Marguerite La Caze

As Divya Dwivedi observes, the pandemic “makes us responsible to everyone everywhere” (2020). But does the pandemic highlight what we did not want to know? Immanuel Kant wrote in 1795 that “Because a (narrower or wider) community widely prevails among the Earth’s peoples, a transgression of rights in one place in the world is felt everywhere; consequently, the idea of cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and exaggerated, but rather an amendment to the unwritten code of national and international rights, necessary to the public rights of humanity in general” (8: 36). Shaj Mohan and Dwivedi’s book, which considers Gandhi’s thought as a system, links to the possibility of a cosmopolitanism or world democracy that creates new freedoms as well as new responsibilities as we recognise the indestinacy of the world. This article response to their call for anastasis or a new beginning not grounded in concepts of destiny nor nature is to explore Mohan and Dwivedi’s interpretation of Gandhi’s view of violence and resistance and then consider what our responsibility could involve given an alternative cosmopolitan conception of resistance.

While the subject of forgiveness has received a great deal of philosophical attention, self-forgiveness remains relatively neglected. This neglect may be in part due to Hannah Arendt’s famous argument that self-forgiveness is not possible. Arendt argues that forgiving, like promising, depends on plurality, on others being with us and acting. Furthermore, Arendt believes that we cannot forgive ourselves as we cannot be both the subject and object of experience. She contends that the most profound reason we cannot forgive ourselves is that ‘we are dependent on others, to whom we appear in a distinctness that we ourselves are unable to perceive.’ (1958, 243) We need others to forgive us, as we do not appear to ourselves as we appear to others. Rather dramatically, she suggests that we are like the sorcerer’s apprentice left without the incantation to break a magic spell. She believes that we need to be forgiven by others in order to escape the consequences of our deeds. My paper proposes to show how self-forgiveness is possible while taking seriously Arendt’s claim that the forgiveness of others will ‘determine the extent and modes in which one may be able to forgive himself’. (1958, 238) We can interpret that idea as meaning that what others can forgive we also can forgive. This may allow self-forgiveness to some degree if we can connect our forgiveness of self with the actual or possible forgiveness of others, trying to see ourselves as others see us. I explain how that possibility allows us to understand the emotions of self-forgiveness, using a range of fictional and everyday examples. First, I argue against claims, for example by Paul Hughes, that resentment towards the self is not coherent and show that we can resent ourselves. This is one of the emotions that we can feel towards ourselves and that we need to give up or control in order to forgive ourselves. Second, I demonstrate how self-respect and compassion toward the self are both required to make such self-forgiveness possible, not simply self-respect, as Robin Dillon maintains.

In this essay I explore Simone de Beauvoir’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential articulations of sexuality and discuss their potential usefulness for feminist philosophy. I argue that Sartre’s apparently pessimistic thinking about bad faith, the look, desire and sexuality may contain more resources for feminist philosophy than is sometimes thought. The possibility of authentic relations he hints at is more fully developed by Beauvoir. I interpret Beauvoir as suggesting in The Second Sex that authentic love and an authentic sexuality that is not structured by oppression would be experienced differently, although she allows that love and esteem or respect may lead to a genuine and reciprocal sexual relationship even under oppression. Nevertheless, numerous challenges remain for the possibility of authentic sexual life in general.

My paper explores the power that forgiveness and the promise, as potentialities of action, have to counter the two difficulties that follow from the possibility of being able to begin something new or what Arendt calls the ‘frailty of human affairs’: irreversibility and unpredictability. Acts of forgiving and promising are expressions of freedom and natality, as they begin human relations anew: forgiveness creates a fresh beginning after wrong-doing, and the promise initiates new political agreements. Arendt argues that forgiveness and the promise depend on plurality. Historically, forgiveness has been important in political thought in the form of pardon. In contrast, promises have been conceptualised in political thought primarily in contract theories. Arendt argues for her view that action is different from labor and work in that its redemption arises from itself through her account of forgiveness and promising. Labor is redeemed through the made world of objects, and work is redeemed by the meaningful narratives that speech and deeds create. In the case of action, the ‘faculty’ of forgiving allows for the possibility of redemption from ‘irreversibility’ or the problem of not being able to reverse what one has done. The remedy for unpredictability in the forms of human unreliability and the unforeseeability of the consequences of actions is the promise. Forgiving undoes the deeds of the past, while promises set up security, continuity and durability amidst uncertainty. Without these remedies the human condition itself seems to be destroyed. These faculties of forgiving and making promises embody a moral code that are directly linked with the world. Ultimately, the miraculous potential of action depends on its basis in natality, the possibility of new beginnings that can provide faith and hope. I argue that Arendt’s thinking about action needs to be linked to a fuller consideration of ethics and passional motivation.

