Beauvoir and Toril Moi: The Personal and the Philosophical

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
     —Ralph Ellison, from the epilogue to Invisible Man

...the personal is not something given, it is a task (Beauvoir would surely say a 'project'); the personal is not a possession, but something to be learned and refined.
     —Toril Moi, What is a Woman?, 246

The meaning of a word is its use in the language. 
     —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §43

Thus we see that myths can be explained largely by the use that man makes of them.
      —Beauvoir, The Second Sex, N 1271 (trans. modified) 

One can say that the concept 'game' is a concept with blurred edges.—'But is a blurred concept a concept at all?'—Is a photograph that is not sharp a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp by one that is? Isn't one that isn't sharp often just what we need?
     Frege compares a concept to a region, and says that a region without clear boundaries can't be called a region at all. This presumably means that we can't do anything with it.—But is it senseless to say 'Stay roughly there'? 
     —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §71



We hold these truths to be self-evident: Keep your ears stiff!
"Halt die Ohren steif!" This is what a friend blurted out as an example of the German phrases that he'd picked up. (A second one is "Do you like my tight pants?", but that perhaps belongs in a different blog). Literally, the phrase says "keep your ears stiff," and so in complete bafflement I asked what on earth it could mean. He explained that it was something like "keep a stiff upper lip," but another friend, with fluent German, insisted that it was less an exhortation to rigid stoicism and more like a wish for someone to "stay well" or "stay healthy." This brought up the question of how one would use the phrase, of when one would say it. It was, she explained, something you might say to a friend in parting. A fourth person, with fluent English and German, suggested that "keep your chin up" would be a better translation.

None of this sounds much like what we think of when we think of doing philosophy (or theory), but it's exemplary of the procedures of clarification that philosophy can--and in the work Beauvoir and Toril Moi, does--undertake.

Most philosophical texts wish to use language clearly, and one form this wish takes is a demand that key terms be used with definite and consistent meanings. This is sometimes far from a neutral demand, and indeed we began the semester examining a contest between Burke and Wollstonecraft over the meanings of contested terms, most centrally "manly," "sublime," "beautiful," and the "rights of men."

Burke, recall, objected to the abstraction of the rights of men from the social life in which those rights are agreed upon and secured; he felt the revolutionaries were practicing "political metaphysics," and opposed to this "the real rights of men," embedded in shared histories and social practices (Reflections 149). Wollstonecraft's response is instructive:

Reverencing the rights of humanity, I shall dare to assert them... The birthright of man, to give you, Sir, a short definition of this disputed right, is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact, and the continued existence of that compact. (Vindication of the Rights of Men 259)

Like Burke, she accepts that the rights of human beings depend on our shared practices, our "social compact." But she disagrees with him about what those practices are (and should be), and in this passage she at once claims to be in a position to know and value them, and acknowledges the boldness of that claim: "I shall dare to assert them..."

It's hard to separate here claims about the meaning of a word from claims about how we (ought to) live together. And of course it would be a fantasy, characteristic of some ways of doing philosophy, to imagine that we could settle such an argument by getting the meaning or definition of "rights" right. To whom or what could we appeal for such a definition except to each other? And how, then, do "we" settle such an argument? If there's no truth about the "rights of humanity," perhaps the only real thing is the power that produces them? Such questions about truth and power have been at the heart of arguments by Anderson, Brown, Berlant & Warner--and, more distantly, Butler, Foucault, and Habermas--that we've been looking at for the past couple of weeks.

Wollstonecraft and Burke, significantly, are debating in print, in the public sphere as it existed in England in 1790: their clashing treatises are a perfect example of the sort of public debate that Habermas might hold up as an example of "communicative reason," or that Brown might wish to understand as grounded not in reason or Truth but in competing claims about "what I want for us." Indeed, Wollstonecraft's first sentence assumes that "the rights of humanity" are available in the way that truths are, even as it dramatizes their assertion by a finite self ("I"). The beginning of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is also at once a statement and an act: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." And yet they weren't so self-evident that they didn't need to be declared, not so true that it was unnecessary to give voice to them.

Does the truth depend on me, on us? If it does, can it be true?

And what does all of this have to do with stiff ears?

Wittgenstein and "ordinary language philosophy"
One way of doing philosophy seeks to get meanings right: questions about what a word means, about what the truth is, seek to bracket or eliminate the subjectivity of the philosopher and to arrive at objective answers.

