Episode #107 - Transcript

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

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

So, even if you’re binge listening to this and you just got done listening to last episode, in the interest of painting a clear picture here, I think it’s important to do a quick recap of everything Simone de Beauvoir has said so far in The Ethics of Ambiguity. When you take an honest look at what it is to be a human, what you realize is that we all exist in a strange place between various dualities: subject and object, facticity and transcendence, individual and member of a group. To be a human being is to be all of these things simultaneously. Now, recognizing you’re in this state of ambiguity can sometimes be a bit confusing to people. It can cause tension because, fact is, we don’t like not being able to nail down exactly what we are at any given moment. And, if you look back at the history of philosophy and religion, Simone de Beauvoir says that what you’ll find is a long tradition of people in the business of trying to simplify what we are so that everything seems a little less ambiguous.

For example, “You, you are a citizen of a sovereign and benevolent nation. You signed a social contract at birth. Remember? Forget whatever your own individual desires are. You have a duty to uphold to this state in this life. And that comes first.” In other words, reducing one side of this duality, finding some rationalization, some way of looking at our place in the world that makes everything less ambiguous. Or, “You! You’re not a body. You are a stream of consciousness temporarily inhabiting that body. You can’t ultimately control anything that happens outside of you. Only thing you can really do is choose how you’re going to react to whatever happens to you. Learn to accept it.” Again, reducing one side of this duality, finding some rationalization that makes everything less ambiguous.

But this isn’t really what life is, right? No, to be a human being is to be both an individual with particular individual desires and a member of a state simultaneously. Being a human being is finding a balance within this state of ambiguity, between this duality. It’s coming to terms with where your allegiance to your individual desires ends and your obligation to the state begins or to the company you work for or to your bowling team, whatever. Being a human being is to exist in a constant state of ambiguity. And we can tell ourselves any one of these rational stories from history, bury our heads in the sand, but we’ll never actually escape that ambiguity in reality.

Now, why are we trying to escape it? Why are we trying so hard to come up with a story that gets us out of this state of ambiguity? Well, to Simone de Beauvoir it happened to us in childhood. We’re born into a world, into a situation where we don’t have to face the ambiguity of existence head on. Our parents shield us from it in the interest of letting us just play and be kids, all the while hammering into our heads things like, “Hey, mister. Listen. You got a lot to learn about the world if you want to be an adult like I am.” I mean, think about it. Whenever you have a problem as a kid, who do you go to? Your parents. And, magically, no matter what problem you have, they always have a solution. To a kid, parents seem to have this god-like level of wisdom and industrious ability. We start to view them like they’re gods. We start to see them as these completed beings that have harnessed the ultimate values of the universe.

But then something happens. As we reach the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood -- a pretty arbitrary place in life if you really think about it -- but what that crossroads is marking, really, is the moment you face the true ambiguity of the world: the existential weight of considering all of your freedom, all the different choices you have, all the different plates you have to keep spinning finding balance within these dualities; all the mystery, all the regret, all the responsibility you have for every single choice you make. We’re hit by the tsunami of that, and who could blame us for wanting to go back to the safe cocoon of childhood? Who could blame us for wanting to find a way to not actually consider all this stuff?

She lays out a scale of different strategies people use to deny this ambiguity of the world and their true state of freedom. The scale moves from least free to most free. First, we had the sub-man, who is a person that either rejects the fact they have this freedom or they become super apathetic about everything, telling themselves, like, “Well, nothing’s worth pursuing anyway.” Next we had the serious man, which makes up most people. This is any variation of removing the ambiguity by claiming to have found some ultimate cause or ultimate project that you’re going to be engaged in for the rest of your life. A little bit more free than that person was the nihilist, who recognizes the ambiguity of existence but then makes the mistake of thinking that because they’re never going to be one of these completed people everyone else is trying to be that nothing’s worth doing at all.

The next entry on the scale -- more free than the nihilist, still not totally free, but probably as free as you’re going to get without actually being free -- is what Simone de Beauvoir calls the adventurer. Now, the adventurer, without question, is Nietzsche and his whole way of looking at the world. Not a big fan of this part of Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir is not. If you remember, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche lays out the progression of the camel, the lion, and the child.

