Category: French Literature

Camus’s The Plague on Evil and Human Decency

Every classic is supposedly timeless; The Plague is one of those books that are fortunate enough to have the world remind us of their timeliness every so often. I did not return to it during the Covid years, but I have returned to it now, at a time when occupation and diffuse evils are once again relevant to our own lives – or at least to those whom we may feel are close to us. Camus began the novel in 1941 and saw it published in 1947, at a time when the French and the rest of liberated Europe wanted to understand how to perceive themselves. There were some who were undeniably heroic freedom fighters, and Camus was one of them, while on the other side of the spectrum were those who had collaborated with the occupants willingly. Besides these two groups, however, there was a great mass of people who were neither willing collaborators nor resistors and wanted to know what to think.

To these questions, Camus brings his philosopher’s eye, which makes The Plague an intellectually stimulating work, if not necessarily an emotionally stimulating one. My interest in it comes from its treatment of the ideas of decency and responsibility, which are explored through the character of Tarrou in particular.

The novel’s story is fundamentally simple. In the port of Oran in Algeria, a plague breaks out. The population are quarantined and endeavours to live within those conditions as best it can. Some men (and all the characters are men), for varying reasons, fight the plague and help its victims. Others do not. After some time, the plague leaves the town and things return to normal. The Plague is a curious work because we are used to having antagonists, villains, and a corresponding neat and clearly signposted moral taxonomy. Here the enemy is a plague, thoughtless and inscrutable. And just as there are no villains, Camus’s story does not give us much by way of heroes either.

We do have Dr Rieux, handsome and hardworking. He is “a man weary of the world in which he lived, yet who still had some feeling for his fellow men and was determined for his part to reject any injustice and any compromise.” His first action is to refuse to provide a report to a visiting journalist, Rambert, about the state of the healthcare in the region, on the grounds that he cannot tell the full truth. His philosophy is simple: “we must help one another.” It carries him through the book in spite of the challenges that the plague places upon him.

As a doctor, Rieux is at the forefront of the efforts to defeat the plague, tending to its victims, lancing boils and administering painful injections. But there are other people who join him in helping stem its tide. Joseph Grand, a civil servant, helps out with the more administrative side of things. The narrator considers him a hero, even while describing him as “insignificant and self-effacing”, with “nothing to recommend him but a little goodness in his heart.” There is also another man, Tarrou, who is in Oran attempting to work out his life philosophically and who comes to fight the plague as a result of the conclusions he reaches from his questionings through creating bands of volunteers.

The journalist, Rambert, is not from Oran. He is a visitor from Paris, and when the town is quarantined, he attempts to flee it to return to his partner across the seas. Various attempts to smuggle himself out go awry, but when one scheme finally works, he abandons it at the last moment and decides to commit himself to helping the sick. His change of heart, as he tells it to Rieux, comes down to a sudden sense of guilt at the thought of pleasure while others suffer: “there may be shame in being happy all by oneself.” Where once he had protested that the fate of the town is of no connection to him, as an outsider there, he comes to realise that by being there he is already a part of the whole, and thus must bear his share of responsibility for its wellbeing.

All of these characters and plenty of others who do not even receive a name act to resist the plague. They are not doing their job, as Rieux is, but doing something they are not obliged to do. The doctor, however, denies that it is a matter of heroism. Instead, the word that sums up the feeling of these men is “decency”. “The only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Why decency? For one, because the book is quite equivocal about whether any of the efforts to fight the plague, from the doctors’ serums to the efforts of the assistants, actually work. As Rieux at one point quips, “the burial is the same, but we keep a card index. No one can deny we have made progress.” It is not heroism if your efforts are for nought, after all, save the impression they produce.

The second reason for “decency” is that in times of quarantine and occupation, we humans grow lax. We need not consult Camus’ novel to know this, merely our recent memories. I do not refer to wearing tracksuits to work, or even a general sloppiness of manner, which are small sins, if they are sins at all. Rather, in a time of stress, we change as people. Our awareness of others decreases. We become selfish, callous, and cold. There is something lost in us which may provide temporary strength, just as Rieux discovers his growing hardness allows him to see “men dying who were made for life” without losing heart, but when we allow this feeling of humanity to be absent from us for too long, the crevice in our souls that houses it seals up. And at that point, it cannot easily return.  

