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Examples Of Not-Free People

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Index to posts in this series.

In the last two posts I’ve described several responses to Existential Ambiguity set out in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics Of Ambiguity. In this post, I give some examples, and offer a suggestion for using the Existentialist conception of freedom to argue with Trumpists.

Infantile people. There are few people forced into infantile behavior today. De Beauvoir gives some cringey examples from prior times, women denied any agency from birth, for example.

Sub-men. These are people who close themselves off from their freedom. They merely respond to whatever stimuli move them the most. De Beauvoir says these are the people recruited to do the dirty work of tyranny. Examples include Nazi thugs, the secret police, the torturers and their supervisors, and the people who operated the concentration camps and the gas chambers. An obvious parallel today is the ICE goons terrorizing people around the country.

Serious people. These are people who cling to the structures of belief and rules of behavior handed to them by others. They pretend these are immutable facts rather than human constructions. They surrender to others their power to make moral judgments. This, I think, is the largest group.

I think Adolf Eichmann is a good example, at least the Eichmann Hannah Arendt describes in Eichmann In Jerusalem. He obeys the rules he is handed by the regime, and strives within those structures to carry out his orders and advance his career.

In the same way, all the Good Germans who went along with the entire Nazi project, followed the rules, sacrificed themselves and their children to the war effort, ratted out their Jewish neighbors, ignored the assaults on the Jews and others, didn’t question their own participation in the evil.

We see examples of this everywhere today. Of course we don’t know the precise motivation of Trump voters, but apparently few of them have changed their minds despite his abuses. They do not exercise moral judgment about his attacks on people he doesn’t like, whether it’s John Bolton, James Comey, or a bunch of guys looking for day labor jobs at the Home Depot.

Adventurers. In the last post I discussed Don Juan as an example of an adventurer. As another example, here’s a character describes his father, a businessman, in Trade Me, a novel by the Supreme Court clerk turned novelist Courtney Milan:

There is no end to my father’s ambition. Whatever it is he wants, he lays out a plan and grabs it, and once he has hold of it, the only thing he can think about is the thing that is next on the horizon. P. 209.

Passionate people. One possible example of this is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. From what I know, there is nothing to suggest he had Nazi tendencies or was particularly anti-Semitic. He entered and then left a Jesuit Seminary, studied under one Jew and had an affair with Hannah Arendt, also a Jew. But when the Nazi regime took over, he accepted a position as Rector of a major German university and a few days later joined the Nazi party.

He explained himself in an interview published after his death. He called it a compromise to join the Nazi party to save the university, and said he saw an “awakening” in the rise of the Nazi party that would be good for Germany. There’s more. I read this to say he thought his work was more important than the damage done by joining the Nazis.

My book club read The Director: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann. It’s historical fiction about the German film director G. W. Pabst. The character Pabst is a solid example of a passionate person. He loses his subjectivity in his drive to direct films, doing horrid things to carry out his cinematic vision. His end is a living version of Mozart’s punishment of Don Juan.

Critics. There aren’t many examples of critics. Perhaps one is Jean-Paul Sartre, who seems to have been convinced that his version of Existentialism was a universal truth. I say this because when Albert Camus published his book The Rebel, Sartre dispatched one of his followers to write a scathing review, claiming that Camus was not a real Existentialist. The vitriol was one major reason for the split between the two.

I note that critics aren’t the same as rabid religious leaders. They are simply serious people who take their tenets to crazed extremes, and seem thrilled to ally themselves with fascists. Thus, cult leaders and the New Apostolic Reformation leaders don’t count.

Discussion

1. I think that de Beauvoir is right: people unwilling to live their freedom are easy prey for tyrants. Some are active supporters, because they think they can hammer people they despise. Some are passive, thinking they’ll prosper under the tyrant’s regime. Some aren’t paying attention.

2. Ever since the shitter-in-chief got elected I’ve hoped that this kind of reading would help me find things I can do to fight fascism. My first hope was that in these older writings there would be hints of things people might have done that would have slowed the rise of fascism. Sadly no.

