The "Existentialists": Part 3 - Simone de Beauvoir - The Castor

The Dialectics of Liberation: Anarchism, Existentialism, and Decentralism
The "Existentialists": Part 3 - Simone de Beauvoir - The Castor

"Man and woman are not opposites, they are just one unique being." - charlie777pt

1- Introduction

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” - Simone de Beauvoir

All individual, woman or man, should be equal and given the same opportunities, independently from her/his born gender and sexuality.
We live in a violent society, originated by man's image and culture, where sex with a woman can be confused with aggression, dominance, and slavery to the imposed male desires.
Society must make men and women equal, accepting that sexuality do not determine social roles, vocations, and deeds for humanity, based on common rights of any human being without the label of a genre.
Women still live condemned to not being free in this androcentric society, which models femininity with patterns of depreciation and devaluation, which forces one to have a force much greater than men in the struggle for freedom.
Women are forced to be an "other-to-the-other" in a way that reinforces the power and the dominance of the male, that also extends its influence and persecution of differences in sexuality or race.
Women have to fight for their creative ownership, to overcome the societal constraints of a male-dominated world, where gender roles are morally defined by the law of Man, as well as fashion, and sexual expression.

"Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future. Act now, without delay". - Simone de Beauvoir

I was very lucky to accompany Simone de Beauvoir and a friend for two days, and I was impressed by the strength of her character and the emanation of a power born in the people that have hard lives fighting reality and resisting social and moral control.
I remember my strange self-conditioning before meeting her, about never mentioning Sartre that I always dreamed to get acquainted with.

2 - Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908, and she is formerly influenced by Heidegger and Husserl and she saw consciousness as a project for life in the game of anxiety and delight, to take the reins of our destiny in existence.
She was a bright student and finishes her thesis about von Leibniz in 1925, at 21 years of age in the Sorbonne, winning the second prize in philosophy, while Sartre had the first (was it for being a man or by its capabilities?), and as they where together to study for this event, growing a big friendship and falling in love for all their lives.
It is in this period that Sartre gives De Beauvoir a nickname - the Castor- that they will use for all life.
In his book Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), she demonstrates that we are condemned to live ambiguity in relation to freedom for oneself and to the others.

"Think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer help to make history, we are resigned to submitting to it."- Simone de Beauvoir

The Second Sex (1949) shows how men made society underestimate women and that they were are largely responsible for the passivity of accepting a male structured society and morality, creating the conditions for the emergence of the second wave of the feminist movement. The first-wave was centered on women’s voting and property rights.
Femininity is not in the genes or genre, but it is planted in a dominant man's made society, morality, and culture, that subjugate women to accept the stereotypes of passivity and beauty standards of a patriarchal society, diminishing their self-determination and affirm their capacities, actions, and intellectual reasoning.
Women to be free must refuse to submit, behave as a man want, and question these taboos to equalize their rights to participate in the construction of society, without a gender-based authority.
Simone saw that women have a tendency for voluntary servitude instilled by morality, that makes them passive in relation to the power of the State and the masculine society, culture, and education, like a black stain that marks women's Existence.

“Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves like a human being she is said to imitate the male.” - Simone de Beauvoir

She believed in self-emancipation and self-determination to get social justice, and that gender forming roles were tied to morality and the authority of the State, not to biology.
She didn't believe in "good actions" because they are tied to an outside morality that identifies it, and that there was no universal or natural model to explain it.
Morality should be found in the relation of our freedom and the others.
Like Sartre, De Beauvoir was committed to the times in writing, social activism, and philosophy was a whole that oriented her life, as a brave woman that lost the fear and blindness imposed by a man's made world.
They had an intensely intimate and open relationship, including reading each other’s writings, discussing their ideas almost every day, as well as the total sharing of their love affairs and involvement with other lovers in both sides.

3 - Women vs Androcentrism

‘One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature’ - Simone de Beauvoir

De Beauvoir speaks of the invisibilization process of the feminine gender, as a social mechanism that creates a barrier of opacity and opposition, in relation to any action or thought of the woman, where is male power is exercised and imposes its weight, against all types of resistance.
Using Heidegger's concept of the relationship between consciousness and the structures of reality, Beauvoir reveals the intermediation of the man whose interference reduces his affirmation and conditions the woman's ability to enjoy a fulfilling and fulfilling experience in her life.

The statute of being a woman is conditioned by the men who interpose between the feminine gender and the relation of her consciousness to reality, filled by a society and an androcentric culture, which is always favored by the macho power of the state that devalues ​​all its ideas and social praxis conditioning their freedom of choice.
The moral and social concept of the modes of female behavior in the dominant male view corresponds to passivity, to the repression of the right to struggle for power, and to the devaluation of productions and their visions of the experience of reality as women.

“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.” ― Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex

Androcentrism refers to a collective praxis which, whether conscious or not, tends to favor the point of view of men and which appears imbued within the collective centered perception of a masculine "morality" of the worldview, social life and culture and which wrote throughout history.
Simone De Beauvoir comes to invoke a point of view in opposition to the present androcentric state of the society, that leads to the objectification of the woman, in this reality with mirrors that only reflect the way of thinking of men like valid, and that annuls the concept of value of works in the feminine.
Simone De Beauvoir brings a new ontological vision for the liberation of the yoke to which women are subjected, and who must fight against these barriers to achieve their recognition and supply this condition of Existence
Their ability to enjoy an Essence that asserts itself in the world goes through the awareness that there are men and their culture, which subjugate all the free will and actions of women.
The affirmation of the female Being in the relation to Existence passes through a first barrier in the relations with the world -the power of men- supported by their culture and education, as well as, the ideology of the State.

