Eight THE RELEVANCE OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR’S ETHIC/AESTHETIC PROJECT TO THE HUMANITIES Juliana de Albuquerque Katz This chapter examines the relevance of Simone de Beauvoir’s ethic/aesthetic project. Beauvoir tried to reach equilibrium between remaining loyal to philosophical traditions and establishing her individual voice as a philosopher and a writer. I maintain that in Tous les hommes sont mortels, Beauvoir arrives at a sense of human temporality and finitude, through which she sees an opening in the possibility of acknowledging the other, though this acknowledgement inevitably always remains ambiguous. For Beauvoir, it is out of the human experience of love and desire that, with its inherent limits and bounds, our ethical and philosophical reflections emerge. Ethics and philosophy only become possible for Beauvoir through recognition of our fundamental separateness and finitude. For this reason, literary language offers privileged access to the fragmentary structure of our age and its ethical dilemmas. 1. Addressing the Crisis in the Humanities The humanities is currently under attack. As higher education falls victim to the demands of the market, there has been an increasing devaluation of the contributions of the humanities to society. At the dawn of the twenty-first century—a century that most of us awaited with a promise of progress and enlightenment—, we have already witnessed the shutdown of faculties and the amalgamation of entire arts and humanities departments. Although the arts and humanities have qualities essential to the maintenance of democracy, such as the production of cultural and moral capabilities that enable the existence of democracies themselves, American philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum warns that our societies are increasingly discarding those skills for the sake of profit: History has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete man, is more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for the…commercial man, the man of limited purpose. (Rabindranath Tagore cited in Nussbaum, 2010, epigraph) If Nussbaum is right and the situation is irreversible, then yes, we are indeed approaching times when human achievements lack thoughtfulness, when we fail “to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which 130 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ nevertheless, we are able to do” (ibid.). For this reason, we should not be misled by appearances: the crisis in the arts and humanities is not merely academic; the crisis at hand is political. Axel Honneth (2013) reminds us: The types, methods, and contents of [public] education may affect democracy either in positive ways, by fostering cooperativeness and individual self-esteem, or in negative ones, undermining democracy by teaching moral conformism and unquestioning obedience to authority. Furthermore, Honneth mentions that only recently did pedagogy and political philosophy part ways. In the tradition that begins with Plato and finds its correspondence in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, Honneth explains, “the art of government and the art of education were both socially created to fill the same function”: they were both created with the intention to “effect a transition from a state of minority to a state of freedom” (ibid.). It is in the spirit of freedom and in the quest for the political legitimization of our cultural and moral capabilities that we should try to secure a place for the arts and humanities in our societies. Nevertheless, that place will only be safe once we prove the importance and the value of humanistic research, by confronting the arts and humanities with the problems of our own time, demonstrating their transformative potential. This potential is based on the capability of the humanities to interact with other sciences and to inquire about the meaningfulness of their mutual achievements. For this reason, it is our task to ask the rest of the scientific community, “Hey! What are we doing?” We should force the sciences to break with their technical jargon and translate their achievements back into ordinary language, and, consequently, return to the public domain. One example of such inquiry can be found in the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Its paradigmatic importance to our times lies not only in the way she questions mainstream scientific achievements and the advancements of technological society, but also in the way that she dwells on these achievements to enrich her artistic and philosophical perspective upon the world and human relations. The key to understanding Beauvoir’s intellectual project lays in the fundamental role that interdisciplinarity plays in her thought and how she builds her philosophical questioning as one connected with the aesthetic concerns of literature. A thorough study of Beauvoir’s work demands that scholars not build their inquiries based solely on analysis of her essays or on the critical reading of her novels. Instead, a true defense of the originality of Beauvoir’s work—and of its pertinence to our contemporary philosophical debate—can only be achieved once we try to internalize her thirst for novelty and reframe our analysis to one that positions Beauvoir’s philosophy as embodied in the way that she writes. Further, her philosophy and her writing are inseparable Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project to the Humanities 131 from her personal experiences. In this age, society is gradually losing faith in the worth of the humanities and, more crucially, many claim that the humanities has failed to furnish successful means to embrace an explanation of human behavior or to provide guiding standards for our life in the community. Such a bleak context warrants a search in Beauvoir’s work and her philosophical attitude for pointers to alternative ways to do philosophy and ways to shed light on the relevance of the humanities and the place that it should occupy in our everyday lives. This chapter will analyze Beauvoir’s philosophical ideas as embodied in Tous les hommes sont mortels (All men are mortal) (1946). My analysis will attempt to communicate both Beauvoir’s singularity as the writer who expresses herself through a work of art, and my singularity as a reader who attempts to engage in a true adventure of the mind, allowing myself to experience and be affected by the perspective of Beauvoir’s singularity. I will try to preserve Beauvoir’s identity