This is KZSU Stanford.
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Question, what do God in this radio program have in common?
Answer, if they didn't exist, one would have to invent them.
There was a time some 15 years ago when in title opinions didn't exist yet,
and over the past 10 months some of you probably worried that it had all come to an end.
Yet here we are surging back to life after our prolonged hibernation.
It's been quite a while since our last confession, but we're back from the dead now,
back to tell you all, we shall tell you all.
Wayneeth the world, but the watch holdeth.
In title opinions holdeth the vigil.
A glimmer of thought in the thoughtless night of the present age.
They say that in the gloom the gold gathers the light about it,
and it's true as the gloom thickens all around us.
The light gathers all the more intently around our little golden bow
that shakes against the cold in this bare, ruined choir of a world
where the sweet bird sang of late.
Well, our bird hasn't stopped singing.
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The solo end of the entitled opinions.
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I think it was Voltaire who said if God didn't exist,
one would have to invent him.
And speaking of existence, today we have a show I've been looking forward to for a long time
about one of the major proponents of existentialism, Simon de Beauvoir.
Lover or hater, if Beauvoir didn't exist, she would have to be invented.
Indeed, if she were here now, I'm sure she would remind us that human existence
is always invented in both senses of the word.
Inventio and Latin means to find or discover.
According to existentialist doctrine, we find ourselves thrown into a
world that is not of our own making, but which we have no choice but to assume responsibility for.
To exist means to invent, by exercising, or freedom to act.
People who shark that freedom are merely bad inventors.
Those of you well acquainted with this program know that I am an avowed existentialist,
may not be a card-carrying sartrean or Beauvarian,
but I do believe that when all is said and done, we have the world we deserve.
And that ultimately, we are the authors of our destinies.
We do not choose our facticity yet we choose what to make of it.
In my version of existentialism, we are responsible for far more than what we assume responsibility for.
In short, I believe there is a considerable quotient of bad faith and self-deception in all of us,
as individuals, as well as a collective.
That's one reason I think Simone de Beauvoir is one of the most important European intellectuals of the post-war period,
because she never stopped reminding us of our existential freedom and agency.
I have a feeling that my guest today agrees with me about Beauvoir, at least in part.
We've been talking about doing this show for quite some time, and I'm delighted to welcome my colleague Jeremy Sable
to the program. He is an intellectual historian and specialist of French literature, especially French existentialism.
Jeremy received his PhD at Yale and is taught as a lecturer in Stanford University's program in structured liberal education,
otherwise known as SLE. Since 2003, he also lectures in Stanford's Master of Liberal Arts program.
Jeremy, welcome to entitled opinions.
Thanks Robert, I'm glad to be here.
Yeah, I'm glad finally we've been talking about this for a few years actually.
So from our past conversations, I gather you agree with me that Simone de Beauvoir is not only a major intellectual,
but that her thought is as relevant today as it was when she published groundbreaking books, like the Second Sex and the Ethics of Ambigua.
And the 40s and 50s. Am I right about that?
I think so Robert. I'm a real big fan of Beauvoir.
And if I have to think about her importance, first I would just say, you know, the importance of the existentialist in general to our contemporary moment.
I think it's really worth saying something about just the emphasis that we have in our own culture today, thinking about freedom and agency,
and also worrying about victimhood, about social forces and what do we do about the pressure of social forces?
How much freedom do we in fact have with what seems like oppressive social forces all around us?
This is just central questions for the existentialist.
So I think all of them, the existentialists in general, are really important to us now. It should be important to us now.
But Beauvoir in particular, I think Beauvoir thought first and most clearly about how to think about individual freedom given the fact that we're not all socially or politically free.
And so I think Beauvoir is especially relevant today for us as we think about those problems.
So you would, I suppose, say that Jean-Paul Sast is equally relevant in--
I'm just a wonderful, but even more relevant in Europe.
Yeah, good. And there's this is kind of one of the things that Sartreans and Beauvoirians fight about.
Or only maybe recently, we thought about it. It used to be that one was just a Sartrean and Beauvoir herself was a Sartrean.
I think Beauvoir offers some things earlier in her career that Sartreans is struggling to articulate.
So on that front, I think that she is the person to look to for some really good formulations of how to think about these problems.
But of course, both of them were centrally worried about them, and I like to consider them as they consider themselves to be a team.
So I think of their thought really particularly the early work of the late thirties and early forties, where they really came to their first formulations of existentialism.
They were working that stuff out together.
So are you saying that something like being in nothingness that Sast publishes in '43 or '44?
'43.
They were a team already when he was working on that book, and that she helps him out?
Yes, totally.
Yeah, and we have good scholarship on this. I think the scholarship tends to--
and for understandable reasons, want to put Beauvoir in the saddle for a lot of the great ideas of being in nothingness,
partly because in her own career, both Sartre and Beauvoir in their lifetimes really gave him all the credit for it.
So there's this kind of a little bit of a come-up, and there's a little confusion on Beauvoir in part to know why it is that she kind of undersold her own contributions.
But we know for a fact now that Beauvoir was working on her first novel, "Lambite" where she came to stay as it's translated into English.
That got published in 1943 as well.
Beauvoir in working through that novel was reading through a bunch of things, and in the kind of period, right before publication, they were working side by side.
But before that, they were separated and writing letters, and Beauvoir's reading Hegel and saying, "You know, you got to read this stuff. It's amazing."
