And finally, people both have fixed selves, as a result of their past and the choices they have made, and complete freedom to do what they want with themselves in the future (and complete responsibility for those choices).Īs a result of this glaring ambiguity, failure is inevitable: people can never completely fulfill their will, become precisely what they want to be, or make the exact impact they want to make on the world. Humans are also both stuck in the material world (through their bodies and their inevitable deaths) and able to escape it through thought and imagination. At the same time, they strive with their full energies toward these goals, despite knowing them to be of only relative importance. Secondly, people know that they will die, which will render everything for which they have worked throughout their life meaningless to them. People both feel like “a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects,” but also recognize that every other person feels the same way and thus sees them as an object. The first form of ambiguity is that between people’s status as a subject and an object. All rest on the fact that life seems both subjectively meaningful and objectively meaningless. De Beauvoir’s solution to the often demoralizing ambiguity of human life is not to try and escape it by ceasing to strive or expecting to become perfect against the odds rather, she thinks that people should “assume” their ambiguity by recognizing that their goals are provisional and striving precisely to disclose their own being through their actions.ĭe Beauvoir sees a number of paradoxes at the heart of the human condition. Human existence is defined by people’s freedom and lack of any definite being. De Beauvoir explains this argument in terms of the difference between being (a thing’s singular, definite essence) and existence (the simple fact of something’s presence as in the world).
People have absolute freedom over their own limited power, and no matter how much they strive, they will never be what they strive to be precisely because their power is limited.
Simone de Beauvoir chose the title The Ethics of Ambiguity because she sees ambiguity as a central structuring feature in people’s lives: people are at once subjects and objects, in control of their own lives and helpless against the world’s forces.
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