Chapter 4 Responsibility 91 !
4.4 Reframing the Problem: On Violence and Generosity 116 !
“We are condemned to failure because we are condemned to violence. We are condemned to violence because man is divided and in conflict with himself.”
- Beauvoir In light of her recognition of the intertwining of selves, the intertwining of projects that define and advance freedom, Beauvoir is led to accept violence as an inevitable and unavoidable reality. It is impossible to act without in some regard affecting the freedom of the other. Each act creates a “new situation” for the other.451 It offers a new point of departure, if others respond and pick up the appeal
446 Ibid.
447 PAC 135, PEC 351. 448 Beauvoir, 1962, 550.
449 PAC 140, PEC 357. In The Blood of Others, Beauvoir will employ this analogy arguing that individuals are
like stones one piled upon the other. However, therein she will emphasize what easily can be overlooked in this reference. Stones both need and use each other. See BO 238, SDA 225 and BO 240, SDA 226.
450 Tidd, 2006,232. 451 PAC 126, PEC 332.
that it entails. But what if no one responds to this call? Respect for the other’s freedom being “the first condition for my successful effort. I can only appeal to the other’s freedom, not constrain it. I can even the most urgent appeals, try my best to charm it, but it will remain free to respond to those appeals or not, no matter what I do.452 It is for this reason that “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 place. I must love, want and do. My action itself must define the public to which I propose it.”453 But what if charm fails? What if it is given no public? “Wherever persuasion fails, only violence remains to defend oneself,”454 Beauvoir argues. In failing to have their appeal heard, individuals are denied their freedom and thus they are turned into objects amidst other objects. In this regard,
It is this interdependence which explains why oppression is possible and why it is hateful. As we have seen, my freedom in order to fulfill itself requires that it emerge into an open future; it is other men who open the future to me. It is they who, setting up the world of
tomorrow, define my future; but if, instead of allowing me to
participate in the constructive movement, they oblige me to consume my transcendence in vain, if they keep me below the level which they have conquered and on the basis of which new conquests will be achieved, then they are cutting off from the future, they are changing me into a thing.455
Echoing Hegel’s account of the master-slave dialectic, Beauvoir herein makes evident the need to resort to violence in order to regain freedom and hence to re-establish subjectivity.456
Such violence, in one sense, is not evil for it can affect only the facticity of the subject. The freedom of the other – their birthright remains intact. Yet, while it is not an evil, it does not mean that
452 PAC 136, PEC 358. 453 PAC 135, PEC 353. 454 PAC 138, 361 - 362. 455 EA 82, PMA 119.
456 In An Eye for An Eye, Beauvoir will question whether acts of revenge fulfill a “metaphysical requirement
because it re-establishes the reciprocity between humans that the crime negated.” – that is, she considers whether such acts re-establish the ambiguity of the human existence by forcing victimizers to confront their facticity while allowing victims regain through their actions, their freedom. PHW 250
it is not without its moral consequences. For while it does not affect the interiority of those on whom it is perpetuated, it does affect the freedom of him who would perpetuate such acts. In acting violently
. . we give up taking the other as a freedom and we restrict accordingly, the possibilities of expanding our being. The man to whom I do violence is not my peer, and I need men to be my peers. The resort to violence arouses correspondingly less regret in cases where it seems less possible to appeal to the freedom of the man to whom violence has been done.457
In so reducing opponents to things, to their facticity, the subject denies himself the conditions for the possibility of seeing himself as a freedom. As she notes “The other’s freedom alone is capable of necessitating my being, my essential need is therefore to be faced with free men.”458 Without such others, he becomes a thing among things.459
The ambiguity of human existence thus requires that there be recognition that We are condemned to failure because we are condemned to violence. We are condemned to violence because man is divided and in conflict with himself. Because men are separate and in conflict among themselves . . . renouncing the struggle would be renouncing transcendence, renouncing being. However, no success will ever erase the absolute outrage of each singular failure.460
It is for this reason that Beauvoir concludes that while violence cannot be avoided, “one cannot . . . light-heartedly accept resorting to force. It is the mark of a failure that nothing can offset.”461
In her subsequent essays, Beauvoir will go on to make clear that “Freedom which is
interested only in denying freedom,” Beauvoir argues, “must be denied.”462 In this important passage from The Ethics of Ambiguity, she gives further direction as to those circumstances in which violence is justified, claiming that
457 PAC 138, PEC 362. 458 PAC 129, PEC 338. 459 EA 100, PMA 144. 460 PAC 138, PEC 363. 461 PAC 138, PEC 363. 462 EA 90, PMA 131.
It is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbour into prison.463
In attempting to stop those who would deny others their freedom, it is necessary, Beauvoir recognizes “to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint.”464 Their deaths cannot be made right by any kind of utilitarian calculation – by any kind of appeal to future good nor with references to necessary sacrifices offered up in the name of progress or in the working out of History. The ambiguity of human existence necessitates that such actions be seen as failures, not valorized. Yet even in such instances, in fighting to maintain one’s own freedom in and through the fight for the freedom of others, the intertwining of subjectivities makes evident the possibility for something more than violence to exist between subjects and objects. For, as she notes in An Eye for an Eye, while our actions “always imply a failure, . . . this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.”465
Beauvoir recognizes that while the intertwining of freedoms provides the conditions for the possibility of violence, it simultaneously holds open the potential for recognition. How is this possible? Given that subjects are free and that the actions of one necessarily limits the action of another, how are relations with others not grounded in conflict possible? Beauvoir responds to this question by noting that in claiming that individuals are defined by their freedom, she is not forced to conclude that relations between freedoms are necessarily discordant. She notes that, “freedoms are
