Hello to everyone who has responded (publically and in my DMs)!
Thank you so much for commenting back, and for the really gracious offers to take a look at my essay. I didn't realise that I don't have access to direct messages on this forum yet, so I'll post my essay on this forum (as I want to respect the site's restriction on links to external sites). Feel free to add any comments publically or drop me a DM which I will be reading even if not replying!
I am currently switching between topics quite rapidly so this essay has been left 'in the works' and has a few comments from a friend added which I am yet to attend to. Please also forgive the missing titles of works/ philosophers - all will be polished up at a later date and I can direct people to the texts I used if they're interested!
Thank you so much again - it is really appreciated.
Essay:
(2019)
For Søren Kierkegaard, according to Judith Butler, ‘To posture as a radically self‐generated being, to be the author of one’s will and knowledge, is to deny that one is constituted in and by what is infinitely larger than the human individual.’ Discuss, with reference to Butler, Kierkegaard and/or any other relevant thinker(s).
Judith Butler’s quotation outlines Søren Kierkegaard’s description of the process and consequence of an individual engaging their ontological freedom. Kierkegaard endorses individuals being so self-directing as part of his overall philosophical project to reinvigorate subjectivity. In turn, he wanted to deplete the influence of the structures shaping peoples’ choices, conduct, and opinions, including the general concept of an overarching moral dictum. In Mary Warnock’s work [to be inserted], for example, she lists examples such as the ‘standards of history and science’, ’rule-governed morality’, and ‘laws’. //quote or rephrase (mary xxx)// Such a vision establishes Kierkegaard’s work as an origin point for existentialist philosophy and its ethical developments - he turns towards an ethics of subjective voluntarism that is further developed by Simone de Beauvoir with the influence of Jean Paul Sartre. (add their link here) In addition, Beauvoir’s work interrogates the tension between the individual and the collective that is raised in this quotation. If we allow for a touch of hyperbole, Butler’s phrase ‘what is infinitely larger than the human individual’ encompasses a range of modes of belonging and being shaped. We might include how one is constituted within social and cultural history, one’s location in the contemporary social structure, or even how one’s identity is forged within linguistic networks. All examples are underpinned by the pre-established notion that, as an autonomous individual, the choices through which we define ourselves are limited by our intersubjective situation. Someone pushing to expand their choices and overcome their situational boundaries is someone Sartre would consider living authentically as a ‘being-for-itself’. Such a being is conscious, and fulfils the ontological necessity to constantly make choices in order to create the ‘essence’ that succeeds all conscious beings’ existence. Following along Sartrean lines, Beauvoir examines how women, an oppressed group with greatly limited situational freedom, can empower themselves to become (or restrict themselves from becoming) these ‘beings for themselves’.
The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex are Beauvoir’s two seminal texts that both, to difference degrees, detail her version of an existentialist ethics and its application to the situation of women’s oppression. Following Kierkegaard, she questions how the dynamics between a subject and their situation might be conflicting, just as Kierkegaard implies that one must deny one’s situation in order to assert one’s freedom. In relation to Sartre, Beauvoir (according to [to be inserted]) displayed a more astute understanding of the complexities of situatedness than could be encompassed by Sartre’s notion of radical freedom. She realised far sooner that situations limit our freedom to act and they do so differently, if not more severely, for some than others(more formal). She utilises the two terms transcendence and immanence to navigate these ideas. Transcendence is the capacity to engage in creative and dynamic activities that cultivate an authentic sense of meaning, as compared to immanence which is to maintain one’s life at its most basic and functional level - this is not authentic living. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir describes oppression as the stifling of transcendence: ‘transcendence is condemned to fall uselessly back upon itself because it is cut off from its goals. That is what defines a situation of oppression’. Traced through to her examination of women’s oppression, in The Second Sex she confirms that the extreme limits of a woman’s situation enclose her in ‘the limbo of immanence and contingency’. A woman’s sense of restriction is so unwavering because, analysed in Sartrean terms, Beauvoir sees that men are constantly pursuing that ‘impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself’. (rephrase) As such, they strive to assert that their dominance is intrinsic, ultimate, and as unchanging as the essence of an object. Such an understanding provides the first evidence of the masculinist underpinning of Kierkegaard’s idea, as summarised by Butler. //(more explicit)// The idea that asserting oneself as a free individual means stepping outside of the collectivity is predicated on a binary between the individual and the collective. However, to Beauvoir’s mind, women are unaccounted for in the realm of subjects. As she famously states, women are ‘the other’, they are not referenced when one speaks of mankind and are prohibited from achieving the authentic life that transcendence promises. Women have to fight to declare their freedom before they are even permitted into the collective. //(add more personal analysis)//