as an intellectual who sought equilibrium between thinking-with a philosophical canon and establishing her own philosophical autonomy. For this reason, I will remain open to the implications of how thinking-with G. W. F. Hegel influenced Beauvoir’s approach to inter-subjectivity, and how at the same time, Beauvoir’s relationship with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger affected her views. Beauvoir’s reading of both Heidegger and Hegel, particularly of Heidegger’s criticism of Hegel’s notion of progress, helped her to develop her own ethics/aesthetics of relation. I maintain that, in Tous les hommes sont mortels,” Beauvoir develops a living experience of temporality. The necessary affirmation of finitude allows the emergence of the possibility of acknowledging the other and relating to others through the fundamental ambiguity of our condition. In the novel, acknowledgment of finitude accounts for one being able to build reciprocal relations with others who are partaking in the same reality. For Hegel, the particularity of human beings and their finitude are subsumed in the universal. Beauvoir affirms that an existentialist ethics should account for a plurality of finite human beings transcending in the direction of their own projects, through the experience of their own situations, as individuals within whom particularity is inseparable from their own subjectivity. With Heidegger, Beauvoir maintains that her philosophy is based on difference and in a thinking that emerges and develops itself in finitude, in individuals’ situatedness in the world (Beauvoir, 2004b, p. 114). As this analysis will reveal, to Beauvoir, the bounds of love, the bounds out of which our ethical and philosophical experience are made possible, can only happen with the possibility of recognition of our fundamental separateness and finitude and its acceptance by others experiencing the same—the reality of individuals’ fundamental existential structure as being-with-others. How can this analysis contribute to the present debate about the relevance of the humanities? Beauvoir offers a mind-blowing picture of the frag- 132 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ mentary reality of our times and how some strands of traditional philosophy are unable to deal with it due to their duty to clarity of reason and identity. Therefore, her treatment of the concepts of the other and of recognition bears a peculiar dynamic based on her notion of ambiguity (the understanding that our lives are the site of an overlap between freedom and facticity) and their connection to her aesthetic project. Thus, in the real world, the meaning of an object is not a concept graspable by pure understanding. What the study of these notions is bound to show is that there exists no unsurpassable barrier between objective and subjective knowledge as long as they both mean to disclose the truth about the human condition. By developing an ethic/aesthetic project founded in the quest to communicate what is most radically singular in the human condition, Beauvoir related to the philosophical canon and, at the same time, searched for philosophical autonomy. Through an understanding of this approach, one might gain new insight into the possibilities of a new ethics in an age of conflict. There is a need for a new theory where our relation to the world is, more than ever, expressed as a detotalizing totality, or a recondition of singular parts that does not disturb the whole. Establishing an ethics that may finally account for the opacity that remains attached to human freedom and agency is required. 2. Beauvoir’s Youthful Concerns and the Birth of the Metaphysical Novel In a journal entry dated July 1927, Beauvoir commands herself to take philosophy seriously, to systematize her thought, and to believe in the worth of ideas (2008, p. 378). She manifests a commitment to plunge into her reading as if she has just obtained access to the texts for the first time. This is an approach that she maintained throughout her life with regard to her relationships and her work, revealing her deep commitment to a life dedicated to thought. Beauvoir’s intellectual commitment is maintained throughout her student journals, the pages of which are filled with psychological analysis and philosophical questioning. Her all-consuming obsession in these journals revolves around her readings and her projects for future work as she tries to establish her self-identity. In another entry from early 1927, she writes that although she admires the passionate quest of scholars to dedicate a lifetime to the understanding of a philosophical work, and despite her dedication to academia, her desire to act and to change her environment would not allow her to fully succeed in a scholarly career (ibid., p. 322). For that reason, Beauvoir envisioned her work as something that would disclose the drama of humanity’s condition while unifying literature and philosophy to prove her main theses regarding existential ontology, morality, and politics. Conscious that her serious philosophical training had increased her ability to perceive all manifestations of the human spirit as aspects of the whole Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project to the Humanities 133 of reality, the young Beauvoir wrote in the first person singular, maintaining that her investigations were much more engaging when written in accessible language, which also allowed her to acknowledge herself in her work. This is a concern that persists throughout her intellectual life, and which reoccurs in “What Can Literature Do?” Here she writes, “there must be a language that carries the mark of someone.” She asserts that through style and inventiveness, authors must impose their presence upon the reader (2011c, p. 200). Therefore, the young Beauvoir had already noticed that scholarly work had failed to apply a language that could reach the minds of people. She would have to find her voice elsewhere. She adopted a style that allowed her to overcome the dichotomy between everyday life and thought, and to mediate between people’s lives and their metaphysical existence. However, literature has never been Beauvoir’s final goal; as early as 1927, she had given signs that literature would be a vehicle for philosophical ideas which should be vaguely linked to fiction. This method would embody her claim that philosophy should belong to life (2008, p. 387), a sentiment that she later expresses in “Literature and Metaphysics,” where she