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Human Freedom:
Ethics for the being whose being is a lack thereof
What is freedom? The concept of freedom seems so self-evident, so unquestionable in our modern enlightened society, that the question seems almost bizarre. We talk of freeing peoples, of fighting in the name of freedom, but when is the actual concept ever addressed? While it seems possible that freedom may be indeed such a simple concept, a short while thinking on the subject will raise several objections. For example, given the supposed self-evidence of freedom, how can anybody possibly even ignore it in relation to either themselves or others? (I.e. how can slavery even be a choice, both on the part of the master and slave?) This question alone helps serve to point out the innate unconfirmability of freedom and thus the ambiguity inherent in any ethical code derived from ideals of such. However, if any ethical code is ever to be derived, from what else can it? Many philosophers, including the existentialists of the 20th century, have attempted to derive such an ethical code, and their various attempts can be seen, self-documented, throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps more accessibly than most, Simone de Beauvoir addresses the issue in her book Pour Une Morale de L'ambiguïté, translated as The Ethics of Ambiguity.
De Beauvoir's attempt to derive an ethics from existentialist philosophies, including but not limited to ideas expressed in the writing of Jean Paul Sartre, puts up as an ideal the "genuinely free man", a man who lives in a way conducive to his own freedom. In order to set the stage upon which this free man can champion, she first sets up the backdrop, the many different "imperfect" types of people, who all in some way shun freedom. These archetypes are important mainly because of the ways in which they contrast with the "right" way of being—free.
As a backdrop to the world in which these beings exist, explanation is given for the mode of human existence. Humans are thrown into the world of which they are but a miniscule piece; the strong desire to be everything, to really exist, is what characterizes our forays into this world. In wanting to be everything to everything and everyone, I at the same time of course must realize that such an act is impossible; “if I were really everything, there would be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. There would be nothing to possess, and I myself would be nothing.”(71) In order to exist, I must first have been torn apart from all of existence; I must first be nothing. It’s with the understanding of this, our form of existence, that we can then strive for the actualization of freedom.
Of the archetypes looked at by de Beauvoir, perhaps farthest from free, the "sub-man", who "in the face of the risks and passions which [existence] implies…rejects this 'passion' which is his human condition,"(42) and fails at even accepting his existence for what it is, as the aforementioned "being who's being is not to be."(10) In doing such he stops living passionately in the world, and falls into a defeating cycle; "The less he exists, the less there is reason for him to exist, since these reasons are created only be existing."(43) In essence the sub-man is nothing more than "a brute fact," (43) on the level of inanimate objects. This seems like almost a free state in a sense: free from existence, from passion and seriousness. However, the sub-man cannot ever reject existence as fully as a tree or rock can, but exists in denial of it; "the rejection of existence is still another way of existing." In order to deal with his inability to not exist, he ultimately turns to the serious, he prescribes to ready made ideals and thus, instead of being completely free of existing, as he would want, he instead gets trapped in this world, the world which gives up freedom for the security of absolute values. The sub-man fails at being free because he “feels only the facticity of his existences,”(44) and therefore can never experience life in the way a genuinely free man can.
Much closer to actually realizing freedom is the “adventurer,” a nihilist who’s kept a “taste for an existence which he originally felt as a joy.”(58) He “likes action for it’s own sake,” takes from nihilism the “opposition to the serious,” and yet opposes nihilism as well, because of the joy he finds in existence.(58) The adventurer is the “perfect hero”, “if existentialism were solipsistic;” he “does not propose to be[,]… deliberately makes himself a lack of being[,]… though engaged in his undertaking,…is at the same time detached from the goal… and it is not from things that he expects the justification of his choices.”(59) However, the adventurer, while to the point of what could be called freedom, actually fails at actually actualizing it because of how he completely ignores the impact that his actions on others in return have on him. He’s not unwilling to cut through any who may, and inevitably do, stand in the way of his adventures, and thus is never “conscious of the requirements of his own freedom,”(60); As he’s in such a way unconscious, he can never truly liberate himself by also liberating others.
The adventurer is in such a spot that he could possibly realize his mistake of not respecting the freedom of other men. Should he ever become conscious of this mistake, he can then act on it in such a way as to become a “genuinely free man.” The genuinely free man is he who finally does realize that he must take the freedom of others into account in order to be himself free. When such an attitude is reached, freedom has finally been properly defined, and from this point, ethics can then be derived.