Such is the project Beauvoir champions, and yet she explores the idiosyncrasy of women’s oppression due to the extent of the ‘deep complicity’ that ‘The man who sets the woman up as an Other’ will find //(replace by another word)//. It is at this crux that ontology meets ethics for Beauvoir. She divides freedom between ontology and morality, as [to be inserted] outlines. Ontological freedom, as Sartre established, is unchanging - it is a virtue of our consciousness and is inescapable. Moral freedom, however, is a response to one’s ontological freedom. One asserts their moral freedom when they utilise their ontological freedom to make choices assigning value to certain ethical content in the world. //(add a quote)// As Beauvoir summarises in The Ethics of Ambiguity, ‘To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision’. Further, she establishes that ‘To will oneself free is also to will others free’, countering the idea that she aligns herself solely for or against the Hegelian iteration of the master-slave dialectic. In addition, summarising Beauvoir in this way makes the familiar accusation that an existentialist ethics endorses ethical subjectivism redundant. She outlines that an objective morality of the pursuit and maintenance of freedom for all underlies the value one subjectively confers to ethical content. In addition //(repetitive)//, she outlines the ontological necessity of recognising others’ freedom by drawing in equal measure from the Heideggerian concept of Mitsein, ‘the human reality… is at once a Mitsein and separation’. However far we recognise that other consciousnesses infringe on our experience, we desire the experience of meaning in the world which is only achievable through intersubjective significations. As Sartre puts it in Existentialism is a Humanism, when one ‘[chooses] for himself he chooses for all men’, meaning when one endorses the value of freedom, one defines it as valuable for all. Beauvoir evidences this by commenting that ‘the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity’ - treating others as being-for-themselves assures the collective’s transcendence also(move in the sentence). Thus, the case is not so dichotomous as Kierkegaard implies. In Beauvoir’s eyes one can be, and can only ever be, an autonomous subject when one operates under the infinite umbrella of collective significations. //(summary in two lines)//
Yet, because one’s( replace by “individual”) moral freedom is a fulfilment of ontological freedom, one can also face the temptation to flee one’s freedom by refusing to engage their morality. In Sartrean terms, when one is faced with the ‘anguish’ of freedom in making their ethical claim, so too does one face the ‘temptation to flee freedom and to make himself into a thing’. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir examines this conundrum in relation to women and their complicity in their oppression by continuing in “bad faith”. Once again, Kierkegaard and Beauvoir’s views grate against one another. To the former, the mark of a free being is through the denial of one //(subjects unified)// ’s circumstance, whereas the latter believes that agency requires the awareness of one’s belonging to a contextual situation and the ability one has to change it. For example, Beauvoir turns readers towards the situation of women rather bluntly - ‘Yes, women in general are today inferior to men; that is, their situation provides them with fewer possibilities: the question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated’. Relatedly, she firmly establishes that for women to not exploit ‘a possibility of liberation’ if and when it arrives is a moral transgression. At once, ‘transcendence lapses into immanence’, existence is degraded into an ‘in-itself’, and if the subject consents, ‘this fall is a moral fault’ and ‘an absolute evil’. From this perspective, her view supports Kierkegaard’s point that one should not resign themselves to their position in the collective, however it is only by asserting themselves from within the collective that ethical choices are impactful. In addition, a key distinction that [to be inserted] raises from Beauvoir’s work is that ‘Being led into temptation is also ethically different from being forcibly kept in ignorance’. Such an observation implies that Beauvoir has some concept of an educator that will enlighten women to their freedom and uncover the possibilities for liberation. In line with the desire for existentialism to be a practical philosophy, perhaps we can envision Beauvoir self-concept as a version of Plato’s philosopher leading women out of their cave. //(unfinished, explain it more)//