The characters of The Plague are not philosophers, in the sense that few of them are animated by a clear world view. They are just people who do not want to lose themselves in petty compromises and mindlessness. Their variety – from the civil servant, Grand, to the priest Paneloux – speaks to the truth that everyone is capable of action in the face of evil. There are no effective excuses, whatever people actually do. As long as we have a common enemy – death – then we should find common ground with every decent human being on earth in the struggle against it.

Of all the characters, the most interesting is Jean Tarrou. He, like Rambert, is not of Oran, but immediately joins forces with Rieux against the disease, and the volunteer medical squads are in fact his suggestion. The most philosophical of the characters, early on he tells Rieux that his aim is “to find inner peace”, but it is only towards the novel’s end that we get close to him. Only then does he recount the story of his philosophical awakening. As a young man, he once accompanied his father, a prosecuting counsel, to the law courts. Here, rather than being in awe, Tarrou found himself identifying with the accused man instead. He realises that the people in the courtroom “wanted to kill this living man” and that such a thing was completely impossible for him to support in any way. He soon leaves home and begins the wanderings that eventually bring him to Oran.

Did the people in the courtroom really desire the accused man’s death? This is unlikely. But what is true is that when you find yourself becoming a representative of a thing or an idea you start to embody it yourself. This process is almost impossible to perceive objectively, but it is fatal. Because the process of becoming a thing takes away the responsibility – indeed, obligation – to know what one does and the consequences of what one does. For if there is an enemy in The Plague, it is the ignorance as much as the plague itself. St Bernard of Clairvaux once wrote that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In The Plague, it is those good intentions unmatched by the knowledge that are fatal.

This is what Camus’ novel has to say about this:

“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer’s soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”

In Tarrou, we have a character who is not blind. He has broken through the thick crust that conceals from us the true moral nature of things. That nature is that people die and we, through our actions and inactions, are more responsible for this than we would wish. “I learned that I had indirectly supported the deaths of thousands of men, that I had even caused their deaths by approving the actions and principles that inevitably led to them.” We can read Tarrou’s understanding of “actions and principles” according to our own beliefs. One may think of the slogan that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, or that by supporting a government that wages war, however, it may seem moral, we are complicit in the deaths of those innocents who inevitably die as the war is waged.

Awareness is isolation. Of other people, he notes: “I was with them, yet I was alone.” I feel the truth that Tarrou describes, this incredible complicity of breathing, of being alive in an unjust world. But this is not a general view. Upon confessing this feeling to another I have rarely found a sympathetic ear. As a rule, we do not want responsibility, we do not want to see. There is no joy in that, and certainly no peace. But the problem is that once we see, we cannot unsee without an avalanche of guilt. The knowledge of complicity forces one into a terrible decision – either to knowingly do bad or to endeavour as much as possible to do good. If we choose, even once, to do bad, then something happens to us, morally speaking. We surrender our obligations, we give ourselves up to the systems whose evil we acknowledge, and in doing so become destroyed:

“I decided that if one gave way once, there was no reason to stop. It seems that history has shown that I was right; nowadays it’s a free-for-all in killing. They are all carried away by a fury of killing and cannot do otherwise.”

Here, in Tarrou’s speech, we return at last to the plague itself. But not the bacillus that kills our lungs and covers us in boils. Instead, the plague that Tarrou sees is the potential lying dormant in all of us for surrendering to the evil actions we are forced by life to make: “we cannot make a gesture in this world without taking the risk of bringing death.” If we try to blind ourselves to this knowledge, once it is known, we spread the plague, we spread a moral contagion far worse than the disease that strikes Oran: “I know that we must constantly keep a watch on ourselves to avoid being distracted for a moment and find ourselves breathing in another person’s face and infecting him.” Goodness, then, is a combination of watchfulness and good action.