Real briefly, we’re all born camels: beasts of burden told where to go and loaded up with the baggage of all sorts of cultural expectations to adhere to. Eventually, we can shed that baggage to become a lion. We can say “No” to all the other ways people are doing things around us and recognize them for what they actually are, not the right way to do things but the way people happen to be doing things right now. This allows us to separate for ourselves the aspects of our culture that are useful versus the ones that are crippling us. All of this leading to a third level of existence that Nietzsche calls the child, where we start to resemble a child at play again. The same way a child on a playground just moves from one game to the next, present, enjoying each game for its own sake, we, being in this new place where we’re not being spoon fed what we should be doing with our lives by our culture, we create our own values, choose projects to work on that correspond with those values, and just move from one project to the next, enjoying them for their own sake, living a very self-fulfilling life.

This is a really good description of the adventurer. They recognize the ambiguity of the world, so they’re not the sub-man. They recognize the cultural traps you can fall into of believing in a prepackaged meaning to your life. So they’re not the serious man. And they recognize they’re free to create their own values, and they take action on them. So they’re not the nihilist. The problem with the adventurer, to Simone de Beauvoir, the problem with Nietzsche’s prescription is that it’s selfish. And, ultimately, when you’re living as the adventurer, Simone de Beauvoir thinks you’re never totally free.

Remember, to Simone de Beauvoir, the only way you can be truly free is not only by willing your own freedom but also willing the freedom of others. The adventurer is an easy trap to fall into because it’s just so close to being free. You recognize all the ways of denying your freedom. You’re willing your own freedom. But, when you choose the projects you’re engaging in based on the criteria, “Ah, this seems interesting to me. Let’s do it.” -- based on that criteria, you’re not necessarily willing the freedom of others. In fact, she points out how it’s within this sort of self-contained, only-willing-my-own-freedom sort of attitude that most tyrannies emerge.

See, the problem with what the adventurer’s doing is that, ultimately, they’re denying one side of one of these dualities that we exist between. And this is a good place to start making the case for why Simone de Beauvoir thinks true freedom requires the freedom of others. Never forget that you are simultaneously both that individual, with those personal projects that may be interesting to you, but also a member of society at large. What that means is that, as an adventurer, you carry out the projects that you’re interested in within a larger context that’s only made possible by the freedom of other people.

Tons of examples of this. First, and most fundamentally I guess, is that as a person born today you can’t help but be standing on the shoulders of giants at this point. What I mean is, the only way the adventurer is able to pick and choose between all those projects that are interesting to them is because they’re doing so in a world where people in the past willed their freedom. But it’s not only the past. So many of the options you have at your disposal in the present day are only made possible by a countless number of other people going to work every day, willing your freedom. It even goes into the future.

Look, a common attitude of the adventurer is to think of their life as this self-contained thing where I create my own meaning. I work on these projects that are meaningful to me. And, when I die, these projects die alongside me because, initially, when I set them up, they were only meaningful to me. But that’s not the case. Simone de Beauvoir would point out that, in a strange way, the end of your life is not when you die. As the great Marcus Aurelius says, what we do in this life echoes into eternity. That the effects of the projects that you choose to engage in when you’re alive live on long after your death.

Simone de Beauvoir talks about how when you will the freedom of others, as many have done before you to make your choices possible, it’s almost like when you have kids and a small piece of you lives on after you’re dead. Well, your freedom lives on long after you’re dead in this case. You’re planting the seeds of a world that’s going to allow the next generation of people to act freely. This ties into what we talked about last episode. In the same way there’s no ultimate project you’re going to do in your life where, once you’ve completed it, you’ve reached the end and that, instead of viewing the completion of these projects as ends in themselves, we should view them as a launching point for our next project; so too we should see other people as launching points for this next instantiation of freedom that’s going to exist. Maximizing their freedom should be a high priority for us.

Another point she makes about why the freedom of others is necessary for your own freedom is that so much of the meaning of our lives, so much of what we want out of life, can only be given to us by other people who are free. For example, let’s say what mattered most to you in your life was to be considered a great parent and a great basketball coach. Now, without the help of other people, it is impossible for you to ever be either of those things. No, you need a back seat full of other people to be a parent of and a whole basketball team of other people to be a coach of. Otherwise, the whole task is impossible. What Beauvoir says is that our lives and in turn our values are so close and connected to other people that it’s through relationships with other people that meaning’s disclosed to us at all. And they need to be free in order to do that.

For example, if what you wanted was to be loved and respected by your family, what gives their love and respect any meaning at all is their freedom to choose between alternatives. Right? Like, if you ran your house like you were the supreme leader of North Korea and you gave your family no choice but to love you -- you know, you lose your job one day, and they didn’t cry hard enough when you lost your job, so you lock them in the basement for three months. Or you tell them that you love them, and they didn’t fall on the ground, convulsing over the overwhelming love they have for you back. I mean, if you force them to act like they loved you, would you even feel loved there? Would them going through the motions mean anything to you? In other words, to feel loved and to bring about many other goals you may have in life requires willing the freedom of others.