writes that there is no insurmountable distinction between literature and philosophy. Both are different ways to achieve “an original grasping of metaphysical reality” (2004b, p. 273). This reveals that metaphysical situations are concrete situations in which the whole meaning of one’s life is at stake. In “Literature and Metaphysics,” Beauvoir gives birth to her theory of the metaphysical novel as writing aimed at providing a “disclosure of existence unequalled by any other mode of expression” (ibid., p. 276), which would also be able to portray philosophy as an attitude. In the metaphysical novel, her philosophy appears to be in motion, and in its integrity, as part of the whole of reality, as being disclosed in the “living relation that is action and feeling before making itself thought” (ibid., p. 274). According to Beauvoir, a metaphysical novel should keep readers attuned to a mood while reconstructing an experience on a plane prior to any elucidation. She claims that since the actual meaning of objects cannot be grasped by pure understanding, they should be disclosed within the network of relations that we maintain with things and, for that reason, the novelist’s task rests in trying to evoke such “flesh-and-blood presence whose complexity and singular and infinite richness exceed any subjective interpretation.” While the philosopher “wants to compel us to adhere to the ideas that the thing and the event suggested to him,” novelists should use our freedom of thought to their own advantage and fight against our tendency toward intellectual docility. As there are readers who want to keep their freedom of thought, she explains that they are actually encouraged to like “a story that imitates life’s opacity, ambiguity, and impartiality” (ibid.). Beauvoir’s remarks about the relation between literature and philosophy are analogous to Heidegger’s analysis of poetry and the work of art. In his 134 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ mature work, Heidegger writes about poetry not so much as a literary genre, but as a mode of thinking and relating to the world. Thus, he inquires about the relation between poetic and philosophical thinking and explains that their nearness is based on their world-disclosing character. Heidegger asserts that poets—for our purposes, in the spirit of Heidegger’s work, novelists and poets can be mentioned interchangeably since they both share the same mode of thought—are just as important as philosophers in providing us with an understanding of Being. As Alexandra J. Pell observes, writers that share a poetic mode of thinking “place ordinary objects in their context within the scheme of Being and relate objects to a higher level. . . . Whereas philosophers contemplate and interpret being, poets rediscover its very nature” (2012, p. 22). According to Heidegger, while philosophical thinking is explicitly concerned with the sense of being, poetry remains implicitly concerned with it, but does not make this issue thematic. Nevertheless, despite their differences, there lies no insoluble contradiction in the relation between poetry and philosophy. In its broader and original sense, poetic thinking is a mode of disclosure of being that furnishes unity between artist (writer) and philosopher. Poetic thinking is an invitation to allow things and the world into our consciousness and, for this reason, any discussion of philosophy already involves poetic thinking. Therefore, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty duly notes, “from now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated” (1964, p. 28). This is an understanding that correlates with Beauvoir’s analysis of that relation, when she writes, “the more keenly a philosopher underscores the role and value of subjectivity, the more he will be led to describe the metaphysical experience in its singular and temporal form” (2004b, p. 274). Yet, despite that Beauvoir’s theorization of the metaphysical novel and her ideas about the relation between literature and metaphysics appear to be anchored in a Heideggerian perspective, she does not mention any of Heidegger’s works concerning that topic, allusions to which seem to be present in “Literature and Metaphysics” and “What Can Literature Do?.” According to Eva Gothlin, Beauvoir’s silence concerning Heidegger is misleading; it is rooted both in his affiliation with the Nazi regime and his criticism of JeanPaul Sartre’s interpretation of Being and Time. Nevertheless, Gothlin insists, “reading Beauvoir with Heidegger can deepen our understanding of Beauvoir’s view of human beings and their relation to the world and to others” (2006, p. 45). Gothlin asserts that to establish a philosophical connection between Heidegger and Beauvoir, one should read Beauvoir’s texts attentively for explicit and implicit clues of Heidegger’s influence on her work (ibid., p. 46). In “Literature and Metaphysics” and “What Can Literature Do?,” some of the most interesting clues concerning that influence are implicit and relate to themes other than the commonly explored mentions of being-with and inauthenticity. Instead, in both texts, Heidegger’s influence is shown to be deeply grounded in Beauvoir’s discussion about the role of literature in communicating the disclosure of Being and the role of the author in setting up a world Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project to the Humanities 135 where, regardless of our ontological separateness, human relations are made possible. For instance, in “Literature and Metaphysics,” Beauvoir mentions that what shines through the development of the metaphysical novel are truths that were previously unknown to both the reader and the author, questions whose solutions they do not yet possess. She writes: [The author] questions himself, takes sides, and run risks; and, at the end of his creation, he will consider the work he has accomplished with astonishment. He himself could not furnish an abstract translation of it because, in one single movement, the work gives itself both meaning and flesh. (2004b, p. 272) Beauvoir maintains that the metaphysical novel is “an authentic adventure of the mind” (ibid.) that cannot be reduced to the mere exterior imitation of the living process; here she suggests a potential engagement with Heidegger’s discussion about the role of art. As Beauvoir mentions in “What Can Literature Do?,” literature is the privileged space for inter-subjectivity as long as: the writer is capable of manifesting and imposing a truth—that