First though, it must be noted that this freedom in ways seems to be almost fit into the world of the serious. As de Beauvoir says, “it is only by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death itself and to realize itself as an indefinite unity.”(32) This seems to sound dangerously close to one of the greater-than-freedom ideals so appealing to the serious man, as ironic as that sounds; if prolonging the value, freedom, is more important than one’s subjective world, how can this not be the case? De Beauvoir answers this by noting that “To will oneself free is to will others free,”(73) i.e. freedom must be had for everybody if it’s to be had for anybody. Because of this, freedom must then be looked at in a quasi-objective sense; it’s not really ever objective because, by definition, it involves placing one’s subjective existence above all, but seemingly so because of it’s sharedness. One subjectively wants freedom for everybody in order to have it oneself, and though it’s of course impossible to really know what freedom is for anybody else, it’s in one’s selfish interest to hazard a guess. The resultant is a “genuine seriousness”, which is starkly contrasted with the “rejected seriousness” of the serious man.(60)
In the realm of this genuine seriousness, ethics are again created, and in many ways it can be seen to resemble the serious of the serious man. However, it never “subordinates [freedom] to values which would be unconditioned;” (46) in fact, it never puts stock in any unconditioned values at all. Instead of rejecting existence by believing that one can only have value through values greater than himself, in a mindset of genuine seriousness, one looks to no “external justification”(12) for living. There is no reason for existence, and there need not be; existence is, as anything else, “unjustifiable from without,” and therefore “to declare from without that it is unjustifiable is not to condemn it.”(15) In light of this lack of anything outside of existence to justify it, it can seem that ethics are irrelevant, and thus everything is permissible. To the contrary, without any external justification for existence, one’s “acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world… where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well.”(16) With such a responsibility, one must then decide upon an ethical course of action that he feels is most beneficial, to both himself and the world, two things which though separate, separately are meaningless.
De Beauvoir approaches this decision by giving it cultural context; in the human world of her day, so similar to ours that all of her points have remained relevant, men are regularly oppressed by other men, which is all that a man can ever be oppressed by; as de Beauvoir says, “Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom.”(82) In order to “open the future” for one’s own freedom, it’s then necessary to be one “who enlighten[s] mankind by thrusting it ahead of itself,” to somehow defeat those who will keep people oppressed.(83) This “defeating” is somewhat questionable on the grounds of it denying the oppressing parties their freedom. However, an overthrow of an oppressor in essence helps the overthrown towards freedom as well, as he was up till the point of overthrow retarding himself more than any other on the path to the realization of freedom. “All men are interested in this elimination” of a situation in which a party is oppressed, “the oppressor as well as the oppressed, as Marx himself has said, for each one needs to have all men free.”(85) This in no way means that one ethically should force anybody to be free, rather “what must be done is to furnish the ignorant slave with the means of transcending his situation by means of revolt, to put an end to his ignorance.”(86) Though “putting an end to his ignorance” means first awakening the slave to the unhappiness of his immediate condition, it’s necessary in order for him to ever open to him new possibilities for his existence, “and through him to all men.”(86) Of course the formerly oppressed are not much better off than any other man once they are liberated; they can also fall into one of de Beauvoir’s “bad” archetypes as anybody else. In essence, they are as children leaving adolescence, finally confronted with existence, the base situation from which any way of thinking is derived.
With the liberation of others as perhaps the most important part of existential ethics, the question must then be asked: what then? What’s to be done should everybody be liberated? Should this prove unanswerable, the whole liberation process would be ultimately self-defeating. Luckily, the “dream of a future when men will know no other use of their freedom than [a] free unfurling of itself”(81) is a rather happy one. Without oppression, humans can individually focus on whatever of their existence interests them; “constructive activity would be possible for all; each one would be able to aim positively through his projects at his own future.”(81) Even given this supposed utopian future, however, one cannot justify any action with it as a basis; instead of liberation being seen as a means toward an end, “there is a liberation of man only if, in aiming at itself, freedom is achieved absolutely in the very fact of aiming at itself.”(131) Freedom towards a future end not really freedom at all, but rather disguised oppression. Only, to iterate an important point, when freedom “sets itself up as its own goal and fulfills itself by so doing”(132) is it actually freedom as we’re defining it. Only in a movement against an oppressor can such a formation of actual freedom occur. “Revolt alone is pure.”(132)
In order to justify any other act it’s first necessary to prove that “then end is unconditioned,” a proof that is by definition impossible.(146) Even in the name of revolution nothing is explicitly allowed; one act will not necessarily cause a revolution to happen or not, but rather, will hasten or retard it, and therefore must be justifiable outside of the context of the revolution as a whole. As nothing is absolutely justifiable, it’s only through a careful weighing of consequences that any particular act should ever be considered justifiable in any sense. Even then, the possibility of committing an atrocity in the name of ethics is always present. It’s important here to remember that this is the nature of decisions; were there a single perfect choice to a decision, it would never be a decision to begin with, but merely an unfolding of the obvious.
