Psalms and hymns

Although a distinctive American voice would not truly emerge until the nineteenth century, the musical roots of modern America were planted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The settlers in the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies were not the first to come to the New World; in fact, the first Europeans to establish themselves in America were the Spanish explorers who came through Mexico and the southwestern area of what is now the United States. The first gospel songs sung in the New World have been traced to the Roman Catholic Church through the inhabitants of what is now the southern U.S.A. and Mexico. Catholic service books were published in Mexico as early as 1556 and the main effect of this Catholic influence was to introduce the Gregorian chant, sung in Latin, to America.

However, the true settling and growth of what became identified as the United States came from the European settlers who peopled the eastern seaboard and then began moving westward; the roots of U.S. American music are embedded in the European culture these settlers left behind.

The Reformation in Europe brought a new song, sung in the vernacular (not in Latin) by the entire congregation. Two basic forms emerged here: the chorale (associated with the Lutherans and Moravians), and the psalm tune, which developed among the Calvinists. Both the French and English sang psalms which were paraphrased in regular meter, to which were added paraphrases of other lyric passages from scriptures. They sang “God's word” from the Bible. The Lutherans also sang “God’s word,” but welcomed devotional poems written by individuals. The Puritans of New England came from the Calvinist tradition and the transition in America from scriptural to devotional poems – psalms to hymns – was a long and gradual one, hindered by the Puritans’ strict adherence to the psalms. Musically, there was a major difference as the Lutherans and Moravians made use of the organ and orchestral instruments in worship while the Calvinists and English dissenters sang metrical poems in unison without musical accompaniment.

Of all the instruments associated with the blues, the guitar is predominant. And of all the instruments associated with popular culture, the impact of the blues on the guitar – be it in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, or Kurt Cobain – is incalculable. But where did it all start? Can you really make a link between the psychedelic explosions of a pop icon (albeit one who would regularly include blues standards in his repertoire) and a lay preacher from the Mississippi Delta like Blind Willie Johnson? And what about the link between the sacred and the secular forms of the music? Today we tend to see blues and gospel as two distinct genres or, as is the case in today's commercially driven world, two separate markets. As we shall see, it wasn't always thus. The two branches share the same roots.

“You know, the blues come out of the field, baby,” Sam “Lightning” Hopkins told Sam Charters in 1964. “That's when you bend down, pickin' that cotton and sing ‘Oh Lord, please help me’.” Always a secular performer, he was nonetheless at pains to acknowledge the important role of religion, underlining the way in which the line between blues and gospel is often blurred. “The blues is a lot like church … when a preacher's up there preachin' the Bible, he's honest to God tryin' to get you to understand these things. Well, singin' the blues is the same thing” (Charters 1965: 375).

Any discussion that purports to examine the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions under which blues and gospel performers have had to operate must take as its own genesis the dawn of the North Atlantic slave trade, surely one of the bleakest sunrises in human history. Nearly 250 years of the enforced system of legal chattel slavery in North America established a network of laws, attitudes, and strategies, imposed with a frequently vigorous and hateful, sometimes paternalistic and condescending, or misguided benevolent force that contributed to shaping the physical, spiritual, psychological, social, and cultural lives of the enslaved and their descendants. Reconstruction brought hope, post-Reconstruction disappointment, and the Jim Crow-era dismay and anger as a result of the unfulfilled promises of one of humanity's most promising systems. “I got the back woods blues,” sang Rosa Henderson in 1924, “but I don't want to go back home”, the indignities of the Jim Crow cars and southern mistreatment overwhelming her desire to visit her childhood abode. Cow Cow Davenport expressed the sentiment, too – “I'm tired of being Jim Crowed, gonna leave this Jim Crow town” – but he left room open at the end of his song to sing about coming back if the North did not full its promise – an all-too-common occurrence.

Most blues and many gospel performers, after all, have been African Americans, the descendants of slaves, and heirs to this racism and discrimination in their myriad forms, from the far greater likelihood of existing below the poverty level, to discrimination in housing, employment and education, to discriminatory attitudes that associate the “race” with intellectual inferiority and intensified appetitive passions, to the subtle and not-so-subtle internalization of such attitudes to create at times a self-hatred or self destructiveness.