of his relationship to the world, that of his world. But one must understand what these words signify: to have something to say is not to possess an object that one could carry around in a bag and then display on a table, searching afterward for the words to describe it. The relationship is not given because the world is not given. And the writer is not given either. He is not a being, but an existant, who surpasses himself, has a praxis, and lives in time. In this world that is not given, facing a man who is not given, the relationship is obviously not given either. It must be discovered. Before revealing [(decouvrir)] it to others, it is a matter of the writer discovering it, and that is why all literary works are essentially a search (Beauvoir, 2011c, p. 201–202). A novel embodies truth and the unfolding of truth as the disclosure of that which is hidden. Truth is what discovers the entity in itself; it enounces or lets the entity be seen in its uncovered being. Heidegger explains: To say that an assertion “is true” signifies that it uncovers the entity as it is in itself. Such an assertion asserts, points out, “lets” the entity “be seen” (apohansis) in its uncoveredness. The being-truth (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering. (2008a, p. 261) What Beauvoir’s approach to the relation between philosophy and literature reveals is that humanity does not construct a world; on the contrary, human 136 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ beings are thrown into the world and attached to it by an essentially structural bond. Thus, the novel has the potential to call on us to re-educate ourselves in how to see the world we touch at every point of our being. The metaphysical novel can be understood as a privileged mode of expression that provides us with an unequaled possibility to disclose the truth about our existence. The projective and inventive feature of the novel and its situatedness among beings clears an open space in which everything is other than before. They allow us to gain perspective on human events in relation to the totality of the world, “in evoking in its living utility and its fundamental living ambiguity, this destiny that is ours and that is inscribed both in time and in eternity” (Beauvoir, 2004b, p. 273). Thus, Beauvoir claims that only the metaphysical novel “can succeed where both pure literature and pure philosophy fail” (ibid., p. 276). It can provide a conceptualization of human existence that evokes humanity’s spontaneity to engage in the world and make it its own. Beauvoir also identifies this freedom with a notion of projection or transcendence. On Beauvoir’s notion of freedom, Debra B. Bergoffen writes: As human I am perpetually transcending myself in my concrete particularity. I am a way of being that makes myself be by reaching beyond myself toward something other than myself. I am transcending transcendence, a going beyond without end. A new future calls me to new ends. (2004, p. 83) While it is commonly accepted that some novels can provide readers with thought-provoking ideas and explanations to elaborate philosophical problems, it would be a mistake to interpret the metaphysical novel as a work that exposes philosophical ideas to non-academic readers. A metaphysical novel does not tell what the world is about; rather it represents a contribution to philosophy by the way in which it is able to instantiate a world. Yet, the use of the term “pure literature” in contrast to the metaphysical novel is problematic. The metaphysical novel discloses the world of the author, and its authenticity is based on the global expression of the author’s search for self. However, pure literature can be based on the author’s search for the self as well, even though it may partially be identified with what Beauvoir calls fake literature. That is, the works of writers “who have a ready-made story at hand and then choose a fashionable packaging that they apply to this story” (Beauvoir, 2011c, p. 202). In “What Can Literature Do?,” Beauvoir explains that within existentialist philosophy, the role of literature retains its importance because human beings do not inhabit a world that can actually be grasped in the unity of its totality. Instead, the world we inhabit is a detotalized totality, meaning that on the one hand, “there is a world that is indeed the same world for us all, but on the other hand we are all in situation in relation to it” (ibid., p. 198). This situation, which represents “the ensemble of what makes up our individuality” Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project to the Humanities 137 (ibid.), envelops the world in a particular way and dictates that “each person’s life has a unique flavor that, in a sense, no one else can know” (ibid., p. 200). Beauvoir explains: I who am speaking to you am not in the same situation as you who are listening, and none of those who are listening to me is in the same situation as his neighbor. He did not come here with the same past, nor with the same intentions, nor the same culture. Everything is different; all these situations which, in a way, open onto one another and communicate with each other, have, all the same, something that cannot be communicated through the means taken at this moment: lecture, discussion, or debate. (2011c, p. 199) But the task of literature is to forge communication in the heart of this separation, to show us that “metaphysics is, first of all, not a system; one does not ‘do’ metaphysics as one does mathematics or physics” (2004a, p 273). “In reality,” says Beauvoir, “‘to do metaphysics’ is ‘to be’ metaphysical; it is to realize in oneself the metaphysical attitude which consists in positing oneself in one’s totality before the totality of the world” (ibid.) because: every human event possesses a metaphysical signification beyond its psychological and social elements, since through each event, man is always entirely engaged in the entire world; and surely there is no one to whom this meaning has not been disclosed at some time in his life. (Ibid.) 3. What Is at Work in the Metaphysical Novel? Enacting Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project The novel may carry within it a new system of thought or a new set of philosophical ideas. However, as I have maintained with Heidegger, within the novel itself, these ideas are not thematized; they remain a riddle to be accessed by our moods and felt to the extension of our limbs as we immerse ourselves in the world depicted by