Finding really great formulations from Hegel about every self wants the death of the other, these kind of oppositional figures that we see so beautifully conveyed in being in nothingness are this kind of Hegelian formulations that Beauvoir is really finding first and articulating their importance to Sartre.
The opening pages of Beauvoir's novel, "Lambite" is in some ways her own formulation of existentialism and are encountered with the other.
And it's really just a beautifully concise.
I do remind me of that opening.
So the main character is kind of an etheater, right? She works in a theater, and she's like on the empty stage, actually don't remember if she's on the, she's like leaving the theater, coming to the theater.
And she's talking in the theater, right? A theater is just a wonderful place to talk about being thrown into the world, right? Everything is kind of a prompt, and we adopt roles and of course place themselves or inventions, right?
So the meaning of them is pure invention.
And so the problem that this narrator encounters just in the few first pages is the kind of the problem of that all human meaning is created, that nothing is out there for us already, that we are thrown into a world without meaning.
And that kind of the kind of reef of solipsism problem that Sartre encounters in being in nothingness is also really early on in the novel.
And so the idea that he's like, well, is it just me out there or is there anybody else? So a lot of the great moves that are maybe more famous in being in nothingness, both wars working out at the same time, maybe a little bit before, they're sharing back ideas back and forth throughout this period.
And in a really exciting way, and it's just thrilling to read the letters.
Of course, that idea that we're thrown into a world is a high-degenerian origin, having gone to study with high-degener, or at least was at the same university attending lectures.
And this thrownness, big concept in being in time, 1926, thrownness and facticity transcendence, there's a high-degenerian matrix to many of the existentialist concepts there, although it's true.
As you mentioned, that the Hegelian notion that the subject wants the death of the other, because there's this conflict, this irresolvable conflict between two subjects, each of which is struggling to objectify the other.
And I think some of the most potent passages, or parts of the doctrine of being in nothingness, have to do with these hell-less other people, long-fares, and that does have a Hegelian, not a particularly high-degenerian origin.
And I will talk, I think, shortly about how Jean-Paul Satz and perhaps even Bovat, commitment to the Hegelian notion of conflict, inter-subjective conflict, creates this dilemma for them when it comes to trying to articulate why a fully-free existentialist subject must choose the freedom of the other.
And it's almost like choosing the good of the other, where human relations are more the question of solidarity than they are of conflict.
I think that's a fault line that runs through the whole theory.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And, Robert, I just got to make a pitch for Bovat's letters here, in 40 and 41, she's reading Hegel.
And she's reading Hegel, like Lee would read Harry Potter.
She reads the phenomenology in about 10 days, and then she immediately starts in on the logic.
Which is not an easy book to plow through.
I never made it through.
Yeah, it's an impossible book.
And she's writing letters to Sart, like twice a day, about how thrilling it is.
It's like a James Bond novel to her.
And you really feel the excitement of that dialectic and this kind of, what we would think of as a kind of a bleak confrontation of two subjects.
For her, this is just thrilling.
It's very powerful stuff.
So, on the question of freedom, which is one of the existentialists, it's part of our facticity that we are determined by the world that we've been thrown into and we're determined by our gender.
Society, social circumstances, but that we also, in our being thrown into situation and circumstances, we also transcend, invariably transcend because human being is a transcendence.
Another word for which is freedom. And this idea that is very insistent in Jean-Paul Sartte, that this freedom is a source of anguish for most people because it comes with very heavy burdens of responsibility.
And that most of us spend most of our time trying to evade that sense of responsibility and to shield, conceal from ourselves, this kind of groundless freedom that is human existence.
Yeah, perfectly said, Robert. And I think here, the language that Beauvoir uses, which I find powerful, her book that she writes before the second sex, the book that she considers her existentialist ethics, a book called The Ethics of Ambiguity.
The word ambiguous or ambiguity is Beauvoir's formulation for capturing that we have these two sides to us, right, this facticity and this transcendence.
And that they're kind of intention or they don't make sense together. If we talk about the world of facts, there are no freedoms in the world of facts.
And that human beings are really this composition, this composite between these two pieces and the danger is that we want to lapse back into facticity, the imminence.
And it's this great temptation that we have, not only where there are cells, but we love other people's help, right, we love being turned into an object, right, when we talk about objectification, there's some appeal from the subjects,
perspective of getting turned into an object, because there's a solid sin. We don't have to make decisions. We're just, well, I'm a professor, I'm a teacher, I'm a
I'm an identity, cultural or otherwise. This is identity politics today. Yes. So go on.
And maybe we're diving a little bit into the second sex here, but I think one of the, you know, if we go back to the early 40s and we think about Beauvoir and Sarath, they're not only just literary and philosophical geniuses that have this grand vision of what they want to do in the world, they're also just good old-fashioned kind of cultural rebels, right?
They're anti-static quo, they see the interwar period and then World War II and they've taken the moral failures of the French in this period as kind of a result of this kind of bourgeois mentality.
So, and I think a lot of the kind of vibrancy of their thought comes out of this rejection of the cultural values around them. And so this leads to a kind of problem for Beauvoir and for Sarath. I think the idea of social identities, these kind of
ideas about who we might be, you know, for South, he gives the example of the waiter, you know, that a waiter kind of plays like being a waiter, a waiter is a certain kind of personality and a waiter when you get a job in a French cafe, you try to become that waiter.
