Episode 141: Beauvoir’s Existentialism: Moral and Political Dilemmas

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 141 is something like, how does recognition of our freedom affect what we should do ethically and politically? And we're continuing our discussion of Simone de Beauvoir's the Ethics of ambiguity from 1947, this time covering part three, the positive aspect of ambiguity. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@harshlyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, rationalistically optimistic in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Seth: This is Seth Paskin having abandoned his past to the night of facticity in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Wes: This is Wes Alwan making the means justify the ends in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:55 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey choosing between contingent absurdity and rationalistic necessity in Middleton, Wisconsin, last time.

1:03 Mark: And folks should listen to the previous episode before this, because we're really just going to continue where we left off with that. But we laid out Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist take on the ambiguity of existence. You know, are we things in the world yet we are free? And freedom was supposed to have the implication that not only do we will our own freedom, but if we're doing it self consistently, we're willing other people's freedom as well. And so that's sort of the starting point for all of this. We've talked a lot about in other episodes, the existentialist sort of creative idea of morality that maybe Nietzsche came up with, that we create our own values.

There's nothing external, there's nothing written in the sky that we can just point at and say, oh, that's what I'm supposed to do. No, we have more responsibility than that. What does that mean politically? How do we then? Because when we talked about Nietzsche and other folks like that, it seemed hard for us. You know, Nietzsche himself seemed to just shy away from the political. So Simone de Beauvoir does not.

2:06 Wes: Just to touch on the previous episode, the question of the first part was really how an existentialist ethics can actually be an ethics if there's no external standard of right and wrong. And her reply is that actually such external standards make ethics impossible. If we have some absolute external standard, we can lose our subjectivity in that we can cease to be subjects by having this idea that we can fill ourselves by reaching those ends. Being ethical requires maintaining subjectivity, maintaining this lack, maintaining this desire which implies that our ends are freely created by ourselves rather than coming from without.

And to be free, we have to sustain that freedom, which means our ends are not ultimates, but they're sort of the point of departure for new possibilities. And to sustain it beyond even our own lifetimes, we have to will the freedom of others. It's sort of almost like bequeathing or like having offspring, living on in our children. When we will the freedom of others, our freedom sort of lives on in them. And that's why that's ethically necessary. So then the question is how we. What that looks like, what all that abstract stuff actually looks like in the world.

3:17 Dylan: So that's the beginning. That's chapter three then?

3:19 Wes: No, I was just segueing from the previous episode two.

3:22 Mark: Well, the beginning of chapter three does have a little summary at the beginning. That looks nice. But I wanted to hear from Seth first. What did you think of this?

3:31 Seth: I was thinking about it after reading this, putting together our reading list for what we've done on the podcast after 140 episodes. And I was like, wow, that's a hell of a syllabus. But, but I was struck by this particular work. I felt she's challenging a little bit with the language, but an extremely strong reasoner articulates the argument of the text very well. And even though I'm ultimately sympathetic to the existentialist ethical agenda, which means maybe my judgment needs to be questioned in this case, everything she's talking about to me seems almost right on, like dead on. So as far as I'm concerned, this is the handbook that I'm going to live the rest of my life by.

4:15 Wes: Yeah, it is sort of like a really sophisticated self help book. You don't want to be the serious man. You don't want to be the nihilist or the adventurer.

4:23 Mark: I would maybe agree with that for the first half, for this. The second half I found a little more problematic that we'll talk about today. Just what is she actually recommending in terms of revolution? I mean, she talks a lot about the problematics of violence and how trying to accomplish anything politically will involve violence, will involve sacrifice, which often means that you are violating this Kantian, you know, treat everyone as an end, as an absolute. And there's something, I absolutely agree with her, that you can never justify. Even if you justify an action, a political action that results in the deaths of people enough to do it, you can't then sit back and feel good about that and feel like, oh, I followed the utility calculus and I let one person die as opposed to 10.

And so that's fine. I'M a hero. In fact, no, that's always tragic. So that her verdict lines up with the sentiment that I've often expressed about the ultimate tragedy of human morality. But I didn't leave this really knowing. Wait, should I be a communist? I'm not really.

5:21 Dylan: Well, I think that was the whole point of her ending, though, is that you can't be prescriptive in that way.

5:26 Wes: But she does reject sort of collectivism. So.

5:30 Mark: Yes, yeah, she rejects collectivism. And this whole thing grew out of living through the Nazi occupation of France. So merely saying, oh, I'm going to take the long view and just be into my art or into my philosophy or whatever and ignore what's politically going on, because all these things shall pass. That that is cowardly in some way. This whole thing is stacked that there should be action in the face of that and that there is no formula for telling you exactly what action to take.

5:55 Dylan: Yeah, it's more than cowardly.

5:56 Mark: Right.

5:57 Dylan: I mean, she would say that it falls into the same trap as the oppressors themselves. At least philosophically, if not ethically. That not taking action is not being ethical, period.

6:11 Wes: We should say there are really. There's kind of two senses of action here. One she calls positive and one negative. And the bulk of it is this negative sense of rebelling or having a revolution against people who are oppressing you. That's an assertion of freedom. But there is this positive, constructive assertion of freedom, which is the one she starts out with, which is. You can think of it as largely the products of arts and sciences, the things that we do, that our work, basically our creativity.

6:38 Dylan: And she thinks that the positive aspect is the greater one, but that there's commonly situations in which the only manifestation of your freedom is in rebelling. And in fact, it becomes quite a problematic thing when in that rebelling you attain the end of that rebelling, which is just sort of that lack. You end up free in the sense of lacking that constraint. And then making the transition into positive freedom can be really challenging socially, personally, individually, politically.

7:12 Mark: So this part three here is divided into five sections. The first one is called the Aesthetic Attitude, which kind of continues the negative takes on freedom that we talked about in the previous sections. But the very beginning of it has a nice sort of a slightly different take on why asserting my own freedom means asserting the freedom of others. It's not just so after I die, people can continue. She says, every man has to do with other men. The world in which he engages himself is a human world in which each object is penetrated with human meanings.

It is a speaking world from which solicitations and appeals rise up. This means that through this world, each individual can give his freedom a concrete content. So that's kind of the key here. It's freedom in the abstract. If you're on an island by yourself asserting your freedom, I mean, yeah, you could still choose to kill yourself or choose to try to make the best of things or whatever. You still have choices, but that would not give your freedom concrete content. And so just like all those discussions about the self where merely asserting your independence doesn't actually form a positive self, it's the Hegelian move that Hegel described of bouncing yourself off someone else getting their take on you, and then you reacting to that.

And so you become an object in the world that way and then have at least something to work with. You don't have to then just be what they say you are. But that's at least a stage in the formation of a self. And so it's. I think this is part of one and the same phenomena here.

8:39 Wes: I think listeners might be wondering why. Why she's starting with the aesthetic attitude. And I think if you revisit our Schopenhauer and Kant on the aesthetic judgment episode, you'll get a sense of that. Because the idea is that there's a certain freedom to taking the aesthetic attitude, you know? So for Schopenhauer, it was freedom from desire. When I paint an apple and contemplate it that way, I free myself from simply material desire to eat the apple. And she discusses ways in which we might even look at human action through this sort of detached aesthetic contemplation. And I think she might be thinking to some extent of Nietzsche, right, supplanting morality with this sort of aesthetic take on life. But she rejects that because it really provides no basis for action.

9:22 Mark: This is kind of the way that Sartre's very radical form of freedom was originally explained to me was that whatever's going on to you, you have the power to interpret it however you want within some reason, but at least you could identify with what's happening. And so we saw this really cashed out in the Stoics, which I think is part of who Sartre must have been drawing on in coming up with this. And Simone Beauvoir addresses the Stoics several times in here, that if something is outside of your control, you can just decide that it doesn't matter.

And so, yeah, you could kind of do that with all the things that are happening around you. You could Just say, I'm not going to take the default animal attitude of going towards something that is lovely and away from something that is horrible. Because if you live like that, then, well, a lot of horrible stuff happens. So going to be suffering a lot. You're going to be running away a lot. So maybe you should take a more detached attitude to just kind of be able to take everything in. And that seems like it's a more sophisticated take on life. But for the reasons you just said, that's not going to be enough.

10:22 Wes: And it essentially treats people as objects. It treats them as mere disclosures, which is another way of saying experiences. As opposed to these subjectivities in themselves. Which is why this segues into the idea of needing to will the freedom of others.

10:37 Dylan: Yes. She refers, as Mark said, directly to the context of World War II on page 81. After she's talked a little bit about the aesthetic attitude. And she refers to. It's a little bit long, but I'll read it. One can imagine an intellectual Florentine being skeptical about the great uncertain movements which are stirring up his country and which will die out, as did the seethings of the centuries which have gone by. As he sees it. The important thing is merely to understand the temporary events. And through them to cultivate that beauty which perishes not.

Many Frenchmen also sought relief in this thought in 1940. In the years which followed. Let's try to take the point of view of history, they said, upon learning that the Germans had entered Paris. And during the whole occupation. Certain intellectuals sought to keep aloof from the fray. And to consider impartially contingent facts which did not concern them. But we note at once that such an attitude appears in moments of discouragement and confusion. In fact, it is a position of withdrawal, a way of fleeing the truth of the present. So we were just saying that part of this is looking on other people and events as mere objects.

And I think that's part of what's her analysis with the looking on history and taking the position of let's take look at it as the way history goes and be aloof from it. As if things are just merely happening to you. And that there is no action required. I guess this directly the stoical attitude that Mark was referring to.

12:05 Seth: Yeah. The problem with that aesthetic attitude is that you withdraw or you try to detach yourself from things. As if things are what could possibly provide meaning or could possibly be oppressive. So it's a double failure to withdraw in that manner. The first is because you're Withdrawing from other people whose freedom in addition to your own, you have to will, but it's also a failure because you are assigning to things and objects powers that they do not have.

12:36 Wes: So yeah, I think our main problem is if we take the aesthetic attitude towards the present. So in the past she says something like, in the past there are no choices to be made.

12:45 Dylan: Right, Exactly. Yep.

12:46 Wes: But the present is this quote unquote, the moment of choice in action. So if we take, you know, an aesthetic attitude towards the present, then we're withdrawing. It seems like there's that freedom in right. Absenting ourselves from desire and retreating into aesthetic contemplation. But really freedom in the present involves making choices. So if we try and flee that contemplatively, we are fleeing freedom.

13:11 Dylan: So when we say we're fleeing freedom, why is that not a free act?

13:15 Wes: Well, it is and it isn't. She went over this in the last. Yeah, she asked that question. I think she might re ask it in this chapter as well, which is that, you know, there's that paradox of, well, if we're all free, how can we will ourselves to be free? And the idea is that we are all free in this sort of fundamental sense. But we can either will our own freedom or we can fail to do that. We can flee and not do that. Which is not the same thing as saying that we're willing ourselves not to be free. That's not something she thinks we can do, but we can sort of just not do it.

13:44 Dylan: So it's sort of an incontinence with respect to our freedom.

