Unit Two

The Question of Freedom: "Who controls my life?"

 

 

(home)

 










Introduction

The question of freedom is one which philosophers have thought about since ancient times and it is as alive today as ever. Most of the time we simply assume that we are free, that we control our own lives, at least up to a point. We know that we get sick, that one day we will die, and that there are many such things which limit our freedom. Nevertheless, within the field of those limitations, it seems that there is still plenty of room for us to shape our lives as we see fit. Thus the common-sense answer to the question of freedom is "Within limits, I am able to control my life; I am free." Both Epictetus and Simone de Beauvoir accept the common sense view of freedom. However, you may wonder if Epictetus has set properly the limits of our freedom.

Still, when we think more about the question, the answer may not be so obviously the one given by common sense. The history of science is a story of the discovery of the laws and forces which determine (fix or establish) the behavior of the objects which surround us. When we watch the tree outside our window lose its leaves in the fall, we do not think that this event is a matter of the tree's own doing. We think that the cooler temperatures and shorter days along with the chemical makeup of the tree causes the leaves to turn color and eventually to fall.

Everywhere we look in nature we find such causal determination of the changes which objects undergo. Now if human beings belong to the world of nature, isn't it reasonable to think that the changes in us, not just the ones which seem not to be under our control but the ones we think we bring about ourselves, are causally determined events like any other. If so, then our actions are ultimately not under our own control but are controlled by the laws and forces of nature just as the events in the life of the tree are controlled by such laws and forces. So the common-sense answer to the question of freedom appears to be wrong. In short, the answer given by science is, "Natural law and forces acting upon me from outside myself control my life." The psychologist B. F. Skinner argues for this second answer to the question of freedom.

 

Let’s begin our consideration as to whether we are free or determined by looking at an answer to the question of whether we are free or determined that says:  “We are free; we can come to control our lives, but only within very narrow limits.”   The view developed by Epictetus is known as stoicism.

 

 

Selection from Manual for Living (The Enchiridion) by Epictetus

 

Biographical Note

"Epictetus was born the son of a slave woman about A.D. 55 in the city of Flieropolis in Phrygia. He went to Rome as the slave of the freedman Epaphroditus, who held the distinguished post of secretary to the emperor Nero and later to Domitian Epaphrodjtus allowed Epictetus to attend the lectures of the Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, who was impressed by the young slave and trained him to be a Stoic philosopher. After being freed by Epaphro ditus, Epictetus began to teach philosophy at Rome.

In 89, when the emperor Domitian banished all philosophers from the capital, Epictetus traveled to Nicopolis in Epirus (northwest Greece). There he opened his own school, giving lectures which attracted many students and followers, including the historian Arrian, who collected his master's lectures, probably in eight books, of which four survive. Arrian later compiled a summary of Epictetus' philosophy in the famed Enchiridion, or Handbook.

The Enchiridion is a brief introductory manual on how to transform Stoicism Into a way of life. In it arc covered rules for proper social and sexual conduct, and for true thinking. Part of right thinking entails knowing how to distinguish that which we can change from that which we cannot. Our lives are subject to many intractables: the vagaries of health and fortune, and, finally, death. But we retain the power to control our thinking, passions, and decisions. In this way we can come to terms with our environment, and thus free ourselves from a world of chance and dependencies.

Epictetus was one of the most important Stoic philosophers of the first century AD., along with Seneca, Lucius Annacus Cornutus, and Musonius Rufus. Stoicism's emphasis on reason, austerity, and self-control continued to appeal to sober-minded individuals during the next century (the emperor Marcus Aurelius being Stoicism's most distinguished late exponent), before fading as a school in the third century AD. Nevertheless, the works of Epictetus as compiled by Arrian have played an influential role in the development of the modern philosophies of rationalism and secularism.

Epictetus died about AD. 135."1


At the foundation of the way Epictetus thinks about freedom is the idea that freedom is a matter of the dimension of our lives over which we have control. Consequently, we live as genuinely free when we concern ourselves with things within this circle of control. Worrying about what lies outside this circle is pointless for freedom has no authority outside this circle.

 

 

Know What You Can

Control and What You Can't2

Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within our control, and some things are not. It is only after you have faced up to this fundamental rule and learned to distinguish between what you can and can't control that inner tranquility and outer effectiveness become possible.


Within our control are our own opinions, aspirations, desires, and the things that repel us. These areas are quite rightly our concern, because they are directly subject to our influence. We always have a choice about the contents and character of our inner lives.

Outside our control, however, are such things as what kind of body we have, whether we're born into wealth or strike it rich, how we are regarded by others, and our status in society. We must remember that those things are externals and arc therefore not our concern. Trying to control or to change what we can't only results in torment.

Remember: The things within our power are naturally at our disposal, free from any restraint or hindrance; but those things outside our power are weak, dependent, or determined by the whims and actions of others. Remember, too, that if you think that you have free rein over things that are naturally' beyond your control, or if you attempt to adopt the affairs of others as your own, your pursuits will he thwarted and you will become a frustrated, anxious, and fault-finding person.

 

Stick with Your Own Business

 

Keep your attention focused entirely on what is truly your own concern, and be clear that what belongs to others is their business and none of yours. If you do this, you will be impervious to coercion and no one can ever hold you back. You will be truly free and effective, for your efforts will be put to good use and won't be foolishly squandered finding fault with or opposing others.

