Existential Courage: De Beauvoir

[00:00:00]Hello, my friend.

[00:00:02]Here is existential courage.

[00:00:06]Simone de Beauvoir Now, Simone de Beauvoir brings a new edge to existential courage.

[00:00:20]Although she doesn't really actively speak about existential courage, she speaks about an ethics of responsibility.

[00:00:33]And you will see that that's pretty much the same thing as existential courage.

[00:00:42]In the important texts she wrote, particularly the ethics of ambiguity and the second sex, she argues that freedom is meaningless unless it is actively used to liberate yourself and other people.

[00:01:11]So, existential courage is the willingness to inhabit a world that is radically ambiguous.

[00:01:23]To embrace that radical ambiguity of the human condition without giving in to the desire to flee into false security.

[00:01:41]It's the stamina, my friend, to build up a world, to build yourself up in that world as an active subject.

[00:01:54]A subject who does not flee from truth and reality.

[00:02:02]Now, this is particularly clear in her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, which I recommend, because there she outlines the core tension of human life.

[00:02:16]The fact that we are simultaneously always at the same time sovereign subjects, i.e. we are free minds who can think and do, to some extent, what we choose.

[00:02:37]We are also passive objects, so we are sovereign subjects, as well as passive objects, because we are finite bodies subjected to nature, to society, to time, to death, you know, the usual things.

[00:02:58]And most people lack the courage to tolerate this absolute ambiguity, which is maddening and very difficult to handle.

[00:03:12]So, most people attempt to escape it by fleeing into what de Beauvoir calls the ready-made, which is the ready-made of things like a political party, a religion, a social script, a movement, to avoid the anxiety to create your own path.

[00:03:39]She describes various archetypes, various ways of not being courageous.

[00:03:48]So, there is the sub-man, the subhuman, if you like, who is paralyzed by anxiety, refusing to choose at all.

[00:04:06]The subman turns him or herself into a passive brick in the wall, becoming merged with the crowd.

[00:04:20]Heidegger's day again.

[00:04:23]Kierkegaard's crowd, Nietzsche's herd.

[00:04:27]They all agree on that.

[00:04:30]There's also the serious man for de Beauvoir.

[00:04:35]The serious man is a person who loses their freedom, or rather purloins their freedom, gives it away by worshipping an external cause, like a nation or money or an ideology.

[00:04:54]Worshipping it as an absolute truth that they become fanatical puppets in the pursuit of.

[00:05:06]And thirdly, there is the nihilist. Now, the nihilist we all know is a person who is frustrated at not being able to grasp the meaning of life straight away, and therefore decide there isn't one, and that nothing matters, and who is so convinced of the truth of this, instead of continuing to search and research what is the case, that they decide they decide that nothing is worth having, and so they actively begin to try to destroy the world, or even destroy themselves.

[00:05:50]Now, the act of courage for de Beauvoir is to find authentic ways of rejecting falling for any of these roles. It is to be brave enough to look in the mirror and to accept that life is not giving you a blueprint to live by, but that nevertheless you can, although you are ambiguous, you can embrace that ambiguity.

[00:06:28]And you can choose to create yourself and to create a world worth having.

[00:06:37]That is the courage to not fall into the trap of not knowing and therefore becoming dismissive, but rather to accept that there is this tension and that we cannot get rid of that tension and that despite that tension, or perhaps because of that tension, the onus is on us, you and I, to make something of it. So, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir applies this framework to the oppression of women. And she shows how women are not born, but rather become a woman. They become a woman by either buying into the narratives that exist, or by reclaiming their capacity to positing themselves as a woman in new ways, in creative ways, in brave ways, in courageous ways.

[00:07:44]She says that historically speaking, men have always positioned themselves as being the absolute subject.

[00:07:56]The essential subject.

[00:07:59]Whilst defining the woman as his other.

[00:08:04]As his inessential object.

[00:08:08]And it is this trap that women have also fallen into and have accepted.

[00:08:15]Because it makes life so much easier.

[00:08:20]There is a temptation of complicity with man being the subjects.

[00:08:26]Because when you are defined as the other, it is seductively easy to give up the heavy burden of courage. The heavy burden of daring to stand in anxiety and not knowing yet.

[00:08:48]The anxiety of taking personal responsibility and figuring things out. Of earning your keep. Of starting anew. Of being yourself rather than being dictated to or following in somebody's footsteps.

[00:09:07]If society tells you that your only job is to just be somebody's other. To be beautiful, passive, and compliant.

[00:09:18]Then you can give up having to be courageous and having to be creative in becoming what you're capable of being.

[00:09:29]So, the act of courage then is for the marginalized person.

[00:09:37]Which is often the person like the woman who has accepted to be in the margin or to be trodden on to come out of that margin and to have the bravery to shatter your own role as being a passive object claiming your own capacity for transcendence for overcoming for projecting yourself into a new future my friend and to demand to be recognized as a sovereign self-defining subject end of So if you have been in a slavery position or in a minority position or in a submissive position whether you're man or woman whatever culture you're from the time has come to see that becoming a self-defining subject doesn't mean becoming an oppressor it doesn't mean to fight it means rather to step into the ambiguity and to be aware that you can be either a sovereign subject or a willing object that both those possibilities are always there no matter who you are and that it takes a great deal of affirmation and courage for you to get out of the knot of that and to demand the freedom and to accept the ambiguity of life and to work with the ambiguity of life but you can't do that on your own because if you are in a room full of enslaved or oppressed people and you're free, you aren't free at all.

[00:11:41]You need to become capable of being with other liberated people because together we can then embrace the ambiguity and work with it and reinvent the world.

[00:11:59]So, courage is essentially for de Beauvoir an ethical commitment to liberation, not just of your personal self, but of the group you belong to, of the whole of humanity, if you like.

[00:12:19]It is about having the stamina to get on that path to dismantle structural oppression and to stand for freedom and the strength to hold the ambiguity knowing that you have to co-create the future rather than doing it all on your own.

[00:12:49]It's something we do together.

[00:12:52]It's an active, generous, and courageous political daily practice to become courageous.

[00:13:04]It is to face the way the world has become asymmetric and to get rid of the illusions of your own privilege or your passivity, even though that privilege may be to be a minority and to have given up on yourself or to be idle or to say or to be a nihilist or to be a fanatic.

[00:13:36]All of that is self-indulgent privilege, de Beauvoir shows. And what you have to do instead is throw yourself into the collective struggle to make human freedom possible by accepting the temptation of your complicity with a comfortable, secure illusion that keeps things as they are and to become true once more to how life actually is, which is an ongoing struggle between these polarities of subject and object, and to embrace that struggle without fear or favor.

[00:14:33]Good courage, my friend.

[00:14:36]Take care with that process.