13:47 Wes: Right. I think she even uses the word laziness at points.

13:51 Seth: Words like that you're not free to be unfree.

13:55 Mark: Well, yes, we are condemned to be free. That's Sartre.

13:58 Dylan: But being lazy is different.

13:59 Wes: But you're not condemned to will your own freedom. So it's really two tiers. You know, in some sense everyone is free, but that doesn't mean everyone is autonomous. That doesn't mean that everyone is acting morally in the sense of willing their own freedom and doing all that stuff.

14:13 Mark: That, that itself is one of the statements of the ambiguity of our nature.

14:17 Wes: Exactly.

14:18 Mark: We're free, but yet we need extra actually willing act.

14:22 Dylan: You need to activate to really be free.

14:24 Seth: Yeah, I thought Dylan was asking something else like if I choose not to will myself to be free, how is that not freedom?

14:30 Mark: Right, it is freedom. It's just not self consistent paradox. Free freedom.

14:35 Wes: You could say it's freedom, but not autonomy. It's not action. It's a failure to act.

14:40 Dylan: Yeah, It's a little bit different than the kind of self subjugation, you know, the serious man or the cause oriented person who ties himself unambiguously to a cause which. It's still a failure of activating their freedom, but it's a different kind of failure. They're being active in some way, but they are not really instantiating their freedom for all the reasons we talked about in the last episode about the failures of the serious man.

15:08 Wes: So towards the end of the section, I think she gives a good summary of this. So page 83 in mine in the last paragraph. So she had been talking about the way in which a writer might sort of write aesthetically about things that are horrible, including the past. And then she starts this paragraph with. But here too, we must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. All that we can do is to reveal it, to reveal these horrors, to integrate it into the human heritage. To raise it to the dignity of aesthetic experience which bears within itself its finality. So when we're writing about things like the Holocaust or terrible things like that. Yes, there's no problem raising that to the dignity of an aesthetic experience. It's already happened. There's no choices to be made.

15:54 Mark: The dignity of the aesthetic existence, interestingly. Aesthetic existence, Sorry, I think that's an interesting distinction.

16:02 Wes: No, I mean, yeah, I wasn't thinking experience, I was just saying it. So I mean, it's an aesthetic existence in the sense, Right. You've represented it and now it has an existence as this sort of representation as well, in and of itself. This terrible thing that happened in the past is just this terrible thing that happened in the past, but as represented, it's now this aesthetic object also. This aesthetic object today must also exist before being confirmed in its existence. It exists only as an engagement and a commitment. If we first considered the world as an object to be manifested, if we thought that it was saved by this destination in such a way that everything about it already seemed justified and that there was no more of it to reject, then there would also be nothing to say about it.

For no form would take shape in it. It is revealed only through rejection, desire, hate and love.

16:54 Mark: The next sentence is the one that I had picked out. In order for the artist to have a world to express, he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing.

17:02 Wes: Yeah. So before the artist can take this detached aesthetic standpoint, so before there's the representation of the apple detached from the Desire for it. We have to have a world in which we have a desired engagement with apples. One thing presupposes the other. So the artist doesn't even get off the ground. The one world, the world of the aesthetic, presupposes the world of action. But I think the main point of the previous paragraph is that to treat the world as simply like an object, like an aesthetic object and rob it of engagement and commitment would, in a way, to make it not to exist.

It couldn't be the thing that we call the world if it didn't involve this relationship of desire, hate, or love. We have to have these sort of practical attitudes toward the world for it to be what we call the world. So we can't simply say, you know, I'm just going to take this detached aesthetic attitude toward things. Because there are no things without that towards which to take that. We have to start from the standpoint of commitment and desire before we move to the next step.

18:04 Dylan: One interesting thing about that is going back to the question of metaphysics early on, that was just sort of underlying some of what she's been talking about. That action, that concreteness, that activity, is the way of instantiating the world. In some ways. The problem of the aesthetic attitude is that, just as you said now, Wes, is that there aren't things there. And you have to have things in order to act upon them. You have to have things in order to act that drives your any kind of practical action. You have to instantiate it as a thing or something, and you move towards it. And if you don't do that, then you're not going to move anywhere. To me, it made sense of her focusing on action, which I think underlies the reason why she says existential ethics is in some ways the only ethics available. It's the only way in which you can talk about actually acting.

18:58 Mark: It sounds like we might have overstated the epistemological point here. Because if you want to say that you have to be truly engaged in the world in order for there to be things at all, then that would mean that the people who are moral failures on her part, who do not engage themselves in the world, who are subman, don't actually have a world. Not just that they are not driven to autonomous action, but that there are no objects for them to perceive. And that's clearly not what she's saying.

19:26 Wes: No, not that you have to be morally engaged, but just that you have to have these practical attitudes. You could be a complete moral failure and still have desire, hate and love and all the other attitudes. And even if you're apathetic, I think the. One of the points she made with the subman in the previous chapter is that that's still a choice of sorts. And it still represents a kind of practical attitude. It's not simply the disappearance of all attitudes whatsoever.

19:52 Mark: All right, so section two, freedom and liberation. This is the one that I think was really the crux, as far as I was concerned, before we got into the difficult stuff about how many people to sacrifice in a war and things like that. Well, I know.

20:05 Wes: I just think the problem. Maybe we should just start with the problem that she's sort of addressing, which is that, hey, it's all well and good to say, we want to will freedom, but what is the content of that? Right? And that, in a way, is kind of the whole point of this chapter. The larger point here is that, well, when we disclose being, willing freedom and disclosing being are the same thing. Ultimately, the way to think about disclosing being is just as this existentialist version of Kant's construction of appearances. It's about the having of experiences, but also the experience of one's own action in the world. So when you think about being an artist or being a scientist and completing projects and bringing about these concrete results, you know, these inventions or books or paintings and things like that, that's a form of disclosure that gives concrete expression to our freedom.

21:00 Dylan: That seems right. She does want to qualify both. Maybe in particular in the case of science, but also in terms of art, that it matters how you do both those things. In the third paragraph in section 2 on my page 85, she says science condemns itself to failure when yielding to the infatuation of the serious. It aspires to attain being, to contain it and to possess it. But it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries.

What the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom. In a funny way, she's taking a position on a philosophy of science question of are there real laws? And what is science trying to do? And setting yourself right down on the side of science as a. Evolving. That the ends of science are evolving, creative activities that you. There's nothing strange or quizzical about the fact that you have evolving theories that are, in their moments and in their times, concrete. And they have to be that way. You have to be able to engage them.

But they're always, at the same time Transitory. And that's not problematic.

22:20 Wes: Yeah. And also if they weren't, we would cease to be free. Right. If we had all the final, if we knew everything about the world and if we had done everything that's artistically possible, if there were all these external absolute ends in the world and we had sort of consumed them all, then there'd be nothing left for us. There would be nothing to aspire to, no goals, no ends, nothing to do as such. We would no longer be subjects, we would just be things. Among other things.

22:46 Dylan: Yep.

22:47 Mark: So I find it interesting to contrast this to the idea, like in Descartes argument for the existence of God, that unless there is an ultimate, unless there is a limit, then these gradations, these creative acts on an individual level wouldn't mean anything. We wouldn't understand that they were progress unless we had in mind that there is some ideal, that there is some form, some ultimate, that eventually, even if none of our actions could reach that, that is sort of the implicit goal of whatever we're trying to do. So that a scientist is trying to elaborate the truth, the whole truth.

23:25 Wes: Yeah. And for her she's explicitly saying, well, there is an ultimate goal, but that ultimate goal has to be freedom. If we make the ultimate goal this externality, we screw everything up.

23:35 Dylan: You still have to have that externality, but it has to be held ambiguously in the sense that you do have an understanding that, oh, I want to try to understand how the whole world works.

23:48 Seth: Right.

23:48 Dylan: But if you are too serious about that, then you won't actually maintain the progress of science. In fact, you might decide in 1870, oh, you know what, we figured everything out. Everything is just engineering from now on.

24:01 Wes: But also this is another aspect where it's like a self help book. To be free, you've got to be able to deal with failure. You've got to realize that failure is an inherent part of projects. If something is an ultimate end, then falling short of it is sort of ruinous. It actually makes it hard to act. It also becomes hard to act. If the end is so absolute that it's sort of this final termination, that it's like death. Well, we don't want to die, we don't want to cease to act. So it's kind of scary. If these ends are so absolute, if they are sort of provisional, if they're sort of stepping stones to new actions, new possibilities, which is what she wants to make them, they're in a sense more doable.

And then the absolute sort of lies within us. It's this willing towards our own freedom. So each particular end could fail. You know, like at Van Gogh, we could cease to have the possibility of painting, but we wouldn't cease to have the possibility of asserting our own freedom.

24:57 Mark: So you might want to equate freedom with power. Seems like somebody that doesn't have any power doesn't have any freedom. But she wants to distinguish those. Because it would fall from that, that, oh, do I have the freedom to fly? Like, well, no, you can't fly. So therefore, does that mean that you're somehow restricted? You can't fly. But she says, the resistance of Things, page 81 in my version, a couple pages into the section. This is all by contrast to the resistance of people, which people can be actually oppressive. But she says, no, when things get in the way of something we're trying to do, the resistance of the thing sustains the action of man as air sustains the flight of a dove.

And by projecting himself through it, man accepts its being an obstacle. He assumes the risk of a setback in which he does not see a denial of his freedom. And it even uses science as one of the examples of scientists that a certain phenomenon may remain obscure to him. So it's sort of like that's what accomplishing something is. In fact, we do have the freedom to fly. Go build an airplane. That was something that we had to figure out. So it's just. It's a matter of what. When you say you accomplished an action, what are you actually saying that you did?

Well, I overcame these obstacles. And so. Obstacles, even in the simplest sort of action to describe what you did, you really, you know. How did you point at him? Well, I lifted my hand. I overcame whatever resistance gravity and my own biology might have exerted. And figuring out where the person is to point at him and whatever other obstacles. That's what an action is, is overcoming obstacles. In some sense, the obstacles give content to what it is you're doing. That is what it means. That exerting your freedom for it to have external content means that you're engaging with the world for it to not to be empty.

26:50 Dylan: That's why activities like climbing mountains or sailing, doing something arduous really is an instantiation of your freedom. In part because Mount Everest can't oppress you. It can limit you.

27:04 Unknown speaker: Right.

27:04 Dylan: A hurricane and the earthquake can constrain you and you overcome it. But they can't oppress you. Only other human beings can oppress you.

27:14 Wes: Yeah, because only human beings can deny you a future, can deny you your possibilities, which is for her is the meaning of oppression to have hard things to do and to maybe not be able to do them as well as we want or get halfway up the mountain. That's not a denial of possibility or of a future. That's just us progressing along the path into the future.

27:37 Mark: But this way of putting things and distinguishing. Like I agree that this is a proper description of what an action is and so forth, by, you know when you take on a task that there can be these obstacles and even if you sort of. You assume the risk when you're doing it, and it's almost like it's the action that matters, even if you fail. The failures can be interesting. They can tell you something. We know how that works in science, we know how that works in art, that you create something and you learn something from it. But I'm not sure why. And it almost seems to me that most actions involve people in this way as well.