So my second hope was that I would find tactics that might fight fascism among Trump’s less crazy supporters. I see a couple of things. Polanyi says that when change becomes too rapid, people resist it. Arendt says that the intellectual elites abandoned society to the mob. De Beauvoir says that people who are not fully free are easy marks for tyranny. And always in the back of my mind, C.S Peirce tells us that people become very uncomfortable when they suddenly doubt an idea they’ve held, and this is the only thing that will make them think again.

I tried to imagine using these insights in a conversation with some people I knew pretty well in my Church Choir in Nashville. I think they were sincere Christians, and I’m guessing a lot of them voted for Trump.

I imagine myself talking about immigrants with one of them. I think I’d make two points. First, I’d point to rising costs of food, and blame it on Trump’s sudden attacks on immigrants which has caused rapid changes in agriculture.

Then I’d point to the videos and reports of the vicious treatment of these hard-working people: violently kidnapped, held in appalling conditions, shipped to dangerous lands where they don’t speak the language, and separated from their kids. I’d ask how they reconcile that with the command of Jesus that begins the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).

Jesus tells a lawyer to love his neighbor as himself. The lawyer (of course) asks who is my neighbor. Then Jesus tells the famous story, and asks who is the neighbor of the stricken man. The lawyer correctly answers the foreigner who helps. I know they’d see the point immediately; I must have heard that sermon five times over the years I was a member of that church. I’m sure they’d have some excuse, but they’d know it was fraudulent, which I hope would lead to doubt.

I imagine a lot of people at other churches might respond saying their preachers say otherwise. There’s my opening. Why did you let that preacher tell you what Jesus meant? Perhaps your preacher means well, but the most fundamental tenet of every Protestant group is that the individual has the ability, the right, and the duty to understand the words of the Bible themselves. Why are you afraid to make your own moral judgment and offer your own moral justification?

I think this line of discussion brings out the points I’ve learned from all these books. Would they lead to change? No, at least not in the short run. But it’s something I can do, and it might make a tiny difference before it’s too late..

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More Responses to Existentialist Ambiguity

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Index to posts in this series. Please read this post, especially the discussion of ambiguity. This post makes more sense if you read the previous post.

This series discusses The Ethics Of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir. In the last post we saw that de Beauvoir thinks that people’s response to their existential situation, especially to their freedom, is heavily influenced by their childhood experiences. I discussed several types of response to existentialist ambiguity: infantilism, the sub-man, and the serious person. In this post I discuss other possible responses.

I think de Beauvoir is saying that as children we think the structures given by adults are immutable facts of existence. The discovery that they are not creates the need to respond. For many this requires finding a way to deal with the slowly dawning fact that there is no meaning in the universe other that that provided by people, and we have to choose a response ourselves.

Her categories are not phases of development, that is, we do not progress from one to another. They are not permanent, so people can change. And they do share some some qualities.

As you read about these categories, try to think of people who fit into them, whether real people or people in novels or other media.

Serious people. As we saw in the previous post, serious people merely cling tightly to the structures that made them feel safe as children. This is a choice of sorts, but serious people hide themselves from the fact that they have made a free choice. They feel themselves bound by the structures they’ve been given and accept all instructions from those empowered by those structures. For this reason they easily become allies of tyranny.

Nihilists. Nihilists realize that the structures handed to them by others are arbitrary. They deny the possibility that they themselves can create meaningful responses. They deny the possibility of any justification for existence. In rejecting their freedom to create justifications, they deny the essence of their own existence. They refuse to strive towards being. In doing so they become nothing. There is no meaning, so anything is allowable.

Nihilists might further decide that the world and the justifications created by other humans are both contemptible, and respond with scorn. Alternatively they might see the mere existence of others as repulsive, and wish for the annihilation of the world and themselves.

Nihilists realize that they are free, but they see that freedom as a negative thing, leaving them oppressed and confused. They do not see that freedom can be a positive thing, opening up the future to infinite possible human futures. Both serious people and nihilists are unwilling to use their freedom positively, to choose a future for themselves.

