The Ethics of Ambiguity

by Simone de Beauvoir

To attain his truth, man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realizing it.

To exist genuinely is not to deny this spontaneous movement of my transcendence, but only to refuse to lose myself in it.

Man exists. For him it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether he wants to live and under what conditions.

The oppressed has only one solution: to deny the harmony of that mankind from which an attempt is made to exclude him, to prove that he is a man and that he is free by revolting against the tyrants. In order to prevent this revolt, one of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation since, after all, one can not revolt against nature. When