Usos y Beneficios del Nim

Beauvoir (1948: 7-9) begins with an appeal to a fundamental ambiguity that signifies human existence:

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have 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. … 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 external world or by being engulfed in it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment. Hegel, with more ingenuity, tried to reject none of the aspects of man’s condition and to reconcile them all. According to his system, the moment is preserved in the development of time, Nature asserts itself in the face of Spirit which denies it while assuming it; the individual is again found in the collectivity within which he is lost; and each man’s death is fulfilled by being cancelled out into the Life of Mankind. One can thus repose in a marvellous optimism where even bloody wars simply express the fertile restlessness of the Spirit. At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. … Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer. … 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 man and all men. There was

Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face.

Many of the central tenets of Beauvoir’s philosophy emerge from these opening lines: her rejection of reductionist thinking and embrace of ambiguity, her rejection of ethics as a form of calculation and her call for an ethics that reflects the complexity of human existence, her simultaneous acknowledgment of Hegel’s attempt to overcome duality and rejection of his attempt at synthesis.

The existent, argues Beauvoir, is both subject and object, materiality and consciousness, a separate individual within a collective.12 However, she draws a distinction between ambiguity and the kind of absurdity that is presupposed in Sartre’s postulation of man as a “useless passion”. For Beauvoir (129), to “declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.” Fundamentally, “it is because man’s condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.” Beauvoir’s renunciation of the absurd, her insistence on the necessity of failure and outrageousness, which denotes indeterminacy and excess, aligns her position to the hopefulness at the core of Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed, Beauvoir (10) could well be referring to Hegel’s text when she notes “that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasising the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning … [moreover,] one does not offer an ethics to a God.”

The terms outrage and outrageousness feature prominently in Beauvoir’s text. By definition, an outrage implies the other, more particularly, violence directed at the other. For Beauvoir (60): “Every undertaking unfolds in a human world and affects men”. She discusses various attempts by the individual to deny his relationship to the world and to other individuals.13

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See Langer (in Card 2003: 87-106, particularly p.89) for further analysis of the meaning of

ambiguity in the work of Beauvoir.

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Prominent Beauvoir scholar, Kristana Arp, observes that, unlike Sartre, who associates bad faith almost exclusively with women, Beauvoir’s examples of “ethical failure” are all designated by the term man. According to Arp (2001: 56), Beauvoir “usually uses the term “man” to stand for all humans”. I will show that this is decidedly not the case in The Second Sex, where “man” refers only to

Firstly, the sub-man “discovers around him only an insignificant and dull world … [in which he] cannot prevent himself from being a presence … [but] would like to forget himself … [and] is thereby led to take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world” (43-44). In denying consciousness and, thus, the ambiguity of being both materiality and consciousness, the sub-man projects his rejection of existence onto readily available opinions and labels. However, Beauvoir (43) counters, the existent is not merely “a datum which is passively suffered; the rejection of existence is still another way of existing; nobody can know the peace of the tomb while he is alive.”

Now, earlier in her discussion, Beauvoir (10) writes: “Hegel tells us in the last part of the Phenomenology of Mind that moral consciousness can exist only to the extent that there is disagreement between nature and morality.” Describing the failure of the sub-man, who “feels only the facticity of his existence”, Beauvoir (44) declares: “Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity.” The suggestion here is that ethics presupposes “the relative independence of consciousness, its ability to transcend material conditions” (Arp 2001: 49). It is unclear how such a notion corresponds to Beauvoir’s appeal to ambiguity, unless one argues that the statement, “humans are both materiality and consciousness”, presupposes the very duality that it claims to surmount; that it confirms mind and matter as, first (and foremost?), two distinct poles that are somehow fused by superimposing “ambiguity” onto existence.14

men. On the topic of bad faith, note that Beauvoir never specifically refers to the types discussed above as examples of “bad faith”. At any rate, if she had, she would not be attaching the same meaning suggested by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, that is, to lie to oneself about the absolute freedom of human existence. Instead, she would define bad faith as an “attempt to deny our dependence upon others and the existence of other minds” (Simons in Card 2003: 117). Regarding the apparatus of limitation employed by Arp in her analysis of Beauvoir’s ethics, I would venture that these are propelled by her acknowledged unwillingness “to give up on the idea that all people are in some sense free” (Arp: 142). By “free” she means ontologically free, in other words, “the type of freedom that Sartre emphasises in Being and Nothingness all humans always possess” (2). Beauvoir herself does not refer to “ontological” or “existentialist” freedom and I intend to show that her postulation of freedom radically departs from the type of freedom that she associates with Sartre’s ontology.

