November 11

Today, you'll spend more time getting familiar with the details of Beauvoir's metaphysical story. Beauvoir's theory of good living rests on her rejection of the Aristotelean and Stoic ideas of human nature, and her embrace of an account of particular human existences as fundamentally undetermined and open-ended. This notion that "existence precedes essence" means that a good life is not simply a life lived in accordance with nature. Rather, the human being possesses a fundamental freedom to a) live a certain way and b) to value, and find meaning, in certain ways of living. However, this freedom is not simply the "capacity of choosing between multiple options." Rather, existentialist freedom is a kind of irreducible, spontaneity that underpins the movements of human life; this movement is spontaneous in that it is unrestricted by an essence and internally-motivated, rather than caused from the outside. As Beauvoir acknowledges, many of us might balk at the notion that this kind of free existence can possibly be described as good...