Nihilists either scorn or actively hate others. As a result they are naturally allies of tyranny. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt says that this was the position of the intellectual elites before and during the Nazi takeover. They despised bourgeois culture and were willing to participate in its destruction.

Adventurers. Adventurer, like nihilists, see no meaning in life. But unlike nihilists, adventurers enjoy life, and revel in what it has to offer. They seek no justification for their actions beyond self-satisfaction. And, again unlike nihilists, they accept their subjectivity, their ability to make choices. They throw themselves into action, seeking challenges and conquests, moving from one to the next. But there is no transcendent purpose, no goal, for all their activity. Perhaps they are motivated by the thrill of accomplishment, or the satisfaction of trying; or maybe by the wealth, or power, or glory they can gain.

They proclaim their scepticism in regard to recognized values. They do not take politics seriously. They thereby allow themselves to be collaborationists in ‘41 and communists in ‘45, and it is true they don’t give a hang about the interests of the French people or the proletariat…. P 59

Adventurers have no regard for others except as a means to accomplishing their personal goals. They may treat others as comrades in pursuing a specific goal or they may see others as obstacles. This lack of connection makes them plausible allies for tyranny. By aligning themselves with tyrants they can satisfy their personal goals without regard to others.

Alternatively, adventurers may become aware that satisfaction of their own goals involves other people who have projects of their own. They may realize that helping others become fully free is a value itself. At least adventurers may realize that working positively with others helps them achieve their own goals. This is a step closer to becoming fully free.

Passionate people. Like adventurers, passionate people recognize their freedom and use it to create projects with goals and purposes of their own devising. But these goals can easily become ends in themselves, and passionate people lose their own subjectivity in pursuit of those goals. Passionate people see their projects as ends in themselves, and they may well lose their subjectivity in the struggle to attain them, they lose themselves, becoming tools useful only to attain the end.

“The passionate man seeks possession, he desires to attain being.” P. 65. For Existentialists this is bad. The essence of existence is to create in ourselves a lack of being so that we have an open future. Passionate people want full being, which they think will come from the completion of their project, from the attainment of their goal. It won’t. As with adventurers, the goal does nothing to create being. But the drive of passionate people consumes their own subjectivity, leaving them nothing but the end itself, which is absurd facticity, meaningless.

Passionate people are so involved with their project that they are indifferent to others. They live in a kind of solitude. They may be able to impose their will on others by force of personality or by the vitality with which drives them. But they are equally likely to bend to a tyranny that gives them the ability to force others to do their will, regardless of their own projects. In either case they are an obstacle to the freedom of others.

Critics. Critics respond to their freedom by trying to transcend existence, says de Beauvoir. Critics set up “,,, a superior, universal, and timeless value, objective truth.” P. 68. Serious people also do this, but critics claim to have discovered this universal themselves. They see themselves as the singular independent minds that recognize this truth. In this way they surmount the limits of human existence, at least in their own minds.

In doing so, critics ignore the ambiguity which is at the heart of human existence. They do not see a need to justify themselves to others, because they have the Truth. They cannot be fully free or fully human. De Beauvoir says we are all part of the world. We cannot transcend it.

Conclusion

The nub of this chapter is that to be fully free is to recognize our own freedom in the freedom of others. We know freedom in ourselves because we see it displayed by other people. To the extent that others are not free we are not fully free, and we are  responsible to assist them in becoming free. Both for ourselves and others, we are free insofar as we are able to work towards a project while remaining open to the world and to others.

Discussion

1. I think De Beauvoir sees the failure to grasp the nature of freedom as a key element of fascism. A truly free person will reject totalitarianism in all its forms as ridiculous limits on the freedom which is our essential nature. Does this seem plausible in today’s world?

