Review, THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY, Akhil Abraham

Review, THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY, Akhil Abraham

Introduction: Simone de Beauvoir was one of the most preeminent French existentialist philosophers and writers. Working alongside other famous existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir produced a rich corpus of writings including works on ethics, feminism, fiction, autobiography, and politics. In her book 'The Ethics of Ambiguity', Simone de Beauvoir outlines an existentialist ethics. The Ethics of Ambiguity is one of de Beauvoir's most intriguing and original philosophical works. Her philosophical approach is notably diverse. Her influences philosophy from Descartes to Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Immanuel Kant and G.W. F Hegel. Her most famous and influential philosophical work, The Second Sex, heralded a feminist revolution and remains to this day a central text in the investigation of women's oppression and liberation.

The Ethics of Ambiguity: The Ethics of Ambiguity begins with the central existentialist premise that 'existence precedes essence'. Basically, this means that we humans create our own essence or nature through our choices and actions. When de Beauvoir discusses human essence, she refers not only to this general notion, but also to Heidegger's assertion in Being and Time that our creation of ourselves in the present is based both on our past actions and on the choices that we make while projecting ourselves into the future. In Sartrean terms, she sets up a problem in which each existent wants to deny their paradoxical essence as nothingness by desiring to be in the strict, objective sense; a project that is doomed to failure and bad faith. In many ways, Beauvoir's task is to describe the existentialist conversion alluded to by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, but postponed until the much later, incomplete attempt in his Cahiers Pour un­­­­­­­­­­Se Morale. For Beauvoir, an existentialist conversion allows us to live authentically at the crossroads of freedom and facticity. This requires that we engage our freedom in projects which emerge from a spontaneous choice. In addition, the ends and goals of our actions must never be set up as absolutes, separate from we who choose them. In this sense, Beauvoir sets limits to freedom. To be free is not to have free license to do whatever one wants. Rather, to be free entails the conscious assumption of this freedom through projects which are chosen at each moment. The meaning of actions is thus granted not from some external source of values, but in the existent's spontaneous act of choosing them. Each individual must positively assume his or her project and not try to escape freedom by escaping into the goal as into a static object. Thus, we act ethically only insofar as we accept the weight of our choices and the consequences and responsibilities of our fundamental, ontological freedom. As Beauvoir tells us, "to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision." Beauvoir is also emphatic that even though existentialist ethics uphold the sanctity of individuals, an individual is always situated within a community and as such, separate existents are necessarily bound to each other. She argues that every enterprise is expressed in a world populated by and thus affecting other human beings. She defends this position by returning to an idea touched upon in Pyrrhus Et Cinéas and more fully developed in the Ethics, which is that individual projects fall in upon themselves if there are not others with whom our projects intersect and who consequently carry our actions beyond us in space and time. In order to illustrate the complexity of situated freedom, Beauvoir provides us with an important element of growth, development and freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity. Most philosophers begin their discussions with a fully grown, rational human being, as if only the adult concerns philosophical inquiry. However, Beauvoir incorporates an analysis of childhood in which she argues that the will, or freedom, is developed over time. Thus, the child is not considered moral because he or she does not have a connection to a past or future and action can only be understood as unfolding over time. In addition, the situation of the child gives us a glimpse into what Beauvoir calls the attitude of seriousness in which values are given, not chosen. In fact, it is because each person was once a child that the serious attitude is the most prevalent form of bad faith. Describing the various ways in which existents flee their freedom and responsibility, Beauvoir catalogues a number of different inauthentic attitudes, which in various forms are all indicative of a flight from freedom. As the child is neither moral nor immoral, the first actual category of bad faith consists of the "sub-man" who, through boredom and laziness, restrains the original movement of spontaneity in the denial of his or her freedom. This is a dangerous attitude in which to live because even as the sub-man rejects freedom, he or she becomes a useful pawn to be recruited by the "serious man" to enact brutal, immoral and violent action. The serious man is the most common attitude of flight as he or she embodies the desire that all existents share to found their freedom in an objective, external standard. The serious man upholds absolute and unconditioned values to which he or she subordinates his or her freedom. The object into which the serious attitude attempts to merge itself is not important-it can be the Military for the general, Fame for the actress, Power for the politician-what is important is that the self is lost into it. But as Beauvoir has already told us, all action loses meaning if it is not willed from freedom, setting up freedom as its goal. Thus the serious man is the ultimate example of bad faith because rather than seeking to embrace freedom, he or she seeks to lose into an external idol. All existents are tempted to set up values of seriousness so as to give meaning to their lives. But the attitude of seriousness gives rise to tyranny and oppression when the "Cause" is pronounced more important than those who comprise it. Other attitudes of bad faith include the "nihilist" which is an attitude resulting from disappointed seriousness turned back on itself. When the general understands that the military is a false idol that does not justify his existence, he may become a nihilist and deny that the world has any meaning at all. The nihilist desires to be nothing which is not unlike the reality of human freedom for Beauvoir. However, the nihilist is not an authentic choice because he or she does not assert nothingness in the sense of freedom, but in the sense of denial. Although mentioning other interesting attitudes of bad faith the last attitude of importance is the attitude of the "adventurer." The adventurer is interesting because it is so close to an authentically moral attitude. Disdaining the values of seriousness and nihilism, the adventurer throws him or herself into life and chooses action for its own sake. But the adventurer cares only for his or her own freedom and projects, and thus embodies a selfish and potentially tyrannical attitude. The adventurer demonstrates a tendency to align him or herself with whoever will bestow power, pleasure and glory. And often those who bestow such gifts do not have the welfare of humanity as their main concern. One of Beauvoir's greatest achievements in The Ethics of Ambiguity is found in her analyses of situation and mystification. For the early Sartre, one's situation is merely that which is to be transcended in the spontaneous surge of freedom. The situation is certainly a limit, but it is a limit-to-be-surpassed. Beauvoir, however, recognizes that some situations are such that they cannot be simply transcended but serve as strict and almost unsurpassable inhibitors to action. For example, she tells us that there are oppressed peoples such as slaves and many women who exist in a childlike world in which values; customs, gods, and laws are given to them without being freely chosen. Their situation is defined not by the possibility of transcendence, but by the enforcement of external institutions and power structures. Because of the power exerted upon them, their limitations cannot, in many circumstances, be transcended because they are not even known. Their situation, in other words, appears to be the natural order of the world. Thus the slave and the woman are mystified into believing that their lot is assigned to them by nature. As Beauvoir explains, because we cannot revolt against nature, the oppressor convinces the oppressed that their situation is what it is because they are naturally inferior or slavish. In this way, the oppressor mystifies the oppressed by keeping them ignorant of their freedom, thereby preventing them from revolting. Beauvoir rightly points out that one simply cannot claim that those who are mystified or oppressed are living in bad faith. We can only judge the actions of those individuals as emerging from their situation. Only the authentically moral attitude understands that the freedom of the self requires the freedom of others. To act alone or without concern for others is not to be free. As Beauvoir explains, "No project can be defined except by its interference with other projects." Thus if my project intersects with others who are enslaved-either literally or through mystification-I too am not truly free. What is more, if I do not actively seek to help those who are not free, I am implicated in their oppression. As this book was written after World War II, it is not so surprising that Beauvoir would be concerned with questions of oppression and liberation and the ethical responsibility that each of us has to each other. Clearly she finds the attitude of seriousness to be the leading culprit in nationalistic movements such as Nazism which manipulate people into believing in a Cause as an absolute and unquestionable command, demanding the sacrifice of countless individuals. Beauvoir pleads with us to remember that we can never prefer a Cause to a human being and that the end does not necessarily justify the means. In this sense, Beauvoir is able to promote an existential ethics which asserts the reality of individual projects and sacrifice while maintaining that such projects and sacrifices have meaning only in a community comprised of individuals with a past, present, and future.

