A Very Easy Death

Existentialism is a school of philosophical thought and artistic practice which developed in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. It explores the nature of human existence, especially focused on its meaning, purpose, and value. It flourished increasingly in the aftermath of World War II, as European intellectuals struggled to make sense of a world destroyed by war and genocide; a seemingly absurd world without clear meaning. As at Nuremberg Nazi leaders denied responsibility for the Holocaust, deflecting culpability to those above them, intellectuals sought philosophies which emphasized interpersonal accountability, freedom of choice, and individual responsibility. In France, existentialism became a prominent intellectual and cultural movement.

Two main figures of this new existentialism were the philosophers (and life partners) Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre and Beauvoir believed that, although humans are all born into a meaningless world, they should not become nihilists (people who believe in the meaningless and futility of life). Instead, they argued that humans have a duty to create a meaningful life through the projects they pursue, to befit themselves and others. Honoring this responsibility—what Sartre called living authentically or in good faith—brings freedom in this philosophy. Human projects are fragile because there is no absolute authority guaranteeing their meaning, and this existential precarity drives some people to seek a sense of security in a higher authority—such as the Nazi Party—or to avoid projects altogether lest they fail. However, it is essential to maintain this personal responsibility; to do otherwise is not only to risk tyranny but to live in bad faith, suffering the pain and confusion of an inauthentic existence.

Beauvoir’s crucial contribution to existentialism was to formulate a system of interpersonal ethics that bypassed any higher authority like religion. For Beauvoir freedom is fundamentally an ethical responsibility, as “to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.” (The Ethics of Ambiguity. Open Road. 2015. 24.) Instead of seeing ethics as an absolute set of rules enforced by an outside authority (like God), Beauvoir conceives of ethics as something defined and enforced interpersonally. In order to be truly free and moral, one must affirm the freedom of others. However, without a fixed set of ethical rules, it’s unclear how one should act in each situation: One cannot be absolutely sure of the morality of one’s choice until its consequences unfold. This ambiguity causes a type of anguish but, in Beauvoir’s view, this is a necessary anguish.

In her major ethical work, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir identifies predominant types of inauthentic people. Chief among these is the “serious man,” who looks to established ideals, institutions, or figures to define the meaning of life. Beauvoir’s mother Françoise is an example of this type: Françoise tries to define herself externally through Catholicism, bourgeois values, her husband Georges, and the success of her daughter Simone. Beauvoir argues that, in looking outside themselves for meaning, serious people lose themselves in ready-made values and conformity, denying themselves the freedom to forge authentic meaning through their own unique projects. Such an existence is similar to that of a child, who experiences the world as a static phenomenon instead of a dynamic matrix of individual choices. As a child, one has to live under the rules enforced by the adult world: As an adult one has the freedom to create one’s own world and, in doing so, transcend the ready-made values of childhood. These theories are essential to the meaning of Beauvoir’s memoir, especially in examining her mother’s life of conformity and her own experiences of childhood and adulthood in relation to her mother.

Beauvoir acknowledges that some people aren’t as free to choose their world as others; sometimes the world imposes nearly unsurmountable limits on freedom. For example, oppressed people may have little power to fight their oppression and their oppressors may convince them that their station in the world is natural and therefore inescapable. Beauvoir called this system “mystification” and this formed the basis of the feminist arguments for which she is also renowned. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir argues that many women exist in the world through mystification under a system of enforced values, instead of being free to pursue their own projects. These women are treated like children, mystified into believing that they aren’t free to define their own lives. Beauvoir’s memoir shows how Françoise has been mystified in this way for most of her life and, as a result, suffers the pain of self-abnegation.