This is the simple conclusion that Tarrou reaches: “All I say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims – and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence. This may seem rather simple to you, and I don’t know if it is simple, but I do know that it is true.” And so, he fights the disease, he fights cowardice, he fights death. And he attains, so far as is possible, the “hope of peace.”

The messages of The Plague are simple, though that does not make them untrue. We must be decent. We must do good. We must be aware of the consequences and complicities of our actions, and we must do what we can to avoid bringing evil and death into the world.

The challenge with such ideas is bringing them into our own lives. The weight of the knowledge of the evils of life is even greater than it was in Camus’ day. One cannot buy a piece of fruit without thinking of the distance it has travelled and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with it, emissions causing suffering by increased drought or wildfires. One cannot buy some chocolate without considering the palm oil it contains and the land use change and deforestation almost inevitably entailed thereby, no matter what the suppliers say. One cannot eat a fish without considering the depletion of the ocean’s stocks through wasteful trawling practices. There are other issues you may or may not acknowledge depending on your preferences, such as systematic racism and things connected to LGBTQ+ rights and so on. Even one who styles themself a “conservative” still has plenty to consider themselves responsible for within this scheme.

To acknowledge these things rather than hiding from them is one thing; to act upon them is yet another challenge on top of that. And then there is this question of decency. The poet, W.H. Auden, writing the 1930s, wrote that “we must love one another or die,” which is a good place to begin. But how do we assess decency? We come back to a moral scheme that is reliant upon our consciences, like that of Tolstoy after his religious crisis, with all the issues that entails. It is impossible to determine what is decent, and if we have a perfectionist bent in our moral judgements, we are likely to find ourselves forever lacking. I wrote a little about this in my piece on Peter Singer and Turgenev.

I have to ask myself whether I myself am decent. Last week I was interviewed by a local news channel about the initiative to help Ukrainian child refugees that my girlfriend and I created. We found that there was very little support being given to the refugees at English schools and filling that gap by providing extra lessons online seemed the moral thing to do, especially since we had experience teaching and could speak the children’s language and thus help those most in need. We even had several volunteer teachers working with us at first, but one by one they dropped off, citing the busyness of their own lives, while my girlfriend and I carry on as best we can, though we ourselves do not lead empty lives either.

I give several hours each week to do a little with various groups and individuals, but it is easy to feel like I am not doing enough. At times, it feels like I am just doing the bare minimum to make my soul sit at ease. It is certainly not a heroic thing we’ve done, just a decent thing. But it does feel at times that there are lots of people who are not entirely interested in doing even that. And that, it seems to me, as it does to Tarrou, is hard to stomach. It is terribly isolating too.  

This question of decency has become particularly relevant in my own life for other reasons as well. What I have in mind is my relationship with my remaining Russian acquaintances. When your country, or rather its armed forces and its civil and military leadership, is committing or ordering things so awful that I find myself resorting to the language of sin and evil just to begin to describe them, the bar for decency seems to be set a bit higher than it is here in the UK, itself not a spotless country by any means. A few times I have been made angry by the lightness with which a few of them live as if the decent thing to do is to suffer. Which it is not. The decent thing is to act, with knowledge, against evil. Suffering alone never ends evil.

One family that I am close to sheltered a family fleeing Mariupol on their way out to Europe. One friend, now in Canada, helps refugees enter that country and settle there. Another, now in Israel, works with an American lawyer to help those fleeing with the immigration process, including persecuted individuals from Russia itself. But many have just emigrated, and how many others still sit in silence in Russia itself, in fear, alone. Is it decent to leave Russia, rather than resist it from within? Or is leaving alone insufficient – does it need to be matched with action taken once one is in exile? These and other questions need to be asked, but more by individuals of themselves, than by us of them. It seems to me a certain truth that there is enough to be known and done by ourselves for us not to gain much, if anything, from attacking others for their moral failings.

