Significant Other
Michael A. Rizzotti
Significant other refers to a gender blind way to name the
Other partner in a
relationship. The attribute significant
implies having a meaningful and influential effect on the
Other and onto oneself.
Especially if it relates to a deep and liberating experience of love. In her
seminal work of Le Deuxième
Sexe, Simone de Beauvoir proposed her own
analysis of alterity. The Introduction
of the book is such a classic that it deserves to be reinterpreted in light of her invaluable
contribution to the perception of the Other.
Although Simone de Beauvoir wrote her book in 1949 it is
still a major treatise on feminism and phenomenology. The introduction of
The Second Sex is based on her own philosophical
analysis with references to scholars like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, Granet
and Hegel. As such she was a pioneer in using pluri-disciplinary fields like
anthropology, mythography, mythology and sociology in her philosophical
discourse. She brings up some original observations on the importance of myth
in culture in light of her concept of the Other. And to this day it is hard
to deny the caliber of her intellect.
*
De Beauvoir was brought up in a conservative bourgeois
family in Paris.
Her father was a lawyer and an agnostic. Her mother was a devout Catholic. She juggled
the differing influences of her parents by becoming a devoted atheist. The
existence of God did not matter as much to her as the existence of
Other beings "there" in her life. Especially her life long
companion Jean-Paul Sartre, the famed post-war existentialist.
Sartre and de Beauvoir first met in 1929 while taking their
agrégation ─a test that rates students
that enable them to teach in the best schools. Although Sartre failed the first
time he took the test, he was nevertheless awarded first prize on his second
attempt. Whereas de Beauvoir, who passed on her first attempt,
was given second place. She nevertheless succeeded in being the youngest
student to pass the agrégation and became
the youngest philosophy teacher in France.
Following the test, the president of the jury, professor Lalande,
confessed to one of his colleagues that Sartre had marked intellectual
qualities, but he added, the real philosopher is
“her”.
Both were to remain "essential" lovers until
Sartre’s death. They both agreed to an open relationship with a tacit agreement
that they would reveal everything about their love affairs to each other. These
"contingent" love affairs consisted mostly of Sartre’s ongoing womanizing
including several ménage à trois involving de Beauvoir.
Adding her own lesbian relationships along the way.
Sartre and de Beauvoir’s personal letters published
after their deaths, revealed that they were making fun
of the Other lovers in their love
triangles. They were typically being used to reinforce their own “essential” bond .
Following the second world war Jean-Paul
Sartre became the intellectual star of France.
Although de Beauvoir was Sartre’s
intellectual equal, she never matched his fame and popularity. She became
known ironically as Notre-Dame-de-Sartre and
la Grande Sartreuse. Not
until after her death in 1986 was she finally considered a philosopher in her
own right.
French existentialism was a direct product of the liberation
of France at the
hands of the Nazis. Years of countless deaths, destruction and misery were quickly
swept away by a moral and philosophical liberation. God and religion had been
helpless to stop the Nazis and were replaced with a post-war moral freedom,
spiritual skepticism and existentialism. Years of bloodshed unleashed a
joie de vivre and free love that gave birth
to the baby boomers. Sartre became the undisputed symbol of that liberation.
Sartre was the eminent French proponent of existentialism. Later
on, he became an advocate of Marxism, even though revelations about the gulag’s
atrocities committed by Stalin were being well documented. His Marxist’s
leanings might appear as a typical French arrogance towards the Anglo allies
who had liberated France.
However, one must keep in mind that 17 million Russians died during the war. Russian
troops under Stalin had advanced quickly into Germany
ahead of the allies. And they had been instrumental in the fall of Berlin
and the defeat of the Nazis. As such, Marxist Leninism had made a political incursion
in the ideological make-up of most European countries.
Sartre was the undisputed star philosopher of the post-war
era. His fame reached an unprecedented levels, despite
his lack of personal glitter or physical glamour. He was short, crossed eyed
and almost blind in one eye. A drab looking fellow that paid
no attention to his exterior appearance. Simone de Beauvoir was the
opposite: Proper, neat, severe and conservative looking. Despite his appearance
Sartre was known to be a real charmer. He had a tendency of promising the world
to his female conquest, all of them pretty women. A trait
that annoyed the feminist de Beauvoir.