In knowing and attending to what actually concerns you, you cannot be made to do anything against your will; others can't hurt you, you don't incur enemies or suffer harm.

If you aim to live by such principles, remember that it won't be easy: you must give up some things entirely, and postpone others for now. You may well have to forego wealth and power if you want to assure the attainment of happiness and freedom.


So we are advised to concern ourselves with what we can control, the inner life of our mind, what we think, how we respond to things. But it is not easy to control our inner life. Reason may tell us that this is the field of our freedom, yet it is difficult to control our desires. Epictetus tells us that there is a way to master our desires, however. What is his prescription?

 

 

Desire Demands Its Own Attainment

 

Our desires and aversions are mercurial rulers. They demand to be pleased. Desire commands us to run off and get what we want. Aversion insists that we must avoid the things that repel us. Typically, when we don't get what we want, we are disappointed, and when we get what we don't want, we are distressed.

If, then, you avoid only those undesirable things that are contrary to your natural well-being and are within your control, you won't ever incur anything you truly don't want. However, if you try to avoid inevitabilities such as sickness, death, or misfortune, over which you have no real control, you will make yourself and others around you suffer.

Desire and aversion, though powerful, are but habits. And we can train ourselves to have better habits. Restrain the habit of being repelled by all those things that aren't within your control, and focus instead on combatting things within your power that are not good for you.

Do your best to rein in your desire. For if you desire something that isn't within your own control, disappointment will surely follow; meanwhile, you will be neglecting the very things that are within your control that are worthy of desire.

Of course, there are times when for practical reasons you must go after one thing or shun another, but do so with grace, finesse, and flexibility.


Living in genuine freedom requires that we come to live in the knowledge of things. That means especially living in the knowledge that all things pass away. All things are finite.

See Things for What They Are

 

Circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they do. People behave as they are. Embrace what you actually get.

Open your eyes: See things for what they really are, thereby sparing yourself the pain of false attachments and avoidable devastation.

Think about what delights you ; the tools on which you depend, the people whom you cherish. But remember that they' have their own distinct character, which is quite a separate matter from how we happen to regard them.

As an exercise, consider the smallest things to which you are attached. For instance, suppose you have a favorite cup. It is, after all, merely a cup; so if it should break, you could cope. Next build up to things, or people, toward which your clinging feelings and thoughts intensify.

Remember, for example, when you embrace your child, your husband, your wife, you are embracing a mortal. Thus, if one of them should die, you could bear it with tranquility.

When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it; you can either accept it or resent it.

What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.

Stop scaring yourself with impetuous notions, with your reactive impressions of the way things are! Things and people are not what we wish them to be nor what they seem to be. They are what they are.

So Epictetus advises us to live in accord with this knowledge of things as finite. That is the nature of things and we should live in a way that harmonizes with nature. Don't try to change things which can't be changed. We should strive for inner peace. When that peace is missing we can be sure that we are living with desires and concerns beyond what we can control.

 

Harmonize Your Actions with the Way Life Is

Don't try to make your own rules.


Conduct yourself in all matters, grand and public or small and domestic, in accordance with the laws of nature. Harmonizing your will with nature should be your utmost ideal.

Where do you practice this ideal? In the particulars of your own daily life with its uniquely personal tasks and duties. When you carry out your tasks, such as taking a bath, do so‹to the best of your ability‹ in harmony with nature. When you eat, do so‹to the best of your ability‹ in harmony with nature, and so on.

It is not so much what you are doing as how you are doing it. When we properly understand and live by this principle, while difficulties will arise‹ for they are part of the divine order too ‹ inner peace will still be possible.


When we live in this stoic way, nothing can harm us. Not even pain or death.

 

Events Don't Hurt Us,
But Our Views of Them Can


Things themselves don't hurt or hinder us. Nor do other people. How we view these things is another matter. It is our attitudes and reactions that give us trouble.


Therefore even death is no big deal in and of itself. It is our notion of death, our idea that it is terrible, that terrifies us. There are so many different ways to think about death. Scrutinize your notions about death‹and everything else. Are they really true? Are they doing you any good? Don't dread death or pain; dread the fear of death or pain.

We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.


It follows that we alone are responsible for the condition of our lives. Whatever others may do to us, it is how we respond to them that matters. Blaming others is simply a way of evading responsibility.

 

No Shame, No Blame

If it is our feelings about things that torment us rather than the things themselves, it follows that blaming others is silly. Therefore, when we suffer setbacks, disturbances, or grief, let us never place the blame on others, but on our own attitudes.


Small‹minded people habitually reproach others for their own misfortunes. Average people reproach themselves. Those who are dedicated to a life of wisdom understand that the impulse to blame something or someone is foolishness, that there is nothing to be gained in blaming, whether it be others or oneself.

One of the signs of the dawning of moral progress is the gradual extinguishing of blame. We see the futility of finger-pointing. The more we examine our attitudes and work on ourselves, the less we are apt to be swept away by stormy emotional reactions in which we seek easy explanations for unbidden events.

Things simply are what they are. Other people think what they will think; it is of no concern to us. No Shame. No Blame.

1 Enchiridion, George Long, trans., (Prometheus, 1991)
2 The Art of Living, Epictetus's Enchiridion interpreted by Sharon Lebell, (Harper, 1995) pp. 2-11.