its imaginary account. In the novel, we allow ourselves to be affected by our metaphysical dimension, internalizing the possibility of a theory that may change our relation to the world and enrich our experiences. Thus, as Beauvoir sought to develop an existentialist ethics, her literary and philosophical projects overlapped to reveal that the ethical solutions she found in her essays needed to be expressed in a style that, while imitating our projectiveness, would strike both as more concrete and ambiguous. As we consider the overlap between Beauvoir’s literary and ethical projects, we can ask ourselves what is at work in the metaphysical novel. To answer this question, I will offer a brief analysis of the relevance of Tous les hommes sont mortels in relation to its form. The formal structure evinces the 138 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ themes developed by Beauvoir in her ethical writings and her criticism of the philosophical tradition that found its main expression in Hegel’s work. As with any novel, the metaphysical novel tells the story of a character in book-length prose. However, it does not merely set up a story or suggest some general view of life in the manner of an edifying tale. Because of its projective feature, the goal of the metaphysical novel is to directly reflect the being of the world through opportunities presented by the facts and ideas that comprise its narrative. Addressing Beauvoir’s enigmatic mention of a “pure” literature, Debbie Evans explains: The existential novel does not merely describe or express certain preheld abstract metaphysical truths. Neither is it, in its most crude form, “disguised philosophy.” As Beauvoir points out, the “true” novel is metaphysical to the extent that it is concerned with exploring the historical and temporal dimension of human experience, an experience that can never be adequately conveyed through the universal abstractness of the philosophical text. (2009, p. 91) Beauvoir maintains that, given that the metaphysical novel expresses thoughts that cannot be expressed in the sort of categorical manner one expects of a philosophical treatise, it will be the sole form of communication for authors such as Franz Kafka, “who wishes to portray the drama of a man confined in immanence.” Since the issue of transcendence is not thematized in these works, its imaginary account will “allow us to respect this silence that is alone appropriate to our ignorance.” (2004b, p. 274). Tous les hommes sont mortels tells the story of Raymond Fosca, a noble man from the Middle Ages who, in a time of crisis— the existence of his village is jeopardized by the plague and by enemy invasions—, wishes to retain his political power and to save his people from extinction. He drinks a magic portion that makes him immortal but—notwithstanding his successful control of the plague, subjugation of his enemies, and continued power—his immortality will later prove to be a curse. Fosca can only be a human being insofar as he is mortal. As Beauvoir explains, “he must assume [death] as the natural limit of his life, as the risk implied by [his] every step” (2011a, p. 82). However, in choosing immortality, Fosca remains a threat to the men surrounding him; it inspires horror among them. Thus, he condemns himself to eternal solitude, remains unable to cultivate any authentic relationship to others, and watches the truth of his projects collapse into inessentiality: Immortal, an existent would no longer be what we call a man. One of the essential features of man’s destiny is that the movement of his temporal life creates behind and ahead of him the infinity of the past and the future. (Beauvoir, 1953, p. 24) Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project to the Humanities 139 Human existence in time and the inevitability of human death account for the possibility for us to establish reciprocal relationships with others partaking in the same situation. It also allows for participating in relationships through which we will posit the necessity of our projects. As Debra Bergoffen explains,” the fate of my desire depends on the other” and “if no one adopts my goals, they vanish. Without the support of others my projects come to nothing” (2004, p. 84). However, our relationship with others is based on the seemingly counterintuitive reasoning that traces the necessity of human solidarity back to our fundamental separateness: human beings are fundamentally alone; but at the same time, they are logically dependent upon others. The other is already present within the structure of human subjectivity in time, and “these conflicting dimensions of intersubjective life reflect the ambiguity of our humanness (I am always both subject and object) and establish the problematic of ethics and politics” (ibid.). Nevertheless, by describing a main character that became immortal and, therefore, has felt his particularity succumb to a universal that does not account for the ambiguous nature of human existence, Beauvoir criticizes the lack of sensibility of a philosophical tradition that “declares in vain that individuality is only a moment of the universal becoming” (2004e, p. 101). She asserts that the philosophical tradition had traded a notion of projectiveness for a notion of progress. She explains that “if this moment, as unsurpassed, had no reality, then it should not even exist in appearance; it should not even be named” (ibid.). For this reason, she affirms that individuality is a moment capable of tearing apart the unity and the continuity of an indifferent universality. She criticizes Hegelian optimism in saying, “each man must be able to recognize himself in the universal that envelops him” (ibid., p. 111). Both Hegel and Beauvoir hold theories about mutual recognition. Beauvoir approaches Hegel in the way that she describes the inevitability of conflict in our relationship to the other. She also manages to censure Hegel’s formula. She maintains that the fate of self-consciousness does not reside in finding itself pertaining to the realm of Spirit, to the spiritual community of selves, but in that human fate cannot develop itself apart from the subject’s radical character of separateness and finitude. Beauvoir views the world as a detotalized totality, wherein our relation to the world is defined by “the unity of the world that we express and yet at the same time this singularity, this detotalization of . . . the situations in which we find ourselves in relation to it” (2011c, p. 200). Accordingly, Beauvoir reminds us that there are limits to individual expansion of the self. Instead, we must occupy our own place in the world. Therefore, an existentialist ethics should give an account of the plurality of finite human beings transcending in direction of their own projects. This should be done through the experience of their own situations, within which “particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself (2011a, pp. 17–18). 