However, ‘ambiguity’ remains the key term for Beauvoir (becasue xxx). For example, she makes the concession that ‘certain adults live in the universe of the serious in all honesty’, those ‘denied all instruments of escape’, the ‘enslaved’ or the ‘mystified’. Amidst such overarching ambiguity, therefore, between ‘antecedent limits (facticity) and future possibilities (transcendence)’ - as William Schroeder puts it - it seems amiss to set up such a manichean division between morality and evil (between good and evil in terms of binary moralities?). Who decides where the potential for action definitively lies and when it is missed? How does one firmly define an act in pursuit of female liberation? If ambiguity always remains, it seems that the possibility of having committed an ‘evil’ (acknowledgement of “evil”?) places a forbidding ethical weight on individuals. Such is the limitation of lifting an ethics out of ontology, for one attempts to satisfy abstract ontological categories. Though Beauvoir herself argues against the effectiveness of measuring an ethical action according to happiness, ‘We cannot really know what the word ‘happiness’ means, and still less what authentic values it covers’, we can see the temptation of striving towards a more formal measurement //(term/name)//. Along similar lines, her ethics of ambiguity seems strangely incongruous with her endorsement of the idea that if one cannot ultimately change their situation, they should rebel via suicide. She writes, ‘Revolt can then be achieved only in the definitive rejection of the imposed situation, in suicide’. //(title)// Albert Camus would counter such a view virulently, as exemplified by his seminal work The Myth of Sisyphus, for he argues that the greatest rebellion against an unchangeable situation is to find meaning in it. Recall the final resounding line of his work, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’. Both cases are evidence of The Second Sex's contextual grounding, for the whole text is punched through with the spirit of wartime that garners a mentality of being ‘either for or against us’, all in or all out //(committed or withdrawn?)//. Again, the practical project of existentialism falters, for it means that (especially in an ethical project) the works are inextricable from how context has informed them. Ironically, such a case exemplifies the naivety of Kierkegaard’s view and reinforces the impossibility of turning one’s back on all that one is shaped by.
Making a final departure from Kierkegaard, Beauvoir establishes that collective action itself is the most important element of escaping oppression. She concedes that, as summarised by [to be inserted}, where ‘individuals are often powerless to alter significantly the social dimensions of their situations’, (link) ’effective collective resistance to oppressive practices is sometimes possible’. Beauvoir also makes the case that women lack the capacity to conceptualise themselves as part of a collective because they are inhibited from using the word ‘we’. As a result, referring to themselves as ‘women’ means their linguistic self-reference continues to be refracted through a patriarchal lens. The first, and most obvious question, however, is how women are ever going to be able to say ‘we’. [Discuss Butler here?] In addition, Beauvoir’s writing again recalls a war-time spirit as she claims that while there should be no contempt for the individual, ‘no other salvation [will be possible] than his subordination to the collectivity’. Thus, the individual’s only power becomes the power they have within the collective //(obscure, more explicit)//. Subsequently, what realistic leverage do they have if the collective veers in a direction they want to change? Though Kierkegaard glorifies the individual all too much, perhaps Beauvoir is at risk of overshadowing them altogether. Lastly, by arguing that women will only achieve liberation at their own collective volition, there remains something uncomfortable about the moral obligation resting on the shoulders of the oppressed (patriarchal) party. Turning back to Sartre, though one man ‘[chooses] for himself he chooses for all men’ - and Beauvoir argues that they really do only choose for men - it takes a female collective to assert their choice and they can only do so for the separate category that is their sex. Namely, the loose phrasing becomes ‘we, as women, value the freedom you have as a man’ and not ‘you as a person need to recognise the freedom we have as people’ - there is a difference between fighting for //(women/human being)// freedom and fighting for recognition of freedom. //(Butler’s perspective)// Such a subtle difference seems to condemn women to belong to female identity and their women group, and re-establishes the framework that freedom is a women’s issue in terms of patriarchal society. Fortunately, though this view remains realistic for Beauvoir’s time, and aspects of our own, there is no doubt that the politics of liberation are moving beyond it. Ultimately, though, the privileged view of Kierkegaard //(as summarised by Butler)// rings true again; he presumes that one always has the capacity to choose between individuality and collectivity when Beauvoir makes the point that women resoundingly don’t. //(summary)//