Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism

1. Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism

2. What isEXISTENTIALISM? → n. a philosophical theory which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. "existentialism n."The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.Irvine Valley College.1 October 2006<http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t23.e19249>

3. What isEXISTENTIALISM? A loose title for various philosophies that emphasize certain common themes: the individual, the experience of choice, and the absence of rational understanding of the universe with a consequent dread or sense of absurdity in human life. The combination suggests an emotional tone or mood rather than a set of deductively related theses, and existentialism attained its zenith in Europe following the disenchantments of the Second World War. However, the first significant thinker to stress such themes was Kierkegaard, whose work is generally regarded as the origin of existentialism. Existentialist writing both reacts against the view that the universe is a closed, coherent, intelligible system, and finds the resulting contingency a cause for lamentation. In the face of an indifferent universe we are thrown back upon our own freedom. Acting authentically becomes acting in the light of the open space of possibilities that the world allows. Different writers who united in stressing the importance of these themes nevertheless developed very different ethical and metaphysical systems as a consequence. In Heidegger existentialism turns into scholastic ontology; in Sartre into a dramatic exploration of moments of choice and stress; in the theologians Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann it becomes a device for reinventing the relationships between people and God. Existentialism never took firm root outside continental Europe, and many philosophers have voiced mistrust of particular existentialist concerns, for example with being and non-being, or with the libertarian flavour of its analysis of free will. "existentialism"The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.Irvine Valley College.1 October 2006<http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t98.e866>

4. Western Philosophy’s Family Tree:

6. “Christianity is Plato for the masses.”-- Friedrich Nietzsche (BGE) In Christianity we have a specific, historical event (the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ) that becomes universal. After these “Christ events” Christians would (eventually) see Christianity as grounded in a universal revelation of the Absolute. All knowledge, morality, and everything that can be considered “real” becomes grounded in Christ. (And the Church, has Christ “earthly body,” became the authority for all epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics.)

7. It All Starts With God. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible . . . Everything God started in him and finds its purpose in him. Colossians 1:16 (Msg.) Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless. Bertrand Russell, atheist. It’s not about you. The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or your own happiness. It’s far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions. If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God. You were born by his purpose and for his purpose. . . . From the first page of the first chapter of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life.

9. This way of thinking--attempting to ground our ideas in universal, absolute, truth--is a key feature of Western Culture. It works pretty well when I want to know things about the physical world around me because that world seems to conform to “laws.” I might be justified in concluding that those laws were instituted by God (or not).

10. But what about me? On the one hand, I’m a physical object, too. I’m subject to the “laws” of nature as well. On the other hand, I seem to be “free.” I choose to buy a house in Oceanside, take a job at IVC, eat tuna for lunch, etc.

11. This freedom to choose could be experienced as what Kundera called, “lightness.” But could that “lightness” become unbearable? In the West, we tend to try to “add weight” to our choices, and thus to our lives, and thus to existence itself, by “grounding” those choices in something not (or less) contingent and (more) absolute. Obviously, for most people, God is the “Absolute” of choice, but one could choose a political ideology, a nation, a people, or . . . ? Whatever you put on the scale, you hope it’s heavier than you are, otherwise it won’t ground your choices and you will become like Stalin’s son; he put himself on one side of the scale and shit on the other . . . “and the scales did not move.” (He had become unbearably light.)

12. Since the fourth century “God” (conceived in a particular way), has served as this Absolute. In America, the God of Christianity still seems to be the best ‘Absolute’ out there, hence, the popularity of Rick Warren’s book. But suppose I start thinking about this. If the God of Christianity is true, and if truth is universal, shouldn’t reason be able to lead me to this truth?

13. Suppose I were to ask Rick Warren, “how do you know there is a God, what God is like, and what God’s purpose for the universe is?” He might answer: “The Bible reveals God to me.” But I might ask: “Why should I believe the Bible instead of the Qur’an, the Book of Mormon, the Rig Veda, or Catcher in the Rye?” This is where the rub comes in. There is no objective way to demonstrate that the Bible is the Word of God (and all those other books aren’t). This is part of the modern world. So, in the absence of some objective evidence for the Divine Authority of the Bible, a believer might respond with some kind of subjective evidence. But how could such subjective evidence ever be universally valid?

