Abstract

This dissertation is meant as a call for philosophers to turn, and feminists to return, to Simone de Beauvoir's landmark tome The Second Sex. My central claim is that in this book Beauvoir establishes her own genuinely original kink in the history of philosophy by discovering a way to appropriate the tradition that is grounded in questions about her being a woman. I argue that Beauvoir's discovery provides a model for a way to think philosophically about sex difference that dispels the air of self-contradiction hovering around the idea of "feminist philosophy." I further argue that Beauvoir's using her own identity as a touchstone as well as an object of investigation in her appropriation of the philosophical tradition demonstrates a surprising faithfulness to the tradition and hence opens up new vistas of possibility for the discipline. ;Specifically, I focus on Beauvoir's appropriations in The Second Sex of Descartes and Hegel. The substantial "Introduction" to The Second Sex, I claim, is to be seen as a rewriting of Descartes' first and second Meditations, during the course of which the supposedly gender-neutral question "What is a man?"--posed by Descartes directly after the famous discovery of the cogito in Meditation II--is displaced by Beauvoir's decidedly gender-specific question "What is a woman?" ;Beauvoir's attempts to come to terms with this fact issue, I claim, in her finding a way to account for her long-standing interest in the master-slave dialectic of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I prepare for describing this account by considering, first, the appropriation of the dialectic in the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir's life-long companion. While Beauvoir is ordinarily regarded as having simply transplanted the interpretation of Hegel's concept of the "other" found in Being and Nothingness into The Second Sex, I find that it is precisely here that her independence from Sartre is most dramatic. It is central to my view of Beauvoir philosophically and historically to specify my differences on this point--differences that stem from the way I read her relationship to Descartes and to Hegel--even from those scholars who recognize Beauvoir's originality, including Michele Le Doeuff, Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Toril Moi, and Debra Bergoffen. Specifically, I characterize Sartre as committed to philosophizing at a certain level of abstraction and engaging in a particular form of fault-finding that exemplifies a limited, however common, mode of philosophical inheritance pointedly abjured by Beauvoir in The Second Sex. I also chronicle Beauvoir's pre-Second Sex attempts to express her interest in the dialectic and demonstrate that what is missing at this early stage is not a sense of the possibilities latent in Hegel's thinking but the productive terms in which to express these possibilities. Finally, I show how Beauvoir's coming to take her identity as a woman seriously, as something that can serve as the object of a philosophical investigation, opens up a way of understanding Hegel's depiction of the figures of master and slave that exposes the stake both men and women have in exploiting sex difference so as to avoid experiencing a sense of metaphysical isolation--of, this means, avoiding the starting point both of genuinely reciprocal recognition and of modern philosophy