Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism

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Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism
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What is EXISTENTIALISM?
? 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  lthttp//www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.
html?subviewMainentryt23.e19249gt
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What is EXISTENTIALISM?
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  lthttp//www.oxfordrefere
nce.com/views/ENTRY.html?subviewMainentryt98.e8
66gt
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Western Philosophys Family Tree
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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.)
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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 116
(Msg.) Unless you assume a God, the question of
lifes purpose is meaningless. Bertrand Russell,
atheist. Its not about you. The purpose of
your life is far greater than your own personal
fulfillment, your peace of mind, or your own
happiness. Its 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 Warrens The Purpose Driven Life.
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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).
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But what about me? On the one hand, Im a
physical object, too. Im 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.
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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 its heavier than you are,
otherwise it wont ground your choices and you
will become like Stalins 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.)
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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 Warrens book. But suppose I
start thinking about this. If the God of
Christianity is true, and if truth is universal,
shouldnt reason be able to lead me to this truth?
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Suppose I were to ask Rick Warren, how do you
know there is a God, what God is like, and what
Gods 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 Quran, 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 arent). 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?
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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.
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The Big Names in Existentialism
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Pascal

• 1623-1662
• Against Descartes
• We never have an experience of God God is always
  hidden.
• Pascals Wager
• Custom is our Nature
• People who dont want to face these problems tend
  to pursue Geometry or . . . Tennis

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Kierkegaard

• 1813-1855 (Pre-Darwin)
• Anti-Hegel
• Platos philosophy destroyed the authentic
  religion in Christianity
• Emphasized Abrahams offering of Isaac ethics
  are private, not universal
• Leap of faith

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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

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Heidegger

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

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Sartre

• 1905-1980
• 1938 Nausea
• 1943/1956 Being and Nothingness
• being
• no-thingness consciousness
• 1946 No Exit
• Didnt believe in bourgeois marriage--life-long
  relationship with Simone de Beauvoir

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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

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How does de Beauvoir lay out the existential
crises? How is it related to ethics?
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I. Ambiguity and Freedom
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SdBs 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

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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.

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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)

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What is EXISTENTIALISM?
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  lthttp//www.oxfordrefere
nce.com/views/ENTRY.html?subviewMainentryt98.e8
66gt