Ep. 234: Beauvoir on Romance in “The Second Sex” (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 234 is something like what is romance? And we're continuing the exploration of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex from 1949 that we started in episode 232, this time covering chapter 12 from volume two, part three, called the Woman in Love, and supplementing that with chapter one of volume one, part three, called Myths. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, a primordial being that was split in half and then in half and then in half again, forever trying to find all seven of my soulmates in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Wes: Wow.

0:41 Seth: This is Seth Paskin reconciling a basement in a steam in Austin, Texas.

0:46 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, never abandoning myself to the repose of immanence in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:52 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Jenny: This is Jenny Hanson, hoping that authentic love is possible for a woman in Canton, New York.

1:04 Mark: Well, welcome back, Jenny. Thank you so much for joining us for another go at this.

1:08 Jenny: It's a pleasure. I had such a great time last time. My voice is going to be a little not itself.

1:14 Mark: Should we take a poll? So, Wes, I know you're sick, right?

1:17 Wes: Yep.

1:18 Mark: Seth, were you just complaining about something?

1:20 Seth: Yeah, we've got the grippe running through our house too.

1:23 Dylan: I'm fit as a fiddle.

1:25 Mark: I'm pretty good too.

1:26 Wes: So just I guess it hasn't hit you gotten there yet.

1:30 Dylan: It's been going around here. I dodged it at work. A whole bunch of people were sick and my wife got very ill and I managed to avoid that too.

1:37 Wes: Is it hand sanitizer? Is that what you're doing all over body sanitizer?

1:42 Mark: Perhaps I just use the healing power of love. Hey, and actually my wife is sick too, so I don't know what that says about the asymmetrical healing power of love, as is our topic today.

1:54 Wes: Well, Mark, you are the transcendent being in this relationship, so I suppose you've transcended.

2:00 Mark: So the Women in Love chapter, this is one that Jenny, you had picked up when we were trying to figure out selections the first time as being particularly rich, but it was too rich to try to cram into that discussion. So I was glad to come back to this. That kind of gets at the woman's perspective, you know, it's part of the lived experience part that we talked so much about last time, but systematically goes through what is going on psychologically when a woman really. The way it's been set up socially is since she's not allowed to have any. Any other projects in this prototypical version of the kept woman that when in love, which is rarer than you might think, but she abandons herself totally.

Whereas the man, he has stuff going on, even if he's really passionate in wooing. Once he has the quarry, it's a little too much her demands, her putting her entire self on the line and deifying him, essentially trying to live through him because she can't have projects of her own. And then the myth chapter was earlier in the book and is trying to. You know, it's a very long chapter. I felt like the important parts for us were what's the man's expectations from romance? And since the man is the one who makes the myths historically, she uses the example of how woman and nature and chaos and all these things are mixed up in so many different kinds of mythologies and traces it through Christianity and different things that we can sort of see the complementary psychological play within man.

And they don't match up. That's a problem.

3:27 Jenny: The chapter the Woman in Love demonstrates that heterosexuality under patriarchy is an utter failure.

3:35 Dylan: Oh,

3:37 Mark: I should say I also recommended as an optional thing that we look at, the lesbian part of that was also part of the lived experience thing. Volume two, Part one, chapter four, the lesbian, which I think will be more important for our next episode when we talk about gender trouble. But I at least wanted to see if there was some insight there. If heterosexual love is so problematic, is it solved if you just get rid of the difference in sex equation?

3:59 Jenny: I looked at some of that too, and I would say that lesbianism and homosexuality are also constrained and contorted by patriarchy. So in a way, her analysis isn't a analysis of maybe more fulfilling or liberating relationships, but just another aspect of how sexuality expresses itself within that masculine universe.

4:24 Seth: Yeah, I think she says it's actually a strategy. Fundamentally the issue is with the fact that there's subjectivity on one side and objectivity on the other. And all of these different things are ways that women try to cope with that.

4:37 Dylan: The constraint of their situation.

4:38 Seth: Yes.

4:39 Mark: In other words, we've said in the last discussion of this that man is raised as subject woman because she's not allowed to have projects, is marginalized in many, many in various ways, sees herself actually through the man's eyes only as object. So that's an untenable position on both of their parts, right? So here's the first complexity is that her analysis is not that man just wants to dominate the woman. Because you could dominate an animal. You could dominate any number of things. It's that it has to be something like a subjectivity that can answer back to you, that can look back in your eyes.