B. F. SKINNER

Freedom and the Control of Men


Biographical note. B. F. SKINNER was a professor of psychology at Harvard and the best known American proponent of behaviorist psychology (the school of psychology which in the 60's came to be emphasized here at BGSU and gave the psychology department here a national reputation). In the following Skinner argues that what we call freedom is not important and that human behavior should be made the object of scientific control.

For Epictetus, the way to be free is to concern ourselves with the things we can control, the inner life of our own minds. But Skinner claims that it is science that enables us to know the conditions which control our actions and our responses to the world. These controlling conditions do not lie within us but are to be found outside of us in the natural and social environment. We act or behave the way we do because we have been "conditioned" to do so by things and people outside us. The basic mechanism of this conditioning is simple. We repeat actions which in the past have been rewarded with pleasure. We tend to evade actions which in the past have brought pain. By studying this mechanism of conditioning, we can not only learn why people behave in different ways under different sets of conditions; we can also apply this knowledge to controlling the behavior of people. We do this all the time even if we don't recognize that this is what we are doing. When society threatens that being put in prison is the consequence of robbing a store, it seeks to control our behavior and make us law-abiding by putting a pain producing condition on our action. When the boss promises a raise to the most productive salesperson, the boss is seeking to make the workers more productive by placing a pleasure-producing condition on future behavior. In the selection which follows, Skinner argues that we should take full advantage of the study of conditioning to produce a better society by producing better citizens. We should not hesitate to apply this knowledge for fear of interfering with some freedom or "cussedness" natural to human beings. The only kind of "freedom" that matters is freedom from worse forms of control when better forms of control might be applied to producing happier, better citizens. 

Skinner begins . . .

 

Just as biographers and critics look for external influences to account for the traits and achievements of the men they study, so science ultimately explains behavior in terms of "causes" or conditions which lie beyond the individual himself. As more and more causal relations are demonstrated, a practical corollary becomes difficult to resist: it should be possible to produce behavior according to plan simply by arranging the proper conditions. Now, among the specifications which might reasonably be submitted to a behavioral technology are these: Let men be happy, informed, skillful, well behaved, and productive.

This immediate practical implication of a science of behavior has a familiar ring, for it recalls the doctrine of human perfectibility of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century humanism. A science of man shares the optimism of that philosophy and supplies striking support for the working faith that men can build a better world and, through it, better men. The support comes just in time, for there has been little optimism of late among those who speak from the traditional point of view. Democracy has become "realistic," and it is only with some embarrassment that one admits today to perfectionistic or utopian thinking.

The earlier temper is worth considering, however. History records many foolish and unworkable schemes for human betterment, but almost all the great changes in our culture which we now regard as worthwhile can be traced to perfectionistic philosophies. Governmental, religious, educational, economic, and social reforms follow a common pattern. Someone believes that a change in a cultural practice‹for example, in the rules of evidence in a court of law, in the characterization of man's relation to God, in the way children are taught to read and write, in permitted rates of interest, or in minimal housing standards‹will improve the condition of men: by promoting justice, permitting men to seek salvation more effectively, increasing the literacy of a people, checking an inflationary trend, or improving public health and family relations, respectively. The underlying hypothesis is always the same: that a different physical or cultural environment will make a different and better man.

The scientific study of behavior not only justifies the general pattern of such proposals; it promises new and better hypotheses. The earliest cultural practices must have originated in sheer accidents. Those which strengthened the group survived with the group in a sort of natural selection. As soon as men began to propose and carry out changes in practice for the sake of possible consequences, the evolutionary process must have accelerated. The simple practice of making changes must have had survival value. A further acceleration is now to be expected. As laws of behavior are more precisely stated, the changes in the environment required to bring about a given effect may be more clearly specified. Conditions which have been neglected because their effects were slight or unlooked for may be shown to be relevant. New conditions may actually be created, as in the discovery and synthesis of drugs which affect behavior.

This is no time, then, to abandon notions of progress, improvement, or, indeed, human perfectibility. The simple fact is that man is able, and now as never before, to lift himself by his own bootstraps. In achieving control of the world of which he is a part, he may learn at last to control himself.

 

Timeworn objections to the planned improvement of cultural practices are already losing much of their force. Marcus Aurelius was probably right in advising his readers to be content with a haphazard amelioration of mankind. "Never hope to realize Plato's republic," he sighed, for who can change the opinions of men? And without a change of sentiments what can you make but reluctant slaves and hypocrites?" He was thinking, no doubt, of contemporary patterns of control based upon punishment or the threat of punishment which, as he correctly observed, breed only reluctant slaves of those who submit and hypocrites of those who discover modes of evasion. But we need not share his pessimism, for the opinions of men can be changed. The techniques of indoctrination which were being devised by the early Christian Church at the very time Marcus Aurelius was writing are relevant, as are some of the techniques of psychotherapy and of advertising and public relations. Other methods suggested by recent scientific analyses leave little doubt of the matter.3

Notice that Skinner seems to admit that we are free, but it is clear that he thinks that what we call “freedom” is really just something else, cussedness. We confuse freedom, if there were such a thing, with what is nothing more than a kind of stubbornness, a brute resistance to external control.  This resistance isn’t some special point of opposition and self control.  It’s just the “resistance” of  a physical material that must be overcome, just as it takes a certain amount of force to get a heavy stone moving.  .