"The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power." - Simone de Beauvoir

Women still live condemned to not being free in this androcentric society, which models femininity with patterns of depreciation and devaluation, which forces one to have a force much greater than men in the struggle for freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir created a consciousness for a new female view to resist and fight the male and society's stereotypes about femininity that is socially constructed, because humanity will only be free when the last slaves - women and children- are liberated and equalized in the eyes of justice and morals, and when the king man is dead.

Image Source : Wikipedia

“One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.” ― Simone de Beauvoir

More Simone de Beauvoir on Steemit
The Second Sex: Feminist Views of Simone de Beauvoir

Movie :

Os amantes do Café Flore - Beauvoir e Sartre

Short Video:

Simone de Beauvoir: 1975 Interview (English Subs)

Short Video:
Feminine Beauty: A social construct?

The Dialectics of Liberation: Anarchism, Existentialism, and Decentralism.
Published Posts:

• Introduction to the Dialectics of Liberation: Anarchism, Existentialism and Decentralism

I - Anarchism

• What is Anarchism?
• Part 1 - Philosophical Introduction
• Part 2 - The Concept of Anarchism
• Part 3 - Types of Anarchism
• The History of Anarchism
  • Part 1 - Pre-Anarchy - Social Revolution
  • Anarchy: Revolution Against The State
  • Part 2 - Anarcho-Federalism
  • Part 3 - Libertarian Anarchism
  • Part 4 - Anarcho-Syndicalism
• Anarchy Today
  • Part 1 - The Era of Extremisms
  • Part 2 - Crypto-Anarchism
  • Part 3 - Anarchist Tools
  • Part 4 - Anarchy in the Blockchain I
  • Part 4 - Anarchy in the Blockchain II
  • Part 5 - Today's Anarchism
• Index and Conclusions of part 1 - Anarchy

II - Existentialism

• What is Existentialism ?
  • Part 1 - Unplugged Introduction to Existentialism
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: I - Early Pre-existentialism
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: II - Pre-Existentialists
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: III - Phenomenology - Brentano to Husserl
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: III - Phenomenology - Jaspers to Sheller
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: IV - Humanistic Existentialists - Buber, Arendt, and Tillich
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: V - Humanistic Existentialists - Rollo May
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: V - Humanistic Existentialists - Abraham Maslow
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Jacques Lacan
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Michel Foucault
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Emmanuel Levinas
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Jacques Derrida
  • Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: VI - Post -Structuralism - Paul Ricouer
  • Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: I - Existentialism Today
  • Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: II - Fascism and Existentialism
  • Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: III - The Fear of Tthinking
  • Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: IV - Is Direct Democracy back with The Yellow Vests?
  • Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism:V - Existentialism:What is real in the Reality?
  • Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism:VI - Existentialism: The Ghost in the Machine
  • Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: VII - The Meaning of Nonsense
  • Part 3 - The Philosophy of Existentialism: VIII - The Players and the Times - Now and Then

• The "Existentialists"
  • Part 1 - Gabriel Marcel - The Neo-Socratic
  • Part 2 - Jean-Paul Sartre - The Man of The 20th Century
  • Part 3 - Simone de Beauvoir - The Castor - This post

Next posts on the Series:
II - Existentialism(Cont.)

• The "Existentialists"
  • Part 4 - Albert Camus - The Absurdist
  • Part 5 - Merleau-Ponty - The Humanist Existentialist
• Humanism and Existentialism
  • Part 1 - Humanistic Psychologists
  • Part 2 - The Fear of Freedom of Erich Fromm
• Existentialism and Anarchism
• The Future : Posthumanism, transhumanism and inhumanism

III - Decentralism

• What is Decentralism?
• The Philosophy of Decentralism
• Blockchain and Decentralization
• Anarchism, Existentialism, and Decentralism

IV - Dialectic for Self-Liberation

• Counterculture in the 60s
• The Dialectics of Liberation Congress
• Psychedelics, Libertarian and artistical movements
• The Zen Buddism of Alan Watts
• Psychoanalysis and Existentialism
• The Anti-psychiatry movement
• Anarchism, Existentialism, Decentralism and Self-Liberation

V - Conclusions and Epilogue

References:

- charlie777pt on Steemit:

Index of Chapter 1 - Anarchism of this series - Part 1 This Series:

Books:
Oizerman, Teodor.O Existencialismo e a Sociedade. Em: Oizerman, Teodor; Sève, Lucien; Gedoe, Andreas, Problemas Filosóficos.2a edição, Lisboa, Prelo, 1974.
Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Others
Levy, Bernard-Henry , O Século de Sartre,Quetzal Editores (2000)
Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity - Existentialism From Kierkegaard to Camus (1995)
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism, Insanity in the light of modern art, literature, and thought (revised edition)
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (2006)
Charles Eisenstein, Ascent of Humanity
Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre(1956)
Herbert Read, Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism (1949 )
Martin Heidegger, Letter on "Humanism"(1947)
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1968)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism And Human Emotions
Jean-Paul Sartre, O Existencialismo é um Humanismo
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense
Michel Foucault, Power Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977
Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom. New York: Henry Holt, (1941)
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself. 1986
Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: an existentialist diary
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and The Invisible
Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation
Brigite Cardoso e Cunha, Psicanálise e estruturalismo (1979)
Paul Watzlawick, How Real is Reality?
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Robert C. Solomon, Existentialism
H.J.Blackham, Six existentialist thinkers
Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Against-One (1576)

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