Episode #106 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is part two on Simone de Beauvoir. I hope you love the show today.

So, last episode we talked about Sartre’s idea that at the foundation of who we are there’s a constant tug-of-war that’s going on between what he calls our facticity and our transcendence: our facticity being the facts that are true about us at any given moment and our transcendence being the possibilities that we have at our disposal. Last episode, what followed from this, if you’re Sartre, is that people are made massively uncomfortable by this constant tug-of-war that’s going on, and we all tend to gravitate towards removing one side of the people pulling on the rope. We either want to ignore the facts that are true about us or the possibilities that we have so that one side will just fall into the mud pit already, and we can all stop pulling on this stupid rope. But, unfortunately, Sartre would say, the game never actually ends. Despite the fact you may view yourself as some sort of completed project, the reality is that through your actions you are constantly creating and recreating yourself in each passing moment. Every second that passes, you change in some small way. The reality is, we all exist in this place of tension, this tug-of-war that’s going on between two sides of a duality called our facticity and transcendence.

But Simone de Beauvoir’s going to take that one step further, the implications of which is the basis of her book The Ethics of Ambiguity. Just listen for a second to the very first paragraph of the book, and then we’ll talk about what she’s getting at.

“ ‘The continuous work of our life,’ says Montaigne, ‘is to build death.’ … Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. ‘Rational animal,’ ‘thinking reed,’ he escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as 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. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. 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 upon which he depends.”

Now, you can just hear in that passage, she’s describing what she’s later going to go on to call the ambiguity of human existence. Let’s talk about what she means by that. She’d say, sure, Sartre, at any given moment we are both facticity and transcendence. It’s a duality that we exist within. Like we talked about last episode, when you take an honest look at what it is to be me, I am what I am, but simultaneously I also am what I am not yet, in a weird way. And, if somebody asked you, so which one are you really? Are you the facts about who you are right now, or are you all the possibilities you’re bringing about? That’d be kind of a confusing question because the answer is, I’m both. Yes, people commonly fall into bad faith and try to remove one side of it, but the reality is, I am both facticity and transcendence simultaneously. And that reality creates a certain tension for me.

But Simone de Beauvoir would point out that, when you take a closer look at human existence, it starts to look like we’re not just engaged in a single game of tug-of-war that’s going on. It’s not just facticity and transcendence. We seem to be engaged in many different games of tug-of-war all at the same time. See, because, yes, I am both facticity and transcendence. But what else am I? Lots of things, she would say. For example, at any given moment I am simultaneously both a subject, navigating the world freely, and an object within other people’s subjective view of the world. So, what am I? Am I a subject or an object? What if I’m both of them simultaneously and that existing within that duality creates a certain level of tension for me? Another example, at any given moment I am both an individual person and a member of some collective group: family, nation-state, species, whatever. So, what am I? Am I an individual, or am I a member of a larger group? What if I’m both simultaneously and that existing within that duality creates a certain level of tension for me?

Mind and matter, self and other, the examples of these dualities that we exist between go on over the horizon. And Simone de Beauvoir would say that, when you look back at the history of philosophy and religion, so many of the ideas that have been laid out over the years have been people trying to reduce one side of these dualities so that we can simplify the world down into terms that are less ambiguous, to escape the true reality of the ambiguity of being a human in this world. Whether it was to think of the world as merely an earthly shadow of flawed forms, whether it was to think of ourselves as a mind perched up within a brain or a soul inhabiting a body or as a member of a state with a duty to fulfill to the state that transcends your individual desires, within each and every one of these and many more you can see what Simone de Beauvoir says is an attempt to oversimplify our human condition and escape the true ambiguity of existence.

The Ethics of Ambiguity are just filled with iconic quotes that are unforgettable. About this point she says, “At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadows certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they’d like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.” Just listen to that quote. “Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they’d like to entice us,” I mean, that’s just great writing. And shots fired at philosophers and theologians throughout history. Simone de Beauvoir’s saying, they start to look guilty of what your average person does when they fall into bad faith. How is what they’re doing any different than reducing one side of your facticity and transcendence to try to escape a state of tension? No, to be an honest human being is to be in a state of tension. It’s to be in a state of ambiguity.

