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Introduction And Index To The Ethics Of Ambiguity By Simone de Beauvoir

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My next book is The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir. I was introduced to Existentialism in a required philosophy course my freshman year at Notre Dame. I opted for a course on Christian Existentialism, where I read a good chunk of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I conceived a very reasonable dislike for him and for the entire project of trying to understand existence through some feat of reason. I was much more impressed with other existentialists, and very much a fan of Albert Camus, who focused on the absurd and ignored Sartre’s formulations of being-in-itself and being-for-itself and other invented words.

But behind the tortured definitions, Existentialists confronted an existence where traditional meanings had been eradicated. The Divine and its representatives on earth, the Church and the clergy, had lost their self-assurance, if not their legitimacy. The humanist replacements offered by 19th and early 20th C. thinkers were proven useless by the rise of totalitarianism. The hole in the soul, the deep emptiness of the void, was a dominant motif across the Western world.

It was a small comfort to me, facing conscription into an army fighting the illegal and immoral Viet Nam War, to see others confronting an ethical horror.

That feeling is back, as we look at the repulsive US government. The kinds of people who joyfully supported the Nazis and the Holocaust surround us today. The people we trusted to manage our institutions turn out to be weaklings, folding in the face of Trump’s bullying. Watching John Roberts and the Fash Five collapse democracy is painful, physically painful. I’m sure scientists and scholars watching the destruction of their life’s work feel the same anguish. Knowing that my family and other families will have to struggle to make sure their kids aren’t tainted by ignorance and immorality is horrifying.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt gave us a template for the rise of Trump/MAGA. The ideology of neoliberalism, the idea that the only thing that counts is the isolated, atomistic, utterly unconstrained individual, is at the root of the psyche of MAGAs. They believe in the rugged individual epitomized by the Marlboro Man. Their patriarchal religion sanctifies White male domination. Their disdain for expertise and its replacement with crackpots is the same as in Depression-era Germany. With Arendt’s help, we saw it coming but were unable to stop it.

Both Arendt and the Existentialists speak to us today. They don’t have final answers, but they offer a perspective that I think can be helpful, both for protecting ourselves and for preparing for a different future.

Existential Ambiguity

By way of background, I don’t believe there is a systematic explanation for our world. I think we have patches of knowledge that seem useful, that work; and patches of profound ignorance which we can and should acknowledge. We should treat all our “knowledge” as provisional, subject to change. We can’t have a theory of everything, but then, we don’t need one of those. We just need to know enough to survive and flourish.

With that in mind, what does de Beauvoir mean by ambiguity? She (and her translator, in this case Bernard Frechtman) write:

[Man] asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. … This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends. P. 7, Kindle edition.

This isn’t ambiguity as we use the word, as a state in which one of two things is true but we don’t know which. This is ambiguity in the sense that both things are true but they are, in some way, contradictory. This is like light, which is a wave or a particle, or maybe somehow both at once. It’s a kind of superposition.

We are fully conscious of ourselves. That means we see ourselves as existing in time, and as having a beginning and an end. We believe that our consciousness is a thing special to us, that it is impervious to the outside. But we also see ourselves as being the object of external forces, some helpful, some dangerous. We think we are alone in our subjectivity but we believe we are among other creatures who possess a subjectivity of their own, a subjectivity we cannot fully grasp.

We are both individual subjects for whom other human beings are objects, and we are objects for other individual subjects, both at the same time. That’s the ambiguity de Beauvoir is talking about. We are all Schroedinger’s Cat.

We can say a little more about that subjectivity than de Beauvoir did. First, we think our subjectivity not a fixed thing. It’s attached to our bodies and our experiences, but it changes as both change. And we know for sure that our personal subjectivity is affected by, and often changed by, other subjectivities. This adds another layer to the notion of our belonging to the collective of other human beings.

Ethics

At this point it’s sufficient to say that ethics is the area of philosophy which tries to answer the question of how we should live. That includes, among other things, how we should interact with others in the collective of which we are a part. It raises the question of our duties and obligations to others, and their corresponding duties and obligations to us. If any.

Ethics is usually defined as concerning morality, but that seems too bound to a specific culture. For purposes of this series I think it’s better to think of ethics as being about the shared nature of human beings, and this, I think, is how de Beauvoir addresses the subject.

This book is about ethics in the world Simone de Beauvoir faced:

[A]t every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting. P. 9.

 

 

 

 

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Lemmings running off a cliff. Caption translates as Turn back? After we've come so far?

Individuality Is A Big Deal

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Index to posts in this series

So far I’ve written four essays on becoming an individual in the US, without explaining why this seemed like a worthwhile question. The answer lies in the last election. The conventional wisdom is that the state of the economy and the character of the candidates are major factors in the decisions of voters. A third major factor is tribal identity.