In my reading on the question of guilt, my favourite view is that of Karl Jaspers, which I have written about here. But what Camus suggests in The Plague is another important contribution to our considerations of responsibility because it establishes a kind of baseline for our actions through this idea of decency, and through having a clear enemy in the form of all that which dehumanises and destroys the individual. As a novel, I actually found The Plague a little too cold and clinical, and somewhat too formulaic and structured in its approach. But never mind. The novel is sustained by its curious lack of an obvious enemy, and by its philosophical passion. Whether these ideas are too simple, as Tarrou suggests, is not altogether important. As he himself notes, all that matters is that they are true. It seems to me that they are.

A Sense of Unreality: Flaubert’s Sentimental Education

The sense of dislocation, the feeling of some thin film separating oneself from the real world out in front of us – there is perhaps no more modern feeling than this. One of the many ideas that Flaubert engages with in his Sentimental Education is this one. The novel is a Bildungsroman in the sense that it describes a young man’s education, but an unusual one. This is because Frédéric Moreau’s education is one of disillusionment – in love, in life, in himself. And partly this disillusionment is delivered through the idea that between him and the world he experiences there is something that prevents him from immersing himself in the latter properly.

Flaubert’s novel is strange. At nearly five hundred pages in my edition, it is much longer than his earlier Madame Bovary, and much more diffuse. There are a huge number of characters, many of whose names and identities end up melting into each other (Deslauriers, Dambreuse, Dussardier). The plot, combining the politics of mid-century Paris with Frédéric’s love for several older women, is occasionally hard to follow. Nor is the book sustained by Frédéric himself, who is an idiot at best and a selfish ass at worst. Instead, it is sustained by a feeling of reality itself – of Paris and Parisians, politics, and passion – which strains against the novel’s boundaries.

Flaubert wrote that he was “obliged to push into the background the things which are precisely the most interesting”, due to the sheer complexity of the world he was conjuring up. But in fact, this is misleading, for the sheer complexity of the world is already an argument about how we engage with it. As characters and events speed past, and facts and figures (who has what money, what business, and so on), we find it increasingly hard to hold anything in our head. Everything is changeable, people are always coming and going, so why attempt to stop things? We “go with the flow”, which prevents us from engaging more deeply with things. Perhaps the most prominent symbol in the book related to this is the stock market. The stock market is not a place, it is an idea – fortunes can be won or lost at random and with the speed of the roulette wheel. When Frédéric loses money and gains it so quickly, so effortlessly, there’s a sense of unreality about it. The use of money and complexity distances us from the world – they suggest it’s not worth trying to understand.

This might be termed a bourgeois sensibility, and it lies at the heart of the book. But an older, Romantic, view is little better. At the novel’s beginning Frédéric is a student, sentimental and silly – when he sees Madame Arnoux, who is destined to be the central love of his life, his first thought is that “she looked like the women you read about in romantic novels”. Rather than see the woman for who she is, Frédéric immediately lays down an idea of her that covers her up. A Romantic sensibility, looking eternally for symbols, gets in the way of real things just as much as does the bourgeois sensibility above. Frédéric has read too much, thought too much – he cannot engage. When he faces the violence of the revolutionary years following 1848, he “felt as if he were watching a play”.

Frédéric is a spectator. He is a spectator on life, and in life. Politics barely engages him. Its role initially is slightly absurd – a bit of a scuffle on the streets gets in the way of Frédéric’s illicit liaisons. Later, he is supposed to stand for election, but never gets around to it. His personal fortune allows him never to have to do anything, and so he does nothing. Nothing other than chasing women around Paris, that is. He toys with various artistic ideas that go nowhere. From something of a naïve child at the novel’s beginning by the end he is an experienced womaniser, whose exploits, however uncomfortable they make us, nonetheless reflect great talents – if that is the word we would like to use.

Flaubert’s structural ingenuity also detaches us, and Frédéric, from the world. His story is one of comparisons. We visit bourgeois parties and decadent artistic ones. While etiquette means that these must be different, we realise that there is just as much moral decay and licentiousness in the former as in the latter. The social rules that govern society seem like a poor cover for people’s fundamental similarity. Even the characters, such as Frédéric, seem to float between both types of engagement without rhyme or reason.

