Ah so that’s Sartre’s existentialism — there is no god so we must make our own meaning. Thus we can either do so authentically by actively choosing, or let the circumstances dictate what we do even if we want something different. In the second case we’re berated as living in “bad faith”.
I seem to go deeper than he did, and in a way that doesn’t ultimately berate anyone but rather attempts to enlighten us about our nature. As I see it meaning or purpose resides as our desire to feel good rather than bad. Apparently evolution implemented this mechanism because under more open circumstances, standard algorithms alone were too cumbersome. So it used this teleological form of function (the desire to feel good rather than bad) as a simplifying mechanism. I’m not exactly referring to utilitarianism because this is not about the supposed rightness to wrongness of behavior (morality), but rather about the goodness to badness of existing (value). Furthermore it seems to me that the evolved social tool of morality has prevented our mental and behavioral sciences in general from formally acknowledging such meaning or purpose, thus mandating their general failure. I’d like to help expose this problem so that these primitive fields might halt their failure, but then I also procrastinate…
Essentially, yes. Notice that philosophy only bothers itself with the supposed right versus wrong behavior by which a person might be judged, though never considers the goodness to badness of existing in itself. Similarly psychologists get themselves tangled up in knots regarding meaning, purpose, and so on, but fail to grasp the possibility that it might all dissolve back to feeling good rather than bad. Why is it so difficult to acknowledge that we’re all self interested products of our circumstances? Perhaps because it’s socially best for us to not disturb the façade. Otherwise we might be penalized by being perceived to only be out for ourselves. Base hedonists! To play this game effectively there’s general incentive to talk about ourselves in altruistic ways. I suspect this is essentially why psychology continues to fail — our moral notions haven’t permit us to formally acknowledge what’s ultimately valuable.
Well, I am glad you chose to write and post this essay, and I'm glad I chose to read it rather than doomscrolling--which I too have been using to procrastinate on doing things I would like to do (also writing an essay!) and things I have to do for work.
A gripe I have with both Sartre and de Beauvoir is their implication that the authentic choice is the one that centers me as an individual, rather than a choice that places me as one person in a broader community of family and friends. So for instance, it's authentic for the miner's son to set off to be a writer but inauthentic for him to choose to stay in the village, marry a local girl, and mine; it's authentic for Simone to choose to be in an open relationship with Jean-Paul, but the girl who marries and has children with the miner from her village must be denying the responsibility of freedom rather than having made her own authentic choice. But humans are social animals, and so my choice to live just for me is as constrained as my choice to live underwater. I can pretend otherwise, but that will be just as effective as trying to will myself into growing gills.
But no matter how constrained our choices actually are by our biological reality, I think one choice we always have is how to respond to those constraints. And I know I've said this before, but I'll say it again: One of the reasons I like you so much, Ragged Clown, is that you choose to respond to the constraints on your choices by reading philosophy and writing essays. And also doomscrolling--but you and I can both work on that.
In my philosophy forum, someone quoted Beauvoir talking about the differences between being married/a mother and other choices a woman might make — although she was neither married nor a mother.
Speaking as someone who, like Simone de Beauvoir, is not a mother and also considers herself a feminist (I am married, though): I note that even Simone de Beauvoir lionizes traditionally masculine choices as the free ones, and tends to dismiss women's traditional choices as evidence of our passivity. Part of de Beauvoir's whole argument is, in my opinion, an ironically sexist framing that if women were really free, they would make choices more like men do, centering their individual selves. For a long time I, too, bought this framing (and that's probably a key reason I never became a mom), accepting the argument that women have so often sacrificed for husbands and children because they were oppressed into doing so. And of course sexist oppression has to do with some of that. But I now realize that another reason why a woman might choose to sacrifice some of her individual interests for family or community is because that is the better choice.
I have more thoughts on choice and feminism that I'll expand on below.
I think I also understood Beauvoir as saying that women were more restricted than men, not as a criticism of women, but as an explanation for why they rarely made those difficult choices. But yes, maybe women make those choices because they are the best choices (I haven't read The Second Sex…).
It’s interesting to think how much women’s lives have changed since Beauvoir wrote her thing (largely because of her!) and that younger women now seem to feel an obligation to get all that career stuff started before they can marry and have children. It’s like they are now constrained in the opposite direction (I am not a woman...). I wonder if there will come a time when women are able to choose more freely.
It’s possible that I haven’t read enough Sartre to get this right but… there’s a famous parable (true story?) where a young man during the Second World War has to choose between joining the Resistance or taking care of his sick mother. Sartre tells him that he has to choose. So, it’s not necessarily true that S & B always want us to make the difficult or unconventional choice — they just want us to choose.