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Another consideration is that Heidegger himself does not offer any kind of moral imperative for Dasein to triumph over his facticity, thrownness or inauthenticity – these elements are constitutive of its ontological structure. Heidegger (1979: 223) explicitly states: “Dasein exists factically.” Dasein’s possibilities are factical; they are disclosed in the situation in which he is thrown. In the first half of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir is inclined to oppose “transcendence”, “project” and “freedom” to “facticity” and, moreover, to use “facticity” and Sartre’s notion of “being-in-itself” interchangeably.

Elsewhere in her discussion, Beauvoir (71; 100) relates facticity to “hardening”, reminiscent of Sartre’s description of the en-soi as solidity. Towards the end of Being and Nothingness, as I will show, this compressibility, now called “the slimy”, is depicted as hostile to the pour-soi – it threatens to devour, to congeal, transcendence. In short, for Sartre, and certainly the way Beauvoir uses the term on occasion, facticity equals stagnation. Such an interpretation, I think, stretches Heidegger’s meaning of the term. The latter draws a distinction between factuality and facticity. In brief, “Dasein is constantly ‘more’ than it factually is … [however] Dasein is never more than it factically is, for to its facticity its potentiality-for-Being belongs essentially” (Heidegger: 185). The “factual” refers to the given, the “factical” concerns projection. Thus, when Heidegger says, “Dasein exists factically”, it is “only because it is what it becomes (or alternatively, does not become)” (186). The corruption in meaning comes from ascribing a moral value to the insight:

Dasein’s facticity is such that as long as it is what it is, Dasein remains in the throw, and is sucked into the turbulence of the “they’s” inauthenticity. Thrownness, in which facticity lets itself be seen phenomenally, belongs to Dasein.

(Heidegger: 223)

However, we will see shortly how Beauvoir amends her position regarding the relationship between freedom and facticity when she introduces the concept of oppression.

A second reaction to the lack of being is the serious man, described by Beauvoir (46), citing Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as one who confers an absolute status upon certain values and “imagines that the accession to these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself”. Without scruple, the serious man sacrifices others for the values to which he unconditionally submits, even though the “thing that matters to the serious man is not so much the nature of the object which he prefers to himself, but rather the fact of being able to

lose himself in it” (47). If the serious man manages to convince himself that he is sacrificing nothing, it is because, for him, the “rest of the world is a faceless desert” (51).

Thirdly, “disappointed seriousness which has turned back upon itself” (52) describes the nihilistic attitude. The nihilist’s realisation “that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing” coincides with “a systematic rejection of the world and man and if this rejection ends up in a positive desire for destruction, it then establishes a tyranny” (57).

A fourth response to the absence of external justification for existence, is the “gratuitous display of activity” (58) of the adventurer. The adventurer “acts just for the sake of acting, for the sake of expending his constantly renewed energy, of expressing his vitality and the joy he takes in life” (Arp 2001: 60). Now, while it will become clear that Beauvoir promotes the notion of a joyful existence, the adventurer falls short in her estimation because he shares the nihilist’s contempt for other people. An adventurer, argues Beauvoir (61), “is one who remains indifferent … to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert his own existence without taking into account that of others … [and] … treat them like instruments; … destroy them if they get in his way.”

Fifthly, the passionate man imbues the object of his passion with the status of an absolute; however, unlike the serious man, he does not posit the object “as a thing detached from himself, but as a thing disclosed by his subjectivity” (64); put differently, “the passionate man realises that the importance of this object depends entirely on his passion” (Arp: 62). In this way, he “causes certain rare treasures to appear in the world, but he also depopulates it” (Beauvoir: 65). I return to the theme of the passionate man in the analysis of the erotic experience as a possible counter to the interpretation of self-other relationships mooted by early French phenomenology.

Finally, Beauvoir (68-69) also mentions “the critic who assumes for himself independence of mind” and warns that this independent man “is still a man with his particular situation in the world” and that his “criticisms fall into the world of particular men”; that he “does not merely describe … [he] takes sides.”

At the heart of Beauvoir’s critique of the moral failings of these self-others relationships, we find that, “no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself”, instead, it “appeals to

the existence of others” (67): those who “attempt to fulfil themselves outside of the world” (68) when they become “aware of the risks and the inevitable element of failure involved in any engagement” (67-68) are thwarted by the fact that there “is no way for a man to escape from this world” (69).