But on the other hand, he still wants to dominate. So he has these conflicting expectations of her. And then her issue is more directly problematic in not being a subject in the first place. And so, just like we said in so many other realms last time. Experiencing really anything, you know, in an authentic and unproblematic way. Is going to be difficult for her. Right? She already sees herself as a thing,

5:36 Wes: but there's a motivation for her as well, Right. In the Woman in Love chapter, she describes it in page 781 as the infantile dream of existing sovereignly by facing oneself within the other. There's a lot to be gained, as terrible as it ends up being. By living as the objectified one within the gaze of the other. It's interesting how it's sort of a variation on the whole master slave dialectic. And in Hegel. But you get a very specific account of what it means to live in the desire of the other. Or what it means to need an object of desire on each end. So she gives a nice sort of phenomenological account of each of these things for women and then for men.

6:21 Jenny: This sort of makes me want to go to the beginning of the myths, that part. Through chapter one, she starts off that section once again asserting, you know, the very first lines are. History has shown that men have always held all the concrete powers. From patriarchy's earliest times. They have deemed it useful to keep women in a state of dependence. Their codes were set up against her. She was thus concretely established as the other. This condition served males economic interests, but it also served their ontological and moral ambitions. For the rest of this section, she kind of goes more into a very abstract analysis.

That's Hegelian master slave dialectic stuff about how a subject becomes that, you know, lack or negativity is required to assert oneself. What comes out of this, though, is that woman, she's not other in the sense of something setting up a desire to negate and to create. But she instead becomes like this intermediary. She becomes something that man wants to possess. Let me give you another passage. This is on 194. Woman Thus emerged as the inessential. Who never returned to the essential as the absolute other. Without reciprocity. A lot of this chapter goes to this ambivalence that men feel towards women.

On the one hand, they want to possess her, they want her flesh. On the other hand, the fact that she is the reason for their existence, namely because of childbirth, makes them want to reject women because they want to see themselves as not sullied or not linked to that kind of materiality. They want to be pure transcendence. It was good that this was included before while we looked at the woman in love because it sets up a little bit the situation that women are in in patriarchy, Namely that men want that other, that is the woman, but in this very fleshy way, not in this means to greater efficacy or carrying out bolder projects, but as some kind of rest.

8:31 Dylan: It's not part of their transcendence, it's part of their immanence.

8:34 Jenny: Yeah, it's like where they get to lay their head down before they go back out there.

8:38 Dylan: Yep. So in that way, it's the view of woman is a kind of inertia object, relatively inert, that is part of the environment and not part of the transcendence of their being. How they become actualize their own subjectivity.

8:54 Wes: Yeah, she still has to be a consciousness. But Dylan, you're right in the sense that she becomes a intermediary to or representative of nature. It's a really interesting account. Right. Because one of Hegel's innovations over Kant is the movement away from consciousness in relation to these objects of cognition, which is you might say the material part or nature to consciousness as depending in some way, as in relation to other consciousnesses. So there's always the question of is she more like the material cognitive object and lend itself to experience in that way, or is she another consciousness?

And in a sense she's both. She's serving both roles at one. And the way he puts it. Sorry, he. The way de Beauvoir puts it on 195, is she. Is nature raised to the transparency of consciousness? She is a naturally submissive consciousness. So this is a really fascinating innovation on that dialectic.

9:57 Dylan: The presence of consciousness makes her much more powerful for transcendence than mere Nature is right.

10:06 Wes: In fact, self consciousness is impossible without that. But it's in this case it's arrested in a certain phase of the master slave dialectic.

10:16 Jenny: I think all this is helpful because I think what you're helping me see is that she's positing woman, at least under patriarchy, as patriarchy has been constructed as an odd kind of consciousness because It's a consciousness that is fleshy. It cannot escape its fleshiness in a way that, say, transcendence projects seem to demand, or at least the way the man in that universe wants to believe that, you know, he can transcend this body and its limitations and still produce amazing things.

10:46 Dylan: It's also a nature that is. The flip side is true. It's fleshy, but also all those aspects of nature that are absent consciousness, but part of the thing that a consciousness would resonate with the weather, the ocean, the earth, other animals. Except you have this added benefit of there being a consciousness there that ups the ante, right. And so there's a way in which for a woman under patriarchy, in this circumstances, there's a kind of a big tease, right, because you have the recognition of her as a consciousness, but only so far and only as a kind of consciousness of utility, not one that is recognized in itself as a freedom of its own.

11:29 Jenny: Yeah, I think utility is the perfect word. And in fact, I think she uses that word a couple times to describe the role of woman to man in any situation.

