the ethics of ambiguity by simone de beauvoir

Human transcendence is vainly engulfed in those miscarried attempts. All the plans in which this will to be is actualized are condemned and the ends circumscribed by these plans remain mirages. Now, we have seen that the original scheme of man is ambiguous: he wants to be, and to the extent that he coincides with this wish, he fails. The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. Perhaps in no other age have they manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this grandeur been so horribly flouted.

Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense collectivity whose limits are one with the earth’s.

Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. Because everyone confronts different circumstances but everyone is also free, each individual has the opportunity to construct their own identity through the way they apply their individual will to the world. Rather, people are both, and living ethically requires coming to terms with this tension or ambiguity at the foundation of human life. It is therefore ambiguous whether people are subjects with freedom or objects with facticity, but there is no real truth of the matter one way or the other. Ambiguity results from the paradoxes at the center of the human condition: people both have subjectivity and appear as objects to everyone else they recognize their own freedom as well as their powerlessness in relation to the world as a whole and they (at best) relentlessly pursue their goals even though they know they are going to die. She carefully distinguishes this from absurdity, or the notion that life can never have meaning at all.

Most specifically, by talking about life’s ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir points to the sense in which life has no fixed meaning, but that rather its meaning is up to every individual, depending on their commitments, actions, and predilections.

The ethics of ambiguity by simone de beauvoir