14. This is the problem of existentialism. Though the term is thrown around rather loosely sometimes, and though it would probably be wrong to claim that “existentialism” represents some kind of coherent “school” of thought, the people we tend to associate with existentialism tend to be people who have emerged from strong Judeo-Christian backgrounds (often they are/were personally very religious) and have experienced both some kind of crisis as a result of the tension they feel between the Absolute (or loss thereof) and the contingent (and the objective and the subjective), and they have experienced something that leads them to believe there is a way to get beyond this crisis by rejecting (typical) Western philosophy.

15. The Big Names in Existentialism

16. Pascal • 1623-1662 • Against Descartes • We never have an experience of God; God is always hidden. • “Pascal’s Wager” • “Custom is our Nature” • People who don’t want to face these problems tend to pursue Geometry or . . . Tennis

17. Kierkegaard • 1813-1855 (Pre-Darwin) • Anti-Hegel • Plato’s philosophy destroyed the authentic religion in Christianity • Emphasized Abraham’s “offering” of Isaac: ethics are private, not universal • “Leap of faith”

18. Nietzsche • 1844-1900 (post-Darwin) • Anti-Socrates, Kant, and pretty much everybody else • “God is dead” (and this is a traumatic event) • Europe is stuck in this old Platonic-Christian way of thinking • Anti-nihilist

19. Heidegger • 1889-1976 • Synthesized Kierkegaard and Nietzsche • 1927 Being and Time • Dasein (the being of humans) involves choice, awareness of future, reality of death.

20. Sartre • 1905-1980 • 1938 Nausea • 1943/1956 Being and Nothingness • being • no-thingness: “consciousness” • 1946 “No Exit” • Didn’t believe in “bourgeois marriage”--life-long relationship with Simone de Beauvoir

21. Simone de Beauvoir • 1908-1980 • Philosophy at Sorbonne • 1947 Ethics of Ambiguity • 1949 The Second Sex (myth of ‘the eternal feminin’) • Numerous novels, essays, memoirs, and books

22. How does de Beauvoir lay out the existential crises? How is it related to ethics?

23. I. Ambiguity and Freedom

24. SdB’s Version of the Problem (pp. 7-8) • The ambiguity: • rational animal/ thinking reed • 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.” • “unique subject amidst a universe of objects” • “an object for others” - - “an individual in the collectivity” • The philosophical response: • reduce mind to matter • reabsorb matter into mind • merge them within a single substance • the dualists establish hierarchy between body and soul (denied death, or denied life • tended to construct ethical systems by dissolving the ambiguity into pure inwardness or pure externality

25. Existentialism and Ethics • Been accused of solipsism • (And of not explaining the condition of many people, but SdB takes that on in the next chapter) • “From the very beginning . . . has to be his being.” (pp. 9-11) • According to Sartre, the passion to which man subjects himself is something he chooses and “finds no external justification.” (pp. 11-12) • Key SdB argument: p. 14: no suppression of instincts, etc., but also no “foreign absolute.”

26. Various Kinds of Ethics • Dostoyevsky: God. (pp. 15-16) • Kant: Transcend “empirical embodiment,” “choose to be universal” (p. 17) • Marx(ism): Needs of people, class, etc. define aims and goals (pp. 18-23) • Sartre (and SdB) (pp. 23-34)

27. What isEXISTENTIALISM? A loose title for various philosophies that emphasize certain common themes: the individual, the experience of choice, and the absence of rational understanding of the universe with a consequent dread or sense of absurdity in human life. The combination suggests an emotional tone or mood rather than a set of deductively related theses, and existentialism attained its zenith in Europe following the disenchantments of the Second World War. However, the first significant thinker to stress such themes was Kierkegaard, whose work is generally regarded as the origin of existentialism. Existentialist writing both reacts against the view that the universe is a closed, coherent, intelligible system, and finds the resulting contingency a cause for lamentation. In the face of an indifferent universe we are thrown back upon our own freedom. Acting authentically becomes acting in the light of the open space of possibilities that the world allows. Different writers who united in stressing the importance of these themes nevertheless developed very different ethical and metaphysical systems as a consequence. In Heidegger existentialism turns into scholastic ontology; in Sartre into a dramatic exploration of moments of choice and stress; in the theologians Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann it becomes a device for reinventing the relationships between people and God. Existentialism never took firm root outside continental Europe, and many philosophers have voiced mistrust of particular existentialist concerns, for example with being and non-being, or with the libertarian flavour of its analysis of free will. "existentialism"The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.Irvine Valley College.1 October 2006<http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t98.e866>