Hannah Arendt focuses on the problem of judgement from a practical and philosophical point of view throughout her work. She distinguishes between the judgement of the spectator, who tends to take a historical view, and that of the actor, who has to take decisions in the midst of events. Even though she does not focus on the question of the statesperson’s judgments, she gives numerous examples of statespersons making both good and bad judgements. By reconstructing her varied comments on the subject, I show how Arendt’s writing suggest both negative and positive means of making the best possible judgements. The negative means for her include conscience, the examining of prejudices and rejection of ideologies. The positive means are thinking and imagination, which involve the use of moral exemplars and the practice of impartiality.

One feature of realist horror is its merging of reality and fiction, a merging of our contemporary fears of serial killers and psychopaths with classic horror fears of ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Another way of presenting realism in horror cinema is in the sense of psychological or emotional realism. The recent film The Sixth Sense (1999), directed by M. Night Shyamalan, demonstrates this other sense of realism. The Sixth Sense is an important example of realist horror films that evoke our feelings for the protagonist more than our own fears and terrors. This phenomenon in turn sheds light on how we can read the film, and other films concerning the restless dead, as exploring the reality of mourning and melancholia. The layers of meaning in the film also highlight their relationship to jealousy.

Sublimation is considered to be one of the great lacunae in psychoanalytic theory in that the process is never fully explained by Freud. Yet Freud’s concept of sublimation is essential to understanding the workings of the libido, the nature of creativity, and Freud’s views on women and love. These questions are linked together in an interesting way. Examining his work on the question of women and sublimation can illuminate these links and help to develop a more comprehensive understanding of sublimation. Freud thought that women had lesser and more passive libidos, and so a lesser capacity to sublimate than men, and thought it followed from these limitations that women will be naturally less creative, but not less loving than men. This is why the connection between love and creativity is also important to explore – to see whether there really is a disjunction between the two.

Even by people whose moral views diverge widely, integrity is commonly thought of as something worthwhile, a valuable personal characteristic. It is, consequently, something we commonly suppose worth striving to cultivate both in ourselves and in those under our care. Nancy Schauber (1996) offers a provocative challenge to this conventional wisdom - arguing (in all seriousness) that integrity is either something we possess simply in virtue of being persons or else it is not something worth having. An analysis of her truncated accounts of integrity and commitment will show why her argument fails and why integrity is important to certain conceptions of personal identity. That it does fail is a victory for common-sense and for those people (good and bad) who strive for integrity.

In this paper, I concentrate on the way some feminists have interpreted Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist theory. The two main points I make are that a great many passages in The Second Sex have been misread and that it has not been understood that the theoretical basis of much recent work on the female body can be found there. It will also emerge that these two points are connected un that a failure to appreciate the structure and style of Beauvoir’s text obscures understanding of her feminist theory and her relation to existentialism. My aim is to present a different approach to The Second Sex, an approach which will make sense of certain features of the text that are often considered to be serious flaws.

Mia Hansen-Løve's film L’Avenir depicts a philosophy teacher, Nathalie Chazeaux, undergoing a serious existential crisis. Her husband Heinz ends their long marriage, her mother dies, and her book series is cancelled. Rather than despairing, Nathalie continues to pursue her projects and claims to be experiencing total freedom for the first time. Simone de Beauvoir contends in The Second Sex that in considering women's emancipation, we should not take happiness to be the aim, as it is a confining emotion. Instead, using the perspective of existentialist ethics, we should aspire to freedom. I examine how Beauvoir's distinctions between happiness, independence and freedom illuminate L’Avenir and how L’Avenir's portrayal of Nathalie's life crisis enhances understanding of their potential. We might see Nathalie as an example of what Beauvoir calls the independent woman and possibly even a free woman able to live without her ex-husband. I argue that closer analysis of the film does not support the view of Nathalie as completely free and happy. She herself says that older women are not valued, and she is harassed. Furthermore, the songs of lost love in the final scenes and the last shot of her living room with no-one in sight suggest her situation is ambiguous and that her Stoicism belies a loneliness and dread of the future.

