*This was originally written as responses for a final paper for Phenomenology 200 at the University of Miami in 2013. I have provided the prompts for context.Phenomenology: Thoughts on Simone De Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Heidegger, Dasien, and Spartacus
- Explain Simone De Beauvoir’s existential critique of psychoanalysis and biology.
Simone De Beauvoir’s critique of biology begins immediately with a rejection of the notion that humans can be identified solely by their facticity. She draws a comparison between animal and human species saying that the former “are fixed and it is possible to define them in static terms” (467), while the latter “is forever in a state of change, for ever becoming” (467). Here De Beauvoir is in essence positing the facticity-transcendence duality argued for by Sartre; put simply, humans cannot be identified solely by factual properties, only in conjunction with their possibilities, their freedom. On these grounds, De Beauvoir also rejects “any comparative system that assumes the existence of a natural hierarchy or scale of values…” (467). In other words arguing that comparisons cannot be drawn between the human sexes based solely on factual properties as our being is, unlike animals, also constituted by an indeterminate freedom. De Beauvoir argues however that this philosophy has manifested unequally between men and women throughout history, in that “man is defined as a being who is not fixed, who makes himself what he is” (468), whereas there is a tendency with women “to reduce her to what she has been, to what she is today, in raising the question of her capabilities” (468). Here again we see the importance of Sartre’s facticity-transcendence duality in that men are considered complete beings, in that they have the full ability to exercise their freedom in addition to their facticity, whereas women are denied their freedom by only being identified with their factual properties. What’s more, we can also say in the context of Sartre’s Phenomenology that the men who reduce women to their facticity in this way are acting in bad faith. In addition, De Beauvoir claims that “biology is an abstract science” (468) in the sense that physiological facts are what they are, simply facts, and only have significance when meaning is given to them for the purposeful ends they are meant to fulfill. De Beauvoir provides a prime example, saying, “wherever violence is contrary to custom, muscular force cannot be a basis for domination” (468). Moreover, De Beauvoir further substantiates her claim that biology cannot be the sole objective, determinate factor in comparing either facticity or freedom, stating in the context of the former that “it is not upon physiology that values can be based; rather, the facts of biology take on the values that the existent bestows upon them” (469). As well, beings cannot be compared by their both having freedom, as “in the human species individual ‘possibilities’ depend on the economic and social situation” (469). We can draw from this De Beauvoir’s argument that humans cannot be compared or evaluated on their physiological facticity, as both men and women have a transcendent-facticity duality and neither can be defined by either component alone. Though it is important to note that De Beauvoir does not argue that this is the historical case, rather quite the opposite, but that his is the philosophical situation of humans.
De Beauvoir moves beyond biology, though continuing her critique, to address what she see’s as the fundamental question which confronts us, “why is the women the Other?” (470). She first seeks this answer by discussing the psychoanalytic view, initially claiming that psychoanalysis makes a “tremendous advance” over psychophysiology “in the view that no factor [physiologically] becomes involved in the psychic life without having taken on human significance; it is not the body-object described by biologists that actually exists, but the body as lived in by the subject” (470). Once more we see De Beauvoir championing the facticity-transcendence duality in saying that the body-object, our facticity, is not what constitutes our being, but our “body as lived in by the subject,” (470), our facticity in addition to our freedom, to our transcendent experience. Likewise, De Beauvoir reinforces the female’s complete facticity-transcendence reality, expressing, “it is not nature that defines women; it is she who defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in her emotional life” (470). However, De Beauvoir goes on to ultimately rejects Freud’s psychoanalysis, claiming it is fundamentally flawed in that he “based it upon a masculine model” (472). She cites his position that “woman feels that she is a mutilated man,” (472) then says that “the idea of mutilation implies comparison and evaluation” (472), in turn discrediting Freud’s view based upon her aforementioned rejection of physiological comparison and evaluation between sexes.
Ultimately, as we have seen, Simone De Beauvoir rejects the use of both biology and psychoanalysis as a means to assert male superiority, and more basically, to make any comparison, evaluation, or value assessment of the male and female sex against one another. She quite clearly uses much of Sartre’s phenomenological beliefs, particularly the facticity-transcendence duality of beings, in her justification.
- Using quotations from different selections, explain how De Beauvoir agues that the They concepts are not neutral but rather biased towards men (and against women)
Heidegger posits the concept of the “They” to explain the “Being of everydayness” (127) wherein “Being-with-one-another dissolves one own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of the ‘Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more” (127). Heidegger asks who is the everyday Being of Dasein, and the “They” provides us with an answer, though not implying the sum of Dasein’s, rather that “everyone is the other, and no one is himself” (128). This is also to say that “every Other is like the next” (127) in that “we take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge…” (127). In essence, all Beings are Dasein, only individuated from Others by one’s own birth and death. What’s more, when we speak of the qualities of Others, we are doing no more than hiding those qualities about ourselves and the fact that one is the they. Important to De Beauvoir’s critique are culturally defined they categories, which are in essence categories of what one does, what the they does.