If my action is we want to have a hugely influential podcast, well, that means we're influencing people to tune in, to recommend it to their friends, whatever. It's not merely overcoming a technical obstacle of distributing it on the Internet or whatever. Even those technical obstacles seem to rely very heavily on people. And of course, the main point of this, the way it all let off, is it's we need other people's freedom in order for our actions to become positive and real. So even though she talks about how other people can oppress us and they can stop our freedom, I'm not sure why this point about obstacles doesn't also apply to actions involving people too.

In other words, we can use people as means as long as they're not merely means.

28:59 Dylan: Other people can be, in that way part of the environment, part of our circumstance and contingency that we overcome and our things in that respect.

29:09 Wes: Yeah, I think she would agree with that though. Why do you think she would disagree with that?

29:13 Dylan: I thought Mark was noticing that in her examples they were all sort of non human environmental factors, not the examples that he gave.

29:23 Mark: I guess it was when there was resistance involved. And she's saying, if it's just the mountain that's resisting you, that's not oppression. If it's a person that's resisting you, it's oppression. But if a person is resisting my podcast, becoming famous because they don't like it, they're not oppressing me.

29:38 Wes: She's not saying all resistance you receive from people is oppression. She's just saying that no resistance you receive from things can be oppression. Those two points are Different. So, yeah, there's plenty of resistance from people in the world. That doesn't count as oppression.

29:51 Dylan: Yeah.

29:51 Wes: I mean, unless you're really, really sensitive.

29:53 Seth: And then participation in preventing another from positive entrance of freedom is oppression.

29:59 Dylan: Yeah.

30:00 Wes: Yep.

30:00 Dylan: You have to deny something someone, not merely, you know, be a thing in their path.

30:05 Wes: Cutting people off from their future. It's on page 88. It is other men who open the future to me. So our futures rely on other people in a way that they don't rely on things. It is they who, setting up the world of tomorrow, define my future. But if, instead of allowing me to participate in this constructive movement, they oblige me to consume my transcendence in vain, if they keep me below the level which they have conquered and on the basis of which new conquests will be achieved, then they are cutting me off from my future. They are changing me into a thing. So I thought that is sort of the definitive way of describing oppression.

30:37 Mark: But how is it really different than an oppressive heat or I suffer an oppressive injury, something like that? I mean, yes, even in those circumstances, I retain some freedom. But even in a circumstance where somebody is chaining me down, as de Beauvoir would of course agree, this is one of Sartre's examples. I still retain freedom in that case. So it seems the only reason you'd want to call one oppression the other not, is because of the kind of activity you would take to redress it.

31:05 Dylan: Yeah, but if you say it's an oppressive heat, you're anthropomorphizing something that's not

31:10 Mark: actually oppression, but it's limiting just the definition that Wes just gave. It's limiting my possibilities. It's limiting my action in a sort of systematic way.

31:19 Wes: But it's not the same. Again, I don't think resistance to action is the same thing as limitation of action. She's not. So, for instance, I mean, consider the difference between just not having access to a printing press or not being a writer or something like that, versus a governmental apparatus which prevents you from free speech or something like that, which cracks down on it. The first thing can be just seen as sort of a technical problem to be solved. Maybe there are other ways of expressing myself. Maybe I can get access to a printing press, become a writer, do whatever it takes.

But the second one involves me being violent towards other people. I don't have to be violent towards anything to resolve resistance from things. But if it's oppression from people, then gaining my freedom is intimately connected to depriving them of theirs. If they're the oppressors or depriving them of their lives.

32:10 Mark: Well, so what about if you're in a situation where you've had a drought in your area, the oppressive heat that's not really oppressing you, so there's really no food, but yet other people down the road have food and they're not giving it to you. So it would involve just, as you say, doing violence against other people. Just like the printing press being out of my hands to get that. So even though, you know, that's not normally the kind of thing, we think those people, just by having food are oppressing me. That's certainly not something that our libertarian friends would like. But that seems to follow from the description here that, yeah, somebody can, just by being in the situation that they are having the thing that you need, that you can't get any other way than by asking or fighting them for it, are oppressing you if they don't share or give you some means.

32:58 Wes: So I don't. Yeah, I don't think that's true either. I mean, it has something to do with other freedoms. You know, she likes to call people sometimes other freedoms, thwarting your freedom as opposed to the world simply resisting your freedom. So, you know, if a government is prohibiting me from free speech, in some sense, that is just resistance. Right? If I thought of people as automatons, if I thought of them as just like other things in the world, as obstacles like that, you could think of it in that way. But they are also subjectivities. They are also free beings, and my autonomy relies on them. I can't be free unless I'm in a community of other free people who sort of enable my action.

33:43 Seth: Well, I think this might be a place where we can invoke Kant. Oppression, in some sense requires that you're treating somebody else as a thing, which is one way of saying you're treating them as a means as opposed to an end. You know, the difference is in saying that, for example, there's a scarcity of resources, Mark. And you say, hey, there's 10 people in this community and there's only enough food for five. So the five people with the food are oppressing the five people without the food. You know, that's not what's happening. That is one of those situations that she talks about later where she talks about the necessity sometimes of doing violence via resistance.

You're not oppressing somebody if you're in a situation where your self preservation dictates that somebody else may not be preserved because you're not consciously actively treating them like a thing. It's the unfortunate fact of existence. And then the burden is on us to make sense of it.

34:42 Dylan: Well, I thought that she conceded that you would be treating them as a thing and that was unavoidable. That in the case Mark brought up, you're starving to death and there's a closed community that you're outside the walls for and they won't let you in.

34:58 Mark: And there's nothing in that example that says and they don't let you in because they only have enough for themselves. Like that's not at all. No, the parallel that I was trying to bring, that they have plenty, let's say.

35:09 Dylan: Yeah, I think the example works probably even better if you just say they just don't want to share.

35:15 Unknown speaker: Right.

35:15 Dylan: They're not preventing you from going to get your stuff anywhere else. They're just preventing you from accessing the plenty that they have. And they aren't taking any other actions against you other than not opening the door. And so if you are on the outside and you go in and scale the walls or dig a tunnel and go in and maybe you have to, whatever you're doing, you are treating them as a thing. I think she concedes that.

35:44 Mark: But are they oppressing you by keeping you out? You all seem to agree that they're not. But I was thinking, if we're looking at this whole part of this book as the foundation for what's going to constitute legitimate social action and revolution and all this, then I would think that she would want to come down on the side of, yes, actually, they are oppressing you even though they're not doing anything purposefully nasty. If they know that you need this and they know they have enough and could share and don't, then they are oppressing you.

36:12 Dylan: They're denying your future.

36:13 Wes: Yeah, actually, I don't think they are, though, because to deny someone's future, you have to do something unethical to them. You can't simply be in the way. You can't be simply an obstacle, like other things in the world are obstacles.

36:26 Dylan: Why is not providing a man dying of thirst refusing to provide them water? Standing there with the water, refusing to provide them water. Why is that not unethical?

36:35 Wes: Yeah, if we come up with a.

36:37 Dylan: That's the example. That's straight up the example.

36:40 Mark: And the parallel, of course, being for the bourgeois versus.

36:43 Wes: The point is not your particular example the point. I thought Mark was using another. I was referring back to another ethical dilemma where it was simply a Matter of other people having things that we needed, and they needed them, too. So that falls in the category of an ethical dilemma. And I don't think that's really a useful illustration. Yeah, if people are actively and unethically harming us, then I think that falls within the category of oppression. But the main point to keep in mind, the difference between simply scarcity in the world, for instance, and oppression, is that our futures are defined by other people, by the recognition of other people.

That's why they can be oppressors. Our futures are not defined by whether or not we get what we want in terms of things. That's not what she means by having a future. To have a future means to be one of many, to exist in a community of people who have essentially goodwill towards me and are not thwarting my autonomy out of their unethical attitudes.

37:44 Mark: Here's another quote just on the next page. Only man can be an enemy for man. Only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life, because it also belongs only to him alone, to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom. So that sounds more like what you were saying, Wes, that it's not a matter of things, it's a matter of conferring meaning on your acts.

38:06 Wes: Right.

38:07 Mark: We should pick out the places where she rips on Stoicism here. It is here that the Stoic distinction between things which do not depend upon us and those which depend upon us proves to be insufficient. For we is legion and not an individual. Each one depends upon others. And what happens to me by means of others depends upon me as regards its meaning. One does not submit to a war or an occupation as he does to an earthquake. He must take sides for or against, and the foreign wills thereby become allied or hostile. It is this interdependence which explains why oppression is possible and why it is hateful.

38:39 Wes: Here's another example. And then I'll get off this. If my leg gets torn off by a bear in the woods, that's not oppression. That doesn't deny me a future in the sense or my freedom. But if a human being does, does, because to be an autonomous individual, and this is sort of Kant's point, I have to operate in a world that consists of more than bad actors, in a world where everyone else is behaving unethically, I lose the ability to be autonomous myself. That's the sense in which I can lose my future and my freedom.

39:11 Mark: So if you've got a negative view of human nature, none of us have the ability to perform autonomous actions because everybody's unethical.

39:19 Wes: Well, to the extent that, you know, to the extent that you're not being oppressed, you're not being oppressed. Right. No one's interfering with our podcast. We are actors in the world.

39:28 Dylan: And, yeah, this way of thinking explains to me a lot more about why we get so much more upset about a terrorist act that killed one person or maybe killed no one. Upset in a completely different way than a natural disaster that killed a thousand people or 30,000 people a year die in car accidents. And we rise up against an act of human violence in our community in a way that we would never rise up against those car accidents, even if the human toll is fractionally smaller.

40:06 Wes: Yeah, that's because in one case, it's simply our physical well being that's at stake, but in another, it's our spiritual well being. If you think in terms of Hegelian recognition, my existence as a subject depends upon the recognition of other subjects, and that recognition involves their ethical comportment to me. So in a sense, I'm being threatened as an ethical being. I can be turned into a thing by that kind of behavior, whereas an earthquake can't do that to me.

40:35 Dylan: That's the same thing as saying, they're denying me my freedom and the earthquake's not.

40:39 Wes: Someone who harms me and willfully does something terrible to me is depriving me of ethical recognition. And that's a different sort of danger than simply getting harmed physically. And that's why we react to harms which come from people differently than those that come from things. There's another type of damage being done.

40:57 Mark: So I was trying to think of what the silly response to the car example. It's the technocratic industrial complex that is forcing me to live in a society with cars and forcing all the accidents on us. And of course, the response to that is, well, you know, you chose to drive, you're complicit. And I've been looking at this whole thing through the lens of how are we going to talk about oppression of the kind of stuff bell hooks was talking about, the patriarchy and crap like that. You're living in a society where this sort of does oppress all of those involved, yet you're complicit in it. You're still responsible, even though this is actually a distinction Simone de Beauvoir makes later, that there can be a difference between being responsible and being guilty to the extent that you're a sheep.

