The Ethics of Ambiguity

by Simone de Beauvoir

He is first at a distance from himself. He can coincide with himself only by agreeing never to rejoin himself. There is within him a perpetual playing with the negative, and he thereby escapes himself, he escapes his freedom. And it is precisely because an evil will is here possible that the words “to will oneself free” have a meaning. Therefore, not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place. For, in a metaphysics of transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error; and in humanistic philosophies it is impossible to account for it, man being defined as complete in a complete world. Existentialism alone gives — like religions — a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which make its judgments 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 he can lose that he can also win.

She is saying that without an evil or a bad, we can never truly realize what is good. This is similar to a religious outlook. But her form is existentialism. In transcendentalism or transcendence, any bad is done in error, because man is seen to be inherently positive. In humanism, man is a perfectly rational being in a perfectly rational world, so the existence of evil cannot really be explained. But in existentialsim and in most religion, man is negative or sinful, because he is separate from himself or from God, and therefore, evil is possible, depending on the choices men make.