Simone de Beauvoir’s saying, we feel the effects of this ambiguity, and our knee-jerk response throughout history has been to feel like something’s missing. She says we recognize a lack in ourselves -- important word there. We feel like something’s missing, and our strategy’s been that, if only we can come up with the right philosophical rationalization to make us feel like we understand the world perfectly, then the ambiguity’s going to go away. Then we’re going to be complete as people. We’re going to fill that lack. What Simone de Beauvoir is asking here is, what if we’re never meant to be completed as people? What if we’re never meant to fill that lack? And that no matter what story you decide to tell yourself to run from the ambiguity, what if it’s just not as simple as “I am purely a spirit,” or “I’m pure energy,” or “purely an American?” What if the world, what if being a human being is not black and white like that? What if it’s black, white, and grey simultaneously and that we purposefully look at it through a very small lens to make us feel like it’s more simple than it really is?

What would happen if somebody stopped running from this ambiguity and just embraced it? What would that person look like? Could he ever be happy living within that ambiguity? Is there any reasonable foundation we can have to decide how to best behave within that ambiguity? This is the task of The Ethics of Ambiguity. Now, if you’re going to be an existentialist writing an approach to ethics like Simone de Beauvoir is, there are going to be certain classic questions that arise that you’ll have to address at some point. One of them is that, if existence precedes essence, if it is the job of the individual to create their own values and meaning to life, how can anyone ever say that the values I arrive at are any less or more valid than anyone else’s? What I mean is, if someone arrived at a set of values that said, you know, raping and murdering people is a good thing, if I’m not appealing to some standard of good and evil behavior, if existence truly precedes essence, how can I ever say that that worldview is wrong?

Well, to begin answering this question, Simone de Beauvoir is going to cite a famous line that Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness. It’s the idea that “Man is condemned to be free.” Where she’s going with this is that, even if there’s no objective good and evil written into the universe, that doesn’t mean there’s not certain fundamental aspects about the human condition that we have to consider when navigating our lives. We are condemned to breathe. We are condemned to forge for food. We are condemned to turn read receipts off on our cell phones. But she’d say, more important than any of those things is that we are condemned to be free. We are condemned without our prior consent to a life where we have to be constantly making choices.

She points out how, even if you try to deny this reality, even if you just sit around and fall into bad faith and do nothing with your whole life, the choice to do nothing is still a choice you’re making. The fact that we’re condemned to freedom, the fact that we can make practically any choice we want is the very thing that allows us to create the meaning to our lives. In other words, this essence that we’re talking about ultimately relies on this more fundamental aspect of the human condition, that we are free. And, if you examine this freedom closely, she thinks that there are certain essences, like raping and murdering people, that are just flat out contradictory to arrive at. See, because the very idea of morality relies on the fact that people are free enough to choose between at least two different alternatives. Right? I mean, if somebody was truly powerless over acting in a particular way, the whole concept of morality evaporates.

For example, if you were down at the beach and you lost control of your skateboard; and it’s rolling towards the edge of the boardwalk about to go under the ocean, and you have a friend near the edge of the boardwalk. And they could easily put their foot out and stop the skateboard from going over, but let’s say they didn’t. Let’s say they look at you; they look at the skateboard, hands on their knees, smiling as they stare at the skateboard plummeting into the ocean. You might call their behavior into question there. Now, imagine the same situation, but this time you lost control of your 18-wheeler semi-truck. You’re probably not going to wonder why they didn’t dive in front of it like they’re superman. They were powerless. There was nothing they could do about it in that situation.