41:38 Wes: Yeah, the Nazi Youth is Not guilty, though.

41:41 Mark: Yes, he's responsible. He's participating in the military campaign or whatever. But to the extent that he's not really an autonomous decision maker and not in the position where he could be or is denied essential information or is being oppressed.

41:55 Wes: Yeah, yeah, to the extent that he's ignorant, but we don't have time to re educate him, so we have to kill him. That's the conclusion she draws. But not because he's guilty, just because he's in the way.

42:06 Mark: So it's like Children of the Corn.

42:08 Dylan: How Children of the Corn.

42:10 Mark: You adults, you're just in the way. It's not that you're guilty, but we have to kill all of you anyway to get rid of the adultocracy with aesthetic detachment.

42:19 Dylan: I never watched that movie.

42:23 Wes: Yeah, I think it's be justified.

42:25 Mark: I think those kids are guilty of the serious man fallacy because they worship their leader as a religious cult leader.

42:31 Wes: They're in the world of the serious corn, the corn gods. I don't know.

42:35 Dylan: All right, that's really corny.

42:42 Mark: Was the point against stoicism made strongly enough? Do we want to talk about that?

42:46 Wes: That's kind of what we were just wrangling with. Because for the Stoic, they put the resistance of people and things into the same category. They're just the things over which we have no control and so we can just write them off and not worry about it. She's trying to say no, those two things are different.

43:00 Dylan: Yeah, she has a nice thing about how the oppressor can feign being the oppressed or couch it in the fact that it's like the weather. It's like the natural order of things. Not far after what Mark was reading. So the oppressed has only one solution. To deny the harmony of that mankind from which an attempt is made to exclude him, to prove that he is a man and that he's free by revolting against the tyrants. In order to prevent this revolt, one of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation, since after all, one cannot revolt against nature.

When a conservative wishes to show that the proletariat is not oppressed, he declares the present distribution of wealth is a natural fact and that there is thus no means of rejecting it. And doubtless he has a good cause for proving that, strictly speaking, he is not stealing from the worker, the product of his labor, since the word theft supposes social conventions which in other respects authorizes this type of exploitation. What the revolutionary means by this word is that the present Regime is a human fact. As such, it has to be rejected.

44:10 Unknown speaker: So there you go.

44:10 Mark: So the city with the high walls, that is denying the people on the outside the water, that is a human construction. And even though the individual humans in it might just say, well, it's the law of the group, the existence of the walls, it's just the way it is. Some things will never change. It's the Hornsby effect.

44:28 Wes: So we've confirmed that our privilege is a form of oppression. Is that what we're saying?

44:32 Mark: There you go. That was where I was going.

44:35 Dylan: All right, well, the maintaining of that privilege and that status quo, because it would be from an argument like we can't redistribute things because then you would be stealing from me, is faulty logic, according to her, because you are not acknowledging the way in which you had been stealing in the first place. There's some movie or some. Maybe it was Game of Thrones. The comment was made about how the kings became kings because they took it.

45:09 Seth: Right.

45:10 Dylan: And they're aristocrats, not because of some natural order. Even though once they become aristocrats, they will try to explain that this is the natural order, that this is just the way it is. Because we have naturally come here, we've risen out of the ground as being the greater men. No, no, we just took it. Actually.

45:29 Wes: It's in the bloodline now.

45:31 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

45:33 Mark: But so thinking back to the Nozick episode that we had, I mean, of course he would acknowledge that. Yeah, you have to have just first conditions that somebody just taking something, an original crime, is not the way to satisfy society. But if you did have just initial conditions, then there are legitimate and illegitimate ways, fair ways, as long as there are free actions by which resources could get distributed. And then, however the endpoint, however things end up, that is by definition fair because it obeyed those laws. And so this sort of comes from this unshakable respect, supposedly for individual decision makers.

And it seems like de Beauvoir is going to be committed to that. Idolization of that kind of freedom, of that kind of standard, is also in bad faith. Is calling something essentially a natural right like that, calling it a part of human nature, is an improper stiffening of morality. That morality, just like it doesn't have God's laws written in the sky, it doesn't have fundamental rights in that way written in the sky either.

46:38 Dylan: Well, I think you're right about making it almost a fallacy of seriousness, because she would immediately be deeply skeptical of the very first premise that it didn't start off as a crime. That's right. At the beginning, sure.

46:53 Mark: Well, yes, as a practical matter.

46:55 Dylan: But in fact, as a practical matter is in fact decisively important because that's where the fallacy of seriousness comes in, is saying, okay, I have this argument that is deeply internally consistent and has the respect and proper ethical arrangement, but it's utterly hollow because the beginning is not possible.

47:16 Mark: Yeah. And that would fall into a general category of. The other theme that goes throughout this third book here of ethics of ambiguity is to embrace the concrete and the role of the concrete situation plays in ethical decision making over principles, which sort of is a little ass backwards of the way that philosophers normally do ethical philosophy, that you have to apply the principle of utility or whatever. The principle is Kant's principle in an impartial way. Because people are fallible. And even if they sort of are morally good hearted when they get in particular situations, they're going to be fooled. They need guidance, they need these rules to let them judge the tricky cases. And I think she's going to think that any such rules that you're resorting to is cheating, is bad faith, is misplaced concreteness.

48:05 Wes: Nevertheless, we do get general guidance from her involving treating other people as ends. And a lot of this chapter is about sort of how to solve ethical dilemmas, especially when it comes to resisting oppression and when you can use violence and when you can and things like that. There are a few kind of general principles, even though she's not giving us maxims. So the most general of all of them is just this idea of treating people's ends in themselves and willing their freedom. But what about when our freedoms conflict? We can't will everyone's freedom in that case.

And the best example of that is oppression. To revolt against the oppressor, I have to do oppressive things towards them or I have to do things that interfere with their freedom, or I have to treat them like things. So the first section where she really gets into that is around page 93 in my text. So the first thing she starts talking about is how we have to sort of prioritize, right? So we might be oppressed by a number of different things. And then the question is how we prioritize what we're going to struggle against.

49:09 Dylan: So I thought it began a little bit earlier on page 90, talking about the overcoming of oppression. She juxtaposes saying it's something quite different from taking a trip or escaping from a prison, but surpassing the given. I guess the part that jumped out at me next was this section saying that the oppressor is lying if he claims that the oppressed positively wants oppression.

49:33 Mark: Yes. So the question is all this movement toward freedom, is this just a matter of giving people freedom of choice? And then you look at the background here. Even though she's going to say she doesn't like the excesses of the Marxist, do everything for the cause and destroy everybody. Ah, revolution, revolution. She still seems to come down on wanting the freedom of the proletariat. But what if people, the working class doesn't feel oppressed, they want to vote for Donald Trump? Well, that's a bad example because they feel oppressed in a different way. Let's just imagine people who are perfectly happy living in a system where a lot of what they work for ends up going to management and that wealth is accumulating in the upper registers. So why can't she just respect their choice to go with the status quo?

50:22 Dylan: Or even saying that the argument that women really, really want to not be allowed to work or to get education.

50:29 Mark: Yep. So she's going to have to rely on this Marxist. She never uses the word false consciousness, but at the same time she's very aware. Right. Everybody that is of the conservative leaning that sees this kind of argument coming is going to say, oh, you're going to then impose something on me that I don't want, something on the people that they don't want. And she's going to say, really, all you can do is educate is to present people with real options and see if they grasp at their freedom or not. And they're going to make the choices that they make.

50:59 Wes: I mean, if you truly educate them, they will make that choice.

51:02 Mark: They will choose not to be oppressed. Yes, but that's kind of part of what maybe keeps this from being dogmatically socialist or dogmatically anything else. Right. I was just reading some responses to our bell hooks episode saying, oh, she's such a dogmatist. She wants society to be in this way according to her vision. But really, I think she's following in this pattern of, no, we just need to raise people's consciousness so that they have the opportunity to choose freedom or not. And pretty much they're always going to choose freedom, which involves self actualization.

And something stronger than just the content of freedom is something that, just like we were saying, science is creative and art is creative over time is not just a matter of you can determine in advance what concrete actions are going to be freedom. You can't just like Nozick or the founders of the Constitution or Whatever, and say, as long as the government is not restricting this and this and this, then you're free. There you go. Land of the free. Freedom is going to be sort of something that we figure out socially over time as individuals really, but within the social context.

So the quote, all that an external action can propose is to put the oppressed in the presence of his freedom. Then he will decide positively and freely.

52:16 Dylan: Yep. Yeah, I've always thought that for this kind of argument, it's so patently a contradiction because you can just say, well, okay, why don't you switch places? If it's not a problem, then just switch places and they won't. Right.

52:30 Mark: I mean, of course, I was reading, so this is my page 88. So I'm sure it's like your page 95 or I wrote new work down because it was addressing this. The politics of the American employing class, which catches the worker in the trap of sports, gadgets, autos and Frigidaires. On the whole, however, he has fewer temptations of betrayal than the members of the privileged classes because of the satisfying of his passions, the taste for adventure and the satisfactions of social seriousness are denied him. In other words, that even though people of limited economic means still have a lot of freedom of choice, if they don't have really true freedom to like, the actual power to shift their lives in a certain direction, then there's whole realms of right.

So you can have whichever job you want, but in order to support yourself, you're going to have to have two of them and end up working 80 hours a week to support your family like that. Clearly, no matter how many choices among which fast food restaurant or whatever the person's gonna work at, or multiple jobs of that sort does not amount to real freedom.

53:36 Dylan: Aren't you also implicitly or explicitly raising the question of doesn't that amount to oppression?

53:41 Mark: Yes, yes. If that's the economic circumstance in which a person finds themselves. And you could always say, oh, well, you know, he could just make some different choices, choose to live more simply, choose to abandon his kids, you know, get an education. Well, or have gotten an education. I guess it's the. You can hold people accountable for. Yes, at some point they had some opportunity. Somebody else who is in the same situation that they were is not similarly restricted now. So we can therefore say, in some sense you chose the situation you're in now and we can blame you for it if you don't like it because it's freedom.

54:19 Dylan: So this is again making it more complicated because earlier, when we were giving the examples. It makes something that is arguably headless, that is something like the system as being oppressive, in which that system has people who are benefiting from it and maybe continuing to make it work well, but it's impossible to find a person. Right. It's really a class or a group that is defending or acting on it to keep it instantiated. And so that oppression is not really coming from the acts of individual people on other individuals. It's happening to individuals, but it is not being perpetrated in a direct manner by other individuals. Which is the kind of thing that makes it more complicated.

55:14 Mark: Yeah. Do we feel like she's picked on that kind of situation?

55:17 Dylan: This is something that. I think you're right, Mark, that she would call that oppression the way a Marxist would, but that she call what oppression? The social structure such that individuals by the concentration of wealth and the structure of laws are denied the flourishing of their activity. The bare bones example is the one we were talking about earlier. The city of gold with the locked doors and the city of mud outside. Right.