2. De Beauvoir gives examples of some of these categories. For example, she describes Don Juan, the legendary predator, as an adventurer. He seeks the sexual conquest of women, not out of love or even lust, but for the thrill of overcoming the will of the target. In Verdi’s Don Giovanni   the Don Juan character doesn’t care about Dona Elvira and her father. He doesn’t care about Zerlina, the virginal bride, or her husband, Masetto. In Verdi’s gripping story Don Juan’s drive for conquest leads to his doom.

In my next post I will look at examples of each of these categories. If you have ideas for such examples, or any other aspect of these categories, put them in the comments.

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Coping With Existentialist Ambiguity

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Posts in this series.  Please read this first, at least the section on ambiguity.

Preface

The point of this series is to examine The Ethics Of Ambiguity by the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir as a reaction, in part, to the horrors of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. My hope is that we can learn something that will help understand and possibly to derail the drive towards fascism by the Trump Administration.

Existentialism’s core principle is radical freedom accompanied by radical responsibility. In Chapter 2 de Beauvoir shows how people become conscious of their freedom, starting with childhood. She then gives some examples of how people respond to their awareness of that freedom.

I think it helps us to understand this material to think about how it applies to people we know or know about, whether from real life or from books or from the internet.

The origins of awareness of freedom

De Beauvoir starts with a discussion of childhood. She says the child experiences the adult world as a given, a fixed and immutable environment, just like a stage set. The child is expected to take a specific role in that world, a place that is stable and certain. The rules and goals are set by the adults in the child’s world.

At the same time, at play and with its peers the child experiences a completely free world. It is open to all possibilities, even those beyond the child’s physical limits. It’s as if the child is free in a room, with walls, ceilings and floors that protect it from actual danger. Adults provide shelter and safety to go with that apparently unlimited freedom.

As the child grows older, it begins to notice that adults aren’t statues, that they aren’t gifted with perfect foresight, that they make mistakes, and that they say things are one way when the child sees that they are another. At this point the child begins to see that the world is not a given, that it is made by other people and begins to realize it will have to take a role in that making. This can be traumatic.

… [I]t is not without great confusion that the adolescent finds himself cast into a world which is no longer ready-made, which has to be made; he is abandoned, unjustified, the prey of a freedom that is no longer chained up by anything. P. 39.

It is in this moment, says de Beauvoir, that we have to form our own justifications and take responsibility for our actions. At this moment we cross into the plane of morality.

In the next section, de Beauvoir discusses some of the possible responses the newly aware person might have to the moral questions presented by thee discoveries.

Responses to freedom

Infantile people. De Beauvoir says that some people are not allowed to make this transition. She gives two examples. First she talks about certain of the people enslaved in the US Antebellum South who have not “raised themselves to consciousness” of their enslavement (p. 37).

Second, she talks about women who do not separate themselves from the domination of men. Many, she says, were trained from birth to accept it, for religious or cultural reasons, and do not have the means of forming a different view.

In these examples, the person remains in an infantile state, unable to recognize either their own freedom or their responsibility.

Sub-men. Sub-men are people who blind and deafen themselves against consciousness of their freedom. De Beauvoir thinks the underlying problem is fear of existence and a desire to hide from it. Sub-men experience only a dull pointless world, which hands them no reason to exist, and they refuse to use their freedom to create their own justifications, their own reasons for living. They demonstrate the absurd facticity of a creature in the shape of a human but without the fundamental will to exist that drives the fully human person.

De Beauvoir thinks that other people respond to the sub-man with contempt, recognizing the indifference to freedom and responsibility as a failure of human existence. But sub-men are dangerous:

He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody can get control of. In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from among the sub-men. P. 44.

Serious people

Sub-men have not connected with the world or with other people, and have no way to deal with the future. It seems dark and foreboding, full of unknown but real terrors. That forces some of them to realize that the source of their anguish is awareness of their freedom. To solve that terror they grab hold of the solutions that society gives them, abandoning their freedom for the comfort of a fixed existence. These are the serious people.

The givens that governed serious people as children, adjusted for adulthood, become real things, so that their freedom and responsibility, which should be the drivers of individual action, are replaced by aggressive rule-following. The goals of the given norms are absolute ends for these people.

