Pyrrhus et Cinéas

"Pyrrhus is a king and Cinéas is his adviser. The book opens with a conversation between the two of them. Pyrrhus declares that he is going to conquer Greece, and Cinéas asks him, ‘Why? What are you going to do after that?’. To which Pyrrhus replies, ‘Well then I’ll conquer Africa.’ Cinéas asks again, ‘Well what are you going to do once you’ve done that?’ ‘Then I’m going to conquer Asia’, Pyrrhus replies. Cinéas keeps asking this same question until Pyrrhus runs out of lands to conquer, at which point he says, ‘After all this I will rest.’ Cinéas replies: ‘Well why not just rest now?’ Indeed. Why bother doing all those other things first? “Cinéas replies, ‘Well why not just rest now?’ Indeed.” There’s a lot going on in that conversation, but what Cinéas seems to be suggesting is that there’s something absurd about these projects, about all projects. You value the goal you’re trying to achieve while you’re trying to achieve it. But then once it’s been achieved you just move on to something else. So, that’s one of the problems Beauvoir wants to raise in the book: the problem of absurdity. Exactly. But what Cinéas is wrong about, she thinks, is the suggestion that you could just give up committing to these projects, because on Beauvoir’s view you can’t. What it is to be human is to pursue projects. So that’s the problem of absurdity, as she sees it: we are stuck, we have projects and must value our goals, and yet are aware from some perspectives that these goals seem valueless. No, it’s a philosophical essay in the style of Michel de Montaigne’s Essais . It was originally published as a short book in 1944, but only translated into English in 2004. It is fascinating. It strikes me as a much more insightful and interesting analysis of the problem of absurdity than Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus which is the go-to text for that topic. It’s also an important moral argument: her analysis of absurdity produces an argument for Kantian morality, the idea that it’s imperative that you respect and promote human freedom. Her other moral and political writings of the 1940s, including The Second Sex , all are built on that claim. She’s often accused of simply assuming it without any argument, but she hasn’t assumed it, she’s published her argument in this book that was very well received in 1944 in Paris. I don’t know whether it then disappeared in French culture or just never got translated into English. I think the reception of all her moral and political work, certainly in the English language, has been distorted by that crucial missing piece of the jigsaw. I think that’s right. But the contrast between them has even got to the point where some people think that, because of exactly the contrast you’ve described, and because people think existentialism has to be defined in terms of Sartre’s philosophy, that it somehow shows that Beauvoir was not fully an existentialist. But I think it’s exactly the other way around. If you define existentialism as what they were both saying in 1945, then you see this as a tension within existentialism, one that got resolved in Beauvoir’s favour across the 1940s. I’m not sure that is what neuroscience is necessarily telling us, and a certain take on it often overlooks this. The neuroscience story isn’t that what appear to be our decisions are completely epiphenomenal, it’s not that they have no effect, it’s that their effect isn’t directly on our immediate behaviour but rather it’s on training and programming the system that produces our behaviour. I think this is exactly what you find in Beauvoir’s style of existentialism based on her notion of sedimentation. Sartre’s whole model doesn’t make sense without a notion of sedimentation. Why might ‘slimy’ things be disgusting because they conflict with your projects, unless it’s because your projects have become so engrained in your cognitive system that they are even shaping your perception. It looks like sedimentation is required for a lot of Sartre’s existentialism. That’s why I think it’s a mistake to think that existentialism is just the theory of radical freedom and that Beauvoir’s theory is not really existentialist. The radical freedom version of Sartre in 1943 was not even internally coherent for that reason, and that’s ultimately what he came to realise over the 1940s."