The thing that makes Skinner a determinist is that for him all control of behavior is ultimately external. What we do or do not do is simply a result of external environmental conditions, forces acting upon us, causing us to move (“behave”) in one way or another. Conditioning builds up habits in us. The way we think, the way we act is a matter of habit.

 

The conditioning applied to making a child behave properly at the dinner table may be more or less coercive. Coercion is a matter of force applied against what the child is presently disposed or "of a mind" to do. You may threaten the child with no television if he doesn't eat his vegetables. On the other hand you can promise the child an outing to the zoo. It is a bit like the difference between keeping your dog on a leash and rewarding her when she walks next to you. For Skinner, conditioning is more or less coercive depending on the degree of external force and the kind of stimulation applied, i.e. pain-producing versus pleasure-producing.

Coercion is important because it short-circuits the process of letting the person develop the capacity to act from having followed certain procedures, made the calculations, etc. for herself or himself.  Unlike Skinner, the compatibilist is someone who thinks we are both free and determined.  The compatibilist distinguishes between external and internal conditions for action, the latter being very important for what may be called freedom.  If we let the child eat as he pleases, according to his desires, we do not coerce him and he is, in a sense, “free.”  However, ultimately, the way the child acts, says the compatibilist, is indeed ultimately a result of external forces which produce the child with the wants it happens to have at this particular moment in time.

If we are determined to think and act by external forces, then why do we have such a strong sense that we are free when we act according to how we think and feel?  According to Skinner we are under the illusion that what we think and feel is a matter of  the activity of our “minds” when actually what we think and feel is simply the effect of external controlling forces.  Education and attempts to persuade me to think and act in one way rather than another are simply ways of controlling behavior.  They are socially more acceptable than the threat of brute force, but they don’t appeal to some special independent agency in me owing to my having a “mind.”  Skinner continues . . .

 

With respect to some methods of control (for example, the threat of force), very little engineering is needed, for the techniques or their immediate consequences are objectionable. Society has suppressed these methods by branding them 'wrong," "illegal," or 'sinful." But to encourage these attitudes toward objectionable forms of control, it has been necessary to disguise the real nature of certain indispensable techniques, the commonest examples of which are education, moral discourse, and persuasion. The actual procedures appear harmless enough. They consist of supplying information, presenting opportunities for action, pointing out logical relationships, appealing to reason or "enlightened understanding," and so on. Through a masterful piece of misrepresentation, the illusion is fostered that these procedures do not involve the control of behavior; at most, they are simply ways of "getting someone to change his mind." But analysis not only reveals the presence of well- defined behavioral processes, it demonstrates a kind of control no less inexorable, though in some ways more acceptable, than the bully's threat of force.

Let us suppose that someone in whom we are interested is acting unwisely‹he is careless in the way he deals with his friends, he drives too fast, or he holds his golf club the wrong way. We could probably help him by issuing a series of commands: don't nag, don't drive over sixty, don't hold your club that way. Much less objectionable would be "an appeal to reason." We could show him how people are affected by his treatment of them, how accident rates rise sharply at higher speeds, how a particular grip on the club alters the way the ball is struck and corrects a slice. In doing so we resort to verbal mediating devices which emphasize and support certain "contingencies of reinforcement" that is, certain relations between behavior and its consequences‹which strengthen the behavior we wish to set up. The same consequences would possibly set up the behavior without our help, and they eventually take control no matter which form of help we give. The appeal to reason has certain advantages over the authoritative command. A threat of punishment, no matter how subtle, generates emotional reactions and tendencies to escape or revolt. Perhaps the controllee merely "feels resentment" at being made to act in a given way, but even that is to be avoided. When we "appeal to reason," he 'feels freer to do as he pleases." The fact is that we have exerted less control than in using a threat; since other conditions may contribute to the result, the effect may be delayed or, possibly in a given instance, lacking. But if we have worked a change in his behavior at all, it is because we have altered relevant environmental conditions, and the processes we have set in motion are just as real and just as inexorable, if not as comprehensive, as in the most authoritative coercion. . . .


The methods of education, moral discourse, and persuasion are acceptable not because they recognize the freedom of the individual or his right to dissent, but because they make only partial contributions to the control of his behavior. The freedom they recognize is freedom from a more coercive form of control. The dissent which they tolerate is the possible effect of other determiners of action. Since these sanctioned methods are frequently ineffective, we have been able to convince ourselves that they do not represent control at all. When they show too much strength to permit disguise, we give them other names and suppress them as energetically as we suppress the use of force. Education grown too powerful is rejected as propaganda or "brain-washing," while really effective persuasion is described as "undue influence," "demagoguery, seduction," and so on.

If we are not to rely solely upon accident for the innovations which give rise to cultural evolution, we must accept the fact that some kind of control of human behavior is inevitable. We cannot use good sense in human affairs unless someone engages in the design and construction of environmental conditions which affect the behavior of men. Environmental changes have always been the condition for the improvement of cultural patterns, and we can hardly use the more effective methods of science without making changes on a grander scale. We are all controlled by the world in which we live, and part of that world has been and will be constructed by men. The question is this: Are we to be controlled by accident, by tyrants, or by ourselves in effective cultural design?

