Liberating the mystified slave requires external intervention to build consciousness
Evidence
What must be done is to furnish the ignorant slave with the means of transcending his situation by means of revolt, to put an end to his ignorance. We know that the problem of the nineteenth-century socialists was precisely to develop a class consciousness in the proletariat; we see in the life of Flora Tristan, for example, how thankless such a task was: what she wanted for the workers had first to be wanted without them. “But what right does one have to want something for others?” asks the conservative, who meanwhile regards the workingman or the native as “a grown-up child” and who does not hesitate to dispose of the child’s will. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 88
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- QUESTION: This is where her derivation of ‘willing my freedom requires willing yours’ is being tested — the move from external intervention to universal freely-chosen freedom deserves scrutiny.