Of course, parties are important for another reason. Or rather, they are unimportant. We may recall from the history books the importance of banqueting clubs for fomenting revolutionary feelings, but ultimately having dinner is the opposite of actually acting. People spend the novel talking, walking, but never doing. Frédéric, as mentioned, never really gets a job. The revolution passes people by, providing a reason for sleepless nights and arguments at dinner, but never anything more. Flaubert shows an age of inaction, in comparison to the regular reference point – the Revolution of 1789. Everyone disagrees with the means used, but at least Robespierre and pals did things. The comparison makes the revolution of 1848 seem more like a spectacle than a real event.

Just as the scenes that Flaubert chooses to depict reflect a world where people are not engaged, so too does the superabundance of characters. If there are a great many characters, none of them can plant themselves in our minds as particularly real. Nobody can be a hero, or even remotely heroic, when the spotlight is only ever placed on them for a few minutes at a time. A major character gets ill on one page and dies on the next. At the funeral people forget to show any real sympathy at all.

The novel also, naturally enough, says an awful lot about social structures. I mentioned the stock market earlier, with its random twists and turns. Frédéric’s life, despite the most unbelievably stupidity on his part, never seems to go wrong. The banker, Monsieur Dambreuse, has the most extraordinary tolerance for his young acquaintance’s idiocy, whether it be being seen in public with a woman of ill repute or refusing to turn up to meetings. Although Dambreuse is determined to see that Frédéric succeeds, whether financially or politically, and always helps his protégé when he has trouble, Frédéric tends to blatantly ignore his own friends’ pleas for help. Fate itself seems to be saying to the young aristocrat that the world was made for him, that he needs not to worry. A hint of the self-entitlement I know all too well in myself and my old schoolfriends is ever present in the background. And if we are entitled to the world, we never need to engage with it. Like men standing before a tree with ripe fruits, we know that we need not bother ourselves to pick them – they will fall of their own accord.

The book ends with two extraordinary chapters of complete brutality. Frédéric, the great womaniser, finds himself defeated and alone. And Flaubert skips into the future with wonderfully dead language:

“He travelled the world.

He tasted the melancholy of packet ships, the chill of waking under canvas, the boredom of landscapes and monuments, the bitterness of broken friendship.

He returned home.

He went into society, and he had affairs with other women. They were insipid beside the endless memory of his first love. And then the vehemence of desire, the keen edge of sensation itself, had left him. His intellectual ambitions were fading too. The years went by; and he resigned himself to the stagnation of his mind and the apathy that lived in his heart.”

Frédéric learns that he has done something to himself, something horrible, over the course of the novel. He has destroyed his connection with reality, and now he cannot rebuild it. Life is dead, and Frédéric has killed it. Whereas in Russian literature a figure like Pechorin (in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time) comes to us already broken, Flaubert writes the creation of the superfluous man. For that, it is a more terrible read in many ways. When Madame Arnoux, the first love, discovers him again after all these years, we feel an apprehensive shudder. And so we should:

“The lamp, standing on a console table, lit up her white hair. It was like a blow full in the chest”.

Frédéric, even now, cannot face the world. The woman who loves him now needs to be replaced by the image of the woman whom once he loved. And reality itself is left all the poorer for it. Perhaps the most beautiful line in the book comes here: “In every parting there comes a moment when the beloved is already no longer with us.” When we try to picture this sentence, we see the problem I have been trying to describe – two people, and then behind them their spirits, already floating away in different directions. There is no connection, either to each other, or the earth itself.

Flaubert’s story is one of decline, of failure. Like John Williams’ Stoner, which I reread recently, it presents a life where things do not quite go to plan. Or rather, where there is a certain mundane okay-ness about how they turn out. Flaubert does not suggest what the reason might be. When Frédéric and his friend Deslauriers meet again in the very final chapter, they both acknowledge that their respective dreams of love and power have come to nothing. But in considering the reasons, both come up short. Deslauriers says “I was too logical, and you were too sentimental”. We may agree or disagree with this, depending on what we have taken away from the rest of the book. But there is nothing didactic about it. For a novel which has “education” in its title, it doesn’t want to teach. It shows us two bad paths, but no examples of what a “right” path might be.

