Beauvoir Reading • • Selections from Pyrrhus and Cineas (1944) Selections from The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) Introduction (Pyrrhus and Cineas, 1944) Plutarch tells us that one day Pyrrhus was devising projects of conquest.1 “We are going to subjugate Greece first,” he was saying. “And after that?” said Cineas. “We will vanquish Africa.”—“After Africa?”—“We will go on to Asia, we will conquer Asia Minor, Arabia.”—“And after that?”—“We will go on as far as India.”—“After India?”—“Ah!” said Pyrrhus, “I will rest.”—“Why not rest right away?” said Cineas. Cineas seems wise. What’s the use of leaving if it is to return home? What’s the use of starting if you must stop? And yet, if I don’t first decide to stop, it seems to me to be even more pointless to leave. “I will not say A,” says the schoolboy stubbornly. “But why?”— “Because, after that, I will have to say B.” He knows that if he starts, he will never be finished with it: after B, it will be the entire alphabet, syllables, words, books, tests, and a career. Each minute a new task will throw him forward toward a new task, without rest. If it is never to be finished, what’s the use of starting? Even the architect of the Tower of Babel thought that the sky was a ceiling and that someone would reach it one day. If Pyrrhus could push the limits of his conquests back beyond the earth, beyond the stars and the furthest nebulae, to an infinity that would be constantly fleeing before him, his undertaking would only be more foolish because of it. His efforts would be dispersed without ever coming together for any goal. Viewed by reflection, all human projects therefore seem absurd because they exist only by setting limits for themselves, and one can always overstep these limits, asking oneself derisively, “Why as far as this? Why not further? What’s the use?” “I found that no goal was worth the trouble of any effort,” said Benjamin Constant’s hero. Such are often the thoughts of the adolescent when the voice of reflection awakens in him. As a child, he was like Pyrrhus: he ran, he played without asking himself questions, Pyrrhus (319–272 BCE) was the militaristic king of Hellenistic Epirus, on the Ionian Sea. In 281, Cineas, his chief adviser, attempted without success to dissuade Pyrrhus from invading Italy. After a victory against the Romans in 279, his heavy casualties caused Pyrrhus to declare, “One more such victory and I am lost,” thus the origin of the term “Pyrrhic victory.” 1 2 and the objects that he created seemed to him endowed with an absolute existence. They carried within themselves their reason for being. But he discovered one day that he had the power to surpass his own ends. There are no longer ends; only pointless occupations still exist for him; he rejects them. “The dice are loaded,” he says. He looks at his elders with scorn: how is it possible for them to believe in their undertakings? They are dupes. Some have killed themselves in order to put an end to this ridiculous illusion. And it was indeed the only way to end it, because as long as I remain alive, Cineas harasses me in vain, saying: “And after that? What’s the use?” In spite of everything, my heart beats, my hand reaches out, new projects are born and push me forward. Wise ones have wanted to see the sign of humans’ incurable folly in this stubbornness. But can a perversion so essential still be called perversion? Where will we find the truth about humanity if it is not in them? Reflection cannot stop the élan of our spontaneity. But reflection is also spontaneous. The human plants, builds, conquers; she wants, she loves: there is always an “after that?” It could be that from moment to moment she throws herself into new undertakings with an ardor that is always new, like Don Juan deserting one woman only to seduce another. But even Don Juan gets tired one day. Between Pyrrhus and Cineas the dialogue starts over with no end. And yet, Pyrrhus must decide. He stays or he leaves. If he stays, what will he do? If he leaves, how far will he go? “We must cultivate our garden,” says Candide.2 This advice will not be of much help to us, because what is my garden? There are humans who claim to work the entire earth, and others will find a pot of flowers too vast. Some say carelessly, “What happens when we’re gone is none of our concern,” while the dying Charlemagne cried at the sight of the Normans’ ships. A young woman gets irritated because she has leaky shoes that take in water. If I say to her: “What does that matter? Think of the millions of men who are dying of hunger in the middle of China,” she answers me angrily: “They are in China. And it’s my shoe that has a hole.” However, another woman may cry about the horror of the Chinese Candide (1759), a satiric novel by the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire (1694–1778), deals with the cruel truths of this “best of all possible worlds,” a place where unguarded optimism is foolish and relentless pessimism leads nowhere. The novel’s conclusion is that we should tend our own garden rather than speculate on unanswerable philosophical questions. 