Simone De Beauvoir

 

    Simone de Beauvoir was a preeminent French existentialist philosopher and writer who produced writings on ethics among various topics. Her method incorporated different ethical dimensions, like her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, where she developed an existentialists ethics. In her ethics, Simone De Beauvoir refers to one's existence as ambiguous; I will describe what she refers to when one's existence is ambiguous and the meaning to such a notion. I will describe the relationship between freedom and ambiguity. Why other people are necessary for our freedom? And what we owe to others. Also, why should we treat others ethically? And what does it mean to treat others ethically? In her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, she argues that there are different ways in which people cope with ambiguity. Among many other modes where she described how one copes with ambiguity, I will explain how "The Serious Man" manages his/her ambiguity.

     For Simone Beauvoir, we are neither entirely free nor are we just objects of reality. That makes our lives ambiguous. If we were utterly free, then we can determine ourselves as we would want to be, and there be no question of who and what we are. But we cannot do that because we are not entirely free. If we were objects, then we would be who we are, but we cannot gain distance from the world or ourselves to deliberate from ourselves or make choices for ourselves; we would be what we are. Even if ambiguity is not explicit or we do not think about it daily, we live with this ambiguity. There are ways to resolve this ambiguity; we either attempt to reduce mind to matter or observe matter into mind. The first premise (1) tries to reduce the mind to matter. Is to say, “No, I am just an object, I work by instinct, or I am causality determined with all that I do and nothing more.” The second premise (2) We can resolve this ambiguity by reabsorbing matter into the mind. It is to say, “Everything is just mind; everything has been created by the human perspective and nothing more to it.” For Simone De Beauvoir, these two ways of resolving our ambiguity are dishonest; to cope with these two resolutions are bad faith. The promise of immortality is another form of ambiguity; we can claim that life is an illusion or ambiguous, but that promise to live with an eternal Being will be whole and complete follows that form of ambiguity to soothe ourselves.

Since the ways I have described to resolve ambiguity are bad faith, we are essentially ambiguous. Our being is ambiguous, and we must live with that ambiguity. One feature of ambiguity is our relationship with others; on the one hand, each of us is sovereign over ourselves, meaning we decide for ourselves, but we are also part of a collective whole. That is another form of ambiguity. One decides for himself, exercises sovereignty over himself, but that person realizes he is not entirely free because wherever that person turns, there are other people he must deal with. We are neither wholly free nor just an object in the world. We are individuals, among other individuals. So, we must confront this ambiguity and live within these bounds of our humanity because that is all we have and know. To expand further and elaborate more into Beauvoir’s thought, it is impossible without failure as far as ethics is concerned. Ethics is impossible without failure. That is the whole reason we need ethics, but this does not mean we cannot become what we ought to be. What is present is the constant failure of ethics that requires our continuous failure; our passions are useless; it will not get us anywhere. There is this ambiguity in our existence, which means we fall short of our ethical standard, but that is precisely the situation in which ethics is necessary. Ethics is only necessary for beings who can fail what they ought to be; we cannot coincide with the world as parts of the world because then we will become objects. Only at our distance from the world then we can become meaningful. The world is not significant to the rock because the rock is just part of the world as an object, and the rock cannot get distance from the world to determine what is essential to the rock. It is in our distance which we can find disclosure of the world, and we want this distance and desire it. We are passionate about what this world means to us. We can have it through a lack and strive towards completion and identity; that is the idea that intertwines in the ambiguity. Only in that ambiguity can we have a world; otherwise, we are who we are. There would be no need to fuss over ambiguity; there is no need to reach into the world. To find meaning and to give things value; hence that makes us humans. “Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship “wanting to be” but rather “wanting to disclose being.” Now, here there is not failure, but rather success. This end, which man proposes to himself by making himself of being, is, in effect realized by him. By uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present...” (Ethics of Ambiguity, pg. 11 - 13). We desire the world whole and complete; we desire to be the grounds of our being. We cannot surpass our ambiguity, the ambiguity of existence, and the positive possibilities we create; we should set aside the end goals and absolutes that are already there to guide us. Because these reveal our absolute failures, by having an idea as the perfect way one should be, but continually falling short, one sees themselves in a negative light. Rather than seeing that ambiguity the possibilities of falling short as a positive thing to create opportunities, there are no absolute failing standards. Using the values available to us and the meanings, in return, we determine and establish what is worth pursuing. Even that lack makes up that ambiguity from one thing to another is not absolute because there is no absolute standard.

For Beauvoir, there are different ways to cope with ambiguity; one way is the serious man; he devotes himself to worldly things to escape his subjective existence. By devoting himself, he then, in return, attempts to give up his freedom. Denying freedom in favor of one's absolute claim, he is not content with the lack of being; he is incapable of existence without guarantees according to that existence. It is a way of coping with the lack of one's existence by being wholly invested in a movement's claim and taking them as absolutes. The reliability and predictability are that conformity, which is a kind of facticity. But this facticity leaves the world devoid of the rich meanings it ought to have, and levels out the world, there are unique experiences and meanings. The serious person does not recognize them as legitimate because they do not fit into the adopted worldview. The world then becomes diminished. The serious man, who embraces facticity this way, embraces and attempts to merge with the world established by authority and traditions, will not likely accord much significance to things or people beyond the practices. It then becomes dangerous; if other people are not on board with the absolute plans, the serious man does not owe anyone anything. “Thus, fundamental as a man’s fear in the face of existence may be, thought he has chosen from his earliest years to deny his presence in the world, he can not keep himself from existing, he can not efface the agonizing evidence of is freedom. That is why, as we just seen, in order to get rid of his freedom, he is led to engage it positively. The attitude of the sub-man passes logically over into that of the serious man; he forces himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society.” (Ethics of Ambiguity, pg. 43) The serious man is born into a particular body of norms, laws, and traditions, which are a kind of facticity. The serious man embraces those traditions present to him; he then invests himself into those traditions and attempts to become one with those traditions. He tries to become part of that perfect facticity. The person does not care about the cause that person embraces, no matter how brutal that movement is, because the lack of existence is terrifying, hence finding absolute meaning. With no ambiguity or failure, the serious man can be on the right side of history, but for Beauvoir, recognizing the possibility of failure is the first step to be an ethical person living in ambiguity. To reject that failure is dangerous, it is then impossible to be ethical living in ambiguity.