Simone de Beauvoir

Ken Taylor
Coming up on Philosophy Talk: Simone de Beauvoir.

John Perry
French feminist…

Ken Taylor
Novelist…

John Perry
Self-proclaimed midwife of Sartrean existentialism.

Simone de Beauvoir
was against any kind of oppression: the oppression of class, of individuals of peoples—the oppression of individuals particularly.

John Perry
De Beauvoir’s is monumental book, “The Second Sex,” is a classic of feminist philosophy.

Speaker 1
I considered it to be an essay, a search to obtain a deeper knowledge of woman.

John Perry
The first to distinguish biological sex from socially-constructed gender.

Speaker 1
When I began to write the book, I didn’t even suspect how heavily a woman’s condition weighs on her. So writing my book was a revelation for me—an apprenticeship, rather than a political act.

John Perry
Our guest is Shannon Musset, editor of “Beauvoir and Western Thought: From Plato to Butler.”

Ken Taylor
The philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir

John Perry
…coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that start at Stanford University at Philosophers Corner. That’s where Ken and I are professors of philosophy.

Ken Taylor
Today it’s the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir.

John Perry
Simone de Beauvoir is probably best known as a novelist and feminist thinker, but she was also an existentialist philosopher, and like her lover, Sartre, thought a lot about freedom.

Ken Taylor
Now John, I’m a big fan. I’m a growing fan in my old age of existentialist philosophy, and I’ve always been a fan of feminist thought, but you know, I’m not really sure how feminism and existentialism go together.

John Perry
Well, let’s start with the more familiar part of Beauvoir’s work, the feminist theory, and then see if we can work our way over to existentialists.

Ken Taylor
Okay, good plan. Her most famous work was “The Second Sex” It’s a really big book. And it’s a hugely influential book—it laid the groundwork for what’s called the second wave of feminism.

John Perry
Now, first wave feminism is a term we use for women’s suffrage and property rights back in the 20s, when they got the vote. The second wave broadened things to include sexuality, inequality, family, the workplace, reproductive rights, and so on. All of that started with Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” and it continues.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. And in that book, she outlined powerfully how women are perceived as other in patriarchal society, other in the sense of secondary to the male, the “second sex.” Men, we’re the first sex, we’re the default sex.

John Perry
She famously wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.”

Ken Taylor
Now what do you think she means by that exactly, John?

John Perry
Well, I think she’s getting at how the roles we associate with women are not really given at birth just in virtue of biology—they’re socially constructed. And women are taught that what they’re supposed to be in life and what they’re not supposed to be, what kind of roles they can or can’t perform in virtue of being “the second sex.”

Ken Taylor
So let’s try and—I think we can begin to relate that kind of idea to existentialist concerns with freedom and living in bad faith and all that actually.

John Perry
Well do go on, Ken.

Ken Taylor
Well look, existentialists are concerned with radical freedom, with the kind of freedom you have when you make a decision in good faith—when you kind of choose from the ground floor what you are to be. We always have that kind of radical freedom, Sartre says. And if you deny that, if you deny that you’re always free to choose yourself, you’re living in bad faith. You’re allowing yourselves to be ruled by identities imposed on you from outside. You can’t do that.

John Perry
Well, that’s fine. But what does that have to do with with this dictum that you’re not born a woman but you become a woman?

Ken Taylor
Well, think about it. If someone has taught her entire life that to be a woman, she has to behave in a certain way, dress in a certain way, play a subservient role within her family work, only certain kinds of jobs have limited life, expectations. And then if she accepts that role, she’s less free, she’s less authentic, she’s surrendered herself to the other to be the imposing other.

John Perry
But look, existentialism posits radical freedom: you don’t have a pre established essence, and nobody else can decide what your essence is either. You always choose who you are. But then oppressive male society, it seems she’s saying, preamps or co-opts that choice, it imposes an identity.

Ken Taylor
You could wonder—you know, you’re right, I see your point that, you can wonder if that’s consistent, because if you’re radically free, how’s anybody going to impose an identity on you?

John Perry
So maybe you’re suggesting, Ken, that she shouldn’t have written this 785 page what she calls an essay on male oppression. She should have said, “Hey, we’re all existentialists—buck it up women! Nobody can impose your identity on you. You’re condemned to be free.”

Ken Taylor
Well, right. So yeah, it’s a puzzling thing, you know. And to help us get our way into de Beauvoir’s mind, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Caitlin Esch, to learn more about her life and her times. She files this report.

Caitlin Esch
Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 to an upper middle class family. But that privilege largely dissipated after her grandfather went bankrupt. Beauvoir’s father was determined that both she and her sister would get an education and become self supporting.

Bradley Stevens
And this was quite distinct, obviously, when compared to other bourgeois upbringings.