The danger of the misuse of power is possibly greater than ever. It is not allayed by disguising the facts. We cannot make wise decisions if we continue to pretend that human behavior is not controlled, or if we refuse to engage in control when valuable results might be forthcoming. Such measures weaken only ourselves, leaving the strength of science to others. The first step in a defense against tyranny is the fullest possible exposure of controlling techniques. A second step has already been taken successfully in restricting the use of physical force. Slowly, and as yet imperfectly, we have worked out an ethical and governmental design in which the strong man is not allowed to use the power deriving from his strength to control his fellow men. He is restrained by a superior force created for that purpose‹the ethical pressure of the group, or more explicit religious and governmental measures. We tend to distrust superior forces, as we currently hesitate to relinquish sovereignty in order to set up an international police force. But it is only through such counter- control that we have achieved what we call peace‹a condition in which men are not permitted to control each other through force. In other words, control itself must be controlled.

Science has turned up dangerous processes and materials before. To use the facts and techniques of a science of man to the fullest extent without making some monstrous mistake will be difficult and obviously perilous. It is no time for self- deception, emotional indulgence, or the assumption of attitudes which are no longer useful. Man is facing a difficult test. He must keep his head now, or he must start again‹a long way back.

 

 

The Metaphysical Libertarian’s Answer to the Question, “Who controls my life?”




The metaphysical libertarian believes that we are free in a strong sense. She or he holds that the future is open, to be shaped by the choices we make where such choices are not caused by external conditioning interacting with internal mechanical processing. (Metaphysical means what is beyond or above the physical, that is, in our case, beyond physical determination.) The existentialist philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, is a libertarian. She holds that the future is indeed open and that this openness is the space of genuine possibility.

According to the common-sense idea of freedom the meaning or significance of freedom is the access to possibility. Freedom is conceived as a power we possess which gives us substantial control of this access.

There is substantial agreement between Skinner and De Beauvoir on one count at least.   Both agree that social conditioning has a great deal to do with the way we think and act.   Indeed, there is for each of us a whole period in our lives which is largely a matter of our knowing that we must learn how to eventually act in “serious” ways.  This is the period in which we are children.  As children we are allowed to play, to not be serious.  Yet even the child’s play is occupied with trying out the roles that later on he or she must take on as an adult.  The recognition of our fundamental freedom comes only later on.  Adolescence could even be defined as that time in life when we come to recognize our freedom and when we choose either to accept the responsibility that comes with being free or, perhaps, choose to go on living as children, denying our freedom and letting social conditioning “determine” the character of our thought and action.  De Beauvoir puts this denial of freedom as a matter of being “serious,” acting as if values are ready-made things as opposed to being simply the products of our choices.  As children, we assume that the world is a serious place, that is, made up of just such ready-made roles and values, there being no alternative but to grow up and take on one’s assigned roles and duties.

THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY

Simone de Beauvoir

translated from the French by BERNARD FRECHTMAN

Published by Citadel Press, A division of Lyle Stuart Inc.
120 Enterprise Ave.
Secaucus, N.J. 07094
Copyright 1948 by Philosophical Library
ISBN 0-8065-0160-X

From SECTION II: PERSONAL FREEDOM AND OTHERS

Man's unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child. And indeed the unfortunate choices which most men make can only be explained by the fact that they have taken place on the basis of childhood. The child's situation is characterized by his finding himself cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish, which has been fashioned without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit. In his eyes, human inventions, words, customs, and values are given facts, as inevitable as the sky and the trees. This means that the world in which he lives is a serious world, since the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as ready-made things. That does not mean that the child himself is serious. On the contrary, he is allowed to play, to expend his existence freely. In his child's circle he feels that he can passionately pursue and joyfully attain goals which he has set up for himself. But if he fulfills this experience in all tranquility, it is precisely because the domain open to his subjectivity seems insignificant and puerile in his own eyes. He feels himself happily irresponsible. The real world is that of adults where he is allowed only to respect and obey. The naive victim of the mirage of the for-others, he believes in the being of his parents and teachers. He takes them for the divinities which they vainly try to be and whose appearance they like to borrow before his ingenuous eyes. Rewards, punishments, prizes, words of praise or blame instill in him the conviction that there exist a good and an evil which like a sun and a moon exist as ends in themselves. In his universe of definite and substantial things, beneath the sovereign eyes of grown-up persons, he thinks that he too has being in a definite and substantial way. He is a good little boy or a scamp; he enjoys being it. If something deep inside him belies his conviction, he conceals this imperfection. He consoles himself for an inconsistency which he attributes to his young age by pinning his hopes on the future. Later on he too will become a big imposing statue. While waiting, he plays at being, at being a saint, a hero, a guttersnipe. He feels himself like those models whose images are sketched out in his books in broad, unequivocal strokes: explorer, brigand, sister of charity. This game of being serious can take on such an importance in the child's life that he himself actually becomes serious. We know such children who are caricatures of adults. Even when the joy of existing is strongest, when the child abandons himself to it, he feels himself protected against the risk of existence by the ceiling which human generations have built over his head. And it is by virtue of this that the child's condition (although it can be unhappy in other respects) is metaphysically privileged. Normally the child escapes the anguish of freedom. He can, if he likes, be recalcitrant, lazy; his whims and his faults concern only him. They do not weigh upon the earth. They can not make a dent in the serene order of a world which existed before him, without him, where he is in a state of security by virtue of his very insignificance. He can do with impunity whatever he likes. He knows that nothing can ever happen through him; everything is already given; his acts engage nothing, not even himself.

