Existentialism, Feminism and Simone de Beauvoir

253 Pages·1997·12.904 MB·English

by  Joseph Mahon (auth.), Jo Campling (eds.)

EXISTENTIALISM, FEMINISM AND
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Also by Joseph Mahon
AN INTRODUCTION TO PRACTICAL ETHICS
Existentialism,
Feminism and
Simone de Beauvoir
Joseph Mahon
College Lecturer in Philosophy
University College Galway
Consultant Editor: Jo Campling
First published in Great Britain 1997 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-39774-7 ISBN 978-0-230-37666-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230376663
First published in the United States of America 1997 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-17606-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mahon, Joseph.
Existentialism, feminism, and Simone de Beau voir I Joseph Mahon;
consultant editor, Jo Campling.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-17606-8 (cloth) .
I. Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908- 2. Existentialism. 3. Feminist
theory. I. Campling, Jo. II. Title.
B2430.B344M34 1997
194--dc21 97-3279
CIP
© Joseph Mahon 1997
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 978-0-333-65912-0
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
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with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97
To Evelyn

Contents
Acknowledgements V111
Preface lX
1 Early Philosophical Writing
2 The Blood of Others: The Fictional Primer on
Existentialism 18
3 The Ethics of Ambiguity: An Existentialist Ethics 35
4 A Character Ethics 46
5 Ethics for Violence 59
6 Other Defences of Existentialism: De Beauvoir
and Merleau-Ponty 68
7 Other Defences of Existentialism: De Beauvoir
and Sartre 74
8 De Beauvoir's Ethics: A Critical Appraisal 88
9 The Historical Background to The Second Sex 96
10 The Philosophical Foundations of The Second Sex 104
11 The Second Sex: Woman as the Other 114
12 Existentialism and the Origins of Male Supremacy 123
13 The Married Woman 129
14 The Mother 139
15 The Independent Woman 149
16 Responses to The Second Sex: 1962-79 155
17 Responses to The Second Sex: 1981-85 161
18 Responses to The Second Sex: 1986--94 175
19 Simone de Beauvoir's Existentialist Feminism:
A Defence 186
Notes 197
Bibliography 220
Index 227
vii
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Jo Campling, consultant editor for Macmillan, for her
substantial help and advice with all stages of this book's preparation.
My thanks also to Ezra and Sascha Talmor, editors of The History of
European Ideas until1995, for their sustained support for my research
over fifteen years. Various members of my own family must also be
mentioned: Evelyn, my partner by marriage, with whom I have had
endless discussions; my son James, a graduate student of philosophy
at Duke, who read sections of the final draft, and my daughter Alyce,
completing a doctorate at the Courtauld Institute, for her help with
the Bibliography, and the Notes section. Finally, I wish to thank
several generations of students of philosophy at University College
Galway who, by their written and oral responses to lecture material,
have helped me shape the thoughts contained in these pages.
viii
Preface
Twentieth-century philosophy has had its share of scandals, and
among the more notorious has been the exclusion of Simone de
Beauvoir from the major anthologies, and studies, of existentialist
prose. 1 This exclusion is all the more extraordinary when one con
siders her long association with Jean-Paul Sartre, her philosophical
essays of the 1940s, her role in the major debates concerning existen
tialist ethics in the immediate post-war period, as well as her sub
stantial editorial role in, and contributions to, Les Temps Modernes.
For these and other reasons, I shall argue here that de Beauvoir's
writings, and especially her works of the 1940s, merit inclusion in the
existentialist canon, and that to deny her a place in the pantheon is to
do her a singular injustice.
In her memoirs, de Beauvoir speaks either modestly, or severely, of
her philosophical monographs. Of all her books, she says, The Ethics
of Ambiguity 'is the one that irritates me the most today'.2 On the
whole, she continues, she went to a great deal of trouble 'to present
inaccurately a problem to which I then offered a solution quite as
hollow as the Kantian maxims'.3 The basic flaw in her argument had
been to think that she 'could define a morality independent of a social
context' .4 Many commentators have accepted de Beauvoir's own
appraisal of such works, Deirdre Bair observing that 'this is one of
her least popular writings and one which scholars have generally
tended to ignore'. 5 I shall argue, against this trend, that her philoso
phical monographs make a substantial contribution to existentialist
thought, and particularly to existentialist ethics; that her critique of
Heidegger in Pyrrhus and Cineas is not only convincing, but varies
arguments found in Being and Nothingness; that many of the philoso
phical seeds of The Second Sex are to be found in her earlier philoso
phical essays; and that of the three major defences of existentialism
offered in the immediate post-war period, viz. those of de Beauvoir,
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, hers is the most philosophically sustained
and impressive.
Where de Beauvoir is concerned, the following orthodoxy has had a
considerable currency: (l) that de Beauvoir, unlike Sartre, remained
locked in the bleak isolation of existentialism;6 (2) that, as Moira
Gatens phrases it, 'the particular form of existentialism employed by
de Beauvoir is that developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Noth-
ix