December 2007

No wonder loving is difficult

We know the old story: woman is nothing without her man. For a while now, we have adamantly and rightly rejected this notion as insulting to women, a form of their infantilism under patriarchal social order ('Woman needs a man like an infant needs a parent' became, in the 1970s, 'Woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle'). To admit the need, even desire for a man and his love, or even if bravely admitting the need or desire to love a man, equates to oppression according to this familiar feminist argument. I, like many women of our generation and our mother's generation (though not my own mother), have cried out against the prescriptive 'need' for a man, against the idea that we are nothing without that man. And, I think we are, to a large extent, right. We do need to assert this. What kind of citizens, or even human beings, are we if our own sense of self-worth comes to us only from a male partner, or from anyone else for that matter?

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Indeed, Simone de Beauvoir, inarguably one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers, had this to say about the 'woman in love':

The measure of values, the truth of the world, are in his consciousness; hence it is not enough to serve him. The woman in love tries to see with his eyes; she reads the books he reads, prefers the pictures and the music he prefers; she is interested only in the landscapes she sees with him, in the ideas that come from him; she adopts his friendships, his enmities, his opinions; when she questions herself, it is his reply she tries to hear; she wants to have in her lungs the air he has already breathed; the fruits and flowers that do not come from his hands have no taste and no fragrance. Her idea of location in space, even, is upset: the centre of the world is no longer the place where she is, but that occupied by her lover; all roads lead to his home and from it. She uses his words, mimics his gestures, acquires his eccentricities and his tics. (The Second Sex, p.663)

Astonishingly, while this may sound like a late 1960s or 1970s proclamation, Beauvoir's The Second Sex was first published (in French) in 1949. Nevertheless, it is easy to dismiss Beauvoir's statement as pertaining only to her own era, to see ourselves as having moved far beyond such a pathetic image - this 'woman in love' belongs to a long-ago age. And this may be true. Maybe most of us have reached the stage where we no longer look at ourselves in the mirror through the alien (though dominant) gaze of masculine eyes. Or maybe we just think that we have. How many of us, if being honest, have not at any stage of our relationships with men read the books that he read, preferred the pictures and the music he preferred, adopted his friendships (even at the expense of our own), etc. Yes, maybe not to the extent that Beauvoir is caricaturing, but I think I do know a number of women who have gone down this path at some stage, including myself. In many ways, when we enter into relationships with men, even really wonderful, enriching relationships, there is, I would argue, this inevitable depletion of self, something I'm not sure most men go through to such an extent. And yes, maybe that depletion has lessened as time has passed, but a depletion of the self is still an unwanted situation. Surely.

It is this depletion of the female self - as a woman, once a child with real dreams, ambitions and longings for her self in the world - that Beauvoir rightly admonishes (and many thanks to Dr Michelle Boulous Walker, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Queensland, whose work I am drawing heavily on here). The 'woman in love' is a woman ensnared in what Beauvoir calls 'romantic love.' This dominant form of love, with its self-negating effects on women, brings about a dis-location of the woman from herself; the 'other' (her man) becoming the source and centre of everything:

... to justify her future she puts it in the hands of one who possesses all values. Thus she gives up her transcendence, subordinating it to that of the essential other, to whom she makes herself vassal and slave ... little by little she does lose herself in him wholly; for her the whole of reality is in the other. (The Second Sex, p.661)

However, for Beauvoir, it was almost as if women of her generation had no other genuine choice, given the patriarchal societies within which they lived (and perhaps still do live), social structures that held (and maybe hold) them back from attaining what she (and Sartre) would call autonomy, freedom and transcendence: 'No other aim in life which seemed worthwhile was open to them, love was their only way out' (655). Again, while this may seem antiquated to us, we still need to ask what this means, for I suspect, despite our beliefs about our so-called freedom and autonomy, Beauvoir's writings have a lot to say to us still.

It means that according to Beauvoir, we as women cannot easily fall in love and have loving relationships with men without reducing ourselves and being reduced to mere objects of his desire, objects willing simply to mirror him and his greatness, his peculiarities, even his flaws (though he will never see these flaws as his own; his use of woman as mirror, and her complicity in this, is quite selective. This is something Luce Irigaray, arguably Beauvoir's greatest successor, explores in greater critical detail). I know, this is hard to hear and most of us will reject this when we think about our own lives. Please, bear with me.

In contrast to this self-effacing (for women) 'romantic love,' Beauvoir does, as Michelle Boulous Walker and other contemporary feminist philosophers suggest, theorise another possible scenario which she calls 'authentic love.' Authentic love is characterised by two somewhat contradictory ideas (and I really can't go into too much detail here): the recognition of the other (the beloved) as both subjectivity/freedom and as objectivity/a being in situation. For Beauvoir, all human beings - the thinking animals, if you like - have two principal features.

