The French existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Jean‐Paul Sartre are renowned philosophers of freedom. But what “existentialist freedom” is is a matter of disagreement amongst their interpreters and, some argue, between Beauvoir and Sartre themselves. Since the late 1980s several scholars have argued that a Sartrean conception of freedom cannot justify the ethics of existentialism, adequately account for situations of oppression, or serve feminist ends. On these readings, Beauvoir disagreed with Sartre about freedom—making existentialist ethics, resistance to oppression, and feminism (...) coherently defensible. This article identifies four conceptions of freedom in order to clarify the questions of whether and how they disagreed, arguing that some incompatibilist readings of Sartre and Beauvoir conflate or confuse these conceptions in ways that render their conclusions unconvincing. However, there are stronger grounds on which to claim that Beauvoir disagreed with Sartre about morality—and the conditions of its possibility. (shrink)

One of the key insights of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is the idea that gender-based subordination is not just something done to women, but also something women do to themselves. This raises a question about ethical responsibility: if women are complicit, or actively implicated in their own oppression, are they at fault? Recent Beauvoir scholarship remains divided on this point. Here, I argue that Beauvoir did, in fact, ethically criticize many women for their complicity, as a sign of (...) what she called “bad faith”. I challenge recent accounts by Nancy Bauer and Manon Garcia, who both read Beauvoir as exonerating complicit women. According to this reading, women emerge as human “freedoms” within a social world where a “destiny” of inferiority is already prepared for them. Their self-subordination is then an inevitable product of acting in a patriarchal world. I argue, however, that this interpretation generates a crucial tension, leading Bauer and Garcia to call on women to stop being complicit, while also claiming they cannot avoid complicity. I propose instead a different interpretation, on which feminine complicity is often fueled by criticizable ethical attitudes that are far from inevitable. By revisiting Beauvoir’s notion of “bad faith”, I show that this account is compatible with recognizing the limitations imposed on women’s agency and I show that this feminist ethical criticism is itself an important part of a collective project of social transformation. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Might paranoia bear some promise, not only danger, for democratic theory and politics? To suggest that we should treat paranoia with anything but disdain today, in the age of Q anon and other white-supremacist lies, seems dangerous. But three decades ago, feminist theorist Naomi Schor took the risk and defended female paranoia, arguing that paranoia is an appropriate affect for feminist theory and critique. This essay follows Schor’s invitation to risk proximity to paranoia. I argue that the political importance of (...) Schor’s essay lies in one particular attribute of female paranoia that she celebrates: its love of detail. To explore the promise and limitations of the paranoid love of detail I pair Schor with two 20th-century theorists – Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir. Each studies a paranoid woman who clings to details: Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen counts the number of teacups that she serves in her German salon. Beauvoir’s housewife collects tufts of dust. With Schor, Arendt and Beauvoir, the article argues that love of detail is a critical component not only of paranoid indictments of the world, but also of any project that desires to repair the world in the wake of paranoia. (shrink)

This paper offers a reading of Beauvoir’s Second Sex as a genealogy of ‘morality’: the patriarchal system of values that maintains a moral distinction between men and women. This value system construes many of women’s experiences under oppression as evidence of women’s immorality, obscuring the agential role of those who provoke such experiences. Beauvoir’s examination of the origin for this value system provides an important counterexample to the prevailing debate over whether genealogical method functions to debunk or to vindicate: while (...) the currently dominant moral system may have been historically necessary at certain stages in human development, Beauvoir nevertheless debunks it; only the value system itself now remains, without its precipitating needs. Thus, Beauvoir’s critique reveals what I call the moral unintelligibility of women’s experiences of oppression: women encounter difficulty in making sense of the harms wrought against them because the operative value system obscures them as harms in the first place, instead construing women themselves as immoral. Against the prevailing construction of moral blame and responsibility, Beauvoir’s solution is the political virtue of moral invention, a virtue epistemic as well as moral, collective as well as individual. (shrink)

In this re-reading of The Second Sex, the author argues that Beauvoir transgressively employs Sartre’s universal binary categories of Being and Nothingnessin her effort to account for the economic, political, cultural and psychological conditions of women’s situation. In doing so, she challenges Sartre’s theory of radical ontological freedom and concretizes his abstract philosophic voice, thereby avoiding their rationalist and voluntarist implications. Contesting Beauvoir’s feminist critics, who saw her as emotionally and philosophically dependent on Sartre and her work as an amalgam (...) of Sartrean existentialism and feminist insights, the author maintains that Beauvoir had her own independent project – to transform Sartrean existentialism to make it contextually sensitive. Distancing herself from Sartre’s theory of freedom and its valorization of masculine experience and disembodied consciousnesses, Beauvoir’s theory of situational freedom and embodied subjectivity draws her closer to the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

