The situation of children is where Simone de Beauvoir begins her discussion and analysis of freedom and the notion of the situation, the situation of the human being in the world, and the situation of a specific group of individuals in the world.
Children, de Beauvoir says and argues, live or exist in a world that they neither created nor could shape or re-shape. This world was brought about and rendered possible by others, by the adults that govern, decide, and determine the meanings, values, and purposes of this world.
This is why, de Beauvoir says, the child neither experiences existential anguish or despair nor is obliged to come face to face with any serious or meaningful consequences that constantly accompany free acting and responsible deciding. The world of the child and its meanings, values, and purposes are brought about and shaped by others.
The child is thus metaphysically privileged, for it finds itself in a situation specifically designed to render impossible all anguish and despair and all possible serious consequences.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir says that there exist in society certain individuals and specific groups of people that are obliged to live in a world similar to or even identical to the world of the child. To these groups of people belong women in patriarchal societies.
Yet there is a difference between the situation of children and the situation of women. The situation of children is imposed on them, for they have no choice. Women, on the other hand, either choose their own situation or agree to never disrupt it. That is, some women consent to their situation in the world.
De Beauvoir realizes that there exist some situations in which challenging or disrupting oppression is impossible; that is, there exist situations that lack any real or genuine possibility of freedom.
But there also exist situations in which the possibility of genuine freedom dwells, yet unnoticed, concealed, or renounced. De Beauvoir criticizes these situations and argues that they are in bad faith because they ignore or renounce their freedom and refuse to take responsibility for their actions and decisions.
De Beauvoir takes the existentialist argument that “existence precedes essence” and argues that the child does not hold within itself its future adult, its future self. But this does not mean that there is a radical discontinuity separating and rendering apart and radically unrelated one’s past and one’s future.
According to de Beauvoir, one’s past is connected to one’s future, for one is constantly conversing with past decisions and actions and the future and its projects. But this does not mean that the already decided cannot be re-shaped or rendered different. This does not also mean that one’s original choice cannot be revisited, challenged, re-thought, reversed, or rendered radically other.
De Beauvoir’s argument is that past deciding directs the projects of the future, which are themselves related to, and are rendered possible only because of, a past deciding, an action decided in the past. In other words, the future is a conversation with what took place and was decided in the past. Freedom occurs and first becomes possible through a conversation between a future project and a past decision.
Ambiguity and Absurdity
In the second part of The Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir discusses bad faith and how it occurs when different groups of people and specific individuals renounce, ignore, or avoid their freedom.
This part of The Ethics of Ambiguity resembles Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus discusses different examples of the absurd man. The difference between The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Myth of Sisyphus is de Beauvoir’s insistence not on the absurdity of existence, but rather on its ambiguity.
According to de Beauvoir, “to declare existence absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed”. That human existence is absurd is a declaration that there is no meaning, that meaninglessness is inevitable; it is an announcement that existence and life are forever meaningless and futile.
Ambiguity, on the other hand, says that meanings, values, and purposes are neither pre-determined nor fixed; they are merely there, still undiscovered, unnoticed, and undetermined, awaiting to be rendered possible, awaiting the free and responsible human being to bring them about.
De Beauvoir’s argument that existence is merely ambiguous and not absurd grounds her refusal of nihilism. For de Beauvoir, meanings, values, and purposes are rendered possible and brought about through freedom, that is, through free deciding and responsible acting.
This means that de Beauvoir’s rejection of nihilism, which takes place as the radical absence of values and meaning, contains within itself an argument against bad faith, since, according to de Beauvoir, bad faith occurs when freedom is rejected and when responsibility is ignored.
Freedom, the Self/Other Relations, and Oppression
In the existentialism of de Beauvoir and unlike the existential thinking-philosophizing of Sartre, the conflictual model of the self/other relations is rejected. But this does not mean that de Beauvoir assumes or argues that the self/other relations cannot be oppressive.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir discusses and analyses oppressive relations and the possibilities of oppression in the relations linking oneself together with the Other. For de Beauvoir, interdependence renders oppression possible and lets it take place.
Oppression, de Beauvoir says, could destruct the oppressed emotionally, physically, and psychologically. This destruction renders impossible any possibility of authentic acting, genuine deciding, and meaningful resistance.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir says that one should help the Other to be free, that is, one should struggle for the freedom of the Other by allowing the Other to see that its own freedom is still possible and hence should not be abandoned.
The oppressed, de Beauvoir says, should come together so that challenging oppression could become a true possibility, so that freedom could be genuinely attained.
In order for any resistance to be more effective, de Beauvoir says that those who belong to the same oppressed group should come together. That is, women, for instance, should come together in their struggle for freedom, for to belong to the same oppressed group is to experience a togetherness in oppression and to share the struggle for freedom from out of the same lived experience.
Philosophy and Death
Death is a recurrent theme in the thinking-philosophizing of Plato. There are, therefore, many ponderings on grief, mourning, sorrow, and healing in the dialogues philosophizing and thinking toward death and dying. The fear of death, Plato says, burdens humans while they are awake and haunts their dreams.
Schopenhauer on Death and Afterlife
In the thinking-philosophizing of Schopenhauer, death is central because it is linked together with the “will-to-live”. Death is the fragility pervading our existence; a fragility necessarily delivering into philosophizing
At the end of Division One of Being and Time, Heidegger says that investigating the everydayness of Dasein makes understandable and hence brings nearer to Dasein’s being, yet it does not bring Dasein wholly, completely, or fully face to face with itself; that is, it does not bring “Da-sein as a whole in view”.
Heidegger on “Being-Toward-Death”
For Heidegger, death brings closer to the question of the meaning of Being: “Death opens up the question of Being”. Heidegger says that only to the human being belongs the possibility of being brought face to face with death: “Only humanity ‘has’ the distinction of standing and facing death, because the human being is earnest about Being: death is the supreme testimony to Being”.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre criticizes Heidegger’s conception of death in Being and Time and offers his own account of the finitude of existence, which is grounded not in the certainty of death, but rather in our choices and freedom.
For more articles on the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, visit this webpage.
For an article explaining what Sartre means by freedom and the situation, visit this webpage.