philoSOPHIA

Penelope Deutscher's The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance is an important contribution to our understanding of Beauvoir in two respects. First, her innovative reading of Beauvoir's well-known and less-cited texts gives us a complex Beauvoir who, though drawing on the existential and phenomenological traditions, cannot be confined within the existential and phenomenological fields. Second, in critiquing Beauvoir as we would critique any philosopher—unapologetically—Deutscher makes it clear that such criticism poses no threat to Beauvoir's philosophical status. Further in directing her attention to those who influenced Beauvoir without fear that this will compromise Beauvoir's status as a philosopher, Deutscher signals Beauvoir's coming of age as a philosopher; for she shows us that the space around Beauvoir is now philosophically secure. Deutscher is not alone in securing Beauvoir's philosophical place. Nor is she alone in stepping into it. She stands out, however, in showing us how best to use it.

Deutscher reads Beauvoir as an ethical theorist who, from the beginning to the end of her philosophical career, saw us as existing in an ambiguous relationship to ourselves and others and who translated the perceptual reversibility [End Page 251] that defines us as ambiguous into an ethical and political vocabulary of vulnerability and risk. As Deutscher reads her, Beauvoir saw the givenness of our ontological ambiguity as entailing the givenness of an ethical choice. We may either risk death by confronting the other before whom we are vulnerable as an enemy who must either be dominated or destroyed, or we may risk becoming a victim by acknowledging our vulnerability before the other in the hope that they will acknowledge our shared vulnerability instead of succumbing to the temptation to exploit us. Deutscher notes the Hegelian influence in this first formulation of Beauvoir's ethics, and this notation becomes important not only in understanding Beauvoir's relationship to the philosophical tradition, but also in Deutscher's analysis of the way in which Beauvoir reformulates her ideas of ambiguity and the other in The Coming of Age. In noting how close Beauvoir was to Hegel in her first ethical formulations and how radically she reworked these formulations in The Coming of Age, Deutscher alerts us to the ways in which Beauvoir uprooted the philosophical traditions that anchored her thought.

As Deutscher reads her, Beauvoir has no trouble defending the claim that the second response to our ambiguity, the choice to assume our vulnerability, is the more difficult one. Her challenge comes in defending the claim that this more difficult choice is also the only ethical one; for both choices register the intersubjective truth of our vulnerability and each in its own way confronts the risks of this vulnerability. The difference is that the first choice, in its decision to eliminate or dominate the other before whom we are vulnerable, is, even when we accept full responsibility for it, a bad faith attempt to deny our vulnerability. The second choice, however, in consciously affirming the truth of vulnerability, pursues the intersubjective implications of this truth by accepting the risks of the desire for recognition. Beauvoir seems to assume that in convincing us that the second choice is the ontologically truthful one she will convince us that it is also the only ethical one. That the more truthful choice is also the more ethical one, however, is not self-evident. It assumes the ethical value of truth. After Nietzsche, our suspicions regarding this assumption must be addressed. Neither Beauvoir nor Deutscher deals with this issue head on. Instead, Deutscher focuses on Beauvoir's ongoing debate with the Marquis de Sade regarding the ethical limits of assuming responsibility for our choices; for Beauvoir must convince us that Sade, in meeting the ethical requirement of assuming responsibility for his choices to abuse others, is nevertheless unethical. One of the innovations of Deutscher's reading is to see the essay "Must We Burn Sade?" as critical to Beauvoir's ethical...