Thank you for your kind words, Doctrix Periwinkle. I have been doom-scrolling a bit too much in recent weeks. I have a list of posts I want to write and I have have been reading a few too many that other people are writing!
That's a cool anecdote--thank you for sharing that. Still, whether the young man chooses to be conventional and stay with his sick mom or defy convention and join the Resistance, these are big, one-time, Hero's Quest sorts of decisions. The Big Decision is what's central, rather than the ongoing decision to, say, do the dishes. (One of the things I like about existentialist Albert Camus, in contrast, is his explicit recognition of doing the dishes as an important choice.)
I think there's an unintentional sexism here, that makes it easy to see the self-sacrificing housewife who doesn't argue and who doesn't fight the system as someone who is isn't making choices at all. But bearing others' burdens uncomplainingly is hard. Doing so day after day, year after year, is harder. This requires a choice that is made to not once, but committed to over and over again. The fact that the choice is made continuously makes it fade into the background, with the Big Decisions in sharp contrast in the front and center--it makes it feel like the day-to-day maintenance tasks of traditional women's work are not a choice. This is a mistake that I think affects both de Beauvoir and Sartre.
Anyway, though, gotta go finish washing up my lunch dishes.
Mrs Clown is a self-sacrificing housewife, but we make all the important decisions together. We've moved around a lot, and this forces us both to reset and start over with each move. For example, we had a beautiful garden in California that she worked really hard on and was very proud of. When we came back to England, she decided she didn't want a garden any more, and started getting little jobs as an 'extra' in movies and TV shows instead. She is still a self-sacrificing housewife, but I wonder if being forced to choose every time we move makes being a wife less "years-of-tedium-and-burden".
I'll ask her after she makes my dinner!
(I missed this comment before. I think Substack has a bug where the notifications are all out of order.)
I very much agree with Freddie that I don't see the point in writing… but then having an LLM generate all the writing for me. I enjoy writing; having someone else do it defeats the object.
I also agree with him that its fun to generate the images. I’m not good enough to draw them myself and I certainly don't have time. I find it fun to generate them.
Ah so that’s Sartre’s existentialism — there is no god so we must make our own meaning. Thus we can either do so authentically by actively choosing, or let the circumstances dictate what we do even if we want something different. In the second case we’re berated as living in “bad faith”.
I seem to go deeper than he did, and in a way that doesn’t ultimately berate anyone but rather attempts to enlighten us about our nature. As I see it meaning or purpose resides as our desire to feel good rather than bad. Apparently evolution implemented this mechanism because under more open circumstances, standard algorithms alone were too cumbersome. So it used this teleological form of function (the desire to feel good rather than bad) as a simplifying mechanism. I’m not exactly referring to utilitarianism because this is not about the supposed rightness to wrongness of behavior (morality), but rather about the goodness to badness of existing (value). Furthermore it seems to me that the evolved social tool of morality has prevented our mental and behavioral sciences in general from formally acknowledging such meaning or purpose, thus mandating their general failure. I’d like to help expose this problem so that these primitive fields might halt their failure, but then I also procrastinate…
So the constraints imposed by social ideas of morality prevent us from finding our own meaning?
Essentially, yes. Notice that philosophy only bothers itself with the supposed right versus wrong behavior by which a person might be judged, though never considers the goodness to badness of existing in itself. Similarly psychologists get themselves tangled up in knots regarding meaning, purpose, and so on, but fail to grasp the possibility that it might all dissolve back to feeling good rather than bad. Why is it so difficult to acknowledge that we’re all self interested products of our circumstances? Perhaps because it’s socially best for us to not disturb the façade. Otherwise we might be penalized by being perceived to only be out for ourselves. Base hedonists! To play this game effectively there’s general incentive to talk about ourselves in altruistic ways. I suspect this is essentially why psychology continues to fail — our moral notions haven’t permit us to formally acknowledge what’s ultimately valuable.
Well, I am glad you chose to write and post this essay, and I'm glad I chose to read it rather than doomscrolling--which I too have been using to procrastinate on doing things I would like to do (also writing an essay!) and things I have to do for work.
A gripe I have with both Sartre and de Beauvoir is their implication that the authentic choice is the one that centers me as an individual, rather than a choice that places me as one person in a broader community of family and friends. So for instance, it's authentic for the miner's son to set off to be a writer but inauthentic for him to choose to stay in the village, marry a local girl, and mine; it's authentic for Simone to choose to be in an open relationship with Jean-Paul, but the girl who marries and has children with the miner from her village must be denying the responsibility of freedom rather than having made her own authentic choice. But humans are social animals, and so my choice to live just for me is as constrained as my choice to live underwater. I can pretend otherwise, but that will be just as effective as trying to will myself into growing gills.