11:38 Mark: Both the relationships are described in here as religious, but in different ways. So that the woman in the Woman in Love chapter is exalting the man because she's trying to live through him. And she says this religious sort of love just inevitably ends in failure because the man can't live up to that. It's an untenable thing. But what you were just describing, Dylan, this is the flip side of that is man's relation to woman is also religious, but it's kind of like pagan religion. Like it's man being afraid of the outside world in general and yet having a longing toward it, you know, so that woman is cast in all these mythical features.

12:14 Wes: They're both trying to find each other, find themselves in each other, right? So as she says on page 195, woman embodies positively the lack the existent carries in his heart. And man hopes to realize himself by finding himself through her. If you're going to be an existent, if you're going to be a transcendent subject with freedom, you have to. She puts in the ethics of ambiguity. You have to be able to embrace that lack and the phenomenon of trying to fill that lack up in various ways and to find oneself through those fulfillments. And it could be values, right?

It could be the values of the serious man. It could be religion, but in this case, it happens to be woman, who, as we'll see, has a lot to do with those sorts of higher values. But. So she's trying to find herself in a transcendent being. And he's trying to find himself in an immanent being. That's the asymmetrical dialectic that's going on. Which would be better off if it's more fully reciprocal.

13:15 Jenny: On that same page, De Beauvoir refers to woman as a naturally submissive consciousness. And then follows up with. And therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in woman. He hopes to accomplish himself as being. Through carnally possessing a being. While making. Confirmed in his freedom by a docile freedom.

13:37 Wes: So this is the easy way out, right? To be free really means something entirely different. But we get deluded. We get easily diverted on this track of taking a kind of fool's gold. Where we can seemingly confirm our freedom through a kind of subjugation.

13:56 Jenny: That's a great way to put it. But, you know, the thing that she says right after that. That I think is really interesting is she says no man would consent to being a woman. But all want there to be women.

14:07 Wes: Vive la différence.

14:09 Jenny: But that's not really. Right, That's. Yeah. I mean, that's exoticize or something. That's not really living the difference. Because in a certain sense, by saying you don't want to be a woman. The way I think about it, given that it's the male universe that's been constructed and under those rules. And women have been confined and subjugated to those rules. Of course, no man wants to be a woman. Because to be a woman is to be naturally docile consciousness.

14:36 Wes: Or to live in the desire of the other. To really have one's existence predicated on being for another. And maybe that's not the best way to put it. But being focused on the desire of the other. As opposed to being focused on one's own desire or freedom. Which I think it can be, you know, as she acknowledges, a kind of vertiginous religious experience. It can be an incredible sort of experience. But it's also terrifying. If you have not been conditioned to be in that position. It can be so terrifying that people lash out violently. That there are some men who will lash out violently. If they feel like they're being put in that position.

15:14 Dylan: It's also unsustainable. That is part of the problem as well. Both for the one who is submitting, but also for what they're submitting to. Because a man isn't a God. Also that there's something fundamentally untenable about that drive towards actualization through immanence. And self subjugation.

15:34 Wes: Man is not a God. And everyone finds that out because they have relationships. Right? She talks a lot about disappointment in all of this. People know, people understand this at some level, even as they enact these roles, because they suffer so much because of it, because they find out that man is not the transcendent being, or woman is not the mediator to nature or something like that.

15:57 Mark: Can we just clarify what man being the transcendent being means? I thought that just means, as Jenny keeps emphasizing, that he transcends his flesh, that he is an existent, so that by enacting any projects, he is always the transcendent being. In fact, we are always, if we recognize ourselves correctly, the transcendent being. So being the transcendent being doesn't mean you're God.

16:17 Wes: Right. All of us are ultimately subjects, and if we inhabit that role, we become transcendent beings. Transcendent as in transcending all of the material conditions that might otherwise determine us. Right. Transcending character, transcending all of that facticity because we are subjects, because we can decide on what meaning those things have and freely act to the best of our ability within those confines. It's a difference between saying that I am more than all those conditions and simply saying, oh, that's what I am.

16:51 Jenny: I'm essentially that Wes, you're helping me again remind myself how Cartesian Sartre is. And she's taking some of this up because that transcendence, it's a very abstract event. You're thrown in a world, you find yourself embedded in a bunch of relationships, and you know, there's certain material facts of you. But the Sartrean move is to say we can redefine what all those things mean. We have complete freedom to redefine those things. We don't have the power to make ourselves 8ft tall, or we don't have. You know, that's not this kind of libertarian free will, but we do, with our minds, have the power to redefine what.