This is an example of how the whole idea of what we’re morally obligated to do is directly connected to the amount of freedom we have in a given situation. Or, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it, you don’t offer an ethics to a god. You don’t offer ethics to someone who thinks they can’t make mistakes or, on the other hand, somebody who thinks they’re so powerless they can’t make choices. Good news for us is, in actuality, we are neither of these things; people just tell themselves they are. And because this whole discussion of ethics and what we’re morally accountable for is ultimately contingent upon our level of freedom, it follows, to Simone de Beauvoir, that any serious discussion about what we’re morally accountable to do at the very least needs to begin from a place that maximizes that default state that we were born into, condemned to be free.

In other words, in the same way we shouldn’t deny one side of these dualities we exist between in an attempt to run from the ambiguity of existence, we shouldn’t deny that we are condemned to be free. No, we should recognize that the fundamental aspect of our being is that we are free, embrace it, and then move in the direction of behaviors that maximize that freedom rather than run from it. Now, the extension of this, and one of the highly unique aspects of her ethics we’re going to talk about next episode, is that to truly maximize your freedom, to Simone de Beauvoir, requires the maximization of the freedom of others. That, for many reasons, you can’t really be totally free unless if other people around you are totally free. Again, we’re going to talk all about it next episode because that’s the third and final part of The Ethics of Ambiguity. And what we’ve been talking about so far is what she lays out in part one. So what does that leave us with? Part two.

I guess I want to talk briefly about how this book is structured. Pretty brilliant what she does, and I didn’t really realize exactly what she was doing when I first read it years ago. But it’s worth mentioning. So, part one lays out this whole idea of the ambiguity of existence and the maximization of freedom. Part three lays out how we should actually be behaving in practice. And part two can sort of read like a tangential aside where she just wants to put certain people on blast for not being free enough. But the genius of what she’s doing in part two is that she foresees all the people coming along, reading her work, mistakenly thinking that they have it all figured out. She foresees people saying stuff like, “Oh, ambiguity? Oh, yeah, way ahead of you, Miss de Beauvoir, way ahead of you. Long ago I accepted the ambiguity of my existence. And even longer before that, when I was but a child, I realized how free I am. It sometimes gets a little lonely, you know, being so smart, being so much more free than everyone else around me.”

But this is what’s so awesome about part two. Simone de Beauvoir lays out like 12 different personality types of people that she sees all around her, personalities that you still see everywhere in today’s world, some very simple, some very nuanced, but all of which are examples of tactics people use to convince themselves they’re free when they actually could be much more free. Not only that though. When you look at these types of people she talks about, Simone de Beauvoir thinks that all these different approaches to looking at life are reactions to when we were children. They’re reactions to when we were first faced with the reality, the true freedom and responsibility that’s required of us in adulthood. We reacted in these ways.

She says, two things happen when we’re kids. One, we’re born, and we look at adults as these authoritative sources of information, people that have grasped the ultimate values in life. And we need to be more like them. We see them as these completed people, these people that have figure out what’s lacking, like we talked about before, and have completed themselves. But, again, what if in reality we never complete ourselves? What are they doing, then? The second thing that happens is that, throughout the entire time you’re a kid, you live in a state of never having to deal with the ambiguity of existence. Your parents protect you from that. And what you end up doing is just running around, playing, and being a kid. So, in other words, what Simone de Beauvoir’s saying is that, for the first 16 years of your life or so, you don’t even know about the ambiguity of existence. You don’t even know about this constant state of tension that life truly is.

There’s people that have emailed me recently and asked, why do you think we have such a tendency to gravitate towards bad faith as opposed to embracing our freedom? Well, how can you blame people? You’re smacked in the face by the cold, hard reality of the freedom and responsibility of being an adult. And, when you look around you at the role models you have at your disposal, they’re all people that claim to have this whole life thing figured out. They’re all people using one of these strategies she talks about, convincing themselves that they’ve completed themselves.

