The Ethics of Ambiguity: Part 1 Summary & Analysis

Citing the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, de Beauvoir argues that humans are unlike other forms of life because they consciously understand the inevitability of their deaths, or “the non-temporal truth of [their] existence.” Because of their consciousness, each person feels like “a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects,” but is also an object from everyone else’s perspective.

People have recognized this duality throughout history, and philosophers have largely “tried to mask it” by rejecting the distinction between mind and matter, and by arguing that people have an immortal soul or can reach eternal enlightenment. Their ethical thought tries to turn people into “pure inwardness or pure externality,” although Hegel tried to supersede this binary. All of this only makes “the paradox of [the human] condition” more obvious. The more people feel like individual agents in charge of their own will and able to shape the world, the more they realize how easily that world overwhelms them. This has never been more apparent than now, and instead of avoiding this paradox, de Beauvoir insists on “look[ing] the truth in the face.”

This ambiguity is central to all existentialism, which gets attacked for giving people no principles on the basis of which to live. Sartre in particular declares that people inevitably try and fail to synthesize their will with the world. But even “the most optimistic” ethical systems have first focused on humans’ inevitable failures; if people did not have room for improvement, there would be no point in ethics. Indeed, acting ethically for self-improvement only makes sense for the kind of subject who “questions himself in his being.” And yet Sartre’s thought leaves no possibility of someone ethically improving, or “becoming the being that he is not.” He only briefly touches on ethics in the last pages of his central work, Being and Nothingness, but this does not mean that he totally “condemn[s] man without recourse.”

In his words, Sartre sees man as “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” First, this means that people choose their own passions, which can have “no external justification” but can still justify themselves. Indeed, the choice of passion “nullifies being” only in order to “disclose being,” to recognize the world’s presence (and allow the world to recognize one’s own). For instance, by contemplating a landscape a person expresses both a desire to merge with it and a pain at their inability to do so; but they “take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession,” which is a success rather than a failure. By trying to be God, in other words, one comes to one’s human existence. As “an effort to be,” one’s impossible attempt to be what one desires serves as “a manifestation of existence.” A person exists precisely in virtue of being a lack.

Thus, in order for people to become their true selves, they must seek to realize, not overcome, their being’s ambiguity. Rather than denying that one transcends oneself, one must “refuse to lose [one]self in” that tendency to transcendence, or continue to recognize the gap between one’s being and one’s projection of oneself. The “existentialist conversion” must bracket away one’s “will to be” for the sake of analysis, looking at one’s relationship to one’s projection rather than hoping to genuinely achieve that projection.

This “existentialist conversion” means that one must, first, reject external standards and recognize that genuinely existing only means “being right in [one’s own] eyes.” The idea of external values actually denies people’s freedom—in fact, people’s free existence is what creates values. This is not about optimism or pessimism; existence is a brute fact, with no reasons or justifications for or against it. It “make[s] no sense” to ask whether or not human life is worth it, only how to go about living.

De Beauvoir next asks whether this human freedom implies that people can do whatever they want, that there is no true ethics. But actually, she says, it is the opposite: people are the ultimate measure of their own actions, completely responsible in a moral world they create. They cannot legitimately take recourse to God, or say their life inherently matters or not, because it only matters depending on what they do.

Many people accuse existentialism of making morality meaningless and subjective—but it is a universal, objective truth that everyone is a subject unto themselves. Indeed, existentialism continues the tradition of major Western philosophers (like “Kant, Fichte, and Hegel”) as well as “all humanism” by arguing that moral laws and individual consciousness are inextricably tied to one another. Yet whereas Kant and Hegel saw this in the fact that each individual expresses a universal human experience, will, or consciousness, existentialists ground morality not in the abstract “impersonal universal man” but rather in “the plurality of concrete, particular men” acting from their own particular contexts. De Beauvoir wonders how “men, originally separated, [got] together” in these other ethical systems, which see them as all the same.

De Beauvoir insists that “we are coming to the real situation of the problem” at the center of her book. Given the notion that “there is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve,” or that ethics is about improving an imperfect reality, other ethical systems have jumped the gun by assuming that people are bound to the same moral laws rather than recognizing that, initially, they are separate, and that universal moral laws are an idealized abstraction of what perfected individual morality would look like. Conversely, “an ethics of ambiguity” must leave open the possibility that “separate extants can […] be bound to each other” and each individually “forge valid laws for all” through their freedom.

De Beauvoir notes that Marxism shares existentialism’s “notion of situation” and the “recognition of separation which it implies.” Marxism is founded on the concrete needs of the class struggle, not an abstract concept of the just or good. It requires a revolutionary movement founded on this class struggle, which “an intellectual or a bourgeois” can only appreciate in the abstract (because it does not emerge from “the very impulse of his life”). And yet, whereas Marxism thinks that the individual will is the mere product of “objective [economic] conditions,” existentialism thinks it is fundamentally free. Indeed, the proletariat (working class) can adopt various attitudes to class, and Marxism does emphasize freedom in so far as it is necessary for revolutionary action (which is the whole point of revolutionaries’ moralizing political speeches).