Now, once you’re convinced of the point that willing the freedom of others is an essential part of what it is to be ethical, you’re still not out of the woods yet. Section one of part three of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir writes about a mistaken way of looking at the world that even people who are totally free are at risk of falling into. The name of this way of looking at the world, the title of section one, is “The Aesthetic Attitude.” The Aesthetic Attitude. Where she’s coming from is this. It has to do with the history of art in the world. Throughout the history of philosophy, a lot of people have talked about what the best way is to determine whether a piece of artwork is beautiful or not. Throughout the history of philosophy, there’s been this idea that to truly appreciate a work of art, to really judge the piece of artwork accurately, what you need to do is remove yourself of all biases and prejudices before you look at it.

For example, if you’re somebody that just hates bongo drums for some reason -- you know, you hate how they sound, hate how everyone playing them seems to be 20% happier than you are in your life -- if you despised bongo drums for some reason, there’s a lot of people throughout the history of philosophy that would say that you shouldn’t be reviewing an album that’s exclusively bongo drum music. Reason being, you’re going to bring tons of biases and prejudices to the table that are going to make you not objective. You’re not going to be fair to the bongos. Now, your job at this point as a critic of art is to adopt an aesthetic attitude. It’s an attitude where you separate yourself and your own feelings away from the judgment you have to make about whether the piece of art is beautiful or not.

Simone de Beauvoir would say that this is a massive error that thinkers have been making for a very long time, over a thousand years, and that, in reality, what it is to view a piece of art, or anything in the world for that matter, is to view it from a particular perspective. You can’t help but bring those biases and prejudices to the table that are based on your prior experiences. This whole delusion, that we’re somehow going to adopt this aesthetic attitude, we’re going to exit our bodies and look at this piece of artwork like we’re a newborn baby, no value judgments, I mean, it’s just that. It’s a delusion. We just can’t do that as people. We can’t remove ourselves of bias completely. It’s an integral part of how we make sense of anything at all. What we should be focusing on instead is being open and honest about the biases that we have so that we can have a real productive discussion about this piece of art that’s in front of us.

Now, what follows from this is that, over the years, people have taken this paradigm of the aesthetic attitude, and they’ve applied it to the way that they look at the world. This attitude, that all of us have no doubt heard at some point in our lives, is that, to truly understand what’s going on in the world and to commentate on it effectively, you can’t be in the thick of things. You can’t be super involved in what’s going on on the ground, or else you’re going to bring tons of biases to the table that are going to inhibit your ability to see it clearly. In other words, in the same way when you’re judging a piece of art you’re supposed to try to remove yourself as a part of that culture entirely, in this case you’re supposed to try to remove yourself from history entirely and then supposedly look at the world from this objective vantage point from the sidelines. But you’re not being objective. And, to Simone de Beauvoir, the people you should really be worried about are the people that are constantly telling you how objective they’re being.

“Oh, those guys over there, yeah, yeah, they have an agenda when they bring you the news. But us over here, well, we’re giving you both sides of the story. No need to look anywhere else.” No, the fact is, all of us approach the world from a particular perspective. We all look at the world through a very biased lens. And what we should be focusing on is being more self-aware of what biases we have so that we can understand how they’re shading the way we’re viewing things. The people with this aesthetic attitude that think of themselves as just spectators to history, just watching it, they talk about the world like they’re at a movie theater and they’re eating a bag of Sour Patch Kids. “Crazy times we’re living in, all this stuff happening. It’s going to be insane to watch it unfold, right?”

What they’re doing, whether they realize it or not, is detaching themselves from history as though they aren’t actively contributing to it right now. You know, it’s so common for people to think of history in this abstract way. “History is something that exists in history books. It’s this story that I read, and every day history is unfolding itself before my very eyes.” People say things like this. Simone de Beauvoir would say, yeah, like five seconds ago when you said that history is unfolding in front of you, that’s history now. That with every action you take or don’t take, you are actively contributing to that story of history that’s eventually going to be written down. I mean, in a sense, you are history unfolding. And that makes you at least partially responsible for whatever unfolds. You’re never actually separate from the world out there on the sidelines.

