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Part 1
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Ethics of Ambiguity, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Existentialism and Ethics
Ambiguity, Being, and Existence
Freedom
Politics, Ethics, and Liberation
Summary
Analysis
To children, the world is established, and human creations appear unchangeable, “as inevitable as the sky and the trees.” This is a serious world, in the sense that values appear as “ready-made things,” and the child sets up their own “happily irresponsible” world of freedom through play. They believe in adults’ being and the absoluteness of good and evil. And in turn they believe in their own being, while also imagining themselves as grown-up beings (“explorer, brigand, sister of charity”) during play time. And the child incurs none of the “risk[s] of existence,” including responsibility and “the anguish of freedom.” The child “is in a state of security by virtue of his very insignificance.”
De Beauvoir has given a theoretical picture of what genuinely free decision making requires, but she has still not concretely outlined what it looks like to live a genuinely free life. This part of de Beauvoir’s book is an attempt to show what moral success and failure—good and evil—entail for existentialists. De Beauvoir conceives of morality as a process of growth that takes place during individuals’ lives, so starts from the beginning of that process, with children who fail to see that values are constructed and believe that good and evil are set in stone.
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Many people live their whole lives like children, such as slaves and women who do not understand their oppression, and so respect and confide in their oppressors. Of course, these people have chosen their childishness: they have not chosen their oppression, but there is a dishonest “resignation of freedom” in their refusal to pursue liberation.
De Beauvoir is not blaming people for their oppression, but is blaming people for embracing their oppression rather than recognizing it as oppression and fighting against it. To live like a child is to forever conceive oneself as incapable of serious moral action and always relegate responsibility to others one conceives of as truly mature.
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But usually, people begin to question the world as they grow up, learning about their own subjectivity and the faults of adults. In adolescence, they realize that they are joining this adult world and that their “acts weigh upon the earth as much as those of other men.” This is an empowering change, but also a disillusioning one: people realize they are abandoned in the world, “the prey of a freedom that is no longer chained up by anything.” They are then forced to decide what to do with themselves and their freedom. It is possible to reverse one’s original decision, but generally the past conditions the future, and people act themselves into “a more and more rigorous circle.” Ultimately, people grow up to be nostalgic for childhood, when they did not understand their freedom.
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There is “still another aspect” of the misfortune of having been a child: although moral choices are completely free, they are also dependent on what one has been in the past. And children have no awareness that their actions will eventually have consequences by contributing to future moral decision making. Choice and freedom precede reason and reflection; people are predestined by their previous (childhood) selves, although they can always save themselves.
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In the move from childhood’s “contingent spontaneity” to adulthood’s moral freedom, people make themselves “a lack of being.” They take responsibility for “reinvesting [themselves] with human signification,” disclosing the joy of existence through any of a variety of ways of “casting [themselves] into the world,” like vitality (which is about “free generosity” with the energies of the body), intelligence (which is about adapting one’s actions to one’s abilities), and sensitivity (which is about attentiveness to oneself and one’s world). These qualities give people goals and “reasons for existing,” and also exert influence on others.
De Beauvoir suggests “a kind of hierarchy among men.” The lowest are those without “living warmth,” who spend their energies preventing freedom’s movement and withdrawing themselves from the world. They are fundamentally afraid of the world, the responsibilities that come with their freedom, and the passion that is central to human life. Such a “sub-man” sees the world as “insignificant and dull,” unable to provoke feeling. He never truly pursues his goals, acting indifferently or without deliberation. He hopes to be a “brute fact,” unconscious like trees or rocks, but in fact his lack of responsibility makes him worse still, worthy of contempt and stuck in a cycle of negative emotions, unable to engage in positive projects and frightened of the future. He gladly “take[s] refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world,” often jumping from one ideology to another and “do[ing] the actual dirty work” of political repression.
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All that the sub-man’s existence discloses is the fundamental nothingness of humanity, never humans’ ability to justify their existence. He easily becomes “the serious man,” denying his freedom by proclaiming his loyalty to absolute values that he believes in turn make him valuable. He invests himself in being, continuing to live as people do in childhood. It does not matter what values he chooses to cling to, only that he can find some values in which “to lose himself.” This is his only important act, “believ[ing] for belief’s sake,” claiming freedom only as the “freedom of indifference.”
While some people are forced to live seriously because they live in oppressive conditions they cannot escape, the serious man has to hide from himself the fact that he actively chooses his servitude to certain values or institutions. He chooses to become unable “to will freedom in an indefinite movement,” caring only about what is “useful” but never about what it is useful for. He also ignores this when it comes to other people, treating them as worthless and denying their freedom because he only cares about what is “useful.” In order to make way for his own serious values, he denies others’ serious values, or else turns into an indifferent and insensitive sub-man as soon as his values are no longer in question, becoming a “has-been” who cannot see any meaning in life outside of his specific ends.
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The serious man is constantly afraid and anxious, guarding his “idol” because it is outside himself and his control, “constantly upset by the uncontrollable course of events” and disappointed by the world’s refusal to “harden into a thing.” He “wills himself to be a god” despite knowing that he cannot be, often turning into a nihilist when forced to confront the limits of his power and the arbitrariness of his goals.
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The nihilist is one who actively decides and strives to become nothing, the opposite of being. Nihilists tend to be adolescents overwhelmed with “the lack which is in [their] heart[s]” or older people who fail to become the being they wanted to be. Unlike the sub-man, nihilists initially embrace their existence before giving up on it. Some are demoniacal men, who maintain their serious values only so that they can ridicule and reject them. Some go further, actively sabotaging projects and “following a strict injunction to commit disorder and anarchy.” Nihilism requires “contradict[ing] constantly the movement of existence” through every action, for the very act of negation shows the truth of existence and freedom.
