The Ethics Of Ambiguity

In Part I, Beauvoir establishes the two conceptual pillars upholding existentialist ethics: ambiguousness and freedom. How these concepts animate and interact with human life are the basis for The Ethics of Ambiguity.

Beauvoir begins by asserting that paradox is embedded in the human condition in that human beings are simultaneously both subject and object. That is, every human is the main character of their own life, while simultaneously being a minor character in someone else’s: “Each [human being] 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” (8). This is but one of many paradoxes of the human condition, all of which point to one glaring fact: Life is a messy, ambiguous thing. But if one embraces this messiness—which, as de Beauvoir sees it, is the “genuine conditions” of our life, we “draw our strength to live and our reason for acting” (8).

Ambiguousness is a complex term for de Beauvoir and existentialists at large, but for the most part it refers to the paradoxes of human existence. De Beauvoir notes that many philosophers have tried to ignore or rectify contradiction in human existence: “As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it” (6). Here, de Beauvoir is referring to any philosophy or way of thinking that attempts to neatly to explain man’s condition. Unlike other systems of philosophical thought, Beauvoir sees existentialism as never having shied away from paradox: “From the very beginning, existentialism has always defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity” (8). Existentialism confronts the ambiguousness of human existence, which, for de Beauvoir, is timely,as World War II brought the ambiguous nature of existence to the fore: “Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition…They are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them” (7).

The second pillar of de Beauvoir’s system of ethics is freedom, which is a core belief for all existentialists: “As for us [existentialists], whatever the case may be, we believe in freedom” (23). But de Beauvoir poses the question of whether this belief in freedom “must lead to despair” (23). De Beauvoir includes despair because, if humans are free to do as they please, they have the burden of making the right decision. Here de Beauvoir refers to the discomfiting side of freedom, a concept originally developed in previous work by Sartre. De Beauvoir, however, finds that freedom need not necessarily lead to despair:

On the contrary, it appears to us that by turning toward this freedom we are going to discover a principle of action whose range will be universal. 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 (23).

By acknowledging the messy truth—by “turning toward this freedom”—de Beauvoir discovers an ethical way of living.

De Beauvoir states that “to will oneself moral [and] to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (24). If one actively engages with the process of trying to understand the concept of “human freedom”—in short, if one is a thinking, enlightened person—then one transcendstheir facticity. “Facticity,” another key term for de Beauvoir, refers to the unchangeable facts of existence, such as the time and place a person is born. In considering abstract ideas such as “human freedom,” facticity is transcended by entering into a universally-important, age-old abstraction.

However, most humans do not engage in that kind of deep thinking, and therefore they do not transcend their facticity: “Men slide incoherently from one attitude to another. We shall limit ourselves to describing in their abstract form those which we have just indicated” (35). In this way, de Beauvoir introduces Part II of The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is an overview of her archetypal ways of being.