Beauvoir's Situation

Boots and Socks

  Beauvoir's views on object and subject explored in her book Ethics of Ambiguity, addresses an understanding that "You cannot manifest freedom in a vacuum." My freedom requires your freedom. You can't just say "hell is other people" because other people mess with your theory. Schopenhauer might have agreed with Sartre on the "other people" issue, Beauvoir did not.

 Those who avoid wallowing in the extreme irony of sociopathy and retain a fondness for ethics, moral principles and good human conduct, might enjoy Beauvoir's : "To will oneself free is also to will others free." We can think about that as we look to understand the world Beauvoir preferred to live in. 

 In Ethics of Ambiguity, creating the "Me" is inherently political and collective. You build your "Me" through your concrete actions in the public square, and your primary moral duty is to tear down the physical, economic, and political structures that prevent others from building their "Me." Freedom isn't an abstract feeling inside your head, it's the physical space you fight to clear so that every human being has the bread, the dignity, and the air to decide who they want to become.

 She had her archetypes, her villains, her "other people," her crew of inauthentic. They included:

 The Apathetic. They live in a state of dull inertia, letting society, habit, or routine make every decision for them. They fear passion, fear commitment, and live like a houseplant.

The Serious Man. Claims to care deeply about morality, but they surrender themselves to an external Cause, an Organization, a Party, or a God. They say things like "The doctrine is absolute. I am just a humble servant." By pretending the "Cause" is an objective truth, they feel justified in crushing anyone who opposes it.

The third type, Beauvoir referred to as Nihilists.  I think we can consider Beauvoir's Nihilist as the person who knows the Serious Man is full of crap, but has decided that nothing is objectively true, nothing matters! Everything is permitted! It's a cynical and destructive nihilism, an Existential Nihilism rather than an Epistemological Nihilism.

 Her fourth archetype, she called The Adventurer. The Adventurer loves their own freedom and lives wildly, taking risks, pursuing passions, and exploring the world, but doesn't care about anyone else's freedom. They treat other people as mere scenery or obstacles in their personal game. A cad and bounder. A spittoon next to an altar, as they say. 

 For Sartre without a pre-ordained "Me," you are radically free to become your own "Me" in a world that is simultaneously material and idea, object and subject. Now if your existence precedes your essence and if you are radically free to be a "Me" your "Me" has no excuse for your Bad Faith choices

 Sartre treated the emergence of "essence" as a solo flight into empty space. Beauvoir saw that emergence as a human life lived on solid ground among other people. For her, essence is not something you invent in a vacuum, it is a slow, concrete sediment built up through your choices in dialogue with the world, your body, and the choices of others.

 Beauvoir agreed that there is no divine blueprint or fixed "nature" waiting inside us when we enter the world. But her point was that even without a fixed nature, you never exist as a blank slate. No!  You exist in a Situation.

Breakfast with Simone and Jean-Paul

Young Turkey

 Let's look at existence as it was between Sartre and Beauvoir who shared a long intimate relationship with each other. The Sartre in question is Jean-Paul Sartre, a man presented as a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, and is considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. The Beauvoir is Simone de Beauvoir a woman presented as a writer, social theorist, and feminist activist, who didn't consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered a philosopher at the time of her death, yet her influence on Feminist Existentialism and Feminist Theory is considered dramatic.

 For those who might be concerned about this and that, or find it difficult to breath without titles, a philosopher, is either a Professional Confuser, a Question Machine, or according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a thinker, scholar, or seeker of wisdom who studies fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, ethics, and reason.

 One of Beauvoir's many books, is Second Sex which was published in 1949 and was soon banned by the Vatican. In the book Beauvoir asked "What is Woman?"

 Her answer, in mid twentieth century society, Men were considered the default, Women were considered the other. She argued that the great defeat of woman occured in the Bronze age with the emergence of private property which resulted in woman becoming riveted to their body, like an animal and made it possible for men to dominate both her and nature. Beauvoir followed the Ancient Greek idea that men succeed in the world by transcendence, immanence is the lot of women. She added the twist that "One is not born, rather one becomes a woman." And yes her writing style was very precise. 

 Immanence for Beauvoir meant existing within the boundries of an object, a cup, a mind, a body, nature. There was no way out, no transcending motherhood for girls. Her point, the family and patrimony oppresses women. Yes indeed Simone de Beauvoir was one of the few who believed that of women this side of the Bronze Age only Saint Teresa of Avila lived her life for herself.

 What did Beauvoir think of her long time male friend who was scared of lobsters, a condition exacerpated by his one time, 1935, experiment with that favorite of the early beatnik aesthetic, Mescaline. How did she manage his understanding of Freedom, how did she react to his approach to a theory of emotions which suggested that emotions were basically feeble bad faith reactions that resulted from chosing not to be free.

 Well these were the cool people, the van guard of the future, who understood irony, never delivered milk, mail or worked in a coal mine. For them Mescaline was an experiment with the mind in an attempt to get closer to creative, not a chance to forget until Monday morning.

Simone wanted to show how men had historically built a culture that claimed, Reason, Logic, and Action for themselves. This was their Ego, they were the Subject of Reason, Logic and Action.. In the process, as Simone understood it, they dumped Emotion, Passivity, and the Body onto women. To men, Beauvoir was inclined to think, Women were the Shadow, they were the Object of Emotion, Passivity and the Body, an immanence they were unable to transcend because, you know, they gave men sons.

 At the breakfast table the Patriachal division of existence went this way for Simone. The Male was reason, action, mind. He was The Subject. The female was emotion, passivity, body. She was the Subjugated Other.

 When men labeled women as overly emotional or hysterical, Beauvoir reckoned  they were doing exactly what Sartre called Bad Faith. Men were running away from their own bodily, emotional vulnerabilities, because they'd dumped those weakness onto woman.

