Existentialism and Simone de Beauvoir
Existentialism was, for a sweet minute, the new way to think
about self and the world in the 20th century; but few—so very
precious few—understood anything about it. Christians were probably the primary
reason it bombed among traditionalists, but its novel language, complex ideas,
and deep avowal of the value of personal choice were strong determinants of its
unrecognized benefits. So what is it exactly that Existentialism offers? Simone
de Beauvoir does a wonderful job drawing out the practical significance of
existentialist ideas, such as:
1.
An affirmation and value of one’s own self as
the center of the universe
2.
Confidence in one’s own powers to shape the
world
3.
A confidence in the importance and necessity of
others and their happiness
4.
A call to action and responsibility within the
context of a limited understanding
5.
A framework to understand the world in a more
practical way which exposes and utilizes the subject-object tension consistently
evident in our experience.
She offered answers for postmodernism and
post-traditionalism and post-“what the heck do I do now that I realize I have
to decide for myself?”-ism. Besides
defining a new method for ethics, she also took on crass communists and gross
capitalists and staunchly defended a philosophy of authentic, vulnerable,
courageous living against a petrified, simplistic code of morals that for
centuries has enabled instant action but not an understanding of the nature or
goals of one’s existence. It will always be difficult to defend a new idea
against deeply ingrained and widely accepted customs, but then again, there’s
air conditioning. Old ways of thinking, no matter how convenient, are like
Missouri summer weather, while the ethics of existentialist ambiguity is like
air conditioning. Who wants to live in Misery without air conditioning? You
sir? Be my guest, but I’m thinking air conditioning will ultimately win the
day.
Beauvoir and Sartre
This book is especially for anyone wondering what the blank
they should do with the ideas of Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism. Many
summarize Sartre’s philosophy by his words, “Man is a useless passion”, and
though some women may agree (ha!), I think mostly his words are being wrenched
out of context. In Being And Nothingness
Sartre laid out that humanity is a lack
in that every existing person has a consciousness which has, in effect, stepped
away from the world of things (thus a lack)
to be able to comprehend the world of things. In other words, the
subject-object relationship is fundamental and absolute, for if all were object
there would be no consciousness of objects at all. And because this
subject-object disparity is the foundation of consciousness, there is no going
back. The subject strives to expand in the universe, to “disclose its being” and
define its dimensions. Its goal is to continue to become more without becoming all,
because in becoming all it would be object (in that there would be no object
besides itself), and it would cease to exist, theoretically, as conscious
subject. Beauvoir sums it up nicely, “If I were really everything there would
be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. There would be nothing to
possess, and I myself would be nothing.” In other words, we strive to remain
conscious as a limited, transcendent being-away-from-objects, but we also
strive to assimilate things we are becoming conscious of. This is the paradox
and “useless passion” that Sartre spoke so frankly about, but I would think the
words “endless passion” would better characterize the tension.
Beauvoir, Sartre’s compatriot in country and mind, takes up
existentialism where Sartre left off, and tackles how one should live with these
new ideas. She believes with Sartre that our existence is concerned with
disclosing and expanding our being, but she is chiefly concerned with how to do
so healthily and happily for the best results. In the wake of WWII and
communist turmoil, France, and the rest of the world, someone needed to point
the way with a new species of ethics that wouldn’t land us all in the awful
mess and global suffering the world at that time found itself in.
Ambiguity and an open future
So Beauvoir did what Sartre was never able, or interested
enough, to do. She recognized with him that the ethical character of
existentialism was ambiguity—no external right or wrongs that absolved
individuals from their essential responsibility to decide for themselves and
all the risk that entails, and that this ambiguity would become a perceived
stumbling block for the uninitiated; but she also believed that something might
be done to help people embrace their freedom and love their life, and she hoped
to provide ideological support to assist people in making more rewarding
decisions in the game of life. “The characteristic feature of all ethics is to
consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the
means of winning.”