I venture to suggest that Frédéric’s failure stems partly from a world where a direct connection with things is impossible. This is a sufficiently “weak” concluding argument, in that we can make any suggestion we want for what success would look like or for how Frédéric could reconnect with his surroundings. Manual labour, artistic pursuits, a real love? Take your pick. Whatever we decide, it makes sense to establish the nature of the problem. A sense of dislocation from the world is a feeling that we moderns can never escape – Flaubert’s enduring dramatization of it can teach us how to see it, even if it can’t teach us how to escape it. That is only one of many reasons for reading this amazing work.  

Why Live Existentially? Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity

I appreciate that most people are not much interested in philosophy. I myself am not particularly interested in questions about metaphysics or the meaning and origin of knowledge, even though plenty of thinkers believe that without understanding these things we cannot even begin to approach those questions which I do find interesting. Those questions are simple – what is a good life, what must we do, where does our meaning come from, and is it to be found at all? Existentialism appeals because it deals with questions relating to our existence, rather than that which may lie beyond it or beneath it. Its focus is on the concrete, the practical, the real and the possible. For that reason it has appealed to many artists and people who are engaged in the business of being alive.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity is an essay, or rather series of essays, that aims to introduce existentialism to the common reader. I cannot compare it with Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism, which was also written in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War and has a similar goal, because I have not read that work yet. However, I have heard many suggestions that de Beauvoir’s piece is a better introduction than her partner’s is to the existentialist project among primary sources. I certainly came away from the book with some understanding of existentialism, at least as de Beauvoir sees it, and this is what I will try to share in the following piece.

The book’s structure is relatively simple. The first essay is a kind of introduction, the second essay explains why people who do not follow existentialism’s tenets are likely to cause trouble in the world, and the final essay explores all the cool things about life under existentialism. Obviously, de Beauvoir’s views are distinct from those of her fellow existentialists like Sartre or Heidegger, so here when I write “existentialism” I mean de Beauvoir’s particular take on it.

Introduction – The World According to Existentialism

Beyond us, there is nothing. There’s neither a higher power nor any other source for our values that cannot be challenged. Existentialism’s world is a world continually in flux, with nothing to hold on to. To say that things are solid, completely solid, whether tradition or morals or whatever, is to lie to oneself and hide from the nature of things. Instead, “it is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting”. In other words, we need to work things out for ourselves without relying on the old certainties of life. For each one of us “it is a matter of knowing whether [we] want to live and under what conditions”. Once we have worked out the answers for ourselves, we must live them. But this is much easier said than done.

Dostoevsky is often considered an early existentialist. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan forcefully and terribly argues that if there is no God, then “everything is permitted”. De Beauvoir equally forcefully disagrees. On the contrary, “far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements.” There is no redemption except that which we give ourselves, and no redeeming grace. Freedom in de Beauvoir’s world is dizzying, and it requires us to assume responsibility for our actions. Her enemies in The Ethics of Ambiguity are those people who, consciously or unconsciously, hide from that responsibility.

We are free to do what we want without being bound by past values, but as stated above that does not mean we are given license to do anything. “To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future”. By freedom de Beauvoir means the opportunity to create our own paths in life and follow them, acting to grow and develop ourselves. Defined in this way, freedom means we should not impede others as they pursue their own paths, because although our projects are personal, our freedom is increased when more people are free around us. A despot can do what he or she wants, but they are less free when their people are not free. This is because we are connected with other people, whether we want it or not: “no project can be defined except by its interference with other projects”. The more projects are successfully being pursued, the more our collective freedom is increased.

This means that we must be individualistic, according to de Beauvoir, but not solipsistic. And the fact that we need others to be free in order to fully realise our own freedom is where the ethical component of The Ethics of Ambiguity comes from. For although there are no absolute and unchallengeable values, anyone who cares for freedom must necessarily desire its increase. (Hey, isn’t freedom an absolute value for de Beauvoir?)