Integrity is one of the most important and oft-cited of virtue terms and perhaps the most puzzling. For example, one may acknowledge a person to have integrity even though that person may hold what one thinks are importantly mistaken moral views. When used as a virtue term, ‘integrity’ refers to a quality of a person’s character; however, there are other uses of the term. The most philosophically important sense of the term ‘integrity’ relates to general character. Philosophers have been concerned to understand what it is for a person to exhibit integrity throughout life. What is it to be a person of integrity? Ordinary discourse about integrity involves two fundamental intuitions: first, that integrity is primarily a formal relation one has to oneself, or between parts or aspects of one’s self; and second, that integrity is connected in an important way to acting morally, in other words, there are some substantive or normative constraints on what it is to act with integrity. How these two intuitions can be incorporated into a consistent theory of integrity is not obvious, and most accounts of integrity tend to focus on one of these intuitions to the detriment of the other. A number of accounts have been advanced, the most important of them being: (i) integrity as the integration of self; (ii) integrity as maintenance of identity; (iii) integrity as standing for something; (iv) integrity as moral purpose; and (v) integrity as a virtue. These accounts are reviewed and we then examine two issues of central concern to philosophers exploring the concept of integrity: the relations between types of integrity and between integrity and moral theory.

Sophocles’ Antigone presents a rich source for interpretations in the history of philosophy, concerning law, ethics and sexual difference. In the play, Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, feels she must bury her brother Polynices, although he is regarded as a traitor, and she is forbidden to do so by King Creon of Thebes, Jocasta’s brother. This paper examines the tensions between Luce Irigaray’s reading of Antigone in her chapter ‘Between Myth and history: the tragedy of Antigone’ in In the Beginning, She was and her earlier work and within the book itself. Here she identifies with Antigone’s exclusion and asserts the brother-sister relationship as the basis for conceptualising sexuate identity and difference. It is dissonant with her earlier readings, which did not affirm an identity with Antigone; nor did they affirm the brother-sister relationship as representative of a sexuate identity. Irigaray has generally, in work both before and after this interpretation of Antigone, argued that only the man and woman of the couple provide the basis for an ethics of sexuate difference. Her ambivalence is also shown by her comment at the beginning of the book that the brother-sister relationship is not different enough to represent sexuate identity. (IB, 18) I explore the distinctive possibilities for sexuate identity presented by this reading of Antigone and ask what it means to valorise Antigone today.

Reflection on the relationship between sexist and racist forms of oppression can generate insights into the structure and experience of both oppressions. My argument is that while the two forms of oppression are distinctive, they share a general structure in personal experiences of oppression, in institutionalized racism and sexism, and in approaches to overcoming oppression. First I briefly sketch the central analogies between analyses of racism and sexism in feminist philosophical work. This sketch provides a background for a critical assessment of the usefulness of the analogy, one that takes into account Elizabeth Spelman’s articulation of the risks involved. Simone de Beauvoir’s account is useful in assessing the structure and experience of racist and sexist oppressions, their interaction, and strategies of resistance.

Václav Havel’s concept of “living within the truth” in an authoritarian regime frames Marguerite La Caze’s readings of international cinema, highlighting forms of resistance in which seemingly pre- or nonpolitical aspects of life—such as professional labor, exile, and truth telling—can be recognized as political when seen against a backdrop of general acquiescence. La Caze’s case studies cross genres, historical eras, and national contexts: the apartheid regime in South Africa, in A Dry White Season; post-Suharto Indonesia, in The Look of Silence; 1980s East Germany, in Barbara; the Chilean military dictatorship, in No; contemporary Iran, in A Separation; and current-day Saudi Arabia, in Wadjda. This book explores the films’ use of image, sound, narrative, and character in dialogue with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Aimé Cesaire, Hannah Arendt, Sara Ahmed, and W. E. B. Du Bois to reveal how cinema depicts ordinary people enacting their own philosophies of defiance.

Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life explores the ethical and political problem of refusal as an act and utterance of “not doing” violence and injustice that is expected. The film offers a nuanced and poetic depiction of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter (1907–1943), who refused to give an oath of loyalty to Hitler ( Führereid), and was subsequently imprisoned and executed under the Nazi laws criminalizing conscientious objection as an “offence of sedition.” We argue that Malick complicates the question of what it means to rise in defiance against power by locating Jägerstätter’s refusal not in religious dogma or a position of righteousness, but depicting it as a lived experience infused with affect, hesitation and doubt. We analyze the ethics and politics of refusal in A Hidden Life, focusing on the ways in which Malick depicts the possibility of leading an ethical life in an authoritarian state. This possibility concerns, first, the question of what alternatives emerge from the negative gestures of noncompliance, withdrawal or refusal and the question of enduring and, second, undergoing suffering, rather than imposing it on others. Situating our reading of Malick’s film in a philosophical dialogue with Michel Foucault’s writings on revolt and with Hannah Arendt’s reflections on responsibility in a dictatorship, we argue that Malick’s philosophy of refusal encompasses both the negative registers of refusal and articulates its affirmative, relational and testimonial dimensions in relation to history. This is because Malick's Jägerstätter undertook a very specific act of refusal – that of refusing to “make others suffer” (and chose instead to suffer himself). We conclude by drawing attention to three key presences in the film; nature, children and the wife, Fani, who turn the negative power of refusal into an affirmative gesture of companionship, co-presence and witnessing.