But no reasonable person can deny that Trump is a revolting bag of guts. He has no integrity, no loyalty to the Nation or anyone besides himself, and no reason to want to be president other that personal gratification and staying out of jail.

It is equally inconceivable that any sane person thinks that the current Republican Party cares about the economic or physical well-being of anyone except themselves and their donors. There is nothing in the history of the last 45 years to suggest that Republicans will enact any legislation, adopt any budget, or make any rule change that will benefit any of us. Most of their plans will hurt millions, including their voters.

So why did so many people flunk this basic test of democracy and vote for this oozing pustule?

Their answers

I’ve run across lots of explanations, without keeping track of sources. He says he’ll protect my abortion rights, said one woman. He’s the imperfect tool the Almighty is using. He’s against killing babies. He’s so masculine. He’ll fix the economy. The economy was better under his first administration. He’ll fix the border crisis. He’s for law and order. The Democrats didn’t help me. The price of eggs. Vaccines are killing us.

That’s all crazy, and I doubt it’s the real reason.

Why it matters

We say we live in a democracy, that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. But we ignore the responsibilities democracy puts on us. We do not form a shared view of reality, and of the problems we face. We do not listen and hear ideas about solutions.

Blue voters think the point of government is to make our joint lives safer and more pleasant, and to give everyone the best chance of flourishing. I have no idea what Trump voters think the purpose of government is. Most of them couldn’t tell you. Only the Christian Dominionists have an answer.

I think Trump voters follow leaders who tell them what their problems are. These leaders insist that the important things are abstract ideas  around sexual morality, racial purity, white male superiority, and religious fundamentalism, among others. Trump and his henchmen find or invent instances exemplifying those fake abstractions, and the leaders and the media amplify them. These leaders (preachers, Fox News belchers, Qrazies) tell them Trump will solve the problems created by Trump and amplified by those very leaders.

Normal people know government can’t solve those abstract problems. It can only make life hard for the targets of right-wing obsessions. The leaders know that too. They don’t care. They want votes and obeisance, things that will benefit them.

Two explanations

I think existentialist philosophers like Camus and Sartre are right that many people don’t want freedom. They are willing to do just about anything to avoid exercising it. Perhaps they think it might expose them to ridicule or hostility from the people around them. Perhaps it’s too hard to make a decision. Maybe they’re afraid of the responsibility that goes with exercising freedom. Maybe they think that if everyone exercises freedom, chaos will follow. Freedom is dangerous.

I used to think this existential dread was just an rationalization to explain why so many Germans supported the Nazis, and why so many French people supported the Vichy government. But now I think that they were on to something important. Freedom is terrifying.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a different explanation.  This is taken from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Soon, there become distinct social classes and strict notions of property, creating conflict and ultimately a state of war not unlike the one that Hobbes describes. Those who have the most to lose call on the others to come together under a social contract for the protection of all. But Rousseau claims that the contract is specious, and that it was no more than a way for those in power to keep their power by convincing those with less that it was in their interest to accept the situation. And so, Rousseau says, “All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom, for although they had enough reason to feel the advantages of political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.”

Doing what the dominant class tells you to do is a trade-off for relief from fear of chaos. Watching the fearful vote for Trump is just like watching people run to meet their chains.

Both explanations seem to rely on a deeply human desire for security and certainty. Not all people succumb to that desire. Many of us know that there is no permanent security, and that there is no certainty. That knowledge does not frighten but inspires. The question becomes not how to escape freedom, but how best to use our freedom in an indifferent universe.

Conclusion

1. We all look to others for our ideas. I do. So who am I to judge others for choosing Trump or some rando on YouTube as a leader? Well, I think some things are better than others, and I can make these distinctions, guided by the insights of people who don’t want anything from me. In particular, they aren’t asking me to give them powers they can exploit for their own ends.

2. I used to think conservatism was driven by principles, even if I could not quite articulate them to my own satisfaction.

Now I think millions of Americans choose to abdicate their freedom and responsibility to judge based on their own principles.

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The caption on the front page image translates as “Turn back? After we’ve come so far?”

 

 

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Wimpy Patriarchy

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This article by Professor Molly Worthan at the University of North Carolina diseases the form of religion taught by Bishop Robert Barron.  Worthan says that Barron operates Word on Fire, a ministry that uses social media to preach a tough version of Catholicism that appeals to men, especially young men.

This [tough view] is not the message that [Barron] got as a young Catholic. “To be frank about it, when I was in the seminary, it was more of a feminized approach,” he recalled. “We did a lot of sitting in a circle and talking about our feelings.”

