Simone de Beauvoir on the festival

Simone de Beauvoir excoriates the notion of the "cultural" festival in her book-length essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948, trans. Bernard Frechtman):

Dances, songs, local festivals, and the wearing of old regional costumes are encouraged everywhere: they never open a school. Here we see, in its extreme form, the absurdity of a choice which prefers the Thing to Man from whom alone the Thing can receive its value. We may be moved by dances, songs, and regional costumes because these inventions represent the only free accomplishment which was allowed the peasants amidst the hard conditions under which they formerly lived; by means of these creations they tore themselves away from their servile work, transcended their situation, and asserted themselves as men before the beasts of burden. Wherever these festivals still exist spontaneously, where they have retained this character, they have their meaning and their value. But when they are ceremoniously reproduced for the edification of indifferent tourists, they are no more than a boring documentary, even an odious mystification. It is a sophism to want to maintain by coercion things which derive their worth from the fact that men attempted through them to escape from coercion.

De Beauvoir is attempting here to bulwark the Sartrean notion of bad faith using different language. Whereas Sartre spoke in terms of maintaing balance between facticity and transcendence, de Beauvoir criticized the identification of the self with anything other than the self. Only man can ascribe value and meaning to things. Put another way, the value of the self is intrinsic, that of objects extrinsic. To identify oneself with a mere thing – facticity in Sartrean terms – represents a flight from reality. This existentially nightmarish attitude is nicely encapsulated in her portrait of the sub-man. "To exist," she writes, "is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men." The sub-man seems to parallel Sartre's waiter, the man who identifies himself from without, as a waiter and not as a self. This is, existentially, the most pernicious attitude available for it negates the most fundamental aspect of humanity, the condition of becoming.

Unfortunately, this position is all too prevalent in our society. We apotheosize the festival as a means of disseminating "culture" to the ignorant masses. Festivals of this type are retrograde; they seek to identify people – living, breathing people filled with potential and engaged in projects of being – with history and experience. And while the bare facticity of a human being cannot be ignored, it alone is not sufficient to impel progress. Humanity must be expressed as a lack of being, potential, and not a condition of being. Consider a stone. It is pure facticity: its being is static and anchored in temporal reality. For a human being to be in the same way a stone is implies a banishment of potential, the cessation of all projects, and ultimately the death of humanity. A human constrained by a backward attempt to secure being is closer to a stone than to a man.