Our first aim is to spell out central accounts of integrity from Cheshire Calhoun, Mark Halfon, and Aristotelian virtue theorists and indicate some of their strengths and weaknesses. Part of what is intriguing about the concept of integrity is its relationship to other moral concepts. Our second goal is to examine the relationship between integrity and the concepts of regret and moral luck. Moral luck is a phenomenon in which a person’s moral qualities come to depend on factors outside of their control. To what extent is integrity dependent on moral luck? We come to regret past actions in many ways and for many reasons. Would a recognition that we have lived with integrity mean that we have no grounds for deep regret?

Marjorie Glicksman Grene (1910–2009) wrote on existentialism as a philosophy with a specific focus on the work of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Her work played an important role in introducing continental philosophy to North American and British thought as she lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. While she gained her PhD from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, she also studied as an exchange student in Germany from 1931 to 1933, had a postdoctoral fellowship in Copenhagen in 1936, lived and worked on farms in Illinois and Ireland, and taught at universities in the United Kingdom and the United States, including, for the longest period, at the University of California, Davis (1965–78). Her interpretations are based on a thorough knowledge of the history of philosophy and a wide range of philosophical areas, including European philosophy; Grene attended lectures by Heidegger and Karl Jaspers while on exchange in Europe. While her interest was first piqued by Heidegger’s thought, further research led her to investigate Jaspers’s willingness to combine existential philosophy with the life sciences. I split her often integrated discussions into a focus on five primary thinkers: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty, with the most detailed analysis of Sartre as Grene engages with his work in the most depth.

Joel Katzav’s article describes and explains the realist perspectivist views of Grace de Laguna, showing the distinctiveness of her positions in a number of fields. My focus will be on her views of the self and persons, and how they are embedded in their communities, experience emotions, and develop morality. As Katzav outlines, de Laguna’s position can be characterized as a form of speculative philosophy that develops an ontology of modes of being. Katzav sees speculative philosophy and naturalism intertwining in her work as de Laguna extends and criticizes science (the speculative aspect) as well as drawing on it (the naturalistic aspect). De Laguna’s project is to create a philosophical system that can be communicated to others. This system, according to Katzav, uses imagination, metaphor, and paradoxical formulations, such as ‘qualitative uniqueness’ to describe individuality, in a way that is common in continental philosophy. My commentary examines de Laguna’s views as they are set out by Katzav and suggests how his article opens up lines of philosophical inquiry concerning the self, community and morality. De Laguna’s views on these issues can also usefully be compared to those of Hannah Arendt to see how her articulation of these themes intersects with and differs from Arendt’s ideas.

One of the few philosophers who comments on fashion, Immanuel Kant claims in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View that fashion should be classified as vanity and foolishness. He writes ‘it is novelty that makes fashion popular, and to be inventive in all sorts of external forms, even if they often degenerate into something fantastic and somewhat hideous, belongs to the style of courtiers, especially ladies. Others then anxiously imitate these forms, and those in low social positions burden themselves with them long after the courtiers have put them away. – So fashion is not, strictly speaking, a matter of taste (for it can be quite contrary to taste), but of mere vanity in giving oneself airs, and of rivalry in outdoing one another by it.’ (Anthropology, 2006, 7: 246) Kant’s condemnation of fashion depends on him associating fashion exclusively with mere novelty in production (as opposed to true originality) and imitation in fashion’s wearers. In this paper I distinguish fashion understood as invention for its own sake followed by slavish imitation with a true fashion, which like art, involves both taste and ‘genius’ as understood by Kant. Taste involves a judgement of a particular to be, for example, beautiful. This judgement must be one that we can communicate to others. Genius is in fashion that is original and provides a model to others. (See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 5: 308) While notable designer fashion provides the most obvious examples, this way of looking at fashion does not preclude the possibility of this kind of genius developing outside or alongside the fashion industry. Furthermore, wearers of fashion have to exercise their sense of taste in choosing what to wear and how to wear it. This sense of taste appeals to others and requires an enlargement of our thought just as our taste in art does. Thus seen, fashion and interest in fashion has a potential for improvement of the self as other forms of taste arguably do.

Here I compare Beauvoir’s view of love in The Second Sex (2010) with her descriptions of hate and vengefulness in ‘An Eye for and Eye’. Although Beauvoir argues that these particular negative affects are both ethical and understandable, she shows why the need for a restored reciprocity in the light of crimes usually cannot be fulfilled. Here she parallels this impossible reciprocity with that of love. However, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that reciprocity in love is possible, or would be if women were not oppressed. I argue we must distinguish emotional reactions of outrage from reciprocal loving relations.