This state of being is justified in people described above as infantile, people with no real choice. In the same way, those with little ability to act on the world are more likely to move toward this state. Such people still have access to their own freedom, even though it may be difficult to achieve it.

Those who havve the intellectual and material means to accept their freedom but choose to subject themselves to the givens of their societies become slaves of the ends those givens dictate

I read this as saying that these givens are of human construction built for an earlier time by earlier humans. It’s one thing to accept them provisionally, and to adjust them as circumstances reveal their imperfections, but another to adhere to them rigidly, surrendering your personal freedom to other people with different experiences and unstated purposes.

De Beauvoir thinks this is dangerous because serious people ignore their own subjectivity; but more importantly because they ignore the subjectivity of other people. They are self-righteous in pushing the thing to which they have subjected themselves onto other people, tyrannically hammering them into submission.

She gives examples: the Inquisition; vigilantes lynching Black people in the US; and “…the political fanaticism which empties politics of all human content and imposes the State, not for individuals, but against them.” P. 50.

Discussion

1. As usual, this is a skeleton of de Beauvoir’s thinking, emphasizing the parts that seem relevant to the goal of understanding our current situation. There are other responses to freedom, followed by a discussion of the importance of other people which I will take up in the next posts in this series.

2. De Beauvoir starts her analysis with a discussion of the growing child. Other philosophical theories seem to start with the fully developed adult, as if we came into the world fully formed. Perhaps it helps that de Beauvoir didn’t think of herself as a philosopher, but as a more general thinker.

———-

The featured image is my photo of a work by Trevor Paglen titled De Beauvoir (Even the dead are not safe) Eigenface (Colorized), part of an exhibition titled The World Through AI at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

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Existentialism and Ethics

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Index to posts in this series. Please read this first; at least the section on de Beauvoir’s definition of ambiguity.

I’m on the road, and reading The Ethics of Ambiguity  by Simone de Beauvoir. She was an Existentialist, as one would expect from a person in a long-term relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. In Chapter 1 she gives an explanation of parts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the leading book on Existentialism. She distinguishes it from Stoicism and Marxism, but I won’t address that.

I think she opens with this because any systematic approach to ethics should begin with a statement of the writer’s understanding of human nature. De Beauvoir defines a specific ambiguity which I discussed in the introduction to this series. Her views are also informed by another ambiguity, the absurd. We want certainty. We want a foundation. But there isn’t one. We have to proceed, we have to live, without that certainty we want.

I read Being and Nothingness in College, but I didn’t, and don’t, care much for it. I agree with the Existentialists, including Sartre, that the universe is indifferent to its parts, from planets to mountains, flowers, insects, animals and human beings. I think there is no meaning to existence apart from our experience of it. Sartre explains that this lack of meaning gives us humans a radical degree of freedom, which we cannot avoid. Sartre’s explanation seemed to me to be wrapped up in silly little epigrams, like “Man’s being is not to be.” They did and do annoy me no end.

De Beauvoir gives a more sympathetic reading to Sartre’s tome, and for anyone interested, her explication in Chapter 1 of the wordy and needlessly obscure Sartre is worth reading. The point is to ground her discussion of ethics as a part of the human response to the meaninglessness of life and the freedom and responsibility it entails.

De Beauvoir discusses parts of Sartre’s book

Sartre’s statement that man is the being whose being is not to be begins with the notion of being. That seems to mean a fixed being, as an animal or a tree. People do not necessarily have a fixed nature. We might act like we do, we might aspire to have such a fixed being. But by nature, people live in a present filled with possibility, and want to participate in that possibility. We want to live in that wild freedom.

Freedom gives us the space in which we exist. We interact with others seeking to know them and in the process to know ourselves. We pursue our personal projects. We experience the savors and ugliness and all that come with existence. We want to be like gods in our existence, but this is an impossible and stupid goal.

I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. This means that man, in his vain attempt to be God, makes himself exist as man, and if he is satisfied with this existence, he coincides exactly with himself. P 12-3.

