The Ethics of Ambiguity Paperback – 17 Dec. 2015

an absolute must read for philosophers and lovers of life who want to understand the duality, dyads, and unresolved dynamics of the self that interact with the external world and set conventional decrees.

This is, quite simply, a brilliant work by a towering figure amongst 20th Century Existentialist philosophers. It explains much; why people must assume their ambiguity rather than fight against, and how to be free, one must first wish all to be free.An amazing work!

A bit dated but no doubt it was quite radical when first published.

What an amazing book!! Not for the ill-hearted or the weak-minded.. If people could understand a fraction of her thoughts we would have a better society..

Very intresting

de Beauvoir's investigation of the space of freedom vs structure provides an insight into the need for structure in order for freedom to exist. She provides a contrast between the ontological freedom given at our birth and the moral freedom we action through choice and goes on to contrast choice against decision and action. In all of these contrasts de Beauvoir works through the paradoxical nature of human existence and offers a way to a moral freedom which accepts ambiguity as a necessary structure of human existence, thus providing a further contrast between the deconstructive science we need for the natural sciences and the structured freedom of ambiguity which supports human existence.Important book which does not get the credit it deserves.

arrived quickly. As described

An amazing philosopher of her time. She took existentialism further by looking at the choice of freedom does have moral ethical issues with some of the choices that you make.Simone was a ground-breaking feminist from last century and was a figure head during this time and the fight of women's rights.It is a tough read as is the more famous 'The Second Sex'. I concentrated on Simone in my final year at university looking into different philosophical and how they are still relevant in society.I know that had I had to focus on this in my first year, it would have been a difficult read.I admire Simone for breaking the mould of her bourgeoisie family and background.

Un trabajo de filosofía que da más sustancia a su trabajo del segundo sexo, recomiendo que lo lean junto a su novel "La invitada" también. Es interesante compararla con Sartre, hay similitudes y diferencias importantes.

A very important read. Book showed up in great condition, no complaints.

In this text, de Beauvoir distances herself from the ethics of absurdity and meaning. This sets up the difference between Camus who saw existence as absurd as well as Sartre who saw existence as meaningless and herself in their responses to the interconnections between existentialism, phenomenology, ethics and politics. She makes the crucial move and shifts the existential problem from one of brute absurdity or meaningless meaning to nuanced ambiguity and then reflects upon what our response to ambiguity should be. We find that ambiguity is not just a concept or idea, but an experience that overtakes us. It is not just an abstraction, but a felt authenticity of the human condition.Sartre said that we are condemned to be free. Merleau-Ponty said that we are condemned to meaning. Each of these is incomplete in that each condemns us to one side of duality, this is brutish simplicity. This is also incomplete as Simone de Beauvoir shows us. We are commanded to reside on both sides of many dualities, that is, to reside in ambiguity, an existence of nuance. Simone de Beauvoir shows us that human life is not lived by choosing between dueling dualities, the simplest of which is the freedom versus determinism duality or the meaning of life versus meaningless of life duality. Life is lived within and between and amidst these dualities. In terms of freedom versus determinism, we exist amid the duality, so how can we be only condemned to be free? We are condemned to ambiguity, not freedom, “…ambiguous reality which is called existence…”, p. 24. Too often, we are told that we are either free or not free and that existence is governed by either freedom or determinism. This is not a false duality, but it is a false choice. The fact that it is a choice at all is suggestive of freedom. The gap between perceiving and reflecting is the space in which our ethics is to be found and as de Beauvoir tells us, ethics is the triumph of freedom. However, we are both free and not free, responsible and not responsible simultaneously. Our life is meaningless and yet subject to meaning as we chose to create it. To choose one side of any given duality (mind/body, freedom/determinism, good/evil, subject/object, individual/group member, meaning/meaningless) is to over simplify the experience of the human condition and curtail both our freedom and responsibility by trying to hide from the ambiguity that just is human life. With the addition of the place amid the duality, the initial duality is transformed it into a triality.For de Beauvoir, the ethics of ambiguity create the obligations we have to each other in an uncertain existence where we must create ourselves and own purpose and take responsibility for the project of self-creation. Rights transform into obligations in this ethic and virtue is excellence in human action with regard towards others. We need others in order to achieve any semblance of reasonable life for ourselves and there is no individual flourishing without the success of the community and flourishing of others. Our rights create our obligations to others and claim on others for the same. We need to reconnect rights with duties and obligations within our own sense of self-creation to achieve our own aspirations.Philosophy must be rooted in concrete social reality for it to have any relevance for the human condition, but this also renders any philosophy so derived as local, parochial and dated. Though I think de Beauvoir’s insight into the fundamental ambiguity of the human conditions near timeless, we must recall the that existentialism was very much a product of its time and place as is the case with any concrete philosophical doctrines. That time and place of course being the very uncertain period of post WWII Europe. This was a time characterized by overwhelming uncertainty and feelings of helplessness, just the time when a philosophy emphasizing freedom and responsibility was most needed. This was a time when Western civilization, at the heights of its artistic, scientific and cultural achievements instantly collapsed into a condition characterized by the worst forms of barbaric brutalism, horrific hatred and rapacious racism ever witnessed. At the height of reason, high civilization descended into a nightmare of irrationality. Perhaps the collapse was not instant or even a collapse at all but something long seething within the culture. I pinpoint this seething anti-humanity to the enemy invader Napoleon who was seen as a product of the Enlightenment thus provoking a reactionary anti-Enlightenment culture where he invaded, e.g., Austria, Germany, Prussia, and Russia. This anti-Enlightenment culture consisted of a dark romanticism and mysticism. With this, I believe that any perceived excesses of French existential thought in terms of freedom, responsibility, ethics or politics can be better understood.