So Marxism ends up with contradictory beliefs in both determination and freedom. And yet Marxists, like many Christians, often insist that acting freely means “giv[ing] up justifying one’s acts” and therefore “betray[ing] the cause.” While they insist on moral action, they also reject abstract morality and insist on absolute loyalty to the Party, or “having-to-be at the same time as being.”

De Beauvoir reminds the reader that existentialists “believe in freedom” and wonders whether this freedom means that people are “prohibited from wishing for anything.” Instead, she declares, whereas most ethics is about teaching people how to “win” at life, existentialism shows that people will always fail to be what they want to be, but always succeed to disclose their being, and therefore “win” when their wish is “to be a disclosure of being.” This makes one present in the world, but also implies a gap between oneself and the world (namely, freedom). And so freedom is its own, original moral justification, the foundation of all other values, which means it can never deny itself.

De Beauvoir next asks whether “natural freedom contradict[s] the notion of ethical freedom” because we are born free, and so it makes no sense “to will oneself free.” She decides that this objection fails because freedom is not “a thing or quality” that people have but rather intrinsic to “the very movement of […] existence.” Existence requires precisely “making itself be” through continuous free action. Therefore, “will[ing] oneself free” can be understood as meaning turning natural into moral freedom.

The natural freedom with which people are born is random, spontaneous, and always directed toward something, but never founded on a reflective principle or project. Through “laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, [and] impatience,” some continue living out this freedom and choose not to will themselves (morally) free (even though it is still impossible to affirmatively will oneself unfree). Conversely, by reflecting on one’s actions and their utility in bringing one toward one’s goal or object, one takes legitimately morally free actions. But this is a constant process—one’s project constantly “founds itself,” even though so many people try to hide in fantasy or serious dogmatism.

Having looked at freedom’s “subjective and formal aspect,” de Beauvoir now wonders whether there is any way to “will oneself free.” First, this requires gradually building a will over time, by developing a picture of one’s life in the past and future. And every act of willing implicates past actions’ relevance to one’s project and future acts’ continuation of it. This is a continual, limitless process: whenever one becomes what they wish to become, this self becomes a “point of departure” for the next goal, embracing the continuity of freedom.

In Descartes’s words, however, “the freedom of man is infinite, but his power is limited” because the world resists people’s actions. De Beauvoir asks what one should do about this; stubbornness makes no sense when success is impossible, but resignation is sad and dishonest, making people see genuine possibilities as mere past fantasies. And Stoic indifference simply leads people to give up on their own power to change and achieve things. Better, free action should aim at “precisely the free movement of existence.” A good example is how injured or outcast people can “renew [their] engagement in the world,” directing their energy to new projects and experiencing “both heartbreak and joy.” This shows that freedom is fundamentally about “plan[ning] new possibilities” and so “disclos[ing] being,” not trying to determine a particular future and “trap[ping] being.” This also means going “from being to existence.”

De Beauvoir argues that this “salvation” requires that people continue to see new, fruitful possibilities in the future—this is why the most “obnoxious” form of punishment is requiring people to do senseless work they do not understand (like a student copying down the same line of text over and over). Similarly, life imprisonment is horrible because it absolutely constrains people’s freedom, and freedom naturally rejects all such constraints on it, whether by resolving them (like illness), revolting against them (like a prison or unjust social system), or committing suicide, when there is no other option.

So freedom always seeks to overcome obstacles to it, or “to realize itself as indefinite movement.” And yet there are also always obstacles to freedom, no matter what. Thus freedom is always “a movement of liberation,” which (as de Beauvoir will later show) even tries to “surpass death itself” by “prolonging itself through the freedom of others.”

De Beauvoir declares that, so far, she has shown “that the words ‘to will oneself free’ have a positive and concrete meaning.” This meaning is “original spontaneity” willing “moral freedom” in relation to particular goals, and thereby becoming that freedom.

But this creates a problem: if there is “one and only one way” to affirm freedom, are people ever truly free to choose it? Can they instead choose “a bad willing?” This question pervades ethics, since virtue only makes sense given the possibility of “a bad willing.” De Beauvoir cannot accept the classical answer of philosophers like Plato, who think evil is just moral error, because she argues that humans create all morality through their will.

Like Kant, de Beauvoir thinks that people cannot positively decide not to be free. However, existentialists “do not see man as being essentially a positive will,” but rather as foundationally negative, based on the gap between the self and the projection. One can be oneself only by “agreeing never to rejoin” the projection, but indulging the “perpetual playing with the negative” means escaping the self and one’s freedom. So existentialism can have an ethics because it leaves room for an evil will, and indeed is the only philosophy that seems to leave this room and create the possibility of ethics, while so many other philosophies equate evil with mere error.

This might help explain why people think of existentialism as “gloomy”: there are real ethical consequences to people’s will; people can win and lose; nothing is decided in advance. There are many ways to refuse to make oneself “a lack of being so that there might be being.” One can hesitate, give up, falsely insist that one is being or nothingness, or choose stubbornness or resignation. Often, people combine these tactics. Now, de Beauvoir will turn to the kinds of willful failures she has just outlined.