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This chapter begins with a phenomenological reading of the awakening of a woman to her cognitive and non-cognitive capacities; traditional imagery elucidates the nature of "the lived body", which is thought to exist as a kind of post-Kantian a priori, whose flesh knits human bodies together within a world. This body is a synthetic form capable of creating unity out of multiple sensations, but also capable of generating differentiations in its relation to a world. Granted the lived body, how does the body-subject lose confidence in her own capability? A doubt or weakness is something portrayed in traditional myths about Eve and similarly in twentieth-century portraits of the young Simone de Beauvoir. Each capable subject can imagine herself in the bodily situation of Eve: awakened to the incarnate modalities of our existence we discover the possibilities of "transcendence incarnate." We appear to be given abilities for transcendence; and yet the ambiguity of transcendence within a fleshy, bodily existence suggests a loss of what is, in phenomenological terms, "originally" ours. The chapter demonstrates that what makes a particular person a woman has at a certain historical moment and within a western philosophical tradition also marked her as, in Beauvoir's terms, "the second sex." The gendered variations which distinguish confidence as a personal and social phenomenon indicate that neither women nor men are as we might be. The chapter concludes by advocating a transformation of this negative reality into something positive for transcendence incarnate: new ethical confidence in the abilities of capable subjects.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-6833-1_11

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