Beauvoir’s situational freedom confounds any firm distinction between constituting and being constituted
Evidence
In her critique of my earlier work, Gail Linsenbard simply reasserts the dualism Beauvoir has successfully overcome in Th e Second Sex and Th e Mandarins. Linsenbard asserts: “According to Beauvoir, in deciding the meaning of my situation, I thereby constitute it, I am thus never wholly passive with respect to my situation” (“Beauvoir, Ontology, and Women’s Human Rights,” 157–58). But the point is that we are neither fully the constitutors of our situation nor wholly its passive products. Rather, the signifi cance of Beauvoir’s account of Henri’s decision is that it reveals the tensions and ambiguities of a freedom in situation. Beauvoir here discloses the dialectics of interiorization and exteriorization (to use Sartre’s later terminology in the Critique of Dialectical Reason) through which our choices and projects are born. Th ese dialectics profoundly confound distinctions between the constitutor and constituted that Linsenbard still seeks to maintain.
— Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 502
Categorization
DEFINE: Clarifies the dialectics of interiorization and exteriorization and the rejection of the constitutor/constituted dichotomy as Beauvoir’s position.