Foremost, De Beauvoir argues that “there is an absolute human type, the masculine” (15), therefore the they is inherently male, a fundamentally masculine they category. Women, however, are excluded from this they category as she claims “…humanity is male and man defines women not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being” (15). Rather, women are regarded as “the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential” (16); a clear preclusion of women from the male they category in designating women as a secondary being. The simplest example is the use of “man” in common vernacular to refer to all humans as mankind
Importantly, De Beauvoir goes on to establish the fundamental duality of the Self and the Other, that is “Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought” (16) and “Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One [they] without at once setting up the Other over against itself” (16). Concomitantly, she says that “…the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim,” the reason being, paraphrasing Heidegger, is that we are all each others other. If one individual defines themself as Self, and those Beings distinct from them as Other, this should, according to our understand of the they, apply to all beings. This makes the notion of reciprocity a category of the they, it is what one does because this is what the they does. However, De Beauvoir poses the question: “How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been recognized between the sexes,” (17) for “no subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One” (17). To the contrary, it is the One, a masculine they category, which has defined the Other, which has subjugated the female sex to “pure otherness” (17).
What’s more, this subjugation of the feminine world means that “they are united only in a mechanical solidarity from the mere fact of their similarity, but they lack the organic solidarity on which every unified community is based…” (567). In other words, there is no female they category, only a male they category which women have been purposefully excluded from, and distilled to nothing more than being known as the Other. The lack of a female they category is further substantiated by the notion that this subjugation occurs by a means “so that he takes possession of her only by consuming her - that is, through destroying her” (159). This situation is in direct contradiction to the phenomenological tradition, as De Beauvoir argues, “there can be no presence of an other unless the other is also present in and for himself: which is to say that true alterity - otherness - is that of a consciousness separate from mine and substantially identical with mine” (159). In our everyday reality, the they is by no means a neutral philosophical concept, but one that is highly engendered, is purposefully used to advantage men and disadvantage women, and has hence had significant real world effects throughout history.
- Pick a scene from Spartacus and analyze that scene in light of one or more of the phenomenologists we have discussed
One of the films most renowned scenes, the epic battle between Spartacus’ army and that of the Roman Emperor Crassus, provides an excellent illustration of Heidegger’s conception of equipment. Let us use the soldiers spear as the object to describe as equipment. Put simply, “Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to’…” (97), that is to say that the spear, as equipment, is a non-Dasein being, or rather, an object, which has “the kind of Being which equipment possesses - in which it manifests itself in its own right…” (98). These objects have a readiness-to-hand, “only because equipment has this ‘Being-in-itself…” (98). This readiness-to-hand, what makes an object practical and usable, only proceeds from something that is present-at-hand. Equipment which is ready-to-hand must be “understood and discovered beforehand as something purely present-at-hand” (101), which is to say that its essence is not practical or manipulable, but is a perceptual cognition, simply, knowing that which is theoretical. The structure in-order-to of equipment embodies an “assignment of reference of something to something” (97) meaning that equipmentality “always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment” (97), that is, equipment is never experienced by itself. To any singular object “there always belongs a totality of equipment” (97). Using the example of the soldiers spear, when one thinks of a spear their thought is immediately directed to other pieces of equipment within the context of the totality of equipment which makes sense of a spear. A spear alone is nonsensical, but the spear, in combination with its other relevant accessories, such as body armor, a shield, or a helmet, forms a totality of equipment which allows one to make sense of the spear has ready-to-hand equipment.
Furthermore, the structure in-order-to of equipment can be further disaggregated into three components: towards-which, with-which, and for-the-sake-of-which. Dasein is primarily concerned with ones work, “the work that is to be found when one is ‘at work’ on something” (99), rather than the equipment itself. The towards-which of equipment constitutes one’s work, that is the usability of equipment for the purpose “for which it is usable” (99). For a soldier in Spartacus, the towards-which of the spear is war, perhaps more specifically the killing of people; the soldiers work. The spear is used for the purpose of killing others. The with-which is the equipment object manipulated for the towards-which, in our case, it is the spear. What’s more, the work one produce’s using the with-which for the towards-which is “not merely usable for something” (99), but “the production itself is a using of something for something” (100). In our case the spear is not used for killing people just for the sake of killing people, it is used for something else, the killing of someone for something or someone else. For instance, one of Spartacus’ soldiers is not killing merely for killing, but uses the spear and its totality of equipment to kill someone, one of Crassus’ soldiers, for-the-sake-of-which is to defeat the opposing army.
As we can see the scene of Spartacus depicting the great battle with Crassus, of the soldier’s fighting and the tools they use to fight, provide an excellent introduction to several of the key components of Heidegger’ notion of equipment.