Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 245: Reading Simone de Beauvoir — with Ellie Anderson
Speakers: Samantha Walters, Am Johal, Ellie Anderson
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Samantha Walters 0:03
Hello listeners! I’m Sam with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Ellie Anderson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pomona College, and co-host of the Overthink podcast. Ellie joins us to discuss how she got into philosophy and contemporary readings of Simone de Beauvoir’s work. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:37
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. delighted that you could join us again this week. We have a special guest, Ellie Anderson is with us. Welcome, Ellie.
Ellie Anderson 0:47
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really delighted to be on the show.
Am Johal 0:50
Ellie, wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Ellie Anderson 0:56
Sure I am— Yeah, Ellie Anderson, as you mentioned. I'm an assistant professor of philosophy at Pomona College, which is outside of Los Angeles in Claremont, California. And I don't know how much detail you want. I have been a professor for a number of years now, having gotten my PhD at Emory University in 2016. And I work mostly on French philosophy and contemporary philosophy and the continental European and feminist traditions. I have written quite a bit on philosophy of love and sex. And I'm working on a book right now on selfhood, and subjectivity.
Am Johal 1:29
And Ellie, wondering if you can—
Ellie Anderson 1:31
Oh, I forgot to say, I'm also the co-host of Overthink podcast, which is probably if any of your listeners know me, that is probably what they know for.
Am Johal 1:39
Very successful podcast and a great podcast, highly recommend our listeners check it out. Wondering if you could share a little bit about your sort of origin story of how you fell into philosophy. There's so many routes that people have in terms of, you know, engaging with the writing or they start to read on their own or if it was a particular class, but what is it that drew you into pursuing philosophy in the way that you have?
Ellie Anderson 2:09
Yeah. I grew up Christian and was always very interested in the intellectual traditions of Christianity, which, you know, prior to discovering what philosophy was, was what I understood, you know, thinking about the big questions to be right. I was thinking about the big questions in a religious context. And so, for me, that meant a lot of studying, a lot of reading, this was mostly reading the Bible and theological texts, I got really into Christian mysticism as a teenager. And then as a teenager, as well—I think this is sort of a classic story—started to doubt a lot of the things that I had been taught growing up in the Christian context. And gradually, my theological perspective just became less and less obviously Christian until I realized that I was no longer Christian. And that was around the same time that I also started studying Buddhist thought and philosophy in you know, the, as we call it, Western tradition. So like many people in North America, I took my first philosophy class in college because it was not offered in high school. But I think my adolescent grappling with religion paved the way for me to be interested in philosophy as a young adult. And I've also always been a nerd, interested in reading and writing. And so studying philosophy was a good way for me to continue that. I almost became an actor, and I was thinking about majoring in theater in college. But I realized that with studying roles and performing, the most interesting part of that whole process for me was getting into the head of a character. And ultimately, that led me more to philosophy. I was like writing five to ten page character studies of my characters that I was gonna be performing, and realized that was actually more exciting to me than the performance itself.
Am Johal 4:02
It's so interesting, because you know, of course, theological traditions have a relationship, a very strong relationship, to philosophy, or, as Agamben often says that, you know, much of what we have in the secular world is sort of driven out of theological considerations or even this notion of time. You know, it's 2024 right now, but it goes back to a religious calendar, of course. And I'm wondering, in the theological kind of realm, what were some of the thinkers that kind of spoke to you in terms of your broader philosophical interests? You know, of course, in philosophy, it's quite normal to read Aquinas or others but were there some aspects of your theological reading that remain sort of close to you as you study and pursue philosophy?
Ellie Anderson 4:48
I think the people I was most into back then are not people that I'm still reading today. I was really into CS Lewis's book on heaven as a teenager, St. Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton. And there's this kind of liberal theologian John Shelby Spong, who was really influential on me as a teenager. And so I'm not presenting those necessarily as reading recommendations unless that tradition interests you, because those are certainly not texts that I've gone back to since and I'm sure I would find a lot to disagree with now. But those did have impact on me. And I think I did also get a bit interested in ancient philosophy when I was a teenager. So Seneca's essay on the shortness of life was very influential for me. And that is certainly still something that I not only return to today, but also teach pretty regularly. And I think there's been this huge revival of stoicism in recent years. And a lot of it is done in a very over simplified manner. And there's also like some weird ties to, between the resurgence of stoicism and the man-osphere or incel culture. But I do think that there's a lot to be said about how much stoicism can still impact everyday life in the present day for the better. And I think you also see that in the rise of stoicism in recent years.