That's a kind of a platonic ideal of the waiter out there and it's a social identity. And for Sarath and Beauvoir, those social identities are purely bad. They only constrict us.
They're their refuges for our bad faith. We run, we cling to them so that we don't have to confront our freedom.
And I think this is one of the things that we struggle with in our contemporary moment is we see social identities sometimes as very constraining and even oppressive, but we also find great power in them.
And I think, well, let's say, you know, so start wrote a book about anti-Semitism and for him the definition of a Jew is only an anti-Semitic definition.
Right, there's no value or power in claiming yourself as a Jew, whereas we all know that not to be the case. There's a lot of cultural identities that even when they're problematic and historical and ambiguous, we see real value in adopting them and claiming them for our own.
We want to see some power in the idea of claiming a social identity that doesn't necessarily cut all of our freedom away. And Beauvoir and Sarath are not good in the early formulations of their thought. They're not good about saying why we would want to do that. It just seems only bad to adopt social roles.
Yeah, I think I have to say that the analysis of the waiter, which is one of the most famous passages in being in nothing is like, I always found it very frustrating because I think it mistakes identity with a profession.
Yes, I don't see why it has to be inauthentic to play a waiter as well as you can play the role of a waiter. And then when you're off work, you are who you are. Your identity is not submissive to your role as a waiter. I think it's a little bit unsatisfying.
Unless you take the waiter as an example of how easily we can enter into roles and play roles.
Yeah, and I think you're right, Robert. I think there's a weakness there. But I think it's partly historical. I think, you know, Sartz idea of the waiter in 1942 is somebody who when they went home, they were still a waiter.
Right, exactly.
You know, like the butler that we see, you know, the remains of the day, butler, right, you never shirt that identity.
That's true. And I do agree with Simone de Beauvoir even here because the ethics of ambiguity, I think is a brilliant analysis of different ways in which people get stuck in particular, self-identifications.
And thereby, abnegating their transcendence that we're always transcend a particular role or a particular profession. But she analyzes, she has a whole typology of the subman, the serious man, the adventurer.
Yep.
And it's when you actually solidify your identity with one of these roles that bad faith really takes hold of you.
Yeah, and how, I mean, what I love about that description in the ethics ambiguity is how compelling it seems to adopt these roles, right?
They're very difficult to, it seems easy to say, no, no, no, I'm my own person. I reject those roles.
But particularly as you get older and you commit to choices, voluntary choices in your life, those choices can calcinate, right? They can become hardened and, and, and, well, it's true.
It's where in, in high diggers being in time, one of the most interesting parts of that book for me is when he speaks about a feeder hole in or repetition and where you have this resolve to be your finitude and your projected under death and you shatter against the possibility of your own death.
And somehow that projection that being under death will throw you back upon a series of possibilities that you have inherited or that the past transmits to you for free appropriation.
And that freedom to choose your hero as high digger puts it is one where there would be nothing wrong with freely choosing to identify with your Jewish heritage or to choose a hero.
And emulate or become a Christian or become whatever the choice may be.
My feeling is that it all will sash than see one of the wabad get in trouble by trying to propose norms which would distinguish between what is a good choice authentic choice and not authentic choice.
Yeah, great, great. Yeah, and you're right. I think both war and start, particularly in this kind of moment, 43, 44, 45, right around the end of the war.
They're really struggling with this. They have this clear idea, this philosophical commitment to the idea that freedom is freedom, right? And so if we choose to deny our freedom, bad faith is a choice, right?
We can pretend we're not free that we're a mother, we're a Christian, we're whatever and that defines everything about us and what would make that choice any less authentic than to reject those things.
So they have this philosophical position about freedom being an ontological condition of being human. There's no way you can get around it. It's not a choice, it's not a value, it's simply a fact of human life.
And then on the other hand, they have this, I think, first cultural attitude that then becomes political stance which is that certain kinds of choices are better than others.
And so to fight the Nazis is better than to be a Nazi or to be a collaborator and to reject social norms is better than to embrace them. So why would that be more authentic? Is it just because everybody else is doing the bad one? Is that good enough?
And here I think both of them struggle and I think both war is the first to clearly identify what she calls this ethics of ambiguity, which is that, so both start and both war have this language of I'm just going to back up a little bit and talk about the project.
They both have this idea that we choose projects. And our projects we might even think of as in a broad Aristotelian sense are kind of means and ends, right? There are things we might do for the sake of other things. Here I am in the studio with you.
Why am I doing that? Well, we're friends and we've talked about doing this and why is that? So we could imagine a kind of series of nested choices, nested projects that might go all the way out to the project of our very lives, right?
So we're starting both war, believe that this the largest level set of our projects is this kind of unspecified vision of what our life is. And we don't always have a sense of when we chose that or how about how about bringing more thought into the world?