Caitlin Esch
Bradley Stevens from the University of Bristol is an expert in French literature in history.

Bradley Stevens
Women were expected to marry to make a good marriage and to go on and become good wives and mothers. Simone de Beauvoir, of course, didn’t follow this path.

Caitlin Esch
Beauvoir was one of the first women to get a degree from the Sorbonne. Later as a young woman in the 1930s she taught philosophy. And then in 1939, World War II hits Europe like a hammer. The Nazis occupy France.

Unknown Speaker
More than three fifths of their country was to be blacked out by a military occupation. The remainder was to be controlled by a French government acceptable to Hitler. A tax of 400 million francs a day was to be imposed on the French people to support the German army of occupation.

Caitlin Esch
The war years are hard on Beauvoir, both personally and materially. Her apartment is so cold that she writes from cafes. Oh, and of course the war separates Beauvoir from her lifelong companion, Jean-Paul Sartre and her lover Jacques -Laurent Bost. Both go off with the army.

Bradley Stevens
And this separation from two very important men in her life left her at once vulnerable but also acutely aware of her own independence and her own ideas.

Caitlin Esch
Around this time Beauvoir also begins an ill-fated love affair with a female ex-student that ends up bringing down her teaching career.

Bradley Stevens
It’s very easy with with Simone de Beauvoir for us to focus on what has, over the years, been revealed to be an increasingly colorful personal life, her intimate relationships with both men and women.

Caitlin Esch
But of course, Simone de Beauvoir should not simply be defined by her unconventional romantic liaisons.

Bradley Stevens
Because she had a very rich social network that she helped shape and generate during this period. She’s great friends, for example, with the artist Giacometti and also with Cocteau—this very mythic, very irresistible image of a generation of great creativity.

Caitlin Esch
Through it all, Beauvoir and Sartre were incredibly close. They weren’t just partners: they read together traveled together, and according to Beauvoir’s autobiography, there was only one night in their decades long relationship where they even disagreed. While Sartre was an existentialist philosopher, Beauvoir saw herself more as a writer.

Bradley Stevens
This mantle of philosopher is one that comes loaded with a certain cultural capital, this image of a patriarchal male white class.

Caitlin Esch
Beauvoir wrote novels and autobiographies so her thoughts would be more accessible to women of all classes. And then her book, “The Second Sex,” comes out. It’s instantly popular and considered very scandalous.

Simone de Beauvoir
Being a woman is not a natural fact—it’s the result of a certain history. There’s no biological or physiological or psychological destiny that defines a woman as such. She’s the product of history— civilization, first of all, which has resulted in her current status.

Caitlin Esch
Beauvoir’s assertion that women can reclaim their social privilege and power and be equal to men rightly threatens the patriarchy.

Bradley Stevens
And so you have Albert Camus saying to her in private “Um, this essay makes Frenchmen look weak.” You’ve got Francois Mauriac, the famous novelist, saying that this essay is borderline pornography. But the book sells 20,000 copies in the first week.

Caitlin Esch
“The Second Sex” raised eyebrows but it also cemented Simone de Beauvoir’s status as a feminist philosopher. Beauvoir died in 1986. Her funeral was held six years to the day after Sartre’s and she was buried alongside him in Paris. Bradley Stephen says whenever he visits Beauvoir’s grave he sees flowers, metro tickets, cigarettes and letters.

Bradley Stevens
It’s borderline mythic, and she would always warn us against the temptation to mythologize and idealize somebody’s life or their reputation. Nonetheless, I think it’s undeniable to say that Simone de Beauvoir is certainly one of the most important French writers of the 20th century. She is undeniably one of its great women.

Caitlin Esch
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Caitlin Esch.

John Perry
Thanks, Caitlin, for reminding us what interesting lives French philosophers have. You’ve got two sedate American philosophers here. This is Philosophy Talk. I’m John Perry, with me is my fellow Stanford philosopher, the sedate Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
And today we’re thinking about Simone de Beauvoir. We’re joined now by Shannon Mussett. She’s a professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University. She’s co-editor of “Beauvoir and Western Thought from Plato to Butler.” Shannon, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Shannon Mussett
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

John Perry
Shannon, how did you first get interested in the philosophical work of Simone de Beauvoir?

Shannon Mussett
Well, I would have to say that that was just my feminism class in college. And like many other people, and probably like Beauvoir herself, I read “The Second Sex” and suddenly a problem that I hadn’t even realized was there appeared to me and my whole world shifted.

John Perry
Well, we mentioned earlier her provocative statement “one is not born but rather becomes a woman.” I mean, what is Beauvoir saying here? What did it mean to you when you had this experience of reading her book?

Shannon Mussett
Well, I think this idea that the masculine or the male is sort of the default in our culture and in our language is just something that you don’t really see until you start to investigate it. And once you look at this idea that women are made, and they’re made to sort of be the prop or the other two men, well, then suddenly you start to understand that it’s a construction from the ground up.