Am Johal 6:07
Yeah, the meditations on stoicism. Very interesting. I want to speak to you about— you're scholar in a number of areas of continental philosophy, but certainly you've gone into the work of Simone de Beauvoir in particular and I want to ask you a few questions around sort of what drew your interest in de Beauvoir's work on existentialism, first of all.
Ellie Anderson 6:30
Yeah, I first was drawn to Simone de Beauvoir's work as an undergrad trying to get over a heartbreak. I was studying abroad in Paris my junior year of college, and I was already studying philosophy at that time, I was really excited to go to France because I'd been studying French since high school. And you know, then that ended up setting me up really nicely for a future career as somebody who specializes in French philosophy. But while I was in Paris, studying abroad, I was not having the best time. I was really, really broken up, over having had a recent breakup with somebody I was dating back in college. And this was before the era of FaceTime and free WiFi everywhere. And so studying abroad often meant that you broke up with the person that you were dating with unless you wanted to just literally not see them for three months and exchange a few emails in the interim. And so in trying to get over this heartbreak, I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's work. And in particular, I found out while I was studying abroad, that the person I had broken up with was dating somebody new and they were really in love. And this was just, you know, this was salt on the wound. And luckily, Simone de Beauvoir's novel 'She Came to Stay' was something that I was reading at the time as part of my studies. And that novel is about a longtime couple who ends up bringing a third person into their relationship, this younger woman, and the novel is about the protagonist, the older woman who's been in this relationship for a long time, trying to come to terms with her partner's desire for somebody else and not being able to wrap her head around that. And this story is very different from the story I was living out, from what I was experiencing. But something about that unintelligibility of someone you love desiring another person really deeply spoke to me. And Beauvoir was tying it to traditions within philosophy that I then found compelling, in turn. So the epigraph to that novel, even though it's a novel, of course, it's philosophical, because Beauvoir herself was well trained in philosophy. And the epigraph to that novel is from Hegel. The epigraph is "each consciousness seeks the death of the other." I feel like I might be getting that wrong. I really should know this as somebody who regularly teaches Hegel, but it's from the master servant dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. And that then made me start thinking about... Yeah, the unintelligibility of a lover's desire for another person in philosophical terms and really took me in exciting directions in studying philosophy of love that have led me to the present day.
Am Johal 9:14
I think about like, some of the fiction like Elena Ferrante, to Annie Ernaux, or By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Those moments of infatuation in others, and it's been mined in fiction, but also, you know, philosophy in love or philosophy and friendship have a strong relationship to each other. I've heard you talk about in terms of an entryway into understanding De Beauvoir's sort of broader oeuvre, that you recommend Ethics of Ambiguity as a place to start. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to kind of the importance of that work or why you think that's a way into her broader work?
Ellie Anderson 9:54
Okay. I don't remember recommending that. But I believe you. I have a horrible memory. So maybe, let me try and put myself back in the perspective of when I was probably recommending that like probably on YouTube or Tik Tok or something? I think... So the text The Ethics of Ambiguity is her argument that not only is existentialism profoundly interested in ethical questions, it's actually the philosophy where ethics has a home. Beauvoir is rejecting the ethical approaches that are more common in philosophy throughout its history, especially what we would call in the English speaking world, utilitarianism. But also the approach of Kant or deontology. And both of these approaches, although there's a lot to say about their differences, and also what benefits they bring as we're thinking about ethical questions. Both of them are overly formal for her. And they treat ethics as some sort of universal framework that we can apply in particular situations and Beauvoir's argument is ethics doesn't have anything to do with recipes. It doesn't have to do with maxims, it doesn't have to do with overarching principles, it instead has to do with extremely complex negotiations between individuals and between groups, between groups and individuals that we find ourselves caught up with in our day to day lives. And one of her central claims, and this is a claim that you find in a lot of existentialism, is that being free is central to being human. But being free is really hard and really uncomfortable. And a lot of times we find ourselves in situations where we want to flee our freedom, we want to pretend that we're not free, we want to pretend that we're determined by things outside of ourselves, because it's just much more comfortable to do that. And so she has a whole cast of characters, there's the serious man, there's the sub man, all of these different figures that she articulates in this book in pretty interesting ways. And it's fun to always have like, it's always fun to have a cast of characters in a philosophical text. And she describes these as people who have sort of varying degrees of awareness of their own freedom and varying degrees, you know, on the opposite side of the coin, of rejecting that freedom or of denying that freedom. She's also really asserting in this text that existential ethics is not individualist. A lot of times people associate existentialism with an emphasis on individual subjectivity. And with a kind of emo, let's say, approach to the world. Like, Ah, it's just so hard to be human, I'm so anxious all the time. And that can further isolate us from other people. And Beauvoir's contention is that existentialism requires recognizing the freedom of others and also that our own freedom requires being recognized by others. And so she's providing a sort of communal antidote to the individualism that is associated with existentialism, which I find quite powerful.