What that situation is in such a way that we are not passive or totally dominated by it. And the way that de Beauvoir is describing the feminine in that world is the feminine is never allowed to fully think in abstract ways. Like is a consciousness, can do some work of consciousness, but is held back by her mysterious opaque plenitude, her flesh, her envelope, all the things that is connected to her.

18:00 Seth: This discussion makes me question Beauvoir's relationship to the Hegelian dialectical construct. What I mean by that is she seems to Accept and posit that the encounter of the subject against another subject, it's the essential requirement for developing true subjectivity. Right. So consciousness, consciousness, self consciousness. In this case, it would be subject. Subject subjectivity would be the synthesis. And because there's something abhorrent in the encounter of subjectivity with another subjectivity, because possession requires abandonment.

In other words, for two subjects to have an encounter that allows one of the subjects to transcend through possession, the other subjectivity would have to abandon itself, which is unacceptable, because that other subjectivity is trying to accomplish. The subject is trying to accomplish the same thing. So instead, men as subjects turn towards women because women can in some sense fulfill at least one part of that equation, which is the abandonment. But because they're a kind of consciousness but not true subjects, it's ultimately not fulfilling, or it ultimately is not the same as a subject possessing another subject.

I'm wondering, is she being critical? Is she describing a strategy or a path that's enabled by patriarchy where this is an avenue that men seek out, you know, that ultimately the Hegelian construct is correct, or is she criticizing the construct?

19:31 Dylan: I'm not sure how much of it's the Hegelian construct, but seems to me that she's clearly indicting the notion of actualization through possession as the way of achieving the kind of actualized transcendence that would be an active subject embodying their freedom. That's not accomplished by possession. It's part of the fool's gold.

19:52 Wes: Yeah, you would get with the Hegelian dialectic, ultimately the development would end with a kind of mutual recognition of each other as subjects. Right. As autonomous subjects. But in this case, it seems like a terminus, this relation. But I think that's inherent in it, is that it'll seem natural in some ways and. And it'll seem even desirable to people to the extent that it's, you know, as we discussed in the last episode, the idea of femininity disappearing from the world is sad for people. As she says here, you know, men want there to be women, even if they don't want to be women. It's a question of reaching a false terminus where there's this asymmetrical relation and the mutual recognition versus something that leads to genuine reciprocity. Inequality, I think.

20:43 Mark: So it's not clear to me whether she actually believes that genuine reciprocity and equality, certainly that, you know, shooting for that is much, much better than what we have now. But because she's an existentialist, there might be things about human Psychology that just make actually being happy, actually having a healthy relationship problematic. That it seems like why she's saying that men turn to women in the first place is. Is because when they're dealing with other men, which it's set up that like we're together in society and I recognize you that there's something very problematic about that.

There's built in struggle. And this, I think comes in to the existentialist picture of, you know, we're all alone ultimately and really can't fully connect with anybody. And so we realize that when it's just men dealing with men, that it's going to be sort of surface level. It's going to be insofar as you actually really listen to each other and really connect, there's going to be conflict. So that man then uses woman to get something that's like that but without the conflict because ultimately she's going to give in.

21:46 Dylan: So she's like a dog.

21:47 Mark: He wants her to be his judge, including. That's an interesting point. But she ultimately has to approve, right? She wants him to be his advisor.

21:57 Dylan: It's better than having a dog in the sense of having an active consciousness, because she can provide the validation of a consciousness.

22:04 Wes: Yeah, she does. Mark, to your point, I forget where she says this, but she does seem to say that friendship, who knows? You know, genuine friendship is rare. And I think she even says the virtue of friendship. So I think that, well, Aristotelian virtue of, or even Platonic virtue of true friendship might be a model for that reciprocity. But it's difficult in general. And if you look at the ethics of ambiguity or Sartre's critiques of the anti Semite and what authenticity would mean for a Jew or for others, authenticity seems like a very high bar. There's a kind of bleakness to the. Or pessimism to the account I think

22:40 Jenny: that you picked up on again in these passages around 194 and 195. She does make it clear. And this maybe gets to this question of is she critiquing this dialectic as it's been set up? I mean, I think that was part of your question mark. Right.

22:58 Mark: Clearly it's a critique, as we've been saying, but it's not just a matter of if we just got rid of the inequality, it would fix everything. Like, there's still the basic challenges of being human and dealing with other people as human, but that's at least something that's just like dealing with the difficulty of being ultimately free being and not Being able to rely, you know, these just things that we talked about with existentialism before. There was a nice quote that built this into it later in this chapter, page 239. Woman has often been compared to water, in part because it is the mirror where the male Narcissus contemplates himself.