She begins by laying out what human beings want: freedom
over and above the world of objects, disclosing one’s being in that world, and a
future open with possibilities to continue to expand and define one’s presence
in that world. “My freedom must not seek to trap being, but to disclose it. The
disclosure is the transition from [unconscious] being to [conscious]
existence.” The autonomy of the human being must always float above the
objective world, never equating itself with a thing or finding itself on a
crash course collision with objectification and the ‘stillness’ of absolute and
unconscious being. This is why “freedom is not to be engulfed in any goal;
neither is it to dissipate itself vainly without aiming at a goal.” The idea of
an open future and a continually retreating, but partly-realizable goal, is
what everyone wants in balance, and oppression occurs when one is prevented by
another from feeling fulfilled in balanced and meaningful pursuit.
Flights from freedom
To highlight the different ways in which imbalances are struck
in the subject/object tension from person to person, Beauvoir provides a
brilliant list of six different types of personas who try to evade their
freedom—their separation from the world of objects—and thus begin to limit the
freedom of others.
1. The Child
Literal and figurative children simply wish to remain in a
stage of innocence and insignificance.
“[The child is] in a state of security by virtue of his very
insignificance. He can do with impunity whatever he likes. He knows that
nothing can ever happen through him; everything is already given; his acts
engage nothing, not even himself.”
But this is an illusion. The child has, from his very birth,
been active in creating his world, albeit without a clearly formulated concept
of his having been doing so. Every child changes the shape of his world with
every act, with every cry, with every laugh. His choices warp the world, twist
it this way and that, bring that thing closer and move that other thing
further, influence places and positions and people.
“The child set up this character and this [his current]
universe little by little, without foreseeing its development. He was ignorant
of the disturbing aspect of this freedom which he was heedlessly exercising.”
Many who are frightened at the thought of having to take
responsibility for their world or admit that they create, and have always
created, their own experience, attempt to remain a blameless child in any way
they can by denying responsibility, becoming dependent on others, and refusing
to acknowledge the full power and horror (“anguish”) of becoming the “prey of a
freedom that is no longer chained up by anything.” Anyone who has ever had to
drive a car, pay mortgage, manage employees, or have children of their own can
appreciate the struggle of first realizing the full consequences of power which
can be both creative and destructive. One can understand how some people
regressively pretend to be an insignificant child who can’t do anything great, nor
cause great harm; but of course this is a flight from the reality that even as
a child a human being is choosing for herself, even when she is choosing to
submit to another’s authority.
2. The Sub-Man
The Sub-Man is one who, like the child, attempts to avoid
the significance and responsibilities of his existence, but instead of
attempting to regress to a relinquishment of power to others, the Sub-Man
attempts to passively ignore his situation and failure-to-launch. “This apathy
manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks
and tensions which it implies. The Sub-Man rejects this ‘passion’ which is his
human condition, the laceration and the failure of that drive toward being
which always misses its goal, but [this passive way of life] is the very
existence which he rejects.” There is no escape, there is only denial and a
failure to thrive, and the Sub-Man in his fear and refusal to spend his life on
something worthwhile, spends it nonetheless on his evasions.
3. The Serious Man
The Serious Man, like the Sub-Man, takes the external, objective
world more seriously than he does himself. A spontaneous freedom is an unwieldy
and unpredictable thing, and he wants a stable, predictable, unmoving world
which poses no threats to him. “He [tries to keep] himself from existing
because he is not capable of existing without a guarantee...[but] he will
always be saying that he is disappointed, for his wish to have the world harden
into a thing is belied by the very movement of life.” He resents being the
subjective viewer, the controller of an objective experience which he still
can’t completely master, and in his denial of his freedom, he attempts to kill
his uniqueness by regarding himself as just another object. He wants to be an
effect, a corollary, a pre-determined and fated thing like all other fated
things. Unlike the Sub-Man, he works hard so that, one fine day, he no longer
needs create or take responsibility for his actions. It is a race to escape
one’s self. He thinks he has established that nothing is responsible for itself
if it is conditioned, so he longs to become a thing among things, which, if he
is not free, really takes off the pressure to perform as if he were free.
