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Simone de Beauvoir

The Ethics Of Ambiguity Paperback – June 1, 2000

by Simone de Beauvoir (Author)

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From Wikipedia -- The Ethics Of Ambiguity is Simone de Beauvoir's second major non-fiction work. It was prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945,[which?] after which she claimed that it was impossible to base an ethical system on her partner Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical work Being and Nothingness (French title: L'Être et le néant). The following year, over a six-month period, she took on the challenge, publishing the resulting text first as installments in Les Temps modernes and then, in November 1947, as a book.

Print length

162 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Citadel
Publication date

June 1, 2000
Dimensions

5.42 x 0.45 x 7.88 inches
ISBN-10

080650160X
ISBN-13

978-0806501604
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Citadel; Later Printing edition (June 1, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 162 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 080650160X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0806501604
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.42 x 0.45 x 7.88 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #961,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #397 in French Literary Criticism (Books)
- #4,092 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality
- #4,399 in Essays (Books)

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504 ratings

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Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (/boʊvˈwɑːr/; French: [simɔn də bovwaʁ]; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.

De Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, autobiography and monographs on philosophy, politics and social issues. She is known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism; and for her novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins. She is also known for her open relationship with French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by unknown. uploader Claudio Elias [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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ArianneTop Contributor: Philosophy

We are Condemned to Ambiguity, not Freedom

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2018

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In this text, de Beauvoir distances herself from the ethics of absurdity and meaning. This sets up the difference between Camus who saw existence as absurd as well as Sartre who saw existence as meaningless and herself in their responses to the interconnections between existentialism, phenomenology, ethics and politics. She makes the crucial move and shifts the existential problem from one of brute absurdity or meaningless meaning to nuanced ambiguity and then reflects upon what our response to ambiguity should be. We find that ambiguity is not just a concept or idea, but an experience that overtakes us. It is not just an abstraction, but a felt authenticity of the human condition.

Sartre said that we are condemned to be free. Merleau-Ponty said that we are condemned to meaning. Each of these is incomplete in that each condemns us to one side of duality, this is brutish simplicity. This is also incomplete as Simone de Beauvoir shows us. We are commanded to reside on both sides of many dualities, that is, to reside in ambiguity, an existence of nuance. Simone de Beauvoir shows us that human life is not lived by choosing between dueling dualities, the simplest of which is the freedom versus determinism duality or the meaning of life versus meaningless of life duality. Life is lived within and between and amidst these dualities. In terms of freedom versus determinism, we exist amid the duality, so how can we be only condemned to be free? We are condemned to ambiguity, not freedom, “…ambiguous reality which is called existence…”, p. 24. Too often, we are told that we are either free or not free and that existence is governed by either freedom or determinism. This is not a false duality, but it is a false choice. The fact that it is a choice at all is suggestive of freedom. The gap between perceiving and reflecting is the space in which our ethics is to be found and as de Beauvoir tells us, ethics is the triumph of freedom. However, we are both free and not free, responsible and not responsible simultaneously. Our life is meaningless and yet subject to meaning as we chose to create it. To choose one side of any given duality (mind/body, freedom/determinism, good/evil, subject/object, individual/group member, meaning/meaningless) is to over simplify the experience of the human condition and curtail both our freedom and responsibility by trying to hide from the ambiguity that just is human life. With the addition of the place amid the duality, the initial duality is transformed it into a triality.

For de Beauvoir, the ethics of ambiguity create the obligations we have to each other in an uncertain existence where we must create ourselves and own purpose and take responsibility for the project of self-creation. Rights transform into obligations in this ethic and virtue is excellence in human action with regard towards others. We need others in order to achieve any semblance of reasonable life for ourselves and there is no individual flourishing without the success of the community and flourishing of others. Our rights create our obligations to others and claim on others for the same. We need to reconnect rights with duties and obligations within our own sense of self-creation to achieve our own aspirations.