In the face of this impossibility of one’s decisions being correct, there are two great temptations: first, to “reject the exhausting tension demanded by existentialism”(153) and instead follow heroism, the blind direction toward an uncontested goal, and second, to withdraw from the making of decisions altogether, an act which in itself is a decision with vast and far reaching consequences. Even after these temptations are overcome, the inherent ambiguity of decisions and action prevent from there ever being one clear-cut path. In the context of liberation, the crime and tyranny necessary in the liberation of men, if ever allowed to “triumphantly establishing themselves in the world,” have defeated their very justification, and therefore always run the risk become nothing more than unethical and violent actions.(155) Only by always keeping freedom in mind can this ever be overcome, and such an overcoming can only occur moment by moment.
Ethics are thus seen as derivable from an existential worldview, though perhaps with a fairly uncommon result in relation to ethics as generally conceived. Our existence as humans, should we choose to live it, can only ever be justified, moment-by-moment, by ourselves, to ourselves; without any visible end, the paradise of other worldviews, we can only justify these moments in and for themselves. The existence that we’re thrown into is a life in which we can do whatever we want, until death. However, this freedom to do whatever we want doesn’t necessarily abdicate us from any morale responsibility. By the very condition of freedom one is already concerned with others, and must act accordingly. As de Beauvoir aptly puts it, “Man is free, but he finds law in his very freedom.”(156)
Ethics for the being whose being is a lack thereof
What is freedom? The concept of freedom seems so self-evident, so unquestionable in our modern enlightened society, that the question seems almost bizarre. We talk of freeing peoples, of fighting in the name of freedom, but when is the actual concept ever addressed? While it seems possible that freedom may be indeed such a simple concept, a short while thinking on the subject will raise several objections. For example, given the supposed self-evidence of freedom, how can anybody possibly even ignore it in relation to either themselves or others? (I.e. how can slavery even be a choice, both on the part of the master and slave?) This question alone helps serve to point out the innate unconfirmability of freedom and thus the ambiguity inherent in any ethical code derived from ideals of such. However, if any ethical code is ever to be derived, from what else can it? Many philosophers, including the existentialists of the 20th century, have attempted to derive such an ethical code, and their various attempts can be seen, self-documented, throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps more accessibly than most, Simone de Beauvoir addresses the issue in her book Pour Une Morale de L'ambiguïté, translated as The Ethics of Ambiguity.
De Beauvoir's attempt to derive an ethics from existentialist philosophies, including but not limited to ideas expressed in the writing of Jean Paul Sartre, puts up as an ideal the "genuinely free man", a man who lives in a way conducive to his own freedom. In order to set the stage upon which this free man can champion, she first sets up the backdrop, the many different "imperfect" types of people, who all in some way shun freedom. These archetypes are important mainly because of the ways in which they contrast with the "right" way of being—free.
As a backdrop to the world in which these beings exist, explanation is given for the mode of human existence. Humans are thrown into the world of which they are but a miniscule piece; the strong desire to be everything, to really exist, is what characterizes our forays into this world. In wanting to be everything to everything and everyone, I at the same time of course must realize that such an act is impossible; “if I were really everything, there would be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. There would be nothing to possess, and I myself would be nothing.”(71) In order to exist, I must first have been torn apart from all of existence; I must first be nothing. It’s with the understanding of this, our form of existence, that we can then strive for the actualization of freedom.