A different way of doing philosophy replaces the question "what does x mean?" with "when--in what circumstances--would we say x?" This can sound like a flight from objectivity and an invitation to psychologism or relativism--what if you would say x in different circumstances than I would? Isn't it just a question about what's on my mind, or yours?

It may not be so, and in the case of an idiom like "halt die Ohren steif," the question of when someone  would say this seemed--spontaneously enough at the time, as no one was thinking about philosophy--like the only good way of sorting out its meaning. Even the equivalent we came up with, "keep your chin up," seems like an imperfect equivalent if it's true that "halt die Ohren steif" can be used as a cheerful way of saying good-bye to a friend--not a circumstance under which one normally says "keep your chin up." An online dictionary charmingly suggests "Peace out, player" as a translation. Here, there's no perfect translation because it seems like no English phrase has quite the same range of uses.

For Ludwig Wittgenstein, this kind of patient questioning of what we say when became a philosophical method. In his Philosophical Investigations (1951), Wittgenstein came to see language as inseparable from the ways of life, the human behaviors, in which it takes shape: "Shared human behavior is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language" (Philosophical Investigations §206). This view of the inseparability of ways of speaking from ways of living together justified Wittgenstein's claim that "the meaning of a word is its use" (§43). Philosophers who have taken up this method--J.L. Austin and Stanley Cavell are the most important figures for Moi--are sometimes called "ordinary language philosophers."

Toril Moi

Toril Moi's inspired argument in her essay on Beauvoir, "'I am a woman': the Personal and the Philosophical," is that Beauvoir, who obviously couldn't have read the as-yet-unpublished Philosophical Investigations when she was writing The Second Sex, is that Beauvoir is nonetheless doing philosophy in the same way as Wittgenstein.

When Beauvoir asks "What is a woman?" (5), she doesn't look in the first instance to history or biology or psychoanalysis--though she'll consider all of these sources of knowledge and more over the course of her book. Rather, she takes herself as the first source of insight about what a woman is:

What is a woman? 

Merely stating the problem suggests an immediate answer to me. It is significant that I pose it. It would never occur to a man to write a book on the singular situation of males in humanity. If I want to define myself, I first have to say, "I am a woman"; all other assertions will arise from this basic truth. (5)

Beauvoir's thinking here follows a course that we might put in Wittgenstein's terms thus:

What is a woman? When do I say "woman"? Well, I'm saying it here, now, as I write this book, The Second Sex. And no man would write this book. What does it tell us about the meaning of "woman" that I, a woman, feel compelled to write a book about women when no man would write a similar book about men?

As Beauvoir continues, she'll go on to think through other scenarios motivated by an underlying question about the circumstances in which one feels compelled to say, or not to say, "woman." One of these, which Moi comments on at length, is the conversation in which a man tells Beauvoir that "You think such and such a thing because you're a woman." Here, Beauvoir notes both the asymmetry--one doesn't say this sort of thing about and to men--and also the dilemma that she finds herself in in trying to respond: what such an attack tries to do is deprive her of her experience (Simone de Beauvoir's experience, which is, but isn't only, a woman's experience) as a valid source of insight. She feels compelled to respond to the man that "I think it because it's true." But the "I" in that sentence has had to disown a part of her experience; The Second Sex is Beauvoir's attempt to reclaim it—and not only for herself, but on behalf of all of us.


Speaking for you: philosophical voice and political exclusion
To reclaim a portion of experience on behalf of all of us—that may sound like an odd way to describe a work of theory, at least if we think of theory as

     i) being about ideas rather than experience, or as
     ii) concerned with conflict (argument) rather than consensus, or as
     iii) expressing the view of its author alone.

What gives Simone de Beauvoir the right to speak for you, or me?

This is a central question for ordinary language philosophy, as it has been in very practical ways—think back to the readings by Freidan, Lorde, and Johnson, among others—for modern feminists in their scrupulous attempts to speak in increasingly non-exclusionary ways about women’s experience, to forge alliances that acknowledge differences in race, class, and sexuality. How can a theorist writing about (for example) women presume to speak for women whose experiences and beliefs inevitably differ from hers in some respects?

