Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex

The lecture begins by revisiting Hannah Arendt's concept of totalitarianism, emphasizing the loss of subjectivity in both victims and executioners. Arendt's shift from "radical evil" to "the banality of evil" after the Eichmann trial highlights that Eichmann's greatest crime was his failure to think, which is intrinsically linked to the loss of subjectivity. To be a subject, as Descartes posited with "Cogito, ergo sum," means to think. Without thought, one becomes an object. Thinking is arduous, involving anguish and difficult choices, as seen in Sartre's "bad faith" or Heidegger's "they-self" (das Man-selbst), where individuals conform rather than embracing authentic existence. The burden of subjectivity, the work involved in thinking and making choices, is a central theme that carries into the discussion of Simone de Beauvoir.

Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Ambition and Thought

Simone de Beauvoir, a pivotal 20th-century figure, came from an upper-class Catholic family in Paris. Her father's financial ruin during World War I significantly altered her life, eliminating the possibility of a dowry and opening up new paths. A precocious child, she questioned authority and religion, eventually losing her faith as a teenager. This early experience of religious upbringing followed by a dramatic loss of faith shaped her lifelong commitment to atheism, yet she retained the idea of transcendence—a striving for a "beyond" or a "higher state."

In 1929, at 21, she met Jean-Paul Sartre. Their intellectual and personal relationship was profound. De Beauvoir described Sartre as her "dream companion," a "double" who elevated her aspirations. Both shared an obsession with writing as an existential question. They were part of a vibrant intellectual circle that included figures like Albert Camus, Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Alexandre Kojeve, whose works were in constant dialogue. Though Sartre proposed marriage in 1931, de Beauvoir declined, and they maintained an open but committed relationship, often involving ménage à trois, for the rest of their lives.

The Influence of Alexandre Kojeve and the Master-Slave Dialectic

Alexandre Kojeve, a Russian-born philosopher, was a central intellectual influence on de Beauvoir and Sartre. He was one of four Russian-speaking philosophers crucial in translating German phenomenology into a French context. Kojeve's obsessive reading and rereading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly the master-slave dialectic, profoundly shaped French existentialism and, specifically, de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.

Kojeve, influenced by Heidegger, argued that the world is never independent of Dasein (human existence). He replaced "nature" and "the world" with "le donné" (the given), a Husserlian concept referring to what is presented to consciousness. This "given" is always an interaction, where humans both shape and are shaped by the world. Kojeve blended this with Hegel's idea of negation, where "man is negation of the given," constantly overcoming and transforming what is presented. This space of "nothingness" or negation is crucial for creative existence and freedom. As Sartre would echo, without this nothingness, there is no freedom. Kojeve stated, "man is thus nicht-sein, man is not being, a man is nothing," and this nothingness is the space for freedom, historicity, and individuality.

Post-War Engagement and "The Ethics of Ambiguity"

In the post-war years, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and others founded the journal Les Temps Modernes. Sartre's essay on littérature engagée (engaged literature) in the first issue emphasized the philosopher's role in taking a political stance. This concept of engagement was rooted in the experiences of Nazi occupation, French collaboration, and the distant specter of Stalinism. While Sartre and de Beauvoir initially sympathized with the Soviet Union, this stance led to significant intellectual breaks, notably with Raymond Aron and Albert Camus.

De Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) articulated her existentialist ethics, focusing on avoiding "bad faith" – the temptation to flee from one's freedom and the burden of subjectivity. She engaged with Hegel and Marx, appreciating Marx's critique of society but rejecting his determinism, seeking a space for human agency within Marxist thought. From Heidegger, she adopted the notion of accepting human finitude and mortality as the context for decision-making. Ethics, for de Beauvoir, "presupposes failure" because life involves moral dilemmas with no easy or innocent choices. She believed that the "lack" or "negativity" allows for the creation of positivity, and that human existence itself creates values. Her concept of transcendence, inherited from her religious childhood, became the acceptance of freedom and responsibility in this life, not an afterlife. This manifesto celebrates freedom despite its angst and burdens, asserting that "to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one in the same decision." She emphasized that individuals decide "on the basis of what he has been... what he wants to be," acknowledging the interplay between facticity (our given situation) and transcendence. Her famous slogan, "Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity," encapsulates this idea.