Now, kind of like Nietzsche and the whole camel, lion, and child progression he lays out in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Simone de Beauvoir structures all these different types of people in part two in a similar sort of way where there’s a progression. It’s a progression from the least free to the most free. Now, the least free person out there, the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of freedom is what Simone de Beauvoir calls the sub-man. The sub-man is that guy working at Subway making sandwiches all day. What a loser, says Simone de Beauvoir. Just kidding. Different kind of sub. Sub meaning below in this case, right? Simone de Beauvoir describes this as the kind of person that’s sort of apathetic about everything all the time. She says they feel “like nothing merits desire or effort,” that everything’s dull. Nothing’s really that impressive ever. They see things other people do. They shrug a lot. “Eh, okay.” Nothing really is worth their time.

Simone de Beauvoir says that what this is is a child that saw just how much freedom adulthood had in store for them. They saw the sheer number of possible projects they could work on throughout their life; they felt really uncomfortable considering that prospect. And then, in an attempt to ease their discomfort and return back to that safe, completely unambiguous cocoon of childhood, they sort of retreated and closed themself off from the world. People with a lot of different interests and a lot of capability are at a higher risk for becoming a sub-man. Reason being, because they look at all the possibilities and say, “Man, I could do anything. I could be a veterinarian. I could be a news anchor. I could be a scientist. Ah, man. You know what? Who cares about any of it? Forget it all.” They deny that there’s any sort of tension or lack within themselves that requires action, and they complete themselves by choosing nothing, de Beauvoir says. And the problem with somebody choosing nothing on a social level is that what they become are potential members of a mob. They become malleable fodder for whatever projects the other people are working on as long as those people can persuade the sub-men to be temporarily emboldened by whatever cause they give them to support. Sub-man’s often referred to as what people call a sheep.

The second rung on this ladder of types of people -- a little more free than the sub-man, but still deeply enslaved and running from the ambiguity of existence -- is what she calls the serious man. The serious man makes up probably around 70% of people. This is by far the most common tactic people use to remove themselves from ambiguity. The serious man is something familiar. It’s any version of somebody that denies their transcendence and turns themself into pure facticity for the sake of a cause. This is the child that faced the freedom of adulthood, and they’re all grown up now saying something like, “I am a lifelong democrat, and I’m always going to be a democrat. I have harnessed the ultimate values of life and completed myself, just like my parents did,” or, “I am an evangelical Christian. And I will be that until the day I die. I have discovered a set of absolute values about the world.”

Make no mistake, Simone de Beauvoir’s not saying that being any of these things is wrong. It’s your relationship to how you view the title. Do you live your life as though being a democrat or being a Christian is some sort of permanent and irreversible aspect of who you are? If so, then Simone de Beauvoir would say that you are a serious man trying to give yourself an essence and escape the true ambiguity of your life. And, if you look back at history, even just to the 20th century, you don’t got to look very long to see the bloodshed that often comes when people think they’ve harnessed an ultimate set of values. That’s what Simone de Beauvoir’s worried about here.

Now, another important rung on this ladder, a little higher up the ladder, is a response to the freedom of adulthood that’s a true classic at this point. We’ve all heard of this one before. I’m talking about nihilism. Quick recap of the ladder up until this point. The sub-man either doesn’t realize there’s a lack in their being or denies the whole idea of there being something lacking within them. The serious man acknowledges that there’s a lack and then believes a story about something that will complete him as a person. And the nihilist realizes there’s a lack and that nothing can complete them, so they ask themselves the question, “Why bother doing anything at all? Nothing has any meaning.”

Now, nihilism is a particularly dangerous place to be if you’re Simone de Beauvoir. And the reason why is because the nihilist is partially right. They’ve arrived at the truth when it comes to the ambiguity of existence, but they’re making a big assumption after arriving at that conclusion that blinds them from the fact that they aren’t seeing the whole truth about existence. And it’s dangerous because it’s a very easy trap to fall into and then convince yourself that you’re right, citing that piece of truth you’ve accessed as justification.

So, I want to read you a passage. It’s a passage out of The Ethics of Ambiguity where Simone de Beauvoir is talking about why the nihilist is wrong. You know, full disclosure, I have this passage hanging in the front room of my house. It’s one of my favorite passages of all time from existentialism. We’ll read it, and then we’ll talk about what she means by it.