Ken Taylor
But wouldn’t that be true of any gender role? I mean, are men born rather than made? I mean, are parents born rather than—aren’t all social roles made rather than just given by nature?

Shannon Mussett
Absolutely. And I think that’s one of the best things about existentialism is the way that it makes us question any of these categories, or what they might call absolutes and say, Actually, these are artificial. And we create these and we give them meaning they don’t come to us already endowed with meaning. But the question of woman seems to be a different kind of a construction because it’s so difficult to see where it begins, and also understand how complicated it is. So if I want to question something like, Well, what is the category of Republican or Democrat, it’s easy to see how those are constructions. But woman is such a huge enveloping question that it’s a little bit different than the other kinds.

John Perry
Well, but suppose I want to say—look, isn’t Beauvoir kind of overstating the case? Because look, women are genetically and biologically do have certain roles to play. If we’re going to have a human species that continues, women have to bear children.

Shannon Mussett
I’m not sure that’s so true anymore. In 1949, absolutely.

John Perry
I remember in 1949 that’s the way we would talk about it. And, and moreover, if you look at women compared to other species, these are kind of the roles that all the female of all a million species play. So in what sense, is it not largely biological, that women’s are kind of connected with being at home and raising children and nurturing, and things like that?

Shannon Mussett
Well, so on the one hand, I think that one of the great things about something like the second sex is it really takes seriously biological and physiological and psychological forces that go up to make this category of woman so of course, these things play a role. But since it is from an existential perspective, it’s also about the individual. And individuals are not captured by anything biological or physiological or psychological. We define those things in our acts. We’re not defined by them before we act. And I think that, that that allows us to sort of rupture this idea that women are destined to be mothers or wives or to stay in the home.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s interesting stuff. And I’m gonna follow up on that after the break, because I think it kind of tiptoes us right up to a kind of paradox I have with the combination of feminism and existentialism, but you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Simone de Beauvoir with Shannon mustard from Utah Valley University.

John Perry
In our next segment, we’re gonna kind of try to get deeper into the relationship between Beauvoir’s feminist thought and her existentialist philosophy. How are the two connected or disconnected or what?

Ken Taylor
Gender freedom and existentialism—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Peggy Lee
‘Cause I’m a woman, W-O-M-A-N, that’s all.

John Perry
Being a woman: made not born, says de Beauvoir. I’m John Perry. I’m a philosopher. That’s P-H… Well, nevermind. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor. We’re thinking about the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir,

John Perry
Our guest is the editor of “Beauvoir and Western Thought: From Plato to Butler,” Shannon Musset. You can join Shannon for live chat on our online community of thinkers this coming Friday, March 14 at 12 noon Pacific. Check it out at philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
So Shannon, I can understand how socially constructed identities and roles can people can try to impose them on you. And I can understand maybe a kind of bad consciousness that accepts accepts those identities that lives like the slave is required to live or something like that. But Drupal far is an existentialist at least some existentialist, her buddy jump offs are believed in radical freedom. So how can anybody ever succeed in imposing an identity on you? If you’re always free to just say, hey, no, dude, that’s not what I choose to be. How can that work?

Shannon Mussett
Well, one of the things that I love about Beauvoir is that I believe she really maintains that we are radically free by She’s also so deeply affected. And even before writing the second sex, even when she’s working on the ethics of ambiguity, she’s affected by this idea. But wait a second, not everyone is in the same situation, can you really expect the woman in the harem or an American slave to see themselves as free? When they have been told, by nature, they have a certain essence. And it’s to be secondary. It’s to be the oppressed member of society. And so she’s really taken by that exact question herself. And so she actually focuses on this notion of ambiguity, that it’s not clear cut, we don’t really know that we’re free. We don’t come into the world knowing this. There are a lot of forces that have to sort of come into play to allow this to become a realization that we can take full responsibility for.

Ken Taylor
So it sounds like you’re saying De Beauvoir had a I don’t want to dis sorry, he has a much more complicated view than sorry, because I maybe I misunderstand, sorry. But if searching existentialism says I am radically free, right. And that means I can always kind of constitute myself and not to realize that he seems to think is to live in bad faith. It sounds like you’re saying that De Beauvoir doesn’t think that’s completely adequate to understanding then reality and possibility of oppression in the world. Is that a fair summary or not?

Shannon Mussett
I think that is a fair summary. I think that Sartre, his gift was this incredible, explosive idea of radical freedom. But he was also famous for saying that even the prisoner in chains is radically free. And on the one hand, that prisoner is on the other hand, there are limiting factors that are preventing the expression of freedom that Beauvoir is very attuned to, she focuses on childhood, for example, she’s very aware of the fact that children aren’t considered radically free in the same way an adult is and how a child is educated and socialized is going to contribute a great deal to how when and if they’re going to be able to accept and enact this radical freedom. But it’s always there. It’s always there. It’s just not always given the same kind of situation for expression.

