Simone de Beauvoir (1908 to 1986), the French existentialist philosopher and novelist, showed in The Second Sex (1949) how a culture makes woman ‘the Other’, defined always in relation to man as the measure of the human, and showed in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) that human beings are caught between freedom and the facts of their situation, and that our own freedom depends on the freedom of others. Therapeutic Shamanism sees the same pattern of othering at work, traces it to the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer and the rise of patriarchy, and widens it to include the other-than-human Peoples.
Who was Simone de Beauvoir? #
A French philosopher, novelist and memoirist, born in Paris in 1908. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and met Sartre in 1929, while both were preparing for the national philosophy examination, the agrégation, and the two remained partners in life and in ideas until his death, founding and editing the review Les Temps modernes together.1 Her books include The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), The Second Sex (1949), widely seen as a founding work of modern feminism, and The Coming of Age (1970), on old age, as well as novels and several volumes of memoir. She died in 1986 and is buried beside Sartre in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.2
What did Beauvoir mean by woman as ‘the Other’? #
That the culture has taken man as the human norm and defined woman only in relation to him. In the Introduction to The Second Sex he is the Subject, he is the Absolute, and she is the Other, the incidental and inessential as opposed to the essential.3 She drew on Hegel‘s account of master and slave, but held that women’s situation differs from that of other oppressed groups, because women live alongside men in every class and household, so they have found it harder to see themselves as a group with a shared history of resistance.4
Her best-known line, “One is not born but becomes woman”, says that what a culture calls feminine is not simply given by nature but made, through upbringing, myths and expectations. Women, in her account, have been confined to immanence, a repetitive life without projects of their own, whilst men claimed transcendence, the freedom to shape the world. The oppressed are taught to believe that their lot is assigned to them by nature.5 In The Coming of Age she turned the same eye on old age, showing how decline in old age is partly real and felt from within and partly imposed by a culture’s stigma. Cut off from projects of their own, the old come to look to the active members of the community like one of a “different species”.6
What did she mean by ambiguity? #
That a human life can never be resolved into one thing. We are free, able to go beyond what is given, and at the same time weighed down by the world, by our bodies, our history and our circumstances. We can never become the single source of the world’s meaning, so no ethics can offer final answers. Her answer, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, is to live this ambiguity honestly instead of hiding from it.7
Her ethics is also social. We cannot affirm or live our own freedom without also affirming the freedom of others. Freedom is not a private possession; it needs other free people to answer it and take part in what we do. She described the ways people dodge their freedom, among them the ‘serious man’, who treats the values handed to him as fixed and unquestionable and so never has to choose.8
How does Beauvoir’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most directly in her account of how one group is made Other by another. In Therapeutic Shamanism the oppression of women is not a timeless fact of human nature but something with a history. Hunter-gatherers usually practised some division of roles between the sexes, but on the whole there was still equality and mutual respect between them; they tended to be neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, but egalitarian.9 Patriarchy belongs to the Fall. With the city-state cultures, for the first time in human history one group seizes power and oppresses another, and men seize power and oppress women.10 The sky-religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this then justified the subjugation of half the human population by raising up god and the masculine and denigrating goddess and the feminine, and children and animals were denigrated alongside them.11 See What is the Fall? and What are the sacred Masculine and sacred Feminine (Father Sky and Mother Earth)?
Her chapter on old age meets the same history from another side. In hunter-gatherer cultures the elderly, the infirm and the disabled were usually looked after and cared for, and decisions tended to be taken by the tribe as a whole; the loss of that care for the vulnerable is one of the marks of the Fall.12 See What is an Elder?
Her ambiguity has something in common with the way Therapeutic Shamanism holds two truths together. On one level everything is one; on another, separation is real; both are true, and one does not cancel the other out.13 See Is animism the same as ‘all is one’?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On who counts as Other. Beauvoir’s ethics is about human freedom between human beings. Animism draws the circle much wider. The animals, plants, stones, rivers and mountains are Peoples in their own right, alive and conscious, and the habit of treating them as mere things, there for human use, is the myth of human supremacy. Beauvoir’s Subject and Other can be heard echoing there, stretched across the whole living world.14 See What is the myth of human supremacy? and Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
On nature and the body, too. In The Second Sex freedom is transcendence, rising above what is merely given, and women’s lives were held down in immanence; she warned that calling women’s lot ‘natural’ has been a way of keeping them in it. Therapeutic Shamanism shares the suspicion of anything used to justify oppression, but does not rank transcendence above the body, the earth and the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer. The sacred Masculine and the sacred Feminine, Father SkyFather Sky. The sacred Masculine pole: pure consciousness, from which the Upper-World arises. Paired with Mother Earth. ‘Father Sun’ is the older name for the same pole, found in the first three books. More about this and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, are equal. The sky-religions of the Fall taught that up is good and down is bad, that spirit is good and matter corrupt, that men are good and women unclean; from a shamanic point of view the judgement that up is good and down is bad is simply not true.15
Was Beauvoir simply Sartre’s follower? #
That is how she was long read, her philosophy taken as an echo of Sartre’s. The philosopher Hazel Barnes, for example, in 1961 read Beauvoir’s novel She Came to Stay as showing how Sartre’s abstract principles work out in real life.16 Other scholars have since argued the reverse. Kate and Edward Fullbrook, in Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (1994), and the philosopher Margaret Simons point to her student diaries of 1926 and 1927, written before she met Sartre, and argue that key ideas of Being and Nothingness came from her novel, whose manuscript Sartre read in 1940.17 On the newer view her ideas developed prior to, alongside and often against Sartre’s.18
