Simone de Beauvoir offers one of the most interesting philosophical accounts of childhood, and, as numerous scholars have argued, it is one of the most important contributions that she made to existentialism. Beauvoir stressed the importance of childhood on one's ability to assume one's freedom. This radically changed how freedom was construed for existentialism. Rather than positing an adult subjectivity that tries to flee freedom through bad faith, Beauvoir's account forces a recognition of a situated freedom that itself is also (...) developmentally achieved. In this article, I explore the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. By reading Beauvoir through Rousseau — who was one of her favorite authors — we see not just one but two accounts of childhood in Beauvoir's philosophical work. On the one hand is the idealistic childhood wherein the child is an apprentice to freedom. On the other is the constrained childhood whose product is apprenticed to the serious. I begin with a brief summary of Rousseau's Emile. Next, I offer some justification for reading Beauvoir alongside Rousseau before offering an account of Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. I end by exploring some of the implications of my reading for freedom. (shrink)

This article explicates the meaning of the paradox from the perspective of sexual difference, as articulated by Simone de Beauvoir. I claim that the self, the other, and their becoming are sexed in Beauvoir’s early literary writing before the question of sexual difference is posed in The Second Sex (1949). In particular, Beauvoir’s description of Françoise’s subjective becoming in the novel She Came to Stay (1943) anticipates her later systematic description of ‘the woman in love’. In addition, I argue that (...) the different existential types appearing at the end of The Second Sex (the narcissist, the woman in love, the mystic, and the independent woman) are variations of a specific feminine, historically changing paradox of subjectivity. According to this paradox, women, in a different mode than men, must become what they ontologically “are”: beings of change and self-transcendence that have to realise the human condition in their concrete, singular lives. My interpretation draws on Kierkegaardian philosophy of existence, phenomenology, and early psychoanalysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe central hypothesis of this paper is that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty offers significant philosophical groundwork for an ethics that honours key feminist commitments – embodiment, situatedness, diversity and the intrinsic sociality of subjectivity. Part I evaluates feminist criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. Part II defends the claim that Merleau-Ponty’s non-dualist ontology underwrites leading approaches in feminist ethics, notably Care Ethics and the Ethics of Vulnerability. Part III examines Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodied percipience, arguing that these offer a powerful critique of the (...) view from nowhere, a totalizing God’s-eye-view with pretensions to objectivity. By revealing the normative structure of perceptual gestalts in the intersubjective domain, he establishes the view from everywhere. Normativity is no longer deferred to higher authorities such as duty, utility or the valorized virtue, but through the perceptual gestalt it is returned to the perceiving embodied subject. This... (shrink)

I begin with the assumption that a philosophically significant tension exists today in feminist philosophy of religion between those subjects who seek to become divine and those who seek their identity in mutual recognition. My critical engagement with the ambiguous assertions of Luce Irigaray seeks to demonstrate, one the one hand, that a woman needs to recognize her own identity but, on the other hand, that each subject whether male or female must struggle in relation to the other in order (...) to maintain realism about life and death. No one can avoid the recognition that we are each given life but each of us also dies. In addition, I raise a more general, philosophical problem for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion: how should philosophers interpret deliberately ambiguous assertions? For example, what does Irigaray mean in asserting. 'Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign'? To find an answer, I turn to the distinctively French readings of the Hegelian struggle for recognition which have preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century. I explore the struggle for mutual recognition between womrn and men who must face the reality of life and death in order to avoid the projection of their fear of mortality onto the other sex. This includes a critical look at Irigaray's account of subjectivity and divinity. I turn to the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in order to shift the focus from divinity to intersubjectivity. I conclude that taking seriously the struggle for mutual recognition between subjects forces contemporary philosophers of religion to be realist in their living and dying. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for recognition. Indeed, we must event risk our autonomy/divinity in seeking to recognize intersubjectivity. (shrink)

This article is meant to stage an encounter, a kind of rendezvous, between Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir regarding how alterity seems to enable an ethical relation for Levinas while closing one for Beauvoir. I will argue that Beauvoir's reading of Levinas on “the other” is not a charitable one, and the ethical ambivalence in Levinas's notion of alterity can motivate the praxis Beauvoir seeks for undoing social forms of oppression. I will start with Beauvoir's interpretation of alterity as (...) “feminine otherness” in Levinas's ethics that, for her, originates in the violent perspective of male privilege. Then I will move to Levinas's response to this critique in a set of interviews with Philip Nemo, and to consideration of how a more charitable reading of alterity, understood as a sort of ambivalence in the structure of subjectivity, creates a close proximity between Levinas's and Beauvoir's ethics of action. I contend that both Beauvoir and Levinas respectively developed their ethics of action, either of ambiguity or of ambivalent alterity, in order to free thought from the absolute seriousness with which normative standards are held. (shrink)

