THE SECOND SEX: Facts and Myt DESTINY: The Data of Biology be accidental. It would seem, then, that the division of a species into ilar(as happens in hermaphroditic species)and differentiated only male and female individuals is simply an irreducible fact of observa as particular individuals of a single type. Hegel's discussion reveals a most important significance of sexuality, but his mistake is aly In most philosophies this fact has been taken for granted without argue from significance to necessity, to equate significance with ys to of explanation. According to the Plato th, there were sity. Man gives significance to the sexes and their relations through at the beginning men, women, and hermaphrodites. Each individual sexual activity, just as he gives sense and value to all the functions ad two faces, four arms, four legs, and two conjoined bodies. At a that he es; but sexual activity is not necessarily implied in the certain time they were split in two, and ever since each half seeks to nature of the human being. Merleau-Ponty notes in the phenomeno- rejoin its corresponding half. Later the gods decreed that new human gie de la perception that human existence requires us to revise our beings should be created through the coupling of dissimilar halves ideas of necessity and contingence. Existence, "he says, "has no But it is only love that this story is intended to explain; division into casual, fortuitous qualities, no content that does not contribute to the sexes is given at the outset. Nor does Aristotle explain this division,for formation of its aspect; it does not admit the notion of sheer fact, for if matter and form must co-operate in all action, there is no necessity it is only through existence that the facts are manifested. "True for the active and passive principles to be separated in two different enough. But it is also true that there are conditions without which fact of cAtegories of individuals. Thus St. Thomas proclaims woman an"in- ce itself would seem to be impossible. To be of suggesting resent in the world implies strictly that there exists a body which is view-the accidental or contingent nature of sexuality. Hegel, how- at once a material thing in the world and a point of view toward this ever, would have been untrue to his passion for rationalism had he orld; but nothing requires that this body have this or that particular failed to attempt a logical explanation. Sexuality in his view repre- structure. Sartre discusses in L' Etre et le neat Heidegger's dictum to sents the medium through which the subject attains a concrete sense the effect that the real of man is bound up with death because of belonging to a particular kind (genre). "The sense of kind is pro- of man's finite state. He shows that an existence which is finite and yet duced in the subject as an effect which offsets this disproportionate unlimited in time is conceivable: but none the e less were n sense of his individual reality, as a desire to find the sense of himself resident in human life, the relation of man to the world and to him- in another individual of his species through union with this other, to self would be profoundly disarranged-so much so that the state- complete himself and thus to incorporate the kind (genre)within ment"Man is mortal"would be seen to have significance quite other his own nature and bring it into existence. This is copulation than that of a mere fact of observation. were he immortal, an ex. (Philosophy of Nature, Part 3, Section 369), And a little farther on istent would no longer be what we call a man. One of the essential The process consists in this, namely: that which they are in them features of his career is that the progress of his life through time selves, that is to say a single kind, one and the same subjective life, creates behind him and before him the infinite past and future, and they also establish it as such "And Hegel states later that for the it would seem, then, that the perpetuation of the species is the correl- uniting process to be accomplished, there must frst be sexual differ- tive of his individual limitation. Thus we can regard the phenome- entiation. But his exposition is not convincing: one feels in it all too non of reproduction as founded in the very nature of being. But we distinctly the predetermination to find in every operation the three iust stop there. The perpetuation of the species does not necessitate exual differentiation. True enough, this differentiation is character The projection or transcendence of the individual toward the spe ns istic of existents to such an extent that it belongs in any realistic def cies, in which both individual and species are fulfilled, could be ac- nition of existence. But it nevertheless remains true that both a mind complished without the intervention of a third element in the simple without a body and an immortal man are strictly inconceivable, relation of progenitor to offspring; that is to say, reproduction could whereas we can imagine a parthenogenetic or hermaphroditic society be asexual. Or, if there were to be two progenitors, they could be sim: On the respective functions of the two sexes man has entertained