Beauvoir’s situation concept maps Darwin’s rejection of Lamarckian progress onto the rejection of progressivism.

Evidence

I want to argue that Beauvoir’s idea of the situation is Darwinian in two important ways. Just as, from a Darwinian point of view, Lamarckism has no validity, so too, from a Beauvoirian point of view, the idea of progress must be rejected. Th is idea of progress presupposes that being is essentially rational, and raises the status of progress to a law of being. In practical terms, it means that progress becomes a necessary, invariant, natural part of human nature. Th is is expressed, for example, through the commonly held belief that the improvement of productive forces is forever producing benefi cial eff ects. Questioning progress does not, of course, mean that we can no longer speak of progress; rather, it forces us to question the value of progress and to treat it as something to which we must give meaning, not something that is imbued with value once and for all. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 445

Categorization

• XREF: Connects the reader’s prior notes on Darwin/environment to Beauvoir’s existentialist concept of ‘situation’ — a genuinely cross-domain analogy worth preserving. — connects to: Beauvoir distinguishes inborn ontological freedom from willed freedom that facticity can eviscerate — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 643
• DEFINE: Clarifies what the author means by reading Beauvoir’s situation as ‘Darwinian’ — freedom tied to concrete variation and environment, not teleological progress.

Broader Connections

• Beauvoir distinguishes inborn ontological freedom from willed freedom that facticity can eviscerate #expands (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 643