"The Second Sex": A Revolutionary Text

The Second Sex, published in 1949, was initially serialized in Les Temps Modernes. This book had revolutionary political implications and profoundly influenced generations, changing perceptions of gender relations, women, sex, and marriage.

De Beauvoir's approach is phenomenological, starting with the body and its lived experience. Her critique is not against men but against patriarchal domination and oppressive institutions. She values sexuality, passion, and eroticism but expresses a visceral distaste for pregnancy and maternity, viewing them as a "curse of reproduction."

The core of The Second Sex is about achieving subjectivity, drawing heavily on the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. She asks how women, often treated as objects, can achieve subjectivity when men are the "masters." She argues that women also bear responsibility for not living in bad faith and for claiming their subjectivity rather than remaining objects. Freedom is her highest value.

She begins by asking, "What is a woman?" and notes that the very question implies a preliminary understanding, echoing Heidegger's hermeneutic circle. De Beauvoir observes that women are always defined in relation to men, who are considered the "absolute type" or default human. "Man is normative, woman is somehow derivative or deficient." "He is the subject, he is the absolute, she is the other."

This concept of "the other" is fundamental to human thought. De Beauvoir draws parallels between the experience of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust, Black Americans in the US (an insight gained during her trips to America), and women in relation to men. However, she distinguishes the male-female relationship due to its "primordial mitsein" (being-with) and the biological fact of sexual difference, particularly a woman's vulnerability to pregnancy, which she sees as an irreducible difference not reducible to cultural constructs.

De Beauvoir critiques both Marxism and psychoanalysis as insufficient for fully understanding women's situation. While appreciating Marx's vision of a democratic society without "the other," she finds his reduction of everything to socioeconomic relations too simplistic. She argues that womanhood cannot be reduced to economic relations, nor can the oppression of women be solely attributed to private property. She also criticizes Marxism for ignoring sexuality, which she sees as a realm of freedom.

Similarly, she finds Freud's psychoanalysis too deterministic, rejecting existential choice in favor of hardwired drives and unconscious repression. While acknowledging the importance of sexuality, she believes it cannot be reduced to it, and questions the "value generally given to the penis." She argues that the "subject's tendency towards alienation" and the "anxiety of his freedom" lead to a search for self in external things, a flight from self. Women, she contends, are constantly tempted by this alienation, torn between the desire for freedom and the ease of falling into the role of object.

De Beauvoir uses the concepts of immanence (connected to facticity) and transcendence. She questions whether women can break free from their given situation to transform the world and achieve transcendence. She criticizes women for often living in bad faith, failing to demand their freedom and transcendence, and succumbing to the "temptation to forego liberty."

She does not believe that equality means sameness or the abolition of eroticism, nor does it erase differences between men and women. She advocates for reciprocity and argues that women, by remaining in an object-like state, also imprison men. "All oppression creates a state of war." She envisions a future where women, by claiming their transcendence, liberate men as well. Men, consumed by the need to appear dominant, are "hostile to women because he's afraid of them." Their liberation would come with women's liberation, but this is precisely what men fear due to the temptation to flee from their own subjectivity.

The Second Sex ends not with Hegelian reconciliation but with an optimistic possibility: if individuals embrace their subjectivity and demand the right to transcendence, a reciprocal freedom and subjectivity can emerge, where free, autonomous subjects acknowledge one another with desire. De Beauvoir concludes that the abolition of "the slavery of half of humanity" would reveal the authentic meaning of human division.

For de Beauvoir, freedom is paramount—the freedom to claim one's subjectivity, the responsibility to uphold it, and the generosity it entails. This is not a zero-sum game. She echoes the Polish insurrectionary slogan, "za wolnosc nasza i wasza" ("for our freedom and yours"), asserting that claiming one's freedom can lead to freedom for all.