For many, the serious mindset is most prominently manifested
in religious notions about being a God-slave so as to escape human
responsibility. Reasoning goes thus: God made human beings, he gave humanity a
chance to be free-but-miserable instead of enslaved-but-happy, humanity
offended God and brought upon itself God’s wrath for acting freely, God offered
forgiveness for humanity’s freedom back, and now humanity must suffer with
their own freedom, or relinquish that freedom and live happily in bondage to
God for all eternity. That, for the serious person, is at least a guarantee of
happiness. So why would someone give up a slave’s happiness for the anguish of
freedom? Beauvoir hit it square when she writes, “After having lived under the
eyes of the gods, having been given the promise of divinity, one does not
readily accept becoming simply a man with all his anxiety and doubt.” Of course
Beauvoir doesn’t believe freedom leads only to misery, but there is no denying
that there is some anguish involved in being your own person. It’s that old
proverb, where no oxen are, the stables
are clean.
4. The Nihilist
The Nihilist is just one step beyond the Serious Man. He
is the Serious Man become conscious and, as the poet Ted Hughes so well put it,
“Unwinding the world like a ball of wool, found the last end tied round his own
finger”, and he laments his ownership. He is the Serious Man disillusioned. He
realizes that he can’t become an object, a history, a determination. He’s not
an episode in someone else’s memoir. He despairs when he realizes he must
always be the self-determining author of his own life. So, he attempts to lose faith in the whole
system. “Conscious of being unable to be anything, man then decides to be
nothing.” Now begins his war against his own projects and the projects of
others. Here Beauvoir really gets the ball rolling down a path towards what she
will later clarify as the category of ‘evil’, citing political tyrants as
examples of peaking Nihilists. This Nihilist is the apex of the types of flight
from life which seek to lose themselves in the objective world and thereby
annihilate their subjectivity.
5. The Adventurer
After the Nihilist, Beauvoir backs up to start a new
track in the types of flights from freedom. She describes a more moderate
flight from existence in the form of an attempt to become swallowed up in
subjectivity versus losing oneself in the objective world. The Adventurer is
someone who takes life for what it is, in the moment, in her personal moments
more specifically, and makes the most of them as if the moment is all that is. Adventurers
are those who, as Beauvoir stated at the beginning of the book, “enclose
themselves in the pure moment” and “become pure inwardness to escape the sensible world.” If it weren’t for the fact that
they are escaping their intrinsic human need and responsibility to develop more
distant, meaningful goals, then there might be some virtue in their self-affirmation
and sportsmanlike engagement in their projects. But the problem comes in an escapism
which cares nothing for what appears outside of their self and their narrow
range of solipsistic values. Life is a big game—play it while it lasts, aim no
higher, and regret nothing.
“[The Adventurer] seeks a pretext in [things] for a
gratuitous display of activity…Hoping for no justification, he will
nevertheless take delight in living…he likes action for its own sake...[but]
though engaged in his undertaking, he is at the same time detached from the
goal.”
The detachment from a further goal leaves him with a
short-range concern for life, which is ultimately delusive because he fails to
acknowledge that his consciousness is dependent on his inter-being/inter-consciousness
with others. This devaluing of life around him makes him immediately a threat,
a potentially dangerous person,
especially if someone gets in the way of his fun. “He carries the seed of [a
tyrant] within him, since he regards mankind as indifferent matter destined to
support the game of his existence.”
Beauvoir’s bottom line for her views in general really
surfaces in her discussion about the Adventurer. “No man can save himself
alone…[the Adventurer] will enclose himself in a false independence which will
indeed be servitude.” That is probably the nearest to a pivot for the entire
work, and is probably the thrust of her ethics and extended philosophy.
6. The Passionate
The Passionate person is a more obsessive form of the Adventurer.
He makes a goal out of his goal-lessness and solipcism. He is more conscious
and relentless in his obsession to sacrifice himself to his activities which
are ultimately self-evasive. The Adventurer and the Passionate person both
realize they cannot become an object and know they will never find validation
in becoming a controlled thing, but in rushing madly to sacrifice or spend
their lives to zero, they are attempting to burn out the objective world and
along with it their freedom and separateness in the consuming fire of passion, numbing
busyness, and maniacal risk which leads to finality.
“[For the Passionate person]
nothing exists outside of his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce
him to modify his choices…The cause of the passionate man’s torment is his
distance from the object; but he must accept it instead of trying to eliminate
it.”
