From the extremities of the human condition to existentialist morality: Ambiguity in Simone de Beauvoir (1944 to 1949)

• Grant number: 22/16556-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: August 01, 2023
• End date: July 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - Ethics
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Damon Santos Moutinho
• Grantee: Lucas Joaquim da Motta
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

It is about understanding the concept of ambiguity - that is, what lies behind the drama of the singular existence that is, however, situated with the other existences separated from each other - as a starting point for a better understanding of Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy, from which an existentialist approach to it can be developed through the author's publications in the 1940s: Pyrrhus and Kinea, For a moral of ambiguity and The second sex. Thus, it is necessary to highlight that, according to the proposed circumscription, the way in which Beauvoir claims the terms freedom and facticity, enacted in her own line of thought and constituting this ambiguity, will be evaluated to characterize what she describes as the possibility of situations being singularly and concretely lived through freedom: it is what the philosopher calls authentic conditions of life. Thus, the aim is: first, to understand what the author's existentialism consists of and the position that the concept of ambiguity occupies in Pyrrhus and Kinea and For a Moral of Ambiguity - books in which Beauvoir evokes the austerity of her existentialist morality - and how this elaboration is indicative of the fact that the situation of a singular existence, which is lived in the form of actions spontaneously intended for oneself and for others, can establish a link between it and the collective world: this is a front view of the "moral period" of Beauvoir's literary career, from her novels published in the decade in question. Second, to bring this ambiguity, under a dialectical analysis, to The Second Sex, in order to place how the particularity of the situations of each existence can be justified from an authentic sense to the freedoms; It is in the unfolding of his existentialist morality that the tension of ambiguity is experienced through the subjective and objective extremes of an existence and the way in which the category of the Other, of which woman is a part, is reduced to its facticity, which prevents her freedom from being realized as an undefined movement toward another, because, as such, man - belonging to the category of the Subject - operates himself as transcendence while woman remains in a state of repetition, of reducibility to her immanence. In this way, through ambiguity it will be understood how the situations experienced by subjectivities are fundamental factors for the constitution of these singularities concretely experienced. In effect, the idea discussed here, after the two itineraries exposed above, will be that: the assumption of ambiguity claims the reason why a subject can define itself as positive existence through the values and meanings apprehended by the world as it is unveiled; with the suspension of any hierarchy that can be established through the extremes of the situations of each existence, one of the most fundamental aspects of it is the fact that this existence is at the same time freedom and facticity, a subjectivity situated with the other existences, a subject for itself and an object for the other. Therefore, given that it is in the mentioned decade that Beauvoir attributes a moral value to her literary career, it is through this opening to a new philosophical inquiry into the human condition that it will be presented how ambiguity is one of the key ideas of the author's existentialism.