Simone de Beauvoir · Philosophy
Beauvoir’s deepest structural claim: throughout history, man has set himself up as the <em>Subject</em>, the absolute, the standard human being - and defined woman as the <em>Other</em>, the secondary, relative, inessential being defined only in relation to him. “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other.”
Beauvoir opens The Second Sex with a structural insight that frames the entire work. She observes that human thought is shot through with a fundamental duality: we constantly define ourselves as a Self, a Subject, the One - and in doing so we set up everything outside us as the Other. This is, she notes, an almost universal feature of consciousness: the native sees the foreigner as Other, the in-group sees the out-group as Other, the Self posits itself by opposing itself to what it is not. So far this is reciprocal: when two groups or two people meet, each regards the other as Other, and each, from their own side, claims to be the essential Subject. But in the case of woman, Beauvoir argues, something extraordinary and unjust has happened. The reciprocity has been broken. Man has succeeded in setting himself up as the absolute Subject, the One, the standard of humanity itself - and in casting woman permanently as the Other, the secondary sex, the inessential being defined only by her relation to him. He is the human; she is the female human, the deviation, the second sex.
Beauvoir piles up the evidence that man has installed himself as the measure of the human. In law, in language, in religion, in science, ‘man’ stands for humanity as such, while woman is marked as the special, deviant case. Aristotle declared the female a ‘deformed male,’ lacking qualities; Aquinas called her an ‘incidental’ or defective being. Man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself: she is the womb, the sex, the helpmeet, the object of desire - always defined by what she is for him. ‘He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it.’ The male body is treated as the neutral human body; the female body is treated as a special, burdened, sexed thing. Man is the positive and the neutral; woman is the negative, defined by limitation and lack. She does not get to be simply human; she is always, and only, a woman - marked, particular, secondary - while he gets to be the universal human being who also happens to be male.
The concept of woman as the Other matters because it reaches beneath specific injustices to the structure that generates them. It is one thing to catalogue the disadvantages women suffer - fewer rights, less pay, exclusion from power. It is another, and deeper, to see that all of these flow from a more fundamental fact: that woman has not been granted the status of a full Subject, a free human being who is an end in herself, but has been cast as the relative being, the Other, whose meaning lies in her relation to man. Specific reforms might address specific injustices; but as long as woman remains the Other in this deep structural sense - defined by, for, and through man rather than as an autonomous subject - the subordination will keep regenerating itself in new forms. Beauvoir’s diagnosis thus sets a far more demanding goal than mere reform: nothing less than woman’s achievement of full subjecthood, her recognition (and self-recognition) as an essential, autonomous, free human being on equal footing with man. The whole of The Second Sex is, in a sense, an attempt to understand how woman came to be the Other and how she might cease to be - how the broken reciprocity might be restored, so that man and woman could recognize each other as two free subjects rather than as Subject and Other.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Beauvoir’s structural thesis: man has cast himself as the essential Subject (the One) and woman as the inessential Other, defined only relative to him. Explain what ‘the Other’ means, why woman’s Othering is peculiarly hard to overthrow, and how it differs from other oppressions.
Leads to G. W. F. Hegel.
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