Philosophy must be rooted in concrete social reality for it to have any relevance for the human condition, but this also renders any philosophy so derived as local, parochial and dated. Though I think de Beauvoir’s insight into the fundamental ambiguity of the human conditions near timeless, we must recall the that existentialism was very much a product of its time and place as is the case with any concrete philosophical doctrines. That time and place of course being the very uncertain period of post WWII Europe. This was a time characterized by overwhelming uncertainty and feelings of helplessness, just the time when a philosophy emphasizing freedom and responsibility was most needed. This was a time when Western civilization, at the heights of its artistic, scientific and cultural achievements instantly collapsed into a condition characterized by the worst forms of barbaric brutalism, horrific hatred and rapacious racism ever witnessed. At the height of reason, high civilization descended into a nightmare of irrationality. Perhaps the collapse was not instant or even a collapse at all but something long seething within the culture. I pinpoint this seething anti-humanity to the enemy invader Napoleon who was seen as a product of the Enlightenment thus provoking a reactionary anti-Enlightenment culture where he invaded, e.g., Austria, Germany, Prussia, and Russia. This anti-Enlightenment culture consisted of a dark romanticism and mysticism. With this, I believe that any perceived excesses of French existential thought in terms of freedom, responsibility, ethics or politics can be better understood.

131 people found this helpful

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An authoritative text on existentialism

Reviewed in the United States on December 25, 2018

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‘The Ethics of Ambiguity’ is one of the three authoritative philosophical short texts on existentialism, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ and ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ are the other two. The ambiguity that Simone De Beauvoir discusses in this book is similar to the ambiguity that Sartre and Camus talk about; the ambiguity at the root of existentialism. In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus,’ Camus begins with the encounter with absurd, the encounter at the root of realization that the self cannot be reconciled with the universe. His argument on existentialism starts with a question on suicide and builds to explain the absurd, which once realized, he argues, should not be a source of anguish but bliss. In ‘Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre begins with the premise that ‘existence precedes essence’ and goes on to build an argument on why existentialism is the only doctrine that is humanistic. Within this argument, Sartre clarifies why existentialism is not individualistic but a philosophy that focuses on the greater good of the collective human race. In ‘The Ethics of Ambiguity,’ Beauvoir begins with the realization of ambiguity of existence around human condition, explores how childhood nurture contributes to this condition, investigates how freedom should be asserted in the face of this ambiguity (through a hierarchy of men based on how they react to the ambiguity) and concludes why existentialism is not individualistic but humanistic.

“The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” “Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo,” Beauvoir argues, as she introduces ambiguity of human condition. The ambiguity is similar to Camus’ absurd – a realization that there is no universal meaning to human existence or action. Beauvoir goes on to investigate the source for humans’ belief in the universal nature of their actions. “Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child,” she quotes and explains how we as humans feel happily irresponsible as children, feel protected against the risk of existence but how the same happy ignorance makes us a prisoners of error in our adulthood. In other words, she argues that sooner or later every man realizes that the childhood he grew up with was a world created for him by his parents or adults and that in reality he is not bound to any universality of rules or ethics. He is free, free to will his own world, chart his own rules, yet he can only do that on the basis of what he has been – a child. “The child does not contain the man he will become, yet it is always on the basis of what he has been that a man decides upon what he wants to be,” she says. This freedom although should be liberating, ends up becoming a disturbing realization, one that lifts the veil of finite ceiling over man’s head and leaves him abandoned in the infinite world. In this abandoned anxiety, despite realizing his freedom, man tends to gravitate towards enslaving himself in the childhood condition instead of living freely. Beauvoir classifies this man into a hierarchy in order to build an argument to explain the true nature of existentialist freedom.

The lowest man in the hierarchy is called a sub-man - a blind uncontrolled force that anyone can get control of. “The sub-man makes his way across a world deprived of meaning towards a death which merely confirms his long negation of himself,” she says. The attitude of sub-man passes over to the next class in hierarchy, what she calls the serious-man. While sub-man lives in a perpetual anxiety, the serious-man renounces his freedom to a cause. The serious man claim the absolute and ceaseless denies his freedom, “like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that he has sent it to himself. He is no longer a man but a father, a boss, a member of a Christian Church or the Communist party. The serious man wills himself to be the God but he is not one and he knows it.” The attitude of serious-man transcends into the next category - the nihilist. The nihilist, unlike serious-man, under the burden of his freedom decides to be nothing, denies the world, himself and focuses on annihilation of the world. A nihilist who realizes the universal and absolute end which freedom is, further rises up in the hierarchy to become an adventurer. Adventures, she describes is an attitude closest to a genuinely moral attitude – an indifferent and disinterested encounter with the world that defines the true existentialist freedom. The adventures is perhaps Sisyphus – the man who is ceaseless rolling a stone to the top of the mountain, not in revolt but in lucid indifference.