140 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ Already in Pyrrhus and Cineas (2004e), Beauvoir incorporates the other within the self’s transcendental movement; ergo, every subject achieves liberty only through a continual reaching for others’ freedom. However, the reciprocity we establish with each other is prior to the epistemic framework of a (Hegelian-type of) dialectic that aims at a reconciliation of our individual oppositions. Instead, the reciprocity between self and other already belongs to our ontological structure, a dialectic simply representing one possible explanation of how this structure unfolds itself. As Ursula Tidd explains, given its transcendental structure, the other is reciprocally equal to me and is “always already included as the goal of this movement of consciousness towards its own perpetual self-constitution” (2006, p. 230); yet, we radically differ in the manifestation of this structure. If reality should necessarily account for a plurality of separate individuals, for the discontinuity of humanity, then this reciprocity should not find comfort in any of the variations of Hegelian dialectic (neither speculative philosophy, nor dialectical materialism). Instead, it should hold on to a simpler and yet more fundamental solution. Our reciprocity should be based upon expression. Expression is a notion that despite her overall criticism of the philosophical tradition, Beauvoir extracts from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s notion of active force, which is also in accordance with Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein as projectiveness. The notion of expression in relation to the radical and quasimonadologic structure of our individuality is exactly what can “relate humans to a common world and express their intervention into that world” (Hengehold, 2011, p. 193). Excellence in expression is related to the degrees of our activities; i.e., our interventions in the world. Therefore, it will also be the notion of expression that will account for the opacity and the ambiguity that our bodily individuation represents in our relationship with others and the experiences of our situations. Due to his acquired immortality, Fosca is condemned to retain his human appearance; but he is no longer able to identify with others, to express individuation in a language that communicates and accounts for the phenomena of difference and discontinuity of finitude. He remains a foreigner to the world around him and will never be able to seize the truth about the finite world, the absolute of every ephemeral consciousness. The realization of this curse occurs to Fosca every time he tries to inspire love in another character. One of these moments happens when, upon the death of his son Antoine, he tries to conquer the affection of Béatrice, who had long been in love with the recently deceased young man. However, Béatrice would never be able to love Fosca; he is not human, she claims. Even if he insists that he loves her as a man loves a woman, his flesh and blood belong to another species; his deeds do not convince her. He is an exceptional being who would never be able to personify Antoine’s pride in being a man like any other man and who—despite the limitations of his humanity—had dared to express himself (Beauvoir, 1946, Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project to the Humanities 141 pp. 214–216). Unable to inspire love or solidarity, Fosca remains alone in the world while conscious of the futility of his objectives. As Beauvoir writes: All figures disappear; they are reduced to the universal ground whose presence cannot be distinguished from absolute absence. Here also there is no longer desire, no longer fear, nor hardship, nor joy. Nothing is mine. Eternity joins with the instant; it is the same naked facticity, the same empty interiority. (Beauvoir, 2004e, p. 101) Fosca is abolished within the universal. “Spread out into infinity,” his “place in the world is erased” (ibid.). For this reason, Tidd explains that when Beauvoir refutes solipsism in Pyrrhus and Cineas, she claims that a relation of mutual acknowledgment between self and other can only be achieved in its potential reciprocity, “experienced as it is in All Men Are Mortal in a dialectical framework of history” (Tidd, 2006, p. 230). But the mention of dialectics, history, and reciprocity already establishes Beauvoir within the language of a tradition that she intends to criticize. She may share with Hegel an idea that human beings belong to their own time and that human acts are invested in the morality of their period of history. However, her aforementioned criticism of “Hegelian optimism” does not allow her to see history in anywhere near to Hegelian terms, i.e., as the story of the progressive achievement of human self-consciousness. Instead, Beauvoir was strongly critical of a notion of progress that she identified with the philosophies of Hegel and Auguste Comte and that incurred the risk of fusing humanity’s ambiguous condition with a notion of the future that appeared both to inscribe meaning to our transcendence and to represent the immobility of being. The greatest achievement of Tous les hommes sont mortels is the portrayal of the failure implied by such a notion of history coined under Hegelian influence. Fosca’s character embodies the illusion represented by the ontological and moral optimism that Humanity and its future could be perceived as a monolithic individuality: Don’t singular sacrifices find a necessary place in world history? The myth of evolution wants to delude us with this hope. It promises us the accomplishment of human unity across temporal dispersion. Here transcendence takes the place of progress. In each man, in each of his actions, the entire human past is written and immediately surpassed entirely toward the future. (Beauvoir, 2004e, p. 108) But is this really the case? The myth of progress presupposes human continuity and that “human transcendence would be entirely grasped again within each moment,” unveiling an