In the field of Beauvoir research, one of the least explored philosophical connections is that between Simone de Beauvoir and Martin Heidegger. Although a number of works have been written regarding the Heideggerian influence on Sartre's philosophy, few exist on Beauvoir's appropriation of the same thinker.

This chapter explores ways in which Heidegger can be seen as decisive for Beauvoir’s philosophy and why it is important to consider this. Showing philosophical influences and connections is, in my view, important only if it adds to the analysis and understanding of a philosopher. In regard to Heidegger and Beauvoir, I definitely believe this is the case. Reading Beauvoir with Heidegger can deepen our understanding of Beauvoir’s view of human beings and their relation to the world and to others. This approach might be called hermeneutical in the Heideggerian sense: it reveals new meanings without assuming that a final comprehension is ever possible.

INTERVIEW

Brison: Yesterday, you agreed that it's not enough for women to put themselves in exactly the same situation as men in order for them to be liberated. But you didn't say what you think we need to do now. I'd like to ask you the same question that you asked Sartre, a question it seemed to me he avoided: “Should women completely reject the masculine universe or should they find themselves a place in it? Should they steal their tools or change them? I'm thinking of science as well as language, the arts. Every value is marked with the seal of masculinity.”

de beauvoir: That’s a lot of questions in one. I think that feminists, at least those I’m involved with, want to change not only women’s situation but also the world. That is, these are women who would like to see a certain dismantling of society and who think that if feminism were victorious, if the oppression of women were completely eliminated, well, society would be shaken to its foundation. This cannot be accomplished without other kinds of action, for example, actions supporting class struggle and immigrants, in other words, all the actions one can imagine in favor of society. They must all be linked. So, it’s a matter not of women taking men’s place in this world, but of their being emancipated in such a way as to simultaneously change this world.

In the introduction to The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir characterizes the category of the other as primordial (SS 16; DS I 16). To understand the relations between social groups, including men and women, we must follow Hegel's insight that there is “in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility to every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object” (SS 17; DS I 17). Here, Beauvoir presents a framework for explaining the relations between the sexes that makes them continuous with other human relationships. That man should strive to subjugate woman is not in itself unexpected, since it exemplifies a universal disposition also manifested in the behavior of nations and races and even in that of three travelers who share a compartment and make vaguely hostile “others”out of all the other passengers on the train (SS 17; DS I 16). What is surprising, however, is the extent of man's success. For while domination is usually an unstable and temporary achievement upset by war, potlatch, trade, or treaties, woman has been subordinate to man throughout history, and the sheer persistence of this state of affairs therefore needs to be accounted for. Beauvoir here sets out to examine a difference not of kind but of degree. Among the social relations that express the primordial dynamic between subject and other, man's domination of woman is an extreme case; it lies at one end of a spectrum of more or less persistent forms of domination (although its immutability makes it appear ahistorical), and its tenacity is what renders it puzzling.

The topic of this chapter, the early philosophical influence of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) on Simone de Beauvoir, may surprise those who remember Beauvoir's reference to Bergson in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter where she denies Bergson's importance. She writes there of her interests in 1926: “I preferred literature to philosophy, and I would not have been at all pleased if someone had prophesized that I would become a kind of Bergson; I didn't want to speak with that abstract voice which, whenever I heard it, failed to move me.”

But in this case, as in so many others, Beauvoir's diaries present a very different picture. Her unpublished diary of 1926, written when she was 18 years old and beginning her study of philosophy, contains several pages of quotations from Bergson's Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), which she describes, in an entry dated 16 August, as “a great intellectual intoxication.” The entry continues:

EXISTENTIAL CERTAINTIES

“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” These most quoted words of The Second Sex became the centerpiece of first-wave feminism and the signature of their author, Simone de Beauvoir. Their meaning, fleshed out in The Second Sex's descriptions of women's daily lives, once seemed obvious. They seemed to point to the difference between sex and gender. They seemed to indicate the ways in which human beings born with vaginas were habituated and initiated into the roles of adults called women. Today things seem less clear. Do these words mean that sex and gender are radically distinct – that any sexed body can become whatever gender it chooses? Could any body become a woman? Should Beauvoir's critique of the “biology is destiny” argument be taken as an argument for the complete malleability of the body? Or should her words alert us to the fact that the different materialities of human bodies constitute us as sexually distinct but that the sex/gender differences mandated by patriarchy are epistemologically untenable, ethically intolerable, and politically unjust (SS 267)?