463 Ibid.
464 EA 98, PMA 142. 465 PHW 259.
not united or opposed,” but, rather, that they are separate.466 What is the distinction to be drawn herein between opposition and separation? Beauvoir seemingly is attempting to avoid the immediate assumption that the schism between freedoms, between consciousnesses, necessarily results in acts of hostility and domination. That is, she is trying to escape the kind of individualism enacted in She
Came To Stay and thus of charges of solipsism leveled at her work and at existentialism more
generally.467 Returning to her reading of the Phenomenology directly, Beauvoir notes how ‘Each consciousness,’ said Hegel, ‘seeks the death of the other.’ And indeed at every moment others are stealing the whole world away from me. The first moment is to hate them. But this hatred is naïve, and the desire immediately struggles against itself. If I were really everything there would be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. There would be nothing to possess, and I myself would be nothing. If he is reasonable, the young man immediately understands that by taking the world away from me, others also give it to me, since a thing is given to me only by the movement which snatches it from me.468
Being separate from other freedoms hence does not necessitate acts of violence and hostility, but neither does it discount such actions.
Beauvoir in this essay for the first time ventures to consider the potential for relationships developing that are not grounded in the conflict between self and other but rather in their
acknowledgement of each other as subjects. The example she provides is that of gratitude or
generosity. An act of generosity must by definition meet two conditions, two conditions that ensure, by definition, that it is an example of recognition. First, such acts must be free. Each assumes their actions as nothing more than “situations that will be new points of departure for others.”469 If not so entered into on the subject’s own accord, the act is not generous but rather at best is an instance of reciprocity, at worst a subtle form of coercion. There can be neither debt nor devotion at hand.
466As translated by Kruks, 1998, 47. 467 See for example, Nye, 1986, 106. 468 EA 70 – 71, PMA 101.
Nothing is owed and nothing deserved. Indeed, “Between what he has done for me and what I will do for him, there can be no measure.”470 For this reason, generosity cannot be repaid. Indeed, any such offerings, any such “gifts are not touching; they wound.”471 For they deny a second condition which acts of generosity must fulfill. To be generous not only necessitates the free action of a subject; it further requires the subject to see the other as he sees himself. “In enlightened, consenting gratitude,” or “lucid generosity” as Beauvoir describes it,
One must be capable of maintaining face to face these two freedoms that seem to exclude each other: the other’s freedom and mine. I must simultaneously grasp myself as object and as freedom and recognize my situation as founded by the other, while asserting my being beyond the situation.472
The self must grant to the other the same qualities he ascribes to himself. Generosity thus goes beyond acts of reciprocity involving not the taking of turns at being subject to being an example of recognition in the confrontation of subjects.
The novelty of Beauvoir’s project in Pyrrhus and Cinéas is twofold. First, she articulates the outline of the theory of subjectivity that informs and frames of her writing of She Came To Stay and her reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. She dares to identify the conditions for the possibility of freedom being not just voiced but enacted. In so doing, secondly, she conceives of relationships between consciousnesses that are defined not only nor necessarily by hostility and conflict but that give way to the recognition of subject by subject. However, while advancing on her earlier project in these important regards, Beauvoir nonetheless remains dissatisfied with this essay.
Her concerns about the essay are multiple. Firstly, the essay yet still too detached from the history and the particularities of the situation which gave rise to the questions concerning freedom and responsibility that had sparked its writing. Divorced of particularities the abstractions it entailed
470 PAC 123, PEC 324. 471 PAC 123, PEC 325. 472 PAC 123, PEC 325.
confounded rather than clarified the questions concerning responsibility for the other it takes up. Further, she found that she had not successfully escaped the kind of subjectivism or individualism that had pervaded her previous novel. As she describes it, in this essay
Coexistence appears as a sort of accident that each individual should somehow surmount; he should begin by hammering out his ‘project’ in a solitary state, and only then ask the mass of mankind to endorse its validity. In truth, society has been all about me from the day of my birth; it is in the bosom of that society and in my own close relationship with it, that all my personal decisions must be formed. My subjectivism was, inevitably, doubled up with a streak of idealism that deprived my speculations of all, or nearly all, their significance.473
What she had written of herein, the interdependence of freedoms, did not so much build the framework for recognition as it elucidated the way projects in which overlapped incidentally rather than showing how they revealed each other’s freedom necessarily.
With these criticisms in mind, Beauvoir turns to writing a new novel. Therein the abstract formulation of the problems raised in Pyrrhus and Cinéas give way to a more grounded or
contextualized consideration for the ethical issues which marked post-war France. More specifically, such generalized considerations of “What is my garden?” evolve into more detailed reflections on the question of violence and the nature (extent, dimensions, limitations) of responsibility. And she would therein take seriously what perhaps can best be understood as the difference between the revealing, the reciprocity and the recognition of freedoms. She would do so by having her new main character take up the challenge of determining how to live amidst others recognizing at one and the same time, that he is separate yet dependent upon others, acknowledging that he is responsible and yet not responsible for them. In so doing, she would revisit Hegel’s philosophy and further complicate her understanding of the problem of the other’s consciousness.