Simone de Beauvoir on Art, Science, Freedom, Busyness, and Why Happiness Is Our Moral Obligation

“The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

In her incisive inquiry into the intelligence of emotions, philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote: “Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning.” But the moral system itself — what comprises it in a philosophical sense, how it is enacted in practical terms, and what it aims at in the daily act of living — remains one of the most conflicted ambiguities within and between human beings.

Those elements of the moral machinery are what the great French existentialist philosopher and trailblazing feminist Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) examines in The Ethics of Ambiguity (public library) — the paradigm-shifting 1947 treatise that gave us Beauvoir on vitality, the measure of intelligence, and what freedom really means.

To wrest a graspable conception of morality, Beauvoir turns to art and science:

Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it; which does not prevent there being truths and errors, masterpieces and lemons, depending upon whether the discovery or the painting has or has not known how to win the adherence of human consciousnesses; this amounts to saying that failure, always ineluctable, is in certain cases spared and in others not.

For this reason, she suggests, success and failure bear no equivalence with right and wrong. If we are to seek an understanding of morality, the equivalence is to be found not in the outcomes of art and science but in their methods. She writes:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/42639

By User:Jean-no – Image:Breakdance oldschool.jpg, FAL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3175166

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/american-psychosis-trumpism-and-the-nightmare-of-history

This image is from the Los Angeles Review of Books

Insanity in individuals is somewhat rare. But in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

They have cut down the  old cherry tree
Where my cat used to climb and watch me.
Little black lady cat
On my old bike she sat.
Then knocked on the door for her tea.

I used to post letters near here
The cat would pretend to no fear.
But when I turned to go home
Faster than  sound she came
So  from the old porch she would leer.

All that is left it this stump
And the bike is well fit for the dump
The pillar box red is there
But my own use is rare.
I see  a small celandine clump

I walk through streets where once I walked with you
Everywhere I look  seems different now
I wring my hands and wonder what to do

I hate these feelings which are both old and new
I know that I should let them be somehow
I walk through streets where once I walked with you

Former losses  entered and they grew.
I must grieve but will not this allow
I wring my hands and wonder what to do

Melancholic states within my soul  now   brew
And hamper me from wielding my old plough
I shiver  in the  streets I walked with you

I must digest my losses  for their clue.
And act upon it  when the time is new.
I wring my hands and wonder what to do

When I grieve ,I  must find out  for who.
As long ago  they mended me with glue
I wander streets where once I walked with you
I wring my hands and wait to get my clue.

As if my  heart has roots   which have been torn
I need protection for my tender skin
I wait in  starless darkness for the dawn

My eyes are heavy and I am forlorn
I’m wounded  yet I’m willing to begin
Repair my  heart  whose roots  have been  so torn

My energy and purpose have both gone.
My skin  does not protrct;it is too thin
I wait in  starless darkness for the dawn

The world seems different now my love has gone
I have no loving  arms to lie within
Nor repair my  heart  whose roots  have been  so torn

It’s I who am  now different ,of love shorn.
A harlot who gives love to anyone
I wait in  starless darkness for the dawn

My eyes gape  like black holes bereft of sun
Shoot me,God, with your own devil’s gun
For my  heart has roots   which have been torn
I wait in  starless darkness  as holes yawn

https://youtu.be/8rGD0W9Yz54

Hello.what brings you here?
My feet doctor.
I have enough derision already.
Oh.dear.I have reduced vision too.
Are you hard of hearing?
No,my ears do it all by themselves.
You don’t understand.
I wear underpants but I have no standing in the community.
I’m a doctor.
Well,you could have fooled me.You have fooled me.
You are a complete nitwit.
What wit are you on about?
Nits!
Do you mean lice or knitting?
Oh,my God!
Are you enjoying a vision?
No,God is rarely on the television.
You need to get tuned in?
Shall I drop out first?
I’m tempted to spank you.
Well,I’ve always been a glutton for punishment.
It’s a prank.
A plank is quite useful for crossing mud.
Who is helping whom?
I don’t even know Hoom.Is he new here? I once read Hume.
This is hopeless…
Don’t give up……….. try a Samaritan…
Where are they?
Inside the handset.
No,I give in.Why am we here?
I have an idea……….
Oh, no……it’s too late.
For what?
Hush.. just listen……..
There’s a kind of hush, all over the world tonigh

He wanted some trifle
As he had an eyeful
She gave him his wishes
And he washed  the dishes.

He wanted another
So she phoned his mother..
Two trifles  each weekday
And three on a Sunday.

He was diabetic
And almost ascetic.
She was psychotic
And never quite got it.

He liked the great  sea shore
And sanded wood floors oh
She liked the true heather
Whatever the  weather.

They bought jars of bees’ honey
And spent more than their money.
The bees liked them more than
An egg loves a fry pan

Raspberry trifle
Is utterly delightful
With silver balls in the cream
It’s any man’s dream

How kind the air I breathed was when I walked
How  stuffy when I’m back inside the house
The place where ghosts of lost ones call  and stalk
How kind the air I breathed was when I walked
If only sheets and pillows learned to talk
And duvets wrote strange poems in language loose.
How kind the air I breathed was when I walked
How deadly it now seems inside the house

The afternoon is ended but the sky
Is lilac in the darkness where doves dwell
The neon lights of town are raised up high
The afternoon is ended at the sky
They  call to me, why did he need to die?
No poet nor priest  can own the words to tell
The afternoon is ended but the sky
Shows lilac in the darkness where love dwelled

The face that was familiar is no more.
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again
If ,by a chance, his life could be restored
It would affect me like the hidden chord
Which played, my own life force would go.
That one must live and one must die is plain
The face that was familiar is no more.
Yet in my dreams ,he is alive again

Time

https://www.loc.gov/poetry/interviews/wallylamb.html

“Many of the most important turning points in your characters’ lives are centered on trauma and loss. Do you think that the way people process these events is what defines them?

I don’t think people’s processing of trauma and loss necessarily defines them fully, but these surely influence the course of their lives. I was 12 years old when a dam collapsed at the northern end of my hometown, releasing millions of gallons of lake water that cut a path of death and destruction. Among the dead was a 27-year-old mother who drowned in the flood waters after helping rescue her three sons, ages four, two, and six months. I drew on that remembered local tragedy when I wrote We Are Water and, in the course of my research, became friends with those three little boys—who are now well-adjusted, middle-aged family men. Each has a successful career and a great sense of humor. Were these three brothers greatly impacted by the loss of their mother on that terrible night and the reality of having grown up without her? Certainly. But are they defined solely by tragedy and loss? No.

For the past 15 years, I have volunteered at a maximum-security women’s prison where I facilitate a writing program. Most of my students there had terrible things done to them as children and many have been convicted of having done terrible things. Some are serving life sentences and will die in prison. Yet each is a complicated equation not fully defined by the trauma she endured or the crime for which she has lost her freedom. In my novel The Hour I First Believed, Maureen Quirk, afflicted with PTSD and drug addiction after the Columbine trauma, must discover how to live a useful life in prison. In I Know This Much Is True, Dominick Birdsey must ride a roller coaster of emotional responses to his twin brother’s mental illness. In We Are Water, Andrew Oh must struggle with the grim truth that he killed a man in a rage and has not been caught. Should he keep his dark secret or reveal it? In my fiction, I’m interested in examining and depicting not only the ways in which trauma and loss derail the lives we may have imagined or planned, but also, and more importantly, how our responses to these can attest to the resilience of the human spirit. Thankfully, I have not had to endure the tragedies that befall my characters. But what we share in common is this: we are imperfect people living less-than-perfect lives yet trying to become better people.

Has your work with the female inmates of the York Correctional Institution changed the way you write your female characters? If so, how?

I grew up with older sisters and older girl cousins who lived next door. The only other boy on McKinley Avenue was a rock- and snowball-thrower named Vito, which didn’t exactly make him great playmate material. A loner, I frequently was thrust into the role of observer of my sisters’ and cousins’ exotic games of pretend—not a bad perspective for someone who will grow up and become a fiction writer. The girls were cowgirls and stagecoach robbers one day, Amazons in sarongs (old curtains) the next, harem girls the day after that. In the latter fantasy, I was enlisted to play the minor role of a sultan named Kingy Boy, which required me to sit cross-legged on the floor with a bath towel wrapped around my head turban-style and say things like “Peel me a grape” while they danced and undulated around me. All this to say that, from an early age, I became immune to the spell of “the feminine mystique.” I’ve always felt comfortable among, sympathetic toward, and amused by females, and I am aligned with and supportive of the tenets of feminism. This has served me in my interactions with the women of York Prison and my goals for them as writers.

If I have taught my incarcerated students a thing or two about how to write more effectively, they have taught me a number of things, minor and major, about life—everything from how to talk “street” and how to cook an English muffin pizza with a plastic bag and a hair dryer to how to use humor, art, writing, and sharing as survival tools in a harsh and institutionally hostile environment.

I reject the supposition that men are marooned on Mars and women on Venus, and that each gender, therefore, is doomed never to understand the other. That rejection has allowed the women of York Correctional Institution to give me the gift of their trust. Whenever they hand me writing in which they expose the hard truths and long-buried secrets of their pasts, or they read their highly personal pieces aloud to the group for the purpose of getting feedback, I am an eye- and ear-witness to acts of courage and generosity. Perhaps that’s the most impactful thing these students have taught me about writing and life: that taking risks, no matter how risk-averse one may be, will pay dividends in ways you might never have imagined.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6324/aharon-appelfeld-the-art-of-fiction-no-224-aharon-appelfeld

“In 1941, when Appelfeld was nine years old, the Romanian army invaded his home village of Jadova, near Czernowitz. His mother and grandmother were shot. Appelfeld and his father escaped but were soon rounded up and marched, over two months, to the Transnistria concentration camps, where they were separated. Once again Appelfeld escaped. He spent the next two years hiding in the forest, doing odd jobs for a group of prostitutes and thieves. When the Soviet army arrived, in 1944, he joined them as a kitchen boy and eventually made his way, via Italy and Yugoslavia, to Israel. In 1960, he discovered that his father had also survived and come to Israel, and the two were reunited.

The story of Appelfeld’s survival is told in his memoir, The Story of a Life (1999). The war years have also provided material for the majority of his novels, including The Age of Wonders (1978), Tzili (1983), and the book for which he is best known abroad, Badenheim 1939 (1975).

—Alain Elkann

INTERVIEWER

So you come here to work at Ticho House twice a week?

APPELFELD

Yes. I come here somewhere around ten or eleven. I stay here for two or three hours and then I go home. It’s a routine. Generally, when we say routine, it sounds bad, but routine is important.

INTERVIEWER

You write longhand. How many pages per day?

APPELFELD

One page, sometimes half a page, sometimes one and a half pages. I stop when I am tired—when I do not see more, when I do not hear more.

INTERVIEWER

Then you go home and read what you’ve done?

APPELFELD

Yes, in the late afternoon, after I have had my lunch, I spend another two hours on the same pages, then I leave it. I used to type them. I liked to type them very much. Suddenly you see there is something you have done. It was a joy. But now a woman comes to my house and I dictate. My old typewriter doesn’t work anymore.

INTERVIEWER

You don’t use the computer?

APPELFELD

No, I like the paper. Writing, like every art, is a sensual art. You have to touch it, you have to feel it, to correct, again to correct, always to correct.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/15/ts-eliot-festival-donmar-jeanette-winterson

“Eliot says: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” That, for him, was not the reality of dingy streets and gas fires, typists and tinned food, though he writes about those things so well, but the vast reality of two quite different invisible worlds – “the heavy burden of the growing soul” (Animula), and what might be called the “shaft of sunlight” (Four Quartets), a spiritual illumination that became, for Eliot, a journey towards God.

For Eliot, the 3D world where we live, that which he calls in The Waste Land the “unreal city”, is a beguiling or distressing distraction from facing life head on, facing ourselves as we are – and ultimately, facing God. He is tough, he refuses consolation, “Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.””