He leans toward her with good or bad faith. In other words, man could have great intentions. You know, it's just. This is the structure of the relationship that's been historically set up. But in any case, what he wants from her is to be outside him. All that he cannot grasp in himself. Because the interiority of the existent is only nothingness. In other words, him is only nothingness. And to reach himself, he must project himself onto an object, right? That that's what that existential freedom means, is that as an interiority, my essence is nothingness is a gaping void.

And so we use other people to try to not just even possess them, but project ourselves onto them as an object to have some sort of self validation. Which also seems different to me than Hegel. I'm not sure in Hegel we'll have to clearly, like, you know, Fukuyama's take on Hegel that we discussed. People want recognition from each other. Like, that's his big takeaway from Hegel. But the way Hegel actually describes it, it's a byproduct that when people deal with each other, we get this mutual recognition. Not necessarily that one of our fundamental drives is craving for this recognition.

Because there are all sorts of, you know, animal species and primitive forms of human relationship, slavery being one of them, where that's not the stated goal, like, I just want to dominate you, or I just want to, you know, have comfort from you or whatever. I'm not trying to build myself as a concrete desire. But in the existentialist picture, I think we are trying to do that because we are, at our core, empty.

25:05 Jenny: I was going back to again some of these early lines in that chapter. And, you know, she sets up that section by again repeating this Hegelian notion of how subjects gain their subjectivity, that how they start to transcend, how they start to engage in projects and not be just mere immanence. She keeps using words like ceaselessly or, you know, surpass himself at each instant. You know, there's this sense that the project of negating the negativity that is the self, right? The project of transcendence, there's no resting in that. It's forever. So, like, if we ever, in an existentialist, point of view were to think about what's a healthy relationship, it would be a very dynamic one.

Right. It wouldn't be one where someone sort of laid out the ground rules, we all agree to them and then go forward. It'd be constant renegotiation and checking in. And given that way that she sets it up, though, she says on page 194, because she's talking about how, again, I remember even learning about this when I was in college and thinking, like, when do you get to take a break about the man and the way that the man looks towards a woman, that in her there are dreams of restfulness and restlessness. So one problem with the way that this possible universe that's been constructed and she calls patriarchy and the way this possible universe defines transcendence projects and women's incomplete, they're not completely able to transcend in the way men do, is that they become this, I mean, maybe puppy, maybe moment of rest, moment of getting back your juices after, you know, battling all the time.

And I think again, when we get more deeply into the woman of love and woman of love, it's so clear then why men may fall in love with women. They may be passionate, they may, you know, have all kinds of obsessions, but it'll pass because their real project is this ceaseless, unending need to negate their negativity and thereby produce things.

27:18 Mark: What do we think of that idea, the relationship between resting in a relationship and being restless in your projects, Like I would think that would be the goal, is that we all need some respite. And so it's not just man taking this from woman, but woman should also take this from man or just whatever sexes are involved in the relationship, that the time together shouldn't necessarily have to be a constant renegotiation, because I guess this is the question. Does the other person in the relationship have to be your project, or can you just have projects that are out there and then you come back and are just satisfied with each other and that's fine.

And maybe you do as you just said, Jenny. You just establish the ground rules and, you know, don't push each other's buttons and don't constantly try to renegotiate. Don't be restless. That is just using common sense. That seems like, yes, you need to grow as people and keep recognizing and not take each other for granted and not treat it purely as a place of rest. It has to be a place of conversation and real bonding. But it doesn't have to be pushing in the same way that the self transcendence of the rest of your projects, of, you know, writing your new book or whatever, the thing you're going to do in the world is.

28:25 Jenny: The way that I see this is that if we're going to, okay, if we're going to not look at the way the woman is in love in patriarchy, but if we want to imagine or a woman who is free, not a kind of passive freedom or docile freedom, then I think that there's a lot of complexity about relationships. But independent of choosing to be in a relationship with someone, the two are still, still both transcending consciousnesses. The idea that that won't impact the relationship is impossible because there's going to be things that each partner is going to engage in for a variety of reasons that also may mean a kind of butting up against each other and that may then redefine the relationship. I mean, that's true freedom, right? For her, real freedom means no possession. In fact, she says possession isn't ever really possession anyways. It's always a fiction.

29:25 Dylan: I hear you emphasizing just the other pole of what Mark is saying, which is that, you know, you can choose to emphasize the part that involves a kind of stability, but at the same time recognizing that stability isn't one that's sort of cast in stone, that never changes. So when you start pointing to that side, you point to the revisionist side, that the way in which even that stability is in an environment that's constantly becoming. And so it may be that those two individual freedoms that they in their activity, there gets to be points where that stability has to be renegotiated, that has to be reasserted.