Women and colonised peoples were the main targets of de Beauvoir’s rallying cry. In many cases unaware of their freedom, the women of the mid-20th century lived sad, deprived lives. Likewise, many colonised peoples did not realise they could and should be free. Under existentialism, we have a duty to help them free themselves from oppression, because in their freedom “new possibilities might be opened to the liberated slave and through him to all men”.

What’s so bad about not being an existentialist?

This mumbling about freedom is probably slightly less vague in the original than in my retelling of it, but nevertheless readers may say that they don’t want freedom for the women, or perhaps more reasonably, that they value tradition, order, organisation. De Beauvoir has no love for conservatives, and the second essay of The Ethics of Ambiguity explores why we have an obligation – a responsibility – to be free. Looking at various groups – the “sub-man”, the “serious man”, “nihilist,” “adventurer”, and others, she explains how their lack of freedom is harmful not just to them, but to everyone.

The Sub-Man

The “sub-man” is someone who merely exists. He acts without a plan or unifying idea. “By the incoherence of his plans, by his haphazard whims, or by his indifference, he reduces to nothingness the meaning of his surpassing” – in other words, he destroys his freedom by hiding from it. As a result, he enters a vicious circle: “the less he exists, the less is there reason for him to exist, since these reasons are created only by existing”. Such a man suffers through life, or at best, is indifferent to it. But because he does not grasp his freedom, he is vulnerable to being grasped by others. A sub-man is dangerous because others can control him and use him for evil ends – de Beauvoir might have had in mind the widely-publicised trials of Nazis in the postwar period, and the ambiguous condition of the German people themselves, who had in many cases so blindly followed orders.

The Serious Man

The “serious man” is by contrast someone who does have an idea. He sets himself up with an ideal and allows nothing to challenge it. He betrays his own freedom by ignoring it as soon as he has used it once – in the act of choosing his ideological goal. The serious man “puts nothing into question” and thereby sees the whole world through the prism of utility. Is something useful for his goals, or not? And this means that he comes to devalue everything around him, especially people. De Beauvoir gives as an example the colonial administrators who valued Empire more than they did the lives of the inhabitants of their colonies, with the result that the building of a railroad became infinitely more important to them than any native lives lost in the process. At the same time though, these men are dependent upon their idol. As soon as they lose it, their life is filled with anxiety and despair. One thinks here of certain businessmen or generals whose retirement deprives their lives of their meaning. Because they do not value freedom, but only the governing idea they choose for themselves, their life collapses when that same idea is removed or fails.

The Nihilist

“Nihilism is disappointed seriousness which has turned back upon itself”. A nihilist wishes to believe in the same idols that serious people do, but they can’t, making them revolt against them. Revolt is an important part of The Ethics of Ambiguity, but not as the nihilist does it. Unable to find the seriousness within themselves, they destroy the sources of seriousness – the idols – of others. They end up destroying anything that anyone values, in order to confirm their own view of the world as meaningless. This is a mistake, in de Beauvoir’s view. “The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly”. The nihilist basically forgets to be free; he forgets that beyond the idols there lies something worth valuing – freedom itself.

The Adventurer

Adventurers are fun characters. At first they seem to be perfect existentialists – they focus on action, not on idols or rumination. They also are driven by a swashbuckling enjoyment of life – one thinks of Don Juan. All this is good, but there are a number of issues within the adventurer’s hedonism which de Beauvoir highlights. The first is solipsism – the adventurer does not value freedom for itself, so they do not care about others at all – “the adventurer shares the nihilist’s contempt for men”. Also, adventurers often have secret goals, making them serious, even though they hide it – for example, the pursuit of glory, money, power. The main problem is this lack of respect for freedom, however, because it means that “favourable circumstances are enough to transform the adventurer into a dictator.” And in 1948 nobody was a fan of those.

What’s so good about being an existentialist?

Those were the bad guys, but what I liked about The Ethics of Ambiguity is de Beauvoir’s depiction of the good guys and how existentialism makes life exciting. Of all the ways of being, existentialism is the one, in de Beauvoir’s view, that is most firmly rooted in lived experience. It has its virtues, ones that are unambiguous: “What is called vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence are not ready-made qualities, but a way of casting oneself into the world and of disclosing being”. These are valuable because “the reward for these spontaneous qualities issues from the fact that they make significances and goals appear in the world. They discover reasons for existing”.

