Applied Existentialism: On Kristiana Arp's The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir's Existentialist Ethics

The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir's Existentialist Ethics. Kristina Arp. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 2001. xii + 184 pp. $42.95 h.c., 0-8126-9442-2; $19.95 pbk., 0-8126-9443-0.

In her recently published book, The Bonds of Freedom, Kristina Arp finds in the work of Simone de Beauvoir grounds to put "existentialist ethics on a sound philosophical footing" (152). Building on Beauvoir's ethical framework by examining the philosopher's earlier essays and literary works, but concentrating primarily on Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity, Arp discovers what she calls "Beauvoir's innovative conception of moral freedom" (151). Indeed, moral freedom is an innovative idea, and Arp's clearly written explication and elaboration of Beauvoir's concept is well thought through and philosophically innovative in its own right. Arp argues that in The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir distinguishes Sartre's ontological freedom from her own theory of moral freedom. Further, this "conception of a specifically moral level of freedom has an important contribution to make to theorizing oppression in general and women's oppression in particular" (145). To demonstrate this second point, Arp compares The Ethics of Ambiguity with The Second Sex, arguing convincingly that Beauvoir's emphasis in the former on moral freedom offers a better framework for a specifically sexually based analysis of oppression, given that the oppressed lack what Arp names the "power" to achieve moral freedom (120). For Arp, this means that the oppressed lack efficacy to discern and/or choose opportunities to "interact with the material world" (124). Therefore, freedom from oppression requires a "minimum level of material well-being," as well as the possibility to formulate projects and goals in conjunction with others (124).

Arp's view of moral freedom entails the positive embrace of possibility, through which we may be liberated from our own and others' oppression. Moral freedom must be actively willed, and willing one's own moral freedom demands that one also will the moral freedom of others. It is this theme that informs Arp's analyses in The Bonds of Freedom:

Moral freedom is the conscious affirmation of one's ontological freedom. And it can only be developed in the absence of certain constraints. Most importantly, however, developing moral freedom requires assuming a certain sort of relation to other people. As Beauvoir says, in order to be genuinely free, one needs others to be free as well. My attaining moral freedom depends on others being able to attain it. (2-3)

In reviewing The Bonds of Freedom, I will confine my focus to examining what I see as very different philosophical commitments underlying Arp's and Beauvoir's work. I will briefly explore Beauvoir's ontological point of departure for moral freedom in order that Arp's distinctive interpretation can be intimated here in its own right.

Beauvoir did not view The Ethics of Ambiguity as a radical departure from the phenomenological analysis of the human being described by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, but as building upon the latter work. The human being as the being whose very being is not to be, yet who desires, impossibly, to be, is one in whom passion is indeed useless. Beauvoir agreed with Sartre's insistence "above all on the abortive aspect of the human adventure" (Beauvoir 1970, 11). But she suggested that Sartre himself left open a positive possibility for life, albeit absurd, to be lived "not in vain" (12). Because his phenomenological inquiry in Being and Nothingness describes only the "human world established by man's projects and the ends he sets up" (11), Sartre did not explore the possible positive ramifications of the human effort to make meaning for being. Instead, Sartre emphasized that existing among others is a fundamental fact of one's own existence—in...