Beauvoir and Arendt on the Ambiguities of Belonging

CFS Lecture by Sophie Loidolt, Professor of Philosophy, Technical University Darmstadt.

Abstract

Belonging has become a widely used concept in psychology and the social sciences since the 2000s, as it started to reconfigure and partly replace the term “identity”. Initially often characterized as “vaguely defined,” there are meanwhile several analytic frameworks on the table that offer to structure the concept and the discussion in a multidimensional way: One of the main distinctions in the literature is that between psychological and political (or personal and structural) belonging. While the first has a subjective, affective component, and is conceptualized as personal, intimate, private sentiment that grows out of everyday practices, the latter refers to objectifiable social and political structures such as citizenship or participation and conceptualizes belonging as an official, public-oriented, formal structure of membership. What is still rather rarely treated, however, is the flip side of belonging, and the inherent normativity that belonging is perceived as “good,” whereas non-belonging is perceived as “bad” and pernicious for our well-being in general.

Given this state of the debate, what I would like to offer from a phenomenological point of view is a differentiated, ontologically and existentially grounded perspective on the ambiguities of belonging. I will therefore turn to two central female phenomenological thinkers, Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt. Some of their views concerning belonging might come across as tough, and have also been criticized as such, but might also have a refreshing effect for helping us to refocus on the normativities and ambiguities of belonging. I will first examine Beauvoir’s early writings on ethics, with side glances on her major work The Second Sex. Then I will take a look at Arendt and the question of belonging and non-belonging in The Origins of Totalitarianism (and related writings) and Rahel Varnhagen. The Life of a Jewish Woman.