This essay will look at three concepts in a philosophical lens, informed by modern psychology. Seriousness is a concept that found a philosophical treatment through the writings of Simone De Beauvoir, a well-known French thinker of the mid-twentieth century. Fixation is an idea that has its roots in more recent writings, in fact there is an expanding body of literature on the subject that is dedicated to understanding this quirk of human nature. From the standpoint of De Beauvoir, we can say that fixation of a serious nature is antithetical to our personal freedom. Freedom is perhaps the highest good in the history of philosophy, after a centuries-long rise to acceptance culminating in the Enlightenment. We all want to be happy, healthy, and free–so how can we maximize our chances?
Simone De Beauvoir
Simone De Beauvoir was an existentialist philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, and like her contemporary, Albert Camus, during her life she did not wear the label she has been assigned through the retrospective lens of history. De Beauvoir was a very creative thinker, but she was not uncontroversial. The partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a self-avowed existentialist philosopher even during his life, De Beauvoir’s philosophical depth and relaxed attitudes toward elements of the culture of her day led her to a place from which she was able to formulate, brilliantly, an ethics of ambiguity.
Ethics is a discipline that requires a substantial amount of engagement to produce novel theorems and it is seldom the case that challenges to the mainstream view are met with acceptance. It is quite important to develop ethical thinking that can accept ambiguity because doing the opposite would entail writing a script for people to follow; and not only is this impractical because people hate losing their freedom to choose what to do, it is also a completely untenable solution to the problem of what to think about actions because it is utterly unrealistic.
De Beauvoir thought deeply about the goodness of life and pursued freedom above all else. Actions, paraphrasing an essay I wrote in 2020, are good for De Beauvoir insofar as they increase the freedom of the person acting. Commensurately, a choice or deed is bad insofar as it damages the autonomy of the person taking the action. In another essay around the same time, I argued that De Beauvoir sees seriousness as a major problem for us because it takes away our freedom if we allow it to creep into our lives. My approach here is to relate seriousness to a psychological phenomenon we can think of as fixation.
Fixation: A Cause for Concern
Becoming too fixated on something is directly related to taking that thing seriously. If we fixate on it, it’s as if the rest of the world drops away and we become pulled out of ourselves. For Camus, this pulling-out is an encounter with the absurd. We forget that life is absurd for sometimes long periods. Then, something inside of us breaks and we lose that focus on the object of fixation and we regain that basic conscious awareness that the world does not make sense; we have an absurd moment.
Freedom, for De Beauvoir, is something very much like awareness of the absurd, for Camus. One example of this from my life is the recent development of a situation I never thought I would witness: I’m in better shape now than when I was much younger. For many people, this is not the way that aging goes. It’s both a rebuke of my younger self’s lack of effectiveness in training and a testament to the value of determination even in circumstances that could be considered somewhat adverse. The only thing it proves is that you never know where you’ll be able to get if you put the effort in.
How can we tell the difference between problematic fixations and beneficial ones? Well, if we listen to Simone De Beauvoir, the good ones will increase our freedom and will not be felt as serious as frequently as the bad ones will. Perhaps the primary goal should be to try to avoid a fixation if it begins to become something we take too seriously.
Psychological Insights
If we take a step back and think about the way that we approach our lives, we’ll all find things we take seriously and things we are less serious about. There are an infinite number of anecdotes any of us can come up with. We’ve all seen the athlete rage after an unexpectedly bad performance, we’ve seen groups of people from sports teams to political parties publicly ruminate about the things that went wrong after the fact, and we’ve seen angry, aggressive people do terrible things to one another that they never would have done, had they not been fixated too deeply on something they couldn’t control.
The principle that seems to animate most of this admittedly broad category of examples of seriousness is simple: people become fixated upon a goal and place it upon themselves, by taking it seriously. Then, the people behave in an increasingly inappropriate and ineffective way until the fixation is resolved (usually not by them getting what they want).
Seriousness is weakness, a telltale sign of insecurity. And yes, there are things for each of us that we rightly feel insecure about. Weight, height, appearance, personality–each of us has a unique body and each of us is painfully aware of our own deficiencies as well as our own strengths. When we look at ourselves in a comparative way and don’t like the results, we can develop a fixation. If the problem we initially see is weight, we can develop conditions such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia. In this sort of instance, we develop the fixation around the idea of losing weight, and these conditions can become life threatening because no amount of weight lost will resolve the inappropriate cognitive focus upon losing ever-more weight.
The strategies we see from cognitive behavioral therapy and techniques such as focusing and EMDR involve basic psychological manipulations to resolve trauma, which we will be thinking of as ‘serious fixations’ for the rest of this short essay.
EMDR uses an external sensation such as tapping or an endogenous technique involving eye movements in which patients are encouraged to think through their trauma alongside participation in the added technique. This process can help to process trauma and enable patients to move on from their serious fixations.
Cognitive behavioral therapy involves a therapist teaching a patient to make their own subtle corrections to thought patterns in general. This can involve a range of broad cognitive patterns, including techniques such as orienting attention from the past toward the future.
Focusing is a practice that is oriented toward bodily awareness. When focusing, one directs the attention to troubling thought and attends to the resulting thoughts, accepting them and allowing the body to decide what is right in terms of how to feel about it.
In each of these strategies, when it works, the person using the cognitive technique is able to reframe the troublesome pattern of thoughts they have become fixated upon and regain their personal freedom to think better thoughts.
In some sense, we could argue that De Beauvoir’s notion of freedom is in fact a freedom from serious fixation, or a freedom to embrace absurdity. If we contrast this concept of freedom with Kantian agency, which we can summarize as freedom to take action, the most immediate observation is that the two concepts are deeply similar.
Goals: Freedom From Serious Fixation
De Beauvoir’s freedom from the fixation of the ‘serious man’ is simply an update to Kant’s freedom to take action that accounts for a particular subset of situations in which Kantian agents find themselves flummoxed by their surroundings. The two notions are deeply consistent with each other. Playful fixations can lead to all sorts of growth and benefit, but serious fixations seem to fester and rot within us.
In our efforts to live our best lives, we form fixations to things that stand out as helpful or useful because our brains are machines that create novel action sequences and automate them over time as we live. This is why practicing the guitar turns us into guitarists–all those moments you spend as a beginner trying to understand what to do and then do it poorly at first are actually new circuits in your brain that you’re creating. Over time, these become robust enough that you spend less and less energy consciously thinking about them until you’re so good you can do it for hours in front of people without missing a note. As you playfully explore the musical space of the instrument, you develop beneficial new skills and gain new opportunities to do more things along the same lines.
Now, let’s imagine a situation in which you are being taught a musical instrument you have no interest in. If your teacher wants results, the student must take the lesson seriously. Punishment is one means by which to gain the desired result, but the cost is trauma to the student. And in all likelihood, the student will gain an aversion to the instrument and drop it as soon as possible.
The move to develop one’s own personal technique to avoid serious fixations is a metacognitive moment in which we grant ourselves the freedom to enjoy ourselves and our surroundings even if things aren’t perfect. This does nothing to absolve us of the need to provide for ourselves and interface with modern society for this end, and so the world for each of us must remain absurd to one extent or another no matter what. We do not have control. This is why our fixations are so dangerous sometimes. The goal is not to change everything until we become happy, it’s to avoid problematic fixations so that we can freely and creatively build the best lives we can.
