The Mandarins marks Beauvoir’s break from early Kantian-inflected moral theory.
Evidence
Of course, she does already depart from a straightforward Kantianism insofar as she insists that the self must decide “in situation” and oft en in situations that do not admit of a straightforward moral resolution through the application of principle. But she still attributes a strong autonomy— indeed, an “infi nite” freedom— to the self. She argues that others’ actions may impinge only on the “outside” (les dehors), and thus not on the ontological freedom of an individual (PC, 83, 86). Th us, she also argues, each of us must judge and act alone; consequently, we must also assume full moral responsibility for our individual actions. To deny this responsibility, it follows, is to attempt to fl ee one’s freedom; it is to act in “bad faith.” … For what the novel reveals is that making political judgments is itself a form of situationally suff used action. “Judging,” in this fuller sense, is an activity that we can very rarely undertake detached from the facticities of our own particular lives. For these facticities will strongly color (even though they do not determine) how we view the world, and they will signifi cantly shape what we decide and do. Th ey will suff use our freedom and shape our judgments in ways that Beauvoir does not admit in her early essays, in ways that Sartre does not conceive of in Being and Nothingness, and that generally still remain unacknowledged in neo-Kantian conceptions of judgment. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 478
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to standard historiography of Beauvoir’s development from The Ethics of Ambiguity to The Mandarins. — connects to: Beauvoir rejected Kantian ethics for presupposing a closed voluntarist circularity — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 428
- DEFINE: Clarifies the distinction between liberté and puissance as Beauvoir draws it.
Broader Connections
- Beauvoir rejected Kantian ethics for presupposing a closed voluntarist circularity
#expands(0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 428