Of the archetypes looked at by de Beauvoir, perhaps farthest from free, the "sub-man", who "in the face of the risks and passions which [existence] implies…rejects this 'passion' which is his human condition,"(42) and fails at even accepting his existence for what it is, as the aforementioned "being who's being is not to be."(10) In doing such he stops living passionately in the world, and falls into a defeating cycle; "The less he exists, the less there is reason for him to exist, since these reasons are created only be existing."(43) In essence the sub-man is nothing more than "a brute fact," (43) on the level of inanimate objects. This seems like almost a free state in a sense: free from existence, from passion and seriousness. However, the sub-man cannot ever reject existence as fully as a tree or rock can, but exists in denial of it; "the rejection of existence is still another way of existing." In order to deal with his inability to not exist, he ultimately turns to the serious, he prescribes to ready made ideals and thus, instead of being completely free of existing, as he would want, he instead gets trapped in this world, the world which gives up freedom for the security of absolute values. The sub-man fails at being free because he “feels only the facticity of his existences,”(44) and therefore can never experience life in the way a genuinely free man can.
Much closer to actually realizing freedom is the “adventurer,” a nihilist who’s kept a “taste for an existence which he originally felt as a joy.”(58) He “likes action for it’s own sake,” takes from nihilism the “opposition to the serious,” and yet opposes nihilism as well, because of the joy he finds in existence.(58) The adventurer is the “perfect hero”, “if existentialism were solipsistic;” he “does not propose to be[,]… deliberately makes himself a lack of being[,]… though engaged in his undertaking,…is at the same time detached from the goal… and it is not from things that he expects the justification of his choices.”(59) However, the adventurer, while to the point of what could be called freedom, actually fails at actually actualizing it because of how he completely ignores the impact that his actions on others in return have on him. He’s not unwilling to cut through any who may, and inevitably do, stand in the way of his adventures, and thus is never “conscious of the requirements of his own freedom,”(60); As he’s in such a way unconscious, he can never truly liberate himself by also liberating others.
The adventurer is in such a spot that he could possibly realize his mistake of not respecting the freedom of other men. Should he ever become conscious of this mistake, he can then act on it in such a way as to become a “genuinely free man.” The genuinely free man is he who finally does realize that he must take the freedom of others into account in order to be himself free. When such an attitude is reached, freedom has finally been properly defined, and from this point, ethics can then be derived.
First though, it must be noted that this freedom in ways seems to be almost fit into the world of the serious. As de Beauvoir says, “it is only by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death itself and to realize itself as an indefinite unity.”(32) This seems to sound dangerously close to one of the greater-than-freedom ideals so appealing to the serious man, as ironic as that sounds; if prolonging the value, freedom, is more important than one’s subjective world, how can this not be the case? De Beauvoir answers this by noting that “To will oneself free is to will others free,”(73) i.e. freedom must be had for everybody if it’s to be had for anybody. Because of this, freedom must then be looked at in a quasi-objective sense; it’s not really ever objective because, by definition, it involves placing one’s subjective existence above all, but seemingly so because of it’s sharedness. One subjectively wants freedom for everybody in order to have it oneself, and though it’s of course impossible to really know what freedom is for anybody else, it’s in one’s selfish interest to hazard a guess. The resultant is a “genuine seriousness”, which is starkly contrasted with the “rejected seriousness” of the serious man.(60)
In the realm of this genuine seriousness, ethics are again created, and in many ways it can be seen to resemble the serious of the serious man. However, it never “subordinates [freedom] to values which would be unconditioned;” (46) in fact, it never puts stock in any unconditioned values at all. Instead of rejecting existence by believing that one can only have value through values greater than himself, in a mindset of genuine seriousness, one looks to no “external justification”(12) for living. There is no reason for existence, and there need not be; existence is, as anything else, “unjustifiable from without,” and therefore “to declare from without that it is unjustifiable is not to condemn it.”(15) In light of this lack of anything outside of existence to justify it, it can seem that ethics are irrelevant, and thus everything is permissible. To the contrary, without any external justification for existence, one’s “acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world… where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well.”(16) With such a responsibility, one must then decide upon an ethical course of action that he feels is most beneficial, to both himself and the world, two things which though separate, separately are meaningless.