This article examines the ethics of ambiguity formulated by existentialist authors in the 1940s, linking it to turn-of-the-century debates on ethics between philosophy and the social sciences. The underlying thesis is that, rather than representing a radical conceptual novelty, the ethical thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, strained between freedom and situation, constitutes a revisiting and updating of philosophical positions from the landscape of the Third Republic. To demonstrate this, the thought of Frédéric Rauh is examined. Indeed, anticipating (...) what de Beauvoir would later call “ambiguity”, Rauh sought to develop an ethics of action that would constitute a third way between sociological objectivism and the empty abstractions of idealism and rationalism. By reconstructing the transitions from one generation and historical context to the next, the article shows how, and through which mediators, the existentialists were well aware of this debate and, in their own way, developed a philosophy of action, of ethical experience, similar to Rauh’s. (shrink)

In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence as its instrument, (...) Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of “realistic and positive” and “idealistic and moral” arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis was set against the background of changed expectations on education and teachers’ work in contemporary Western societies, reflecting global educational trends of standardisation and assessment moving further down the ages. The overall aim of the thesis was to explore and gain understandings of how teachers’ work is constituted. The exploration was based on lived experience and philosophical perspectives, and the main research questions were: i) what is the significance of existential dimensions of teachers’ work, and (...) ii) how can they be understood in the light of a globalised and standardised education? The theoretical and methodological basis of the thesis was mainly the philosophy of the life-world as formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The studies included employed the following methods: drawings with associated oral comments, written teacher responses and follow-up interviews, visual documentation with associated oral comments, and finally, the study of the relevant philosophical literature. In total 50 teachers and 112 children participated in study I, ten teachers in study II and eight teachers in study III. In study IV, the data consisted of philosophical literature.The findings show that teachers’ work involves not only teachers’ intellectual capacities and skills, but also their emotional and embodied being, and intertwined relationships as well. Further, teachers’ work it affected not only by the views of children, knowledge and learning held by teachers, policymakers and society that affect teachers’ work, but also by ontological assumptions and existential dimensions in a wider sense. It emerged that teachers’ views of education and their attempt to appreciate the unpredictable beyond dualistic assumptions are holistic, and multidimensional, in comparison to the rather linear and standardised global agenda.The crossover analysis of the findings suggests that teachers’ work is mainly constituted by ambiguities and intertwinings of an ontological character that have epistemological implications. In this thesis ambiguities are used to describe aspects that at first seem contradictory but are in fact more like irreducible uncertainties – as intertwined and reversible aspects of teachers’ work as a whole. Accordingly, existential dimensions of teachers’ work are ubiquitous within these ambiguities and intertwinings, and appear as significant in mainly two ways – firstly, as closely connected dimensions of the life-world and lived experience, referred to as lived time, lived space, lived body and lived other; secondly, as basic notions mainly about the relationships between i) subject and object, ii) mind and body, iii) human, culture and nature, iv) linear and multidimensional temporality. These existential dimensions of teachers work are discussed as Intercorporeal reversibilities, Intertwinings, chiasm and flesh and A chiasmic being. The ambiguous aspects of teachers’ work seem to derive from a general ambiguity of views on education, in which the rationalistic view tends to dominate since it often reflects the management of education. This overall ambiguity demands a reconsideration of the wider aim of education as well as of different relationships within education beyond dualisms and divides. Particularly, intercorporeal and intertwined relationships are essential, encompassing the significant intertwinings of ‘subjectobject’, ‘mindbody’, and ‘humannatureculture’. It is argued that this rethinking needs to be done in order to create conceptual and operational space for diverse and challenging pedagogical relationships. Thereby, a process of a chiasmic being for teachers in their work and for children’s learning can be enhancedKey words: teachers’ work; teaching; school; early childhood education; lived experience; existential; pluralistic; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

The decades immediately following the Second World War saw extensive interest in the literary novels of Sade. Compared with the Sade studies of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir offers a unique perspective in her essay Must We Burn De Sade?. Indeed, unlike her contemporaries, Beauvoir focuses not only on Sade's prose but also on Sade's life and the relationship between Sade's life and literature. The latter is interpreted in two different ways. Thus, Beauvoir uses at (...) least three different perspectives to understand the Marquis de Sade. In our essay, each of these three approaches, not clearly distinguished by Beauvoir's interpreters, will be discussed separately. This discussion will be linked to the important point that Beauvoir mentions three different notions of sadistic enjoyment. It will be argued that the distinction between these different notions coincides with the distinction between the three perspectives Beauvoir uses in her reading of Sade. We will evaluate both how Beauvoir's study on Sade is related to her existentialist philosophy, and the relationship between Must We Burn De Sade? and the studies of Beauvoir's contemporaries, a relationship which is neglected by most scholars in continental philosophy. (shrink)