Okay, good ideas about sharing. So you know your project Robert. Well, so you're an educator as much as I am. You spent even more time with students committed to this project now. Good. Okay, good. So we've got projects. What makes projects better than other projects? Well, both war says that projects which lead to our ability to live out our freedom concretely indefinitely.
definitely, so meaning not a specified thing, but I can act out concretely in the
lived world any old way I want is better than projects that don't end up like
that. So, for example, if I'm in solitary confinement, if I'm a political
prisoner, I'm in solitary confinement, I can choose to characterize my life as a
life of political struggle, of mute resistance. I could even commit suicide,
maybe. I can't do just any old thing. I can't live out that freedom. I still
have the freedom to define my life, define why it is that I'm in prison,
decide the meaning of my life, but I can't decide to make myself a really nice
breakfast with, you know, ex-fluorant team. I can't do that. And it would be better if I
could choose projects in my situation that led to more concrete freedoms that are
indefinite to be able to act in any other way. So, those are the good kinds of
projects that lead towards open horizons instead of close horizons. And so
Bovard just says just upfront, "Hey, this is ethical. One is better than the
other. And if we choose for ourselves to shut down our open horizons and choose
closed-ended projects, that's a moral failure. And if we cause others to do that,
that's evil." So, she's just straight up like that's, there's an ethical system
right there. The foundation of that system is freedom and ethical choices fall
out of seeing freedom not only as a human fact, but also as a grounding value in
the world. Yeah. No, it's true. And I still find that there's something
sufistical in the argument that because freedom is an ontological condition,
there is a norm for our concrete choices in life which would be making
choices that favor freedom rather than, yeah, then the opposite. But, go ahead.
Yeah, she's very persuasive when she's analyzing the bad faith of these other
types. You know, the subman, the serious man, the bourgeois, this is where
Jean-Paul Satt, and the one that they were really quite brilliant because they
love being in a tribunal where they themselves were not under accusation,
where they were the accusers. Yeah, Robert, and I think the problem that you're
talking about, I totally identify with. And it's this moment where there's this
kind of social critique which is very appealing, this kind of characterization of
bad faith, both of the individual and the social level. And that kind of more
philosophically rigorous backdrop to that, that they want to be just really hand in
hand. And it seems like they're not totally hand in hand. Right? It seems like,
you know, if we think about bad faith being just a cognitive part of human
reality, like am I redefining my projects when I'm brushing my teeth or am I
lapsing into imminence when I'm brushing my teeth? Well, I'm lapsing into
imminence. No big deal, right? I mean, it's just part of cognition that we're not
always going to be reinventing ourselves. That for starts not a moral flaw. So
when does it become a flaw? When does that kind of cognitive fact about us start
to shape our behavior? I think it's when you when you deliberately fail to not
only take responsibility for the consequences of your action, but you fail to
become aware of the degree to which you have brought about certain
circumstances for yourself and for others without full awareness of how they
had been chosen without you're being aware of it. That's bad faith. Yeah. It's
when you're lying to yourself where you're able to tell yourself that you
something that you know is not true and convince yourself of that. Yeah. And
here Robert, just because you said it's a nicely just there, I'm just going to
remind our listeners when we talk about bad faith kind of casually and I
certainly do this all the time, we you know, we tend to talk about it in this
sense of the human being being composed of both freedom and
facticity, right? Transcendence and and and imminence. And we tend to talk most of
the time about bad faith being a a willful lying to ourselves about the fact
that we are transcendence, right? We pretend that we are in fact this imminent fact
about the world, but it's equally bad faith to forget that we are a thing that we
are we have imminence to us, right? And here's here's where we willfully forget
our own past, right? We think, oh, we're pure transcendence. I can walk away
from the child I had. I can walk away from that life because I'm free to choose.
I don't have to take responsibility for that. Right? So that's equally bad
faith is to forget that in fact our choices do become facts in the world and we
have to own those as equally as we own our freedom. Sure. Jeremy, let's talk a little bit
about the second sex, which is the major work that she's known for. And why do
you think that's that book had such a powerful resonance when it came out?
Yeah. And why is it still a book that everyone should read today? Good. Great.
My favorite question, Robert, I think for for many decades the second sex was seen
rightly as having an impact, a real impact in the world, a political impact in
the world of women's rights. It had an enormous impact in the English-speaking
world. I think a bigger impact in the English-speaking world before really the
French-speaking world and really all the kind of forerunners in the angophone
world of what we now call second wave feminism were very influenced by this text. So
the kind of 1950s, 1960s in England and America reading the quickly translated
English translation of the second sex had a huge impact on actually the lived
experiences of women. So big political impact. And I think we're still living in
the wake of that. I think you know they're both the excitement around Cheryl
Sandberg's lean in and also the criticisms of it just completely resemble the
excitement and the criticisms of the second sex in 1949 and 1950s. I wouldn't put
those two books in the same category. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do. I think it's a
wonder. Sandberg's book is not quite doesn't have the philosophical heft of the
second sex. Well we leave that aside. Okay. But okay. So call it applied
existentialism. I do. And I think this is where I think it's impact maybe among
French intellectuals. I think some of them saw this. I think Sart himself saw the
importance of this book in terms of its philosophical impact. But I think
we're still coming to terms with thinking about this book not as a foundational
text in kind of European feminism, Western European feminism. We're still
struggling with seeing it as a really a book of philosophy. And I think that's
really what's most exciting to me about the book in addition to its supreme
historical and political impact. I just think it's a book which is really
trying to show us how to apply existentialism in a particular area where it
seems like existentialism might just not help us. And I think when we first
learn about existentialism we see it's immediate kind of thrill and also the
burden of it in terms of our individual lives. We see it, oh, I'm making choices and
those choices matter. And I'm the only person responsible for those choices. And so
they immediate impact of existentialism is always at that kind of individualist
level. And very early on in the 40s, you know, everyone said, well this this
isn't this sign that I help us with social problems. It's not going to help us
think about broad collective issues. So for both water to pick up the the
subjugation, the second class status of women all over the world. And throughout
time as a broad historical fact, collective fact and say, hey, existentialism's
the right way to think about this, that was just an exciting kind of gauntlet thrown
down to say that existentialism first of all can attack ethical problems but
really collective political problems and it's the right way to do it. I just find
that thrilling. So what is her argument in the second sex about women?
