Beauvoir innovated by pairing Hegel’s immanence with transcendence only in The Second Sex

Evidence

Although Beauvoir’s early ethical treatises incorporate a Hegelian and Sartrean concept of transcendence, associating transcendence with activity, progression, and the surpassing movement of consciousness, it is not until Th e Second Sex that Beauvoir appropriates the Hegelian concept of immanence as a counterpart to transcendence. Once paired with immanence in Th e Second Sex, transcendence refers to constructive work and, more generally, to an active mode of existence in which one attempts to surpass the present, burst out onto the future, and remain free from biological fate. Immanence, by contrast, designates the round of futile and largely uncreative chores necessary to sustain life as well as a mode of existence marked by passivity, ease, and submission to biological fate. Th e concepts of transcendence and immanence in Th e Second Sex are multifaceted and simultaneously descriptive and normative, but the metaphysical meanings of transcendence largely drop out in Th e Second Sex, and transcendence and immanence become delineated primarily in terms of a typology of activities or active and passive modes of existing. Th e account of oppression developed in Th e Ethics of Ambiguity using the distinction between maintenance and progression is imported in full into Th e Second Sex, together with the thesis that an authentically lived existence requires that one establish reason for being for oneself through transcendent activities. Activities of transcendence include precisely those activities of progress, creation, and discovery that are opposed to the mere maintenance of life in Th e Ethics of Ambiguity, while the mechanical chores that minister to the life process are here activities of immanence. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 594

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the definitions of transcendence and immanence as Beauvoir reworks them, and tracks the conceptual lineage from the Ethics of Ambiguity.
• XREF: Connects to the maintenance/progression distinction in Ethics of Ambiguity and to Hegel’s master-slave immanence-transcendence schema, central to Beauvoir scholarship. — connects to: Beauvoir’s The Second Sex applied existentialist method to the history of patriarchy — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 666; Beauvoir transformed phenomenological thought by exposing its patriarchal biases — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 85; Hegelian Other-mediation marks the central early Beauvoir-Sartre divide — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 253 (+5 more)