Am Johal 13:09
Now, a lot of people of course, discover, De Beauvoir through her work The Second Sex, and we have a number of graduate students who will be listening to this as well who may not have read this work as of yet, but wondering if you could speak a little bit to the relevance of this text. And you know, some people have argued that maybe this is dated and others disagree with that, what can we recover from it today? Or how can we put it into context? But what do you get out of your own reading out of The Second Sex that you find relevant in terms of thinking through philosophically
Ellie Anderson 13:44
The Second Sex is a super long and in many ways, weird text, and so there's a lot that you can get out of it. And there's also very easy ways to misunderstand this text. I read The Second Sex as a way of understanding the condition of women in Beauvoir society, which was 1940s France, predominantly in a bourgeois context, through the lens of phenomenology. But for Beauvoir phenomenology, which is a tradition of philosophy that focuses on first person lived experience, is never separate from the historical and structural conditions that support our individual experience. And so when we're talking about doing a phenomenology of women's condition, we also have to be talking about historical, sociological, cultural elements. And you see Beauvoir doing— also biological elements. You see her doing all of that, in this text. One of the main critiques of The Second Sex is that it's not intersectional. That it predominantly pertains to Beauvoir's own milieu of as I mentioned, late 1940s French, in particular Parisian bourgeois context, and I think that's definitely a fair characterization in the sense that Beauvoir is in places overreaching that claim quite a lot and talking about the universality of women's condition. And so I think at the same time, if you situate it in that context, you'll find on the one hand that as a phenomenological description of that kind of milieu, it's extremely powerful. And on the other hand, there's also a lot that people in different contexts can learn from it and a lot of the more universalizing claims that Beauvoir is making aren't so easy to dismiss. There's a lot to be said about, you know, what we can draw what we can't, I will also say in this context, that another thing that Beauvoir sometimes, sometimes people like about her and sometimes people don't like about her, is she's often read as a social constructionist about gender, as somebody who saw gender as distinct from sex. And that's a bit anachronistic. She's writing in a language and in a decade at which the sex gender distinction had not yet been made. But the reason that people see her as a social constructionist about gender, is because she says, famously, one is not born a woman, one becomes one. And the reason for that is that from a phenomenological perspective, and also from an existential perspective, there is not a hard and fast line between nature and nurture. There is not a strong distinction between what is socially constructed and what is natural, what it means to be human is to always be taking up all elements of your situation. And that sheer fact of taking those up kind of transforms them. So, I think that as a model for a kind of philosophy that one can do even if one goes in different directions from Beauvoir is fascinating. It's highly original. It's very synthetic. It's also for that reason, quite messy. But I think in addition to that form, or structure of the text as being something we can learn from, there's so much in the actual analyses that are really worthwhile. And just to use one example here, I have found her depictions of love and the way that women in patriarchal societies are encouraged by so many means to be obsessed with seeking and sustaining loving relationships with men, to be quite relevant still in the modern day. And I think sometimes it's easy to be like this text was written almost 100 years ago, it's no longer relevant. But then when you when you dig a little bit deeper, and you look at studies that are being done, even today, about the uneven distribution of you know, emotional labor, or what I call in some of my work, hermeneutic labor, the labor of interpreting people's emotions, that's still by and large being done by women when they're in romantic relationships with men and I think that's something Beauvoir can really speak to.
Am Johal 17:48
You know, she writes a lot about love and eroticism versus marriage as a sort of contract. You've written as well as looking at sort of how can we read De Beauvoir into contemporary hookup culture and trying to update her inside of this context of things that people are trying to grapple with and think through. But this broader notion of you know, how to be in a relationship and at the same time, maintain one's freedom. And in a patriarchal context as well, that even though the times have changed, some of those dynamics, of course, remain and persist. And of course, contemporary hookup culture is functioning in a sort of post pandemic technological age. And so I wonder if you can share a little bit to how De Beauvoir might be helpful in thinking through some of the contemporary dynamics of relationships.
