Simone de Beauvoir: a presiding spirit of our ambiguous project
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
- Albert Camus
As will be clear from anyone who has read through the posts on this blog, certain presiding spirits haunt our project. John Keats, Bob Dylan, Mark Fisher, John Winslade, Gerald Monk, Micheal White, Stewart Lee, Louis MacNiece are all high in our pantheon and are daily useful in thinking through the implications of our storied world. They are white, male, and mostly dead: we’ll return with what to do with this recognition another day. In itself, this list demonstrates how stories evolve, by selection, and both collaboratively and through accretion: some we brought independently to work we came to share, and pieces of these stories were selected to fit our meta-stories as we developed them; others we shared independently and forged a friendship over sharing those longstanding loves, they helped us select each other as collaborators; and others we have approached together, and found features of their work out of which to build our analytic framework. This dynamic, in which new stories build upon, contradict, and shift the meaning of existing stories, poet and critic T.S. Eliot described in his famous 1919 essay:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
- T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’,
Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1980:15)
As will also be clear to any regular readers, one of the most animating presiding spirits, at this stage of our development is Simone de Beauvoir and, in particular, her singular essay The Ethics of Ambiguity, linked to in its entirety. As an introduction, the discussion held on Partially Examined Life, concluded here, alongside—taking a very different tack—this Owls at Dawn episode, offer accessible and erudite wrestles with they essay’s content.
With its roots in a lecture de Beauvoir delivered in 1945, The Ethics of Ambiguity was first published in 1947, and is both dense and lucidly written. It closely followed both Sartre’s 1943 Being and Nothingness and his 1946 Existentialism is a Humanism which de Beauvoir edited and helped shape. Experientially, The Ethics of Ambiguity is shaped by de Beauvoir’s time in the French Resistance. Under the influence of both of these bodily and intellectual convulsions, her project is to find an ethical basis for existentialism that she has found lacking in Sartre, to repudiate the claim that existentialism is necessarily individualistic and solipsistic, and to justify action in the present in its own right, not as result of some personal nature, not contributory to some putative future, nor premised on a god, but as a disclosure of the same being in which Sartre had trafficked: our being as a lack of being, and so, our transcendent freedom.
So what, then, are the features of a narrative approach which find fertile connection with de Beauvoir’s ambiguity? Pushed to crystalise the three key productive features—those which make it possible to use narrative to make things happen in the world—of our approach, we would highlight:
antiessentialism - observing the operation of cultural stories, as things which proceed and shape our identities outside-in breeds a skepticism about an innate nature, a human nature, or an essence of anything or any one at all;
antirealism - a narrative toolkit to denaturalise claims of truth, systems of power and obligation, preferring to understand them as stories we tell and so only stories, rather than inherent truths about power;
choice-making - building on our non-essential selves, and the non-natural nature of existing power, narrative understandings lead us to recognise that we are always in the middle of a story, which can always be otherwise.
Although de Beauvoir does talk directly about stories (as quoted earlier here) it is not her philosophical focus in Ethics of Ambiguity. Storytelling was her artistic focus, and she always referred to herself as a novelist, rather than a philosopher. In the essay, these three narrative themes recur repeatedly, albeit framed in different language:
existentialism - the belief, after Sartre, that “existence precedes essence” - our being is a fundamental lack, a creative absence, one that exists so that we may act into it;
rebellion - an ethic to not only will ourselves free, but to will all people free, and a requirement that ethical action must, in accordance with the central existentialism, will being by willing a lack of being, so that willing freedom and willing being are interchangeable. This lead de Beauvoir to lend herself bodily to the fight against the all-too-natural seeming power of the Nazi occupation of France, and her politics to liberation struggles everywhere;
transcendence - the ethic that freedom is embodied in our ability to transcend our facticity, the brute and dead facts of our history, and build a new and surprising world here and now, in the moment of our freedom and our choice.
It is in the nature of narrative thought to be skeptical of such a pattern-finding impulse, but holding it loosely, it becomes fruitful to examine the set of stories outlined by de Beauvoir as traps which compellingly betray these understandings. While de Beauvoir recognised stories could, in their positing of beginnings, middles, and crucially endings model the narrative reality that “the present must die so that it may live […] it must assert itself as an absolute in its very finiteness; man fulfils himself within the transitory or not at all. He must regard his undertakings as finite and will them absolutely.” (2015:137) she also detailed identity stories—pretences that essence precedes existence—that she named ‘the serious’, ‘the adventurer’, ‘the nihilist’ and ‘the subman’ which could be tightly wound denials of our transcendent freedom. We will explore each of these, as stories, in our fifth episode.
The task of living becomes a triangulation between these stories, and de Beauvoir sets out a method which we recognise as experimental, in the spirit of living always within a story enables us to take proper care of our transcendent potential, and wield a will towards freedom in each storied moment. It is in this way, that de Beauvoir reconfirms our conviction that narrative means lead to radical ends, without conflating the interpersonal and the political:
For if it is true that the cause of freedom is the cause of each one, it is also true that the urgency of liberation is not the same for all; Marx has rightly said that it is only to the oppressed that it appears as immediately necessary. As for us, we do not believe in a literal necessity but in a moral exigency; the oppressed can fulfil his freedom as a man only in revolt, since the essential characteristic of the situation against which he is rebelling is precisely its prohibiting him from any positive development; it is only in social and political struggle that his transcendence passes beyond to the infinite.
- Simone de Beauvoir,
The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Philosophical Library, 2015:93-94)
We need not fall for the story that “the personal is political” to see that the interpersonal understanding of stories must be expanded, for it is by anti-narrative strategies that we will embody this understanding of “the cause of freedom” and can incorporate the struggle for freedom into our individual and collective lives. A narrative approach is a rebellious and struggling way of disclosing being… More soon.
