.”

5

Earlier in The Prime of Life, Beauvoir (1963: 105-106) is more candid about her complicity to the narcissism and isolationism encouraged by her bourgeois upbringing: “In my day-to-day life I scarcely ever departed from the habit of cautious isolation I habitually practised, and I refused to envisage other people as potential individuals, with [consciousnesses], like myself. I would not put myself in their shoes; … such gratuitous stupidity involved me in difficulties and ill will and errors of judgment. This did not stop me from picking all and sundry to pieces with Sartre till the cows came home.”

6

In The Coming of Age (Beauvoir 1972: 440) describes a survivor as “a dead man under suspended sentence”, which seems an apt description of the vacuity that filled her days. Biographer Deirdre Bair (1990: 284) describes Beauvoir’s world during the war as “solipsistic … its boundaries were her hotel room and Sartre’s … [and] composed entirely of their fractious intrigues, unsatisfied appetites and economic insecurities.” The financial woes were alleviated by participating in broadcasts on the Nazi- friendly Vichy state radio. (Bair: 279) The “fractious intrigues” are recounted in Beauvoir’s Letters to

Sartre (1991). In Beauvoir’s most autobiographical novel, The Mandarins (2005), her fictional

counterpart, Anne, still reeling from the news of Hiroshima, tries to rationalise the moral dilemma faced by leftists who had been pinning their hopes on the Soviet Union to deliver their world from the evil of capitalism, only to learn about the labour camps in Russia: “Everything passes; ‘all is vanity and vexation of spirit’; we’ll be past this someday. … It’s laughable, this little ephemeral life brooding over those camps which the future had already abolished! History takes care of itself and each of us into the bargain. Let’s just keep quiet, then, each in his own little hole” (Beauvoir 2003: 432) and “I

Resistance Movement, nor did she, or most of her countrymen, disobey Nazis commands. In The Prime of Life, she links this stupor to her preoccupation with Hegel’s text. Beauvoir (372- 373) remembers:

It was, indeed tempting to abolish one’s individual self and merge with Universal Being, to observe one’s own life in the perspective of Historical Necessity, with a detachment that also carried implications concerning one’s attitude to death. How ludicrous did this brief instant of time then appear, viewed against the world’s long history, and how small a speck was this individual, myself! Why should I concern myself with my present surroundings, with what was happening to me now, at this present moment? But the least flutter of my heart gave such speculations the lie. … I turned back to Kierkegaard and began to read him with passionate interest. ... Neither History nor the Hegelian System could, any more than the Devil in person, upset the living certainty of “I am, I exist, here and now, I am myself.”

Beauvoir ascribes her apathy to the horrors of war to being momentarily overwhelmed by the “flight into the Universal”. The Hegelian System no longer underscores her connectedness to the world, her solidarity with each and every individual; instead, it symbolises detachment and indifference. Previously, she enjoyed the world’s embrace; now, she feels engulfed by it. Dissolving into fragments had seemed like an overcoming of her previously solipsistic self; now, the disappearance of her “self” in the vastness of the history of the world is no longer portrayed as the birth of her ethical consciousness, but only as the death of her individuality. Beauvoir repeats Sartre’s rejection of Hegel in favour of Kierkegaard7 and, in the formulation

was thinking today that people are really wrong to torment themselves over anything and everything. Things are never as important as they seem; they change, they end, and above all, when all is said and done, everyone dies.” (433). Robert, Anne’s husband, replies that she, like most other witnesses to human suffering, takes refuge in apathy because of the feeling of powerlessness “in the face of certain overwhelming facts”, like the sheer number of people murdered, tortured, displaced and enslaved between the Nazi camps and the Russian camps. Note how Anne’s sentiments echo Beauvoir’s own apathy during the time when first started reading Phenomenology of Spirit.

7

See Part 2e. Coincidentally, Beauvoir, like Sartre, refers to Kierkegaard only four times in The

Second Sex, and none of those references have any bearing on individualism, dialectics or Hegel.

Given that Beauvoir connects her indifference to the Occupation to her reading of Phenomenology of

Spirit, it escapes her sense of irony that she turns from the flight into the Universal only to be

passionately absorbed by Kierkegaard. She feels no contrition for her apathy, only for having enjoyed Hegel.

“I am, I exist, here and now, I am myself”, she seems to be referring to the same unmediated subject of Being and Nothingness that Sartre posits as an alternative to the ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’. This retrospective dismissal of the Hegelian system symbolises her public allegiance to existentialism in general, and Sartre in particular.8

It does not, however, point to an absolute disavowal of Hegel. Indeed, the very first of the texts produced during Beauvoir’s moral period, She Came to Stay (1949), is prefaced: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other one.”9 Beauvoir (1948: 70) quotes this exact line in

8

At the risk of over-interpreting Beauvoir’s public rejection of Hegel at this precise moment in French history, I would venture that it serves as atonement for her compliance with a Nazi order to sign an oath that she was neither a freemason nor a Jew in order to continue teaching at the Lycée Camille-

Séc, which Sartre condemned as an act of complicity with the enemy and a betrayal of their

philosophy (Beauvoir 1977: 369).