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Some nihilists commit suicide, and others give up and turn to different attitudes, which de Beauvoir illustrates by cataloguing the fates of surrealist artists. Nihilism must annihilate not only the self, but “all mankind,” so as to avoid confirming his own existence. This means it is a will to destruction, which requires a taste for power (de Beauvoir gives Nazism and the French fascist writer Drieu la Rochelle, who committed suicide, as examples).
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The nihilist, de Beauvoir insists, is correct to see “the ambiguity of the human condition.” But nihilism does not see that people are responsible for defining themselves and building their own lives; it rejects and tries to destroy the world, including people’s freedom within it. Fundamentally, the nihilist fails to see “the importance of that universal, absolute end which freedom itself is.”
It is also possible to “take delight in living” despite not understanding freedom, using things one does not accept or believe in as “a pretext […] for a gratuitous display of activity.” A person who does this is an adventurer: one who takes on projects energetically and zealously, but cares more about conquest and “action for its own sake” than actually achieving any particular end. Like the nihilist, he scorns the serious world, yet he sees nothingness and ambiguity as a positive potential rather than a negative lack.
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The adventurer is “very close to a genuinely moral attitude,” choosing to become “a lack of being” in order to “aim expressly at existence,” having a clear goal but not being too seriously attached to it. “If existentialism were solipsistic,” like its critics insist, then it would love the adventurer. However, the adventurer often has a serious underlying goal (“for example, fortune or glory,” or in the case of seducers the “taste for possession”).
A more significant problem for the adventurer is that he has to deal with other people who confront him along his path. He may start respecting others’ freedom and working for “the liberation of himself and others,” which would make him no longer an adventurer, but rather “a genuinely free man.”
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But the characteristic adventurer simply ignores his impact on other people, who (like the nihilist) he sees as instruments for his own power. To get power, he ends up supporting whoever will give it to him (usually the most authoritarian government around), and in fact “fortune, leisure, and enjoyment” become serious ends for him. His “abstract independence” actually “turns into servitude” toward those in power—and if he gets political power himself, he becomes a dictator or tyrant. He believes so strongly in his own independence that he refuses to acknowledge that he will have to give up his existence to others (through his reputation and legacy) when he dies. And, in refusing to acknowledge his dependence on others (as allies or as enemies), he turns his own independence into a serious goal he can never achieve.
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The opposite of the adventurer is the passionate man. The adventurer achieves subjective freedom, but without directing himself to the right content, while the passionate man has the content, but not the subjectivity. The passionate man is like the serious man, but takes his absolute goal not “as a thing detached from itself” (as the serious man) but rather “as a thing disclosed by his subjectivity,” like passionate love, which is meaningless without the self’s subjective involvement (although seriousness and passion can certainly turn into one another).
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There is maniacal passion, in which the impassioned person wants to possess the object of his passion in order to “attain being.” Everything else ceases to matter, and he becomes completely dependent on the idea of fulfilling his passion (which is, of course, impossible). The maniacally passionate man is admirable (because he so definitively choses a goal) and horrifying (because he cuts himself off from the rest of the world besides his object of desire). He, too, can become a tyrant, treating other people as instruments and things in his path toward fulfilling his passion.
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There is also a way out of maniacal passion, however. This involves embracing the inevitable distance between the self and the object of desire. One famous writer of love letters insisted that she loved her unhappiness, that she loves her inability to possess the person she loves. By opening up to others’ freedom (the freedom of the person one loves to refuse one’s love, and the freedom of others to love that person, as well), de Beauvoir argues, one can turn their passion into genuine freedom. In fact, not only must the passionate person open up to others in order to achieve freedom, but all freedom requires acknowledging that one’s existence depends on others’ existence.
Some intellectuals try to avoid their dependence on others by working in a separate creative or critical world cut off from people. While seriousness often turns to nihilism, critical thought inevitably turns from the negative rejection of other thought to the positive elevation of a universal truth, even though no critic can ever find such objective truth removed from their subjective experience and position in the world. While for the most part “the artist and the writer […] do not propose to attain being,” their work is still an attempt try to make existence absolute, and many do end up seeking to pin down being and locking themselves “in the universe of the serious” through their work.
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It is impossible for people to escape the world, de Beauvoir writes, but it is also possible for people to achieve a moral attitude here in the world. Freedom aims toward its own ends without either letting any goal completely overtake it or losing sight of any goal whatsoever. Subjects must “desire that there be being,” which is the same thing as willing one’s freedom, but not the same as willing oneself to be. And this moral will requires a “bond” between individuals and all other humans. People do not always recognize this bond—young people often get caught up in egoism, seeing others’ excellence as a challenge to their own potential. But they must also realize that their will and projects only make sense in relation to all other wills and projects. Another way of expressing the same truth is to say that “freedom can not will itself without aiming at an open future.”
This “open future” shows why existentialism is not solipsistic: pursuing one’s own freedom requires engaging others’ freedom too. In fact, existentialism sees “passion, pride, and the spirit of adventure” as vices precisely because they involve imposing one’s own will on everyone else. In reality, the individual expresses his subjectivity through the indefinite movement of freedom, which ultimately surpasses the subject who initiated it; subjectivity requires other people to eventually carry it forward. Like any ethics, existentialism concerns what the individual can and should do, but this does not make it solipsistic, for it takes “the me-others relationship” as central and inevitable.
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This also addresses the other main criticism of existentialism: that it cannot tell people how to engage their freedom. Clearly, people must do this concretely, depending on their individual places and relationships with others. And yet people’s relations to others pose ethical problems, which are the subject of de Beauvoir’s third and final section.
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