And I think you're pointing to cases where, depending upon how that goes, the continuing actuality of those freedoms might result in that there not being a stable point. I mean, that would be the extreme version, right? But I think the notion of a stability and the notion of a dynamic

30:22 Jenny: are compatible, like dynamic equilibrium or punctuated equilibrium.

30:28 Wes: I think she has good things to say about this when she's talking about disappointment, because it's in disappointment that you see what the relationship should be or could be. So, for instance, on 786, Colette in The Vagabond and Mes Apprentissages often alludes to this bitter agony. This disillusion is even crueler than the child's at seeing paternal prestige crumble because the woman herself chose the one to whom she made a gift of her whole being. So here's the most relevant part. Even if the chosen One is worthy of the deepest attachment, his truth is earthbound.

It is not he whom the woman kneeling before Supreme Being loves. She is duped by the spirit of seriousness, which refuses to put values in parentheses, not recognizing that they stem from human existence. Her bad faith erects barriers between her and the one she worships. She flatters him, she bows down before him. But she's not a friend for him. Since she does not realize he is in danger in the world, that his projects and finalities are as fragile as he himself is, and so on. She misunderstands his freedom, which is hesitation and anguish. This refusal to apply a human measure to the lover explains many feminine paradoxes.

This goes the other way as well. Right. You give a very similar account from the man's. And as she does, I just don't have it on hand. But from the man's perspective, the problem in relationships is not respite. It's seriousness in her sense.

31:56 Jenny: That comes out of the ethics of ambiguity. But that's not in this book, so I think we should define it.

32:02 Dylan: She uses that word, for sure.

32:05 Wes: I'll start. It won't be very good, and you guys can add onto it. But just values is something that come not from us, but from on high, from outside of us. Something to which we sort of submit ourselves and lose our autonomy. Yep. What she calls the serious man, the serious human being. And ironically would be willing to do anything for. Even do horrible things like enslave people, kill people. So, you know, when she talks about keeping them in brackets, it really ultimately comes down to there being a higher value, which is the freedom of others. In Kantian terms, would be treating people as ends in themselves, which no value could ever. Or being attuned to the freedom of others, which is the same thing as being attuned to. One owns freedom, which no other value could be so serious as to subvert. We can't subvert our own freedom to any value.

32:58 Jenny: I think that was good, but I want to think more through this disappointment that you're bringing up. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like, Wes, that the woman becomes disappointed in the man once she realizes he's not a hero, he's not a God. He's not always going to do amazing things. He's just going to be a person. Was that part of what you're talking about?

33:19 Dylan: You know, this section that west pointed us to is in the middle of a paragraph, the beginning of which emphasizes this question of contingence. She says an authentic love should take on the other's contingence, that is his lacks, limitations and originary gratuitousness. It would claim to be not a salvation, but an inter human relation. And then she goes on to talk about the disappointment in exactly the way you're talking, you and Wes were talking about. But it's worth noting that it's exactly this recognition of another's individual situatedness, their contingency, their originary gratuitousness.

That part of what is disappointing. But the frame of that disappointment has to do with your own lens on the world of wanting to have certain kinds of firm facts. I guess there's a way in which both sides are suffering from the desire of a firmness to their existence that is unattainable. And so that's the origin of this disappointment. And sort of trying to figure out how you hold that. I guess it was sort of the open question for an existentialist, whether you moderate the disappointment or you just aren't disappointed anymore because you understand how to hold it.

34:32 Wes: Well, Jenny, what were you about to say about that?

34:34 Jenny: I just wanted to give you a way that I. Maybe it's like too much of an overview, but a way that I understand what. What de Beauvoir is saying about what's problematic about the woman, the woman in love, the woman who was engaged in idolatrous love. So I've always read this chapter. I always read it and then I read Freud's Mourning and Melancholia because I think that they get at the same thing. And what they get at is the woman is, in a Freudian sense, narcissistic by nature. It's been made that way by patriarchy. And narcissistic in the sense that there's just this fundamental wound, there's just this lack.

Maybe for existentialism we're all lacking, but in the case of woman, she's the other. She's not the positive or the neutral, to use that metaphor, that de Beauvoir has. And so the only way she sees, and this is part of me borrowing from Freud, but it's right in her chapter too, is she tries to identify with somebody who will, through her identification with him. Namely, as long as he takes her in and loves her, adores her, fills her, she now becomes important, valuable, not lacking, not wounded anymore. Right? So it's this description of love that's just so pathetic and pathological.