There are beings whose life slips by in an infantile world because, having been kept in a state of servitude and ignorance, they have no means of breaking the ceiling which is stretched over their heads. Like the child, they can exercise their freedom, but only within this universe which has been set up before them, without them. This is the case, for example, of slaves who have not raised themselves to the consciousness of their slavery. The southern planters were not altogether in the wrong in considering the negroes who docilely submitted to their paternalism as "grown-up children." To the extent that they respected the world of the whites the situation of the black slaves was exactly an infantile situation. This is also the situation of women in many civilizations; they can only submit to the laws, the gods, the customs, and the truths created by the males. . . .

The fact is that it is very rare for the infantile world to maintain itself beyond adolescence. From childhood on, flaws begin to be revealed in it. With astonishment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks himself, "Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?" He discovers his subjectivity; he discovers that of others. And when he arrives at the age of adolescence he begins to vacillate because he notices the contradictions among adults as well as their hesitations and weakness. Men stop appearing as if they were gods, and at the same time the adolescent discovers the human character of the reality about him. Language, customs, ethics, and values have their source in these uncertain creatures. The moment has come when he too is going to be called upon to participate in their operation; his acts weigh upon the earth as much as those of other men. He will have to choose and decide. It is comprehensible that it is hard for him to live this moment of his history, and this is doubtless the deepest reason for the crisis of adolescence; the individual must at last assume his subjectivity.

The crisis of adolescence, says De Beauvoir, is that “the individual must at last assume his subjectivity.”  What does she mean?  To be a subject is to be something other than an object.  Objects are things that are acted upon.  They have no freedom to act in virtue of their own thought and choice.  To be a subject is to be the kind of being that acts, and such a being is a being that thinks, that has a will, and that chooses freely.   The crisis of adolescence is that, generally speaking, individuals come to be aware of themselves as subjects rather than objects.  One way or another, they will take on the weight of being a subject, whether in taking responsibility for it or whether in fleeing their freedom.  If I am to take responsibility for my freedom, says De Beauvoir, I must “make myself a lack of being.”  That is, I must not view myself as an object, as a thing having a given role or function.  To be a subject is precisely to lack such an objective nature, to have to choose for oneself what to be and do.  To deny such a responsibility is  to be a sub-man, says De Beauvoir.

 

From one point of view the collapsing of the serious world is a deliverance. Although he was irresponsible, the child also felt himself defenseless before obscure powers which directed the course of things. But whatever the joy of this liberation may be, it is not without great confusion that the adolescent finds himself cast into a world which is no longer ready-made, which has to be made; he is abandoned, unjustified, the prey of a freedom that is no longer chained up by anything. What will he do in the face of this new situation? This is the moment when he decides. If what might be called the natural history of an individual, his affective complexes, etcetera depend above all upon his childhood, it is adolescence which appears as the moment of moral choice. Freedom is then revealed and he must decide upon his attitude in the face of it. Doubtless, this decision can always be reconsidered, but the fact is that conversions are difficult because the world reflects back upon us a choice which is confirmed through this world which it has fashioned. Thus, a more and more rigorous circle is formed from which one is more and more unlikely to escape. Therefore, the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know its exigencies. . . .

If we were to try to establish a kind of hierarchy among men, we would put those who are denuded of this living warmth - the tepidity which the Gospel speaks of - on the lowest rung of the ladder. To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This apathy manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies. The sub-man rejects this "passion" which is his human condition, the laceration and the failure of that drive toward being which always misses its goal, but which thereby is the very existence which he rejects.

Such a choice immediately confirms itself. just as a bad painter, by a single movement, paints bad paintings and is satisfied with them, whereas in a work of value the artist immediately recognizes the demand of a higher sort of work, in like fashion the original poverty of his project exempts the sub-man from seeking to legitimize it. He discovers around him only an insignificant and dull world. How could this naked world arouse within him any desire to feel, to understand, to live? The less he exists, the less is there reason for him to exist, since these reasons are created only by existing.

 

Unlike an object, a subject, a person, has the capacity to transcend what he already is.  The sub-man tries to be an object, is largely unaware of and indifferent to the possibilities of self-transcendence.  However the sub-man is not a nothing.  Actually he is very dangerous.  Why?

