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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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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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