Great and freedom. Great. Well, first of all, she, she challenges us as existentialists to
wonder why it could be that there is such a thing of sexism. So if we think about
bad faith as being a choice we can make to let's say I'm a young mother and I
want to identify as a mother and that's my social role. That's bad faith on my
part. So why would it be that a whole set of people, all women would be
somehow more collectively inclined to bad faith than men? That just seems bizarre.
So it seems that we are aware of women making choices and women have a social
status in the world different than men and it seems like individual choices
about bad faith couldn't possibly make sense of that. So,
a priori existentialism doesn't bad faith at least, doesn't offer us a way to
understand why it would be that women collectively have a second class place in
society. So, both of our, it has to then say why why would existentialism help us
solve this problem and here's her great insight and I'll tell you, you just
have to read the first 17 pages of the book. The whole book is wonderful, but
the introduction spells it all out. She says that there are, there's always two
things going on. First of all, human beings find deep meaning and satisfaction
in transcending, transcendence, reaching beyond ourselves towards these
projects, towards these open horizons. That's what human beings are made to do.
That's when we're authentic. That feels good to us. All human beings constantly do it.
That's what we're put on earth to do. That's what we do whether we want to do it or
not. But then we have these social roles and some social roles celebrate
transcendent activities in the world in terms of concrete lived out freedoms and
some don't. So for, for, sorry, in both of our writing books is a kind of
heroic activity of transcending yourself and putting yourself out there in the
world and becoming someone new. And in fact, lots of roles that we might
traditionally describe as masculine are socially seen as associated with
lived freedom, concrete lived freedom. And then there are social roles that are
kind of like making the bed and making, making breakfast for the family. And those
are roles which I value. But do they lead towards open horizons? Do they open up
towards new projects? Well, now you got to kind of do them again tomorrow.
Are always the same. So for both war, she characterizes a whole set of activities as
kind of mired in imminence. You're never going to transcend. No matter how
beautifully you make the bed, you're going to make the bed tomorrow. So what
happens when a group of people get assigned roles which are mired in imminence?
Well, if they want the social status and the social constellations that go along
with those roles, then they need to agree to them. And that's kind of the
bad faith choice, right? So I choose to be a mother and maybe I'm giving up some
transcendence. But I'm a great mother and I get all the cultural value associated
with that. So I get the cultural value. I get the social value. But I'm living in
bad faith. So I'm not authentic. But if I'm a guy and I get to be president or a pirate
or the writer of great novels and plays and existentialist works of philosophy.
Well, then I'm authentically living out my freedom in a philosophically sensible way.
And I'm also getting all the social status that goes along with being a male and having a
traditional male situation. So for a group of people, even when I am mired in bad faith as
a male, I might be still living out roles which might encourage me towards living
authentically. Whereas for a one, you got to choose. It's a double mind, right?
Either you rebel and you are a yeah, social rebel, you cast off the social roles which
define you and then you get none of the solace or social status that goes with those
things. But you live authentically or you have to live in bad faith and then you get the
social status. You can't have one or the other. You can only have one or the other.
You don't get both. So for both war, this is the definition of oppression when you can't
live authentically with yourself. When a whole group of people can't be authentic. So to
me, that's an exciting way to describe a social phenomenon that's still really grounded
in the language of bad faith and authenticity and transcendence. True, however, female
facticity is not the same thing as male facticity. No, it's not universal the way Jean
Paul Sash would have liked it to be when he speaks about human existence in a non-gendered
way. And female facticity requires a rather different approach than male
facticity. And here I think that she has to come down against the traditional roles that
women have played historically speaking. So much so that she ends up in dieting,
is putting it too strong. You say that she indicts motherhood as a choice. Yeah, this is terrible.
I mean, it's terrible for those of us that think that mothers are important and do important
work in the world. Both war seems very, very against. Because you could say that what could
be more transcendent than bringing new life into the world, nourishing a new life because
that is what the open horizon is the future and so forth. Men left to themselves their
horizons are much narrower insofar as Natality is primarily of the other.
Right. Yeah. So you would think just off the cuff, right, that what could be more transcendent
than motherhood and also what how great to be a woman in which built into your facticity is
this ability of creating new life, right? That just seems like that's amazing, right? That's
like the emblem of existentialism itself is that built into our facticity is this power
to create an event. It's so symbolically perfect yet no. And what are her reasons? Well,
so she goes into this brilliant and maybe infuriating chapter of the second sex about
about motherhood. Part of it is that you know, both war describes and here we might accuse her
of a little bit of bad faith as well that her own life choices and her own kind of commitments
as a person have led her to see motherhood in a really narrow sense and for not to understand
that motherhood could be empowering or amazing or existentially profound. But here her now
says go something like this. There's really two ways that you might live out the experience
of being my mother. The first is that you would see this new life as really being your project
as part of your open-ended project of the future and it's all about you, right? It's
your project. It's not about this other new life who is in fact their own subject. So this
is kind of the steam rolling mother, right, who sees the new life as a way to relive,
out, repeat, or reinvent herself at the expense of the transcendence and authenticity of this
child. So that seems obviously bad. Then what's the other alternative? Well, to really
live vicariously through this new life and to really see yourself as really only an auxiliary
to this new life that really the child, the son, the daughter, is the true subject. And
I'm the helper as the mother, I'm the one who permits this transcendence to flourish.
