• About me
  • About this blog
  • Comment rules
  • Other writings

Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Simone de Beauvoir

In which I come out

29 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by Sandhya Lele in Aesthetics, Biology, Metaphysics, Politics, Self

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

autobiography, gender, identity, Natalie Wynn, qualitative individualism, Simone de Beauvoir

The liberation of women from traditional subservient gender roles has been the crowning achievement of the 20th century. That process of liberation is not complete, and will likely not be for some time. As it proceeds, it can take on unexpected consequences and connotations.

In particular, it turns out that the complete eradication of gender is something relatively few people ever wanted, even in those societies where feminism has gone furthest. Early feminists like Beauvoir understandably attacked the ways in which social understandings of womanhood kept women in a subservient position. For Beauvoir, gender roles interfered with women’s expression of their authentic selves.

Yet as women’s social position has improved over the decades since Beauvoir (and I don’t think there’s much debate that it has improved), gender has not withered away, or even begun to. Rather, it turns out that – on the same grounds of authentic self-expression that animate Beauvoir – many of us now welcome more signifiers of gender than we have to. That is: the past decade has seen an explosion in transgender expression, in which one comes to believe that one’s authentic self is essentially a particular gender – just not the one that had been assigned according to sex organs. And one then often goes through great lengths in order to have the various signifiers of that gender – and sometimes even the associated organs themselves. Feminists and psychologists had long noted a distinction between sex as a biological category and gender as a social construct overlying that category. It turns out that for many, the result of that distinction was not to eradicate gender, but to embrace a gender identity that does not correspond to one’s biological sex.

I say all of this as a preface to a more personal announcement: I consider myself gender-fluid, and have done so for nearly three years now.

Continue reading →

Let us not define ourselves by biological categories

25 Sunday Apr 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, French Tradition, Human Nature, Politics, Self

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Confucius, existentialism, gender, identity, Mencius, postmodernism, Prince Ea, qualitative individualism, race, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Smith

In my mind, one of the most important implications of qualitative individualism is that we human beings should not be defined by bodily or biological categories. I think that point has done a great deal to underlie various liberation movements of the past century. I think it is perhaps most visible in Simone de Beauvoir, who detached gender roles from biological sex and warned us against an “essentialism” that tied sex and gender so closely together. The increased acceptance of people being transgender, I think, is the next step in a process that began with Beauvoir: my biological genitalia do not define my gender identity. I view the struggle for racial equality in the light of this ideal as well, as Prince Ea does: skin colour or related phenotypical characteristics should not define who we really are. Continue reading →

Existentialism is a qualitative individualism

09 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by Amod Lele in Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, French Tradition, Human Nature, Self

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

depression, existentialism, gender, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Prince Ea, qualitative individualism, René Descartes, Simone de Beauvoir

My first post on qualitative individualism attracted several helpful comments, possibly drawn here by a link from Daily Nous. A couple of these commenters pointed out that that the ideal is not as “invisible” as I made it out to be – not even to philosophers. I hear it expressed relatively rarely in philosophical works now, but this would not have been the case fifty or sixty years ago, when the philosophy that was all the rage was: existentialism. Existentialism is not the only way for qualitative individualism to be expressed philosophically, but it may well be the most influential to date. Continue reading →

Welcome to Love of All Wisdom.

I invite you to leave comments on my blog, even - or especially - if I have no idea who you are. Philosophy is a conversation, and I invite you to join it with me; I welcome all comers (provided they follow a few basic rules). I typically make a new post every other Sunday. If you'd like to be notified when a new post is posted, you can get email notifications whenever I add something new via the link further down in this sidebar. You can also follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter. Or if you use RSS, you can get updates through the RSS feed.

Recent Comments

  • Nathan on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Amod Lele on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Nathan on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Amod Lele on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Amod Lele on Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?

Subscribe by Email

Post Tags

20th century academia Alasdair MacIntyre Aristotle ascent/descent Augustine autobiography Buddhaghosa Canada conferences Confucius conservatism Disengaged Buddhism Engaged Buddhism Evan Thompson Four Noble Truths Friedrich Nietzsche G.W.F. Hegel gender Hebrew Bible identity Immanuel Kant intimacy/integrity justice Karl Marx Ken Wilber Martha Nussbaum Mencius modernity Pali suttas pedagogy Plato qualitative individualism race rebirth religion Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha) T.R. (Thill) Raghunath technology theodicy Thomas Kuhn United States utilitarianism Śaṅkara Śāntideva