Ellie Anderson 18:40
Sure. My previous work on this on Beauvoir in hookup culture centered around the way that hookup culture tends to favor a typically masculine way of relating over a typically feminine way of relating and that typically masculine way of relating has to do with sort of who can be less— who can be the least interested. And whoever can be the least interested has the most power, and also sort of transactional approach to romantic relationships. Now, I want to be very clear that I'm not saying that the problem with that type of relating means that we should go back to some previous way of dating where you couldn't have casual sex with people or you couldn't explore various connections at once. And I don't think that's Beauvoir's point either about romantic relationships and the relation of sex to them. She has, you know, views of eroticism that are really quite radically different from the idea that eroticism flowers in a monogamous marriage. But I think that there is a way that hookup culture— and we've seen this even since I was first writing on this— in studies that have been done on how dissatisfied people, and especially women, but really people of all genders are with this framework. I think since then, we've seen a kind of doubling down on some of those features. And so when I first was working on this, there was online dating, there were apps, but it wasn't as prevalent as it is today. And this was also well pre pandemic. And so one thing that I would add to some of those earlier reflections that I also think we can use Beauvoir to help us understand, is the rise of a sort of visual way of relating to people where we're seeing their images and they're often still images when we're looking at apps. And then we're reading their words, but really, it's the images that are painting the main picture of who they are. And then imagining who they might be on the basis of that. And I don't think that that's necessarily bad in and of itself. But when that comes to counterbalance more dynamic ways of relating, which is definitely something that we saw during the pandemic. And I think we also see in some of the ways that young people are finding it really hard today to sustain intimate relationships, that signals that something has gone amiss. And so that rise of the visual, I would say, is a potential problem. I'm certainly not against dating apps, I think there are problems that we're seeing with them. You know, and I mentioned that some studies have been done on this. But there's also a lot of beauty to those apps. I mean, one thing that I really value about the rise of apps is that it broadens one's circle of potential relationships, or you might say potential hookups, or, I would love to say, beyond the bounds of just like sex and or romantic love, it also broadens our potential for meeting other people in different contexts too. And I think we definitely are living in a society where people are using apps pretty much exclusively for sex and or romantic relationships, like Bumble BFF didn't really take off. But in a perfect world. I mean, maybe we'll start to see the establishment of more relationships through these means too, because one lesson that I take very seriously from Beauvoir is that the emphasis on romantic love over other kinds of relationships is a big problem. And her vision of authentic love is much closer to friendship than it is to romantic love. I think that's a progressive way of understanding relationships that is worth emphasizing. There's a dethroning of romantic love that I think is quite important if we're going to envision new, more communal ways of living with one another in the future.
Am Johal 22:33
Interesting, we had a couple of psychoanalysts on Below the Radar, who were talking about dating during the pandemic, in particular. Hilda Fernandez and Fernanda, and it was interesting speaking with them, because they, you know, in their clinical practice, were looking at, you know, everything from queerness, to situationships, to polyamory, to all of the kinds of new questions that arise from moving out of what would be a more traditional relationship. And so these questions arise psychoanalytically, but this idea of sort of the borderlessness between friendships and intimacy, and relationships and queerness, there's so many other questions that arise and I'm wondering, is there something in De Beauvoir or somewhere else in the philosophical realm that could be useful to think through some of these questions today, given the technological mediation, but also a broadening of what's an acceptable relationship today?