That also has connections with her characterization of the serious man in the ethics of ambiguity,
who says that it's the highway or the bridge, it's whatever I'm working on. That's the
transcendent thing and I am bringing that into. That is what I worship is the project
or it's the new life, it's the son. I have to say I believe that a lot of the primary
narcissism that is socialized out of us when we're kids comes back with the vengeance when
some people become parents. We're now in the name of their children, they permit themselves
the most atrocious forms of ecotism and self regard where everything can be done, everything
can be justified in the name of doing it for one's children.
Robert, here, this is where I disagree with Beauvoir and I've got to say, first of all,
a lot of what I've been talking about, I've learned from colleagues of ours here at Stanford.
So, Lanier Anderson and Laura Whitman, your colleague in French and Italian, both their
ideas about Beauvoir really influenced me, so I just want to shout out to them here.
And Lanier Anderson and I have gone around on this and he thinks Beauvoir is right about
motherhood or that her argument makes sense and I want her and him to be wrong. So, I'm
clinging to that. And I kind of wish in my optimism, I wish Beauvoir would have described
these two dangers of motherhood as that, as risks, right, the kind of steam rolling of
the other and the kind of abasement of the self for the child as being too real dangers
in motherhood. But in some ways, aren't they the real dangers in all of our encounters with
the other? I mean, so this to me gets back to the old existentialist problem is, can
we see of interactions with the other as anything other than a kind of a hostile competition
where one has to be subject and one has to be object? Or is there such a thing as collaboration?
Is it possible to live for, live with another and have shared projects? Is that possible?
So I see Beauvoir's challenge here on the motherhood front as similar to her larger challenge
of trying to figure out what it would mean to share projects with others.
Yeah, good. So, when it comes to this question of the concrete basis on which one makes decisions
and this problem that Jean-Paul Sasht and Beauvoir had, they invoke both of them
Kant's categorical imperative, no? Yep. Which is in Kant's articulation of it is that when I'm
faced with the choice, I should ask myself if this action that I'm going to commit were to be
universalized across all of human society, what would be the consequences? Many of these choices
would lead to the complete collapse and undoing of human society if everyone were to murder,
if everyone were to steal it so forth. Yeah. And although they don't want to apply it case by case,
they do invoke this categorical imperative to, as the basis of human freedom and intersubjective
relations, which seems highly problematic to me. So, let me read a passage from the ethics of
Andrew Guelly. Okay, great. Where we go back now here to Hegel and she says, "Each consciousness,
she's quoting Hegel, each consciousness seeks the death of the other." And indeed, at every moment,
others are stealing the whole world away from me. She says, "The first movement is to hate them,
but this hatred is naive, and the desire immediately struggles against itself. If I were really
everything, there would be nothing beside me, the world would be empty. There would be nothing
to possess, and I myself would be nothing. If he is reasonable, the young man immediately
understands that by taking the world away from me others also give it to me, since a thing is
given to me only by the movement which snatches it away from me, to will that there be being
is also to will that there be men by whom and for whom the world is endowed with human
significations." Okay. Marjorie Greene was one of the first American philosophers to engage with
existentialism. It's actually the near Anderson with whom I did a show on Jean-Paul Sashio,
who I love that show. He referred me to this essay of hers, Marjorie Greene, written really
contemporaneously almost with the ethics of ambiguity called authenticity and existential virtue.
And let me just say what Marjorie Greene, let me quote what she writes here. She says that
"There's some uneasiness is felt about this contradiction between the Hegelian objectification
war of subjects that someone uneasiness is felt about it even at headquarters, headquarters being
Simone in the end." It's evidenced by the extremely crude arguments with which Beauvat has
since attempted to dismiss it in ethics of ambiguity. The first few one takes of another that
the other consciousness wants to death of mine is naive. She says, "For one at once realizes
that, of course, as we all know, if anyone takes anything away from me, he is really giving it to me
all the while." This is undoubtedly one of the worst philosophical arguments ever penned, not to mention
the shocking fact that there are, in this case, 400 pages of naivety in the master's masterpiece.
So, ouch. That does hurt. Especially for an ex, as I said, I'm in a voud existentialist.
I still hold to the, you know, the basic arguments, but it's that kind of
very French, sophisticated reasoning that what is given to me is actually taken away from me and
what's taken away from me is actually given to me where everything becomes its opposite that can
become innovating and a source of frustration, not only for the analytic philosophers who are demanding
more consistency, but even for people who are struggling to answer these questions like,
you were doing about, why does motherhood have to be condemned in a blanket way? Can't there be
cases in which the waiter can play his role to the best of his abilities while he's on duty and
then be someone else when he's not in so forth? Well, okay, boy, Robert, I got a bunch of things to say
to that. One, first of all, is, you know, I think part of our unease with this
Kantian and Hegelian background in both Bovar and Sarte is that they both kind of
rail against Kant and Hegel as being insufficient and not enough and, you know, Sarte says he's
not a Kantian, he's got all these problems with Kant, and he just sounds like a total Kantian.