“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” When originally written, these words produced shocking effects. They soon became central to the feminist critique of patriarchy. Eventually they became familiar, obvious. Contemporary theorists and advanced technologies have returned these words to their radical origin.

A critic of the currently popular genre “Reality TV” sums up the enterprise: the basic idea is that the watchers and the watched will more or less forget about the cameras, “and the result will be raw, emotion-packed - and tedious.” Having pointed out that the extensive editing of such programs to adapt them to the respective tastes of Europe and America means that viewers are surely not in fact getting an unadorned slice of reality, this critic hypothesizes that “reality TV”is in principle an oxymoron. The general hypothesis may be wrong; Road Rules and Real World seem to show that normal teenagers discussing their feelings can forget all about the cameras and behave naturally. Still, the very availability of the kind of information supplied by “Reality TV” raises an important question, one which was anticipated by Simone de Beauvoir in her 1965 contribution to the forum, Que peut la littérature? She describes reading Children of Sánchez, an account put together from tapes that recorded the daily conversations of a father and his four children off and on over an eight-year period. The advantage of this format of collecting and presenting information, she observes, is that the reader receives a presentation of family life from multiple viewpoints, the sort of thing that literary works frequently try to do. One could, she says, produce more works of this kind – technologically we could record and present information about the daily inner workings of all sorts of social units. If we did so, she asks, “Would literature still have a role to play?”Beauvoir's answer is “Yes” (QPL 74-75). The difference between information and literature, she says, has to do with the basic features of the human condition and with the distinctive way in which literature functions.

Among the many eminently quotable lines from the corpus of Sigmund Freud are those concerning his supposition about the response of the young girl when she first sees the penis of a sibling or playmate: “She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.”Even if a generous reader were to grant Freud his contentious supposition, a question remains: what does the girl see, and judge, on a second, or a third, or even a fourth look? According to Simone de Beauvoir, Freud's judgment about the role anatomy plays in the formation of the psychic life of women is based on “a masculine model” and envy “could not arise from a simple anatomical comparison.” “[T]his outgrowth,” Beauvoir continues, “this weak little rod of flesh can in itself inspire [young girls] only with indifference, or even disgust. The little girl's covetousness, when it exists, results from a previous evaluation of virility. Freud takes this for granted, when it should be accounted for.”

Taking little for granted, Beauvoir argues that whether girls will judge the penis to be enviable, “insignificant, or even laughable” (SS 300) will depend on its importance, its symbolic and social value “within the totality of their lives.” In any event, whatever attitude a girl may adopt, “it is wrong to assert that a biological datum is concerned” (SS 307). Unlike Freud, Beauvoir endeavors to offer a comprehensive account of girls’ and women’s desires, attitudes, and judgments as these are formed within the totality of their always situated existences.

BACKGROUNDS AND BASICS

During the 1950s, an era when feminism was at a particularly low ebb, American college students encountered translations of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity in courses on French existentialism. The popularity of these courses was due in no small part to the French existentialists' addition of sexuality to the philosophical agenda. Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness was the centerpiece, and Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity was introduced to show how, contrary to Sartre's early view, existentialism might indeed provide a ground for ethics. The Second Sex, however, was presented as though it simply applied Sartre's philosophy to women's situations, a view later to be challenged by feminist scholarship, as many chapters in this Companion show in detail. Yet readers were astonished even then by perspectives The Second Sex offered on female sexuality. Raising ethical and political issues, Beauvoir's The Second Sex nicely complemented Alfred Kinsey's “scandalous” but coldly scientific report on sexual behavior in the human female, which appeared in the same year as the paperback edition of the English translation of Beauvoir's treatise on women.

Surely one of the more off-putting aspects of Simone de Beauvoir's work is her negative depiction of old age in The Second Sex and elsewhere. In the 1940s Beauvoir argued that it was both a woman's “erotic attractiveness and . . . fertility which, in the view of society and in her own, provide the justification of her existence.” For this reason she depicts aging as the deprivation of femininity and value for a woman. She repeatedly describes the experience as une mutilation. Beauvoir suggests that the experience of most women is similar: “Long before the eventual mutilation [la definitive mutilation], woman is haunted by the horror of growing old” (SS 587; DS i i 400), she writes confidently, not distinguishing at this point in her work among the experiences of old age in women of different cultural backgrounds, eras, or life-history.

