De
Beauvoir and Biological Differences
Simone de Beauvoir based its
philosophy on a simple observation:
“Humanity is divided into two
categories of individuals whose clothes, face, body, smile, gait, interests,
occupations are manifestly different: perhaps these differences are
superficial”
and a question:
“What is a woman?”
De Beauvoir gives a first
obvious and naive answer:
“Woman appears essentially to
the male as a sexual being“. Specifically, the woman has never been defined by
comparison to humans. Woman is the Other : “Otherness is a fundamental category
of human thought. No community is defined as one without ever once asking the
Other in front of you.”
Following Hegel’s dialectic,
De Beauvoir explains that “The human subject arises only by opposition” which
induces a reciprocal relationship. However, Simone de Beauvoir notes after the
Second World War, there is no gender, report of reciprocity. “In almost any
country, the legal status is identical for every human.
But even when rights
abstractly recognized this equality, manners and habits still discriminate
women”In general, she observes, “it is often the numerical inequality that
gives this privilege” but this principle
does not work as there are many women (if not more) than men on Earth !
Woman are not a social class
like slavers or the proletariat. “They have no history, religion of their own,
and they are not like the proletarian solidarity work and interests (…) They
live dispersed among men, attached by housing, labor, economic, social
condition of some men – fathers or husbands – more closely than other women”
In conclusion: “The division
of the sexes is in fact a biological given, not an event in human history”
Adopting the principle of
moral existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir asks about the possibility for a woman to be
fulfilled as a human being, what circumstances limit their freedom and if one
can overcome them.
It is therefore right to
review the views of the woman taken by biology, psychoanalysis, historical
materialism, which were the “real women” and the figure of the Other, and what
were the consequences in terms of men.
In the first chapter, Simone
de Beauvoir begins by describing the physiological and sexual differentiation
of women compared to men, the only to be natural. In fact, it’s not skin color,
religion or nationality which separate man from woman, it’s sex, one had to
start there. In general, the purely sexual differentiation is in addition to
other features: for example, women have a less robust shape, muscle strength and
lower respiratory capacity, pulse beating faster, her vascular system is more unstable. These
features explain not only the sexual differentiation, but the gender hierarchy.
In the second chapter, Simone
de Beauvoir observed that for psychoanalysts, Freud for example, “man is
defined as a human being and woman is defined as a female: whenever she tries
to behave as a human, she is accused to emulate the male”
In the next chapter, Simone de
Beauvoir critics basic deductions of Engels: he assumed that access to private
property led to the submission of women, because of her lack of workforce.
Nevertheless, no biological reason or psychoanalytic technique explain any
hierarchy between the sexes.
De
Beauvoir and History
Simone de Beauvoir will,
therefore, turn to history in its second part: “the world has always belonged
to males“. “Thus the triumph of patriarchy was neither a coincidence nor the
result of a violent revolution. From the beginning of humanity, their
biological privilege allowed only males to assert themselves as sovereign
subjects“. They are the ones who later will make up the social codes.
Simone de Beauvoir draws some
conclusions from this historical part:
“The whole history of women
was made by men.”
De
Beauvoir and Myths
In a third part, De Beauvoir
analyses the reasons for the inequality of man and woman in the study of myths.
These include “The eternal feminine”, the counterpart of the “black soul” and
the “Jewish character”. The man posed as subject and woman as object: so he is
active, she is passive, he is the foundation, she is the field for sowing.
Similarly, she can become a trophy for the man who loves prowess, wins the game
(Rastignac by Balzac, Sentimental Education by Flaubert…).
Legible and accessible, the
Second Sex seems to remain a must read for any young woman who reflects on her condition, his destiny, its future choices.
Simone de Beauvoir examines an exhaustive, erudite, logical and rational study
of women’s condition. The second volume reviews women in their situation.
List of characters mentioned
in the trial for uttering statements more or less sexist: the monotheistic
religions, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, St. Augustine, Pythagoras, Rousseau,
Proudhon, Bonald, Auguste Comte, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Montherlant,
Napoleon, Hitler (Küche, Kirche, Kinder), Faulkner, Montaigne, Diderot,
Voltaire, Helvetius, d’Alembert, Mercier, Stuart Mill, Erasmus, Fontenelle,
Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Carnot, Marx, Engels, Blanqui, Hemingway…
“There is a good principle
which created order, light, and man and an evil principle which created chaos,
darkness and woman” (Pythagoras).
No comments:
Post a Comment