Digifesto

I appear to be unable to stop writing blog posts about philosophers who wrote in the 1940’s. I’ve been attempting a kind of survey. After a lot of reading, I have to say that my favorite–the one I think is most correct–is Simone de Beauvoir.

Much like “bourgeois”, “de Beauvoir” is something I find it impossible to remember how to spell. Therefore I am setting myself up for embarrassment by beginning to write about her work, The Ethics of Ambiguity. On the other hand, it’s nice to come full circle. In a notebook I was scribbling in when I first showed up in graduate school I was enthusiastic about using de Beauvoir to explicate what’s interesting about open source software development. Perhaps now is the right time to indulge the impulse.

de Beauvoir is generally not considered to be a philosopher of science. That’s too bad, because she said some of the most brilliant things about science ever said. If you can get past just a little bit of existentialist jargon, there’s a lot there.

Here’s a passage. The Marxists have put this entire book on the Internet, making it easy to read.

To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed. Science, technics, art, and philosophy are indefinite conquests of existence over being; it is by assuming themselves as such that they take on their genuine aspect; it is in the light of this assumption that the word progress finds its veridical meaning. It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute.

de Beauvoir’s project in The Ethics of Ambiguity is to take seriously the antimonies of society and the individual, of nature and the subject, which Horkheimer only gets around to stating at the conclusion of contemporary analysis. Rather than cry from wounds of getting skewered by the horns of the antinomy, de Beauvoir turns that ambiguity inherent in the antinomy into a realistic, situated ethics.

If de Beauvoir’s ethics have a telos or purpose, it is to expand human freedom and potential indefinitely. Through a terrific dialectical argument, she reasons out why this project is in a sense the only honest one for somebody in the human condition, despite its transcendence over individual interest.

Science, then, becomes one of several activities which one undertakes to expand this human potential.

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

Science is the process of free inquiry, not the product of a particular discovery. The finest scientific discoveries open up new discoveries.

What about technics?

The attempt is sometimes made to find an objective justification of science in technics; but ordinarily the mathematician is concerned with mathematics and the physicist with physics, and not with their applications. And, furthermore, technics itself is not objectively justified; if it sets up as absolute goals the saving of time and work which it enables us to realize and the comfort and luxury which it enables us to have access to, then it appears useless and absurd, for the time that one gains can not be accumulated in a store house; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent, and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

Here we have in just a couple sentences dismissal of instrumentality as the basis for science. Science is not primarily for acceleration; this is absurd.

But actually it is not a question of giving men time and happiness, it is not a question of stopping the movement of life: it is a question of fulfilling it. If technics is attempting to make up for this lack, which is at the very heart of existence, it fails radically; but it escapes all criticism if one admits that, through it, existence, far from wishing to repose in the security of being, thrusts itself ahead of itself in order to thrust itself still farther ahead, that it aims at an indefinite disclosure of being by the transformation of the thing into an instrument and at the opening of ever new possibilities for man.

For de Beauvoir, science (as well as all the other “constructive activities of man” including art, etc.) should be about the disclosure of new possibilities.

Succinct and unarguable.