Barbara Johnson, in a sentence I’ve quoted admiringly a few times before, formulates this problem as a conflict between theory and practice:

...deconstruction introduces a fissure between "woman" as a concept that can never be a proper name for all women and "feminism" as a movement that must--but cannot--consider "woman" as an epistemological ground for action. (The Feminist Difference, 7)

Notice that this formulation sees “woman” as a term with distinct boundaries, and takes that distinctness as a problem: no use of the term “woman” can include all the experience of all women, and so our very language condemns us to exclude one another; if we speak of “woman,” we should understand this as a practical compromise in a given situation.

I think Johnson’s position isn’t in the end too far away, in practice, from Moi’s and Beauvoir’s, but her presuppositions about language are different, and typical of deconstructionist approaches in that she

     [deconstructive reading]
    a) focuses on a single word,
    b) understands the word as making a truth claim, and
    c) sees concepts as having sharp edges.

Moi’s way of close reading differs from this in that she

     [ordinary language philosophy]
     a) tends to focus on statements or utterances (“I am a woman”) rather than single terms (“woman”),
     b) sees statements as making truth claims, but takes these as claims upon you, appeals to you, and
     c) sees (following Wittgenstein) concepts as usually having blurry edges—hence Moi's choice of the  
         blurred image of a woman for the cover of her book (see above)—and isn’t troubled by this.

What follows from this this view of concepts (like “woman”) is not a lack of concern about exclusion, but an emphasis on exclusion in particular cases, through particular utterances, and not as a problem that arises meaningfully at the level of concepts alone.

Moi also, because of this view of language, approaches the problem of what it means for one person to speak for another in a different way. One solution to this problem is, for example, for a theorist to qualify his theoretical statements with a full account of his subject position: "As a white, middle-class, heterosexual male, I think that..." But it's not clear that this is a solution at all, both because the list of qualifiers could be endless (American, San Franciscan, etc), and because knowing these things about the speaker may not help you to evaluate his claim--in the worst case, the implication is that if you don't share those traits, you may not need to take the claim seriously, or that I may not take you seriously as an audience. Moi sees the theorist's (any writer's) attempt to speak for you differently, as an inevitable and necessary feature of what it means to write philosophically. (See pp. 233ff on the philosopher's "arrogation of voice," a phrase that she borrows from Stanley Cavell). And so if Beauvoir makes claims about "women" that other women are unable to find themselves in, the hoped-for response isn't that Beauvoir will be accused of philosophical presumption, but rather that her reader will take the disagreement as an invitation to further thinking.

Theory as Unalienated Distance
What Wollstonecraft says to Burke is thus an implicit feature of any philosophical claim: "I shall dare to assert..." Every philosopher takes this risk, as must everyone who responds to her. And for many kinds of philosophical claim, it's crucial that the philosopher be able to take her own experience as exemplary of human experience--which doesn't at all mean assuming that everyone else is like her (see Moi's distinction between taking oneself as an example and generalizing from a particular case on 232).

This is the problem, for Beauvoir, with feeling that the only available response to a man who says that "you say that because you're a woman" is that "I say it because it's true": that utterance in that context "eliminates my subjectivity," she says (5). The point here isn't that she wants to say "it's true because I say it" or even "it's true because a woman says it"; subjectivity in these sentences isn't a ground for truth because these sentences misunderstand what subjectivity is, on Beauvoir's terms, insofar as they fail to address themselves to another subject who is as free as I am.

Any reasoned claim requires that the speaker take some distance from her own experience and subjectivity. But distance need not entail detachment from ("I'm a human, and not a woman") or misrecognition of ("I'm a woman, and not human") oneself. These ways of taking a distance from oneself are forms of what Beauvoir would call alienation, "the subject's tendency...to search for himself in things" (Second Sex 57, my emphasis), where "things" include others' ideas of what one should be. To be alienated is to accept oneself as Other:

In men's eyes--and for the legion of women who see through men's eyes--it is not enough to have a woman's body nor to assume the female function as mistress or mother in order to be a "true woman." In sexuality and maternity woman as subject can claim autonomy; but to be a "true woman" she must accept herself as the Other. (N 1272)

Theory as written by Beauvoir and Moi attempts to include, but never to retreat within, the writer's subjectivity: it sees the self from an unalienated distance.

