Kristana Arp

The fifth and final meditation of Edmund Hussefl's Cartesian Meditations has been the subject of a great deal of attention over the years. A number of commentators have focused on Husserl's treatment of the experience of other subjects there and the majority of them have been quite critical. What is not often remarked on, however, is that Husserl's initial intention at least in the Fifth Meditation is to address another topic, one that he evidently considers to be of even greater urgency. 1 This topic comprises what Husserl calls "transcendental problems pertaining to the Objective WorM. ''2 This topic is an urgent one, he tells us, because unless such problems can be solved his phenomenology remains open to "what may seem to be a grave objection. ''

The ancient Athenians believed that their forebears sprang directly from the earth rather than being created by gods or born of human parents. In some version of the myth, the ancestor was depicted as having a man's form above the waist and a snake's form below: "Having emerged from the earth, he still in part resembled the creature that slips to and fro between the upper and lower worlds."'1 At the beginning of her 1947 work, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir asserts that there is a fundamental ambiguity to human life. According to her, every human, like the chthonic ancestor of the Athenians, exists at the same time in two realms: "he is still part of the world of which he is conscious."2 Rooted as they are in the earth, humans can transcend their material origin in thought but they can never escape it.

In July 1940, Simone de Beauvoir began a routine of going to the Bibliothèque Nationale most days from 2.00 to 5.00 p.m. to read G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Hitler's armies had invaded and occupied Paris earlier, on June 14, 1940. She was teaching philosophy classes at a girls' lycée and living in her grandmother's empty apartment. Her close companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, who had been a soldier in a meteorological unit of the French Army, had been captured and was now being held in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Beauvoir was relieved to receive a note from him sent on July 2 saying he was being well treated, but life in Paris was dismal. Food was scarce, and the German troops were grim reminders of Parisians' lack of political freedom. Her reading routine helped soothe the dread, isolation, and alienation she felt. Beauvoir had always been a very earnest student. She had passed the demanding aggregation exam in philosophy at the young age of twenty-one. To supplement her knowledge of classical philosophical texts, she learned German and read texts in phenomenology. In 1935 she had read Edmund Husserl's The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness “without too much difficulty.” She also read Heidegger and translated long passages into French for Sartre. Back when she was in college, her prodigious work habits had earned her a special nickname among her friends: Castor, or the beaver. Poring over a difficult philosophical text in a foreign language for three hours a day might seem a strange way to get through such times, but with her it made sense.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Hypatia 14.4 (1999) 186-191 [Access article in PDF] Simone De Beauvoir: a Critical Reader. Edited by Elizabeth Fallaize. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. As this special volume attests, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in Simone de Beauvoir. A number of books on her have been published in the last several years. However, Elizabeth Fallaize's book, Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (1998), occupies a special niche. Many of its essays are excerpts from studies done of Beauvoir's work before this latest renaissance. Some of these studies are not in print in the United States. Some are perhaps unfamiliar to present-day readers or those from different disciplines. In addition, the articles reprinted here are otherwise not easily accessible. Fallaize has performed an important service by gathering them all in one place and by carefully editing, presenting, and, in some cases, translating them. The book is divided into three sections, the first entitled "Readings of The Second Sex." Aside from Judith Okely's piece that assesses Beauvoir's chapter on myths from an anthropological standpoint, the essays mainly address the philosophical aspects of this work. Beauvoir herself of course swore that she was not a philosopher and that Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1953) was the sole philosophical foundation for all her work. Some recent analyses have attempted to turn this picture on its head by arguing that Beauvoir was a central influence on, or even the origin of, the philosophical doctrines put forward in Being and Nothingness. None of the writers in this book addresses this issue. But two emphasize Beauvoir's intellectual independence from Sartre. The Swedish scholar Eva Lundgren-Gothlin argues that Beauvoir turned to G. W. F. Hegel to find a satisfactory theoretical model with which to explain the subjugation of women (Lundgren-Gothlin's essay is taken from her book [End Page 186] Sex and Existence [1996]) . In opposition to other scholars, she argues that the French Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, not Sartre, influenced Beauvoir's interpretation of Hegel. Following Hegel and Kojève, Beauvoir envisioned a possible resolution to the struggle for recognition—reciprocal recognition—whereas Sartre's view of self-other relations in Being and Nothingness rules such reciprocity out. However, Lundgren-Gothlin judges, Beauvoir was not critical enough of the sexist presuppositions of Hegel's thought, citing the same pronouncements Beauvoir makes that subsequent feminists have criticized. Another piece that stresses Beauvoir's philosophical originality is "Beauvoir: The Weight of Situation," taken from Sonia Kruks's book Situation and Human Existence (1990). For some time, Kruks has been doing excellent work placing Beauvoir within the wider phenomenological tradition. In this piece, she argues that, starting with the early essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and culminating in The Second Sex (1989), Beauvoir elaborated a more nuanced position on the nature and extent of human freedom than Sartre did in Being and Nothingness. According to Beauvoir, human freedom, which Sartre dramatically proclaims is absolute, can under some conditions, notably conditions of severe oppression, "be reduced to no more than a suppressed potentiality" (Fallaize 1998, 57). In The Second Sex, Beauvoir definitively breaks with the philosophical framework of Being and Nothingness by implying that a woman's situation is a general one, not individually self-constituted, and one that she cannot transcend by an act of free choice. The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides a better foundation for Beauvoir's conception of subjectivity as socially mediated and embodied than does Sartre's philosophy, Kruks suggests. Another piece in this section, Judith Butler's landmark essay "Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex" (1986), highlights Beauvoir's philosophical originality in a different way. In her introduction, Fallaize points out how this essay served as a foundation for Butler's own subsequent work on a performative theory of gender. Butler argues that Beauvoir's claim that one is not born but becomes a woman implies that gender is socially constructed and not natural, as people have insisted for centuries. But to the extent that we become women, gender is not something...