John Perry
So so one of one of the people influenced by SAR was Erich Fromm, who had this great book escape from freedom at least, I thought it was great when I read it as an undergraduate, maybe I should reread it. But the idea of escape from freedom was was bad face here, you can be free, you should realize that. And then if you say, Yeah, but I’m a CEO of a company, therefore, I really have to be interested in maximizing profit for the stockholders or I’m a philosophy professor. So I can’t do this, I can’t do that. That’s escape from freedom. But that does seem to presuppose that you realize that you’re, you know what you’re escaping from and if De Beauvoir, the way you describe, it seems to have a little bit more subtle approach to it. So that there’s a precondition for bad faith, which is something she needs to spell out, I guess, right?

Shannon Mussett
Well, and so, oppression is the very move that people make to prevent others from coming to an awareness that they are radically free. And it is possible to do, you can’t eradicate the freedom of the other without killing them. But you can certainly prevent them from having the awareness of it to a real to a very extreme degree. And so we have to be able to understand that not every person, not every individual is going to find themselves in the same situation. Now, however, once we do come to the awareness that we are radically free, then all of those bad faith rules apply. So once I recognize my radical freedom, right, I can’t use the CEO excuse or the philosophy professor excuse, I have to accept the fact that I am responsible.

Ken Taylor
So does is this a fair summary and just trying to get my grip around that? It’s a complex set of ideas, right? But I’m just trying to get my head around this, the totality of idea Well, a part of the totality of ideas. So the first thing that an oppressor has to do in order to oppress me, is blind me to the real possibilities for myself. I mean, they have to, they have to interrupt my seeing of myself in a certain way is I mean, because if I absolutely right?

Shannon Mussett
Sure, and institutions do this, individuals do this. I mean, it’s not always fully intentional. But if I am educated and socialized in certain familial or educational systems, then I may be prevented from really having access to what I really am and that’s what’s so terrifying to Beauvoir, when she says, wow, it’s not that women were not free. It’s that they had been prevented for millennia and all these different cultures from coming to the awareness of it. So X Men and women are equal.

Ken Taylor
So now make more sense of the idea that women your one doesn’t want is not born but becomes a woman. Because in her sense of becoming a woman, at least, especially this oppressed other it’s, it’s it’s coming To see oneself or to fail to see oneself in a certain way, because of the institutions around you that are trying to interrupt, you know, as it were yourself seeing or something like that.

Shannon Mussett
Exactly. I think that’s a really good way of putting it.

John Perry
So so how much of Beauvoir’s analysis of the problems of the Second Sex could apply to the first sex? I mean, over the last 20 years, we’ve seen emphasis on gay rights, which often means the freedom of males to to to not live within the sex roles that are kind of defined for them transgender rights, so forth and so on. To what to what extent is the first sex also bound in a similar predicament?

Shannon Mussett
Well, I think lots of people are, are caught in this kind of oppressive situation that she talks about, it’s not just a problem that belongs to women, I think she discovers it when really looking at women. And I think now, it’s not quite the same, the rules aren’t quite the same for what would constitute this category of the other. But I still think that that category is still a feminine category. And so people who get placed into that category, whether it be by virtue of class, or race, or orientation, are going to be placed in that feminized category of the other. So it’s still useful to look at how she talks about it, even if you’re not just talking about women. So then men, women, people of color, you know, people of different classes can all sort of feel the effects of this analysis that she’s talking about in the second sex without necessarily just being a biological female.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re discussing the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir with Shannon mustard, and we’d love to have you join this conversation. And Alicia, from Berkeley’s on the line, welcome to Philosophy Talk, Alicia.

Alicia
I just wanted to thank you for taking my call. And also I really appreciate your program. Well, I you know, I came of age in the 60s. And even with the free speech movement, feminism was not really born yet. And I just want to acknowledge the fact that VA, unlike some of the other feminist writers, who was really respected by the, you know, our better half the men who were, you know, kind of into the hole, existential, and John Paul Sartre and all that. And that I actually, including my husband saw men actually reading the second sex, which is pretty astounding. And I think she really gave a certain legitimacy to the movements at its infancy in the in the 60s.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for the Thanks for the comment, Alicia. So, Shannon, so tell us about the actual underground influence this expanding malicious question of Simone de Beauvoir?

