Politics, Ethics, and Liberation Theme Analysis

Unlike many philosophers who see individual action and decision-making as separate issues to be judged by separate criteria, for de Beauvoir the political and the ethical are continuous: it is impossible to act ethically without taking into account the interests of other people, or to make political decisions that are not also ethical ones. Accordingly, de Beauvoir spends the last portion of her book exploring existentialism’s implications for politics, especially in terms of how oppressed people should deal with their predicament. While she argues that “crime and tyranny” are sometimes the only way to create freedom in the face of oppression, she also considers it essential that revolutionaries do not themselves become oppressors once they seize power. Just as de Beauvoir thinks individuals inevitably fail to meet their lofty moral goals, yet must strive for them nonetheless, she thinks that a perfect society is impossible, but it is still imperative to work for a better society—even when violence is the only means to do so.

For de Beauvoir, there is no strict division between the ethical and the political. Contrary to those who see existentialism as a solipsistic doctrine, meaning that it is entirely focused on individual morality and gives people no reason to worry about anyone else’s interests, de Beauvoir (like Sartre) argues that anyone’s freedom is actually interdependent on the freedom of everyone else. This is true concretely, because one remains free to act in the world only when others are not oppressing them, and because one’s individual decisions inevitably have effects for other people. Without other people, there is no future toward which one’s actions can build. And it is also true theoretically, in the sense that every individual’s pursuit of their own individual projects is also the pursuit of a vision of how the world as a whole could be if their projects were completed, and so each individual tries to “forge valid laws for all” in pursuing their ideals. Accordingly, to act ethically is to implicate other people (and their particular interests) in the consequences of one’s actions, and to act politically is to pursue a personal project in conjunction with a collective one.

De Beauvoir highlights how oppression sets limit on freedom—this is why it is evil and needs to be overcome. Most straightforwardly, oppression often keeps people in a childlike or serious state. Some people remain like children because of oppression: they are so disempowered that none of their actions have any real consequences, and so they can never realize their freedom. For instance, in most contemporary societies women’s desires and abilities are seldom taken seriously, and many women simply serve other people’s ends because they never gain the resources necessary to understand their freedom and potential to pursue their own desires and interests outside the framework of patriarchy. Tyrants and oppressors keep people in a state of subjugation by reducing them to their facticity. Oppressed people become defined by what they are externally (a certain color, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, lineage, sexuality, economic status, and so on) but never by the most distinctive part of any human being’s identity: their freedom and what they choose to do with it. Many tyrants also turn their followers and themselves into things, seeing their followers as mere instruments in their own quest for power and seeing themselves in terms of the facticity of their power, rather than in terms of their own humanity.

While overcoming oppression is absolutely paramount for de Beauvoir, it is never a cut-and-dry process. In fact, movements responding to oppression can easily turn oppressive themselves when they too easily trample on freedom in their attempt to restore it. At the same time, however, sometimes this trampling is necessary, and much of de Beauvoir’s third section concerns how to defeat the oppressor without installing a new form of oppression. For instance, in the most severe situations, the only appropriate response is pure revolt. Yet people accustomed to revolt often become paralyzed, serious, or nihilistic when they do need to make a positive plan for the future. In such conditions, the oppressed must turn the oppressor into an object for the sake of the freedom struggle, often through violence, precisely because the oppressor does not see the oppressed as human and therefore is willing to trample on their own fundamental freedom. Violence is always immoral, but de Beauvoir thinks it is sometimes necessary in order to open a free future. She does not believe in moral perfection, for ethics and freedom only exist because humans are inevitably imperfect, and “the world has always been at war and always will be”; accordingly, she sees it as perfectly plausible that violence might be the only means to reduce violence in the long term and thinks that politicians and revolutionaries who promise a peaceful and fulfilling future are deceptive. Many supposed revolutionaries (like the Soviets) turn into authoritarians by deciding they are willing to sacrifice any other freedom for the sake of their cause, but ethical ones vigilantly weigh the full impact of every action, taking into account its impact on everyone’s freedom. To achieve this vigilance, de Beauvoir thinks that revolutionary movements should allow and seriously weigh internal criticism, both because it improves the movement and, more fundamentally, because such movements are founded precisely on the principle of free resistance to power.

Although de Beauvoir’s book is centrally about ethics, it is clear that she chooses to cover these political themes not only because existentialism rejects the distinction between politics and ethics but also as part of her own personal project, in order to help liberation struggles through her own platform as a public intellectual. Her examples of oppression and revolt, particularly with respect to French colonial Africa and World War II, are carefully chosen to show both the moral pitfalls of blind revolt and the necessity of doing everything realistic to fight the structures of oppression that continue to encircle a significant proportion of humankind.