PhilosophersSimone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Existentialism · Feminist philosophy1908 – 1986 FranceExistentialist philosopherTheorist of feminismMoral philosopherCommitted intellectual
The Second Sex, 1949, vol. II, "The Woman in Love"

Authentic love is the recognition of two freedoms, not a surrender

What it claims

The love of the woman who loses herself in the man is a surrender and not authentic love. The day a woman can love "in her strength and not in her weakness", love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not a mortal danger.

Why

A woman who loses herself in a man to save herself fails: two freedoms must recognize each other, neither giving itself up.

Valid with an implicit premise

In "The Woman in Love", Beauvoir describes a woman in love who puts everything she is at the service of one man. She makes him a god: he is "divine" if he says yes, "petty" if he says no, and he can never be simply a man. She keeps nothing for herself: she loses herself in him in order to find herself, Beauvoir says, and the result is that she loses herself for good. Beauvoir does not call this love but a surrender. Authentic love, she writes, would rest on the reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. Note: she describes the love of her time, in a society where women had hardly any other way to justify themselves than through a man. She does not condemn love, she says how it could become a "source of life and not a mortal danger".

P1The woman in love seeks to justify and save herself through love, and to do so she begins by losing herself in the man: she subordinates her freedom to his and makes herself his vassal and slave.
P2She makes him a god, that is, a being who no longer has the right to be human, weak or tired. A fallen god is not a man, it is an imposture.
P3This love cannot succeed: if she makes him an idol, she destroys her idol if she wins the game, and if she loses it she loses herself. There is no salvation.
P4Authentic love should be founded on the reciprocal recognition of two freedoms: neither lover would give up their transcendence, neither would mutilate themselves.
P5 · implicit premiseA love in which one of the two gives up her freedom and makes the other an absolute does not meet this condition: it is not authentic love.
So the love of the woman who loses herself in the man is a surrender and not authentic love. The day a woman can love "in her strength and not in her weakness", love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not a mortal danger.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a world where a person subordinates herself entirely to another and makes her an absolute, and yet this is still authentic love: for example if she freely chose, knowingly, to devote herself in this way.
Valid with P5, which links the description (P1 to P3) to the norm (P4). Without P5, we know how the woman in love loves and what authentic love would be, but not that the first is not the second. To resist the argument one must deny P4 (love does not need reciprocity between equals: one can love by giving without counting) or deny P1 to P3 (this picture is not what women in love live). A careful reading also notices that Beauvoir does two things at once: she describes a social fact (what society makes of women's love) and she proposes a norm (reciprocity).
Analogy. Two climbers roped together move forward as a pair. Each holds the other without carrying them, and each keeps their feet on the rock. If one lets go and is hauled up, the rope still holds for a while, but it is no longer a rope between two: it is a weight. Beauvoir says authentic love is the first rope.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Jean-Paul Sartre 1943 · attacks premise 4

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes lovers as two freedoms, each of which wants to be loved by the other. He sees a contradiction in this: each is captive of the other insofar as he wants to be loved by him, and at the same time demands of the other a love that is not reduced to the project of being loved. If that is the structure of love, two freedoms can love each other, but not recognise each other without conflict.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Beauvoir in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Beauvoir does not answer Sartre in this passage. Her ideal (two freedoms revealing values and ends together in the world) changes the aim of love: one no longer aims only at being loved, one forms a shared project. This reading is ours, and Sartre could answer that this amounts to no longer being in love as he described it.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The core disagreement is whether the conflict lies in the structure of love (Sartre) or in the way we love (Beauvoir). An open point, our summary.
S
Shulamith Firestone 1970 · attacks the conclusion

In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), in the chapter "Love", Firestone takes up Beauvoir's analysis: love is at the heart of women's oppression. But she does not conclude that women should simply love differently. For her, love is distorted as long as the two sexes are not equal, and the change must be one of society, not just of each woman's behaviour. Summary of her thesis: we could not read the text.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Beauvoir in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Beauvoir ends with "the day it becomes possible for woman to love in her strength": she thus already makes authentic love depend on a condition that does not come from woman alone. The two are not opposed on this point, but Firestone insists on changing structures. Our reading.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Feminists still debate whether love can be reformed within society as it is, or whether this requires first changing relations between the sexes. An open question.
b
bell hooks 2000 · attacks the conclusion

In All About Love (2000), hooks treats love as a practice anyone can learn, men and women alike: care, respect, commitment, trust, honesty. On this view, love and domination do not go together, and there is no need to choose between giving oneself and asserting oneself. She sees in both sexes the same confusion between love and control or sacrifice. Summary of her thesis: we could not read the text.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 2000, after the author's death (1986).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Beauvoir and hooks agree on the ideal of love between equals. They differ in emphasis: the danger specific to women (Beauvoir) or an ethics of love for everyone (hooks). The disagreement concerns how much weight to give to women's situation. Our summary.