Shannon Mussett
Well, I think that was a that was a great point that she made before did give a certain legitimacy because she was such a good philosopher. She was every bit the philosopher that Merleau Ponty and Camus and Sartre were so she was playing on that level. And therefore, when she wrote this book, people took it seriously, whether they hated it or loved it, they took it very seriously. And so it gave a solid foundation to this burgeoning feminist movement. And I mean, if you want to talk about influence, if you read something like Betty Friedan’s, The Feminine Mystique, which really launched that second wave of feminism in the United States, you see all sorts of elements of the Second Sex and Beauvoir in philosophy in there. This idea of the myth of femininity is very much I think, influenced by what Beauvoir discovered in her own writings.

John Perry
So, during World War Two women were, at least in America, I’m sure it was true. In Europe, too, were forced out of their predetermined gender roles to do things like work in factories, and so forth and so on. And then at with the end of World War Two there, you know, there was a movement to push them back in the 50s. To what extent was this responsible for that being the time at which the second wave of feminism was launched?

Shannon Mussett
That’s a good question. I think that something that might have affected Beauvoir directly a little bit more during World War Two was the Nazi occupation of Paris. And at that time, she really got to experience what it was like to need to rebel and to have to challenge a truly oppressive force in your own society and to see how oppression actually operated. And so I think that that really affected her as far as wanting to have a political and social stand against these kinds of practices and really infused a lot of her philosophy that came afterwards. And so I think that had a much more direct influence on her than the idea that women had to get out and work for the war effort.

Ken Taylor
I want to ask you another question, though. I want to go back to this self seeing and the totally oppressed person whose self seeing is interrupted. I mean, that seems to me really hard to do. I mean, even the kid who’s not, who’s not full only aware of his freedom chiefs that his parents, you know, dictates and says, Well, why do I have to stay out overnight? I mean, I mean, if freedom is ever present as a metaphysical reality, then why doesn’t it shout to us? You know, in this in the moment of oppression? Hey, what are you doing? You know? Or does she think it?

Shannon Mussett
I think she does think it does. I think that if we were actually to go back and have some kind of magic way to reopen history, we would see people struggling against these oppressive structures all over the place. She saw this when she was working very closely with the efforts to stop the French Algerian War that people can be oppressed but, and be told that they are to be in this oppressed position, by nature and forever, but they’re still bucking up against it, they’re still struggling against it. And so I think it is always there. But the idea is that it’s constantly beating you down, the social forces are constantly telling you no, no, no, you don’t have it. And after a point, people tend to sort of resign themselves to the given they resign themselves to their situations, and they stop fighting more or they die trying,

Ken Taylor
or is that resigning themselves? So I remember reading the, what’s it called the ethics of ambiguity? Is that what it’s called? That’s what it’s called? Yeah, that she talks about resignation. And she talks about complaint. And both are somehow expressions of freedom or something like that.

Shannon Mussett
Right. Right. I mean, that’s, and that’s, that’s, that’s something that I that I was exploring some years back that when I was trying to tease out this idea of all of the different ways that one could still be radically free, and yet not be taking full responsibility for that freedom, that there are different ways that that freedom can extend itself that one can resign oneself to one situation, one can revolt against it, one can fully accept it or just sort of have it dissipate, because there’s no active avenue for it to be taken up by. One of the great things about Beauvoir is that she recognizes that our freedom requires other people to take it up, take our projects up in their own projects. And if I don’t have anyone taking my projects up, if I’m being told that they’re useless or worthless, or don’t contribute anything, then I’m not really getting very far in the utilization or the expression of my freedom, even if I am free, right? It’s kind of abstract and empty at that point, even if it is there,

John Perry
We have some good email from our old friend Paul in San Francisco, excellent conversation. If we are as radically if we are radically free, then by what standards, do we evaluate our choices? And if we are radically free to choose our standards, then by what standards do evaluate those choices? That is, isn’t radical freedom, kind of not give us much ground to stand on? It’s just kind of this—

Shannon Mussett
It gives us no ground to stand on!

John Perry
Yeah, I mean, is that really a helpful perspective?

Shannon Mussett
I think it’s exhausting. Actually, I think to fully live, this sort of existential freedom is exhausting, because you have to recognize that at every moment, you’re choosing yourself, but on a certain in a certain level, if that’s true, then why not accept that and so there is no justification for my actions outside of my giving them meaning, but maybe that’s just the way things are. And if I accept that fact that who I am and what I choose to do is validated only by those choices, and by the way in which they go out to others and are accepted by others. Well, maybe that’s just a more true way to live.

Ken Taylor
So, you know, somebody would say, this is very western kind of kind of radical autonomy, self making and all that sort of stuff, I mean, but let’s ask the kind of normative question suppose I lived in a society in which it was kind of the norm is to bow to the other the parent the social structures like Eastern societies and the self is less kind of important. Is there some—

John Perry
Old people like me.

Ken Taylor
Is there one is the one is the de Beauvoir Sartre existentialist complaint against that form of society? Is there some Oh, is it just this is how we do it in the West rethink about us?

Shannon Mussett
Well, I mean, I think it is, it is a Western conception. I think there’s no doubt but if I, I mean, if I wanted to sort of save it a little bit, I might say that there’s still no no ego or soul or substance there that’s doing any of this stuff. So in a certain sense, I think that it could, it could transcend different cultures. It’s really just the activity of living. It’s the activity of choosing if you want to say what freedom is, there’s no human nature there that supporting it. It’s just the very act of living itself. And so that act is going to be taken up in all sorts of different cultures in different ways. But I think somebody like Beauvoir would say wouldn’t matter if different cultures are educating people to behave in different ways that activity of living is the same.

John Perry
Well, I mean, it seems to me, it seemed to me when I, when I used to read a lot of SART and I must say, if you if you really like French philosophy of that period, it is a it is a tremendous burden. I mean, their books are so long. But, to me, sorry, it was just this. It was like a natural extension of philosophy. I mean, you get into philosophy, you read Descartes, you start questioning, you get through the first meditation, you realize all the meditations are just so much bowl. And, and, you know, it’s very liberating. And then it’s very liberating. And then it becomes very frightening and start more than anyone else kind of kind of developed this to me idea, not, not so much what is what it is to be human, but what it is to be philosophical. Now, whether that’s particularly Western, I don’t know. I mean, Confucius didn’t seem to draw the same conclusions, but maybe he did. You got a brief response. Yeah,

Shannon Mussett
I would just say that I think that these books are, “The Second Sex” and “Being and Nothingness,” they are monsters, but I think they capture the very passion of philosophical inquiry, unlike most other books written in the 20th century. So I think that they do carry on philosophical inquiry in a way that is deeply moving and very intoxicating.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re talking about Simone de Beauvoir with Shannon Mussett, editor of “Beauvoir and Western Thought: From Plato to Butler.”

John Perry
What would Beauvoir think of the progress women have made —or not made‚since she wrote “The Second Sex” 65 years ago or so? What would she say about the feminist cause now, and what a feminist today think about Beauvoir’s ideas?

Ken Taylor
Feminism: then and now—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Robert Palmer
Women are smarter than men in every way.

John Perry
Well, I wouldn’t want to argue with that point of view: man smart, but women smarter. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor, and we’re asking about the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. Our guest is Shannon Matson from Utah Valley University. Shannon will be part of a live chat at our online community of thinkers this coming Friday, March 14, at 12 noon pacific time—I hope you can join us at philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
So, Shannon, if she were alive today, what do you think Beauvoir would say about the progress of women and in particularly in philosophy, there’s been a lot of discontent. Because in philosophy, the number of women faculty lags behind a lot of other disciplines. And and people are trying to figure out why that’s so and what should be done about it. What, what advice do you think Simone de Beauvoir might give to the present generation of men and women philosophers about this problem in philosophy?

Shannon Mussett
Well, first, I think she would be thrilled, I think she would say as far as the progress that has happened since the writing of the Second Sex, she was politically active all the way up until her death in 1986. And she was really excited to see all these changes and all this political activism and, and women being exposed and invited and participating in avenues that they had never had been barred to them before. So I think overall, she would say good things have happened and continue to happen. But I also think she would say as far as whether or not the work has been done, is pay attention to history, one of the things that she was very good about, and if you read the second sex, you see how deeply immersed it is, in the historical perspective, that we don’t come onto the scene in a vacuum that we don’t exist in a vacuum and if situations are such that there still aren’t enough women participating in philosophy or other disciplines, or politics or what have you, then go back and look at the history and see how we got to where we are so that you can understand why we are where we are.

Ken Taylor
You know, there’s a reason in some circles, a kind of, De Beauvoir is very sensitive to history and the situation and all that and that’s deep and important, but there’s there there is a kind of line of thinking, that’s a cousin to hers, that thinks, you know, all these ideas of autonomy and radical freedom are blind to the role of historicity and situatedness in constituting us and people many people think that, you know, this kind of radical autonomy is just a myth or something like that. I mean, it’s this this, De Beauvoir ever confront, that thought in directly and defend this view of her as a gun. That kind of, you know, we are where we’re already are where we always already situated the situation plays a role in constituting us. Autonomy is a kind of, you know, lots of feminist philosophers, for example, who reject this ideal of a radical autonomy. So what would you say to people like that?

Shannon Mussett
I mean, I think the answer is simply in her works, where she shows all of the different ways that we are impacted and influenced by structures and power and things like that. And she would say, Sure, I grant all of that to you. But when you ask for people to be liberated, when you fight against oppression, what are you appealing to, if not the fact that we are free, and that we all have this, this, this ability to take responsibility for our actions and the creation of our societies? If you don’t maintain that, then you’re not fighting for anything? You’re just part of the cog of a machine that has nothing to do with individuals.