As is so often the case in her writing, Beauvoir’s rhetoric plays two hands at once. On the one hand, throughout The Second Sex she depicts societal views about femininity and aging that she does not herself support. On the other hand, her writing seems on occasion to abet these views. Her use of the brutal word mutilation is a case in point. Beauvoir uses the term to forcefully remind us that the rejection of older women from the public sphere and the domains of value should be regarded as a violent formof social exclusion.

Simone de Beauvoir was an existential phenomenologist who was centrally concerned with problems of oppression and embodiment. Her philosophy, novels, and autobiography remain popular, especially The Second Sex, which continues to influence feminist thought. Beauvoir lived her life as an intellectual. She considered her life's work to be social commentary. Her tools for social analysis were philosophical.

Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 and died there in 1986. She went to school with Simone Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Jean-Paul Sartre. She and Sartre became lovers and companions, and although their relationship was not exclusive, it continued throughout most of their lives. Beauvoir had many friendships and love affairs with women and men. Some are revealed in her autobiography, others in posthumously published letters. Beauvoir traveled widely and wrote about her experiences and views in fiction, plays, journalistic articles, autobiography, and philosophy.

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is well known for its negative descriptions of the female body. Several interpreters claim that Beauvoir presents the female body as a mere obstacle: being dominated by the cycles of menstruation, pregnancies, and nursing, the female body severely limits the free choice and self-fulfillment of the woman. Critics argue further that such a view of the female body is partial, and worse, biased by a male - Sartrean or Cartesian - point of view. According to the critics, Beauvoir ends up describing the female body as a burden (DS 11 511; SS 630) because she accepts Sartre's voluntarist notion of subjectivity.

This common reading of The Second Sex is mistaken. Beauvoir’s negative comments regarding the female body do not disclose her fundamental concept of feminine embodiment. They constitute only a provisional step in a more far-reaching argument. Beauvoir’s discussion of femaleness can be understood only if its philosophical starting points are understood and appreciated. The aim of this chapter is to clarify and make explicit these starting points.

For Simone de Beauvoir, both men's and women's lives are fundamentally marked by historical events. In reference to her own life she said: “the Resistance, the Liberation, the war in Algeria . . . these are the things that marked eras, at least for me . . . That's what marked the big epochs in our lives, it's the historical events, the historical involvements one has in these larger events. It's much more important than any other kind of difference.”

From her first writings published during World War Two, Beauvoir’s work is marked by an awareness of these historical crises and the dilemmas that they pose. What is one to do with the knowledge of the Nazi death camps? Is forgetting a betrayal of the dead, or is surrendering to the pain of remembering a betrayal of the living? What action is necessary in the face of the Nazi occupation of France? How can one reconcile the need for terrorist actions with the implacable knowledge that no calculation of means and ends can erase the loss of a human life? Could the Soviet labor camps be compared with the Nazi concentration camps, or did they have some positive meaning or justification? How can one live in an occupied city when the occupiers are one’s own countrymen, as during the Algerian war?

“MUST WE BURN SADE?”

There are many surprising aspects to Beauvoir's consideration of the Marquis de Sade. Beauvoir is a feminist, and Sade is one whose name gave rise to the phenomenon of sexual sadism. Beauvoir has written copiously on the empowerment of women; Sade sought, through sexual means, to punish and control women and then to write, in the form of fiction and essays, a detailed account of his form of libertinism. In asking why Beauvoir reads Sade, and why it is a question whether or not he must be burned, we are asking what, if any, encounter there might be between a philosophy of feminism that grounds itself in freedom, as Beauvoir's clearly does, and a philosophy – and practice – of sexual libertinism that for the most part assumes the pleasurable aspects of the domination of women within heterosexual practice?

There are many tricky questions here, and it will serve us well to consider some of them. When Beauvoir asks whether we should burn Sade, she is referring to Sade the author. Should we burn his books? This is an incendiary title in more ways than one. To ask the question is to recall the burning of heretics and saints, including Joan of Arc. It is also to recall the burning of books, mainly Jewish and heretical, that took place during the Inquisition in Spain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Spain.