55:42 Wes: It's still unclear to me what she actually thinks about that.

55:44 Mark: Well, maybe that's one of these things that it's a creative act to sort of decide and I guess that we should get at this. I'm not sure if we've really come to the point in the text where she's talking about this yet, but how does she give guidance for political action if she's not going to have in the normal way? Well, here's some sort of abstract rules that you can then in particular cases you can derive what you should do. Now we've had other episodes where we consider ethics that are not rule based in this way and those ethics all seem to be based on virtue ethics.

I'm not sure that this is. She at least doesn't sketch out anything that looks like a developed virtue ethics, even though that's actually kind of how I was reading her as we got into it, that you know, to be the kind of person that asserts your own freedom in a self conscious way means making yourself wise basically is being able to really think through the consequences of what you're going to do and how it's going to affect other people. People and just having the self knowledge to see whether this is really what you want to do, to be in touch with your own social nature.

The fact that you don't want to oppress other people, you know, it just gets down to kind of that.

56:52 Wes: Well, the general guidance. Yeah, I mean we're kind of jumping towards the end here, but is that the individual must be the absolute end of action. That's the one thing she says, and not the collective, for instance. It can't be that the individual means nothing compared to the well being of society. The individual has to be absolute. And she says that doesn't give us specific ends. And then also that we shouldn't really just try to derive our ends from culture or authority or something like that, you know, but that it's on a case by case basis.

And then she gives some very kind of vague advice about what you do when my freedom conflicts with someone else's, when I have a real ethical dilemma, then we solve that problem. Not in terms of collectives and these abstractions, not in terms of thinking about generalizations, about groups, about different social classes or something like that, including race and gender, by the way, but by thinking concretely about how it's going to affect individuals, how it's going to affect their happiness. We have to think about those things. Which isn't to say that violence might not end up being justified, because I think she thinks it will be in certain circumstances, but just that we have to take those things into account.

And the other part of it is where she talks about not sacrificing the means to the ends, so that the ends sort of have to be imminent in the means and things like that. Anyway, I'm just giving that sketch just because that's why I think there is some guidance in here, even, you know, as kind of general as it is.

58:16 Mark: Well, I think we have enough text left that I think trying to throw out what are the important points, rather than trying to go chronologically through the rest of the sections might be our best bet here to make sure that our discussion hits the salient points. So you had jumped right there to the ambiguity chapter. My question jumped us to this ambiguity chapter. It's chapter five of part three here. I had in bold a particular quote here from my page 134. What must be done practically, which action is good, which is bad. To ask such a question is also to fall into a naive abstraction.

We don't ask the physicists which hypotheses are true, nor the artists. By what procedure does one produce a work whose beauty is guaranteed. Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods. So that's kind of what she kicks off this. Then the closest she gives to a recipe, which most of it dwells on, that treat everybody's ends thing that you were just Talking about the individual as such is one of the ends at which our action must aim. Is how she introduces that. I would not make this my bible just because it seems like a lot of the things she's really concerned with and responding to have to do with the particular intellectual climate of her time.

Not only this, having lived in France during the Nazi occupation, that's, of course, a huge thing. And then also the fact that communism was sort of the default, oh, I'm a radical and want to do something, so I'll join the Communist Party. Hegelianism was apparently so trendy still that so much of what she's reacting to is between the communism and the Hegelianism and the fascism. Was this notion of the collective being. Well, yeah, it's the broad view of history and individuals are subordinated to that. And this just doesn't seem like a very live view for us.

I mean, we're just in such an. Nozick is much, much more relevant a thing to argue against for us than any form of. Oh, yeah, take the long view of history and progress and sacrifice yourself as an individual to that. Like, that is totally foreign to us. Just think about there being a draft here now or something. People would not put up with that shit.

1:00:26 Wes: And just looking at the Antinomies of Action chapter, she's going to say, look, to liberate ourselves from oppressors, that can require violence, that can require sacrificing the lives of others and in a sense, sacrificing ourselves. Because to the extent that we become oppressors ourselves, we turn ourselves into. We become thing like. So there are these real sacrifices that have to be made in the fight for liberation, and we shouldn't paper those over. Like, one of the things that this idea of the collective does that she thinks is sort of false is that it makes the value of individuals out to be nothing in comparison to this larger goal, which is, you could call it humanity or the state or something like that.

It sort of denies the fact that there are ethical dilemmas in a way. It denies the fact that there are real sacrifices to be made. If we have to do something horrible to liberate ourselves, it's still horrible. That doesn't disappear just because we were doing it for some larger goal. That's part of the problem with this idea of the collective.

1:01:26 Mark: So I was trying to get clear on what an antinomy is, just looking it up. It's a paradox, a contradiction between two beliefs or conclusion that are in themselves reasonable. Well, so the antinomies of action. This is supposed to parallel the kind of thing that. What. Do you remember the name of the section in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason? The Antinomies of. Of the Antinomies of Reason. Right. So that when we're considering a metaphysical question like does the universe have a beginning or not? You could sort of give an equally reasonable argument for yes, of course it has to have a beginning. It can't have an infinite series. Or you can give a good argument against that. And there's just nothing that can decide between those two things. Well, so what's the paradox that's involved in any sort of action?

1:02:08 Wes: It seems the paradox is that in order to get rid of the oppressor, we must become an oppressor. The paradox is that, you know, that liberation requires real sacrifice. That the whole goal of treating others as ends requires that we treat them as means if they're standing in the way. Things like that.

1:02:27 Mark: Well, and she was so bleak about how violence works out that I really was reading this as I think you could very easily read this as just a call against violence in just about every possible circumstance. I mean, she says, look, if there's somebody else's being oppressive, then either you have to do nothing and basically implicitly join them in their oppression, or you have to be their enemy. But she leads off the whole section to say, look, thoroughly moral liberation wouldn't just involve converting the oppressors, would involve sort of explaining to them, hey, you know what, you're not being self consistent in your freedom. Why don't you stop a police?

1:03:02 Wes: Yeah, but she says that, you know, we sort of in many cases don't have time to do that.

1:03:06 Mark: That's impossibly utopian. We can't.

1:03:08 Wes: The urgency of the struggle forbids this. This is 105 to 106. The urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor, the labor of education. We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint. To me she seemed very open to violence in the name of fighting for liberty.

1:03:29 Mark: Well, I think this might be one of the places where there's room for creativity in political action, just as there's creativity in values is because it's bad whichever you do. There's a paradox. You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. Then there's a lot of room for deciding based on your conscience. I'm going to be a conscientious objector. I'm going to Be a Gandhi, as long as you're really being conscientious. If you are. You know, I want to destabilize the regime, so I'm going to go blow up schools or something. No, that's not going to be something I think that under any circumstances she's going to go for. You know, she talks about that like, as a resistance, I could kill the two army officers that are sort of ruling the town, but then I know that they're going to retaliate and like kill several dozen citizens or more. And she doesn't say, well then don't do that exactly.

1:04:19 Wes: But that's something she rejects a utilitarian calculus. And ultimately it comes down to sort of what she calls the anguish of choice. A decision in which we try not to make the means inconsistent with the ends. Right. If the end is serving humanity and the means don't serve humanity, then we have that sort of inconsistency. So that's one way of guiding our choice. But there's no utilitarian calculus where we can add up lives and figure out what to do. It's sort of. It's a riskier, maybe more intuitive kind of, kind of process.

1:04:55 Dylan: You can easily end up doing things that you don't really want to do. On page 106, she says, as we have also seen, the situation of the world is so complex that one cannot fight everywhere at the same time and for everyone. In order to win an urgent victory, one has to give up the idea, at least temporarily, of serving certain valid causes. One may even be brought to the point of fighting against them. Thus, during the course of the last war, no anti fascist could have wanted the revolts of the natives in the British Empire to be successful. On the contrary, those revolts were supported by the fascist regimes.

And yet we cannot blame those who, considering their emancipation to be the more urgent action, took advantage of the situation to obtain it. Thus, it is possible, and often even happens that one finds himself obliged to oppress and kill men who are pursuing goals whose validity one acknowledges himself. So when I read this, I thought of the whole ISIS Syria question. Do you take the side of the rebels in Syria against a depraved regime? Or do you fight against ISIS in Syria alongside the depraved regime and fight against the rebels there? Right, that's the kind of conflict that she's talking about.

1:06:12 Mark: So you don't think she comes down as a radical? There are certain things that she says, like about how. Well, whenever you're trying to achieve something like this, you end up, as we were saying, being an oppressor, being a tyrant, really. You know, you're not just taking an action as an individual, as a resistance fighter or something, but you're actually as a nation, deciding, we're going to fight ISIS in this country or whatever. Then you're ordering people around, and you have to make it so they don't question. You have to deny, in fact, brainwash the soldiers so that, first off, they are signed on.

They're not gonna second guess you. So you're kind of asking them to sacrifice their own freedom prior to, you know, whatever sacrifice you'll be asking them to make in committing these acts of violence. And that if people were to say, hey, who are you to order me around? Then everything would just fall apart.

1:07:01 Dylan: Well, I didn't get the sense that she. The characterization of brainwashing them and stuff like that, that seemed to be like a tactical thing. I don't know where she would fall on that. I do think that she would acknowledge that if you're in a state of war, that if your soldiers desert and the punishment for desertion is shooting them, then you need to shoot them. I think that she would agree with that.

1:07:22 Mark: I mean, it's hard to say when she's thinking of army action. She's not thinking of a volunteer army. So this whole, like, how do we get our soldiers into isis? It doesn't really apply to what she's talking about. She's talking about the whole, you know, you have a draft, and that's really the.

1:07:37 Dylan: No, what I described is even true of a volunteer army. Once you're in the army, you're there. Right. Even in our army, you can't just leave.

1:07:46 Mark: Even if it was on the books that, oh, well, you deserted. You deserve death. She would never say, oh, well, that's what's on the books. That's what you gotta do.

1:07:54 Dylan: No, she would never do that. Right. I mean, there's gonna be circumstances and stuff like this. There's gonna be judgment that has to be involved. But she wouldn't simply say, well, you cannot deny that person's life, because that would be denying them their freedom.

1:08:07 Mark: No, you're right.

1:08:08 Seth: You're right.

1:08:08 Mark: There's no. Even though. Yes. Their individual subjectivity is sacrosanct. That doesn't mean that we can't. There isn't some situations in which it could be sacrificed.

1:08:18 Dylan: Yeah, it's complicated for her. I mean, right after the paragraph I just read part of, she says, this is not the worst thing that can be said. For violence. It not only forces us to sacrifice the men who are in our way, but also those who are fighting on our side and even ourselves. Since we can conquer our enemies only by acting upon their facticity, by reducing them to things we have to make ourselves things in the struggle in which wills are forced to confront one another through their bodies, the bodies of our allies, like those of our opponents, are exposed to the same brutal hazard. They will be wounded, killed and starved.