Consequences of flight freedom
The problem with all of these various ways to escape oneself
and one’s responsibility is that they become not only destructive to self, but
destructive to others. In other words, the Sub-man and the Passionate person
both threaten me because they have assigned me a value of being just another
object in their world in which they are not invested. The failure to see others
as critical components of one’s own consciousness leads to a reduction of others’
worth in a subordinate role. This idea of interdependence of the frameworks for
consciousness is what Sartre referred to as “intersubjectivity” in his work, Existentialism Is a Humanism, and it
underpins all of Beauvoir’s philosophy of the human concern for one another. The
existentialists fought hard to make people see that we are all woven into a tapestry
of consciousness which comes into being together and cannot function rightly
without each other. “The freedom of one man almost always concerns that of
other individuals… his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of
others.” In the repeated emphasis of human solidarity one can clearly
understand how French existentialism was birthed in crisis amid the political
and communistic oppression of the mid-20th century, not to mention
the Nazi occupation.
Ethics of ambiguity
So, now that we know how NOT to act, how DO we act?
Essentially Beauvoir heads towards a “greatest good for the greatest number” form
of rationale, and it stands up pretty well. She offers well thought-out and
cogent responses to humanitarian quandaries like using force against others,
sacrificing a few that more may live, sacrificing many so that one with a more
hopeful future can live, and using means in the light of ends while making sure
that the ends are present in-part with the means.
However, while it seems that Beauvoir is presenting a
hard-and-fast ethic—being concerned for others—the whole point of human
existence is realizing our fundamental freedom from external influence that
would condition or determine human beings’ actions or choices, and it is this
which introduces ambiguity as the freedom from the restraint of rules,
traditions, dogma or imperatives of any kind. There is no external authority to
be blamed or praised for an individual’s unique and unqualified personal choice,
not even the authority of thinkers like Beauvoir. My choice is my own, and no
one else’s. It is mine alone, and will always be so. Therefore, the other can
only suggest tools that I can use to help me achieve more success with my
actions, and even then, I have to assess those tools and experiment with them
at my own risk. I am liable only for myself to myself. This is why Beauvoir
proposes personally utilized ‘methods’ and not universal absolutes, even when
it comes to things like human oppression and murder. “Ethics does not furnish
recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods.”
Probably the most uncomfortable part of existentialism, and
of this work in particular, is the deflating assertion that we must accept
risks in ethics as in the rest of life without having complete information, being
always in a state of partial doubt; and this, says the author, is the most
fundamental trait of human existence.
“The movement of the mind, whether it be called thought or
will, always starts up in the darkness…we must [at bottom] maneuver in a state
of doubt… Man always has to decide by himself in the darkness, [and] he must
want beyond what he knows.”
For many, this will
not sound consoling, but for those who have already begun to recognize that
this is indeed our situation, it is freeing to be able to admit it, and maybe
to start loving it for what it is. For one like myself who has come to the
realization that they may not have been one hundred percent certain of anything
at any point in their life, it comes as an affirmation to know that all the
good that could ever be achieved can only be achieved, and has only ever been
achieved, by courage and love with all of their concomitant dangers. That feels
pretty good to know.
Conclusion
If ethics are not absolutes but only proposed methods, what
about the people who may not adopt the methods which I believe ultimately
benefit humankind, and instead employ methods which produce only devastation?
This, my dear, is what war is for. “There are cases where a man positively
wants evil, that is, the enslavement of other men, and he must then be fought.”
I assume Beauvoir believes that her method-of-proposing-helpful-methods must be
somewhat effective in producing authentic living and honest thinking which
naturally engender a human concern for one another; but it’s easy to see that
she isn’t opposed to a very physical approach to attitude adjustments when all
else fails. And this would still fit within her philosophy of being concerned
for others, even those fought against, because another’s unwarranted violence against their own self or another person “is an
attempt of the individual against his own freedom”; and so violence against
violence can be justified, and only
justified, if the fight is against a person, for a person, and for others’ ultimate welfare. “The tyranny
practiced against an invalid can be justified only by his getting better.”
Some may ask, “How dare you? How dare you, Simone de
Beauvoir, though your name is like a honeyed song rolling off the tongue? If
you are so concerned with the Other, what right have you to hurt another human
being?” She would answer (and she did), “… love authorizes severities which are
not granted to indifference.”
Now THAT’S a woman.
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