Hi everyone!
Today, we're talking about Simone de Beauvoir's concept of ambiguity.
I'll mostly be drawing on work that she develops in her book the
ethics of ambiguity, from 1947.
Simone de Beauvoir is an existentialist philosopher, and
she believes that existentialism is a philosophy of ambiguity.
Ambiguity is the human condition that we find ourselves in because
we are caught between our freedom, our subjectivity, our transcendence
on the one hand, and our facticity, our situatedness, on the other hand.
I am a subject for myself that I am an object for others.
And to be human means to have this dual condition.
The dual condition is what Beauvoir calls ambiguity.
She thinks that most philosophers have tried to flee ambiguity and
that this has meant that they've gone off into abstractions or idealisms.
They've artificially reduced and oversimplified the human condition.
But existentialism for her is the philosophy that encourages us to
actively assume or take up our ambiguity.
This means recognizing that we are freely projected toward an uncertain future.
That we can shape through our own projects and that we are also limited
that we are shaped in relation to others.
So I shape my future, but I'm also shaped by my past, by my present, by
my society, by the people around me, by things that are outside of my control,
by facets of my body or my personality.
Let's think a little bit more about what she means by freedom, which for her is
closely associated with transcendence.
Freedom for Beauvoir is a source of all values and justifications.
For Beauvoir, there is no ethics without human freedom.
We simply wouldn't need to negotiate questions of right and wrong
to try and figure out what the right course of action might be
if the course of action were already determined for us.
She says one does not offer an ethics to a God because God would already have
omniscience, omnipotence, and so on.
Instead, ethics is really the domain of negotiation that happens among
humans and within our own selves.
Right?
We're trying to figure out what the right course of action might be.
And that means recognizing that on the one hand, we are not totally unlimited.
Right?
We are situated.
We are facticity.
But then on the other hand, we are free, right?
These are the two sides of the same coin that constitute human ambiguity.
And so that dimension of freedom, I want to think about a little bit more.
As an existentialist, Beauvoir is in line with the view that freedom is
not a thing, a faculty, a capacity that humans possess in some sort
of set of psychological features.
Instead, freedom is nothing.
Freedom is the way that we hurdle towards an uncertain future.
Freedom is itself ,the groundless ground of justification of activity
of projects, but this original freedom that we have, this freedom that is
nothingness, Beauvoir suggests we need to convert into moral freedom.
We need to actively take up our own freedom.
To recognize it.
And this also means recognizing the freedom of others when we
don't recognize our freedom, we're in what Sartre calls bad faith.
Sartre and Beauvoir share a lot of these points in common, although they're
different in other ways, um, because they were life partners and shared their
philosophical works with each other, their philosophical ideas throughout their life.
For Beauvoir, freedom is an indefinite movement that always appears as
a movement of freeing or freedom appears as liberation or freeing.
And the situations that are preferred in Beauvoir's ethics are those that enable
freedom to self-actualize more and more.
The ones that allow for the indefinite movement of freedom.
So Beauvoir is against the idea that morality is a question of codes,
rules, or principles that we need to apply in a given situation.
But this doesn't mean that she thinks that all situations are morally equal.
The aim of ethics is to realize freedom.
This leads to our account of oppression in the ethics of ambiguity.
Oppression for Beauvoir is not a natural fact.
It's a specific form of human interaction where one human or one
group of humans denies the freedom of another human or group of people.
In denying another person's freedom.
One is denying their ambiguity because freedom is one of the
features of ambiguity, right?
This dual human condition of being both free and being situated.
The oppressor takes the oppressed to be entirely situated so much so
that they completely objectify the oppressed, failing to recognize
that their objectivity is only one facet of their humanity.
The oppressor prevents the oppressed from participating freely in their own futures.
And what often happens in situations of group oppression over a long period of
time is what Beauvoir calls mystification, borrowing a term from Marxian philosophy.
Mystification is the condition of being so oppressed that you don't
even realize that you have freedom.
You are attached, desirous of your own oppression, because you are trapped
in the false consciousness that the oppressor has instilled in you.
You believe that you are condemned to your condition.