1:08:54 Wes: And then the beginning of the next paragraph is actually the statement of the antinomy. So thus one finds himself in the presence of the paradox that no action can be generated for men without its being immediately generated against men. We are sort of in this inevitable bind because we'll find out later that even when we're not in situations of oppression, we're always on this plane of struggle. Our projects always negatively intersect the projects of other people. So we can't act or accomplish anything without acting in some sense against others. And maybe that's debatable, but that's the broader implication of all this. Oppression is just the most extreme example of a conflict of wills.

1:09:33 Mark: So I can never remember the terminology when I try to bring this up in discussions, but I think when I was first learning about ethical philosophy and Kant in particular, that there was something like perfect world ethics and then real world ethics, that a rule like treat everyone as an end in all circumstances only really works if everybody else is, you know, if at least most people are doing that as well. The kingdom of ends that Kant pictures.

1:09:59 Wes: Yeah, but it's of course, as both Kant and de Beauvoir, you know, recognize you can treat and do, and must treat people also as a means. It's just that you can't treat them simply as a means.

1:10:09 Mark: Exactly, exactly. And then Kant would get into, well, you could still have capital punishment because that's actually respecting the killer's subjectivity, respecting his autonomy by saying you have to be responsible and die for your.

1:10:21 Wes: Does Kant say that?

1:10:22 Mark: Improper action or something. But wow. Yes, he is actually in favor of

1:10:26 Dylan: capital punishment, but not lying for the sake of some other good. Yeah, can't do that.

1:10:32 Mark: I guess you can't do that.

1:10:34 Wes: But.

1:10:34 Mark: So the implication is that some of these abstract moral theories, that they would work well in this sort of best case scenario. But of course, as Simone de Beauvoir points out, we're never in that situation. So even having a sort of calculus like Kant's is sort of inappropriate because everything. Yeah, we're all steeped in sin. The other example we gave is like Nozick the libertarian, saying, well, if the initial conditions are correct are just for property distribution, and then everything, you know, since that is never going to happen, it's not even useful to have that sort of as an ideal on the back of your mind. Forget all that way of doing philosophy.

1:11:09 Wes: Every action is tainted in this sense, or she calls it, there's an element of failure in every action. So in the sentence after the one I just read on page 107, this obvious truth, which is universally known, is, however, so bitter that the first concern of the doctrine of action is ordinarily to mask the element of failure that is involved in any undertaking. And then she goes on to talk about the way that's done with, say, Hegelianism or Marxism, where you just say there isn't any failure and there isn't any sacrifice because the individual isn't worth anything anyway. So if I'm sacrificing nothing, there's no sacrifice. So you mask that. You sort of generate a fantasy of there being an untainted action by making the collective absolutely worth everything and nothing else matters. That's one way of having a simplistic ethics, to deny the messiness of the world.

1:12:02 Mark: So it's around page 100 in my text. One of the point that you're getting toward is making the point that, you know, it often seems in a war that just an individual human life isn't worth very much. And she wants to explain that by, yes, human life does not seem so valuable when we are reduced to our facticity, if we're just talking about the chemicals in our body or something. So that's to ignore one half of the ambiguity, is to ignore the transcendence part of it.

1:12:27 Wes: But when we treat people as things, they begin to seem like things. So then she goes into the Holocaust examples, you know, where reducing people to their physicality, bizarrely enough, almost makes us empathize less with them, reducing them to these starving skeletal figures. And it's a perverse sort of thing,

1:12:45 Dylan: isn't part of that by reducing people to things, to their facticity, is we also reduce them to utterly the present, and there's no sense of them being a transition between the past and the future. And the future in particular is the big deal, because she gets out of this at the end of that section by talking about children. It's probably worth quoting a couple parts of this thing. So she points out, all oppressive regimes become stronger through the degradation of the oppressed. I'm on page 109 this section begins with what Mark was talking about.

Reduced to pure facticity, congealed in his immanence, cut off from his future, deprived of his transcendence and of the world which that transcendence discloses, a man no longer appears as anything more than a thing among things, which can be subtracted from the collectivity of other things without its leaving upon the earth any trace of its absence. You can walk across the bodies of the dead and not be disturbed in your tranquility. Right after the point about oppressive regimes becomes stronger through the degradation of the oppressed on page 109.

So, despite all this oppression and the savageness that ends up resulting from this degradation, she says, yet with all this sordid resignation, there were children who played and laughed, and their smile exposed the lie of their oppressors. It was an appeal and a promise. It projected a future before the child, a man's future. If in all oppressed countries, a child's face is so moving, it is not that the child is more moving or that he has more of a right to happiness than the others. It is that he is the living affirmation of human transcendence.

He is on the watch. He is an eager hand held out to the world. He is a hope, a project. The trick of tyrants is to enclose a man in the immanence of his facticity and try to forget that man is always, as Heidegger put it, infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to being what he is. Man is a being of the distances, a movement toward the future, a project. The tyrant asserts himself as a transcendence. He considers others as pure immanences. He thus arrogates to himself the right to treat them like cattle. We see the sophism on which his conduct is based, of the ambiguous condition which is that of all men.

He retains for himself the only aspect of a transcendence which is capable of justifying itself for the others. The contingent and unjustified aspect of immanence.

1:15:10 Mark: I kept thinking in reading this book about various post apocalyptic media. Apocalyptic media like the Walking Dead and stuff like in a show like that, that on the other hand, oh, there's only a few people left, so they're so valuable. They're the hope of humanity. They have to serve. But on the other hand, it seems like, especially in that show with the dead walking around to kind of give an exemplar, and everybody has this disease that will make them end like that, no matter how they eventually die. Life seems cheap Given that we don't have any.

I don't have any direct experience of war or whatever, this is the closest I have to sort of really keenly feeling that ambiguity that she's referring to, that on the one hand the human life seems so cheap and on the other hand it seems so rare and precious because in regular life I don't feel like life is cheap at all. It wouldn't even occur to me.

1:16:00 Wes: The collectivism ideology comes out of this because the tyrant has followers and he has to be able to say something to them. He can't just say, oh, you're worth nothing. My transcendence is everything. So the collectivist idea is that, well, this is for the sake of liberation of mankind with a capital M. So you are sacrificing yourself, but there's this payoff, this higher goal, this higher value, the state or humanity in general. And then she's going to criticize that as not making any sense. And it makes no sense, basically because, well, I don't see the payoff. Maybe future men will reap the benefits of my sacrifice, or maybe some Hegelian mind spirit will have those benefits. But me personally, no, I don't. So why would I do that? Once I understand that, why would I make that sacrifice?

1:16:47 Dylan: Why would you become a suicide bomber?

1:16:49 Wes: Well, at that point you believe, though, you believe this ideology of the collective.

1:16:53 Dylan: Yes. Yep, yep, yep.

1:16:55 Mark: Well, unless you're wanting the versions, then it's not the collective, it's the.

1:16:59 Wes: Well, it's still a matter of a payoff, you know.

1:17:01 Dylan: Exactly.

1:17:02 Wes: There's always a payoff.

1:17:03 Dylan: It works the same way.

1:17:04 Wes: If your fantasy is that the payoff is the liberation of humanity in general, I think you're still, you're identifying with that freedom. You've lost the belief that freedom is available to you as a particular individual subject. You have this idea that it's obtainable only in self sacrifice. It's only by destroying myself that I can actually be free. That's the perverse ideology of the tyrant.

1:17:27 Dylan: Yeah. And she says this is the point at which fascist ideology and Marxist ideology

1:17:31 Mark: convergence seems like one of the greatest things about Hegel in particular is that nobody's ever like run into battle, sacrificing themselves, yelling for the absolute world spirit.

1:17:43 Wes: It's not, they might say, for God, for country, over. Yes, for my aunt. My Aunt Harriet.

1:17:51 Mark: So have we pressed home, I think we pressed on what the antinomy is that this liberation requires sacrifice. But why would you sacrifice yourself? And moreover sacrificing other people that Seems right out, but yet this is kind of what at least the messy circumstances of life, when there are already oppressors all over the place, forces us to do. I would think that the reaction would be more or less in response to the degree of oppression. So lucky us, if we just live in a capitalist society where the oppression is covert and a matter of the way to fight that, I would think, on her model would not be to rise up against the bourgeoisie and slay them in their beds, but would be to raise the consciousness of the working class so that they demand changes in the economic system, so that they vote for Nader, for Sanders or whatever.

Have we told enough of the story in terms of what this really means for political action, or the degree to which she has and has not told us how to actually who to vote for?

1:18:49 Wes: What comes out of this is, you know, what she calls the irreducible value of the individual. So when we acknowledge the inevitability of the sacrifice, that's the same thing as acknowledging the irreducible value of the individual. So she calls this on page 114, the bitter truth of sacrifice.

1:19:04 Dylan: Well, it's worth pointing out exactly in that spot that just before that she's taken Hegel to task again and lumping his universalism in with the Marxists and the nihilistic pessimism and saying that in the end, that too, that kind of rationalistic optimism still fails to provide the way to freedom. Yeah, because it isn't holding the ambiguity, it isn't recognizing the antinomy.

1:19:27 Wes: Yeah, so this is the no payoff sort of thing I was mentioning. The individual renounces himself, but no reality in favor of which he can renounce himself is ever affirmed or recovered. So that reality being this spirit or something like that, if the individual is nothing, society cannot be something. Take his substance away from him and the state has no more substance. If he has nothing to sacrifice, there is nothing before him to sacrifice to. So we can't simply make the individual out to be nothing in comparison to the value of the collective, because the collective is composed of these individuals and we can't simply get rid of individual subjectivities.

1:20:05 Mark: Doesn't she then follow up and say that that actually gives sacrifice meaning? To put the which again, it seems such a straw man from our perspective. Like, of course individual sacrifices have meaning, and of course our soldiers now don't think of themselves as meaningless nothings compared to the state to which they're readily. No, if they're putting their lives on their line, they're Putting it on because they believe, not even just in the abstract country, but because they're trying to defend their family. You know, the concrete people. I think there's very concrete stuff in mind that people have.

1:20:35 Dylan: And I think you mentioned earlier that it's a volunteer army, which is really important in this respect. Right. It's different to volunteer for the army and submit yourself to it. But having freely chosen to do that submission versus being rounded up and put onto a train to go fight on the front lines, they are completely different things.

1:20:55 Mark: Although we could give a corresponding. You know, we started in the bell hooks episode thinking about the pornography example, which the Unmute podcast has now released their episode on that the issue being just this one of false consciousness, that yes, if maybe people are volunteering to be in that, but how can we judge? Or are they really in the position to make an informed choice? Is that kind of choice something that somebody could really legitimately make without being somehow self deceived? And I could see one giving a comparable one about at least very dangerous military service.

1:21:26 Seth: I don't know.

1:21:29 Mark: Nobody wants to take the bait on that. No offense.

1:21:31 Dylan: No, I just. Well, I guess to put it in that way, I guess then you would have to make the argument that anyone who willingly takes on an activity that has a high likelihood of causing them physical harm can't possibly have proper self understanding. That seems unlikely.