In 1946 Sartre decided to move in with his mother, although
he had become well-off from his royalties. Most of the money he made from his
publications was spent on sustaining his love affairs. Sartre confessed that
the reason he began writing plays was to create acting jobs for his lovers, who
had no means to support themselves. Overall he was known to be generous, intelligent
and charming man. Not renowned for being a warm or attentive lover.
Despite the complexities of his philosophy, Sartre managed
to make existentialism fashionable. Anybody could become an existentialist,
especially the young. People might not have fully understood its philosophical
intricacies but could readily identify with its unabashed free love and overall
moral laxity. Jazz music, Paris night
life, dancing, erotic euphoria were deemed the highest expression of a post-war
existentialism. Nonetheless, existentialism also exposed a spiritual vacuum
about the harsh reality of human existence.
In her Ethics of
Ambiguity de Beauvoir described existentialism in clear terms and made it
easier to understand ─her own interpretation and tribute to
Being and Nothingness. Unlike Sartre,
who had the propensity of being too analytical, dense and sometimes prone to
lucubration. It was wrongly believed that de Beauvoir had no original ideas of
her own. And the she was merely making Sartre’s existentialism more readily
accessible to the reader.
Throughout her relationship with Sartre she was viewed as
his philosophical apprentice, an intellectual second fiddle. After her death,
as more of her personal correspondence was made public, a different portrait
emerged. The letters show her as the more dominant partner in terms of
exploring new sexual experiences and relationships. She was also more
passionate and more emotionally daring than her companion. In retrospect, a
reassessment of her life’s work does indeed prove that the real philosopher was
“her”.
In her book Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she
undertakes to disclose the “enterprise of living” in which literature is
substituted for life’s spiritual and religious needs. In this book, and a few others
to follow, she reveals the intellectual journey of a twentieth century woman.
Disclosing a moral disconnect with traditional religion and social conventions.
On the one hand, she reveals the condition of women in light of post-war
existentialism. On the other hand, her novels depict fictional accounts of her personal
sexual experiences with varied partners of both sexes.
De Beauvoir proclaimed herself to be an atheist. Being an atheist however, does not mean being devoid of spirituality.
In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she describes her relationship with her
mother in this manner:
At every moment in the deepest of
my heart she was my witness and I could not make any distinction between her
gaze and that of God.
In retrospect, her life’s intellectual journey reveals a
re-enactment of the twentieth century’s history of religious thought. She was
raised a good Catholic and then grew up to embody a post-war secularization of established
creeds, beliefs and practices. With a consequential reassessment
of traditional religion, its sacred rituals and symbols.
De Beauvoir through her profane
art of writing disclosed a preoccupation with the absolute: An absolute without
God. Simultaneously denounced materialism and hedonism, as
flawed and lewd. And objected to the idea that you
needed to redeem yourself in this world in order to save yourself for the next
in heaven. Her life and her writings reveal a search of the absolute through
the living experience of the Other.
It is with the publication of The Second Sex that de Beauvoir’s
analytical thinking is fully revealed. In it she states the premise of her
book, “On ne naît pas
femme: on le devient”. One is not born a woman: One becomes one. Explaining that a woman is a
cultural label dependent on her identity only as a reference to “man”. An alterity in relation to the totality
implied in the conceptual ideas like “mankind”. She exposes a patriarchal
vision were the feminine is belittled, censured and negated. The book
quickly became a manifesto for
women’s liberation. Fans were grateful that a woman had finally understood
their condition. For a growing number of them she became their “symbolic
mother”.
Today, many of her ideas have become common knowledge and
are now part of an acceptable way of thinking. But at the time of its original
publication her observations were considered quite revolutionary. When the book
came out she was branded by her male critics as an “existential Amazon” who has
written “a
manual of erotic egotism” full of “pornographic zeal”.
Her assessment of the Other begins with her own insights about her own status as a
women. A bright, sexually emancipated and independent human being
in a world of women economically dependent on an “absolute” patriarchal system.
As she explains: the relationship between
the sexes involves a duality and like any duality it gives rise to conflict.
Inevitably, the dominant partner will assume the status of absolute.
Now, what peculiarly signalizes the
situation of woman is that she ─a free and autonomous being like all
human creatures─ nevertheless finds herself
living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the
Other. They propose to stabilize her as
an object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be
overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign.