This is what we see among women under the condition of patriarchy
in Beauvoir's view, something she discusses at length in the second sex.
The oppressor treats the oppressed as a thing.
The oppressed often ends up treating themselves as a thing as a result.
And this is actually always a temptation for any person.
According to Beauvoir, freedom is really scary for us.
And so we're tempted to flee our freedom by treating ourselves
as objects in the world.
Right?
It's easier for me to pretend that I don't have freedom than it is to actively
take up responsibility for my own future.
And so the oppressor trades on the temptation that we all as humans have
to treat ourselves as a thing, to deny our own freedom, and convinces
the oppressed that they are not free.
In doing so, the oppressor undercuts their own power,
however, because in order to be recognized as an oppressor, they need
to be recognized by a free subject.
Only a subject can recognize something else.
And so the oppressor is also caught in this denial of their own human ambiguity
by overlooking their own facticity.
And also by weirdly wanting to be recognized as an oppressor, which would
be an aspect of factical existence, by someone whose very subjectivity
and freedom they are denying.
In this sense, Beauvoir says in ethics of ambiguity that
oppression is self contradictory.
How does one overcome oppression, especially if the oppressed are often
caught in the trap of mystification, where they don't even realize
that they are being oppressed?
Beauvoir says that the first step is that the oppressed need to be faced with
their own freedom, ideally by others who are not oppressed, but obviously
it's not going to be the oppressors.
And once the oppressed are faced with their own freedom, They can
hopefully actively take it up.
This is sort of a classic moment of consciousness raising that we might
find in feminist or Marxist theory.
And in order then to transition from actively recognizing one's own
freedom when one is being oppressed to overthrowing the conditions of
oppression, one needs to temporarily
deny the freedom of the oppressor when needs to treat the oppressor as a thing,
one needs to deny the ambiguity of the oppressor, according to Beauvoir.
So she actually does think that violence against oppressors
is in some cases justified.
Now, one thing that happens is that the oppressors then say,
well, there you go oppressing me.
So there's a strange false equivalency on which the oppressors
trade by saying that they are now the ones who are being oppressed.
You might think about the common phrase that gets bandied about
today, which is that equality feels like oppression or the removal of
a privilege feels like oppression.
Beauvoir says that this is ultimately a ,dishonest point of view.
Now the oppressors, however, I mentioned that before, it does think that violence
is sometimes justified in the case of oppression, but she's not like,
okay, this needs to be a free for all.
Violence is something to resort to, she thinks, when there are not other options.
The goal is really to encourage a conversion
among the oppressors, where they are recognizing the freedom of the
oppressed, as well as recognizing their own human condition of ambiguity.
So we may temporarily have to deny the freedom of those who are denying
the freedom of others, but ultimately the goal is for there to be a
widespread recognition of freedom among the participants in society.
That would be the overcoming of oppression.
Ultimately, Beauvoir's ethics is oriented toward human freedom.
But this also means, as I said, that human freedom that exists
in relation to its situation.
That is the ambiguity side of it, right?
This is an ethics of ambiguity that Beauvoir is offering.
Now the closest we get to a sort of imperative in before his
existential ethics is her claim
that one must will oneself and others free, treating the other as a freedom.
This is a law of freedom, which she says has three parts.
The first part is to actively assume or freedom rather than fleeing.
The second part is to assume it by a positive and constructive movement.
Although freedom itself, as we said, is not a thing, a capacity that humans have,
it's not a quality of our being, but rather a nothingness, this nothingness
converts into something positive through the projects that we create
in the world, through the choices we make, we are all participating in
the creation of the human condition.
We all need to take action in order to create the world
that we would like to see.
And the third aspect is that we also need to assume freedom by a negative movement.
And this negative movement is the rejection of oppression
of both oneself and others.
Thanks so much for watching today!
I'd also love to shout out our podcast, which I co-host with my dear
friend, David Pena- Guzman, Overthink.
Highly recommend checking it out.
We talk about Beauvoir and a bunch of other existentialists frequently
on the show, and it's a fun, chill, conversational podcast that's
meant to be accessible for folks who haven't read these thinkers
that I discuss in my videos.
We have episodes on everything from existential anxiety to
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