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The Ethics of Ambiguity

Simone de Beauvoir

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Apr 07, 2024 Steven R. Kraaijeveld rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: existentialism, philosophy, ethics, french, literature, metaphysics, books-i-own, sartre, beauvoir

"Existence asserts itself as an absolute which must seek its justification within itself and not suppress itself, even though it may be lost by preserving itself. To attain this truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. He rejoins himself only to the extent that he agrees to remain at a distance from himself." (12)

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), Simone de Beauvoir takes up a challenge that she was apparently given d

"Existence asserts itself as an absolute which must seek its justification within itself and not suppress itself, even though it may be lost by preserving itself. To attain this truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it. He rejoins himself only to the extent that he agrees to remain at a distance from himself." (12)

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), Simone de Beauvoir takes up a challenge that she was apparently given during a lecture: to ground an ethical system in existentialism—or, more specifically, to show how one can derive a concrete ethical system from Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. She thus responds to a prominent criticism of existentialism that it is too abstract to guide action and to answer questions about how one ought to live. Beauvoir takes on the challenge of showing how the metaphysical and ontological underpinnings of existentialism—radical freedom, the absence of God and absolute values, the ambiguity of human beings being both objects and subjects in the world, being both beings in-themselves and beings for-themselves—can give rise to a practicable and convincing ethics.

To that end, I don't think she quite succeeds—as interesting and instructive as some of her arguments in The Ethics of Ambiguity might be. The main idea is that any absolute goals and anything given or taken as absolute must be questioned—placed between parentheses—from the perspective of the freedom that human beings have and the ambiguities that our existence necessarily entails.

Even if you share all of Beauvoir's and existentialism's metaphysical and ontological assumptions (if you don't, then the system does not get off the ground), the ethics that she ultimately derives is not only still quite abstract (which she acknowledged years after writing The Ethics), but it is also a little thin. Ultimately, I'm not convinced that the ethics of ambiguity gets us a full-fledged ethics; nor that it is fundamentally different ethics from the Kantian approach that she uses in later parts of the book (treating others always as ends-in-themselves) or even the Millian kind of liberty arguments about one person's freedom (only) being limited by that of others. The question about others, in any case, and how exactly to treat them remains too vague, perhaps, to be truly instructive. Furthermore, even though the starting point of existentialism is that there are no absolutes to rely on (God, values, and so on), it seems that some values do sneak in toward the end of the book—for example, when she affirms happiness and the 'joy of existence' on page 146 (where does this joy come from, and why wouldn't we begin with an affirmation of the joy of existence instead?).

Nevertheless, the fundamental ambiguity of human existence and the awareness of our freedom and responsibility in having to make choices (not making a choice also always means choosing!)—avoiding becoming what Beauvoir calls a serious person or even, somewhat problematically, a sub-human—are points well worth taking. ...more

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