Liberation, according to de Beauvoir, is based on our mutual
recognition that each partners is free and
alternatively Other. Lovers view
themselves ambiguously as subject and object of erotic desire. Rather than being
confined and defined as a cultural or institutionalized man or woman. The
concept of ambiguity, a fuzzy perception of self and
Other, is in love identified as
an essential step in the process of transcending the oppression of patriarchy.
The erotic experience is one that
most poignantly discloses to human beings the ambiguity of the condition; in it
they are aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as the
subject.
At the time of the writing she introduced some ideas that
might appear as self evident today but were shocking to the more conservative
population of the time. As she explained, woman was defined as an incidental,
the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.
But her analysis did not only limit itself to her feminist views of patriarchy
but overlapped into the condition of the Other in culture in general. It is this contribution that we
would like to emphasize here.
The category of the Other is as
primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the
most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the
Self and the Other. This duality was not originally
attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent on any empirical
fact…The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it
was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right
and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human
thought.
In addition to her assessment on the condition of women she
also describes the idea of alterity
in varied aspects of culture. She brings up the example of racism as applied to
Black people as well as with Jews and anti-Semitism. All are based on a culture
of master and slave and a tribal division between us and them. The outcast ─Other─ being relegated outside our
mental process banned from our network of contacts, belittled and excluded from
our spiritual embrace.
*
De Beauvoir’s idea of “man” as absolute, must not be confused with a
person defined by his gender, but as a symbol of a patriarchal
system. An invisible hierarchy that is over-powering and omnipresent. A top
down system of control that is covert and guarded. More often than not, this
power structure has been confused with God. It is intangible, pervasive and so
elusive that it is deemed to be non existent.
What is usually visible about the hierarchy is the violence
and terror displayed by totalitarian regimes, the war industry, hate groups and
terrorist organizations. All the while, the workings of these systems remain
invisible, expanding with legal immunity and impunity. Such is the enduring
power of the elusive hierarchy.
The paradox is that the Other is a decoy to help
reinforce the echelons of power. The Other that
lays
outside the system is a reminder that the hierarchy is in need of a scapegoat
to be viewed as a threat so to strengthen the system.
Anybody who has experienced being excluded from family, friends,
a group, a club, from people of a foreign nation, unable to speak the language,
knows the feeling of helplessness from being excluded, of being the
Other. This segregating
experience allows us to see how the system works from the outside. It enables a
solitary view of the whole scheme of which
one is excluded.
Different examples of the Otherness are represented here as: the stranger, the foreigner, the
immigrant, the
Jew, the gentile, the black person, the Muslim, the infidel, the mad, the gay,
the elderly, the poor, the homeless, the orphan, the sick, the unemployed, the
prisoner, the handicapped…These groups signify varied aspects of human
condition that are overshadowed by the majority in society. They become labeled
as Other so
to discount their value. Invariably distorting our mental
perception of the whole human reality.
Cultural and racial boundaries between self and
Other define who
we are spiritually. The wider our level of affective and cultural openness
towards the Other
determines how developed we are spiritually. The more boundaries we raise, the
narrower we become mentally. The greater denial of the
Other, the more regressive and
sectarian we become. These exclusions then activate a fanatical set of beliefs
that are the basis for a cult: A perversion of true spirituality.
Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought
De Beauvoir’s assessment that
Otherness is a fundamental principle of
human thought is compelling and could easily be applied to other aspects of
human perception of reality. The example of the
Other as a profane reality
revealed in the Catholic concept of God in the doctrine of the Trinity comes to
mind.
God the Father
God the Son the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit is Other in relation to the absolute implied in the
patriarchal relationship between God the Father and God his Son. The gender
component of the Mother is missing from the divine relationship between Father
and Son. What makes pro-creation of either principles
possible is “censured” and “negated”. The Holy Spirit is the Other,
defined at the Giver of Life. A passive and overshadowed reality of the divine
and sacred feminine. A principle that is
nonetheless an essential and fundamental part of our spirituality’s dynamic.
In
respect to her views about God and patriarchy, we can safely say that Simone de
Beauvoir was not thrown out of the garden of Eden. She
left voluntarily. Unafraid to leave behind the grip of a jealous
Landlord and his overbearing generosity. A Lord who
demands unconditional obedience in exchange for living in an environment of
overwhelming security. She escaped with no regrets for having eaten from
the fruit of the tree and revealed the secrets of the knowledge of good and
evil.