1:21:49 Mark: Right. And there are certainly a lot of reasons that one could get into that. The one that I was putting forward before is because people have a very vivid sense of what their potential sacrifice would be for. And I guess that's the point of, you know, as de Beauvoir points out, she criticizes techniques of Stalinist Russia. It's always, oh, if you don't go along with this thing, then the whole revolution you're betraying. But no, what is the actual practical upshot of your participating this military maneuver, say, and putting your life on the line there?

What actually would go amiss? So even though you might get into the army, you know, ultimately protect your family and your community, one could argue that sending you in certain parts of the world that the US has no direct interest in being in, you know, this is the kind of argument that people give against military intervention, that that's just never. That's not what they signed up for. That's not what is an appropriate sacrifice to merely sort of meddle in who's going to be the leader in some distant land that's not protecting your family or whatever.

1:22:50 Wes: She moves on here in the Antinomies of action to try and tell you the question is, well, when is the sacrifice justified? And she goes through these different cases. She calls it violence, but I think we can think of violence also as just the use of, of force in general. And she rejects utility as a way of justifying the use of force. She rejects utilitarianism and you know, because it conflates the interests of a particular human being with those of human beings in general. And then she rejects what she calls the future, which basically means that we justify some atrocity in terms of the supreme external end, you know, in the future that we know we're going to achieve this ultimate goal if we just do these things, when in reality we don't really know that.

Which leads into Section 4, the present and the future, where she's talking about utopia. So that's the idea, you know, you might justify the use of force based on a sort of utopian future.

1:23:46 Mark: Just before that section, I had another quote that I pulled out. The freedom of a single man must count more than a cotton or a rubber harvest. Although this principle is not respected, in fact it is usually recognized theoretically. So yes, of course we don't want to say, oh, I will sacrifice my life for some possible future state of humanity that is not actually within sight. That's kind of what this present and the future section is going to be for. The difference between a sacrifice for really one of your projects, a foreseeable immediate future, and the sacrifice for some hoity toity abstraction like the Hegelian absolute. That is absolute bullshit.

1:24:23 Wes: But also for some idea of a utopian society that's far in the future. The gold can't be that remote.

1:24:29 Mark: But that particular example with the.

1:24:31 Wes: What page is that?

1:24:32 Mark: Rubber harvest 113. You know, this is the kind of thing like oh, we're gonna make a railroad, we're gonna. Almost anything industrial that we do, somebody's gonna die in making this damn thing. Unfortunately we can put a lot of emphasis on safety, but it's not even just in building things. Like again, back to the auto accident example, the fact that we have roads at all, that we have determined as a society that it's more important to give people the free of movement and to encourage industry and you know, all the advantages that the highway system gives us. People are going to die for that. And we've sort of decided as a society that that's okay, that those sacrifices are worth it or else we wouldn't do it. We would say, just shut this down.

1:25:11 Wes: I think you're talking about the section where she's really talking about the useful. Right, and utility. And she's rejecting this as a criterion of action or sacrifice. Sacrifice. Because there is no absolute useful outside of us. It's only when we're in the serious. You know, what she calls the serious mode, where we quote, unquote, raise the thing or the cause to the dignity of an unconditioned end. So in that case means just the means to get there just become a technical problem. And we can treat other human beings as simply a technical problem.

So it's only in light of treating the useful as some unconditioned thing that other human beings simply become. We forget about the fact that they are also ends. So I don't think that that means that we can't build roads even if we know that people are going to die doing that. It just means that when we make those decisions, we have to take into account the value of the individual. And also we have to take into account that roads aren't these all important sort of things, whatever that means.

1:26:09 Dylan: But the example is a little more complicated. It's not necessarily the people dying making the roads. It's the fact that people using the roads die.

1:26:16 Wes: Oh, sorry, was that your example?

1:26:18 Mark: Yeah, it was two levels of example. Obviously, the extreme one is like building the railroad with Chinese labor brought in in totally dangerous ways. And like, it's kind of part of the calculation that a certain number of the workers are going to be killed off doing this? Yes, that is the most extreme example. But you can say on the other side, the cost of having this infrastructure thing is that, you know. Yes, during construction as well. We're very aware. As much of an emphasis on safety as there is, something's probably going to go wrong at some point in the country.

1:26:47 Dylan: And isn't that the calculation that we explicitly make whenever we say those pollution controls are going to cost jobs? So we say that. Yes, we can see if we aggregate it all together that 20,000 people die a year because of this level of pollution. But you know what? It doesn't rise enough. We don't like to make that calculation. And I think in practical terms, it's only when enough people feeling like in this case the pollution is directly causing a shortness of their life, that they take a stand against it. So you see this happening in China now where the pollution level is just so high that people are fighting against it.

And this was true in the early Industrial Revolution. That just was so horrible. Or the generation of the sewer system, you know, in New York and Other big cities, once the sewage started creeping up into the rich people's houses and they could smell the stink, then that's when sewage systems were built.

1:27:48 Mark: I think we might have gotten to the point in this country, just like we would no longer put up with the draft. I was saying that we no longer accept that there's going to be a certain level of death involved in even the highway system. I mean, that's like one of the main initiatives of every state department of transportation is like towards zero deaths is what can we do to make these things idiot proof, to maximally educate drivers so that they're not such idiots to, you know, whatever we need to do, can we get over that? And even more so, you know, there's not the expectation that workers are going to die on these things. Like safety is the priority.

1:28:23 Dylan: I mean, we're maybe drifting a little bit off topic, but I can't help but ask the following question. So when it happens that we have autonomous vehicles that can drive on highways, will it become mandated?

1:28:36 Wes: Yes, it will.

1:28:37 Dylan: That everyone who drives on certain highways are required to have such technology. Yeah, I think you're right.

1:28:45 Wes: Based on my inside knowledge of the transportation industry,

1:28:52 Dylan: it'll be an interesting revolt. I mean, it'll surely first happen on the highways, which as the easiest problem to solve. No cross traffic, limited entrance freeways and stuff like that.

1:29:03 Wes: Yeah, well, the fact that it'll eliminate traffic virtually, in many cases, eliminate congestion and eliminate accidents, that's the carrot part of it. But then there's. Then there's freedom, man. You're depriving people of their freedom.

1:29:18 Mark: Yeah, I was just thinking of. I got a movie pitch for you that it's like a taxi driver and it's a human being, but he has to like disguise as a robot and hide out and like goes on these illicit runs and the robot cops are after him for driving on that. It'll be awesome.

1:29:34 Dylan: The problem is that there won't be a robot that looks like a human being driving that car. It'll be a little square box the size of a cigarette pack.

1:29:40 Mark: No, it'll be C3PO.

1:29:44 Dylan: R2D two man.

1:29:48 Mark: Yes, I guess he drives. C3PO will amuse you.

1:29:51 Dylan: He can't move his elbows. I never understood C3PO. At least R2D2, you know, he's purely mechanical. But C3PO, they can't put a freaking

1:30:01 Mark: voice thing in him. What's with that?

1:30:03 Dylan: Yeah, that's true. I never.

1:30:06 Mark: Star wars is inefficient.

1:30:09 Wes: It's so great I think. Is that what you're about to say? It's so true.

1:30:11 Mark: You should at least carry the C3PO around his neck like Twiki and Dr. Theopolis. All right, so is there anything else to say about this? There's this whole section for the present and the future. You know the two meanings of the future. Here's just a quote. When I envisage my future, I consider that movement which, prolonging my existence of today, will fulfill my present projects and will surpass them toward new ends. The future is the definite direction of a particular transcendence. It is so closely bound up with the present that it composes with it a single temporal form.

This is the future which Heidegger considered as a reality which is given at each moment. But through the centuries, men have dreamed of another future in which it might be granted them to retrieve themselves as beings in glory, happiness and justice. This future did not prolong the present. It came down upon the world like a cataclysm announced by signs which cut the continuity of time.

1:30:54 Wes: So, in other words, when we're engaged in an action, we can think of taking the future into account in two ways. One, in this extreme, I've got to figure out what's going to make everything perfect and great. I've got to figure out what's going to bring about the universe. Utopia, as opposed to just figuring out the second version of the future, which is just what I need to do next.

1:31:12 Mark: He calls it a future thing.

1:31:14 Wes: That's the quick take on that distinction.

1:31:17 Unknown speaker: I don't know.

1:31:18 Mark: Like, I've heard arguments again by the sort of libertarian crowd of pretty much that whenever you want to, if you're liberal, if you want to do things to improve the world, then you must have some kind of perfect utopian state in mind that you're shooting forward, right? So when I talk about the new work, stuff like, oh, you must be shooting for it. And of course, utopians are all bullshit that there is no, as de Beauvoir points out in here, there is no situation, given the desiring creatures we are, where harmonious development would then reconcile all of us. Men would fulfill themselves as a pure positivity. She says this dream is not permitted since man is originally a negativity. So there's always going to be struggle, right?

1:31:59 Wes: It's not just that utopia is practically infeasible. It's that that using that as your standard is ethically compromising. It de subjectifies you. It puts you in that position of no longer embracing your lack. Right? Because you're thinking of a day when that will be completely gone.

1:32:17 Dylan: It's exactly the same criticism of the Serious Man. It's exactly the same.

1:32:22 Mark: But yet she is super progressive and the book that she writes after this is basically espousing a lot of the same kinds of stuff that we saw in Bell Hooks and et cetera.

1:32:32 Dylan: Why do you say yet? But it sounded like you were saying that in contradistinction to the criticism of the Serious Man. You wouldn't have thought that she would be a progressive.

1:32:40 Mark: Yes, just again going on this line partially because I was just reading our responses to our Bell Hooks episode and a lot of the typical responses by certain right wing types. Whenever you put forward any kind of progressive position that you must be espousing a utopian. You must be saying, I have a vision of the future and everyone will act like this. And that will of course do huge damage to human nature and be not only technically infeasible, but really just a disaster, theoretically, just wrong headed on every single level. So think of the novel Herland, we got similar comments about that.

And that actually is a vision of a more or less static. Well, we don't have to get off on that. But no, I think that correctly done, this sort of progressivism is open ended in exactly the way that Simone Beauvoir is talking about that you are just thinking about how can I make things actually better in a foreseeable way? You know, it's still meaningful whether there's a utopian endpoint or not.

1:33:39 Wes: Yeah, but I think she seems to be more focused on people's individual projects though. Right. It's not just this is all about social justice. This is about I want to be a writer or something like that. You do a lot of positive work through focusing on one's own projects like that. It's when you get into the collective good is actually where it gets dangerous. It gets tricky because you can want to subordinate the individual to that. I think the other thing with this idea of this positive future, the serious positive future that she rejects, part of the problem with that fantasy is that in fact our struggle never ceases.

And thinking of things in terms of this positive future is actually a flight from freedom. It's a flight from the fact of that struggle. So I think it's not that you can't fight for social justice as long as you're not thinking of it in its utopian way, as long as you're not using it as a way of flying from your own freedom and harboring this idea that we can eliminate struggle from the world or that even that action can be univocally good. Right. That action can not involve the sacrifices that it inevitably does.

