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Of Hegelian Bondage
In the introduction of The Second Sex,(1) Beauvoir raises the notion of woman's Otherness. In an effort to trace the development of woman's subordinate position as Other to man, she engages with the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.(2) Beauvoir's engagement with Hegel focuses on his famous master-slave dialectic, found in his Phenomenology of Spirit. The master-slave dialectic describes a struggle for supremacy between two antagonists, one thereby becoming master, the other slave. She uses the dialectic to exemplify the processes which lead to and maintain structures of domination and subjection. It offers, on her account, a means of analysing the asymmetrical relations between the sexes and a model which provides keen insight into women's situation. Indeed, she says that the master-slave dialectic suits her purposes even better than it suits Hegel's (96).
Beauvoir's characterisation and use of the master-slave dialectic diverges considerably from Hegel's. These differences are most apparent in relation to their respective accounts of the nature, roles and aspirations of women. Most significantly, not only does Hegel not apply the dialectic to male-female relations but, in the wider context of his work, such an application is impossible.
The thematic divergence of Beauvoir from Hegel, while being justified, nonetheless creates lingering problems for her analysis. It is imperative that she reconceptualise Hegel, because his account is corrosive of women's emancipation, rationalising the very structures she seeks to undermine. Yet her attitude to Hegel is equivocal. She enthusiastically endorses parts of his master-slave dialectic, and his basic account of the development of competition and hierarchy. While there is nothing wrong with her `sampling' his work, it is not entirely clear how much of it she embraces. Those aspects of Hegel's account that she repudiates she replaces with ideas that ultimately have an Hegelian origin, or in any case just as surely result in a picture inimical to women's emancipation. There are strings attached to the parts of Hegel she embraces, and her appropriation threatens to create misunderstanding, contradiction, or at the very least obscurity and confusion.
The point of this examination relates directly to what Beauvoir wants to achieve. She wants to liberate women from the oppressive structures of patriarchy. At its worst, her flirting with Hegel compromises her legacy. Woman's...