De Beauvoir approaches this decision by giving it cultural context; in the human world of her day, so similar to ours that all of her points have remained relevant, men are regularly oppressed by other men, which is all that a man can ever be oppressed by; as de Beauvoir says, “Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom.”(82) In order to “open the future” for one’s own freedom, it’s then necessary to be one “who enlighten[s] mankind by thrusting it ahead of itself,” to somehow defeat those who will keep people oppressed.(83) This “defeating” is somewhat questionable on the grounds of it denying the oppressing parties their freedom. However, an overthrow of an oppressor in essence helps the overthrown towards freedom as well, as he was up till the point of overthrow retarding himself more than any other on the path to the realization of freedom. “All men are interested in this elimination” of a situation in which a party is oppressed, “the oppressor as well as the oppressed, as Marx himself has said, for each one needs to have all men free.”(85) This in no way means that one ethically should force anybody to be free, rather “what must be done is to furnish the ignorant slave with the means of transcending his situation by means of revolt, to put an end to his ignorance.”(86) Though “putting an end to his ignorance” means first awakening the slave to the unhappiness of his immediate condition, it’s necessary in order for him to ever open to him new possibilities for his existence, “and through him to all men.”(86) Of course the formerly oppressed are not much better off than any other man once they are liberated; they can also fall into one of de Beauvoir’s “bad” archetypes as anybody else. In essence, they are as children leaving adolescence, finally confronted with existence, the base situation from which any way of thinking is derived.
With the liberation of others as perhaps the most important part of existential ethics, the question must then be asked: what then? What’s to be done should everybody be liberated? Should this prove unanswerable, the whole liberation process would be ultimately self-defeating. Luckily, the “dream of a future when men will know no other use of their freedom than [a] free unfurling of itself”(81) is a rather happy one. Without oppression, humans can individually focus on whatever of their existence interests them; “constructive activity would be possible for all; each one would be able to aim positively through his projects at his own future.”(81) Even given this supposed utopian future, however, one cannot justify any action with it as a basis; instead of liberation being seen as a means toward an end, “there is a liberation of man only if, in aiming at itself, freedom is achieved absolutely in the very fact of aiming at itself.”(131) Freedom towards a future end not really freedom at all, but rather disguised oppression. Only, to iterate an important point, when freedom “sets itself up as its own goal and fulfills itself by so doing”(132) is it actually freedom as we’re defining it. Only in a movement against an oppressor can such a formation of actual freedom occur. “Revolt alone is pure.”(132)
In order to justify any other act it’s first necessary to prove that “then end is unconditioned,” a proof that is by definition impossible.(146) Even in the name of revolution nothing is explicitly allowed; one act will not necessarily cause a revolution to happen or not, but rather, will hasten or retard it, and therefore must be justifiable outside of the context of the revolution as a whole. As nothing is absolutely justifiable, it’s only through a careful weighing of consequences that any particular act should ever be considered justifiable in any sense. Even then, the possibility of committing an atrocity in the name of ethics is always present. It’s important here to remember that this is the nature of decisions; were there a single perfect choice to a decision, it would never be a decision to begin with, but merely an unfolding of the obvious.
In the face of this impossibility of one’s decisions being correct, there are two great temptations: first, to “reject the exhausting tension demanded by existentialism”(153) and instead follow heroism, the blind direction toward an uncontested goal, and second, to withdraw from the making of decisions altogether, an act which in itself is a decision with vast and far reaching consequences. Even after these temptations are overcome, the inherent ambiguity of decisions and action prevent from there ever being one clear-cut path. In the context of liberation, the crime and tyranny necessary in the liberation of men, if ever allowed to “triumphantly establishing themselves in the world,” have defeated their very justification, and therefore always run the risk become nothing more than unethical and violent actions.(155) Only by always keeping freedom in mind can this ever be overcome, and such an overcoming can only occur moment by moment.
Ethics are thus seen as derivable from an existential worldview, though perhaps with a fairly uncommon result in relation to ethics as generally conceived. Our existence as humans, should we choose to live it, can only ever be justified, moment-by-moment, by ourselves, to ourselves; without any visible end, the paradise of other worldviews, we can only justify these moments in and for themselves. The existence that we’re thrown into is a life in which we can do whatever we want, until death. However, this freedom to do whatever we want doesn’t necessarily abdicate us from any morale responsibility. By the very condition of freedom one is already concerned with others, and must act accordingly. As de Beauvoir aptly puts it, “Man is free, but he finds law in his very freedom.”(156)
indescribable
mellow
quixotic
full
clothesed
bloodthirsty
thoughtful
weird, though not in a bad way