1:34:41 Mark: Well, I think it's also that we can't know the human good a priori. She says, this is page 142 in mine. The good of an individual or group of individuals requires that it be taken as an absolute end of our action. But we are not authorized to decide upon this end a priori. So she does think that this sort of respect for human dignity individuals does mean that, yeah, we have an ethical obligation to pursue the good for people. And again, that's not necessarily what they say the good is because they could be brainwashed or duped in whatever way, but we're not in an epistemic position to.

She compares it to growing a plant. Like a lot of people. Like, oh, you know, we know how a plant is supposed to grow. You know, you just. You put it in the right conditions and you give it water. And that's how governing people should be. Because we kind of understand what human flourishing is and we can just grow them that way. Like, no, that you can't. That would justify a paternalistic society that would then just set up all this stuff. But that's not the way that human nature works. We are a freedom.

1:35:45 Wes: And in fact, to be free requires not knowing everything. According to her, we need this, what she calls an opaque future.

1:35:51 Dylan: I think you're right, Mark, about the point. She does use that example of the plant, but I did find that example a little bit confusing, given that, yes, she would be opposed to the forcing someone to be free and the paternalism involved in a certain interpretation of enabling flourishing. But on the other hand, her focus on freedom and the way she speaks of it seems to really be pointed to a version of enabling people's own flourishing and their own embodiment of their freedom. That is exactly that language and that way of speaking about their self actualization.

So, yes, to the point of a paternalistic kind of rendering where you're constantly saying, well, this is for your own good, that we're going to make sure that you become the best version of who you are. There's certainly an oppressive way that that can be done. She seems unambiguously in favor of a genuine attention to the flourishing of other people as an acknowledgment of their freedom. That would be the positive way in which you do that.

1:36:58 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:36:58 Wes: And the other part of the positive. It's page 131 of my edition where we finally, you know, she's rejected all these different criteria for justifying our actions, including the positive future. And her conclusion is that we can in fact make decisions without knowing the future, Knowing everything about the future, we can operate with limited knowledge. So the way we justify our actions is not by these grand predictions of the future, but it's in their finiteness. And I think part of what she means by that. So on page 131, I think it's important we say, since this is her sort of positive account, say what she means by this.

1:37:34 Dylan: Are you thinking about the stuff about festivals?

1:37:36 Wes: Well, that comes right after that. That's just an example that follows this main point.

1:37:41 Mark: So right before festivals, it's about the hermeneutic treatment of human accomplishment. In other words, it's a story. It has a beginning and it has an end. And he talks even about literature should reflect that. Whereas usually we think of like, oh, TV falsifies and movies falsify things, falsify life. Because really there's no just endings. It's always just stuff flowing into other things. But if we're gonna make sense of our lives, if we're gonna make sense of our struggles, then something like the Nazis finally getting kicked out of France, she wants to say, like, that was an ending and that's reflected in our art and how we make sense of things. Is that what the point you're looking for?

1:38:22 Wes: Maybe what you said is actually relevant, but. So it's 134 to 135. The end justifies the means only if it remains present, if it is completely disclosed in the course of the present enterprise. So the point I wanted to get at with this idea of finitude is just the sense in which it's not a transcendent future that justifies our action. But in a way, the action must be self justifying. That, you know, instead of the means sort of being for the sake of the ends, the means includes the end in it, if that makes any sense.

1:38:52 Mark: Or at least the end includes the me, includes what you're doing right now. That has to be part of the end. It's not simply for existence.

1:39:00 Dylan: Existence must be asserted in the present. If one does not want all life to be defined as an escape towards

1:39:05 Wes: nothingness, this will be cashed out later in terms of, you know, part of the way of saying is the means ought not to contradict the ends. If your end is to serve humanity and your means, Means doesn't serve humanity. That's a case where the finitude fails or the imminence of the end in the means isn't there. And so the festival is just. Is an example of that in the sense that it asserts existence in the present. So even though we never reach the end, in the sense of a complete accomplishment, we can still celebrate. Do you know what I'm saying?

1:39:35 Dylan: Yeah.

1:39:36 Mark: Yes. Well, just to tie it into the example that I'd given before, she gives the festival as I guess one of their biggest festivals is celebrating when the Nazis got kicked out of France. And she says it's characterized by destruction. The ethics of being is the ethics of saving. By storing up, one aims at the stationary plenitude of the in itself. Existence, on the contrary, is consumption. It makes itself only by destroying. Then even talks about art.

1:40:01 Wes: This whole idea of destroying and you know, the bacchanalia and the drinking, the excess, she says, is a way of asserting our independence from the thing. So that's a way of live for today, of saying that we are not beholden to things, we can waste them.

1:40:16 Mark: We do not project ourselves toward the future thing. That should be a superhero or something. Future thing.

1:40:22 Wes: It sort of ends with. It's. Well, it's 137, paragraph one. If we reject the idea of a future myth in order to retain only that of a living and finite future, one which delimits transitory forms, we have not removed the antinomy. The present sacrifices and failures no longer seem compensated for in any point of time. The utility can no longer be defined absolutely. Thus are we not ending by condemning action as criminal and absurd, though at the same time condemning man to action? So in other words, we've rejected all these different criteria for justifying our actions until we get to this idea of finitude. But it seems unsatisfying. She's subjecting this whole idea that there's no payoff, that criticism back at herself. And it's the next section that's going to try and answer that. The ambiguity.

1:41:06 Mark: I had a more pithy quote in mind, which is just that people in this festival, which then she talks about one of art's roles is to fix this passionate assertion of existence into a more durable form. So the festival is kind of what theater, music, dance, poetry, they're all about. In the festival art men express their need to feel that they exist absolutely. And they must really fulfill this wish. Okay, then here's the quote. They clearly perceive the. This ambiguity of their condition, which is the most fundamental of all. That every living moment is a sliding toward death.

But if they're Willing to look it in the face. They also discover that every moment toward death is life. So there you go. There's her existentialist version of carpe diem or whatever. So it's the concrete, sensible to be preferred in ethical thinking over the abstract. It's not the Ten Commandments. It's looking into the face of somebody that you're thinking of killing or stealing from. And I don't know, that oversimplifies things. But, yes, that's the way it is. Something closer to what we've described in other episodes is moral intuitionism without being subject to whim.

There is no anarchy of personal whim because we find laws of ethics in our very freedom.

1:42:13 Wes: Where are you now? You're in ambiguity.

1:42:16 Mark: This is just in the conclusion.

1:42:18 Wes: Let me just say. So we've talked about, you know, she ended that section by asking, well, where's the payoff? And it's on page 140 of ambiguity that she describes how it is that our actions are sort of compensated. Basically, she's going to say that it's not that we're compensated by achieving some absolute end through action except insofar as we're absolutely willing our freedom. So the willing, in a way, becomes the payoff. Our freedom is the payoff. That's ultimately the justification. That's how you justify action.

1:42:50 Mark: And I'm sure we could struggle for longer or find a better work to even more clearly spell out why that doesn't entail ethical egoism or anything like that. Because I, you know, she's told us she wants to be on this divide between, yes, it's an individualistic philosophy. You're not subordinating yourself. You're not sacrificing yourself. It's very much about individual freedom. But at the same time, because we're so connected to other people, that's gonna imply an ethics. And I think that's kind of a hard sell because it has to be something more than just people have natural altruism or something like that.

Because I think it was in this Nussbaum book that we're reading for a future episode right now, points out, like, look, evolutionarily, like, kids actually have a lot of hostility towards strangers and feel like strangers should be punished just for being strangers. So you can't just look at human instinct or something and say, we're social animals. So it's not just a matter of the human telos or the human instinct means we have to be nice to people. If we're sort of paying attention to what our Instincts are really telling us it's not that kind of moral intuitionism.

It is something more abstract, a little closer to Kant's.

1:44:05 Wes: It's deontology, definitely.

1:44:06 Mark: Yes, yes. But I don't feel after this whole thing that I've really, you know, I feel a little more confident than when we did this with Sartre, just because she's actually gone into detail and tried to give us a lot of concrete examples. And I, and I love her overall approach, but I still, if you are trying to argue with somebody who was in favor of, say, ethical egoism that, you know, I've sort of had the libertarian there floating as a pole for argument. I don't think this would convince such a person.

1:44:35 Dylan: They're unconvincable because they're serious.

1:44:38 Wes: But I don't.

1:44:39 Mark: Yeah, I suppose so.

1:44:41 Wes: Ethical egoism seems like a. Is that a real. Is that anyone really advocate that? All right, let's wrap up any other closings.

1:44:49 Mark: We just, We've already said how much we love the reading. Anybody? Any takeaways?

1:44:53 Dylan: It's awesome. You should go read it.

1:44:57 Mark: Great.

1:44:57 Wes: Nope.

1:44:58 Mark: All right, thanks, guys. Hey, everybody. Become Partially Examined Life Citizen. Go follow us on Twitter. Go look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com to read blog entries. Go comment on this. I want interaction with these people. We're trying to bring together some of the different strands here. People who are fans of the show but have different political views. And I'd love to get more of that discussion going in an open and philosophically deep, rich way. Simone de Beauvoir is just an awesome example of somebody that is being really systematic, but yet ultimately for her time.

Right on. You know, very, very, very practical, confronting the ethical dilemmas of that moment. Something that seems sorely missed from many discussions now that I read. Okay, okay, just two quick announcements before we go. First, I wanted to remind you about the after show on these Simone de Beauvoir episodes. You can join the conversation. It's going to take place Sunday, June 26th at 5pm Eastern Time. In order to attend, you have to be a Partially Examined Life citizen. Go look under not school groups for the listing for that after show and join that group to sign up.

However, anyone can watch it on YouTube streaming video while it's happening or after the fact. We will put a link up to that. Second, if you're wondering what happened to Seth, he dropped off ill during the episode. And for reasons that I don't think are related to that, he's not gonna appear on the next few episodes. At least if you Want to reach out to him directly, Tell him how much you love that he's on the show. Whatever. That's Seth. Partiallyexaminedlife.com All right. Good night, everybody.

1:46:29 Dylan: Good night.

1:46:29 Wes: Good night.

1:46:47 Unknown speaker: Don't know quite what I should say but I I do know what I should not at the times when things get this way I'm usually thinking a lot so I inevitably talk too much out of fear of being unreal despite the desire for a human touch I think we control what we feel so I'm not saying it's gone too far A setup is making me weak overreactive I feel stronger I will not become me. Of course I like you how could I not what with the way we get along I think about you how could I not? And I don't want to mess things up. I couldn't want you to change your ways it's not my place I know I'd be thrilled just to keep these days but it's moving oh should I stop it?

Bend to him to should I drop it? I should not ask but I must know if you're as confused as what you show as how I feel alive and well I hope that bitch this won't break that spell and no one gets hurt. So I'm not saying it's got to change but I had to get out what was in whether indiscretion or honesty you should know that you're under masking. Of course I like you how could I not what with the way we get along I think about you and him you've got and I don't want to mess things up don't want to mess you up don't want to mess him up don't want to mess me up.