 For Jean-Paul emotions were a magic trick, they were chosen by consciousness to avoid difficult realities, they were malaise foi big time. For Simone, there was no magic trick, emotions were "genuine, embodied responses to real world vulnerabilities and situations."

 For Jean-Paul, other people were a threat to his freedom. "Hell," he claimed, "Is other people." Simone thought that just silly.  For Simone, the condition of her freedom was my freedom. Her freedom required the freedom of others.

 For Jean-Paul the body was a fact. It was a facticity, it was something to transcend though choice. For Simone, we people lived through our physical, emotional and everything else body. It was the anchor. Go ahead, transcend appendicitis while you eat your crusty baguette and complain about your coffee being too hot!

 Sartre saw us people as possesing a radical, lonely freedom, we had no moral guide to tell us what to do. For Simone that was a bunch of quaint pipe smoking and sometimes cute nonsense. She saw action in solidarity, people helping people. Freedom was only authentic when it worked to liberate others. Anything else and what was the point, go live in a mountain, be a Pallas's Cat.

 Those breakfasts must have been fun to witness

Das Man, Authentic, Inauthentic, Bad Faith.

Fruitfly Season

 The Daimōn of the Ancients is Jung's Shadow. Jung's Persona, a person's outward presentation, is Heidegger's Das Man. For Jung, Sartre's Bad Faith, his beautiful expression mauvaise foi, is the ego denying the shadow, or attempting to deny the shadow a voice role in the public square. Jung's Individuation, is an often heated negotiation between the control freak that is Ego who wants a persona that makes no ripples and the "what about me's" of the often disruptive Minority interests of the Shadow.

 Inauthenticity and Bad Faith are the Ego’s attempt to live a half-life, holding up a polite, sterile mask, aligator skin shoes and a bowtie, while pretending the dark cellar beneath the house doesn't exist.

 Authenticity and Individuation require an act of bravery. The Ego stepping out of the crowd, listening to the uncomfortable, disruption of the Daimōn, going down into the cellar to shake hands with the Shadow, and owning the total, messy, finite reality of one's existence.

 With straight faces Sartre and Heidegger acknowledge the existential demands of freedom and honesty. Jung in his turn gives us the internal map of the territory we have to traverse to achieve freedom and honesty.

 But all is not well in this world of clever boys pontificating on this existence of Das Man. Men do that to girls, mother life, the womb of all things and then men claim credit because men have the larger Adam's Apple and like girls we have twenty four ribs. 

 We've talked about Arendt and Heidegger. How her Martin left her to rot in the stew of his own authenticity. Tomorrow we'll look at Sartre's reaction to a mescaline trip and at Sartre's Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote her book the Second Sex, in it she took apart her Jean-Paul's ice cold approach to a theory of emotions, and, by so doing took the Daimōn out of the interstitial spaces through her understanding of emotion, passivity and the body. 

God, Man, Captains, Heidegger and Sartre.

Goldenrod

 "I do suspect that material plenty is an incorrect answer to a question that was asked generations ago." And why? We people tried to answer an existential question with an industrial material answer. Sartre's ego-less consciousness, a sailing ship at sea looking for the wind. Sartre's consciousness, his 'Being-For-Itself,' is a Nothingness which catches the breeze of a choice, a project, or a commitment.

 A material answer to For-Itself leaves nothing but "more" in its wake until it becomes the absurdity of "Let's go to Mars." At the other extreme "There's paradise after death for the dutiful in a world beyond the heavens." This doesn't feed the children or protect the playground from Leopards.

 We were going to talk about Sartre's clash between "Being-For-Itself" and "Being-In-Itself."

 Being-in-itself. The Being of inanimate objects. Solid, fixed, mindless object, it's identical with itself, it has no freedom. It just is.

 Being-for-itself. The Being of human consciousness. It's not a solid object, it is an empty gap, a Nothingness. And because it has no fixed essence, it is pure freedom, constantly projecting itself into the future.

 For Sartre, his "Being-in-the-world" means a being For-itself, a free, hovering consciousness, dropped into a sea of concrete "Being-In-itself" where "Being-For-Itself" is forced to make sense of it all without a safety net.

 Our problem as sentient creatures is who trims the sails, who decides and why.  As for the sapient let them smoke weed, until then Sartre had his idea of "Project" and Heidegger had his idea of "Resolutness."

 Meanwhile, long before Plato the ancients had their Daimōn. Not quite a god, not quite a man. A Priestess once told Socrates that Love was a Great Daimōn, a divine something, a divine what, no one really knew. When Zarathustra went for his Ahura Mazda, to put an end to the quarreling he wanted one source of Wisdom, but far too many minds had wanted to keep their Daimōn, their neither God nor Man, an Aedicule, not good not bad, yet understanding and friendly, fun to be around. Christians, weren't that fond of the semi divine, saw the Daimōn by any other name as a devilish. The Virgin Mary, she's still thought of as an understanding of Daimōn, and she was for Christian Priests, of course different, no devil there.

 In the sailing ship terms and where was the captain if not in the interstitial places between God and man, here's Heidegger and Sartre:

 Heidegger’s Resoluteness.  Heidegger heard the call of his horizon, his captain recognized giveness, the exact build of his wooden ship, he read the specific tides and stars of the waters he was born into, accepting that the ship would eventually sink, he took the wheel with total, quiet authority.

 Sartre’s Fundamental Project. Sartre launched his ship into empty spaces, his captain realized the ship has no assigned destination on any map, picking a point on the horizon purely because he decided to, and catching the wind to sail toward it, knowing full well he could turn the wheel hard west tomorrow if he chooses.

 Called by history. Making sense of nothingness. Interstitial devious Devils. Take your pick