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Simone De Beauvoir and a Twenty-First Century Ethics

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Simone De Beauvoir and a Twenty-First Century Ethics Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE 12-2013 Centralizing Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir and a Twenty-First Century Ethics Kristen Oganowski Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Oganowski, Kristen, "Centralizing Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir and a Twenty-First Century Ethics" (2013). Dissertations - ALL. 28. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/28 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT: In this dissertation, I examine the relevance of Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity to contemporary feminist thought on the self, autonomy, and ethics. More specifically, I argue that this text has the potential to make unique contributions to these areas of contemporary feminist philosophy. After introducing my project and offering a basic outline of The Ethics of Ambiguity in my first chapter, I offer a more detailed analysis of Beauvoir’s ethics in my second chapter. This analysis includes specific attention to Beauvoir’s conceptions of the ambiguity of the human situation, the reciprocity of moral freedom, and the ways in which individuals can abnegate their freedom. In addition to this analysis, I examine the socio-historical context of The Ethics of Ambiguity, situating the text both in terms of the historical moment in which Beauvoir wrote it and in terms of her other literary and philosophical works. In my third chapter, I demonstrate that Beauvoir’s ethics are relevant to contemporary feminist thought on the self, autonomy, and ethics. Accordingly, this chapter includes both a limited examination of contemporary perspectives on these topics and an explanation of how The Ethics of Ambiguity is thoroughly equipped to respond to some of the same concerns and issues that are important to today’s philosophers. In the fourth chapter, I sketch a conception of relational autonomy that shows one of the ways in which Beauvoir’s ethics could make a unique contribution to contemporary feminist thought. More specifically, I develop a conception of autonomy that incorporates Beauvoir’s analyses of ambiguity, emotion, and reciprocity: one that blends relational autonomy with what I call “moral attunement with the world.” In this respect, I maintain that it not only adds a moral dimension to autonomy itself but also helps to fortify the significance of autonomy as a philosophical concept. Finally, in my fifth chapter, I review my arguments and key moments in The Ethics of Ambiguity, and I stake the claim that Beauvoir is not only an important thinker from the 20th century but also an important thinker for the 21st century. Centralizing Ambiguity: Simone de Beauvoir and a Twenty-First Century Ethics By Kristen Oganowski B.A. University of Dayton, 2003 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Syracuse University December 2013 ©2013 Kristen Oganowski All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is with unequivocal and sincere gratitude that I thank Linda Martín Alcoff for her commitment to my work and my dissertation over the past six years. Her timely comments, her support for my work, and ceaseless desire to make certain that I did not give up on this project have carried me through the highs and lows of this process. For this and more, I am forever grateful. I also want to thank those who have either served on my committee and/or commented on various iterations of this dissertation: Kenneth Baynes, Vivian May, Laurence Thomas, Michael Stocker, Kara Richardson, and Debra Berghoffen have all contributed insights and critiques that have only made this project stronger. Lisa Farnsworth and Sue McDougal have been exceedingly kind and patient with me over the course of my graduate studies. I thank them for keeping me on track, keeping me informed, and keeping me out of registrar hell. Marilyn Fischer, Amy Morgenstern, Paul Benson, and Kurt Mosser—all professors and mentors from my undergraduate days—were instrumental in shaping either my love of The Ethics of Ambiguity and/or my love of academic philosophy. In ways big and small, their influence can be traced throughout this project. For that, I am grateful. And finally, my family. I want to thank my in-laws, who helped me through the final push of this project. I want to thank my mom, who babysat my children in the early stages of my dissertation-writing, and my dad, who stepped into the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning at the very moment that I reviewed the very last sentence of my completed manuscript. I want to v thank my children, Miles, Alec, and Eric: I finished this dissertation in spite of and because of them. I finished it in spite of their boisterousness and demands for my attention, and I finished it because of my desire to make them proud. And lastly, I want to thank my husband, Tim. His partnership, his friendship, his unceasing encouragement, and his boundless generosity have sustained me through graduate school and beyond. Being able to live life alongside him is something that gives me pure, unambiguous joy. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements v Chapter 1: Introducing the Project 1 Chapter 2: The Ethics of Ambiguity: The Argument and the Context 18 Chapter 3: Relationality and the Relevance of Beauvoir’s Ethics to Contemporary 81 Feminist Philosophy Chapter 4: Rethinking Relational Autonomy through the Lens of Beauvoir’s Ethics 154 Chapter 5: Concluding Remarks 202 Bibliography 209 vii Chapter 1—Introducing the Project Analyses of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity generally remain limited to the text itself, rarely reaching beyond the Beauvoir corpus. In other words, their scope remains limited to the field of Beauvoir studies—a field that, while flourishing in recent years, typically only reaches an audience already interested in and/or engaged in Beauvoir studies. This is not to say that these analyses are philosophically or theoretically uninteresting: some notably point out how Beauvoir’s positions in The Ethics of Ambiguity differ from some of her more well-known positions in The Second Sex, while others demonstrate Beauvoir’s achievement in creating an existentialist ethics that is neither nihilistic nor absurd. I argue, however, that examinations of The Ethics of Ambiguity can and should fit within a broader philosophical framework. To be clear, my argument is not simply that The Ethics of Ambiguity is unacknowledged within feminist philosophy. On the one hand, it is the case that many feminist philosophers and/or philosophers working on existentialism do not acknowledge or refer to Beauvoir’s ethics when it seems appropriate or even obvious that they are indebted to her philosophical work. In some respect, then, The Ethics of Ambiguity is an “unacknowledged” text. On the other hand, most Beauvoir scholars do concede that The Ethics of Ambiguity is a substantial philosophical text.1 But to leave analyses of this text solely within the realm of Beauvoir scholarship ignores the philosophical possibilities that Beauvoir’s ethics can open up for feminist theorizing. In particular, I argue that Beauvoir’s ethics opens up new possibilities for thinking about the self, 1 Especially in recent years, many Beauvoir scholars have offered fruitful analyses of Beauvoir’s ethics. See Barbara Andrew (1998), Kristana Arp (1999), Eva Gothlin (2006), Eleanore Holveck (1999), Stacy Keltner (2006), Sonia Kruks (1999), and Monika Langer (1994). 1 autonomy, and ethics: possibilities that contemporary feminist theorists in particular have not fully explored.2 Specifically, I contend that this text offers unique and noteworthy insights into many contemporary feminist discussions. As I see it, the uniqueness of these insights revolves primarily around Beauvoir’s conception of ambiguity and its function in human experience and ethics. It also revolves around how Beauvoir conceives of the fundamental relationality of the self, of freedom, and of ethics: a relationality that is unequivocally tied to her articulation of the ambiguity of the human situation. I ultimately argue that these insights can serve as a springboard for a broadened conception of relational autonomy. Before embarking on a more detailed delineation of my argument, I will give a brief overview of the general themes running throughout Beauvoir’s argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity. Providing such an overview will create a concise characterization of Beauvoir’s ethical framework to which I can turn in my outline of my own project. Furthermore, it will create a series of philosophical “signposts” in Beauvoir’s ethics to which I can refer in subsequent chapters. The Ethics of Ambiguity: An Overview Notably, I do not purport to offer a definitive overview or encapsulation of Beauvoir’s ethics in this section. My primary goal in offering this overview is instead to give the reader some sense of the “key moments” in Beauvoir’s ethics: to highlight the concepts that, as I see it, 2 To say that these possibilities have been entirely unexplored would be inaccurate. Specifically, both Barbara Andrew (1998) and Karen Vintges (2006) have offered brief examinations of ways in which Beauvoir’s ethics can contribute to contemporary feminist philosophical discussions. It is worth pointing out, however, that Andrew limits her analysis to the ways in which Beauvoir’s ethics can contribute to discussions of care ethics. Moreover, Vintges offers a very brief argument explaining the ways in which Beauvoir’s conception of the self is relevant to contemporary postmodernist and multiculturalist discussions. Because these arguments are so limited in their scope, they do not approach the breadth of the project that I plan to undertake.
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