An acceptance of Pierre Bourdieu's structural scaffolding, the Habitus in which we confront the unwritten of our absorbed existence is rightfully useful. There within Bourdieu's scaffolding you'll find the 'situation' through which de Beauvoir's 'nothingness' becomes. In these shadows, you can if you're desperate enough, mandate or inspire new structural rules, but you can't force a human organism to thrive, and note the symbol thrive, under a scaffolding a human organism no longer regards as legitimate.
De Beauvoir herself, despite her antipathy toward elements of the Habitus - she had some very cruel and self centered things to say about La Belle France into which she was born - was able to thrive because the scaffolding of her Habitus and her capacity to navigate her situation allowed her to thrive.
Sartre's 'freedom' went this way : As a nothingness I am free regardless of the world I am born into. My consciousness is always radically unbound.
De Beauvoir's 'freedom' went this way : As a nothingness I am born into a structured situation, a 'habitus.' To will myself free in the situation I have found myself born into is to will others free because my freedom needs a world of free others "to act upon and disclose" which is a way of saying I need something like a permission structure in a Habitus that allows me to decide what I want to become. Hence "You aren't born a woman, you become one."
In her Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir put it this way: "Man can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men." She went on to write: "To will oneself free is also to will others free...."
And of course it had occurred to her that since the Bronze Age, female humans had been turned into objects by male humans.
"Where are we? I'm lost!"
De Beauvoir: Freedom needs an open future of choices, just having free will inside your head, like Sartre, is useless if your 'situation' offers no real possibilities. If a person is trapped in poverty, tyranny, or rigid social roles, their future is closed off. We need free others to give our actions meaning.
"Really?"
If everyone around you is reduced to a passive, subjugated instrument, your own freedom operates in a vacuum and it becomes meaningless.
"Really."
Oppression, de Beauvoir argued, is a mutual mutilation. To turn a free, conscious "subject" into an "object," the oppressor destroys the very thing that makes human society dynamic. By closing off the future of others, you shrink the richness of the world you yourself inhabit.
"You sound very woke!"
If the scaffolding isn't legitimated by the free choices of the people living inside it, it becomes an enforced cage - one that degrades the freedom of those running the cage, too.