John Perry
So So here’s email from Lada in San Francisco, and it’s in question. She says, third wave feminist critique the second wave for representing the concerns of white middle class women. Is this a fair critique of second wave feminism and to what extent it would it be a fair critique of Beauvoir?

Shannon Mussett
It is a perfectly fair critique, and I think it’s one that should be made and needs to be made. And it’s and it’s a good one because when Beauvoir talks about transcendence and and what it means to be a human being, and what the most fulfilling lives of human beings could possibly be, it sounds an awful lot like what an educated white male would find to be a very valuable kind of life. And it really doesn’t take into consideration that maybe we ought to challenge the human as being very dominated by the masculine. And so I think that it’s a completely fair critique. She was very sensitive to issues of race, she was very good friends with Richard Wright, and Nelson all granted Shona around, and she toured the United States and saw all kinds of racial problems throughout the country. But she did tend to collapse the problems and say, Wow, just like people, like African Americans in the United States suffer, so do women suffer? They both get placed in this category of the other.

Ken Taylor
But she also had a, well, I don’t know if you would call her a Marxist, I guess, not a Marxist. But she thought a lot about Marxist critiques of social life and history, didn’t she? So that’s not just from a white upper class person. I mean, that’s Solidarity. Solidarity it?

Shannon Mussett
Yeah, absolutely. She had solidarity all over the place. So she may not have been wise to the fact that her idea of freedom may have been biased by her education and class to the full extent that she could have. But she studied very much and believed very much in these kinds of social movements and class consciousness and, you know, racial and gender identities that we all sort of fall under. So she may not have been able to fully envision the third wave critique of her work. But I think that she at least had all of the ingredients to acknowledge the fact that yeah, there were a lot of loopholes and blind spots that she would be more than happy to address.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I get you, I don’t really want to. I’m not an expert in this. So I don’t really want to wade into deep defend. But But I don’t see that it’s a criticism of, of second wave feminism or De Beauvoir in particular, that some people are not in a social position to conceive of themselves as as yet a subject of radical freedom that shows you how, how diminished in some ways, the socially given cells, the socially given possibilities are that shows you how how oppressed they are. Now you might say, Oh, who do you get off calling these people even more depressed, but But you know, oppression, not the slave who accepts his slavery and thinks that it’s, you know, like God given or something? Or is it? That’s the most oppressed person imaginable?

Shannon Mussett
Exactly. And and you and you want to, to think that people can be liberated from those conditions, because they are free, and that we can appeal to that, because doesn’t have to be that way.

John Perry
Let me try out an idea. That’s, that’s from a very different perspective, and I may want to disavow. But if you look at biology, if you look at mammals, what stands out about humans is not that women have some especially subservient role, but that men have been drawn in, in a very unusual way into what biologically is basically the woman’s enterprise or the females enterprise, of having and raising children. So from this point of view, the problem with the human condition is is that women have only halfway won the war. They’ve got men that are much more involved in in Domestic and worthwhile pursuits in your average goat or bowl, but they’re still extremely weird, weird organisms that do all kinds of strange things like start wars and beat people up. So so the Pro, the prom isn’t really to make women have the freedom of men, but they get men more involved in the kind of gender roles that are typically associated with women. That’s my analysis.

Shannon Mussett
Yeah. And I think that she, she was sort of aware of that she said, Look, even if women work, and she’s saying this in 1949, and it’s still true today, even if women work, they are largely responsible for the domestic activities when they return from work. So they’re either in the domestic space or largely required to look after the domestic space, and that still doesn’t seem to be equal. And that still doesn’t seem to allow for their transcendence or free activity in the same way that the masculine or men are allowed to experience that. So it’s still sort of the same kind of problem. But again, this idea that even the domestic sphere or or raising children, and all that is, is women’s work that men need to participate in, I think she was spot on about that. There’s no reason why that’s inherently women’s work that’s been relegated to women. And therefore it’s been diminished and put into secondary categories, less important, but there’s no reason why participating in that as some kind of is being feminized in some way.

Ken Taylor
So see, this is where if we had more time, this is where I want to push back just a little, you say relegated to women, right? As if men handed it over. I mean, a species is a complex thing. And it species life is a complex thing. And through some interaction, some complicated dialectic, as it were between men and women. It has come to be it came to be the women’s sphere, but I don’t think it just men just said, you know, unilaterally. Oh, you guys, you occupy the domestic sphere. I don’t know exactly how it happened in the prehistory of humanity. But I don’t think it was just a relegation, a one sided relegation.

