GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY
Simone de Beauvoir
Writer
Simone
Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French writer,
intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist
and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher,
she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and
feminist theory.
By George Templeton
Rim Country Gazette Columnist
Simone de Beauvoir and a Philosophy of Political Ethics
Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables,
first published in 1862, was proclaimed by Upton Sinclair as "one of
the half-dozen greatest novels of the world". It is about justice and
redemption in the time of the French Revolution. In his novel,
ex-convict Jean Valjean steals the Bishop’s silverware. Caught again,
the police return Jean to confront the Bishop, but he covers for Jean by
explaining that the silverware was a gift and that Jean forgot the
candlesticks. In his example of turning the other cheek, the Bishop
saved Jean’s life for God. He goes forth in a hero’s quest for the
remainder of the novel.
Hugo
saw that civilization makes “social asphyxia” possible. He was
concerned with violence toward women and children. His book explores
the foible of human frailty. Archetypical morality points to the
question confronting us all: What is the meaning of our lives? There
is more than one answer.
The
Misérables template reappears in Claude Lelouch’s beautiful 1995 French
film of the same name. It reveals that which is both deep and simple
in human nature. Set in WWII Nazi occupied France; it was a crime to
protect Jews. It is in times of suffering that meaning crystallizes and
illuminates our Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nature. Human misery remains
with us. We understand personal morality, but political ethics is a
different thing. It’s a funny kind of love that demonizes families
that are trying to escape violent crime and poverty.
Science
does not begin until individual facts lead to an explanatory theory.
Most of us do not directly work with atomic physics, yet it influences
our lives in countless profound ways. In that spirit, we try to reduce
things to their simplest form. We consider the political-moral
philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), who lived in France during
the WWII Nazi occupation.
The Politician
Simone
de Beauvoir defines a politician as a person whose activities come from
principles and objectives. They may be subjective, passing on values,
or motivated by objective business goals. Politicians influence the
future. They are not people who are self-interested or career
oriented. Their values can come from their heart or from the external
situation, but they can’t have politics as their job and be a
politician. A dual role is incommensurable, like mixing oil with water,
and consequently unstable.
There
are those who believe in the power of the collective, but the
collective is cut from the cloth of individuality. We depend on each
other. Man, who would have God’s power, lacks the wisdom to understand
that he can destroy himself. His traditional ethics has been
ineffective in preventing the growth and proliferation of nuclear
weapons.
Our
leaders spend more time raising money than mapping the future. How
many are truly politicians? How many do the right thing regardless of
consequences to themselves. How many actually represent all the people,
instead of money, power, and special interests?
Of
course, it is hard to find an idealist who does not need to worry about
his job, about paying the bills. But we have found those who need not
worry about finances but nevertheless lack morals. For now, we adopt
Beauvoir’s classifications because they are necessary to understand her.
Values or Results
Ambiguous:
“Having two or more possible meanings”. It is inherently human,
feeling, and subjective. Philosophers find its complexity intriguing.
Politicians use it to not answer the asked question.
Politics
has its policies. The moralist believes that there are universal
eternal principles. They are not legal or about punishment and reward.
Moralists want the comfort of a stable foundation. As Beauvoir puts
it, “By uprooting himself from the world, man renders himself present to
the world and renders the world present to him.” Monks sometimes
isolate themselves from the fray, but they cannot remain pure in this
way. They too have to embrace the ambiguity of their existence. They
have to care about demands, needs, and desires that are in conflict.
This requires compromise. It creates a tension between the objective
and the subjective they find themselves within.
Knowing
right from wrong requires no great intellectual acumen, according to
Immanuel Kant, but many people hate rationality. His views, expressed
in his 1785 ethical treatise, were like the Golden Rule, but with the
added condition of universality.
In
the fifties, we used to say that a young man’s car was all show and no
go. Is morality like that? It gets in the way of what needs to be
done. Conscience is only feckless weakness. Morality denies necessary
actions by throwing up a mine-field of obstacles. We stop short of
carrying the cross. The problem for the moralist is that it is
impossible to save everybody and everything. It seems that failure,
horror, and human misery are inescapable.
People
have no problem with the realist. He is concerned with tactics, not
principle, but those who claim that something is impossible contribute
to making it so. Our choices reveal what we really are. There is
always ambiguity. It makes ethics possible. Decisions are partly
constrained. Every situation is different. Our freedom to decide makes
us responsible. To find morality, look there. Failure is intrinsic to
ethics. Without failure there can be no ethics. Could this be the
biblical fall of mankind?
