The Serious Stance

Upon reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, I was struck by how close her description of the ‘serious man’ resembles a certain species of self-righteous political disagreement, especially online. Here, I attempt to explicate upon some of her remarks about how I see it playing out in Twitter, ‘the culture wars,’ and wider discourse. I develop a notion, born from her serious man, of a subjective state I call the serious stance and how it fails to consider error and change. I instead argue we ought to take up the fallible stance.

To begin, some caveats; de Beauvoir characterises the serious man as one who “loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his subjectivity.” To avoid getting into confusing existential ontology, and for our purposes of analysing the current discourse, let us think of these terms as something closer to a metaphor (and not something de Beauvoir would necessarily agree with). From here on, the Object will mean something like an absolute value in which one categorically believes or thinks they must signal objective belief in. Ones subjectivity can just mean the radically free and variable ways in which we make, act on, and establish value in real world practice (no one seems to really be a strict Kantian, for example). Finally, I want to avoid blanket characterisations of whole beings as serious men. I think most people when they are guilty of what I will go into later in this essay only do so in certain social situations or on certain questions. My experience of people in one-on-one conversation is that most people are reasonable and willing to discuss the complex shades of grey. I would prefer to call it something like the serious stance. That being said, let me explain first what the serious man is.

The Serious Man

The essence of the serious man is summed up below by de Beauvoir:

The serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself. Shielded with ‘rights’, he fulfills himself as being who is escaping from the stress of experience…he refuses to recognise that he is freely establishing the value of the end he sets up.

In other words, the serious man is the one who embraces one absolute and external value instead of what she sees as the ultimate truth of (inter)subjectivity. This, to her, is an excuse; it is a denial of one’s ultimate freedom of their own being in the world, which is one of necessarily constantly moving moral parts. To aspire towards one abstract and objective truth, to assert himself as The One With All The Answers is not only to shield himself from criticism but also to “permanently confer value upon himself” and upon any actions justified in the name of the Object. But what does this actually look like in practice?

The most obvious examples of this in recent history are Fascism, Nazism, Religious violence, or any other Utopian projects. The Object, whether it is racial purity or glorious revolution is a special way in which the serious man manages to post-hoc justify any atrocities. The Object for the serious man becomes an “inhuman idol to which one will not hesitate to sacrifice man himself.” The serious man above all else is dangerous. For de Beauvoir, it is only natural that those of this disposition become tyrants. She writes that:

he pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him; and by the same token he also ignores the value of subjectivity and the freedom of others, to such an extent that, sacrificing them to the thing, he persuades himself that he sacrifices nothing

The key point to take away here is that this attitude is fundamentally willing to sacrifice any and all obstacles to their own Object should it be required to reach that end. Plus, the serious man’s belief in that Object’s efficacy will be enough to convince them the sacrifice was made for a worthwhile cause. The serious necessarily leads to a fanaticism. This is all well and good, but to what extent do these, ‘serious men,’ even exist outside of dictator’s or radicals that are pretty unanimously denounced anyway? Did I not mention earlier that I think people do not actually act this way? This leads into something we are all guilty of.

The Serious Stance

What I am calling the serious stance falls outside of committed revolutionaries and devotees of one abstract end. While the serious man is an archetype, the serious stance is an individual’s disposition towards certain ends in certain circumstances. The serious stance is to take a stance towards a very specific usually emotionally charged or morally consequential issue, question, or situation as an unquestioning zealot to that end. It is to be wrapped up in the truth of one’s object (regardless of your leanings about whether some kind of objectivity can be realised); it is the subjective state and action itself that posits this. What this means is that those taking the serious stance commit themselves to one smaller scale object as necessarily good. This means that any casualties in service of the object are taken as justified and compromise to the opposition side is taken as betrayal.

One striking place where I see the serious stance taken is when it comes to the debates between trans activists and ‘TERFs’ (the acronym does not seem to mean the sum of its parts anymore it seems to just be a derogatory term for anti-trans so I will use it as such). As a disclaimer I really do not have any idea what this debate is really about, nor do I have any stakes in it, so forgive my impropriety going forward. The fact that I feel I must apologise in advance for mild criticism is something I am willing to bet most have felt when coming into contact with someone’s else’s sacred object as I am about to; this is the first demonstration of my point.

