Written by Angus Lees Miller
Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism, in recent scholarly work, has oftentimes been interpreted as essentialist. This article will review this conception of her work, reconstruct it and then offer a tentative reappraisal of her theories – arguing in Judith Butler’s shadow that de Beauvoir attempts to move beyond the Cartesian dualism’s binary that so often haunts western philosophical thought.
While she was one of the first feminists to loudly claim that gender is socially constructed, critics argue she did so only by presenting it in opposition to the supposed “reality” of sex. This underpins a dualism at the centre of her philosophy whose discursive work was one that, in a story familiar to western philosophy, ultimately reaffirmed the division between “objective” against “subjective”: Science v Emotion, Man v Woman, West v East, “Existence v Essence”. In an intellectual space dominated and framed by the west, it is a discursive tactic we see everywhere: tabloid journalists claiming to be the voice of “common sense”, centre-ground politicians imploring economic “rationality”, or, here, esteemed philosophers pontificating on “essence”. In a world of binaries, shouting about one always entails a whisper about the other. For de Beauvoir and existentialism, then, the abstracted distinction between existence and essence is no different. It divides the world into two static opposites presumed to exist as, importantly inevitable, opposites.
This, critics argue, is no more evident in the famous adage underpinning de Beauvoir’s existentialism: “One is not born a woman; one becomes a woman”. Herein we see that for de Beauvoir, “woman” refers to a set of cultural expectations that one must subscribe to to attain a “subjective” existence – our “Essence”. Prior to doing so, we may have our “objective” existence (i.e be embodied beings in the natural world), but alone that means nothing since meaning is itself only a cultural construction. Existence, therefore, can only be interpreted and used by a subject. Only as subjects, as “essence”, as a “woman”, do we use existence to express something as an individual, society or culture. Long hair “exists” but it doesn’t equal a “woman” without “essence”. The cartesian split between subject and object is therefore clear in de Beauvoir’s work. The object has its own existence, and the subject exists outside of the object as “essence” wherein each half has an existence independent of the other.
For critics of de Beauvoir this dualism underpins an essentialism that thereby emerges in her work. To start, in this vein the “objective world”, existence, is understood to simply (and uncritically) exist –suggesting that “sex” or “human nature” are inevitable and inescapable organising principles of the polity. Biology becomes destiny to a significant degree. Over and above this, however, If “essence” is an independent set of cultural checkboxes prescribed by the society we are born into, subjects can therefore only gain their subjectivity by being passively inscribed with meaning. Essence is achieved only in line with what culture deems it to be. While this conception can certainly put critical focus on the norms that Western culture prescribes to femininity and womanhood, since those norms are seen to constitute the subject, is a familiarly Cartesian idea that, in its this form, nonetheless pits a static object alongside a static subject. How people can resist, conform, and transform themselves within or outside of “essence” is obscured instead by the classic, reified subject/object distinction. Either you are a “woman”, or you are not.
Who can be surprised, then, that a philosophical framework which pits two static entities against one another in the search for meaning ultimately, and implicitly, lets through the backdoor an essentialist (and scientifically flawed) binary conception of sex? As Butler corrects us, categories are not fixed, nor essential - they are made, they are performed.
This is the consensus we have come to be familiar with in recent perspectives on de Beauvoir and existentialist feminism. However, this article wishes to suggest that there is perhaps a more radical interpretation of de Beauvoir then the one I have just described. One that offers the possibility of a nonetheless cautious reappraisal. This article will argue, therefore, that buried within de Beauvoir’s existentialism is a kernel of a far more radical perspective – something that Judith Butler themself has noted.
This requires returning once more to the founding statement: “One is not born a woman; one becomes a woman”. The potential for a reimagination of her philosophy begins with her choice of the word “becomes”. Herein de Beauvoir posits a means of mediation between existence and essence and insodoing she does two important things: (1) She moves away from the idea that subject and object exist independently of each other by introducing a medium of interpretation– since existence “becomes” essence. (2) She posits a transitory stage between the two, introducing agency and reflexivity. This is because the act of becoming is not a passive act, but an active one conducted on the part of the subject. That there is a transitory stage between existence and essence now suggests that essence is not a one-time achievement but a continual project of performance. It takes an awareness of that performance, therefore, to adapt and change that performance according to the needs of that stage. Simply put, this implies a level of self-reflexivity in the act, since subjects are no longer externally prescribed “essence”, and thus this necessarily entails a degree of innovation in the act of “becoming” since each individual’s context and demands are situationally different. Resistance, innovation and transformation become increasingly possible. Already, this begins to transform what was a prescriptive conception of gender performance into a far more active and dynamic theory. What is most interesting however is that if there is a medium between the two, the boundaries between each become blurred. This is because, accepting first that existence is interpretable only by essence, existence “becoming” essence always takes place within the context of an already gendered society. If there can be no interpretation of existence outside of essence, conceived of as a self-reflexive project that is never fully completed, then that is to say that the body becomes a corporeal tool by which that essence is performed and “become”. In this vein, the body and existence become not an abstracted opposite to essence but the very means by which essence can be accomplished and constructed. We can therefore “never experience or know ourselves as a body pure and simple, i.e. as our 'sex', [is] because we never know our sex outside of its expression as gender”.
In this vein, de Beauvoir deconstructs the Cartesian dualism by introducing the possibility of mediation between the two binaries. This serves to demonstrate the extent to which both are not assured but created. “Sex”, or more aptly termed existence in our bodies, provides the means by which to express gender but only according to the standards already established by and interpreted by gender. So long as gender is constructed as a binary, our understanding of existence and our bodies becomes binary itself.
This implies however that to the extent that essence/gender is a practise that is upheld by its own performance; binaries can change and even by dismantled. Gender is a continual act of becoming whose possibilities are only defined by the performance of itself. Judith Butler popularised this, but maybe it was Simone de Beauvoir who lay the seeds?
This article is inspired by and adapted from Judith Butler: Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex.
Butler, J. (1986). Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. Yale French Studies, [online] 72(72), pp.35–49. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2930225.
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