identity that would be established by dialectically encompassing its preceding moments within the higher level of a historical 142 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ meaning. This meaning “would not become fixed in any of them, since progress always continues” (Beauvoir, 2004b, p. 109). However, the myth of unity falls apart because, most fortunately, “the detours, the setbacks and the misfortunes of history” are endowed with such violence that it would be impossible for a consciousness to keep track of them over the centuries without falling into despair (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 73). In this context, human finitude is necessary not only to remind us that the basis of our solidarity resides in our mortality. It is also required to make us realize that “humanity is a discontinuous succession of free men who are irretrievably isolated by their subjectivity” (Beauvoir, 2004e, p. 108). Therefore, when we lose grip of our finitude, we become detached from society and consequently from life in community and the possibility of realizing our existential freedom. This is clear in a scene when, after centuries of immortality, Fosca finds himself back in Carmona and notices that although nothing had changed, there was no void in Carmona, nobody needed him—nobody ever needed him. Unlike the princes buried in the cathedral, remembered by their people for their actions, Fosca was already dead, but still around—a witness to his own absence (Beauvoir, 1946, p. 276). As Beauvoir writes in La force des choses (Force of circumstance), Fosca is unable to “create a living connection between the centuries” (1965, p. 73). The reason is that every new creation either in the life of an individual, or in the life of a species, presupposes a new beginning that must already comport within itself the drama of our own separateness. “If the desires that moved eighteenth century men would be achieved in the twentieth century, the dead would not be able to reap what they sow” (ibid.). This observation finds its ground in The Ethics of Ambiguity, where she writes: What we maintain is that one must not expect that this goal be justified as a point of departure of a new future; insofar as we no longer have a hold on the time which will flow beyond its coming, we must not expect anything of that time for which we have worked; other man will have to live its joys and sorrows. (2011a, p. 128) Every project is singular and finite—there is no point in setting ourselves goals aimed at establishing a relationship with infinity. Whatever we do, even if we choose to delude ourselves, our ontological structure remains and we cannot set our projects beyond its limits. Human beings are being-inthe-world-with-others and “the breaks between generations are necessary in order to move ahead” (1965, p. 73). This claim reflects Beauvoir’s philosophical consistency by also forging a communication between La force des choses and her earlier work, “The Ethics of Ambiguity,” where she writes: As for us, the goal must be considered as an end; we have to justify it on the basis of our freedom which has projected it, by the ensemble of the Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project to the Humanities 143 movement which ends in its fulfillment. The tasks we have set up for ourselves and which, though exceeding the limits of our lives, are ours, must find their meaning in themselves and not in a mythical Historical end. (2011a, p. 128) According to Beauvoir, at the moment Fosca realizes this, he can no longer rule over others like a demiurge, with the devastating will of a god. If an authentic notion of history is to be established, it should take into account that each person is free and sovereign of its own will. This finding allows us to perceive that history cannot escape the structure of our own projectiveness. We also see that history is not universal progress, but the discontinuous narrative based on a myriad of radically singular projective structures that express the particularity of our situations. As such, it remains prior to its understanding as a collection of dates and events ordered in a sequence of time that is continuous and alien to humanity. Instead, an authentic notion of history should pose the question of what it means to be you and me amidst our involvement with the world and the way that it opens itself to us in our situation. Once we establish this notion and comprehend what the exact framework of history is, within which the possibility of reciprocal relationships with other subjectivities is set, we are able to set forth an ethics of relations: Only by my free movement toward my being can I confirm in their being those from whom I expect a necessary foundation of my being. In order for men to be able to give me a place in the world, I must first make a world spring up around me where men have their places; I must love, want, and do. (Beauvoir, 2004e, p. 135) 4. Conclusion I have maintained that Beauvoir’s intentions with the metaphysical novel overlap her goal in setting up an existentialist ethics. Both are concerned with expressing the projective or transcendent structure of subjectivity and arguing for the paradoxical nature of action, the opacity of reality, our radical separateness, the failure of ontological and moral optimism. Due to the lack of continuity in time and history, our projects should find their meaning within themselves and not within the illusion of a historical end. Beauvoir’s ethical thought pertains to a fundamental ontology, which is able to account for the situatedness of the subject. This avoids the mistake of enclosing the human condition within an a priori set of rules that are far removed from the current context of the subject. Beauvoir’s way of thinking allows us to perceive human existence and accommodate the great and intricate diversity of its manifestations, without placing them in a system of thought (such as religion or cultural tradition) that has become dissociated from the subject’s relationship with the world. 