2 3 famine. If I say to her: “What does that matter to you? You are not hungry,” she would look at me with scorn: “What does my own comfort matter?” So how to know what is mine? The disciples of Christ asked: who is my neighbor? What, then, is the measure of a man?3 What goals can he set for himself, and what hopes are permitted him? Part 1 Candide’s Garden I knew a child who cried because his concierge’s son had died. His parents let him cry, and then they got annoyed. “After all, that little boy was not your brother.” The child dried his tears. But that was a dangerous thing to teach. Useless to cry over a little boy who is a stranger: so be it. But then why cry over one’s brother? “It’s none of your business,” says the woman holding back her husband who wants to join in a fight. The husband goes away, docile. But if the woman asks for his help a few minutes later, saying: “I’m tired, I’m cold,” he looks at her with surprise from the heart of the solitude where he has withdrawn, thinking: “Is that my business?” What does India matter? And what does Epirus matter? Why call this soil, this woman, these children mine? I brought these children into the world; they are here. The woman is next to me; the soil is under my feet. No tie exists between them and me. Mr. Camus’s Stranger thinks like this; he feels foreign to the whole world, which is completely foreign to him. Often during hardship one thus denies all one’s attachments. One does not want hardship; one looks for a way to flee from it. If I myself were only a thing, nothing indeed would concern me. If I withdraw into myself, the other is also closed for me. The inert existence of things is separation and solitude. There exists no ready-made attachment between the world and me. And as long as I am a simple given in the midst of nature, nothing is mine. A country is not mine if I only grew there like a plant. What is built up upon me, without me, is not mine. The rock that passively supports a house cannot claim that the house is its own. Mr. Camus’s Stranger is right to reject all those ties that others want to impose upon him from the outside; no tie is The question of the measure of man is a play on the claim of the Greek philosopher Protagoras (ca. 490–420 BCE) that “Man is the measure of all things.” 3 4 given at first. If someone is satisfied with a completely exterior relationship with the object, saying, “My painting, my park, my workers” because a contract bestowed her with certain rights over these objects, it is because she is choosing to delude herself. She would like to spread out her place on earth, to expand her being beyond the limits of her body and her memory, yet without running the risk of any action. But the object facing her remains, indifferent, foreign. Social, organic, economic relationships are only external relationships and cannot be the foundation of any true possession. In order to appropriate safely goods that are not our own, we can still resort to other ruses. Seated by his fire and reading in his newspaper the tale of someone who climbed the Himalayas, the contented bourgeois cries out proudly: “Now there’s what a man can do!” He feels like he climbed the Himalayas himself. By identifying himself with his sex, his country, his class, with the whole of humanity, a man can increase his garden, but he increases it only in words. This identification is but an empty pretension. Only that in which I recognize my being is mine, and I can only recognize it where it is engaged. In order for an object to belong to me, it must have been founded by me. It is totally mine only if I founded it in its totality. The only reality that belongs entirely to me is, therefore, my act; even a work fashioned out of materials that are not mine escapes me in certain ways. What is mine is first the accomplishment of my project; a victory is mine if I fought for it. If the weary conqueror can rejoice in the victories of his son, it is because he wanted a son precisely in order to prolong his work; it is really the accomplishment of his own project that he salutes. It is because my subjectivity is not inertia, folding in upon itself, separation, but, on the contrary, movement toward the other that the difference between me and the other is abolished, and I can call the other mine. Only I can create the tie that unites me to the other. I create it from the fact that I am not a thing, but a project of self toward the other, a transcendence. And it is this power that Camus’s Stranger is unaware of: no possession is given, but the foreign indifference of the world is not given either. I am not first a thing but a spontaneity that desires, that loves, that wants, that acts. “That little boy is not my brother.” But if I cry over him, he is no longer a stranger to me. It’s my tears that decide. Nothing is decided before me. When the disciples asked Christ: who is my neighbor? Christ didn’t respond by an enumeration. He told the parable of the good Samaritan. The latter was the 5 neighbor of the man abandoned on the road; he covered him with his cloak and came to his aid. One is not the neighbor of anyone; one makes the other a neighbor by making oneself his neighbor through an act. What is mine is therefore first what I do. But as soon as I have done it, the object goes and separates itself from me; it escapes me. The thought that I expressed a moment ago, is it still my thought? In order for the past to be mine, I must make it mine again each instant by taking it toward my future. Even the objects that were not mine in the past because I didn’t found them can be made into mine if I found something on them. I can rejoice in a victory in which I did not participate if I take it as a point of departure for my own conquests. The house that I did not build becomes my house if I live in it, and the earth my earth if I work it. My relationships with things are not given, are not fixed; I create them minute by minute. Some die, some are born, and others are revived. They are constantly changing. Each new act of surpassing gives me anew the thing surpassed, and that’s why technologies are ways of appropriating the world: the sky belongs to those who know how to fly; the sea belongs to those who know how to swim and navigate. Thus our relationship with the world is not decided from the