My Critical Evaluation: Simone De Beauvoir is the brilliant mind behind this work; a work that forever changes the lives of those who read it. Here is my analysis of my favorite book on existentialism, the ethics of ambiguity. Indeed, we are nothing without those around us. Without other beings and other objects, what would we have to compare ourselves to? Through human history, many of mankind's schools of thought have failed to deal with the reality of our situation in a way that doesn't deny life or death. Regardless of what life or death is, or even what the future holds, the present moment is our home; to deny this by contriving some sort of escape will not help one to be true to the present moment. Thus we are both individuals and part of a collective entity. Our lives and deaths will one day be forgotten; they will simply merge into the life and death of mankind, which will one day be forgotten. This is the way of nature. All of the structures that can be built, all of the wealth that can be accumulated, and all of the battles that can be won will not change the fact that we will, one day, die and that mankind will one day die. Thus we have to realize that these things do not matter, since nothing was meant to last; it was meant to LIVE. Dead things remain as they are forever, living things, on the other hand, undergo constant change. It is thus that we can feel good about the fact that death will one day occur for everything. Because of this, we are been able to ebb into existence and flow into death. Although the book is difficult for most to read, I would highly recommend reading it several times; turning over each paragraph in order to understand the deeper meaning. It is truly a paradigm-shifting experience to read and analyze the work of Simone de Beauvoir.

Conclusion: De Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity do not meet the parameters for ethical subjectivism. To remind you, these parameters are 'no ultimate moral standards', and 'moral judgments are based merely on individual opinion'. First of all, de Beauvoir does propose ultimate, universal criteria for whether or not a choice or action is moral. The criteria are, whether or not it advances the moral freedom of others, and whether or not it treats the other as a 'for-itself'. Secondly, de Beauvoir's ethics are not based merely on individual opinion. Instead, her conception of subjectivity is relational and reciprocal, this being one aspect of the ambiguity of the human condition. There's no such thing as the opinion of an isolated individual, because there's no such thing as an isolated individual. For these reasons, de Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity contradicts the very definition of ethical subjectivism.