Because the whole setup is that this woman needs the man mostly to be aligned with him, to therefore be seen. Almost as if she is as efficacious in the world or valuable in the world as he is. Because she is denied those opportunities. Theoretically. But that's a tricky move. Because that means that you have to come up with some kind of dance. Where you keep your lover in love with you. Keep him coming back. Even though he's going to be like, okay, cool, I gotta go do stuff. I'll see you in a couple weeks. She needs him there. She needs to have his eyes on her.

To make her valuable, to make her have some meaning or purpose in the world. And so she has to get into this dance where she's trying to make that happen. But it's almost always going to end in her being left. And when she's being left. And I guess this is why I always read this with Freud. It's not like she's losing something like a child. She's not mourning the death of something she's lost, something she's never had. It's melancholia. It's the most profound sorrow. Because if you had really nothing that gave you a sense of belonging in the world.

Or mattered in the world. And then you thought you had it by identifying. And by identifying, I mean, like literally identifying. Just saying, I am him, right? I am. Heathcliff is one of the examples she gives. And then when that person inevitably leaves. Because they simply don't need to be around all the time. They don't need. They don't intensely need that bond.

37:34 Wes: Or they just could be. They disappoint, you know. Heathcliff's not all that great, it turns out.

37:38 Jenny: The disappointment seems like it's almost better for the woman, right? Even better if he dies. But, you know, then there's some kind of, oh, well, you know, at least there's some stories you can tell herself. But being left, being abandoned, that is, I think, the real risk. And I think quite common thing that happens still when if you've put all your eggs in that basket and you have nothing, you have you not your own projects, right? You've made him your project. Then when he leaves you, you can't just mourn it like, oh, that relationship's over. You have to just face your absolute lack. And maybe here I'm sounding too Freudian. Because, you know, existentialists, we are our lack. But here she really is talking about it in terms of a kind of nothing. There's nothing left.

38:26 Wes: Well, the identification is an attempt to fill up that lack in an authentic way. So that's what the mourning and melancholia does. Instead of mourning the loss, you can mourn Some things.

38:37 Jenny: But when the identification is. I mean, what essentially the identification is is with her own lack of right. Even though she's identifying with the man. It's really just a manifestation that she is not nothing. That's melancholia. That's just. Where do you get out of that?

38:53 Wes: No, that's very good. We're getting into the psychological dynamics of inauthenticity and the denial of lack. I mean, what's going on on both ends of the relationship is the use of others to deny our own lack, to deny our own contingency, deny all those things that become disappointing in other people when real relationships grind down. These sorts of illusions. And some of this on both ends, I think, has to do with idealization of the other in order to want to feel omnipotent oneself. It's about denying one's own lack by identification with someone who's been idealized.

And I think it happens on the male end as well. It's just that what's being idealized is not freedom and subjectivity. What's being idealized is, you know, as we get into the Myths chapter, it'll be nature and maternality and grace and self restraint and all of these values that we associate with femininity. They're idealized as something. No, I'm not going to become a woman, but they're idealized as something in the world that I can use or that I can be in relation to.

40:07 Mark: So I'm already hearing a little of, you know, the question coming up. To what extent is this problem reciprocal and to what extent, you know, as we think about more modern relationships where women are not. You can argue whether they're under patriarchy, but they're certainly not in general kept, you know, the readers of this in the way that I keep using that term. Women are allowed to have projects of their own, but yet there are still these social forces that make it maybe sort of, you know, you've been. Maybe there's just more of an emphasis in girls on love and dreaming about your marriage.

And so it seems like it's a more common problem for women than for men to lose yourself in a relationship and feel like if the other person leaves you, then you just have nothing left and you are nothing. Beauvoir says in here a man could exhibit that, but then I think she kind of just throws it away that. But then he's not actually being a man. So it's like no true man would suffer this. Whereas I was raised as a very young person, put a lot of emphasis on romantic love and had and crushes and very erratic in terms of going from, you know, wanting to make that.

It's a project that I would very easily fall into. You know, is it just less extreme, the polarity of the discontinuity between the sorts of problems that women have in abandoning themselves versus men, or they just, you know, it's not a matter of degree. They're just fundamentally different in kind, and they will always be.

41:31 Wes: Part of the complexity of this account is that, you know, in a book like the Ethics of Ambiguity, it doesn't look like a lot of people are authentic or embracing their lack and their freedom anyway.

41:46 Jenny: Right.

