M. Kagan's notes on selection from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in Mahowald's
Philosophy of Woman , pp. 80-99. (Note: This text, as indicated in the syllabus, is on reserve in the library).
Comments, additions, and corrections are welcome.
Please send them to
Michael Kagan
Le Moyne College Department of Philosophy
Syracuse, NY 13214
Email: KAGAN@maple.lemoyne.edu
Begin by briefly reviewing the central and crucial role of freedom in this kind of existentialism,
the concept of project and responsibility. Perhaps even discuss Camus' Myth of Sisyphus.
- p. 80, "What is woman . . . ?" Does what de Beauvoir says here ring true to you now, almost 50 years later?
- p. 80, "because you are a woman/because you are a man." Has "man" become gendered in the past 50 years or so? Can a critic now challenge an opponent by saying, "you think thus and so because you are a man?" Have you experienced this?
- p. 82. Otherness. Discuss. Briefly compare with Becker's treatment in Escape from Evil, pp. 18-20; 94-95, 108ff.
- p. 83, "the strain involved in pursuing authentic existence." Make sense out of why one might want to be a thing; compare with Sartre's distinction between persons being and that of an ink pot. Discuss bad faith. compare with "submission" as "the temptation of every existent in the anxiety of liberty."(p. 90)
- p. 84, note the emphasis of liberty over happiness. What's going on here? Discuss.
- p. 87; problem of collision of old with new; personal and political collide..
- p. 88 ft. "He would be liberated himself in their liberation. But this is precisely what he dreads."
- p. 89, the romanticizing of the oppressed; pedestal as prison.
- p. 90-91 One kind of sexual-temporal economics. The role of time. Compare this with recent tensions over housework.
- p. 92. "Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice." Discuss.
- p. 92 "bad faith first appears when each blames the other. "Discuss.
- p. 93--what makes sense out of the charge of "abandoning children to their parents?" What are some of the implications of this.
- p. 93. Discuss the claim that "in human society, nothing is natural"
- pp. 94-95. Note how this tension with taboos parallels Plato's discussion on book 5 of the Republic.
- p. 96. "the fact that we are human . . . is infinitely more important . . ." discuss this response to difference.
- p. 97 return to critique of romanticizing of oppression; discuss; discuss backlash, the lure of the old.
- p. 99 "It is for man to establish the reign of liberty in the midst of the world of the given." Discuss .
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