David Hume and Simone de Beauvoir agree that human beings have a great deal of control over their moral and political lives, which is well captured in Hume's assertion that "mankind is an inventive species". But Hume argues that the most important thing needed to settle our social lives and determine justice is the agreement on rules of property, while Beauvoir thinks that the rules of property will never be enough to establish the best life, but rather that we should (...) be focusing on freedom. In this article we reconstruct Hume's argument for property, then develop a Beauvoirian critique of Hume that brings out the weakness of any theory of property that does not prevent inequalities of property from interfering with freedom. And then we give the last word to a Humean response to Beauvoir that would insist that there can be no freedom but only violence without rules of property, which she ignores. Both thinkers appeal to humanity as an overriding goal, and perhaps that is the way to reconcile the two: we need both property and freedom to achieve our humanity. (shrink)

The thesis examines the theoretical relationship between law and ethics. Its methodology is informed by both the existentialist tradition of ethical phenomenology and the natural law tradition in legal theory. The main claim of the thesis is that a phenomenological analysis of ethical experience, as suggested by the writings of existentialist authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas, provides important support for the natural law tradition. This claim is developed and defended through detailed engagement with the natural law theory (...) of John Finnis. Specifically, I contend that Finnis’ account of moral reasoning as applying the principles of practical reasonableness to a context of self-evident, basic values gains significant support from a phenomenological theory of ethical experience. Finnis’ emphasis on the irreducible role of choice in moral deliberation also finds support in the existentialist tradition. However, I criticise some key aspects of Finnis’ theory, including his emphasis on the transcendental character of the basic values and his account of legal obligation. I begin by outlining some central features of the existentialist approach to philosophy. I advance an interpretation of existentialism as ethical phenomenology. I then discuss some possible methodological connections between the existentialist and natural law traditions. This discussion provides the methodological framework for the remainder of the thesis. The thesis develops and defends a substantially original theory of the relationships between law, ethics and politics. The exposition begins with an account of the relationship between law and community that draws upon the work of Finnis and G. W. F. Hegel. I then outline a phenomenological theory of ethical experience, drawing in particular on the writings of Sartre and Levinas. I employ this phenomenological account of ethics to develop a conception of moral reasoning as reflective, good faith engagement with pre-reflective social judgements of ethical significance. This view of ethical experience and moral reasoning is then used as the basis for an examination of the concept of law and its relationship to political discourse. I turn next to the notions of legal authority and obligation. I argue that law, in the focal sense of the term, presents a generic, peremptory obligation that is necessarily moral in character. In the course of the argument, I critically discuss the conceptions of legal authority proposed by Joseph Raz, Adolf Reinach, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Finnis, Jacques Derrida and Hans Kelsen. This view of legal obligation entails there are fundamental moral conditions that positive rules must satisfy to qualify as law, in the focal sense. I explore the nature of the moral framework created by these conditions through a detailed analysis of the ethical foundations of political discourse. I argue that political discourse is founded upon an ontological apprehension of the nature of humans as free, ethical beings, which finds expression in a developed notion of political freedom. I suggest that the distinction between positive and negative forms of freedom advanced by Isaiah Berlin is best understood in terms of the different types of political claims invoked by those conceptions. I develop this theory by reference to the work of Charles Taylor, Gerald C. MacCallum, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, W. D. Ross, Robert Nozick and F. A. Hayek. I conclude by discussing the role of ethical experience in the interpretation of legal materials. I argue that ethical judgements play an irreducible role in constructing the natural interpretive context for judicial reasoning. I engage with the work of Hart, Lon L. Fuller, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ferdinand de Saussure and Ronald Dworkin, among others. In the final substantive chapter of the thesis, the potential for ethical judgements to play a constructive role in judicial action is illustrated through a detailed discussion of the doctrine of government neutrality. (shrink)

Beauvoir's distinction between romantic and authentic love offers us an opportunity for thinking through the complex refotions among phihsophy, reading, and love. If we accept her account of romantic love as a flawed, dependent mode of being, and her suggestion that an authentic love—one that engages maturely with the other—is possible, then we might take the risk of thinking of reading in these terms.

A large number of feminist philosophers and social critics accept that Simone de Beauvoir's conception of transcendence in The Second Sex relies on masculinist ontology. In contrast with feminist interpretations that see Beauvoir claiming the success of masculinist ontology, this article argues that transcendence as masculinist ontology does not succeed in The Second Sex because it requires a relation of domination, something contrary to its own definition of freedom-producing relations. The Second Sex obliquely reveals this failure, but Beauvoir does not (...) ruminate upon it. Instead, Beauvoir turns to imagine freedom-producing gender relations in the future where the body and consciousness are already emancipated from constitutive domination. This is a future that resonates with G. W. F. Hegel's `Stoic Consciousness'. The significance of this finding is that the location of freedom neither resides in the intertwinement of the male body and consciousness previously argued to be the case, for Beauvoir, nor does it reside in the intertwinement of the female body and consciousness. Rather, freedom resides in the intertwinement of male and female bodies and consciousness where domination is already absent, that is, a place outside of history. Thus, the conclusion of The Second Sex can be read as a consolation and an escape from the inescapable limits of the present. (shrink)

Referencing ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ is to reference a stage in the history of feminist philosophy; when one cites the name ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, as the signature of The Second Sex, one is also citing...