History

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) can rightfully be considered the founder of, as well as the most prolific and influential figure in, feminist phenomenology. Her works testify to an unwavering commitment to the phenomenological method, notably the direct focus on embodied lived experience, and they enrich the phenomenological description with first person accounts of the inescapably gendered character of experience that has been neglected in classical phenomenological texts.

Unlike her male contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French existential phenomenologists known for their lengthy and influential writings on intersubjectivity and embodiment, Simone de Beauvoir’s contributions to phenomenological discourse have been more subtle, but no less significant. In nearly all her writings, including not just philosophical texts but also memoirs and novels, we find profound insights into ethical, social and even metaphysical problems that could only be derived from the examinations of concrete, particular human situations, rather than abstract theorems. Thus the strength of Beauvoir’s thought lies in her method: by continuously appealing to the concrete, lived experience of her characters, her acquaintances and herself, Beauvoir set herself apart from her contemporaries by performing and applying phenomenology to a degree that, at the time, had not yet been realized within phenomenological discourse.

Beauvoir’s choice to write novels and memoirs was part of a phenomenological commitment to the role of experience and language in the development of human thought. In her 1946 essay “Literature and Metaphysics,” Beauvoir draws on the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger to outline the significance of lived experience and the role of language in the revealing of the world’s meaning. Thus the rich and complex characters of Beauvoir’s novels and short stories (some of her most famous being She Came to Stay, The Mandarins, and The Woman Destroyed) provide especially powerful contexts from which the reader can gain insights of great philosophical import. However, Beauvoir’s greatest contribution to the study of phenomenology, and particularly feminist phenomenology, was the rigorous examination of the lived, embodied experience of being a woman. Before the publication of her groundbreaking book The Second Sex (1949), there had been no phenomenological investigation of the perceived and felt experience of the sexed body. However, Beauvoir’s sustained inquiry into the physical, psychological, and social aspects of female embodiment exposed the astonishingly wide-reaching effect of patriarchal norms within Western culture. For this reason, The Second Sex has continued to have a profound effect on readers and feminist movements for over fifty years, proving that Beauvoir’s phenomenology has given women new language to articulate their realities as well as the conceptual tools necessary to effect social and political change. For these reasons, Beauvoir should be considered an essential and invaluable figure in the history of feminist phenomenology.

Although few women became internationally renowned scholars in the discipline of phenomenology, Edith Stein and Hannah Arendt also count as important historical figures within the phenomenological movement and they bring a woman’s intellectual perspective to the discipline.

Edith Stein (1891-1942) was an assistant of Edmund Husserl and then a faculty member at the University of Freiburg, where she established a firm reputation as one of the university’s leading philosophers. She authored an important phenomenological study of empathic relatedness titled "On The Problem of Empathy" (doctoral dissertation defended in 1916). Stein’s partnership with Husserl was tremendously productive. She wrote additional treatises on "Sentient Causality," 1918, "Individual and Community," 1919, and "On the State," 1921, where she employed the phenomenological method in an original way, with special interest in the questions related to political and communal life. She achieved some public stature as a lecturer in the wake of the publication of her translation of the De Veritate by Thomas Aquinas. Husserl's refusal of a proper recommendation on grounds of gender thwarted her plans to pursue a university career, and she opted for a teaching post at the Educational Institute of Münster instead.

Even though Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is best known as a political philosopher, the phenomenological method, especially Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology, had a great and lasting influence upon her work. Arendt studied philosophy with Heidegger at Marburg University in 1924. She subsequently studied at Heidelberg with the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, and wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in St. Augustine's thought. Her major philosophical works include, among others, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, The Human Condition, 1958, On Revolution, 1962, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963, On Violence, 1970, The Life of the Mind, 1978, and Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, 1982.

It has often been said that Arendt's political inquiries follow a crucial impetus from Heidegger's project in Being & Time in its suspicion of the 'metaphysical tradition's' move toward abstract contemplation and away from immediate and worldly understanding and engagement, in its critique of modern calculative and instrumental attempts to order and dominate the world, and in its emphasis upon the ineliminable plurality and difference that characterize beings as worldly appearances. However, Arendt’s distinctive approach and political engagement is at odds with Heidegger’s later preoccupation with philosophical-poetic contemplation. Arendt’s method remains consistently phenomenological in that she focuses on the experiential character of human life, rather than conceptual definitions or empirical generalization utilized in political scholarship, in an attempt to uncover the fundamental structures of political experience. Her objective is to capture the uniquely political way of being-in-the-world, for example in terms of the phenomenal core of lived experience in human action, labor, and work.

Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) was a leading contemporary American political scientist and feminist phenomenologist. She contributed much to the formation of Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology just before her death. Young’s work on gendered and specifically female embodied experience helped rejuvenate phenomenological scholarship and make it directly relevant and useful to feminist philosophy. Young authored a collection of essays On Female Body Experience (2005), which span over two decades of research in diverse aspects of women’s lived body experience within contemporary Western societies. Young tackles issues as diverse as young girls’ sense of space and motility, the sexuality of breasts, the unique experience of temporality related to menstruation, pregnant embodiment, the meaning of being at home and the tactile experience of clothing. Young creatively employed the ideas and methods of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Martin Heidegger, to distill the defining elements of gendered embodied subjectivity in a social and political context. Even though Young’s analyses are descriptive in nature, in agreement with the classical phenomenological tradition, they contain also deliberately formulated prescriptive valuations of women’s rights, opportunities, and unfounded constraints on freedom which women continue to experience within patriarchal society. Young’s scholarship is therefore especially useful for feminist concerns in that it straddles the perceived descriptive/prescriptive divide and has the emancipatory potential of outlining a vision of female experience that would be liberated from the unjust limitations on women’s bodies, such as the socially construed divide between sexuality and motherhood.