144 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ The whole of Beauvoir’s thought will move within Heidegger’s message that ethics, in its most fundamental sense, ponders the dwelling place of humanity, and that a “thinking which thinks the truth of being as the primordial element of man, as one who eksists [in Heidegger’s coinage, “eksistence” means standing “by” beings], is in itself the original ethics” (Heidegger, 2008b, p. 258). Therefore, Beauvoir maintains that her existentialist ethics “will refuse to deny a priori that separate existents can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all” (Beauvoir, 2011a, p. 18). Beauvoir’s ethical project is not interested in proscribing solutions to moral dilemmas. Instead, it occupies itself with setting up a map of our existential structure. It describes the composition of our being-in-the-world-withothers and acquaints us with the unfolding of our freedom and the acknowledgment of our fundamental ambiguity. Beauvoir says, “at the same time [man is] a freedom and a thing, both unified and scattered, isolated by his subjectivity and nevertheless co-existing at the heart of the world with other men” (2004a, p. 258). Thus, human actions are already endowed with the possibility of failure. Given that the world is populated by a multitude of other subjects who are also striving to achieve freedom, if we do not realize that our own freedom relies on acknowledging the freedom of others, we will fail to embody our own existential structure, that is, we fail to be free. For this reason, an approach to concrete ethical issues will always entail “the painfulness of an indefinite questioning” (Beauvoir, 2011a, p. 133). Such indefinite questioning lies in the experience of our own finitude and can neither be superseded nor cancelled, for it informs our subjectivity of its temporal structure and we must always choose our situation within the very heart of its ambiguity (Beauvoir, 2004a, p. 259). Thus even if Beauvoir claims, “the affirmation of the reciprocity of inter-human relations is the metaphysical basis for the idea of justice” (2004a, p. 249), we cannot take for granted that such reciprocity will always and necessarily be restored—due to our fundamental separateness, and the character of projectiveness qua expression, either an act of love or an act of vengeance can have its meaning educed from the presence of the other. According to Beauvoir, we cannot give anything to others except for points of departure for them to pursue as they will. For this reason, “tales in which the hero, saved from mortal peril, is forced by his savior to one preset day give up his own life for him seems so cruel to us” (Beauvoir, 2004e, p. 121). She explains that because a saved person will always give back “something quite different from what he received” (ibid.), his imperious benefactors will always resemble unjust tyrants. Here is the ethical contribution that a whole philosophical tradition, embodied by Fosca, failed to see but that remains crucial to our times: “I am not the one who founds the other; I am only the instrument upon which the other founds himself. He alone makes himself be by transcending my gifts” (ibid.). Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethic/Aesthetic Project to the Humanities 145 Based on Beauvoir’s critique of Hegel’s notion of history and of a speculative principle that aimed to establish an identity of difference, she was able to perceive the fragmentary nature of our times and describe a metaphysical structure of ethics based on difference. This ethical structure is founded on an intricate Heideggerian background that takes into account our radical singularity, its projective structure, and its expressive character. Beauvoir maintained that the source of all human values resides in human freedom. She claimed that existentialism had also taken as a point of departure “the principle according to which the essence of right and duty and the essence of the thinking and willing subject are absolutely identical” (Hegel cited in Beauvoir, 2011a, p. 17). Thus, there would be no more delusions about a multiplicity in the unity. Instead of investigating being by taking the absolute concept as an object of thought, Beauvoir wanted to take difference qua difference as an object of thinking. She accounted for the being of humanity within an irreducible plurality of subjects constantly striving to fulfill their own projects and to interact with the world from within the expression of their own particular point of view (Beauvoir, 1976, pp. 17–18). Without establishing presuppositions, but affirming that despite their separateness, “existants” would be able to live “their individual freedoms” and “forge laws valid for all” (ibid., p. 18), Beauvoir allowed the possibility of an ethics of tolerance—so necessary nowadays. In this ethics, all differences would remain expressed as long as they are carried out in all the ambiguity residing within our transcendence. As Beauvoir claims, such an ethics is neither negative nor does it require that we remain faithful to a static image of ourselves; instead: To be moral means to seek to found one’s own being and to transform one’s contingent existence into a necessity. But man’s being is “a being in the world”; he is indissolubly linked to the world in which he lives and without which he can neither exist nor even define himself. He is linked to this world through his actions, and it is his actions that he must justify. Since each act transcends a concrete and singular situation, each time one must invent anew a mode of action that carries within it its own justification. (2004c, p. 188) We must constantly renew our bounds to the world; reinvent our modes of action and our relation to others: that is the contribution of the ethic/aesthetic project of Beauvoir that proves why the humanities still matter. Beauvoir’s work is the living proof that neither moral, nor intellectual conformism should rule over humanity. By questioning a philosophical tradition, she acts like a true humanist and teaches us to attentively read the texts that inform our cultural expressions. It is this attentiveness to detail in scholarly investigation, combined with the refreshing pursuit of an original way to establish communication with others through an artistic medium, which propels 146 JULIANA DE ALBUQUERQUE KATZ interest in Beauvoir’s work among future generations inside and outside academia. It brings knowledge back to the public discourse and transforms it into the principle that legitimizes political practices in a democracy. Her emphasis on our radical singularity, which, nevertheless, reaches communion with the other through the complementarity in the difference of our expressions, is what may account for a democratic discourse on diversity—a discourse that is more than ever needed to found the structures of tolerance in multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies.