228 | Skye Cleary on Existentialism and Authenticity

0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Existentialism has an interesting place in philosophy and the history of philosophy. Many of you might know that modern Western philosophy can often be divided very roughly into two parts. There's sort of the analytic tradition with logic and mathematics and epistemology and metaphysics and a scientific outlook, then there is the continental tradition, which is more about the human side of things, reading texts, interpreting things. More philosophy as literature than philosophy as science. And that classification, existentialism is absolutely on the continental side of things. The image that gets conjured up is people in France sitting around a cafe table, either drinking coffee or cocktail, smoking cigarettes, talking about the meaning of life, right? But in some ways, existentialism is a response, a taking seriously to and of the scientific view of the world.

0:01:01.9 Sean: The existentialism grew out of concerns on the part of people like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky that the world was becoming disenchanted, that we didn't have the rules that had been handed down by God anymore. We had to find meaning for ourselves. There's a motto in existentialism that existence precedes essence. In other words, things exist, that's what actually is out there in the world, and the essence of a thing, the thing that makes a rock a rock or a person a person, in some way, these are categories that we human beings attached to them, which is actually a very modern scientific way of thinking about things. It's very in tune with poetic naturalism, I should say. So, today we're gonna talk about existentialism with Skye Cleary, who is an expert in the subject and the author of a new book, How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment.

0:01:58.3 Sean: The idea being, alright, let's confront this world that does not have these objective guidances from the outside, it's we human beings in the universe that are in charge of things, and in particular, it is we individuals who are in charge of creating our own lives. Yes, it is true, we are made of particles and fields, or we are made of cells and neurons and whatever, but as human beings, as agents, even though we have predilections and preferences and intuitions, we also have the ability to reflect on them to decide to change them, to create who we are ourselves, to be true to ourselves by rebelling against standardized norms and expectations of the rest of the world. That's what it means to be authentic.

0:02:46.6 Sean: And I think with many philosophies that try to talk about the meaning of life and how to be a good person, it's not science or math, at the end of the day, it's not something that is right or wrong, and that's the whole story. It's a question of, can we find something useful in it, can we be inspired or be provoked to think about things in a new way. And by that standard... A new and productive way, let's say, by that standard, I think it's absolutely interesting to talk about this subject. Beauvoir was famous for many reasons, not just being existentialist, but for being an extremely important feminist philosopher, especially at a time when that was not necessarily the popular position there. And there's a lot for us to learn by thinking about how she thought about life and the mistakes that she made as well as the insights that she had, so let's go.

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0:03:55.7 Sean: Skye Cleary, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:57.8 Skye Cleary: Thank you, Sean. It's great to be here.

0:04:00.8 Sean: We're gonna talk about primarily Simone de Beauvoir. You've written a book about her and sort of updated some of her thoughts to the modern world with your own thoughts, but of course, she's very much in this existentialist tradition. I thought that we should set the stage a little bit about existentialism. It's clearly a very influential school of philosophy, but also maybe not one that is being championed actively by a majority of people in the academy right now. There's an interesting history there clearly. Where did it come from? There were precursors to existentialism. Maybe you should start there.

0:04:34.4 Skye: Yeah, it has a long history. And you're right, some people do dismiss it as sort of a mood of the 20th century, but there are still existential questions that keep popping up, people are still asking questions about, why are we here? What are we doing? What should we do? How do we get along with other people? These are all very solid existential questions, and this is one of the reasons why people like me and many others are still writing books about existentialism all these years later. And so just to put it in a little historical context as you were asking about, existentialism grew out of romanticism. And so we have the age of enlightenment where science was flourishing and was answering lots of questions about how the world works, but romanticism said, well, what about things like emotions, and love, and fun, and creativity, and all these other sorts of questions that science wasn't able to answer.

0:06:02.3 Skye: Then the romanticism also had a spiritual angle to it, but existentialism, kinda some of the, I guess, precursors or grandfathers of existentialism, where people like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. And Kierkegaard was writing in rebellion against philosophers like Hegel and Kant, who were very abstract and thinking about wanting to create systems to explain how the world works from a philosophical perspective, whereas Kierkegaard was much more interested in passion and how that relates to acting ethically in the world and how that relates to religion. And then of course Friedrich Nietzsche was also similar to Kierkegaard, was very much in rebellion against all those traditional philosophies and religion too. And Nietzsche is famous for saying, well, God is dead. But we have killed him. That full quote there.

0:07:07.8 Skye: And he was saying, religion used to be the primary way that people would organize their world and understand meaning in their lives. But now that science came along and explains a lot about the world, we still act with religious underpinnings, particularly, I guess Christian commandments of be nice and do not kill thy neighbor and things like that. [chuckle] And so Nietzsche was saying, well, we're still operating in a world based on these kind of religious values, but so few people really believe in religion anymore. And so he was questioning, which is one of the reasons he wrote in aphorisms and stuff, because he was challenging people. And so the existential philosophers grew from that tradition.

0:08:00.2 Skye: And they became particularly popular around the 1940s, after two world wars when people were... It was a particularly tumultuous period in history. And people were asking questions like, well faced with NAZI occupation of France. And so particularly Beauvoir and Sartre were asking, okay, well, if you're being tortured and you have this choice as to whether tell the torturers where your friends are or don't tell them and risk death, these are really intense choices that we're making, and these aren't choices that necessarily science or religion can answer. And so this is one of the reasons why existentialism flourish, because they were talking about choices, freedom, anxiety, responsibility and authenticity.

0:09:04.7 Sean: That's a very interesting answer because it's a very positive answer starting with romantics and everything. Like usually I hear that existentialism grew out of this dread and worry that we had, like you said about Nietzsche, lost our objective stances or foundations of moralities. So is it right to say the existentialists fought against that by just buying into it? Literally like, yes, there isn't any objective stands for morality or meaning out there, therefore we can create it ourselves.

0:09:36.6 Skye: Yeah, they definitely built on Nietzsche. And yeah, it does tend to be portrayed as a gloomy philosophy, partly because, Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most, pretty much the most famous existential philosopher. And he does take a little bit more of a gloomy view of human nature. Whereas I think my more positive interpretation comes from Beauvoir, who argued pretty heavily that existentialism isn't all about doom and gloom. It's a very positive philosophy because it's all about seizing control of what we can. She has some, like a couple of stoic roots in there, I think, like by the dichotomy of control, but acknowledging... She calls it facticity and transcendence. So the facticity, they're the facts of our lives.

0:10:36.0 Skye: They're the things we can't change. Like we can't change that we were born. We can't change who our parents are. We can't change the situations that we came into. We can't change the bodies we were born with, although there are some ways that we can change that now [chuckle] but... And her point was trying to acknowledge those facts of our existence, but where existentialism comes in is in that window of freedom where we can overcome our facticity, where we can transcend beyond the given. And that sort of transcending in ways that we choose is where authenticity comes in.

0:11:22.6 Sean: So the transcending and the choosing and the freedom. I do wonder how this fits in with modern science. I get the impression that existentialists were pro-science. They weren't trying to resist some of that. And I personally, philosophically, am a compatiblist about free will and so forth. But if we brought Robert Sapolsky in here, the neuroscientist who was a previous guest on the podcast, he'd be like, what do you mean making choices? These are all just neurons in your brain. They were trained by evolution and everything. Is that perspective in any way undermining the existential point of view?

0:12:01.5 Skye: I think it's raising questions about it, but existentialism raises questions for science as well. So, not all neuroscientists are deterministic in that way. And there does seem to be research to suggest that we can override our impulses. And there are choices that we can make in life. And so existentialism is more, I guess in sync with that kind of view. Like, yes, we have brains, they're part of our facticity, and we have genes also part of our facticity. But what's interesting for the existentialists, and again, this is part of the positive perspective, is what's interesting is to figure out where that window of freedom is, to figure out where we can exercise our free will, where we can make choices in our lives. And there's a lot of literature on the plasticity of our brains as well, and how we can retrain them to... Reorient our brains and learn new skills and learn to do new things and that's very compatible with existential philosophy.

0:13:18.0 Sean: Yeah. Again, I think I'm on your side here, but I'm just, I've heard a lot of alternative perspectives that I know are gonna get riled up by this kind of discourse, because what they're gonna ask is who is the "we" that are changing our minds? Like certainly our minds do change, is there an extent to which we can say we are changing our minds rather than our minds got changed? I think the answer is yes. And I think that that's compatible with existentialism, do they have a take on that? Or is that just not considered a central question?

0:13:54.9 Skye: So I think the way I wanna answer this is with the idea that we as humans are creative nothings. So what I mean by that is that there's no necessarily fixed self that we will always be referring back to, but rather we are creative beings who make choices, who overcome those facts of our lives, who can orient ourselves in new ways, who can recreate our being. And so what the existentialists focus on is that kind of creative aspect of our being. And so this is part of the point of Jean-Paul Sartre's most famous work, Being and Nothingness. He's like, "Yes, we as humans, we exist. We are this being, we have this meat suit, [laughter] but we are also nothingness."

0:15:00.8 Skye: In the sense that whether some of our past actions, we are these beings who are making choices now, and we're also beings who are setting intentions about where we want our lives to go. And that sort of trajectory is never completed until death. But that gap between who we are now, and that collection of choices that we've made about ourselves and the way society, I guess, has shaped us and how genetics and everything else has shaped who we are now. That gap between our present state and the future and death, that space is nothingness, that's what he calls like a not yet or a lack. And the way we project ourselves into that future is the space of freedom, the space of creativity, the space of choice making.

0:15:53.6 Sean: Existentialists talk about death a lot more than most philosophers do. Is that safe to say? [laughter]

0:16:00.0 Skye: They do. Yeah, they do. [laughter] It's funny that existentialists have a reputation for being atheists, but some of them weren't, some of them were religious, like Kierkegaard. But what they... The key point about death and why it's so important is that death kind of puts a hard stop on our lives, and even for the atheist philosophers, it doesn't even matter what happens after death. What death means is that there's no more of this particular life and no more of our existence in this earth. And what they thought was that that sort of hard stop meant that every moment is valuable. All the choices we make have consequences for our lives and for other people's lives. And so that kind of limit they thought should help us to appreciate life in all its glory right now.

0:17:10.7 Sean: Yeah. No, I'm actually a big believer that we don't talk about death enough. So to me, this is one of the great points in the favor of existentialists. I actually did... One of the very first podcasts I did was with Megan Rosenblum about the death positive movement that we should face up to death a lot more explicitly and plan for it, so that's good for them. So, okay with that sort of groundwork out of the way, let's... And again, before getting directly into de Beauvoir specifically... By the way, is her last name Beauvoir, or de Beauvoir?

0:17:44.0 Skye: So the current standard is to say Beauvoir.

0:17:49.5 Sean: Beauvoir.

0:17:50.0 Skye: Without the de, and there's... And so that's kind of, that's the trend at the moment.

0:17:55.8 Sean: I would like to be trendy, so I'll do that. Okay, good. [laughter] So maybe just get on the table, there are some positive claims that come from existentialism, some central ideas around which the discussion is based, and they're in your book. So one of them, which I quite like, even though it's one of those things where it makes no sense when I first hear it, I'd have to think about it, is existence precedes essence. Have I got that right? Tell us what that means.

0:18:22.0 Skye: You have got it right. And if you had to sum up existentialism in three words, that would be it. [laughter] And the idea is related to what we've already talked about so far is that the existential philosophers thought that we're thrown into the world, thrown-ness is kind of Heideggerian word that a lot of the philosophers came to embrace. So we're thrown into the world, we don't choose to be here. But once we do, it's up to us to create our essence, so we're not born with a soul, we're not born with a fixed thing, fixed trajectory inside of us, but we are creative beings. And to live an authentic life is to create our essence in ways that we choose, but while acknowledging that we live in a society and we coexist with other people.

0:19:22.4 Sean: So good. So if I... And like I said, I love this little encapsulation. I think it's one of those things that is too pithy to be understandable without the extra explanation, [chuckle] after the fact, but I like the claim that is being made. I mean, there are facts, there is existence, like you say, but who we are in some grander sense, how we think of ourselves, how we would go about describing ourselves in some sense comes later. Like, it's very much fits into an idea that there's a microscopic, comprehensive, physical view of reality, and then there's a higher level description that we use at the human level, right? I mean, they were inventing emergence before physicists use those words.

0:20:05.3 Skye: Yeah, definitely. And when I say we're creating our essence, or it's up to us to create our essence. I mean, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness was very much about radical freedom. And yes we're always gonna come up against obstacles, but it's our choice whether to push ourselves up against those obstacles or to choose not to [chuckle] go climb that mountain, or to choose to take a different path. But he kind of moderated his views later. And I think this was also because of Beauvoir's influence. And Beauvoir was much more kind of sympathetic or realistic, depending on how you look at it. [laughter] Two, like the pressures that we all face.

0:20:51.3 Skye: Not all of us can just go out in the world and do whatever we want, and we actually shouldn't go out and do whatever we want because there are other people there and our actions have consequences. And so she was very much acknowledging that there are social, economic, historical, I guess limitations on how we can exercise our freedom. And one of the words that people are using to describe this is sedimentation. And so Beauvoir's idea is that we grow up and we sort of gather, something like a river. You know, we go through life and we gather a lot of sediment that shapes who we become, like Jean-Paul Sartre's idea of us being the sum of our actions.

0:21:40.7 Skye: Though all those actions kind of shape who we are today, but it's not... And there are so many different, different influences on us pushing and pulling us in different directions. Like you said, maybe there are brain pathways and stuff that are fixed. But it's kind of depressing I think for me and for the existential philosophers to think that, oh, we're just these blind bodies going through life. And this is one of the reasons I really like existentialism because it does open up that window of freedom. It does say, yeah sure, there's all these things, all these pressures on us, but what's important is looking for what we can choose, looking for ways we can take control over our lives and become the kind of people we wanna be.

0:22:37.7 Sean: I like the idea of sedimentation. It reminds me of recently... And I forget the source, I'm very sorry, but I was reading about how to handle grief, like when something very terrible happens to you. And the idea is not that you get over it, but that it becomes part of you. And you don't forget the terrible thing that happened, but you bring it into who you are and never let it go, but still function as a person. Is that a related? I didn't associate that with existentialism, but it sounds like maybe it fits in.

0:23:10.1 Skye: Yeah, it does sound like it fits in. I don't know. Kieran Setiya has written a book about this recently. I think it's called Life is Tough, and he also talks about grief, and not necessarily from an existential perspective although there are existential elements in there. But yeah, I mean, you can't change that someone you love has died. That's part of who you are, that's part of your experiences. And I think the... Well, at least Simone de Beauvoir would argue that that's an important part of... That becomes an important part of our existence. And a funny story. Okay, not so funny, but an interesting story between Beauvoir and Sartre. At some point Beauvoir's mother died and Beauvoir was really sad about it and she was crying and she was partners with Jean-Paul Sartre.

0:24:11.8 Skye: But tears really annoyed Jean-Paul Sartre and so Beauvoir started to take medication so that she would stop crying in Jean-Paul Sartre's presence, because Jean-Paul Sartre was of the view that emotions are choices, emotions are strategies for coping in the world. And so I'm much... So even the existential philosophers disagreed on a lot of this sort of thing, of course, as philosophers do. But I think Beauvoir was much more spot on in this realm, in that it's okay to show emotions. It's okay to live and feel all the feels throughout life. And it's important to move on at some point and not to get stuck in that space, but it's still important to recognize that experience as part of our facticity and still to, you know, when it's time to think more about transcending and stretching ourselves forward again.

0:25:18.3 Sean: Well, that leads very well into the other two pillars of existentialism. I just invented these as the pillars of existentialism. Sorry about that. But the words that I keep hearing, freedom is obviously one of them, but we've talked about that, the crucial aspect there. And the other is authenticity, which you've already used. It's in the title of your book, clearly it was very important. So what does it mean in this particular context?

0:25:43.4 Skye: So the way I define authenticity is that it's a process of creating your essence. So a couple of things there. First of all, authenticity is a process. Often we hear people talking about authenticity or people say, oh yeah, I'm really authentic. But for the existential philosophers, authenticity isn't like a certificate you can hang on your wall. And like I'm authentic now. I've done it. I have found that gem or that blueprint in my soul, and now I have got it, and now I can just listen to that thing and it'll tell me what to do and it'll tell me what's gonna make me happy. So, no, for the existential philosophers, authenticity is, it's a creative process. It's embracing our freedom, transcending, making choices about who we wanna become.

0:26:36.2 Skye: And it relates back to what we were talking about before. So authenticity is a process of creating your essence. And so it's that essence isn't something we're born with, it's something that we create as we go through life and as we build up that sediment and drag along our past, like a ball and chain behind us. But it's a very liberating way to look at it I think. Look at authenticity because it means, okay, maybe you haven't made such authentic choices in your past, but it's never too late. We can always start thinking about our space of freedom and who we wanna become right now. And the other thing I like about...

0:27:24.4 Skye: This is particularly Beauvoir's conformulation of authenticity, is that she's not really telling us how to be authentic specifically, even though at the title of my book is How to be Authentic, that's a little bit tongue in cheek. [laughter] What I'm saying is that, there's a way that there are these words that we're talking about, freedom, choice, facticity, transcendence, authenticity, and understanding these frameworks and these ideas is a way of raising our consciousness to understand what's authentic for us. But authenticity is actually something that each of us needs to figure out on our own. And so Beauvoir really is, she's just sharing some kind of guidelines and important things to keep in mind.

0:28:11.1 Sean: So I guess I buy the idea that we're creating our own essences, I think that's genius. I love it. But there seems to be an implication that we could do that inauthentically. That some processes of creating who we are are fake, inauthentic, whatever you wanna call it. What is the difference if we're certainly creating our own essences, how do we know that we're doing it authentically versus some other way?

0:28:36.8 Skye: Yeah, this is a good question. And inauthenticity or what the existential is called bad faith was a big challenge. And the main I guess criteria for choosing things authentically as opposed to inauthentically is being lucid about what you're doing. Trying to understand whether it's you choosing or whether you're just doing things because other people are pressuring you into it. Are you getting married because you genuinely wanna get married? Or are you doing it just because it's what your family and society expects of you and you're being pressured into it? And it's really hard to tell sometimes whether they're acting authentically or inauthentically and you know what? And sometimes we're often actually, we're making choices almost pre-reflectively.

0:29:33.7 Skye: And it's not like we can stop every time we have to make a choice and say, oh, is this authentic or inauthentic? No, I mean, we've gotta live. And Boaz's point was that sometimes we don't know if the choice we made was consistent with who we wanna be until we've actually leapt into the choice. And until we've actually done the thing and figured out, oh, actually, that didn't have the consequences I intended. Because none of us can predict the future. And although we can imagine what certain consequences might be, but often we make mistakes. Often there are unintended consequences, and so often we can only really understand whether something was aligned with what we wanted to do after the fact.

0:30:19.9 Skye: And so her philosophy is liberating because it incorporates the importance of those mistakes of learning from what we've done in the past. And it incorporates a mode of reflection on big choices and especially the existential leaps, which are those big, meaningful, important choices that are virtually impossible to reverse. And this is why, and this, the existential leap is one of kierkegaard's terms originally. And his point was that, yeah, the existential leap is such a leap because we can't always know where we're gonna land after we jump. But our being, our essence is defined by making those leaps. And if we have to, we adjust, but we are not gonna develop as a human by just staying stagnant and not making any meaningful decisions in our life.

0:31:30.2 Sean: So authenticity seems to be related to honesty or maybe just self honesty, the idea that there's an alignment between our true inner desires and what we're stating to the rest of the world is why we're doing something. Is that right?

0:31:43.4 Skye: I mean, honesty and self honesty is definitely a part of it. But I mean, and even the existential philosophers disagreed on this. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre would say that, it's important to be honest with yourself, but being honest with other people is a whole different story. [laughter] But I think being... Yeah, and I think honesty with yourself, or I mean, being reflective about who you are and who you've become and the choices you've made in the past and reflecting about what you wanna do with your life, that kind of lucidity. And Albert Camus talked about lucidity more. And I think lucidity is probably more a term that Beauvoir uses as well. Trying to be as lucid as possible about our situations, being as lucid as possible about the different kind of pressures on us, and making choices with that lucidity. But also while recognizing we are not always gonna have full information about any situation. But all we can do is just try and think and try and be lucid about who we are and where we're going.

0:33:09.2 Sean: So modern philosophy is often roughly divided into analytic and continental, at least in the English speaking or some European centered world. And existentialism firmly, I would say in the continental camp, the continental philosophy, is more about how we live our lives and things like that. Analytic philosophy is more proving theorems and logic. [laughter] But I get the impression that modern continental philosophy in the post-modern era would be a little bit more skeptical of authenticity. Right? They'd be a little bit more, or at least there's more room in there for saying, well, look, sometimes we perform. We are inauthentic, we put on masks. We are not expressing our true inner self. And that's okay. I'm sure I'm vastly oversimplifying things, but I don't know, is that a fair reading or is the existentialists gonna argue against that? Like, no, you've gone too far.

0:34:05.1 Skye: No, I don't think that... I think what the existentials would say is, okay, first of all, they would say, we're not telling you, you have to be authentic. We're telling you that life can be richer, deeper, more fulfilling if you do consider orienting your life in authentic ways. And in fact, Jean-Paul Sartre said specifically, I'm not authentic. I'm just pointing the way for others. And also authenticity isn't something that's necessarily, I could say, "Hey, Sean, you are not being authentic right now." Like, that's not for me to judge. Authenticity is something for each of us to assess on our own, through being lucid about our situations and through reflecting. And so I can say, "Oh, Sean thank you for being open about your experiences or something." But it would be meaningless for me to judge you as to whether you are being authentic or not, 'cause only we can do that.

0:35:14.5 Skye: I can catch you in a lie or something, but that's more about honesty, not about authenticity. But back to your point about continental philosophy and analytical philosophy. Yeah, you're spot on that continental philosophy tend, especially existentialism tends to be more interested in the real world and... Sorry, the real world. How to live. When I say real world, I mean less abstract. And quick story that you may have already heard. But for listeners who haven't heard one of my favorite stories is about the birth of existentialism. When Beauvoir and Sartre had finished studying at the Sorbonne, and they were out drinking at a bar, and their friend Raymond Aaron came and joined them. And Raymond Aaron had just been learning about phenomenology, which is one of Husserl, Edmund Husserl kind of was a phenomenologist. And so he'd been learning about this, and Raymond Aaron said to Beauvoir and Sartre, if you are a phenomenologist, you could make a philosophy out of that apricot cocktail you're drinking. And Sartre was like, wow, okay.

0:36:35.1 Skye: He said something like, finally there is philosophy. Because what they'd been learning about were all these very abstract kind of system building philosophies that seem so remote from everyday living. And so what excited Beauvoir and Sartre was this idea that, okay, yes, you could think about an apricot cocktail or think about your personal experiences or love relationships and analyze those things philosophically. So that was what was exciting for them. And Beauvoir also said in one of her memoirs that she had no interest in building a philosophical system to explain the world, but she was more interested in what obsessive tendencies lead people to want to build kind of big systems in life. But she was more interested in kind of, I think she said practical solutions and everyday problems. Which is one of the reasons that she and many of the other existential philosophers wrote novels to kind of play with these different situations and ways of being. And it's also why Beauvoir wrote memoirs and published her letters and diaries.

0:37:52.0 Sean: Okay two things. First, very quickly, apricot cocktails sound terrible. That just sounds like disgusting, and I'm very sad that would be what they were drinking. But secondly you've given us a great segue into what I wanted to talk about next was more about the facticity or sedimentary history of Simone de Beauvoir herself. I mean, part of your book is using... You're trying to say some things that are true, but you're certainly using this one person's life and work as a lens through which to do it. And she had quite a life. So maybe tell some of the listeners about where she came from and why she was so important.

0:38:29.7 Skye: Yeah, sure. Okay. I'll take your point about apricot cocktails. Not... I haven't really had one before, but I've had cocktails with fruity stuff in them and they were good. So, I don't know, we'll see.

[laughter]

0:38:41.4 Sean: Next time, next time I'm in New York.

0:38:44.2 Skye: Yeah. So Simone de Beauvoir, she was... Basic stuff. Born in like 1908, died in 1986. She grew up in Paris. She was born into a family that had been wealthy at some point, but had lost sort of their wealth by the time she was a child. And this is important for Beauvoir's life because at the time in the early 1900s, as a woman, you were defined by who you were married to, really. And Beauvoir because she didn't have a dowry, she couldn't get married. Or at least not married to someone of sufficient social standing. So, from a very early age, she was expected to go and work, and as she grew up, she had other friends who were kind of being groomed for marriage, and she was so grateful that she wasn't in that same situation because if she had to go and work, she had a bit more freedom, not complete freedom, because careers for women at that time were fairly limited.

0:40:01.4 Skye: And in fact, she came out, well, Beauvoir came out, a book was published by Simone de Beauvoir just in the last year or two called The Inseparables. And it was an unpublished manuscript that she wrote about her childhood friendship and the torment that one of her best friends went through in being prepared for marriage. So yeah, interesting side note. And so Beauvoir went to study at the Sorbonne University. She hadn't had the same kind of high school education as her male counterparts like Jean-Paul Sartre, but she was I think the youngest person ever to go to the Sorbonne Philosophy Program. And she was also I think the eighth woman ever to graduate from that program. So she was very special, she was very intelligent and she could hold her own with the men who also became famous philosophers, including people like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others.

0:41:13.8 Skye: And yeah. And so it was at the Sorbonne where she met Jean-Paul Sartre and they fell in love, but they didn't have a... Well, from the very beginning they wanted to give each other plenty of freedom, so they sort of... They talked briefly about marriage, but they're like, no, let's make sure that we're both free to fall in love with other people and not just have sex with other people because just being free to sleep around is kind of a cheap use of freedom, but they're like, no, let's be more ambitious and give each other the freedom to actually fall in love with other people, which of course comes with a lot of other issues and there are a lot of jealousies and a lot of different problems. But yeah, but back to Beauvoir.

0:42:08.2 Sean: But they tried to walk the walk. Right?

0:42:09.7 Skye: They what?

0:42:10.2 Sean: They tried to live up to their... They tried to walk the walk. They tried to live up to the philosophy they were developing.

0:42:16.4 Skye: They did and what's also interesting about that is, yeah, so they tried to give each other freedom, like embrace freedom and live as well as... With as much vivacity as they could and not be kind of dragged down by bourgeois institutions and bourgeois values and to be locked into marriage. But with their experiences in involving other people, one of the big issues was that people would get hurt along the way and sometimes hurt very deeply. And it's interesting the way Beauvoir and Sartre kind of handled that and negotiated their responsibility. Well, I say negotiated, I mean, I guess discussed their responsibility because fine, she and... Beauvoir and Sartre had made this pact to treat each other as primary like as the most important relationship in each other's lives and then other people were kind of secondary or contingent, but those other people weren't existential philosophers.

[laughter]

0:43:32.0 Skye: And so Beauvoir, I guess later, and she did write in a letter and in some of her memoirs that she felt later that they were responsible for a lot of the hurt and she did come to a bit of a reckoning in a way that Jean-Paul Sartre doesn't seem to have done in the same way. And one of the questions that people sometimes bring up and that I think about and I talk about this in my book is that if Beauvoir and Sartre agreed to that relationship as primary in each other's lives, then even that limits their freedom to have other relationships that might have, might become so important that they do challenge that, that sort of primary status of one another.

0:44:25.9 Skye: And especially for I think Simone de Beauvoir, because... And even Jean-Paul Sartre. Yes, they were very interested in freedom, but also they emphasized how important responsibility is and that includes responsibility to other people. Because if you just unrestrain freedom, then that sort of devolves into hedonism or egoism and that's not what existentialism is, that's... And it's the responsibility piece that they emphasise because they wanted to create a philosophy that does acknowledge that we have relationships and debts to other people.

0:45:09.4 Sean: I mean, maybe it's a cautionary tale or at least... Not a cautionary tale, I guess... Let's be totally unfair, was their relationship a success overall?

0:45:25.4 Skye: Well, they would say... They said it was.

0:45:28.2 Sean: They said it was.

0:45:29.0 Skye: And they said explicitly it was. They both did and so I am reluctant to judge whether their relationship was a success or not. I'm like, okay, that's up to them. They chose that. They freely chose it. But also I want to make clear that just because you're taking on existential principles or kind of studying existential philosophy to be... Okay, I was gonna say to be an existentialist but no, because you can't... Because their idea is that we're always growing and transcending and so to box ourselves into a role or a label is problematic. But I want to say that even if you orient yourself in existentially authentic ways it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have an open relationship at all.

0:46:23.6 Sean: Sure, okay.

0:46:24.5 Skye: What it means is that you are, that you... Even Beauvoir talked in The Second Sex about how an authentic marriage is possible if two people come together and are really lucid about what they're agreeing to and don't try and drag each other down into these traditional patriarchal roles with the women doing most of the home, housework and men going off to be breadwinners. And as long as people can come together and agree to terms of the relationship themselves on their own terms, then you can still have a monogamous even marriage under those terms. So, yeah, and Beauvoir also pointed out, she's like, don't take me as a role model. I'm choosing my authentic path, I'm orienting my life in authentic ways, but that doesn't mean for you to be authentic you need to orient your life in the same ways. You've got to work it out for yourself.

0:47:29.6 Sean: Well, taking that to its extreme... I mean, I take the point about just falling in with traditional gender roles. That's sort of arguably not the most authentic thing to do. You're just doing what society tells you to do. But there has to be a space for, even if it's a tiny number of people, some couples want the traditional gender roles, right? That's their authentic desire. And then the tricky part would be making sure that it is their authentic desire and not that they're just folding in the face of societal pressure.

0:48:02.0 Skye: Yeah, absolutely. And I think Beauvoir's point was that we are not going to know if that would be your authentic choice until you truly have a choice that you can make with that. And the way society is now, especially in the US, so many people, we're channeled into the path of marriage. There are so many tax benefits and health insurance benefits and perks to getting married. It's like the society is built for us to channel us into these sort of paths. And so all these sort of pressures and structures around us do distract us from what might otherwise be an authentic choice. And how can you make a purely authentic choice if the odds are weighed so heavily in one direction. And so, yeah, Beauvoir was, her point was like it's important to actually be able to make a free and fair choice. And then you are gonna know that you're choosing that because you truly want it, and not just because you get a whole lot of perks from doing that.

0:49:13.4 Sean: Well, you mentioned The Second Sex. I mean, maybe to tell people who are not familiar with that book in particular, probably her most famous book, right? I mean, by being a woman, by experiencing how women were treated, this gave Beauvoir a special angle on existential philosophy that is still very, very resonant today.

0:49:34.2 Skye: Yeah. It is still resonant. And yeah, so she wrote it in... Well, she published it in 1949. And it's really all about how femininity and masculinity are regulated in our... Well, in French society, but also in our society too. And this is why it's still so relevant, because these themes are, we still see these themes coming up. And her point was that policing these norms about what women are supposed to do and what men are supposed to do limits all of us. And what her goal was, was for all of us to be able to start to become authentic, to create ourselves on our own terms. But the problem is there are all these structures and norms of society and tradition that will punish us if we don't conform. For example, now it's pretty accepted for women to wear trousers and men's clothes or young girls to wear men's clothes, but even boys wearing girls' clothes, that's not a thing. Like boys will be...

0:51:00.1 Sean: Yeah, it's a little sketchier, right.

0:51:01.4 Skye: Or they'll probably be teased and they'll be... There's punishment to that.

0:51:04.4 Sean: Yeah, [0:51:05.3] ____ we don't think that.

0:51:08.5 Skye: And so Beauvoirs' I think goal was let's try and get rid of these policing norms and free ourselves from those kind of structures so that we can all be free to express ourselves as we choose. And part of her book is all about how there are obstacles to becoming authentic, to expressing ourselves freely in the world. And she kind of goes through a bunch of those obstacles like narcissism and marriage is one and love being held up as the ideal destiny for all women and something that all women want. So yeah. And she thought that once we can kind of clear those obstacles out of the way, then we can start to live fulfilling lives and start to become authentic.

0:52:06.3 Sean: The norms are very strong sometimes, the cover of your book has artistic representation of Simone de Beauvoir, and she's wearing a tie, a traditional masculine kind of garment. But there's no drawings out there of Jean-Paul Sartre wearing a skirt. Right [laughter] But I wonder about it. I mean it's a weird, it's hard to divide, to pinpoint the line between a norm just being oppressive of your creativity or whatever, or a norm acting as a useful organizing principle for how people get along in a society filled with a whole bunch of different people.

0:52:48.9 Skye: Sure. And I guess Beauvoir might say that, how is someone wearing a skirt useful in organizing? I think she would say... Or okay, she didn't talk about a skirt necessarily, but let's talk about an example she did talk about was kids and how boys are encouraged to go out and roughhouse and climb trees and it's okay if they come home dirty, but if a girl is to go out and get her pretty white dress stained then... Or get a scratch, then often... I mean, sure, she was writing this in the 1940s, but it's still, we still see this today. Girls are meant to be pretty, girls are meant to... Girls are wearing makeup and high heels. And that's still not accepted for men to do that. And so Beauvoirs' point was that for all of us to be authentic, what's important is for us to be able to choose how we present ourselves, to choose how we engage in the world. And if there are these kind of policings and norms that don't serve anyone except the traditional patriarchal way of doing things, then that's a problem.

0:54:13.5 Sean: No, that's a very good point. I mean, asking who is being benefited by the enforcement of these norms is always an interesting question to ask. I guess...

0:54:23.5 Skye: Yeah. And I'll just say that also... Sorry, can I just say also that on... And yeah, we're talking about children, but this flows through and we're still seeing pipeline problems in STEM fields, which is still dominated by men and girls struggle in those fields. So it's, yeah. So this kind of... In Beauvoirs' point was that these kind of norms get stronger and stronger as people grow older.

0:54:54.2 Sean: Yeah. No, I guess this... I'm not articulating this very well, 'cause I'm like 99.9% exactly on her side. I think a lot of norms are made up. They're usually made up for either arbitrary or bad reasons, but then there's like the norm that in the United States we drive on the right side of the road. Right? That's a very useful social coordination kind of norm. And I'm just mentioning that I can't see a very simple way to delineate the difference between the useful norms and the just restrictive norms. So that's ongoing work, I suppose.

0:55:24.0 Skye: Yeah. Oh yeah. And I'm so glad you brought that example up because this, one of the things that the existential philosophers were pushing back against was you've probably heard the famous quote from Dostoevsky that says something like, if God is dead, anything goes. And so the existential philosophers were like, if God is dead, that does not mean that anything goes. [laughter] And so they were working towards trying to figure out how to create a kind of ethics that isn't based on religion. And in fact, and so Kierkegaard, I'm gonna go back to Kierkegaard for a second, but he talks about how, okay, a couple of different spheres of life, but there's the aesthetic sphere where you're enjoying life and going around and being frivolous and having a lot of sex and stuff.

0:56:22.1 Skye: And so this sort of embodies the aesthetic realm. But what he says is that that's like a meaningless... Well, I mean, there is some meaning in it 'cause it's a beautiful way of life. But what he said is that what we need to do is make an existential choice to leap into the ethical realm of life where we acknowledge that we do live with other people. And so he is... One of his recommendations from his book Either/Or is that we should get married is one of the things. And he says that marriage increases our freedom because it gives us a sense of stability and constancy. And so if you know that you have a partner there who's going to be supportive of you, then that actually releases you to go and enjoy your life in some ways, which is the same as your example with driving on the right side of the road.

0:57:22.7 Sean: Yeah, exactly.

0:57:23.4 Skye: Yes. We need some basic rules, drive on the right side of the road. And in fact, that rule increases freedom for everyone because we all know we can go out and drive mostly safely [laughter] on that side of the road and we're free to travel around and go places.

0:57:39.0 Sean: Good. Yeah. No, okay. That's actually very clarifying. Thank you. One of the things about existential philosophy is it's often talked about, and what we've been talking about is it can seem to focus on ourselves individualistically a little bit and not so much on other people, but I do think that one of Beauvoir's points is the other with the capital O, not just that we're talking about other people, but specifically the worry that we treat others as objects rather than subjects. Is that the right way to put it?

0:58:11.2 Skye: Yes. Yeah, so yeah, and this also relates to authenticity because often when we think about being authentic, it's like an individualistic kind of introspective process, but Beauvoir thought that there were a couple of different dimensions to our being. Sure. One of those is being for ourselves, but the other really important aspect of our existence is being for others. And why? Because other people reveal aspects of our being that we can't always see on our own. Like the saying, the eye can't see itself. Like, I can't see my own eye right now. I need to look in a mirror, or I need you to tell me what my... So I need something else to give me insights into what my eyes look like or my actions. I can't always tell when my writing's bad, I need a friend or an editor to tell me.

0:59:11.5 Skye: And so Beauvoir's point, and... Sartre, some of the other existentialists talk about this as well, is that we learn about ourselves through engaging with other people. And I'm learning through the questions you're asking me and hopefully people are learning through these responses as well. And so if we're purely being for ourselves, then okay, that's very individualistic and narcissistic and self-centered but... And this is something Beauvoir talks a lot about in the second sex, if we're all at the other extreme being for others, that's dangerous too because Beauvoir's like traditionally women have been pushed into that role of being for others at the expense of being for themselves. And they've been treated as the second sex, secondary to men. Whereas men have been the primary, the subject, women have been treated as other.

1:00:13.8 Skye: And so Beauvoir's point was like, both extremes are problematic, but what we need to find is a more harmonious kind of being with others where we try and balance being for ourselves, balance with being for other people. And there's no specific formula for getting to that balance because it's going to be different depending on the situation, depending on the context, depending on the choices that we're making. Fine. I may have to empty the dishwasher for the second time today just because [laughter] I understand that my partner has to work late or whatever. But as long as I realize that that doesn't... If that happened all the time, that would be a problem.

1:00:57.9 Sean: Exactly. Right.

1:00:58.6 Skye: But if... Of course, it's always gonna be a give and a take. And as long as the relationship is generally equal and as long as we generally find a good balance, then I think that can be an authentic relationship.

1:01:12.9 Sean: Well, let's mention that your previous book was Existentialism and Romantic Love which I will confess I haven't read, but I'm gonna conjecture that part of the lesson there is treating your partner as a person with being in themselves rather than just a object furnishing your personal life.

1:01:34.1 Skye: Yeah, exactly. [laughter] That's a good conjecture [laughter] based on our discussion. But yeah, and I look at a few different perspectives there, but yeah, the key one, and actually my favorite, which was why I went on to write this next book, specifically about Beauvoir, was because her ideas on authentic love were that love is a mutual recognition of two freedoms. And neither person annihilates themselves and both support each other and support each other's flourishing, and both contribute to the universe together. And so I really love this kind of very positive, not... And I was gonna say equal relationship, but what I mean is not strictly equal, everything has to be 50-50.

1:02:32.0 Sean: No. Right.

1:02:32.3 Skye: But definitely this acknowledgement that relationships are dynamic and this... It's the mutual respect or the term she uses is intersubjectivity. So I recognize that you are a subject, you recognize that I'm a subject and we recognize we're objects for each other, but we really just treat each other as humans with dignity and respect.

1:02:56.8 Sean: I don't know how much you've dug into recent controversies about incels and the Incel movement. Have you read a lot about that?

1:03:04.9 Skye: A little bit, but I'm not an expert in that. I think...

1:03:10.2 Sean: I'm certainly not an expert either, involuntarily celibate community, which you might think of as like a description that you reluctantly admit amongst yourselves, but it's become a little point of pride among certain people. They have their own Wiki where they discuss their view of the world. And I think that I... Again, I'm not an expert, but maybe this is a big part of what they're missing, that they have a view in which women in particular are supposed to play a certain role in their lives, in the incels life, and they refuse to do it, and it doesn't really fit in rather than treating other potential people, romantic partners and otherwise, as subjects in themselves, as agents with their own concerns and cares and need for authenticity.

1:04:00.8 Skye: Yeah. I think that sounds right. And I think as, yeah, Amia Srinivasan talks about this in her book that came out not so long ago, called The Right to Sex. But what I did learn also apparently that the original incel website was started by a woman who was involuntary celibate.

1:04:16.0 Sean: Huh. I did not know that.

1:04:19.4 Skye: But it got taken over by men, but yeah, I think I would agree with your analysis there.

[laughter]

1:04:26.7 Sean: As two people who don't really know a lot about it, we're free to agree with our each other. Let me ask about one aspect, that you talk about in the book of Beauvoir's Philosophy, that I'm not sure whether I buy into completely, which is the idea that we not only have freedom and we seek authenticity, but there's a role that is a very strong role played for rebellion, for resisting the... I don't know, the expectations, the typicality, the conventional way of doing things. And I can certainly imagine that for some people, that's super-important and that's what gives their life meaning, et cetera. But I can also imagine that for other people, happiness and fulfillment and contentment is found by having a job, bringing home the bacon, having a happy family life, watching sports on weekends, and then that's it. And they don't really wanna rebel. They kind of like the standard norms. Is the idea of Beauvoir or other existentialists that they're making a mistake or that it's okay not to be them?

1:05:37.3 Skye: So I think first of all, I think Beauvoir would say, you should be free to live your life however you choose. But if you're sticking your head in the sand and isolating yourself from whatever's happening in the rest of the world, then you're missing out on a big part of life. And so I think her main concern was that... She said that justice can never be created within injustice. And so her point is that if we respect freedom for ourselves, if we respect authenticity for ourselves, then we must respect it for other people. Otherwise we're being hypocrites. And so what she wanted to challenge us is to not just hide ourselves away, but actually engage in the world and look at how other people are being oppressed.

1:06:39.2 Skye: And because so many people are prevented from exercising their freedom, prevented from making free choices about how they want to live their lives, and if our freedom comes at the cost of oppressed people's freedom, then she would think that that's inconsistent and deeply problematic. And so, as long as there is oppression in the world, then rebellion is an important part of becoming authentic, because really what she wanted to do was to recreate the foundations of the world on human freedom instead of oppression. And it goes back to your driving analogy. If we're all free to drive on the right hand side of the road, if there are rules that says, "Yep, everybody's free to drive on the right hand side of the road," then that means that all of us are free.

1:07:37.4 Skye: And so we can navigate around the world safely if other people are allowed to do that too. And so she actually goes back to kind of a stoic idea here, which is that humanity is like stones in an arch and the sturdier the individual stones and the sturdier the structures then the sturdier the arch. So as long as all the... If all the stones are healthy, then humanity is healthy, if everyone within is healthy. And so she was trying to also take existential philosophy from this sort of, as you mentioned, a reputation for being more individualistic to saying, "Yes, okay. Other people are not just important for us to understand ourselves, but the way we engage with other people and get along with other people has implications for the health of humanity and the societies we live in." And so she was taking it to that even higher level.

1:08:43.3 Sean: Yeah, no, that's actually very interesting to me 'cause I guess I didn't appreciate that. It is a more demanding way of looking at the world. If you say that, okay, a single individual might be entirely in favor of rights and freedom for other people, but they don't do anything about it. They let oppression and lack of freedom exist in the world without taking action against it, then in some sense they're complicit, I guess is what you or she are saying.

1:09:16.5 Skye: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing I'll mention is that she's not saying, "Oh, you have to go out and march on the streets or create... She's not dictating what you should do about it because she's like, "We're all individuals. We've all got pressures on us in different ways. You know, some people have kids that they need to take care of, some people have jobs that they absolutely need to go to. And so she was very, understanding that we all face different pressures in our lives.

1:09:49.4 Skye: But I think what she was responding to particularly was that she, herself came into a very privileged position as a famous writer, and she was looking for ways to use that privilege for a good, and so she did very much get involved in activism and changing laws around access to contraception and abortion, which led to real changes in the law. And so what she was encouraging us to do is just like, "Yeah, look, a lot of us are just focused on survival, but those who are in privileged positions who have the power, we have a responsibility to help other people." And she made mistakes in how she helped other people.

1:10:49.2 Sean: Sure.

1:10:49.5 Skye: She was criticized for various things, but I appreciate how she did try to use her power for good and did try to change the world for the better.

1:11:01.6 Sean: No, that's an excellent point and excellent distinction 'cause I always worry that the class of people in whom I definitely belong, who write books and have podcasts and the chattering classes, who live pretty comfortable middle class lives are constantly telling other people how they should live their lives. And I worry about that and I don't want to do that too much, but if she's drawing a distinction saying, "Look, once you are fairly privileged, your responsibilities shift a little bit." Like you say, sure, some people just have gotta make it through the day, right? Like, it takes all of their effort just to keep things going and live from day to day pocket... Paycheck to paycheck, I should say. Whereas others have some space in their lives to try to agitate, to try to make things better, and then it becomes a responsibility to do something like that.

1:12:01.0 Skye: Yeah. And I think that was where she was going and she wasn't... As I said, she's not saying, "Oh, you have to get out and protest or sign petitions," or whatever. She's like, "You have a responsibility to do what you can, whether it is creating a podcast to provide a platform for interesting ideas that help people understand their world better," or writing books to do the same. Like that's... I think she would've thought that as long as you're working towards supporting human freedom and doing it in responsible ways, then that...

1:12:36.0 Skye: And by responsible, I mean or she meant that you're not creating new forms of oppression and restricting other people's freedoms in creating these freedoms. But she also acknowledged that the world is so complex and we can't always know what we're doing or the consequences of our actions. But she was optimistic that we can make changes for the better. And if people in positions of privilege and power can make small steps towards improving the conditions for people who are less privileged. And she was saying that if you're in that position, you have a responsibility to try.

1:13:24.3 Sean: Very good. I guess for the last thing I wanted to touch on, you already alluded to the fact that she and other existentialists would very clearly use fiction as a way of discussing philosophical ideas. I can imagine that writing fiction is fun. Maybe it increases your sales of philosophy books. What is the intellectual justification for choosing fiction as the medium in which to discuss ideas like this? What's the advantage there?

1:13:55.9 Skye: Yeah, so Kierkegaard called it indirect communication. So it was... So he wrote fiction and he wrote under pseudonyms because he wanted to release the reader from preconceptions about him, the author. And so what that does is... With fiction, what it does is it's not Kierkegaard or Beauvoir or me saying, "Oh, I think this is what you should think." Rather it puts the responsibility back on the reader to figure out their own meaning and take their own messages away from the writing. And so what a lot of these existential philosophers in particular were really... They were challenging readers to make up their own minds, challenging readers to think for themselves rather than just accepting objective truths or just accepting things from themselves.

1:15:03.4 Skye: Kierkegaard was particularly annoyed with the clergy. People in Denmark would plot off to church and just get told... The clergy would tell them what to think. And Kierkegaard was like, "No, that's like, we need to teach people to think for themselves and think critically and not just go along with the herd." And so I think that's what fiction can do. Challenge us to consider the nuances of different situations and contexts and think about how the different situations apply to our own lives. And fiction can often do that in ways that journal articles or philosophical, strict philosophical essays, in a way that they don't always.

1:15:50.1 Sean: Are you planning a novel?

1:15:52.5 Skye: I'm not now, but now maybe I should.

1:15:55.4 Sean: Of course you should. That'd be great. [laughter] We've all wrote fiction when we were kids and then it's beaten out of us, but maybe this is your perfect excuse.

1:16:04.1 Skye: Yeah, yeah. I'll give that some thought. Thanks for the idea, Sean.

[laughter]

1:16:08.9 Sean: Well, we're looking forward to that happening. I think it'll be great. I'm definitely gonna be someone who buys it. So Skye Cleary, thanks so much for being on The Mindscape Podcast.

1:16:17.1 Skye: Thank you, Sean. Thanks for having me. This has been fun.

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