If there's a danger in my describing Beauvoir's theory as an attempt to reclaim subjective experience, it's in the possible implication that that experience must lie somewhere in the past. But the implication I intend is that Beauvoir feels rather that for women under patriarchy, subjective experience hasn't yet been found as fully as it might be. The typical question of ordinary language philosophy, about "what we say when," can similarly be mistaken for a necessarily conservative question, one that will always favor tradition. But it needn't be so if the question appeals honestly to a living "us" in the present. And so Moi insists that Beauvoir's interest in when we say "I am a woman" isn't just an interest in how this sentence has been used, but an attempt to change how it will be used:

Beauvoir’s aim is nothing short of revolutionary: she wants to produce the dramatic changes necessary to make the statement ‘I am a woman’ appear as something else than a limitation, to place woman in a reciprocal relationship to man. (Moi, 236)

Looking Away
Questions about "what we say when" can appear to presume consensus, as if "we" will always be able to agree on such things. They can also seem to encourage introspection at the expense of empathy, as if the best I can do in answering the question of what we say when is to figure out when I would say it.

When ordinary language philosophy leans in these directions, there are gains as well as liabilities: an openness to dialogue, and a scrupulous testing out of one's own claims against one's experience. These gains are both intellectual and personal--a theorist who doesn't take her own experience as exemplary, writes Moi,

risks missing out on those exhilarating moments when one’s thought truly seems to illuminate one’s experience and vice versa, the moments when one finally recognizes that ‘this is how it is with me.’ Without such moments, many of us surely would not feel much satisfaction in intellectual work at all. (218)

In writers like Moi and Cavell, "how it is with me" has everything to do with how it is with others; the best writing in Wittgenstein's tradition is neither merely autobiographical, nor naive about the possibilities of consensus: Cavell writes that disagreements "pounced upon: for the explanation of it can hardly fail to be illuminating" (quoted in Moi, 219).

Still, I'd like to conclude this post by turning to a moment that's a hard to fathom as an attempt to figure out what we say when, but which seems important as an unexpected, sometimes unacknowledged part of doing so. Amanda Anderson, remember, concluded her essay with an argument for the political value of "disidentification." We see a low-key version of this in the following passage from Woolf, where she turns away from conversation rather than engaging in it:

If by good luck there had been an ash-try handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if some one had let fall a shade. (Room, 11)

We talked about Woolf's playful development of this harmless, unnecessary cat into a teasing commentary on Freud's phallic symbols. But there's more going on here in the lovely, descriptive excess of this passage, in Woolf's emphasis on shifts of "emotional light" and "shade" subtler than any symbolism could allow for. As she looks away from her dinner party and becomes absorbed in the scene out the window, she begins a train of thought that leads her to attend not to the words people use, but to the "murmur" beneath those words, which suggests (but doesn't say) something about how the relations between the sexes have changed since the war. Woolf laughs, and asked to explain why, she can only "point[-] at the Manx cat" (13).

This is hardly a good-faith effort at engaging in what Habermas or Benhabib would be likely to call "communicative reason." Woolf's absorption in appearances and sensations here must seem to her companions like a queer sort of absent-mindedness, and to her readers it certainly doesn't convey a message with much efficiency.

In a wonderful recent book, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno, Rei Terada calls this kind of absorption in appearance and sensation "phenomenophilia," love of appearances (compare "philosophy," the love of wisdom), and she suggests taht such absorption can be a form of inchoate dissent, a registration of dissatisfaction with the given world.

To look out the window in the midst of a conversation isn't quite dissent or protest; to wonder what's behind appearances, what's in the murmur beneath the words, is perhaps to ask questions that can't be articulately answered in the present. Laughter isn't an argument. Yet it can be a way to resist the demand to accept what's here as all there is.

Terada wonders, looking back at the book she's completed, about her decision to write about four male philosophers and not to include writers like Woolf or Hannah Arendt:

In the twentieth century there are more female phenomenophiles; Virginia Woolf is a spectacular and complicated example. I don't, however, want to support the cliché that until recently women could not afford speculation, or some such idea, so I'm not satisfied with these reflections. The only thing that's clear to me is that I somehow write about male writers in order to write about myself... (28)

Is this one of "those exhilarating moments ... when one finally recognizes that ‘this is how it is with me’"? Perhaps. I'm not sure if it's quite exhilarating to find one's dissatisfaction reflected in strange faces. Phenomenal might be a better word.

On that note, since it's going to be a long couple of weeks... keep your ears stiff.