9

In the dramatic conclusion of her first novel, Beauvoir (1949: 431) writes: “Xavière was there, existing only for herself, entirely self-centred, reducing to nothingness everything for which she had no use; she encompassed the whole world within her triumphant aloneness, boundlessly extending her influence, infinite and unique; everything that she was she drew from within herself, she barred all dominance over her, she was absolute separateness. And yet it was only necessary to pull down this lever to annihilate her. ‘Annihilate a consciousness! How can I?’ Francoise thought. But how was a consciousness not her own capable of existing? She repeated ‘She or I’. She pulled down the lever.”

She Came to Stay satirises the desire for self-recognition. The first seven pages establish that

Françoise, Beauvoir’s heroine, suffers from the naïve solipsism of the consciousness asserting itself at the cost of everything else. When she is confronted by Xavière, an equally narcissistic young woman who resists being assimilated by Françoise, and threatens to disrupt the world that the latter had created for herself, she sees no alternative but to murder this rival consciousness and in so doing, re- assert her freedom. In short, the novel begins with Françoise embodying the “I = I” of naïve consciousness in the first movement of the dialectic and ends with Françoise once again embodying the “I = I” after defeating the other. Such an interpretation of freedom corresponds to Kojève’s perspective regarding the struggle for recognition. In the final passage, Beauvoir (431) writes: “No one could condemn or absolve her. Her act was her very own.” Françoise’s act is beyond judgment precisely because it is her act. Within the framework of radical individualism evident in Being and

Nothingness and posing as Marxist phenomenology in Kojève’s lectures, there is no possibility of

judging actions beyond ascertaining whether or not they are expressions of freedom, i.e., whether or not they are self-serving. Thus, Françoise’s murderous act is consistent with a view of the struggle for recognition as the annihilation of otherness. It is rather curious that the two combatants in She Came to

The Ethics of Ambiguity. Furthermore, the text that signifies the culmination of this period, The Second Sex, takes the dialectic of recognition as its point of departure. Many of Beauvoir’s texts suggest a preoccupation with the meaning of mortality and, to varying degrees, all of these texts are concerned with the relationship between the individual and the social, responsibility and the problem of identity: Hegel is invoked, by name or by association, in all of them.10 Thus, despite her professed disenchantment with the Hegelian system after her initially positive reception of Phenomenology of Spirit, Beauvoir’s moral period is marked by a recurrent engagement with Hegel.

Most recent Beauvoir scholars remark on the textual tensions in her work. They distinguish between the “dominant voice” in Beauvoir’s work, which is most often associated with Sartre and, a “marginal voice” with less certain origins, which supposedly subverts the main argument.11 Michèle le Dœuff (in Simons 1995: 63) goes so far as to describe Beauvoir’s thought as “precariously balanced between that which she really seeks to think and the doctrinal line that she receives ready-made … [by] the readers of Kierkegaard and Heidegger … [and] the image she leaves us is that of a woman entangled in these references imposed by the times, neither truly gypped nor truly destroyed, but trapped, at least halfway, obliging herself to embrace a doctrinal framework with which, finally, she had little to do, and abandoning what she found in grappling with the arduous reading of Hegel.” While I agree with Le Dœuff’s insight that “Hegel” is at the heart of what seems muddled and contradictory in Beauvoir’s thought, her assessment needs to be qualified. During the course of Part 3, I show that Beauvoir “embraces” Marxist phenomenological existentialism, which Le Dœuff (1991: 107) traces back to Kojève, only insofar as she includes, but does not accept as dogma, this doctrine in her critical analysis of the dialectic of recognition. Ultimately, “Beauvoir’s Hegel” is strikingly different from the incarnation of Hegel advanced by early French Stay are women, given, as I will show, Beauvoir’s suggestion in The Second Sex that participation in

the life and death struggle is the sole prerogative of males. For further discussion, see Simons (in Card 2003: 112-128) and Sirridge (in Card 2003: 138-141).

10

For discussions centered on some of the texts that precede The Ethics of Ambiguity, see Sirridge (in Card 2003: 143-145), Schott (in Card 2003: 233-239), Arp (2001: 21-46), Tidd (1999: 17-24), Barnes (in Fallaize 1998: 157-170), Bergoffen (1997: 45-66) and Lundgren-Gothlin (1996: 152-164).

11

Debra Bergoffen, in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic

Generosities (1997), is one of the noted Beauvoir scholars to draw her distinction between what she

phenomenology. I now turn to an important precursor to Beauvoir’s reinterpretation of the dialectic of recognition, The Ethics of Ambiguity.

b)

The Ethics of Ambiguity: freedom, power and the bond