Artificial Morality
Can
computers make ethical decisions for us? The answer is conditioned by
the form of the question. It goes straight to Cartesian mind-body
duality. Man is the only animal that can be both detached from and yet
part of his situation. He would not be “man”, were he other than this.
He is the only animal that can look apart from himself on his
inevitable death instead of only blindly living out his life. But we
are inseparable from our lives. We have to live with our actions and
decisions until we die.
Man
is the world’s consciousness, the observer whose act of observation
determines instead of just finding. Some physicists think that
consciousness is a fundamental property, like the electric and magnetic
fields that make radio possible. It is without question precisely how
nature works, but it cannot be understood why nature works that way.
The question is: Are we subjective participants, objective observers,
or somehow both?
The ambiguity of the Subjective and the Objective
Imagine
that you have to make a school presentation. Your instructor records
it, plays it back, and then asks you and your classmates, as if they
were experts, to critique your work. You would find this somewhat
intimidating, but it is more than just an exercise. It is the life of
all intelligent beings, a life that loses innocence every time it looks
at anything from the outside.
At
first, you become immersed in the subjectivity of the presentation, in
interaction with the audience, in maintaining their attention. This is
your subjectivity. Then you must, with your classmates, become the
objective dispassionate observer. You can repeat the exercise,
switching back and forth, to polish your presentation, but it is
difficult if not impossible to simultaneously be the actor and observer,
to be the subjective and the objective. This is our ambiguity. It is
the field that energizes the meaning of our lives and permits ethical
behavior. Ethics is not a procedure like arithmetic.
Uncertainty and Our Blind Spot
Let’s
reduce ambiguity to uncertainty. Every measurement is uncertain
because it has a precision and accuracy. Science is uncertain because
all its facts are open-ended and subject to improvement, but its
practice requires both participation and observation. It is out of
participation that creativity and understanding grows. They can’t be
forced. We learn by doing.
The
observer follows a fixed set of rules and believes in a rigid dogma.
We are incomplete when we look at only one side of the total situation.
We have a blind spot when we don’t discover that our values and beliefs
are self-referential. There is no universal law establishing them.
If
we roll a pair of dice, we can calculate the probability of any value
that will result simply by counting. Admittedly, statistics are an
abstraction, but we often have to bet our lives. Suppose that one of
the dice has a blank side that we don’t know about. It would not be
included in our counting, so our probability calculation would be
wrong. But suppose we were given information about this. We would
learn from that and the probabilities would change. Information changes
probability. We are part of a world that is bigger than ourselves and
not alone. But suppose the information was a lie? This is why we have
to be concerned with tolerating them. Their effect continues into the
future and the past cannot be undone. It goes far beyond winning in the
particular instance. It leads to a false conclusion. Lies destroy
our mutual consciousness. But regardless, uncertainty always remains.
People will always choose an agreeable fantasy over disagreeable facts.
Ends and Means, a Self-Referential Ambiguity
All
policy involves ends and means because tomorrow never comes. It is
never a static thing. There are intended consequences and actual
results. Beauvoir explains that ends and means form a single totality
because the “end is defined by the means, which receive their meaning
from it”. The ends are like the wish list provided by young children to
Santa Claus. A recent example is a wall across the Mexico border.
What are the means that would be used to create it? It was shutting
down the government and not paying employees. It became a single
totality, but in so doing the goal was no longer the wall. It was about
political winning.
A
classification that unites the ends and means is not helpful. By
combining everything nothing has independent relationship and meaning.
The scientist takes a reductionist view, modeling the desired optimum as
a function of variables that are related to how cause and effect work.
In other words, what really matters? By this view, the wall was
determined by what Congress was willing to fund.
Who
pays? How will you treat blameless individuals, who through no action
of their own find themselves in grave situations? We must try to
understand slightly complicated statements we don’t agree with. It
requires empathy. We cannot be blameless if we keep our conscience pure
without regard to the consequences to others. We are accountable when
we injure others.
Truth and Power
They
are in every utopian scheme. New ideas are fallible, but without them
we lack any vision of future possibility. Lies are not realism, but one
can dream the impossible dream. Lack of evidence is not evidence. The
world is filled with examples of power that takes precedence over
people. Political systems are influenced by the path they take
forward. That is why our Constitution is so important. Everything
springs from it.
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