 

Yet, he exists. By the fact of transcending himself he indicates certain goals, he circumscribes certain values. But he at once effaces these uncertain shadows. His whole behavior tends toward an elimination of their ends. By the incoherence of his plans, by his haphazard whims, or by his indifference, he reduces to nothingness the meaning of his surpassing. His acts are never positive choices, only flights. He can not prevent himself from being a presence in the world, but he maintains this presence on the pole of bare facticity. However, if a man were permitted to be a brute fact, he would merge with the trees and pebbles which are not aware that they exist; we would consider these opaque lives with indifference. But the sub-man arouses contempt, that is, one recognizes him to be responsible for himself at the moment that one accuses him of not willing himself - The fact is that no man is a datum which is passively suffered; the rejection of existence is still another way of existing; nobody can know the peace of the tomb while he is alive. There we have the defeat of the sub-man. He would like to forget himself, to be ignorant of himself, but the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself. His negativity is revealed positively as anguish, desire, appeal, laceration, but as for the genuine return to the positive, the sub-man eludes it. He is afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of its possibilities. He is thereby led to take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily abandon himself to verbal outbursts or even physical violence. One day, a monarchist, the next day, an anarchist, he is more readily anti-semitic, anti-clerical, or anti-republican. Thus, though we have defined him as a denial and a flight, the sub-man is not a harmless creature. He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody can get control of. In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from among the sub-men. That is why every man who wills himself free within a human world fashioned by free men will be so disgusted by the sub-men. Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity, and the sub-man feels only the facticity of his existence. Instead of aggrandizing the reign of the human, he opposes his inert resistance to the projects of other men. No project has meaning in the world disclosed by such an existence. Man is defined as a wild flight. The world about him is bare and incoherent. Nothing ever happens; nothing merits desire or effort. The sub-man makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirms his long negation of him, self. The only thing revealed in this experience is the absurd facticity of an existence which remains forever unjustified if it has not known how to justify itself. The sub-man experiences the desert of the world in his boredom. And the strange character of a universe with which he has created no bond also arouses fear in him. Weighted down by present events, he is bewildered before the darkness of the future which is haunted by frightful specters, war, sickness, revolution, fascism, bolshevism. The more indistinct these dangers are, the more fearful they become. The sub-man is not very clear about what he has to lose, since he has nothing, but this very uncertainty re-enforces his terror. Indeed, what he fears is that the shock of the unforeseen may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.

 

The sub-man seeks to deny his freedom.  But it is impossible  to dispose of one’s freedom, one’s “lack of being.”  One must act and in acting one makes something of oneself whether  one wants to or not.   So in general, the sub-man passes into the serious man.  That is, having to be something, this individual submerges his freedom by accepting from society the content of life.  He rationalizes this acceptance by claiming that the values he thus embraces are absolute.  The serious man holds that the values he embraces are given by nature, by God or by reason.  Most people come through the crisis of adolescence and, instead of assuming responsibility for their freedom, become serious.  They choose a lie.  Why is the genuinely free person so rare?  In the following paragraphs De Beauvoir identifies  two factors that tend to make it appear acceptable or even necessary to deny one’s freedom.

 

Thus, fundamental as a man's fear in the face of existence may be, though he has chosen from his earliest years to deny his presence in the world, he can not keep himself from existing, he can not efface the agonizing evidence of his freedom. That is why, as we have just seen, in order to get rid of his freedom, he is led to engage it positively. The attitude of the sub-man passes logically over into that of the serious man; he forces himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society. He loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his subjectivity.  . . .The serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself. Shielded with "rights," he fulfills himself as a being who is escaping from the stress of existence. The serious is not defined by the nature of the ends pursued. A frivolous lady of fashion can have this mentality of the serious as well as an engineer. There is the serious from the moment that freedom denies itself to the advantage of ends which one claims are absolute.

Since all of this is well known, I should like to make only a few remarks in this place. It is easily understood why, of all the attitudes which are not genuine, the latter is the most widespread; because every man was first a child. After having lived under the eyes of the gods, having been given the promise of divinity, one does not readily accept becoming simply a man with all his anxiety and doubt. What is to be done? What is to be believed? Often the young man, who has not, like the sub-man, first rejected existence, so that these questions are not even raised, is nevertheless frightened at having to answer them. After a more or less long crisis, either he turns back toward the world of his parents and teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure. Instead of assuming an affectivity which would throw him dangerously beyond himself, he represses it. Liquidation, in its classic form of transference and sublimation, is the passage from the affective to the serious in the propitious shadow of dishonesty. The thing that matters to the serious man is not so much the nature of the object which he prefers to himself, but rather the fact of being able to lose himself in it. So much so, that the movement toward the object is, in fact, through his arbitrary act tile most radical assertion of subjectivity: to believe for belief's sake, to will for will's sake is, detaching transcendence from its end, to realize one's freedom in its empty and absurd form of freedom of indifference.

The serious man's dishonesty issues from his being obliged ceaselessly to renew the denial of this freedom. He chooses to live in an infantile world, but to the child the values are really given. The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives them to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she has sent it to herself. We have already pointed out that certain adults can live in the universe of the serious in all honesty, for example, those who are denied all instruments of escape, those who are enslaved or who are mystified. The less economic and social circumstances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as given. This is the case of women who inherit a long tradition of submission and of those who are called "the humble." There is often laziness and timidity in their resignation; their honesty is not quite complete; but to the extent that it exists, their freedom remains available, it is not denied. They can, in their situation of ignorant and powerless individuals, know the truth of existence and raise themselves to a properly moral life. It even happens that they turn the freedom which they have thus won against the very object of their respect; thus, in A Doll's House, the childlike naivete of the heroine leads her to rebel against the lie of the serious. On the contrary, the man who has the necessary instruments to escape this lie and who does not want to use them consumes his freedom in denying, them. He makes himself serious. He dissimulates his, subjectivity under the shield of rights which emanate from the ethical universe recognized by him; he is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party.