First, we think, speak and live in symbolic worlds (we have language, art, literature, religion, philosophy, etc.) meaning we exist, to a large extent 'beyond' the physical world of nature (which we also represent to ourselves; i.e. 'nature' is something we construct). This 'transcendence' is what separates us (as far as we know) from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is also what makes us anxious in the face of the 'other' (especially the 'beloved'): this person is ultimately out of our control, for this person is also a 'subjectivity' that looks at us (me) as something distinct from him or herself. I am, thus, an 'object' for this person - I belong in the realm of things in the world. Yet, I can really only understand myself as 'subject' (of meaning, life, experience, etc.). And so, too, does he. For Beauvoir, this is precious:

It is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the Other is revealed as an Other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes. Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One renounces being in order that there may be that being which one is not. (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p.67)

To truly love another person we have to forego what as modern subjects is our perceived 'natural' state of being: the belief that I am only everything that is meaningful and important in the world. And don't forget, the other person in this love situation has to do the same thing.

Second, in this authentic love scenario (again, Beauvoir's ideal of love between a man and a woman), we need to remember that the other is indeed a finite being, one who has flaws:

An authentic love should assume the contingence of the other; that is to say, his lacks, his limitations, and his basic gratuitousness. It would not pretend to be a mode of salvation, but a human interrelation. (The Second Sex, p.654)

In other words, for Beauvoir, true or authentic love relies upon the lovers acknowledging both the transcendence (subjectivity) and the immanence (objectivity) in each other. There is something rather lovely about this idea of the human from Beauvoir: we are both divine, eternal, transcendent, free AND mortal, finite, immanent, limited/flawed. The human is not put in contra-distinction to the divine (Beauvoir, like Sartre and the rest of the existentialists, was an atheist). Indeed, to be truly human, we need to recognise both elements in ourselves: that we are subjects (abstract thinkers, unlike other animals) and objects (things in the world). For Beauvoir, real love requires that we not only acknowledge these two dimensions in ourselves, but also in others. We need to realise our own subjectivity and objectivity as beings in the world.

We might say that the woman's problem is that she often finds it difficult to see herself as the former (living in a culture that divinises only the masculine, including the father-son relationship, does not help much), mainly seeing herself through the eyes of the other as an object of desire (i.e. the way man imagines her, in the main; living in a culture that still objectifies the bodies of women for pleasure and financial gain does not help much). Man's problem, according to Beauvoir, is that he finds it difficult to see himself as the latter (in patriarchal cultures, the masculine, or man/men, equates to divinity/subjectivity/autonomy/perfection - lack or insufficiency belongs to the feminine). And he finds it difficult to imagine woman as an autonomous, intelligent subject/citizen of the world. Furthermore, women, too, love men this way. When his flaws become known, something of the love she once held for him begins to rot. Either way, this is not a recipe for authentic love.

But for Beauvoir, authentic love is a potential means for woman to achieve her autonomous subjectivity. Despite Beauvoir's scathing criticisms of the woman in love, it is indeed a certain type of love that is conducive, rather than inhibiting, when it comes to the modern woman:

... in love, affection, sexuality - woman succeeds in overcoming her passivity and in establishing a relation of reciprocity with her partner. (The Second Sex, p.448)

Indeed, we might say somewhat ironically that it only through love, especially sexual or carnate love, that woman can achieve autonomy. I know this sounds contradictory (what happened to the woman who needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle?), but I think Beauvoir's point is that while we can go about our lives functioning as autonomous beings without men (to a certain extent, for our workplaces, social lives, even built environments are still designed with men in mind), genuine humanity or human-ness (understood as transcendent and immanent, as subject and object) is only achievable through our sexual love with an other - with man, for Beauvour. Such love between the sexes ensures both the autonomy and self-respect of each gender:

As a matter of fact, man, like woman, is flesh, therefore passive, the plaything of his hormones and of the species, the restless prey of his desires. And she, like him, in the midst of the carnal fever, is a consenting, a voluntary gift, an activity; they live out in their several fashions the strange ambiguity of existence made body, If ... both should assume the ambiguity with a clear sighted modesty, correlative of an authentic pride, they could see each other as equals and would live out their erotic drama in amity. (The Second Sex, p.728)

Finally, and most importantly for me as a feminist, Beauvoir's insistence that we reject romantic love in favour of authentic love (even if difficult in our society and culture today) has important relevance for us as women amongst ourselves. A nasty effect of romantic love between the sexes is an aggression between women. Cast only as objects of male desire, women can only fight each other to achieve their ultimate goal: the love of a man, who generally has a number of 'objects' out there wanting to be loved by him; and this makes women anxious:

In a state of uncertainty, every woman is a rival, a danger. Love destroys the possibility of friendship with other women because the woman in love is shut off in her lover's universe; jealousy increases her isolation and thereby narrows her dependence. (The Second Sex, 674)

Thus, the idea of authentic love offers promise not just for men and women, but for the friendship and community of women as well. Ignoring the masculine gender (customary for her day) of the subject in the following, closing statement from Beauvoir, we can understand that for Beauvoir men and women can only benefit as subjects if they manage to insist upon, carry out and cherish this form of love. This is, she suggests, the best we can achieve as human beings-in-the-world:

It is possible to rise above this conflict if each individual freely recognizes the other, each regarding himself and the other simultaneously as object and as subject in a reciprocal manner. But friendship and generosity which alone permit in actuality this recognition of free beings, are not facile virtues; they are assuredly man's highest achievement, and through that achievement he is to be found in his true nature. (The Second Sex, p.140)

Julie Kelso e julieanne.kelso@uq.edu.au