The Ethics of Ambiguity

by Simone de Beauvoir

Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to destroy them.

One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance. It is up to man to make it important to be a man, and he alone can feel his success or failure.

A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied.

I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.

We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint.

Since we can conquer our enemies only by acting upon their facticity, by reducing them to things, we have to make ourselves things; in this struggle in which wills are forced to confront each other through their bodies, the bodies of our allies, like those of our opponents are exposed to the same brutal hazard: they will be wounded, killed, or starved.

That is why the Nazis were so systematically relentless in casting into abjection the men they wanted to destroy: the disgust which the victims felt in regard to themselves stifled the voice of revolt and justified the executioners in their own eyes. All oppressive regimes become stronger through the degradation of the oppressed.

Undergone as a misfortune, violence appears as a crime to the one who practices it.

In this way the attitude of England in regard to Spain, Greece, and Palestine is defended with the pretext that she must take up position against the Russian menace in order to save, along with her own existence, her civilization and the values of democracy; but a democracy which defends itself only by acts of oppression equivalent to those of authoritarian regimes, is precisely denying all these values; whatever the virtues of a civilization may be, it immediately belies them if it buys them by means of injustice and tyranny.

Existence attempts in the festival to confirm itself positively as existence.

To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.

the critic is always in a good position to show the limits that every artist gives himself in choosing himself; painting is not given completely either in Giotto or Titian or Cezanne; it is sought through the centuries and is never finished; a painting in which all pictorial problems are resolved is really inconceivable; painting itself is this movement toward its own reality; it is not the vain displacement of a millstone turning in the void; it concretizes itself on each canvas as an absolute existence.

all politics makes use of the police, which officially flaunts its radical contempt for the individual and which loves violence for its own sake.

The thing that goes by the name of political necessity is in part the laziness and brutality of the police.