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Beauvoir, the Scandal of Science, and Skepticism as Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Abigail Klassen
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Abstract

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (herein the Ethics), Simone de Beauvoir declares that science condemns itself to failure if it takes as its task the total disclosure of being (Beauvoir 1948/1976, 130). I suggest that the Ethics actually parallels the spirit of some scientific programs, specifically those that utilize positive skepticism as method. I draw out connections among the Ethics, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau‐Ponty 1945/1962) to which Beauvoir's works show much likeness, and Francis Bacon's The New Organon (Bacon 1620/2000), the latter being at once a scientific and a positive skeptical program. Underscoring the ways in which Beauvoir's method of interrogating the being of beings and reality is compatible with some scientific pictures is important. It complicates the usual thought that existentialism is antiscience, problematizes Beauvoir's overly simplistic depiction of science, and nuances her analysis of the existent's experience of itself.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , Fall 2013 , pp. 835 - 851
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Lorraine Code, Jagdish Hattiangadi, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, and several anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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