Kate Kirkpatrick: Simone de Beauvoir believed love to be an ethical undertaking
The desires to love and
be loved are, on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, part of the structure of human
existence. Often, they go awry. But even so, she claimed, authentic love is not
only possible but one of the most powerful tools available to individuals who
want to be free. So what, exactly, is this authentic love?
In The Second
Sex (1949), Beauvoir argued that culture led men and women to have
asymmetrical expectations, with the result that ‘love’ frequently felt like a
battlefield of conflicting desires or a graveyard for their disappointments. Surely,
she argued, the situation could be improved – and everyone is ‘judge and party’
in the question of how to love well. Beauvoir’s account of ‘authentic love’ in
this book was the product of more than 20 years of philosophical reflection. As
a young philosophy student in Paris, she had already recognised that some
conceptions of ‘love’ legitimated injustice and perpetuated suffering.
As a
teenager, she began a project of revaluating love, in both theory and practice,
that would last most of her life. Caricatures of her beliefs put all the
emphasis on the existential theme of freedom, on whom you love and how, but
there was far more to authentic love for Beauvoir than unhindered individual
choice. For the later Beauvoir, in order for love to be authentic, it must be
reciprocal and non-exploitative. But it was difficult to achieve this, because
society perpetuated myths of love that idealised unethical relations between
the sexes.
Beauvoir’s ethics were
shaped by a tradition according to which whom and what we love plays a pivotal
role in whom we become. For the Augustine-infused Catholicism of her childhood,
one of the key ‘rules of life’ was to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. Her
philosophical education kept returning to it: the ‘love command’ of the Hebrew
Bible, reiterated in the New Testament by Jesus Christ and St Paul, features in
many classic works of normative ethics; both Immanuel Kant and John Stuart
Mill, for example, claimed to offer answers to the difficult question: how can
I love another as myself? Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (1847)
– though less frequently considered a core text of moral philosophy – analysed
the command word by word, in the hope that obeying it could overcome a deep
human dread: ‘the dread of being alone in the world’.... read more:
