Paste your essay in hIt’s A Man’s World and a Woman’s Situation
The philosophical relationship between Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir marked the existentialist scene of the twentieth-century which remains prominent today. Beauvoir’s philosophy is often betrothed to that of Sartre, since his writings act as a framework on which Beauvoir had developed her beliefs. De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is a seminal text for the feminist movement which differentiates her philosophically from Sartre rather than aligning with him. She strayed from challenging Sartre’s conception of freedom obtrusively, rather, she remained subvert to his radical ontologies most clearly defined within his 1945 lecture “Existentialism in A Humanism.” An examination of this intellectual relationship will consider how de Beauvoir developed her own philosophical account in the light of Sartre, concerning herself with one of the central concepts of modern existentialist philosophy – the notion of one’s freedom under the pretenses of oppression.
Jean Paul Sartre embarked on a fundamental reappraisal of the traditional philosophical conceptualization of existence which implies that essence anticipates existence. Sartre explicitly formulated this reversal of thought within “Existentialism in A Humanism” by asserting that existence precedes essence. He argued that there are essentially two kinds of beings: the first being in-itself, which he categorizes as complete and fixed, the second being for-itself, which he characterizes as an incomplete consciousness void of predetermined meaning. The human condition is such that there is not a pre-established implication of the meaning of life, rather it is forced to create itself from nothingness by means of acting in the world of non-exhaustive possibilities. As a conscious being, man must actuate himself and has complete and absolute freedom to do so.
Sartre argues that man becomes conscious when the for-itself being undergoes a process of distinguishing himself from what he is not. It is through this process of negation man comes to understand that he is disconnected from the in-itself on which it depends. Man exists on the merit that he is “something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so” (__). Man is fixed in his freedom through which he is always able to direct his life towards their chosen objective or “project.” These projects cannot be compromised by one’s circumstance. Man is brought into this world through no desire of his own, abandoned, with no predetermined essence, completely responsible for his creation through his projects. Man, through Sartre’s conceptualization, is absolutely free, meaning that there is nothing which, by virtue of external appearance or living in a specific socio-economic condition, would obscure and restrict that absoluteness. Regardless of the facticity of one’s stature, one can always rise above in thought and a denial of this freedom is a form of self-deception and an avoidance of responsibility Sartre conceptualizes as “bad faith.” A man’s condition of absolute freedom is often a daunting task from which he has a tendency to stray and disown, causing him to act inauthentically.
De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex examines how feminine patterns of subordination were never result of a pure for-itself freedom, rather, an socially contained freedom. A woman’s situation may restrain her possibility of transcendence, obligating her immanence through no will of her own. Her situation is not a pure expression of freedom as it should be, for-itself, rather there is an aspect of materiality which imposes itself onto her. To Beauvoir, a women’s situation “represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression” (__). A woman who is confound to her state of immanence is not due a choice of her own, the woman does not consent to her objectification, but she cannot rise above it considering she lacks the tools to do so, or is merely not aware of her situation.
A woman’s situation, like all oppression, does not reach the subject through a particularity of their being, rather, it constitutes their entirety. A woman finds herself in a situation where she is incapable of realizing her situation for it is all she knows. Not only is her social situation subordinated but her aspirations, fantasies, and possibilities follow suit. She was not equipped with the syllogism necessary for transcendence as she remained “ignorant of what constitutes a true action” (__). Beauvoir does note however, that there are women who choose to reside in their state as an objectified “other.” She who revels in the comfort of the lack of responsibility and anguish associated with her immanence is then said to live in bad faith. Capable of overcoming her situation, but does not want to face the accountability of slefsustenance and her responsibility of defining herself in her own means.
A consistent Satrean position would make woman responsible for herself, no matter how constrained her situation, but insofar as de Beauvoir’s interpretation of a woman’s situation is that of an existence synthesised of freedom and limitation, it implies a tenet distinct of Sartre’s. Through a Sartrean conceptualization, the transcendence of factuality through thought is what gives way to freedom and consequently one’s moral obligation of that freedom. De Beauvoir examines a flaw with the prioritization of one half of an apparent dualism of existence, which she considers to be composed of both materiality and thought. In opposition to the Sartrean formulation of transcendence, de Beauvoir states a necessitating bodily immanence as an inescapable half of the human condition. The condition of a woman and a man respectively is subject to change and variation depending on an individual’s external circumstances; where its future manifestations are not determined wholly through its earlier realizations, however they do imply and provoke certain alternatives.
Freedom for Beauvoir does not reside with a particular in their individuality, but rather within the relations between particulars. It is the case that for Sartre, man does not simply adapt possibilities to himself, but recognizes them in the presence of another being that exists for-itself, another human being with a will of his own. Sartre however, only recognizes the other as a mechanism for self-realization or general realization in that sense. Merely a disengaged exchange of acknowledgement. Beauvoir insists on their direct infiltration that the reality of one’s positioning within the world can have on freedom of an individual. Women have been relegated to a type of passivity to man as the “other” half of a whole where both components are if equal necessity for the other Freedom of a woman is dependant on her emancipation from the current relations she bears to man that is possible but not yet the reality of today. She states:
As a matter of fact, man, like woman, is flesh, therefore passive, […]. And she, like him, in the midst of the carnal fever, is a consenting, a voluntary gift, an activity; they live out in their several fashions the strange ambiguity of existence made body (__).
Beauvoir alludes to a harmonious relationship between a man and a woman, that like a woman’s freedom, can only flourish under a socio-economic revolution:
when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form (__).
However, oppression can only be overcome not through the individual endeavours of the oppressed, but must be reformed collectively. Beauvoir acknowledges and commands the long winded individual struggle, but admits nonetheless, that these efforts will not see themselves through. Inasmuch as oppression cannot be lived as a freely chosen project, its overcoming requires an individual as well as a social revolution; the situation of a woman is a more general situation, one that transcends their immediate experience.
Sartre did not make way for the reality of oppression within his conceptualization of freedom. De Beauvoir recognizes the human situation, in particular that of a woman, to be one of duality, implying that the oppressive conditions are not just facticity of one’s freedom but that social conditions may encroach on freedom itself. She then provides women with a means of authenticating their subjectivity, in that she must go beyond her individualism and establish a collectivity only through which a slow political struggle can bring about a progressively expanding freedom for women.
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