onset; it is we who decide. But we do not arbitrarily decide just anything. What I surpass is always my past and the object such as it exists within that past. My future envelops that past; the former cannot build itself without the latter. The Chinese are my brothers from the moment I cry over their hardships, but one does not cry over the Chinese as one pleases. If I have never worried about Babylon, I cannot suddenly choose to be interested in the latest theories about the location of Babylon. I cannot suffer a defeat if I was not engaged in the vanquished country. I will suffer defeat in accordance with my engagements. A person who has fused his destiny with that of his country, its leader for example, could say “my defeat” in the face of the disaster. A person who has lived in a certain country without doing anything but eating and sleeping there will see the event only as a change of habits. It can happen that, in light of a new fact, one suddenly becomes aware of engagements that have been lived without being thought. But at least they had to have existed. As distinct from me, things never affect me; I am never affected except in my own possibilities. We are therefore surrounded by forbidden wealth, and we often get irritated with these limits. We would like the entire world to become ours; we covet the goods of others. I knew, among others, 6 one young student who wanted first to make the world of the athlete hers, then that of the gambler, the flirt, the adventurer, the politician, one after another. She tried her hand in each of these domains, without understanding that she remained a student hungry for experience. She believed that she was “varying her life,” but the unity of her life unified all of its diverse moments. An intellectual who takes the side of the proletariat does not become proletarian; he is an intellectual taking the side of the proletariat. The painting that Van Gogh paints is a new and free creation, but it is still a Van Gogh. If he claimed to paint a Gauguin, he would only make an imitation of Gauguin by Van Gogh. And that’s why Candide’s advice is superfluous: it’s always my garden that I will cultivate. I am enclosed within it until death because that garden becomes mine from the moment I cultivate it. In order for this piece of universe to belong to me, however, I must truly cultivate it. Humanity’s activity is often lazy. Instead of accomplishing true acts one contents oneself with pretenses: the fly on the stagecoach claims that he is the one who led the carriage to the top of the hill. To walk around talking about it, taking photographs of it, is not to participate in a war, in an expedition. There are even behaviors that contradict the ends that they claim to aim for: by establishing institutions that allow a sort of equilibrium in the midst of misery, the charitable lady tends to perpetuate the misery that she wants to alleviate. In order to know what is mine, I must know what I am really doing. We see then that one can assign no dimension to the garden in which Candide wants to enclose me. It is not drawn out in advance; it is I who choose its location and limits. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) 1. Ambiguity and Freedom Nascentes morimur [We are born, but to die]. Humans know and think this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into their destiny. “Rational animal,” “thinking reed,” they escape from their natural condition without, however, freeing themselves from it. They are still a part of this world of which they are a consciousness. They assert themselves as pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and they also experience themselves as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. This privilege, which they alone possess, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what they share with 7 all their fellow humans. In turn an object for others, one is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which one depends. As long as there have been humans and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it. They have striven to reduce mind to matter, or to reabsorb matter into mind, or to merge them within a single substance. Those who have accepted the dualism have established a hierarchy between body and soul which permits of considering as negligible the part of the self which cannot be saved. They have denied death, either by integrating it with life or by promising to humans immortality. Or, again they have denied life, considering it as a veil of illusion beneath which is hidden the truth of Nirvana. And the ethics which they have proposed to their disciples has always pursued the same goal. It has been a matter of eliminating the ambiguity by making oneself pure inwardness or pure externality, by escaping from the sensible world or by being engulfed in it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment. Humans of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. Each one has the incomparable taste in her mouth of her own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth’s. Perhaps in no other age have they manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this grandeur been so horribly flouted. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each human and all humans. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting. 8 From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. It was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel, and it is by ambiguity that, in our own generation, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, fundamentally defined humans, that being whose being is not to be, that subjectivity which realizes itself only as a presence in the world, that engaged freedom, that surging of the for-oneself which is immediately given for others. But it is also claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses humans in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing them with any principle for making choices. Let them do as they please. In any case, the game is lost. Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that the human is a “useless passion,” that one tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make oneself God? But if humans are free to define for themselves the conditions of a life which is valid in their own eyes, can they not choose whatever they like and act however they like? Dostoevsky asserted, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish oneself at the heart of one’s destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because humans are abandoned on the earth, because their acts are definitive, absolute engagements. They bear the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of themselves, where their defeats are inscribed, and their victories as well. A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, humans’ faults are inexpiable. If it is claimed that, whatever the case may be, this earthly stake has no importance, this is precisely because one invokes that inhuman objectivity which we declined at the start. One cannot start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance. It is up to humans to make it important to be a human, and they alone can feel their success or failure. The idea that defines all humanism is that the world is not a given world, foreign to us, one to which we have to force ourselves to yield without. It is the world willed by us, insofar as we will expresses our genuine reality. For existentialism, it is not the impersonal universal human who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete, particular humans projecting themselves toward their 9 ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself. How could humans, originally separated, get together? An ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to deny that separate existants can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all. As for us, whatever the case may be, we believe in freedom. Is it true that this belief must lead us to despair? Must we grant this curious paradox: that from the moment a human recognizes herself as free, she is prohibited from wishing for anything? On the contrary, it appears to us that by turning toward this freedom we are going to discover a principle of action whose range will be universal. Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. […] It was to escape potential failure that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of humans ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom. 2. Personal Freedom and Others [Beauvoir discusses several different characters or personalities, which illustrate different ways of relating to freedom. We focus on the “passionate person” whose relation to freedom is deeply individualistic; for the passionate person, the world of objects “is a thing disclosed by her subjectivity”.] One can become conscious of the real requirements of one’s own freedom, which can will itself only by destining itself to an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means 10 of the freedom of others. Therefore, in any case, the freedom of other humans be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. That is why though the passionate person inspires a certain admiration, he also inspires a kind of horror at the same time. One admires the pride of a subjectivity which chooses its end without bending itself to any foreign law and the precious brilliance of the object revealed by the force of this assertion. But one also considers the solitude in which this subjectivity encloses itself as injurious. Having withdrawn into an unusual region of the world, seeking not to communicate with other humans, this freedom is realized only as a separation. Any conversation, any relationship with the passionate person is impossible. In the eyes of those who desire a communion of freedom, he therefore appears as a stranger, an obstacle. He opposes an opaque resistance to the movement of freedom which wills itself infinite. The passionate person is not only an inert facticity. He too is on the way to tyranny. He knows that his will emanates only from him, but he can nevertheless attempt to impose it upon others. He authorizes himself to do that by a partial nihilism. Only the object of his passion appears real and full to him. All the rest are insignificant. Why not betray, kill, grow violent? It is never nothing that one destroys. The whole universe is perceived only as an ensemble of means or obstacles through which it is a matter of attaining the thing in which one has engaged his being. Not intending his freedom for humans, the passionate person does not recognize them as freedoms either. He will not hesitate to treat them as things. If the object of his passion concerns the world in general, this tyranny becomes fanaticism. In all fanatical movements there exists an element of the serious. The values invented by certain men in a passion of hatred, fear, or faith are thought and willed by others as given realities. But there is no serious fanaticism which does not have a passional base, since all adhesion to the serious world is brought about by repressed tendencies and complexes. Thus, maniacal passion represents a damnation for the one who chooses it, and for other humans it is one of the forms of separation which disunites freedoms. It leads to struggle and oppression. A person who seeks being far from other humans, seeks it against them at the same time that he loses himself. This truth is found in another form when we say that freedom cannot will itself without aiming at an open future. The ends which it gives itself must be unable to be transcended by any reflection, but only the freedom of other humans can extend them 11 beyond our life. I have tried to show in Pyrrhus and Cineas that every human needs the freedom of other humans and, in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant; the only thing he fails to do is to assume honestly the consequences of such a wish. Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity. Thus, it can be seen to what an extent those people are mistaken—or are lying— who try to make of existentialism a solipsism, who like Nietzsche would exalt the bare will to power. According to this interpretation, as widespread as it is erroneous, the individual, knowing herself and choosing herself as the creator of her own values, would seek to impose them on others. The result would be a conflict of opposed wills enclosed in their solitude. But we have seen that, on the contrary, to the extent that passion, pride, and the spirit of adventure lead to this tyranny and its conflicts, existentialist ethics condemns them; and it does so not in the name of an abstract law, but because, if it is true that every project emanates from subjectivity, it is also true that this subjective movement establishes by itself a surpassing of subjectivity. The human can find a justification of their own existence only in the existence of other humans. I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth. The meothers relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship. Conclusion Is this kind of ethics individualistic or not? Yes, if one means by that that it accords to the individual an absolute value and that it recognizes in her alone the power of laying the foundations of her own existence. But it is not solipsistic, since the individual is defined only by her relationship to the world and to other individuals; she exists only by transcending herself, and her freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. This individualism does not lead to the anarchy of personal whim. The human is free; but he finds his law in his very freedom. First, he must assume his freedom and not flee it by a constructive movement: one does not exist without doing something; and also by a negative movement which rejects oppression for oneself and others. In Plato, art is mystification because there is the heaven of Forms; but in the earthly domain all glorification of the earth is true as soon as it is realized. As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts oneself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I 12 remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living humans. I think that, inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to humans. The fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any human who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that she has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of her goals; their certitude comes from her own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: “Do what you must, come what may.” That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each human did what she must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death. Rubric for Philosophers (0.5 total) Criteria Ratings Pts Exposition 0.2 pts Exemplary The paper carefully and concisely explains the relevant ideas, arguments, positions, etc., from the quoted passage. It clearly identifies and expands on at least 2 ideas from the quote, including the most important ideas in it. 0.1 pts Opts Satisfactory Needs Work The paper concisely explains the The paper does not relevant ideas, arguments, adequately explain 2 or more positions, etc., from the quoted key ideas from the quoted passage, but the explanations passage, or the explanations need work or only one of the two provided have significant ideas is adequately developed. omissions or inaccuracies. 0.2 pts Analysis 0.1 pts Exemplary The paper does not just explain the quoted passage, but also accurately and carefully analyzes its significance for the author's broader philosophical purpose and position. O pts Needs Work The paper does not adequately analyze the significance of the quoted passage in the philosopher's broader view, or the analysis provided has significant omissions or inaccuracies. 0.1 pts Originality and Evaluation 0.1 pts Exemplary The paper or commentary does not just repeat ideas from lecture or quiz section, but uses independent thought to develop an understanding of the philosophical significance of the passage, and it uses independent thought to evaluate whether the author's ideas are compelling or problematic. O pts Needs Work The paper does not adequately use independent thought to develop and understanding and evaluation of the passage, or the ideas developed have significant omissions or inaccuracies. 0.1 pts Organization 0.1 pts O pts Exemplary Needs Work The paper is written in clear academic The paper needs organizational or mechanical work. For style and is well organized into paragraphs example, it has typos or grammatical errors; an illogical or with topic sentences. The paragraphs have indiscernible organizational plan; a failure to use adequate a clear structure and coherence, not just a topic sentences; it jumps from one idea or point to another list of notes. The paper contains no typos without establishing any connection between them; or it or grammatical errors. reads like a collection of notes or a hodgepodge of ideas. 0.1 pts Total Points: 0.5
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