The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Simone de Beauvoir on Vitality, the Measure of Intelligence, and What Freedom Really Means

Rilke urged us to live the questions; Keats argued for “negative capability” — the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity; “In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar,” Feynman wrote. And yet the art of ambiguity is ever-elusive, ever-discomfiting, too often a source of anxiety rather than liberation. Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) — dispeller of the “tortured genius” myth of creativity, masterful love-letter writer, curmudgeonly sartorialist — certainly knew that when she penned The Ethics Of Ambiguity (public library) in 1947 — a difficult but enormously rewarding read, exploring the existentialist tension between absolute freedom of choice and the constraints of life’s givens.

“The most precious thing is vitality,” young Susan Sontag wrote in her diary. But what, exactly, is vitality, and what might its secret be? Beauvoir contemplates the question as it relates to liberty in Part II, titled “Personal Freedom and Others”:

Every man casts himself into the world by making himself a lack of being; he thereby contributes to reinvesting it with human signification. He discloses it. And in this movement even the most outcast sometimes feel the joy of existing. They then manifest existence as a happiness and the world as a source of joy. But it is up to each one to make himself a lack of more or less various, profound, and rich aspects of being. What is called vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence are not ready-made qualities, but a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being. Doubtless, every one casts himself into it on the basis of his physiological possibilities, but the body itself is not a brute fact. It expresses our relationship to the world, and that is why it is an object of sympathy or repulsion. And on the other hand, it determines no behavior.

Unlike Mark Twain, she aligns intelligence with morality and, like Jackson Pollock’s dad, makes a case for absolute awareness as the key to vitality:

There is vitality only by means of free generosity. Intelligence supposes good will, and, inversely, a man is never stupid if he adapts his language and his behavior to his capacities, and sensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself. The reward for these spontaneous qualities issues from the fact that they make significances and goals appear in the world. They discover reasons for existing. They confirm us in the pride and joy of our destiny as man.

She goes on to caution against a morally and existentially inferior mode of being, in what she calls the “sub-man”:

If we were to try to establish a kind of hierarchy among men, we would put those who are denuded of this living warmth … on the lowest rung of the ladder. To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire.

Beauvoir examines our inner lives as a kind of existential paradox of choice — those unable to fully inhabit their freedom attempt to make it more manageable by committing themselves to choices and causes not entirely their own, often resulting in deformities like bigotry and violence:

[The sub-man] is afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of its possibilities. He is thereby led to take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily abandon himself to verbal outbursts or even physical violence. One day, a monarchist, the next day, an anarchist, he is more readily anti-semitic, anti-clerical, or anti-republican. Thus, though we have defined him as a denial and a flight, the sub-man is not a harmless creature. He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody can get control of. In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from among the sub-men. That is why every man who wills himself free within a human world fashioned by free men will be so disgusted by the sub-men. Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity, and the sub-man feels only the facticity of his existence. Instead of aggrandizing the reign of the human, he opposes his inert resistance to the projects of other men.

[…]

The sub-man experiences the desert of the world in his boredom. And the strange character of a universe with which he has created no bond also arouses fear in him. Weighted down by present events, he is bewildered before the darkness of the future which is haunted by frightful specters, war, sickness, revolution, fascism, bolshevism. The more indistinct these dangers are, the more fearful they become. The sub-man is not very clear about what he has to lose, since he has nothing, but this very uncertainty re-enforces his terror. Indeed, what he fears is that the shock of the unforeseen may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.

Above all, however, Beauvoir argues that freedom, like the creative life, is a matter of personal choice:

From one point of view the collapsing of the serious world is a deliverance. Although he was irresponsible, the child also felt himself defenseless before obscure powers which directed the course of things. But whatever the joy of this liberation may be, it is not without great confusion that the adolescent finds himself cast into a world which is no longer ready-made, which has to be made; he is abandoned, unjustified, the prey of a freedom that is no longer chained up by anything. What will he do in the face of this new situation? This is the moment when he decides. If what might be called the natural history of an individual, his affective complexes, etcetera depend above all upon his childhood, it is adolescence which appears as the moment of moral choice. Freedom is then revealed and he must decide upon his attitude in the face of it. Doubtless, this decision can always be reconsidered, but the fact is that conversions are difficult because the world reflects back upon us a choice which is confirmed through this world which it has fashioned. Thus, a more and more rigorous circle is formed from which one is more and more unlikely to escape. Therefore, the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know its exigencies.

This misfortune has still another aspect. Moral choice is free, and therefore unforeseeable. The child does not contain the man he will become. Yet, it is always on the basis of what he has been that a man decides upon what he wants to be. He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative. Now, the child set up this character and this universe little by little, without foreseeing its development. He was ignorant of the disturbing aspect of this freedom which he was heedlessly exercising. He tranquilly abandoned himself to whims, laughter, tears, and anger which seemed to him to have no morrow and no danger, and yet which left ineffaceable imprints about him. The drama of original choice is that it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime, that it occurs without reason, before any reason, that freedom is there as if it were present only in the form of contingency.

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Joan Didion famously wrote in 1968, and it was perhaps Beauvoir reverberating through her words.

The Ethics Of Ambiguity is fantastic in its demanding entirety — do your mind’s life a favor.


Published December 20, 2012

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/12/20/simone-de-beauvoir-on-ambiguity/

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