simone de beauvoir the ethics of ambiguity sparknotes

Publication date 1972 Topics Ethics Publisher Secaucus, N.J. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The ethics of ambiguity by Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908-1986 Frechtman, Bernard. Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. To wish for the disclosure of the world and to assert oneself as freedom are one and the same movement.

But the disclosure implies a perpetual tension to keep being at a certain distance, to tear oneself from the world, and to assert oneself as a freedom. But man also wills himself to be a disclosure of being, and if he coincides with this wish, he wins, for the fact is that the world becomes present by his presence in it. 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.

Simone de beauvoir the ethics of ambiguity sparknotes