To be free is to live in a world of ambiguity, but it is also to live in a world of potential. De Beauvoir quotes Heidegger: man is “infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to being what he is”. In other words, we should never be treated as what we are because we are always capable of growth. The great power of freedom is that it provides a secular redemption to make up for the religious one we lose – we can always change our path, and no moment is too late to change ourselves.

At the same time, we get on with the business of being alive. Our projects build ourselves up – the future, “prolonging my existence of today, will fulfil my present projects and will surpass them toward new ends”. There is no reason to fear death, because it is precisely through death and failure and our limitations that meaning is possible: “a man who would aspire to act upon the totality of the universe would see the meaning of all action vanish”. If we look too far in the future, as de Beauvoir suggests the Marxists do with their utopian dreaming, then all of our action is devalued: “from that formless night we can draw no justification of our acts, it condemns them with the same indifference; wiping out today’s errors and defeats, it will also wipe out its triumphs”.

The future matters to us only insofar as it exists to us – we must live in the moment, and in the potential of the future. To live entirely in the present is to devalue others, while to live too far in the future is to devalue everything. De Beauvoir has a lovely phrase against those who think too far ahead: “an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way”. She wishes our ethics to be concrete, to be focused on specific moments. She does not condemn violence when fighting oppression, but instead asks us each time to consider whether it is what is needed or not. This may seem frustratingly vague, but the point is to make us constantly question ourselves. De Beauvoir’s freedom means we must erect no idols, but instead ask ourselves, again and again, whether what we are doing is right, and how it is contributing towards our goals. We must never say “it is useful”, but rather “it is useful for me, for this goal, now”.  

All this may sound rather challenging. We must choose our projects, we must work constantly upon our growth and the attainment of our goals. Nevertheless, de Beauvoir makes it clear that life needs joy too, for freedom without joy is nothing: “the movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness”. All the gains in the world, and all the development, “have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play. If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way”. As important as it is to worry about freedom and good faith, I’m glad that de Beauvoir remembers that we must have our joy. And indeed, I struggle to see how life would be worth living if we lost our sensitivity to that.

Conclusion

The pursuit of a meaning that “is never fixed, that… must be constantly won”, sounds a reasonable approach to living. It appeals a lot to a 23-year-old who has finally finished university and is now alone in the big world, trying to work out what it is he must do with himself. I cannot critique the philosophy behind de Beauvoir’s suggestions – the first essay has a lot of beings and existences and other such terminology that I struggled to appreciate or fully wrap my head around. Can I critique it as a way of life? Perhaps. If we value happiness more than freedom, we may be dismayed at the unhappiness de Beauvoir’s demands of revolt could potentially cause. To bring consciousness of their oppression to the working classes, to the colonised, to women, is to invite them to become aware of suffering that may sometimes be hidden from them. That they would be happy later is perhaps a not all that important. For that reason, de Beauvoir will convince no conservatives to abandon their values and traditions, and her chaotic ambiguous freedom will never appeal to those who prefer order. It is not clear whether it would necessarily create a better world either.

And yet, for an individual, this philosophy cannot help but be attractive. The consequences for one who is indecisive are great. Existentialism, in de Beauvoir’s mode, is a call to action, to responsibility. That’s cool. I like that. I recently read Sarah Bakewell’s brilliant At the Existentialist Café and one thing I found awesome about it was just how awesome de Beauvoir and Sartre really were. They lived existentialism. Where Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism, however admirable, had him torturing himself with self-doubt, de Beauvoir and Sartre were having fun, having sex, and being free. To have there be congruence between one’s words, thoughts, and actions – there can be no greater thing. And de Beauvoir’s essays are a valuable call to action to that end.

For more from the Paris of the mid-20th-century, read my piece on Boris Vian’s Mood Indigo, also known as Froth on the Daydream.