Beauvoir's essay “Pyrrhus and Cineas” serves as an excellent introduction to existentialism for students. People today still try to bring meaning to their lives in the ways she examines: through religion, humanitarianism, the scientific worldview, or a focus on the present moment (inspired nowadays by the West's fascination with Eastern mysticism). She points out the numerous questions these points of view leave unanswered. Her existentialist conclusion is that we ourselves give meaning to our lives and cannot justify our life decisions solely by appeal to external standards.

This work attempts to solve a central problem facing Husserl's phenomenology. The phenomenologist implements the transcendental epoche and abstains from considering whether the objects of mental processes actually exist in order to reach a clearer understanding of the nature of these processes. Among the objects of consciousness, however, are other conscious subjects. Extending the epoche to cover these other subjects appears to raise two serious problems. How can phenomenology then explain our experience of other conscious subjects as distinct from inanimate objects, since what sets the former off from the latter, the other's mind or consciousness, cannot be directly experienced, and that perceptual objects are experienced as public or there for all perceiving subjects? ;In my first chapter I analyze the solution that Husserl offered to this problem in his Cartesian Meditations and judge that it should be rejected on the basis of certain objections commentators have made against it. In the second chapter I turn to Husserl's last work, the Crisis, where, I argue, he began to take a new approach to the issue of intersubjectivity. His stress on the role of intersubjectivity in the generation of meaning, his explicit rejection of mind-body dualism and his focus on the intentionality of others instead of their physical presence in space in the Crisis represents a significant departure from his position in the Cartesian Meditations. ;The new direction that Husserl took in the Crisis provides a rationale for my subsequent attempt to craft an alternative solution to the problem. In my third chapter I extend Husserl's idea of how kinaesthesis or bodily movement is directed towards and responsive to objects in the world in order to explain how we distinguish other subjects from inanimate objects. In the fourth chapter I argue that the function of intersubjective meanings in perception accounts for the possibility of the publicity of objects of perception. Then I show how Husserl's concept of the perceptual horizon of an object already captures the sense that one has that objects can be perceived by other subjects besides oneself