Ellie Anderson 23:33
Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, those of us who are working on philosophy of love, I think, are very interested in these questions. I would say there's not a ton in recent work within philosophy of love about the new technological dimensions of relationships, but a lot of us are working on non monogamy, polyamory in particular, but also other, you know, non monogamous modes of relating. And that's an area of philosophy—I'll just say I hope this isn't too inside-ery from a philosophical perspective—But as some of your listeners may know, there's sort of a divide within philosophy between analytic or Anglo American approaches, and continental European approaches. And I think philosophy of love is a space whereas somebody trained in continental European philosophy, I've seen the boundary kind of dissolve between those two types of philosophy. And I think that's awesome. So yeah, I really value on the analytic philosophy of love side, if we're thinking about non monogamy, I really valued the work of my colleague, Justin Clardy, who I've collaborated with on a number of projects, as well as Carrie Jenkins, who's based actually in Vancouver, or in British Columbia at UBC. So there are folks, I think, who are thinking about this quite interestingly, and Elizabeth Brake is well known for her critique of marriage and her advocacy of what she calls minimal marriage or of extending the benefits of marriage to people outside of traditional marital relationships. It's a little bit less about love and more about marriage, but I think that stuff is great, too. I'm also currently working a bit on Montaigne and Aristotle and what they might have to offer non monogamous approaches to love in their theories of friendship. Because the funny thing about Aristotle and Montaigne is they're actually monogamous about friendship. They think that you can have only one complete friend each. And there are various reasons for that, which I won't get into here. But one of the objections that they both raise is aversion. It's an early version of an objection against nonmonogamy, the TEA objection or the T objection. That's the way that Justin Clardi describes it. And that's the time, energy and attention objection, which is, even if there's nothing intrinsically monogamous about romantic love, it just so happens that we only have enough time, energy and attention for so many people. And really, that so many people is one person, right? You just can't you couldn't sustain multiple relationships with multiple people at one time because of the particularly taxing nature of romantic relationships. And I think there's a kernel of truth to that, which is just that we all have limited time, energy and attention. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to, to have really meaningful relationships that go beyond just this one relationship. And so I think in the same way that most of us find Aristotle and Montaigne's claims that you can only have one complete friend, pretty strange, we should also find the claim that you can only have one loving, romantic partner, pretty strange.
Am Johal 26:45
Ellie, I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about what you're working on now, like either writing or thinking or reading? What are you up to now with your work?
Ellie Anderson 26:53
Yeah, I'm currently working on a book on selfhood that draws on phenomenology to argue for the importance of different ways of relating to ourselves, both for understanding what it is to be in the world, and also for understanding how to be better in the world. And I mean, just to be completely honest here, this is a project that is ballooning out in ways that I didn't anticipate. And so I hesitate to say what the overarching idea is, in part because there's too many but they're not... there's too few that are developed. And it's also very likely that this project is going to end up becoming extended beyond just the particular book that I'm working on right now. Like it's probably, I have way more material than I need for one book. Or than I can have in one book, according to you know, sort of University Press desired page limits, so we'll see exactly where it goes. But I'm really interested in the moment in which we find ourselves where there's a real resurgence in interest in phenomenology, but an emphasis on the fact that phenomenology, even though it's grounded in first person lived experience, is not at odds with more structural and critical approaches to philosophy. And my view on this has changed over the years, I wrote my dissertation on Derrida and I was very invested in deconstruction for many years, and had this sort of deconstructive critiques of phenomenology in the back of my mind at all times, which are, you know, first person perspective always already haunted by second and third person perspectives, the subject, never purely self constituting, et cetera, et cetera. But I think I've come to see that phenomenology is a much richer and more variegated tradition than is sometimes given credit for. And so there's also been this rise that's come along with my kind of recognition of the richness of that tradition. There's been a rise of a subfield called critical phenomenology that's taking in to account the insights of especially Foucault and Fanon, but also people working in critical theory traditions. And so I— yeah, I'm working on a project that tries to offer an account of selfhood that's rooted in that really expansive notion of phenomenology. And that in particular, is trying to hold on to the concept of self in the face of sort of critiques of selfhood and subjectivity that emerge out of post structuralist philosophy, and perhaps more recently, through ideas that the self is a multiplicity.
Am Johal 29:32
We have an interview coming out in a couple of weeks with Ian Angus, a recently retired professor from SFU, who's a Husserl scholar, so we'll make sure to share that with you.
Ellie Anderson 29:45
Great.
Am Johal 29:46
Ellie, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar. Is there anything you'd like to add?
Ellie Anderson 29:52
No, I mean, if you'd like to check out Overthink, we have lots of exciting podcast episodes and YouTube videos that predominantly centered around continental European philosophy and the history of philosophy. So yeah, check us out if you'd like at Overthink_pod on TikTok, and all the other social media, as well as on YouTube and Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much. This has been a really great conversation. And yeah, I really appreciate what you guys are doing.
Am Johal 30:20
Ellie, thank you so much for joining us. And please do check out Overthink, they're doing such a great job and it's getting out to so many people. So thank you so much, Ellie.
Ellie Anderson 30:29
Thank you
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Samantha Walters 30:34
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our episode with Ellie Anderson. Check out the Overthink podcast in our show notes. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.