“The nihilist attitude manifests a certain truth. In this attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition. But the mistake is that it defines man not as a positive existence of a lack, but as a lack at the heart of existence, whereas the truth is that existence is not a lack as such. And if freedom is experienced in this case in the form of rejection, it is not genuinely fulfilled. The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly. Instead of integrating death into life, he sees in it the only truth of the life which appears to him as a disguised death. However, there is life, and the nihilist knows that he is alive. That’s where his failure lies. He rejects existence without managing to eliminate it. He denies any meaning to his transcendence, and yet he transcends himself. The man who delights in freedom can find an ally in the nihilist because they contest the serious world together, but he also sees in him an enemy insofar as the nihilist is a systematic rejection of the world and man, and if this rejection ends up in a positive desire for destruction, it then establishes a tyranny which freedom must stand up against.”

So, I guess a good place to start unpacking that is to say that, if it weren’t for the nihilist being partially right and recognizing the true ambiguity of things, they would be no different than the serious man. Because just like the serious man who might say something like, you know, “Okay. I am a Mormon. And I possess certain ultimate values that are written into the cosmos. I am complete.” A nihilist is making the same kind of proclamation by saying, “There is no cosmically written meaning to my life. I am complete.” In other words, why are we both speaking on behalf of the universe, here? I mean, at least the Mormon believes in a god that gave them this information. What is the nihilist based on? The way it intuitively seems to me as a human being in this ambiguous world?

Look, I’m not saying this because there is some cosmically written meaning, necessarily. The point is, where did this expectation of the nihilist come from? A lot of people think it’s another one of those things we talked about last time. It’s an extension of generation after generation of people thinking of themselves as something born into a realm that doesn’t belong to them. This universe is private property. God built this place. He’s bestowed upon you the gift of life, and as long as you’re staying around here, there’s some chores he wants you to do. When the nihilist realizes that this way of thinking is a relic of a bygone era, they mistakenly assume that because there’s no God out there to confer a meaning onto them, that, therefore, there must be no meaning to anything that I do.

But what if that whole dream of being handed some prepackaged meaning to your life was never how it worked at all? What if that was an assumption? What is meaning anyway? It’s a human construct. It’s a word. What if the same way you have to choose a career and the same way you have to choose a life partner and these things take years of thought to fully realize, what if it’s your responsibility to choose a meaning to your life? What I’m saying is, what if there is a meaning to your life? And I’m not saying that like I’m some late-night pastor, alright? What Simone de Beauvoir would ask is that what if, when you make a grandiose proclamation like, “There’s no meaning to my life or anything that I ever do,” -- I mean, you just did it, like, right there. You just declared the meaning of your life to be, you’re going to sit around making proclamations about how nothing really matters on a cosmic level. Genius of you. And then you’re going to use that as justification to never take action on anything.

You can’t help but have a meaning to your life, to Simone de Beauvoir. It is created and recreated by your actions in each passing moment. The question is, what’s the meaning of your life going to be? To sit around on the couch doing nothing or to transcend, to get out of that job that sucks the life out of you or to travel the world or to help maximize the freedom of others. To leave the house, at least, you know? “My meaning is to feel the fires of hell on my skin as sunlight hits it for the first time in eight months.” What is your meaning going to be?

Next time we’ll talk more about these rungs of the ladder, more of these types of ways children respond to the startling level of freedom and responsibility required in adulthood as well as the importance of maximizing the freedom of others, why we can never be truly free unless if others are free around us, and the wisdom that lies in living a life in the service of others. You know, whenever I read this book, whenever I read part three in particular of The Ethics of Ambiguity and I start getting all excited about the importance of finding a way to serve others in this miserable existence, it always brings me back to, ironically, another quote that I have on my wall by Rabindranath Tagore where he points out the importance of serving others in your life. And I’ll leave you today with it. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.