Categories

  • African Thought (12)
  • Applied Phil (269)
    • Death (36)
    • Family (40)
    • Food (17)
    • Friends (13)
    • Health (23)
    • Place (25)
    • Play (11)
    • Politics (152)
    • Sex (20)
    • Work (36)
  • Asian Thought (392)
    • Buddhism (282)
      • Early and Theravāda (118)
      • Mahāyāna (116)
      • Modernized Buddhism (82)
    • East Asia (82)
      • Confucianism (52)
      • Daoism (13)
      • Shinto (1)
    • South Asia (128)
      • Bhakti Poets (3)
      • Cārvāka-Lokāyata (5)
      • Epics (15)
      • Jainism (23)
      • Modern Hinduism (35)
      • Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (6)
      • Sāṃkhya-Yoga (14)
      • Vedānta (35)
      • Vedas and Mīmāṃsā (7)
  • Blog Admin (26)
  • Indigenous American Thought (3)
  • Method (233)
    • M.T.S.R. (131)
    • Metaphilosophy (156)
  • Practical Philosophy (347)
    • Action (11)
    • Aesthetics (41)
    • Emotion (150)
      • Anger (31)
      • Attachment and Craving (26)
      • Compassion (5)
      • Despair (3)
      • Disgust (3)
      • Faith (19)
      • Fear (7)
      • Grief (5)
      • Happiness (46)
      • Hope (15)
      • Pleasure (31)
      • Shame and Guilt (6)
    • External Goods (48)
    • Flourishing (81)
    • Foundations of Ethics (105)
    • Karma (42)
    • Morality (61)
    • Virtue (146)
      • Courage (5)
      • Generosity (12)
      • Gentleness (5)
      • Gratitude (10)
      • Honesty (13)
      • Humility (22)
      • Leadership (4)
      • Mindfulness (14)
      • Patient Endurance (28)
      • Self-Discipline (8)
      • Serenity (27)
      • Zest (6)
  • Practice (114)
    • Karmic Redirection (5)
    • Meditation (31)
    • Monasticism (41)
    • Physical Exercise (3)
    • Prayer (14)
    • Reading and Recitation (12)
    • Rites (19)
    • Therapy (10)
  • Theoretical Philosophy (325)
    • Consciousness (14)
    • Epistemology (105)
      • Certainty and Doubt (14)
      • Prejudices and "Intuitions" (27)
    • Free Will (17)
    • God (62)
    • Hermeneutics (54)
    • Human Nature (29)
    • Logic (27)
      • Dialectic (15)
    • Metaphysics (90)
    • Philosophy of Language (18)
    • Self (63)
    • Supernatural (48)
    • Truth (59)
    • Unconscious Mind (14)
  • Western Thought (415)
    • Analytic Tradition (90)
    • Christianity (137)
      • Early Factions (8)
      • Protestantism (21)
      • Roman Catholicism (46)
    • French Tradition (47)
    • German Tradition (84)
    • Greek and Roman Tradition (110)
      • Epicureanism (24)
      • Neoplatonism (2)
      • Pre-Socratics (6)
      • Skepticism (2)
      • Sophists (7)
      • Stoicism (18)
    • Islam (37)
      • Mu'tazila (2)
      • Salafi (3)
      • Sufism (9)
    • Judaism (33)
    • Natural Science (86)
      • Biology (22)
      • Philosophy of Science (47)
    • Social Science (144)
      • Economics (30)
      • Psychology (59)

Recent Posts

  • Does the Sigālovāda Sutta prohibit attending the theatre?
  • Of mental health and medical models
  • Of perpetually vulnerable subjects
  • The scattershot application of “neoliberalism”
  • How neo is neoliberalism?

Popular posts

  • One and a half noble truths?
  • Wishing George W. Bush well
  • Do Speculative Realists want us to be Chinese?
  • Why I am not a right-winger
  • On faith in tooth relics

Basic concepts

  • Ascent and Descent
  • Intimacy and integrity
  • Ascent-descent and intimacy-integrity together
  • Perennial questions?
  • Virtuous and vicious means
  • Dialectical and demonstrative argument
  • Chastened intellectualism and practice
  • Yavanayāna Buddhism: what it is
  • Why worry about contradictions?
  • The first philosophy blogger

Personal favourites

  • Can philosophy be a way of life? Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)
  • James Doull and the history of ethical motivation
  • Praying to something you don't believe in
  • What does postmodernism perform?
  • Why I'm getting married

Archives

Search this site

All posts, pages and metadata copyright 2020 Amod Lele. Comments copyright 2020 their comment authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA) licence.

Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Chateau by Ignacio Ricci.