Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–86)

2. The Ethics of Ambiguity

In Pyrrhus et Cinéas, Beauvoir, like Kierkegaard and Sartre, defines the human being as an existent that, lacking an inherent essence, has to form its life and give it meaning. This ethos is repeated in The Ethics of Ambiguity, where Beauvoir radically transforms Sartre’s view of the human being as a ‘useless passion’. According to Sartre, the human is characterized by both the lack of being and an unrealizable passion, the ‘desire of being’ (désir d’être), that is, to attain a fixed identity or essence. Beauvoir adds to this the Heideggerian notion of Erschlossenheit (disclosure; in French, dévoilement), therewith pointing also to the positive side of existence. According to her, the human being not only lacks and desires being, but also wants to ‘disclose being’. Or, through the human’s vain desire, the world is disclosed, that is, appears and is given meaning.

Affirmation of this positive side of existence is identified with authenticity: to ‘deny the lack as lack’, to go through a ‘conversion’, is to set the ‘will to be “in parentheses”’; and further, a recognition of both oneself and the other as free – ‘to will man free… is to will the disclosure of being in the joy of existence’ ([1947] 1948: 135). Beauvoir thus affirms freedom as a fundamental human characteristic. At the same time she is careful to distinguish the freedom of human consiousness – a free spontaneity, a nothingness without given structures – from freedom as a social and political reality. Central to her ethics is the idea that freedom ought to be founded and defended by the individual. On the other hand, society has to facilitate conditions for the positive fulfilment of this freedom. There are thus objective differences between situations, a theme which is further developed in The Second Sex by the aid of such Hegelian-Marxist distinctions as that between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ freedom and between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom.

Another central theme introduced in Pyrrhus et Cinéas and developed in The Ethics of Ambiguity concerns the interdependence of humans. In the latter work she states, ‘The me–others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject–object relationship’ ([1947] 1948: 72). In The Second Sex this interdependence is conceptualized in Heideggerian terms as Mitsein (Being-with). Human reality is a being-with-others, and the subject ‘achieves freedom only through a continual reaching out towards other freedoms’ ([1949] 1953: 27), a theme which points to the ethical orientation of her thought. Unlike Sartre in Being and Nothingness, Beauvoir does not see conflict as inevitable, nor intersubjectivity as impossible (see Existentialism; Existentialist ethics).