Shannon Mussett
And that’s what’s so great about Beauvoir, there is no beginning to any of this. And so if you read something like the second sex, it’s about 12 to 20 different perspectives, ranging from myth to history, to psychoanalysis, to Marxism, trying to figure out how this happened. Because you’re right, there was no war, women didn’t lose this big battle to men and men put them in the subservient position, it just sort of has always bend this way. And there is no origin that we can point to. All we can do is talk about all of these different perspectives on how it could have come to be.

Ken Taylor
Well, this is a fascinating conversation. I wish we had another hour because we I think we’re just penetrating down beneath the surface of this huge iceberg. But I have to thank you for joining us.

Shannon Mussett
Well, thank you so much. It was pure pleasure.

Ken Taylor
Our guest been Shannon Mohsen. She’s a professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University, co-editor of “Beauvoir and Western Thought: From Plato to Butler.” So John, what are you thinking today? You had a complicated thought there at the end I’d love to have to time to explore it more sometimes

John Perry
Well I, you know my my basic view on all these things is is men are the problem they’re a very strange and anomalous being they’re not at all the norm. The norm is is it anyway, that’s that’s my… Yeah. Men are the problem, boys are the solution. We gotta acculturate them.

Ken Taylor
You got to read “The Second Sex” again. Because de Beauvoir goes on and on about the weirdness of the human male as opposed to other males, other males and other species, are they they after they propagate that a lot of them have done yeah, and useless. So you’re right about something. But this is a complicated stuff. And we’re gonna continue talking about this complicated stuff because this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is koja toe Ergo Blago, I think therefore I blog, and you can become a partner YouTube can become a partner in that community by visiting our webpage, philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
And in particular, listen up: March 14, that’s this coming Friday 12 noon Pacific, join us for the community of thinkers because because you can have a live online chat with today’s guest, Shannon Musset. And now a man for whom speed is a natural fact: Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… if I could reverse engineer my prepubescent sexuality, and somebody technology will possess that useless ability. You would find many vague fantasies about beat Nick Lemmon I knew beaten women from cartoons in the setting imposed on the New Yorker from Peter Gunn from movies. Those free love beatnik gals were made not born someone yet sexy in their BlackBerry’s tights and sweaters. They were a direct descendant to the French beatniks with their existentialism and bearded boyfriends in the left bank of Brazil Banco was were insuring descendants of Simone de Beauvoir and her godless boyfriend, John Paul search, who were not married yet they both had girlfriends. How did that work? I’m sure was all complicated and angst driven. But in the brief glimpses I got of them from time or Life magazine, they were presented as many French and knotty they morphed into beatniks and then all the beatniks morphed into energy crabs, because that’s how America rolls. I was supposed to be attracted to strippers and playmates and Marilyn Monroe, but I couldn’t imagine a social situation where I would meet a playmate. Not sure if I knew Hugh Hefner and I was a pop singer. I could hang out the mansion, but I was 12 years old and lived in North Dakota. There were strippers. Yes, it was an oil town and oil workers have been known to frequent stripping establishments. So you go to a bar and watch women take their clothes off and get drunk and then you go home alone, right go home, still hammered and your wife yells at you. I didn’t quite see what the point was. And even a 12 I could tell Marilyn Monroe had issues. Her death had a huge effect on me because that didn’t seem like something that happened with sex pots or whatever it was she was supposed to be. She belonged to a slippery adult world full of Kennedys and cocktails, and Oka dresses and perfume and cigarettes. The beat girls are on the fringe of that world reciting poetry in the coffee house or jazz club or some slumming admin would go in a Doris Day movie you’d spot beatniks in a Perry Mason are as part of a subplot and a gold medal paperback filler. So in skinny women who might accept my kisses if I lived in Greenwich Village and can sing a folk song that was possible, and it’d be Bobby dare on a rock cousin, but it could be a troubled young man with a guitar. A beatnik girl might kiss me while she was thinking about something else. Marilyn Monroe might accept guesses but she really wanted diamonds in validation. The stripper might except my kisses but will eventually marry an electrician in Vegas and get divorced. Their children will be troubled on the other hand, the beatnik man except my kisses, but she’ll marry a shrink or a philosopher. Their children too will be troubled. All those media images of women showed me a large bitter world beyond my own small trouble borders. Now life has gone and look is gone. Said evening posters gone. NuGet Cavalier stag Ms. Magazines a shadow of its former self beatniks are gone hippies are gone. We still have strippers, but now they’re ironic. The bourgeoisie click their tongues and feminists click their tongues and the media click their tongues and middlemen wrote died young. And the Kennedys died young and we’ve all been grownups for a long, long time. I gotta go.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk as a presentation of Ben Manilla productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2014.

Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Chris Hoff, Merle Kessler, Karola Kreitmair, Jimmy Tobin, Jill Covington, and Mark Stone.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Ken Taylor
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John Perry
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Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers.

John Perry
I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
Oh, and thanks for thinking too.