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From existential alterity to ethical reciprocity: Beauvoir’s alternative to Levinas

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While Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of alterity has been the topic of much discussion within Beauvoir scholarship, feminist theory, and social and political philosophy, it has not commonly been a reference point for those working within ethics. However, Beauvoir develops a novel view that those concerned with the ethical import of respect for others should consider seriously, especially those working within the Levinasian tradition. I claim that Beauvoir distinguishes between two forms of otherness: namely, existential alterity and sociopolitical alterity. While sociopolitical alterity is a contingent and surmountable form of otherness that results from oppression of individuals and groups, existential alterity is a necessary feature of the human condition that discloses the foreignness of the other as a freedom. Out of this view of existential alterity, I argue, Beauvoir develops an ethic of asymmetrical reciprocity. In contrast with Levinas, who dismisses reciprocity as a symmetrical or reversible model of relation that minimizes difference, Beauvoir promulgates a view of reciprocity that does not fall into the problems that Levinas diagnoses. Moreover, asymmetrical reciprocity more successfully figures the ethical relation to the other than the absolute asymmetry one finds in Levinas, which becomes evident through revisiting Levinas’s account of eros and contrasting it with that of Beauvoir.

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Notes

  1. The recognition of Beauvoir as a philosopher in her own right arguably began in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Margaret Simons’ interviews with Beauvoir and her resulting articles (1999), and gained momentum with a number of influential monographs in the 1990s. See: Moi (1990, 1994), Le Doeuff (1991), Fullbrook and Fullbrook (1993), Lundgren-Gothlin (1996), Vintges (1996), Bergoffen (1997). In addition to further scholarly monographs and articles, the subsequent two decades have seen a proliferation of special journal issues and illuminating anthologies of both Beauvoir’s works and commentary on it.

  2. See, for instance, Simons (2006), Andrew (2003), Bauer (2001), Bergoffen (1997), Heinamäa (2003), Kruks (2001), Lacoste (2009).

  3. This position is at odds with feminist recuperations of Levinas’s work, even though virtually all of these are qualified recuperations that acknowledge the problems with Levinas’s views of the feminine. See, for instance: Ainley (1988), Brody (2001), Chalier (1982, 1991), Chanter (1988, 2001), Katz (2003), Manning (1991), Perpich (2001), Taylor (2005), Ziarek (2001). Derrida also attempts to make a feminist case for Levinas’s treatment of the feminine in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (1999).

  4. Steffen Herrmann has recently mobilized Levinas’s asymmetrical ethics in the service of an ethic of reciprocity, while acknowledging that Levinas himself rejects reciprocity (2017). Adriaan T. Peperzak has more controversially suggested that Levinas’s asymmetrical ethic may be considered bilateral rather than unilateral (2000).

  5. For explorations of the importance of alterity in Beauvoir’s ethics, see, among others, Daigle and Golomb (2009), Green (2002), Simons (1999), McWeeny (2010), Anderson (2014), Tidd (2006).

  6. “Other” here is “L’Autre”.

  7. This notion has antecedents in Husserl’s phenomenological account of intersubjectivity in the Cartesian Meditations. See Heinämaa (2006). Bergoffen—rightly, to my mind—argues that Beauvoir agrees with Sartre in taking the immediate experience of the other to be one of the ‘look’ (2009).

  8. It may seem that freedom functions as a value or norm in Beauvoir’s thinking. She would, however, deny this: recall that freedom is nothing, and has no determinate content. It cannot, then, function as a value, but rather is the basis of any and all value. Some scholars, following Kristana Arp, have thus pressed a distinction between two forms of freedom in Beauvoir, moral freedom and ontological freedom. See Arp (2001, 55).

  9. The same tenets of Beauvoir’s brief critique of Levinas can also be seen in her remarks about the fiction of Montherlant and Lawrence in The Second Sex. See, for instance, Beauvoir (2011, 263).

  10. Beauvoir’s view of alterity is deeply influenced by Hegel, whose scene of the struggle for recognition Beauvoir wholly accepts. Yet, while Beauvoir draws much from Hegel regarding the initial character of the encounter with another as one of struggle, she “does not adopt Hegel’s understanding of reciprocal recognition wholesale” (Bauer 2006, 69). Rather, Beauvoir adopts Hegel’s emphasis on recognition and its initial struggle in order to resolve it in a manner that maintains the alterity of the other through an ethical perspective of ambiguity, eros, and reciprocity. As Silvia L. López puts it, “The paradigm of intersubjectivity inherited from Hegel is eventually transformed in de Beauvoir’s writing into an erotic model of recognition whereby the conditions of possibility of the moral relationship are based on our willingness to assume the risks of vulnerability and the bonds of ambiguous subjectivity” (Lópéz 2004, 648).

  11. Attempting to act in one’s place would be what Beauvoir, in “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” calls ‘devotion.’ See Beauvoir (2004, 117–126).

  12. See especially Bergoffen (1997), as well as Butler (2003) and Guilmette (2011).

  13. Though I am greatly indebted to Bergoffen’s account of eros in Beauvoir’s work, I disagree with the notion that eros involves “the moment in which I recognize myself in the other,” even as Bergoffen emphasizes that this recognition of oneself does not amount to a dissolution of difference. See Bergoffen (1997).

  14. See, for instance, Irigaray (1991, 1993), Sikka (2001), Taylor (2005), Vasey (1992), Villarmea (1999), Willett (1995). For a helpful overview of feminist issues that arise on the basis of Levinas’s work, especially the concerns of Beauvoir and Irigaray, see Sandford (2002).

  15. Some scholars have suggested alternative examples in Levinas’s work of the relation to the other. For instance, Catherine Chalier (1991), Katz (2004), and John Llewelyn (1995) have suggested that maternity, rather than eros, figures the ethical for Levinas; Anthony J. Steinbock has emphasized the importance of the teacher (2005); Derrida has suggested the guest/host relation of hospitality (1999). Others have also suggested that the alterity of God best figures the other for Levinas. Françoise Dastur uses this to critique Levinas’s view, stating: “too much asymmetry on the side of Levinas leads also to a denial of the alterity of the other which is there identified to God” (Dastur 2011, 177). While I do not mean to suggest that the erotic relation is the only example of the movement toward the other in Levinas, the textual evidence used here demonstrates that it does play a fundamental role in his ethical conception; this is the case from his early to late works.

  16. While Levinas uses the phrase ‘vis-à-vis’ quite frequently, I think this better describes Beauvoir’s view, and thus use ‘the face-to-face’ as a heuristic to counterpose Levinas’s ethics of ‘the face’.

  17. Beauvoir’s remarks on Stendhal are relevant here: in The Second Sex, she praises his writings on love for demonstrating reciprocity. Beauvoir writes that, in Stendhal’s novels, woman is “that other consciousness that, in reciprocal recognition, gives to the other subject the same truth it receives from it,” and that “this supposes that woman is not pure alterity: she is subject herself. Stendhal never describes his heroines as a function of his heroes: he provides them with their own destinies” (Beauvoir 2011, 260).

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    Ellie Anderson

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Anderson, E. From existential alterity to ethical reciprocity: Beauvoir’s alternative to Levinas. Cont Philos Rev 52, 171–189 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9459-3

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