So, let’s talk about what actually unfolds in the world. Again, to be an ethical person is to will your own freedom and the freedom of others. But even if we lived in a world where everybody agreed on that synopsis, which we don’t, the reality is that not everyone in this world is going to be an ethical person. The world is not a utopia. There’s just going to be people out there that want to use other people, denying their subjectivity, denying that they are a being for itself, so that they can bring about some sort of selfish end that they have. Simone de Beauvoir has a name for this sort of tomfoolery. It’s called oppression. Because if your main pursuit in life is to will your own freedom and the freedom of others, the natural enemy that emerges for you in that worldview is oppression.

Let’s talk about what she means by oppression. She starts by talking about stoicism and a mistake that she thinks they made. You know, if you remember, stoicism emerged in the Hellenistic age following the death of Alexander the Great and all the political turmoil that came along with that. People found themselves living in a world of extreme volatility. I mean, they could have a different ruler that demanded allegiance to them twice in one week. They could be sold into slavery. A massive earthquake could level their town, not much of a government to help them. Stoicism responded to this by pointing out that you don’t have absolute control over the things that happen external to you. All you really have control over is your mind, the way that you frame your experience, the way you react to things. And the stoics lay out tons of great tactics to use if you want to cultivate that ability to accept how out of your control the external world ultimately is. Simone de Beauvoir would agree with like half of that. But she’d mark a distinction between the earthquake that leveled the person’s town and the guy riding into town on horseback demanding allegiance.

You know, there’s a reason we don’t get mad at natural disasters like earthquakes, right? I mean, Hurricane Katrina killed some like 1,800 people. Mount St. Helen’s, 1980, killed 60 people. And it’s horrifying and tragic, and people care about these things tremendously. But there’s no outrage, right? There’s no outrage that we’re being wronged by mother nature in some way. There’s this acceptance we have to have about the natural order of things. But something changes when it’s another person that’s ruining people’s lives. When a person reduces other human beings to just objects, to just fodder for whatever ends they want to bring about, that’s when things change from just an unfortunate obstacle in our way that we have to accept, like an earthquake, to a person or group oppressing another person or group, denying them of their subjectivity. And that tends to be when people get mad and feel emboldened to call for action.

She says, “One does not submit to a war or an occupation as he does to an earthquake: he must take sides for or against, and the foreign wills thereby become allied or hostile. It is this interdependence which explains why oppression is possible and why it is hateful. As we have seen, my freedom, in order to fulfill itself, requires that it emerge into an open future: it is other men who open the future to me, it is they who, setting up the world of tomorrow, define my future; but if, instead of allowing me to participate in this constructive movement, they oblige me to consume my transcendence in vain, if they keep me below the level which they have conquered and on the basis of which new conquests will be achieved, then they are cutting me off from the future, they are changing me into a thing.”

Bad people exist. Oppressor’s gonna oppress. It’s just the way of the world. And, unlike the earthquake where we can’t do anything about it, if you’re being oppressed, you shouldn’t sit around trying to frame it in a slightly different way that makes you feel better about it. You have an ethical obligation to will your freedom. If you’re on the outside and you see a group of people that’s actively being oppressed, you have an ethical obligation to will the freedom of others. But here’s the thing Simone de Beauvoir points out. The people doing the oppressing often realize that we have this tendency to accept unfortunate things that are just nature or the natural order of things. And, if you look back at history, many of the biggest instances of oppression have been people justifying whatever the status quo was, claiming that it’s just the natural order of things.

Take one of the actual examples of oppression that Simone de Beauvoir is referencing in this book: the Nazi occupation of France and, I guess, more generally, Hitler’s whole plan to take over the world. Look at their justification for that. “Oh, the Arians and Anglo-Saxons are the superior race!” In other words, “Sorry, it’s just the natural order of things that we’re better than you. It’s an unfortunate thing that all of us have to come to accept, not unlike a Hurricane Katrina.” Colonial Americans saying that the natural order of things is that blacks are inferior to whites. “It’s unfortunate, but let’s treat them accordingly.” Or women. For years it was said that naturally they’re just the weaker sex. “So, unfortunately, they’re going to have to stay home and cook hamburger helper rather than going out and exercising their right to transcendence.” All throughout history people who have been doing the oppressing have tried to sync up the group that they’re looking to oppress with some interpretation of the natural world that makes it not oppression anymore but just something we have to accept as a reality. Simone de Beauvoir would say that we should always be on the lookout for this kind of tactic being used.

