Nancy Bauer

Being-with as being-against: Heidegger meets Hegel in The Second Sex

In this paper I attempt to further the case, made in recent years by Eva Gothlin, that readers interested in a philosophical return to Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex have good reason to heed Beauvoirs appropriation of central concepts from Heideggers Being and Time. I speculate about why readers have been hesitant to acknowledge Heideggers influence on Beauvoir and show that her infrequent though, I argue, important use of the Heideggarian neologism Mitsein in The Second Sex makes inadequate sense apart from an appreciation of the fundamental role played by her appropriation of Hegels “master-slave dialectic” in that book. I suggest a way to square Beauvoirs Hegelian claim that human beings are fundamentally at odds with one another with her Heideggerian view that we are also all ontologically “with” one another. Finally, I sketch out a way of interpreting Beauvoirs employment of certain concepts from Hegel and Heidegger in the service of understanding, hence beginning to overcome, womens oppression.

Beauvoir on the Allure of Self-Objectification

In the past 20 years feminist philosophy has come to fetishize two metaphysics of gender: (1) gender reificationism, on which what it is to be a man or a woman is taken to be definable with precision, and (2) gender eliminativism, on which the notions of “man” and “woman” are understood as thoroughly political concepts. These two positions, which are not necessarily incompatible, both fail to take seriously the phenomenology of being a woman; and their popularity goes hand in hand with the increasing irrelevance of feminist philosophy in women’s lives. We find an antidote to the current state of affairs in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Beauvoir’s metaphysic of sex difference helps us to make sense of the experience of contemporary young women whose investment in their own professional success as “alpha girls” seems decidedly at odds with their apparently retrogressive roles in the current “hook-up culture.” The explanatory power of Beauvoir’s model makes attractive her insistence on the crucial grounding role that everyday experience must play in metaphysical reflection. It also suggests that to be a human being is, and always will be, to be tempted to objectify oneself.

Debating Hegel’s Legacy for Contemporary Feminist Politics

This book has focused primarily on the philosophical implications, for both feminism and Hegelianism, of engagements between Hegel and feminist thought. Traditionally, however, a key concern of feminist engagements with Hegel has had to do with the political implications of using his work for feminist purposes. In this final chapter, we revisit this traditional concern, in a debate over Hegel and feminist politics. We decided to do this by inviting four feminist philosophers with a long-term, active, and diverse engagement in feminist politics to exchange views on the question of the relevance of Hegel’s work for contemporary feminist politics. In doing this we hope to highlight the very different ways in which philosophical and political concerns intersect within feminist thought on Hegel.