And this, this lecture existentialism is a humanism which you and I have talked about before
is just wallowing in kind of pretty easy pop Kantian ethics, which is another wrong with Kantian ethics,
right? But if you're a Kantian, then just say you're a Kantian and be done with it. So,
so part of it is their resistance to just say, hey, by the way, we agree with Kant on this one.
And I think Bovar is a little more honest here than Sarte. I think she's more willing to say
Kant's got something to offer us. So I think she's a little less
dissimulating on this front about her debts to both Kant and to Hegel. So anything more to say
than that, I mean, I kind of want to say back to Green that although I agree the kind of the
spiciousness of the, anytime someone takes something further than the giving you something,
I see that and there are parts of that book that I think aren't beautifully written or I guess
not rigorously written. And in fact, Bovar herself didn't think much of this book, right? She,
she kind of poo-pooze it as being not as good as it should have been and, you know, not her best writing.
What the ethics of him. Yeah. And I've always been sad about that because I see the book as really powerful.
And let me tell you what I suspect, which is that the real power of Sarte and existentialism,
Bovarian and existentialism, and these, was a tragic view of human relations,
based on this idea that there's going to be this inevitable conflict of reification, who can
reify the other, you know, and who is going to survive that encounter. And that this is existentialism
when it's being truly honest with itself and it's not, there's no subterfuge of bad faith.
But that when Sast and Bovar post-war, immediate post-war, they're faced with a situation in France
where Marxism was the hegemonic ideology of the time. And if you were, if you could not
somehow conjugate your existentialism with Marxism, you were going to be cast out.
You were going to be relegated to an insignificant margin of the, of the intellectual times.
And all these kind of specious attempts to make arguments by whereby human solidarity
has to become the foundation for decisions rather than human conflict. I think is an act of
intellectual bad faith in order to make existentialism palatable to the Marxists.
That's what I suspect. Well, I think, I think you're right. Historically, you're without a doubt
right, Robert. I think that both Bovar and Sarte felt the pressure, particularly from the Marxists.
But I think we, we as existentialists should feel that same pressure, not from the Marxists,
but just simply from the position of shouldn't there be such a thing as ethics? Shouldn't we be
able to say that some kinds of uses of freedom are better than others? I think we, if we don't know
how to ground that in philosophical thinking, then that's a challenge for us.
But it's just a case, Jeremy, that Sarte says there are no criteria or no norms for choosing one thing
over the other. He gives these great examples in the essay that in the lecture that you
existentialism as human doesn't mean speaks about the young man who chooses either to stay
with his mother or go and join the resistance. And he, Sarte says, I can't tell you what to do.
It's in the choosing that you will have affirmed your commitment. So if you're going to be truly
existentially honest, you say that I cannot as existentialism cannot provide ethical norms for choice.
Okay, good. So let me, let me try this on you, Robert. If then the choosing is what constitutes
the human meaning, right? It's choice itself, then what allows for choice? What is the precondition for choice?
Well, it's this human fact about us that we are freedom, we are transcendence. So that is a
is a precondition for all of the different kinds of choices we should make. And in some ways,
that precondition is a moral ground. It permits choice. And so if there is some kind of
aspect of our being, which allows for that, basically ethical creation, creating our own ethics,
then that precondition, that prerequisite, is itself an overriding moral ground, freedom itself.
So freedom is not only a fact about ourselves, but it is a normative force. We should choose
choice making. It is better to choose in the name of freedom because freedom itself governs and allows
choice to it. But you said it yourself earlier, I am free to choose to become a mother. And if I choose
it in full cognizance of this unconditional freedom and responsibility that I'm thrown into,
then it's just as authentic a decision as the person who decides that motherhood is not for her.
Great. And here I think this is again, you're calling this intellectual bad faith on
bovar and sartz part. And I have to agree with you, particularly with the word of authenticity.
So they want authenticity to be kind of a badge of courage, a moral virtue in some ways.
Yeah, they want it to be on the right side of history. And I think authenticity can go along with
all kinds of choices that we might call from even from an existentialist perspective on ethical.
I think especially from an existentialist perspective, all sorts of very dubious choices
can be perfectly authentic. This is what is scary about existentialism. This is what can be the cause
for a wholesale repudiation of it, precisely the fact that if it's internally consistent with
its own premises, it cannot presume to be a normative ethical or it has to find
that normative grounding in its existence itself. So it can't look elsewhere.
So that's the crucial part is that it can't look elsewhere for normative grounding.
And this is the problem with all these as sensuous. We have this problem in high-degree,
we have it with Nietzsche, all these people we worry like now, how are we all going to
decide when to cross the street together? So this is a built-in problem with existentialism.
Again, I think both of our offers us the most clarity about how to meet this problem. And here I
think she is the closest to saying you can be authentic and evil. So you can make choices which are
in full cognizance of your freedom, but steam roll the freedoms of others and there is an existentialist
claim to call that evil. Well, let's say that existentialism and evil can coexist.
Let's talk about the authenticity of the behavior of the two protagonists in question,
no? Yes. Because you know better than I do that they had relations with others,
and especially younger women where Beauvoir was seducing her students, sometimes the 16-year-old,
17-year-old getting these young women into a network passing them on to Jean-Paul Sast and
we don't have to rehearse all the sorted details, but these are facts that have come out
with documentation that are even much more revealing since the death of Simone de Vaudevac. Oh, yes.