By appropriate, I think she means merge myself, take possession of in my being, as a god would do. I think the idea of “coinciding” here means that we become fully human, our full selves, all we can be or aspire to be. We can and should aspire to be fully human, but we cannot be gods.

De Beauvoir says that for Sartre, one implication of embracing this freedom is that a fully human person will not accept any outside justification for their actions. People want to justify themselves, and we have to choose standards for justification we learn from others or create ourselves. Our ethics, then, come from the collective or from ourselves. We cannot have standards that emanate from some non-human place. I think this means that we must reject the absolute authority claimed by some religions.

The second implication is that we bear responsibility for the results of our actions. We can’t claim that some external being is responsible for bad consequences. We act, we bear responsibility for the consequences. I think Fear and Trembling by the early Existentialist Sören Kierkegaard gives us a good example in the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham believes that the Almighty wants a human sacrifice, namely his only son Isaac. He acts on that belief. Whether he was right or wrong, he bears the consequences: a lost precious child, or a child tortured by the awareness that his father would kill him.

De Beauvoir says that we cannot escape our freedom, and we cannot avoid our responsibility. But we can simply refuse to will ourselves to exercise that freedom, out of “laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, [or] impatience” P. 25.

De Beauvoir says that responsibility only exists in our minds, in contemplation of the consequences of our actions. Feeling that responsibility happens over time, as those consequences become clear. This is a recognition that only grown-ups have these concerns.

The fact that we do not accept a justification outside ourselves is not a bar to an ethics.

An ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existants can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all. P. 18.

I think this is the source of ethics for de Beauvoir. We cooperate with other people to decide for ourselves what constitutes a justification for actions and projects. We choose to work together because we are part of the collective and our actions affects the collective directly. We share some of the burden of responsibility with others.

Discussion

1. I hope it’s clear which parts of this are mine and which are de Beauvoir’s. But it seems less important with this book. This book asks us to participate in the process of creating ethics, and therefore to think about the foundation of her ethics.

I think this book is useful because de Beauvoir is writing after horrors of the Third Reich and to a lesser extent those of Stalin were known and seen up close. That leads me to think her ethics addresses people of her day. Perhaps she intended to interrogate the behavior of the German people who enthusiastically welcomed and followed the Nazis. Certainly that’s an issue Camus addressed directly in The Plague.

Whether or not this was her purpose, we should ask ourselves what this foundation means for our understanding of the MAGAts, the people who enthusiastically follow Trump and his enablers and the filthy rich bastards who put him back in power.

2. I think we are formed by the collective in a deep way. For more, see my posts on The Evolution of Agency by Michael Tomasello, and other posts. It seems to me that this is the major contribution de Beauvoir makes to Existentialism. She describes Being and Nothingness as focused on the individual, who thrusts himself into the world. The foundation of her book is the ambiguity of being both an individual and being part of the collective.

I think we are formed by the people around us, parents, siblings, other relatives, friends, and institutions. I was raised Catholic, first in a traditional environment and then in a liberal environment. That has a profound influence on my sense of ethics,

I think we have to face our history directly and exercise our freedom to question what we were taught. We have to see ourselves clearly apart from the group in order to assess what we truly believe based on our own experience. Only then are we able to contribute something of our own to the ethics project.

3. I hate this translation: collective has an ugly Stalinist connotation.

4. De Beauvoir writes “… the ends toward which my transcendence thrusts itself …” on p. 14. The word thrust is used three times in Chapter 1, each time apparently quoting Sartre. In each case the connotation seems aggressively phallic. We don’t thrust ourselves into anything. I used the words “find” and “inject” above, trying to suggest that we will to act, but not in any aggressive sense.

I haven’t read The Second Sex, and I wonder if contemplation of this aspect of Being and Nothingness coupled with her sense of the importance of society had an influence on her thinking after writing this book.

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

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Posts in this series.

Existentialism And Ethics
Coping With Existentialist Ambiguity
More Responses To Existential Ambiguity

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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