Joseph Mahon

Engels and the question about cities

By ‘the question about cities’ is meant the question as to whether cities are conducive or detrimental to human flourishing and, on that basis, whether the growth of cities and city life should or should not be encouraged. historically, this question concerns a feature of Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century, a period of economic and social transformation more fundamental, arguably, than any other human development in recorded history.’ Very briefly, the most pronounced and revolutionary changes occurring during this period were the following.

The Married Woman

As de Beauvoir herself never opted for marriage it has, on occasion, been suggested that she was less than qualified to write about it.1 But de Beauvoir and Sartre did seriously, if briefly, consider marriage in 1929,2 and her reasons for rejecting Sartre’s proposal of marriage in the early 1930s were never less than plausible.3 Besides, she had witnessed her parents’ marriage at close quarters, she had observed the behaviour of her married relations at Merignac, and whatever remaining illusions she had about the role of women evaporated when she went to the United States in 1947. As she put it to Deirdre Bair, because I had never felt discrimination among men in my life, I refused to believe that discrimination existed for other women. That view began to change, to crumble, when I was in New York and I saw how intelligent women were embarrassed or ignored when they tried to contribute to a conversation men were having. Really, American women had a very low status then. Men wanted them for sex and babies and to clean house and that’s very much what they wanted for themselves, too.4

Ethics and Drug Testing in Human Beings

In late May 1984, Irish citizens were perturbed to hear that a thirty-one year old man died while participating, as a paid volunteer, in a clinical drug trial at the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology in Dublin. At the inquest, held in September 1984, the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison, affirmed that the cause of death was the reaction of the trial drug Eproxindine 4/0091 with a major tranquillizer which had been given less than fifteen hours earlier as part of regular treatment for a psychiatric disorder. The mixture of the two drugs, he went on to say, increased their effect by between twenty and thirty times their normal strength, and the volunteer had died of cardiac depression.

Early Philosophical Writing

In the 1940s Simone de Beauvoir published two strictly philosophical works, Pyrrhus and Cineas in 1944, and The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947.1 In the second volume of her memoirs she speaks of the first of these two philosophical works as follows. Early in 1943 Sartre had introduced her to Jean Grenier,2 who asked her whether she was an existentialist. She recalls her embarrassment at the question, notwithstanding the fact that she had read Kierkegaard and was familiar with the expression existential philosophy which, she says, had been applied for some time to the writings of Heidegger. Yet she didn’t, she confesses, understand the meaning of the word existentialist, a word which had only recently been coined by Gabriel Marcel. Besides, she adds, ‘Grenier’s question clashed with my modesty and my pride alike. I was not of sufficient importance, objectively considered, to merit any such label; as for my ideas, I was convinced that they reflected the truth rather than some entrenched doctrinal position.’3

The Second Sex: Woman as the Other

At an early stage in the Introduction to The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir quotes, with approval, the following passage from Claude Levi-Strauss’s Les Structures elementaires de la parente: ‘Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality.’1 As de Beauvoir sees it there are two such dualities, or contrasts, to be noted in social reality as we know it. First, there is the duality of the Subject and the Other; second, there is the duality of Man and Woman. These pairs of opposites are not unrelated, moreover: Man always appears as the Subject, while Woman always appears as the Other.

Recovering Lost Moral Ground: Can Walt Make Amends?

In this chapter, we argue that there are two ways to immunize yourself from accusations of wrongdoing, namely, defenses and excuses, and two ways to recover lost moral ground, namely, correct the record so that no moral ground was lost, or make amends. We argue that Walter White has no excuse for his wrongdoing in Breaking Bad, since he was not immature, or mentally ill, and was not coerced, and that it is not possible to defend him from the most serious accusations of wrongdoing, since these acts were not acts of self-defense or defense of innocent others. Further, we argue that his attempts to correct the record by claiming that he never intended to harm anyone fail, and that he is guilty of bad faith. We conclude by arguing that Walt does recover some moral ground by making amends in his final days, and that he is right to think that it is possible for wrongdoers to recover lost moral ground.

The Blood of Others : The Fictional Primer on Existentialism

This highly successful second novel, published in September 1945, was labelled a Resistance novel, and also an Existentialist novel, though its theme, de Beauvoir pleads in her memoirs, was a much more arid philosophical one, namely, ‘the paradox of this existence experienced by me as my freedom and by those who came in contact with me as an object’.1 But this philosophical intention was either ignored by the public, or, as de Beauvoir herself surmises, was simply not apparent to them.

Responses to The Second Sex: 1962–79

There is an extensive literature on The Second Sex, enough now to justify a book in its own right. I propose to devote three chapters of the present work to summarizing this secondary literature; then I shall offer a further, final chapter in which I propose to reply to the main criticisms of The Second Sex and defend de Beauvoir against these criticisms. The present chapter concentrates on the responses contained in the following works: M. Cranston, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, in J. Cruickshank (ed.), The Novelist as Philosopher (1962); R. Cottrell, Simone de Beauvoir (1975); J. Leighton, Simone de Beauvoir on Woman (1975); and K. Bieber, Simone de Beauvoir (1979).

The Historical Background to The Second Sex

The third volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs,1 on which much of this chapter is based, covers the period from August 1944 to March 1963. It begins with the Liberation and ends with meditations on old age and death. In a liberated Paris she participated in and witnessed what she calls ‘an orgy of brotherhood’.2 The streets were full of American soldiers, and everyone felt that Europe would soon be cleansed of fascism.

Ethics for Violence

The third and longest section of The Ethics of Ambiguity is called ‘The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity’, and in it de Beauvoir attempts to demonstrate exactly how the principle of freedom can function as a guideline for human behaviour. This third section is itself subdivided into the following five subject areas: (i) ‘The Aesthetic Attitude’; (ii) ‘Freedom and Liberation’; (iii) ‘The Antinomies of Action’; (iv) ‘The Present and the Future’; (v) ‘Ambiguity’. In this chapter I shall reconstruct her argument in each of these sections following the sequence which she herself has established.