But no matter how constrained our choices actually are by our biological reality, I think one choice we always have is how to respond to those constraints. And I know I've said this before, but I'll say it again: One of the reasons I like you so much, Ragged Clown, is that you choose to respond to the constraints on your choices by reading philosophy and writing essays. And also doomscrolling--but you and I can both work on that.
Although!
In my philosophy forum, someone quoted Beauvoir talking about the differences between being married/a mother and other choices a woman might make — although she was neither married nor a mother.
Speaking as someone who, like Simone de Beauvoir, is not a mother and also considers herself a feminist (I am married, though): I note that even Simone de Beauvoir lionizes traditionally masculine choices as the free ones, and tends to dismiss women's traditional choices as evidence of our passivity. Part of de Beauvoir's whole argument is, in my opinion, an ironically sexist framing that if women were really free, they would make choices more like men do, centering their individual selves. For a long time I, too, bought this framing (and that's probably a key reason I never became a mom), accepting the argument that women have so often sacrificed for husbands and children because they were oppressed into doing so. And of course sexist oppression has to do with some of that. But I now realize that another reason why a woman might choose to sacrifice some of her individual interests for family or community is because that is the better choice.
I have more thoughts on choice and feminism that I'll expand on below.
I think I also understood Beauvoir as saying that women were more restricted than men, not as a criticism of women, but as an explanation for why they rarely made those difficult choices. But yes, maybe women make those choices because they are the best choices (I haven't read The Second Sex…).
It’s interesting to think how much women’s lives have changed since Beauvoir wrote her thing (largely because of her!) and that younger women now seem to feel an obligation to get all that career stuff started before they can marry and have children. It’s like they are now constrained in the opposite direction (I am not a woman...). I wonder if there will come a time when women are able to choose more freely.
It’s possible that I haven’t read enough Sartre to get this right but… there’s a famous parable (true story?) where a young man during the Second World War has to choose between joining the Resistance or taking care of his sick mother. Sartre tells him that he has to choose. So, it’s not necessarily true that S & B always want us to make the difficult or unconventional choice — they just want us to choose.
Thank you for your kind words, Doctrix Periwinkle. I have been doom-scrolling a bit too much in recent weeks. I have a list of posts I want to write and I have have been reading a few too many that other people are writing!
That's a cool anecdote--thank you for sharing that. Still, whether the young man chooses to be conventional and stay with his sick mom or defy convention and join the Resistance, these are big, one-time, Hero's Quest sorts of decisions. The Big Decision is what's central, rather than the ongoing decision to, say, do the dishes. (One of the things I like about existentialist Albert Camus, in contrast, is his explicit recognition of doing the dishes as an important choice.)
I think there's an unintentional sexism here, that makes it easy to see the self-sacrificing housewife who doesn't argue and who doesn't fight the system as someone who is isn't making choices at all. But bearing others' burdens uncomplainingly is hard. Doing so day after day, year after year, is harder. This requires a choice that is made to not once, but committed to over and over again. The fact that the choice is made continuously makes it fade into the background, with the Big Decisions in sharp contrast in the front and center--it makes it feel like the day-to-day maintenance tasks of traditional women's work are not a choice. This is a mistake that I think affects both de Beauvoir and Sartre.
Anyway, though, gotta go finish washing up my lunch dishes.
You made me smile.
Mrs Clown is a self-sacrificing housewife, but we make all the important decisions together. We've moved around a lot, and this forces us both to reset and start over with each move. For example, we had a beautiful garden in California that she worked really hard on and was very proud of. When we came back to England, she decided she didn't want a garden any more, and started getting little jobs as an 'extra' in movies and TV shows instead. She is still a self-sacrificing housewife, but I wonder if being forced to choose every time we move makes being a wife less "years-of-tedium-and-burden".
I'll ask her after she makes my dinner!
(I missed this comment before. I think Substack has a bug where the notifications are all out of order.)
Great description of suspending the agenda to gather energy for what comes next. Thanks
Also after reading this essay of yours, I read this one by Freddie de Boer, which is almost on the same point:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/so-is-everybody-giving-up-on-like
I very much agree with Freddie that I don't see the point in writing… but then having an LLM generate all the writing for me. I enjoy writing; having someone else do it defeats the object.
I also agree with him that its fun to generate the images. I’m not good enough to draw them myself and I certainly don't have time. I find it fun to generate them.