When trans activists posit the highly unintuitive (and I think they underrate how extensive the cognitive dissonance is here for most people) point that self-identified trans women ought to be able to compete in woman’s sports or that sex itself is a social construction built under an already gendered paradigm (my probably bankrupt understanding of Judith Butler’s point in Gender Trouble), people unsurprisingly are sceptical of these views. I am quite partial or open to these arguments myself but the proponents of it are utterly dismaying, in public. Any opponents of these views (which is most people) or more specifically vocal opponents of this view are instantly branded as TERFs that either must be acting in bad faith as they are disputing the sacred object, or are merely collateral damage to be dragged aside in the pursuit of the object.

I see in a (admittedly niche) corner of twitter I like this kind of disingenuous social performance in which seemingly the whole community is unanimously accepting this object as given. They seem, uncharacteristically, to take the serious stance towards it where they happily dispute much less socially rewarding doctrines. I think for morally weighty issues such as this it is not a bad or unexpected thing to be angry and emotional; uncivil if the situation calls for it (I do not want to be dismissed as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ guy). But, I do want to be able to say that this kind of objective purity dilutes any intelligent or progressive discussion to be had.

This special type of subjective state I have been calling the serious stance necessarily leads to a destructive sort of purity testing. A recent example of this was people demanding that Scarlet Johansson resign from playing a trans woman in a movie (note that there was no such debate for the movie Girl — not that it was very big to be fair). I am by no means saying that rich actors are persecuted, that is far from the point. It is more to the point that having an immensely famous actor portray a trans woman in a movie getting wide release is probably one of the best things that could have been done for the recognition of trans people in society. But alas the serious, no compromise nature of the object means that any digressions from party lines are heresy that corrupt any progress gained. Another recent example of this that pertains to the US election is this recent article in The Guardian. Agree or disagree with Warren’s presidential fitness, surely one can see how this rejection of all of those unwilling to accept the object as given (‘true progressivism’) can be nothing but trouble.

The Fallible Stance

Some might reject my reasoning here; it is obviously a straw-man! One might say: “no serious thinker is really like this! That is an unthoughtful presentation of a genuinely well thought out solution.” Well, yes. I agree completely. Do not take the issue that I point out as the paradigm or only case of such a phenomenon; the serious stance is taken by all of us at some point, about certain issues. Notable cases are Trump voters whose object is the deficient institutions that they define themselves as a negation of; purveyors of scientism whose object is an unrealistic reification of science; or the libertarian kneeling down on the altar of the free market. None of these positions are inherently flawed, but for me and I hope for others, to take them seriously the presentation of them must be accompanied by the acceptance of our subjectivity. The serious stance is a state that ought to be overcome; it is an unrealistic and dangerous fallacy that, once again, shields one from valid criticism and moral responsibility; always justifying the means, to an end that is not necessarily true.

Alarms bells may be going off in the more objectively minded readers; this may be construed as subjectivist or relativist. I want to make clear here I am not denying objective reality, truth, or goodness (though that would not be incompatible). I am merely pointing to a certain kind of attitude, disposition or set of actions that intrinsically assert its knowledge or authority of these things as absolute. The disposition I think we all ought to replace our ‘serious’ proclivities with is the fallible stance (to be essentially fallibilistic). We are able to keep any objective standards we might think we have a grasp of but accept that exposed to new information, we could be wrong. While it is hard to withdraw from the serious stance for matters of such moral weight; the assumption of fallibility would foster a much healthier discourse.

I think a lot about a quote from Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius that captures literally everything I have to say here but better, and in a much shorter form:

Ten years ago, any symmetry with a resemblance of order — dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism — was sufficient to entrance the minds of men…Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels.

I am not claiming here to be saying anything truly unique or revolutionary, but I do wish to present a new lens in which to frame the fallibility of human understanding in the context of political disputes; to provide a new way in which to think about the benefits of intellectual humility.

https://medium.com/@rowan.anderson7420/the-serious-stance-ba3355cc06fe