But actually you say, well, were they either being in bad faith when they were espousing
all this moral righteousness of existential authenticity as a criterion or were they being
existentially authentic and yet opting for things that you and I might consider if not evil, then
ethically very dubious. Great, Robert. I mean, this is a tough subject for me because I admire these two.
And you and I were talking about this the other day and I was saying, well, you look at any
figure in history and the more you learn about them, the worse they look and so what you choose
not to look closely or you accept that human beings are imperfect, morally imperfect,
and you stop me short and I just want to call that out that for some reason it seems worse with
these two, that they're moral failings or they're failings as individuals. They're personal life,
the choices they made seem somehow more their hypocrisy, seem more urgent and more
important for us to dwell on than with other people, that somehow worse.
Well, yeah, because you we can assume that there's exploitation there in full.
Now, in my more favorable moments, I say that the authenticity of Satsnab of what on this issue
was to go out there and publicly campaign for the abolition of the age of consent. Okay,
great. If you will go out there and say that the age of consent when it comes to sex
is doesn't make sense that it's denying the agency of even young teenage girls and boys,
then you could say that the seductions of her students age 16 or 17 and the Minajatwa
was humble Satsnab that I am treating them, I'm speaking in her voice, I am treating these young people
as full-fledged human agents capable of choice and for society to condescend and say that you don't
have the existential maturity to make decisions for yourself until you reach age 18 is a form of
institutionalized bad faith in the society as a whole. That I can agree with because I
you know, if you were raised a Catholic like I was there was the age of reason was seven, no,
yep, until age seven you were not liable for damnation, eternal damnation because you were
only after age seven could you commit a mortal sin because you knew the difference between right
and wrong. So that's if you want a age of consent, let's make it seven anyway. In other words,
okay, yep, and yeah, so you can go to hell when you're able you can't you're not allowed to have
sex. That's right, yeah. That's what that's what they're argument.
Yep. And so, okay, so the moment you're referring to Robert is this petition that both
Warren Sart signed in 1977 against the age of consent that Michel Foucault was associated with
and a younger generation in fact, it was thinking about social power and state control,
particularly as a way of persecuting non-normative sexualities. And I think this is a moment where
both Warren Sart were and actually all the philosophers that got behind this petition were
if not on the wrong side of history, certainly blindsided. I mean, I think they were
Foucault in particular is this theorist of power and to ignore the kind of power dynamics that
occur between a young person or an older person, right, all that kind of stuff. It all is kind of
careful examinations of not just institutionalized power but social power, individual power relations
to see that the age of consent or the sexual relations between a young person and an old person
is somehow only permeated by institutional power relations instead of interpersonal power relations.
I think it's just extremely short-sighted. So I think they made that mistake along with Michel Foucault
and many others. I do think that their own choices, and here not in 1977, but in the 60s and the 50s
and the 40s, their own personal choices to kind of ensnare people who were bold over by their
intellectual brilliance and their cosmopolitan lifestyle and to use them and abuse them and then
discard them. I think has nothing to do with this later formulation of age of consent. There, I think
that 1977 age of consent is an attempt to become consistent philosophically with lived principles.
I think if you go back to this earlier time in their lives when they were most guilty of this kind
of ensnarement, there's nothing like that going on at all. It's just completely has nothing to do
with seeing the other as a subject with their own legitimacy and authenticity. It's just purely using
the most object. I just think there's no way around that. I think to wrap it all up. Yes, we
began by saying that the thought of Beuwad is still profoundly relevant to today. Not because
we live in a world which is existentialist. If anything, our times are rather steeped in bad faith
from all sides and at all ages, and at least I'm speaking for myself now, I'm not speaking for you,
but I think that what we need the most is a heavy dose of existentialist realism about
our own strong agency when it comes to the things that happen to me, the choices that I make.
The subterfuge of thinking that somehow I'm not on the bad side of things that I'm always on the
good side of things. Yeah, and so for me, I do agree with you, Robert, I think that
And this is to me why Beuwad is so compelling, is that Beuwad, she's an existentialist. So at the core,
she believes in human freedom, individual choices that we are responsible for how we respond to
the situation we're in. And I don't think she ever let's go of that. And yet, particularly in the
second sex, she is able to use that analysis of human freedom to show us a world which seems like
allows certain groups lived out freedoms that are different than others. So it gives us a way to
analyze social forces, social pressures, to identify victims without taking away their agency and
their choice. So this is our problem, right? And in our contemporary world, we're constantly wanting
to honor and empower individuals for their autonomy and freedom. But we also want to recognize
that there are the victim of social pressures and it's a zero-sum game, right? The more agency we give
them, the more we turn them into responsible for their fate and the more we acknowledge that they
have been the recipients of crimes at their victims, the more we turn them into an object. So
there's no way to win. And Beuwad's project in the second sex is to say that we have to have it
both ways, that we can be once victims, legitimately objectively describe that there's such a
thing as oppression out there. And yet that doesn't do you? That's not the whole story. We're still,
we still have freedoms and in fact we'll never understand that oppression unless we understand
that oppression is caused by human freedom. And it's also transcendable. Yep. So to me, her language of
bringing those together, not one at the expense of the other, but to see those as both vital
components at social description to just understand the world we live in, I find very, very exciting.
Well said, we've been speaking with Jeremy Sable here on entitled opinions. Thanks for joining us,
Jeremy. Thanks for having me. It was a long wait, but well worth it. And all you listeners out there,
or title opinions, we'll be looking forward to having you next time. Take care. Bye bye.
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