Now, all of this discussion is leading to a bit of a paradox. I’m sure many of you out there already see it coming. The problem that’s emerging here, which she calls the antinomy of action, is that, if we have a moral obligation to will the freedom of others and our natural enemy in that cause becomes these oppressive people out there that are denying other people’s freedom for the sake of their own, in order to will the freedom of the oppressed, don’t we need to deny the freedom of the person or group that’s doing the oppressing? She says, yes, that fundamentally in order to get rid of an oppressor, you yourself must in a way become an oppressor. What follows from that is that because the reality of the world is that these oppressors aren’t often swayed by having a respectful debate with them -- “Hey! Knock it off with all that oppression stuff!” “Okay. I’m sorry.” It never works like that. And what follows from this is that sometimes in rare cases, to Simone de Beauvoir, violence is justified if it wills the freedom of others.

Now, if you end up reading The Ethics of Ambiguity, you can find all the criteria she lays out for when violence is justified. But the bigger, overall implication of this paradox is that it immediately underscores the stakes that we’re dealing with here and just how seriously we should be taking our behavior. Think of what you’re being asked to do here. You have to look at the world, identify some person or some group that are actively being oppressed, and then you have to take action. And, if the particular circumstances are extreme enough to warrant it, you have to be willing to commit violence or even kill an oppressor based on nothing but your own personal read on the situation. Simone de Beauvoir makes it very, very clear that this task you have ahead of you is not one to be taken lightly, that part of truly willing the freedom of others rather than just feeling like you’re willing the freedom of others is to have an exhaustive level of self-awareness, an exhaustive education on these issues that you’re dealing with; massive amounts of contemplation on the consequences of your actions, a deep, deep level of wisdom to really know what the consequences will be.

Because that’s the thing. Simone de Beauvoir says that we can never really know beyond a shadow of a doubt what the consequences of our actions will ultimately be. You may do something hasty with the intention of willing the freedom of others. And the consequences of that action may be that even more people are oppressed. And what comes along with that is an extremely heavy moral burden to the person that’s trying to will the freedom of others: a constant humility, accepting how ambiguous the world truly is; knowing that you’ve been mistaken countless times before and this very well may be another one of those times; whether you’re mistakenly willing the freedom of someone who wasn’t actually oppressed or whether you’re complicit in the oppression of a group and need to take action. The point here is that morality is not as simple as just having some sort of moral calculus you reference that gives you the perfectly moral thing to do whenever you have a dilemma. No, that’s a delusion of old philosophy. The world is nowhere near that simple. It’s ambiguous, you might say.

Simone de Beauvoir says to this point, “It will be said that these considerations remain quite abstract. What must be done, practically? Which action is good? Which is bad? To ask such a question is also to fall into a naïve abstraction. We don’t ask the physicist, ‘Which hypotheses are true?’ Nor the artist, ‘By what procedures does one produce a work whose beauty is guaranteed?’ The field of ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods.”

To truly be willing the freedom of others it’s not enough to just read a pamphlet or watch a documentary or listen to a radio program, take a college course, and then you’ve got it all figured out. Simone de Beauvoir warns against falling into the fallacy of the serious man once you’re on this quest to will the freedom of others. It’s so easy to hear some points that somebody made one day that resonate with you and then just spend the rest of your life reading thinkers that are in that immediate proximity that reinforce what you already think you know. No, we have to be vigilant. We have to understand that we have such an incentive to retreat from the true ambiguity of the world that, if you ever have something that you think you’ve totally figured out, be highly skeptical of that. Take another look at it.

Again, truly willing the freedom of others requires this radical self-awareness and honesty with ourselves. It even requires us to examine the actual methods we’re using to bring about the freedom of others and then consider whether or not we could be doing more towards the cause than we are right now. Kind of like we talked about on episode 85, that part of acting morally is not just avoiding the “Thou shalt nots.” Sometimes there are certain “Thou shalts” that we need to consider such as willing the freedom of others. And that part of doing that is examining our methods and asking ourselves if maybe there’s a more effective way we could be willing the freedom of others.

For example, if you looked out at the world, you did your due diligence, and you came to the conclusion that you wanted to will the freedom of the people that are actively being oppressed in North Korea. Let’s say you go to JOANN Fabrics on a Saturday; you make a sign, and for five hours you go into the middle of the street and wave it around and chant limericks about North Korea that you made up. Now, no matter how good your intentions were there, despite the fact that you just spent five hours trying to will the freedom of others, how many minds were actually changed by you doing that? How many people were emboldened to take action towards freeing the people of North Korea by virtue of you doing that? To Simone de Beauvoir, it’s not enough to just feel like we’re willing the freedom of others. Change is hard. Change is a campaign against competing interests. It takes work. It takes real sacrifice. But more than anything it takes a radical acceptance of the ethics that emerge when you realize the true extent of the ambiguity of this world we live in.

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