The Ethics Of Ambiguity

“I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I cannot appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession.”

De Beauvoir’s writing can be quite poetic at times. Here, Beauvoir’s poetic prose is employed to convey a complex idea about the paradoxical nature of existence. 

“Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.” 

This is the quintessential sentiment for the existentialist, who puts human freedom at the center of their philosophical beliefs.

“There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.”

Somewhat unique when compared to other works of philosophy, de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity is a call to action. She rejects “gloomy passivity” in favor of an active resistance against oppression and tyranny.

“Existentialism alone gives—like religions—a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which make its judgements so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet, it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because can lose that he also can win.”

Commonly thought of as a highly-theoretical (and therefore impractical) philosophy, the idea that existentialism could offer practical guidance on how to live was a radical idea. As de Beauvoir shows throughout the book, using real-world examples, there is indeed a right and wrong way to behave.

“There are beings whose life slips by in an infantile world because, having been kept in a state of servitude and ignorance, they have no means of breaking the ceiling which is stretched over their heads.” 

The sub-man lives in a state of perpetual childhood by not embracing their freedom of choice.

“If we were to try to establish a kind of hierarchy among men, we would put those who are denuded of this living warmth—the tepidity which the Gospel speaks of—on the lowest rung of the ladder.”

This is a partial definition of de Beauvoir’s “sub-man” archetype. The “living warmth” referred to here is a natural human curiosity.

“However, if a man were permitted to be a brute fact, he would merge with the trees and pebbles which are not aware that they exist; we would consider these opaque lives with indifference. But the sub-man arouses contempt, that is, one recognizes him to be responsible for himself at the moment that one accuses him of not willing himself.” 

De Beauvoir finds the sub-man infuriating because she knows they have brains; however, they refuse to use them. 

“The rejection of existence is still another way of existing; nobody can know the peace of the tomb while he is alive. There we have the defeat of the sub-man. He would like to forget himself, to be ignorant of himself, but the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself.” 

This passage also concerns the sub-man. Scared to consider something so grave as the nature of existence, the sub-man wishes he would just disappear, but de Beauvoir reminds us that, until death, we cannot escape ourselves.

“Weighted down by present events, he is bewildered before the darkness of the future which is haunted by frightful specters, war, sickness, revolution, fascism, bolshevism.”

For the sub-man, fear is the prime motivator. Unable to move beyond a childlike way of being, the future, like the world in general, is something he doesn’t see himself as having any agency in. 

“The serious man’s dishonesty issues from his being obliged ceaselessly to renew the denial of this freedom.” 

The subjugation of the serious man’s freedom, much like the sub-man, is another defining feature of this de Beauvoirarchetype.

“The less economic and social circumstances [that] allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as given. This is the case of women who inherit a long tradition of submission and of those who are called ‘the humble.’” 

There is a social justice component to de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity. Here, she tries to make sense of how two marginalized groups fit into her schema of ethical responsibility and freedom.

“To will oneself free is also to will others free. This will is not an abstract formula. It points out to each person concrete action to be achieved.”

Here, de Beauvoir asserts that her ethics do indeed have real-world applications, and do not have use only in the philosophical realm. 

“In order to prevent this revolt, one of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation since, after all, one cannot revolt against nature.”

Just as Hitler claimed that the Jewish people were a “naturally inferior race,” de Beauvoir writes that the “ruse” of oppression is to mask a falsehood behind a naturalist argument. 

“This rejection cuts off the will of the oppressor, in his turn, from the future toward which he was hoping to thrust himself alone: another future is substituted, that of revolution. The struggle is not one of words and ideologies; it is real and concrete: if it is this future which triumphs, and not the former, then it is the oppressed who is realized as a positive and open freedom and the oppressor who becomes an obstacle and a thing.”

This passage furthers the theme that philosophy has a tangible, practical application. Especially in wartime and during revolution, philosophy's importance takes on “real and concrete” form.

“Hegel has confused these two movement with the ambiguous term ‘aufheben’...[t]his confusion is the source and also the consequence; it is a perfect epitome of that idealistic and verbose flabbiness with which Marx charged Hegel and to which he opposed a realistic toughness.”

De Beauvoir is particularly critical of Hegel. Not only does she disagree with the philosophy heespouses hisThe Phenomenology of the Spirit, she also takes issue with his notoriously long-winded writing style, agreeing with Marx’s characterization of it as “verbose flabbiness.”

 “To want existence, to want to disclose the world, and to want men to be free are one and the same will.”

Under de Beauvoir’s existentialist belief system, the meanings of freedom, human will, and existence are inextricably linked.

“A freedom which is occupied in denying freedom is itself so outrageous that the outrageousness of the violence which one practises against it is almost cancelled out: hatred, indignation, and anger (which even the Marxist cultivates, despite the cold impartiality of the doctrine) wipe out all scruples.”

When it comes dictators, de Beauvoir takes a by-any-means-necessary attitude toward disempowering them. She does not exactly endorse violence here, but she certainly does not condemn it. Having witnessed the atrocities inflicted by Nazism during World War II likely informs de Beauvoir’s direct, zero-tolerance approach to tyranny.

“It is when a man is alive that his death appears to be an outrage, but a corpse has the stupid tranquility of trees and stones: those who have done it say that it is easy to walk on a corpse and still easier to walk over a pile of corpses; and it is the same reason that accounts for the callousness described by those deportees who escaped death: through sickness, pain, hunger, and death, they no longer saw their comrades and themselves as anything more than an animal horde whose life or desires were no longer justified by anything, whose very revolts were only the agitations of animals.” 

De Beauvoir attempts to explain the cruelty and callousness that is borne out of wartime conditions. Again, this passage is certainly influenced by everything de Beauvoir witnessed and experienced in Europe during World War II.

“Yet, with all this sordid resignation, there were children who played and laughed; and their smile exposed the lie of their oppressors: it was an appeal and a promise, it projected a future before the child, a man’s future. If, in all oppressed countries, a child’s face is so moving, it is not that the child is more moving or that he has more of a right to happiness than the others: it is that he is the living affirmation of human transcendence: he is on the watch, he is an eager hand held out to the world, he is a hope, a project.”

From a historical perspective, with World War II having just concluded, The Ethics of Ambiguity is imbued with a spirit of hopefulness, albeit a tempered one. This poetic passage exemplifies that spirit.

“This distinguishes us from the systematic politician who cares only about collective destinies; and probably a tramp enjoying his bottle of wine, or a child playing with a balloon, or a Neapolitan lazzarone loafing in the sun in no way helps in the liberation of man; that is why the abstract will of the revolutionary scorns the concrete benevolence which occupies itself in satisfying desires which have no morrow...[if] the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy. The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laugh of a child at play. If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way.”

Mundane, individual pleasures of the individual are exalted in existentialism, as evidenced by this passage. This further underlines de Beauvoir’s larger point that life has no large, objective goal. The individual must decide to make meaning, and it is the burden of their freedom to do so.

“Man is free; but he finds his law in his very freedom.”

Though counterintuitive, de Beauvoir finds a governing law in the open-endedness of existentialist freedom.

“This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite.” 

A certain degree of failure, ambiguity, and violence are givens in life, according to de Beauvoir, so part of her ethical system laid out here is rallying against those failures indefinitely. 

“That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it offered me, under a show of the infinite, was consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men.” 

Departing from the rest of the text, de Beauvoir gives a brief personal anecdote here to describe the simultaneous usefulness and futility of philosophy. Her compliment toward the Hegelian system here has less to do with Hegel’s ideas (she was a voracious critic of Hegel) and more to do with philosophy in general.