Men’s world is logically intelligible but full of holes, women’s obscure but complete

Evidence

The notion of miracle differs from the idea of magic: from within a rationally determined world a miracle posits the radical discontinuity of an event without cause against which any thinking shatters, whereas magic phenomena are united by secret forces of which a docile consciousness can embrace the continuous becoming—without understanding it. The newborn is miraculous for the demigod father, magic for the mother who has undergone the ripening in her womb. Man’s experience is intelligible but full of holes; that of the wife is, in its own limits, obscure but complete. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1755

Categorization

• DEFINE: Beauvoir’s core distinction between miracle and magic as two modes of experiencing the world, gendered along the male/female divide.
• XREF: This gendered miracle/magic split parallels the rational-vs-obscure epistemics Beauvoir inherits from Husserlian phenomenology and critiques in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. — connects to: Women’s ambivalence about men prevents them from building a solid counter-universe — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1760

Broader Connections

• Women’s ambivalence about men prevents them from building a solid counter-universe #complicates (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1760