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Simone De Beauvoir: Zeitgeist in a Turban

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Simone De Beauvoir: Zeitgeist in a Turban - 219 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: ZEITGEIST IN A TURBAN HELEN HEISE SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY This paper aims to show, not too gravely yet not in mere play, that we might be able to describe Simone de Beauvoir as our contemporary "Zeitgeist in a Turban," that expression being a play on Hegel's description of Napoleon as "the Zeitgeist on horseback." In a paper of such limited length, I cannot establish as carefully as we might like every step of the argument. Instead we must gallop through, striking sparks, we hope, on the way to our goal. What I mean by "Zeitgeist" is that Beauvoir both embodied her times and directed her times, not of course as a military-political leader, but as a writer and passionate person who wrote and lived in such a way as to capture the imagination of millions of people. Beauvoir is a revolutionary, though she does not proceed like a revolutionary leader who develops a military force which he uses to overthrow an established order, itself defended with military force. Beauvoir's methods are more cunning and canny. There is a passage at the end of the Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right so well known to philosophers it has virtually the status of liturgy to the faithful: One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when activity is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history's inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. (Knox, 12-13) The poetic, resigned tone of Hegel’s passage circumscribing the role of philosophy contrasts sharply with the straightforward, vigorous tone of an equally well known passage in Marx, namely, the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach. “The philosophers have only Interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” (Livingstone and Benton, 423) In another setting, I might have to support the claim that the Women's Movement has wrought a revolution, incomplete, but all the same revolutionary, in that women no longer think of themselves as the “inessential other” whose very existence is directed to the power and well¬ being of men. In challenging both male focus and male power, women put practices, institutions, and even language into question, pervasively and fundamentally. The radicalness and far reachingness of the feminist scrutiny and defiance were sufficient for Herbert Marcuse to label the Women's Movement the most revolutionary of the contemporary social movements. Probably not many of the members of the Simone de Beauvoir Society need to be persuaded that Beauvoir has played a crucial role in the Women's Movement. Carol Ascher says, in evaluating the role of The Second Sex: Whatever its unevenness, and it is far from a perfect book, The Second Sex has probably been the most important work for American feminism, as well as for feminism in most Western European countries.... For all the criticisms that have been leveled at The Sennnd Sex and there have been a number of criticisms by feminists, it is still regarded as "the theoretical foundation for radical feminist theory." (Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom, 147) Second Sex Beauvoir thus provided the theoretical foundation for the Women’s With The Movement That theoretical foundation can hardly be overestimated. Still I want to argue that 220 - Beauvoir’s influence was not only through The Second Sex. She wanted to change the world, she tells us in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, where she reports the effect Sartre's challenges -and support had on her life: . - . [T]he future suddenly seemed as if it would be much more difficult than I had reckoned but it had also become more real and more certain; instead of undefined possibilities I saw opening out before me a clearly marked field of activity, with all its problems, its hard work, its materials, its instruments, and its inflexibility. I no longer asked myself: what shall I do? There was everything to be done, everything I had formerly longed to do: to combat error, to find the truth, to tell it and expound it to the world, perhaps to help to change the world. (345) How did Beauvoir want to leave her mark on the world? She studied and taught philosophy. Did she think of herself as a philosopher? No. Deirdre Bair, in her biography of Beauvoir, tells us, “To the end of her life, [Beauvoir] insisted that she was ‘not a philosopher. Neither intelligent enough nor creative enough, nor possessing the sheer creative brilliance it takes to propound a thesis or construct a system.’" (Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography, 269) It is hardly surprising that Beauvoir, who had studied philosophical systems including ontology, theory of knowledge, ethics, etc. of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz (Memoirs,234) and discussed with Sartre his developing system, should think she couldn't do philosophy because she couldn't "construct a system." Had she been exposed to the Anglo- American analytic philosophy's suspicion of speculative systems, she might have had a different view about her lack of “sheer creative brilliance." Bair reports Beauvoir as saying about Sartre’s work: "I accepted his formulations as soon as I heard them. ... His ideas about the nature of human freedom and the obligations carried by the concept of choice made as much sense to me as his earlier theory of contingency. It was only natural that I sought to express these ideas within literature. ..." (Bair, 269) For a philosopher there is something provocative about Beauvoir's accepting ideas “as soon as she heard them.” She herself reports that "[t]here were ... many things we discussed and even worked on together. For example, while he was working on Being and Nothingness, I opposed some of his ideas. And sometimes he changed things a bit." (Schwarzer, 109) So she did have philosophical views of her own which she was prepared to put forward even in opposition to Sartre, whose "superiority" she "always recognised." (Schwarzer, 109) There is more going on then in her denial of being a philosopher: it is not simply that she could take over Sartre's ideas and that she herself was not up to creative brilliance. I think a further factor was that constructing tight, explicit arguments in the way at least some philosophers deem appropriate was not congenial to her "nature." She relates in the Memoirs (337) that when she and Herbaud were translating Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics in preparation for exams, they were soon "bored to tears.” Perhaps this was from having to translate from the Greek. But perhaps it was the argumentation. Aristotle has been defending particular claims which he is now ready to put together in an important argument: On these assumptions, if we take the proper function of man to be a certain kind of life, and if this kind of life is an activity of the soul and consists in actions performed in conjunction with the rational element, and if a man of high standards is he who performs these actions well and properly, and if a function is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the excellence appropriate to it; we reach the conclusion that the good of man is an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue, and if there are several virtues, in conformity with the best and most complete. (Martin Ostwald translation,1098a, 14-18) This is the style called "deliciously dry” by an Oxford philosopher. For Beauvoir I think it was just dry. Even in The Ethics of Ambiguity, putatively her most philosophical work, so far as I can tell there is nothing like the deliciously (or otherwise) dry language or the succinct, explicit argument .
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