 

How is it that the serious man makes himself a slave?  See if you can see a similarity between what De Beauvoir says of the way the serious man thinks and what Heidegger says about calculative thinking.  Is meditative thinking the medium in which subjectivity initially expresses its freedom?

If one denies the subjective tension of freedom one is evidently forbidding himself universally to will freedom in an indefinite movement. By virtue of the fact that he' refuses to recognize that he is freely establishing the value of the end he sets up, the serious man makes himself the slave of that end. He forgets that every goal is at the same time a point of departure and that human freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself. He accords an absolute meaning to the epithet useful, which, in truth, has no more meaning if taken by itself than the words high, low, right, and left. It simply designates a relationship and requires a complement: useful for this or that. The complement itself must be put into question, and, as we shall see later on, the whole problem of action is then raised.

But the serious man puts nothing into question. For the military man, the army is useful; for the colonial administrator, the highway; for the serious revolutionary, the revolution -- army, highway, revolution, productions becoming inhuman idols to which one will not hesitate to sacrifice man himself. Therefore, the serious man is dangerous. It is natural that he makes himself a tyrant. Dishonestly ignoring the subjectivity of his choice, he pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him; and by the same token he also ignores the value of the subjectivity and the freedom of others, to such an extent that, sacrificing them to the thing, he persuades himself that what he sacrifices is nothing. The colonial administrator who has raised the highway to the stature of an idol will have no scruple about assuring its construction at the price of a great number of lives of the natives; for, what value has the life of a native who is incompetent, lazy, and clumsy when it comes to building highways? The serious leads to a fanaticism which is as formidable as the fanaticism of passion. It is the fanaticism of the Inquisition which does not hesitate to impose a credo, that is, an internal movement, by means of external constraints. It is the fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who defend morality by means of lynchings. It is the political fanaticism which empties politics of all human content and imposes the State, not for individuals, but against them.

In order to justify the contradictory, absurd, and outrageous aspects of this kind of behavior, the serious man readily takes refuge in disputing the serious, but it is the serious of others which he disputes, not his own. Thus, the colonial administrator is not unaware of the trick of irony. He contests the importance of the happiness, the comfort, the very life of the native, but he reveres the Highway, the Economy, the French Empire; he reveres himself as a servant of these divinities. Almost all serious men cultivate an expedient levity; we are familiar with the genuine gaiety of Catholics, the fascist "sense of humor." There are also some who do not even feel the need for such a weapon. They hide from themselves the incoherence of their choice by taking flight. As soon as the Idol is no longer concerned, the serious man slips into the attitude of the sub-man. He keeps himself from existing because he is not capable of existing without a guarantee. Proust observed with astonishment that a great doctor or a great professor often shows himself, outside of his specialty, to be lacking in sensitivity, intelligence, and humanity. The reason for this is that having abdicated his freedom, he has nothing else left but his techniques. In domains where his techniques are not applicable, he either adheres to the most ordinary of values or fulfills himself as a flight. The serious man stubbornly engulfs his transcendence in the object which bars the horizon and bolts the sky. The rest of the world is a faceless desert. Here again one sees how such a choice is immediately confirmed. If there is being only, for example, in the form of the Army, how could the military man wish for anything else than to multiply barracks and maneuvers? No appeal rises from the abandoned zones where nothing can be reaped because nothing has been sown. As soon as he leaves the staff, the old general becomes dull. That is why the serious man's life loses all meaning if he finds himself cut off from his ends. Ordinarily, he does not put all his eggs into one basket, but if it happens that a failure or old age ruins all his justifications, then, unless there is a conversion, which is always possible, he no longer has any relief except in flight; ruined, dishonored, this important personage is now only a "has-been." He joins the sub-man, unless by suicide he once and for all puts an end to the agony of his freedom.

 

The fate of the serious man is generally an unhappy one.  He may even despair of life, finding it in the end to be meaningless, absurd.  What is De Beauvoir’s reasoning here?

It is in a state of fear that the serious man feels this dependence upon the object; and the first of virtues, in his eyes, is prudence. He escapes the anguish of freedom only to fall into a state of preoccupation, of worry. Everything is a threat to him, since the thing which he has set up as an idol is an externality and is thus in relationship with the whole universe and consequently threatened by the whole universe; and since, despite all precautions, he will never be the master of this exterior world to which he has consented to submit, he will be instantly upset by the uncontrollable course of events.

He will always be saying that he is disappointed, for his wish to have the world harden into a thing is belied by the very movement of life. The future will contest his present successes; his children will disobey him, his win will be opposed by those of strangers; he will be a prey to ill humor and bitterness. His very successes have a taste of ashes . . . The serious man wills himself to be a god; but he is not one and knows it. He wishes to rid himself of his subjectivity, but it constantly risks being unmasked; it is unmasked. Transcending all goals, reflection wonders, "What's the use?" There then blazes forth the absurdity of a life which has sought outside of itself the justifications which it alone could give itself. Detached from the freedom which might have genuinely grounded them, all the ends that have been pursued appear arbitrary and useless.

 





3 B.F. Skinner quotations from Twenty Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy, Bowie, Michaels, Solomon eds., (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), pp. 713-718.
4 As quoted in Twenty Questions, p. 718.
5 Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Hong and Hong trans., (Princeton, 1980), pp. 37-42