41:46 Wes: It doesn't look like men or women on the whole do much of that. So remember what she. You know, all the different types of human being that she goes through in the Ethics of Ambiguity, including especially the subman, leads me to think of this as a kind of scale. So when we're talking about. It's not that every man, by virtue of being a man, has really embracing his freedom. Far from that. In many ways, they're in a better position circumstantially to do that some of the time. Maybe, let's say not just circumstantially, but psychologically, the way masculinity goes. So I think it's complicated. I don't know what else to say

42:24 Seth: other than that the structure that's set up means that men and women are playing two different games. You're right. It's not that every man is out there, you know, acting and accomplishing projects and developing their own subjectivity. But that's the game that they're set up to play, is they have that possibility and women don't underneath this structure. And so reading this today, there was much that we read that still resonated with me that I felt was still completely valid. Even with the improvements in the ability for women to accomplish projects and the effacement of gender lines that say that this is acceptable behavior for girls and this is acceptable behavior for boys.

There's still much in here that I think resonates, and I think very much so. The general outline that she puts in place is still very present. So I think, especially in the last decade or so, it's more acceptable for men to be metrosexuals and be in touch with their feelings and emotional intelligence and all that sort of thing. But ultimately, that doesn't change the fact that marriage as an institution still, it still exists in the society. The acceptance of homosexual relationships, even the Lesbian chapter is going to point out that that doesn't necessarily challenge the existing oppressive structure either.

So my answer to that would be most of the things that she's pointing out are still quite valid even now.

43:57 Jenny: So going back to. In what ways there's some reciprocity in the ways women and men can be pained by each other. We can put it that way. You know, the way that she sets up this chapter, it's not going to happen that the man is going to be devastated in the way that a woman is. I think that you could read this chapter now and that men could find themselves identifying with the sort of passionate woman in love because, you know, for whatever reasons. But what I think that at the end of the day she's describing in this chapter is narcissism. And that, I mean that's like a huge topic in our society today.

Not just because everyone's trying to diagnose our president, but it seems like we are a society that is either producing a lot of narcissists or becoming highly aware of narcissists. And I think the way that she describes the woman as a narcissist is helpful because what she's describing, another way to talk about identification is Freud talks about the ego ideal in a certain sense. This person, let's say the narcissist. But in her case, the woman is looking for something to incorporate an ideal to see her or himself as, and then looking to have that constantly that it's not a one off.

If you're gonna need this for some sense of stability, then you, you need to constantly have people be reminding you that you are all the great things that you hope or at least that you've tried to take on to be that you've imitated in the people that you thought were ideal. So I'm going to get to something that I notice as a, you know, just your average female looking. I myself am divorced. I don't know if any of you have been divorced. And I'm seeing a lot of people get divorced. And you actually said mark, to watch the movie A Marriage Story and I couldn't get through

45:53 Mark: is an unpleasant experience. I just thought it was, it might be currently on people's minds.

45:57 Jenny: What I'm getting to here is that one of the things I've noticed, I guess from my position and my life experience and also read a lot of Beauvoir and I'm a feminist theorist, is that what she describes about how women try to keep that man? Right, to keep that man, because she needs that like a passage would be on 787. This is one of the curses weighing on the passionate woman. Her generosity is immediately converted into demands being alienated in another. She also wants to salvage herself. She has to annex this other who holds her being. She gives herself to him entirely.

But he has to be totally available to receive this gift honorably. She dedicates all her moments to him. He has to be present at every moment. She only wants to live through him, but she wants to live. He has to devote himself to make her live. I see sometimes male friends of mine who have been in long term relationships with women that are somewhat like this, we might call narcissistic. And I started to theorize that because usually the male friends of mine that I see in these situations are like fantastic in so many ways, like super metrosexual.

Whoever brought that word in. And it finally dawned on me that somehow that dynamic that I just read, the dynamic of the narcissistic woman who I'm going to completely devote myself to you. I'm going to, I'm all yours, I'm going to give you everything. But this is all really a set of demands. And these demands are, you're going to sustain me, you're going to make me matter, right? You're going to be there always. And that to get that to happen, partner and it doesn't just have to be a woman. This could be either way, the ways in which that narcissistic partner will try to get these things starts becoming Nietzschean.

Tama, passive aggressive, like stuff we talked about before. I've often wondered in this 21st century, 2020, why men, especially very thoughtful, you know, reflective men stay in a situation like that. And I this is like my complete armchair Freudianism. There must be something in that dynamic that is reminiscent of the mother child, maybe mother son, that there must be something in those demands that ensure that she loves him rather than if it was just freely given.

48:36 Mark: Well, I disagree. I think all men are just rational actors and they say if she's gonna be a little crazy, I gotta compare that to the stability in sex.