The same adventures though, she says also carries the seed of destruction and favorable circumstances are enough to transform an adventures into a dictator. However, she argues that if an adventurer turns into a dictator, he fails to assert his freedom and becomes a slave of tyranny, thereby inadvertently denies his own freedom. “Passion is converted into genuine freedom only if one destines his existence to other existences through the being – whether thing or man – at which he aims, without hoping to entrap it in the destiny of the in-itself,” she says and goes on arguing with elaborate detail on why the only way existentialism can exist, the only way a freedom can be asserted is by asserting it not for one but for all mankind. “A freedom which is occupied in denying freedom is itself so outrageous that the outrageousness of the violence which one practices against it is almost canceled out.” From explaining the ambiguity of existence, to its reason and reaction, Beauvoir ends with the argument that all this makes existentialism a philosophy that is not individualistic but a philosophy for the collective good, in other words, the ethics of ambiguity – the argument also at the center of Sartre’s ‘Existentialism is a Humanism.’

All in all, the book touches on the core principles of existentialism, tackles the absurdity of existence from a new direction, and gives the reader a novel perspective on the same principles. For anyone interested in understanding this field of philosophy, Beauvoir’s short but authoritative text should be a must in the reading list.

27 people found this helpful

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billwest

Nicely wraps up Existentialism of 70 years ago

Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2017

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She is excellent. Sort of summed up Jean Paul Sartre for usefulness for today --fifty years later. The universe has no meaning or purpose for us earthly humans, period. Existence is ambiguity, meaningless, absurd. We perfectly well can look in science's dumpster for our religious, philosophical, ideological. poetic, artistic inspirations and meanings for ourselves. But they are really just consolations to pair with death. We can choose freedom.

19 people found this helpful

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Nichole knouse

Amazing

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2018

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Simone De Beauvoir is an amazing writer. I had to read this book for an assignment in my philosophy class. If I would have known about the book otherwise, I would have LOVED to have read it on my own, had I known about it. Overall, this was an incredible book that really taught me so much about existentialism.

5 people found this helpful

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Jesus

I enjoyed this book

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2021

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I found d it interesting to read something new from a different perspective. It has made me think of a lot different situations and asked myself about what would be right or wrong. I learned new theories from different people that I wasn't aware of. The only issued I had was that at times it was hard to follow the point of the chapter.

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Christopher

An Intriguing and Thoughtful Work

Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2021

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Very solid philosophical argument by our dear de Beauvoir. She raises many good points on the nature of existence and it’s implications for ethics, and expresses them in a way that is relatively easy to follow (at least in comparison to her contemporaries.) I am no expert on French translations, so I cannot say anything about the quality of the translation other than that everything read very clearly in English, unlike some translations. All in all, a very good book to read for anyone interested in ethics or existential philosophy.

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federica bianco

book content

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 15, 2019

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an absolute must read for philosophers and lovers of life who want to understand the duality, dyads, and unresolved dynamics of the self that interact with the external world and set conventional decrees.

3 people found this helpful

Barbara C

The Brilliance of Simone de Beauvoir

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 12, 2013

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This is, quite simply, a brilliant work by a towering figure amongst 20th Century Existentialist philosophers. It explains much; why people must assume their ambiguity rather than fight against, and how to be free, one must first wish all to be free.
An amazing work!

8 people found this helpful

Paul Heinowski

No raised eyebrows now.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2017

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A bit dated but no doubt it was quite radical when first published.

Suzy

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2018

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Very intresting

MR A DIDANGELOS

Classic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 1, 2014

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What an amazing book!! Not for the ill-hearted or the weak-minded.. If people could understand a fraction of her thoughts we would have a better society..