Whatever is in his instagram and You-Tube videos, which I, of course, won’t watch, it seems to appeal to younger men, as his audience is over 60% male. Worthan says that among college grads under age 40, 69% of mall claim a religious affiliation compared with 62% of women.

Male resentment

Worthan offers this possible explanation.

Some pundits argue that as gender norms shifted and women started outnumbering men in universities and the white-collar workforce, men have grown resentful and nostalgic for patriarchy—so they seek it in traditional religion. J. D. Vance is the country’s most famous Catholic convert, and the story of his rightward shift might seem like a template for all Gen Z and Millennial men interested in Christianity.

This explanation says that men respond to the success of women by asserting their superiority as the men of the patriarchy. Historically men were dominant and women were subordinate. For many this cashed out as men have all the power and women are submissive. Historically, this system was enforced by the state and by religious authorities. Today it’s a part of all religions, and is a central aspect of all fundamentalist religions.

Seeking a solution to the apparent superiority of so many women in the Patriarchy  is an example of what C.S. Peirce calls the method of authority, one of his four responses to doubt. From his 1877 essay The Fixation Of Belief,

Let the will of the state act, then, instead of that of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young; having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated, or expressed. Let all possible causes of a change of mind be removed from men’s apprehensions. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. .,,

Males Adrift

Worthan offers her own explanation:

Many young men feel unmoored—lonely in a time of weakening social institutions, unsatisfied and overworked by an accelerating professional rat race, alienated by political tribalism. “Men my age, we don’t have the social organizations that our fathers or grandfathers did,” Torrin Daddario, a Barron fan who converted to Catholicism from a Protestant background, told me. “We’re adrift.” Over the past decade, both the left and the right have tried to fill the void with morality tales that treat unfettered individual freedom as sacred and split the world into victims and oppressors. Those stories are getting stale.

Worthan explains that these young men get much of their information from YouTube and other social media. She says they might check out Jordan Peterson, for example, leading to Christianity, and the algorithm leads them to Barron.

This is an example of Peirce’s third possible response to doubt, which we might today call the method of common sense.

Let the action of natural preferences be unimpeded, then, and under their influence let men, conversing together and regarding matters in different lights, gradually develop beliefs in harmony with natural causes. … [Systems of metaphysics] have been chiefly adopted because their fundamental propositions seemed “agreeable to reason.” This is an apt expression; it does not mean that which agrees with experience, but that which we find ourselves inclined to believe.

Listening to random people who don’t have better information that you do is a recipe for failure. Listening to people hawking the old solutions, including patriarchy in its many forms, has the same result. You don’t get answers that are useful in our society. You get contemporary versions of answers to questions aur ancestors asked centuries or millennia ago. We living people have different questions based on radically different societies from those of our ancestors.

Beyond Atheism vs. Religion

All this gets boiled down into a discussion of atheism vs. religion. In the US, this debate is between people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the New Atheists on one side; and the Bishop Barrons and aggressive groups like Opus Dei and Christian Domionists. It almost always is understood as atheism vs. Christianity, ignoring the teachings of other religions. It deals with untestable beliefs like the existence of a Supreme Being or the proper form of worship, and never the moral teachings. This kind of simplistic dualism pervades all  public discourse on almost any issue. I am very skeptical of all dualistic framings, especially dualisms originating in the distant past.

The feelings Worthan describes are common among large numbers of people at especially after the First World war. The result was the origination of  secular theories of humanity that seem to me to transcend arguments about the existence of a Supreme Being and forms of worship.

One example is Existentialism. Those adrift young men listening to Barron might recognize themselves in the ennui expressed in Sartre’s play No Exit. The most famous line in the play is “hell is other people”. The three “other people”, condemned to hell for their sins, will torture each other through eternity. The play concludes with the words: “Well, well, let’s get on with it. …” But is that the answer to the problem they face? Wallowing?

Sartre doesn’t think so. Neither do the other existentialists. Look at The Plague by Albert Camus. The hero is the doctor. In the face of a deadly plague he does his best to tend to the sick and dying, advise the living how to protect themselves, and find a cure. The other characters display other responses to the plague, some modestly useful, others worthless. Camus tells us we have to act, to help, to fight the inevitable, to resist the meaninglessness of the universe by finding meaning in other people.

The odd thing, of course, is that traditionally the fundamental character of the masculine was action, while the feminine was characterized by passivity. Men find their place in society by accomplishment. Women find their place in the home and in child-rearing.

How ridiculous is it that men respond to women’s action in the world by becoming passive wimps? Or by asserting an invented superiority not arising from personal accomplishment?

 

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Image; Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her Columbia academic regalia, 1959

 

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