‘The Ethics of Ambiguity’ is one of the three authoritative philosophical short texts on existentialism, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ and ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ are the other two. The ambiguity that Simone De Beauvoir discusses in this book is similar to the ambiguity that Sartre and Camus talk about; the ambiguity at the root of existentialism. In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus,’ Camus begins with the encounter with absurd, the encounter at the root of realization that the self cannot be reconciled with the universe. His argument on existentialism starts with a question on suicide and builds to explain the absurd, which once realized, he argues, should not be a source of anguish but bliss. In ‘Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre begins with the premise that ‘existence precedes essence’ and goes on to build an argument on why existentialism is the only doctrine that is humanistic. Within this argument, Sartre clarifies why existentialism is not individualistic but a philosophy that focuses on the greater good of the collective human race. In ‘The Ethics of Ambiguity,’ Beauvoir begins with the realization of ambiguity of existence around human condition, explores how childhood nurture contributes to this condition, investigates how freedom should be asserted in the face of this ambiguity (through a hierarchy of men based on how they react to the ambiguity) and concludes why existentialism is not individualistic but humanistic.“The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” “Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo,” Beauvoir argues, as she introduces ambiguity of human condition. The ambiguity is similar to Camus’ absurd – a realization that there is no universal meaning to human existence or action. Beauvoir goes on to investigate the source for humans’ belief in the universal nature of their actions. “Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child,” she quotes and explains how we as humans feel happily irresponsible as children, feel protected against the risk of existence but how the same happy ignorance makes us a prisoners of error in our adulthood. In other words, she argues that sooner or later every man realizes that the childhood he grew up with was a world created for him by his parents or adults and that in reality he is not bound to any universality of rules or ethics. He is free, free to will his own world, chart his own rules, yet he can only do that on the basis of what he has been – a child. “The child does not contain the man he will become, yet it is always on the basis of what he has been that a man decides upon what he wants to be,” she says. This freedom although should be liberating, ends up becoming a disturbing realization, one that lifts the veil of finite ceiling over man’s head and leaves him abandoned in the infinite world. In this abandoned anxiety, despite realizing his freedom, man tends to gravitate towards enslaving himself in the childhood condition instead of living freely. Beauvoir classifies this man into a hierarchy in order to build an argument to explain the true nature of existentialist freedom.The lowest man in the hierarchy is called a sub-man - a blind uncontrolled force that anyone can get control of. “The sub-man makes his way across a world deprived of meaning towards a death which merely confirms his long negation of himself,” she says. The attitude of sub-man passes over to the next class in hierarchy, what she calls the serious-man. While sub-man lives in a perpetual anxiety, the serious-man renounces his freedom to a cause. The serious man claim the absolute and ceaseless denies his freedom, “like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that he has sent it to himself. He is no longer a man but a father, a boss, a member of a Christian Church or the Communist party. The serious man wills himself to be the God but he is not one and he knows it.” The attitude of serious-man transcends into the next category - the nihilist. The nihilist, unlike serious-man, under the burden of his freedom decides to be nothing, denies the world, himself and focuses on annihilation of the world. A nihilist who realizes the universal and absolute end which freedom is, further rises up in the hierarchy to become an adventurer. Adventures, she describes is an attitude closest to a genuinely moral attitude – an indifferent and disinterested encounter with the world that defines the true existentialist freedom. The adventures is perhaps Sisyphus – the man who is ceaseless rolling a stone to the top of the mountain, not in revolt but in lucid indifference.The same adventures though, she says also carries the seed of destruction and favorable circumstances are enough to transform an adventures into a dictator. However, she argues that if an adventurer turns into a dictator, he fails to assert his freedom and becomes a slave of tyranny, thereby inadvertently denies his own freedom. “Passion is converted into genuine freedom only if one destines his existence to other existences through the being – whether thing or man – at which he aims, without hoping to entrap it in the destiny of the in-itself,” she says and goes on arguing with elaborate detail on why the only way existentialism can exist, the only way a freedom can be asserted is by asserting it not for one but for all mankind. “A freedom which is occupied in denying freedom is itself so outrageous that the outrageousness of the violence which one practices against it is almost canceled out.” From explaining the ambiguity of existence, to its reason and reaction, Beauvoir ends with the argument that all this makes existentialism a philosophy that is not individualistic but a philosophy for the collective good, in other words, the ethics of ambiguity – the argument also at the center of Sartre’s ‘Existentialism is a Humanism.’All in all, the book touches on the core principles of existentialism, tackles the absurdity of existence from a new direction, and gives the reader a novel perspective on the same principles. For anyone interested in understanding this field of philosophy, Beauvoir’s short but authoritative text should be a must in the reading list.

She is excellent. Sort of summed up Jean Paul Sartre for usefulness for today --fifty years later. The universe has no meaning or purpose for us earthly humans, period. Existence is ambiguity, meaningless, absurd. We perfectly well can look in science's dumpster for our religious, philosophical, ideological. poetic, artistic inspirations and meanings for ourselves. But they are really just consolations to pair with death. We can choose freedom.

Simone De Beauvoir is an amazing writer. I had to read this book for an assignment in my philosophy class. If I would have known about the book otherwise, I would have LOVED to have read it on my own, had I known about it. Overall, this was an incredible book that really taught me so much about existentialism.

"As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect on the plane of the universal, thus , of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel... But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any us to me... I think that, inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion." -- Simone de Beauvoir"The Ethics of Ambiguity" is the most concise overview of Existentialist ethics I have read. In "Being and Nothingness" Sartre eschewed an ethical system in favor of focusing almost exclusively on ontological relationships. Here, Beauvoir takes "Being and Nothingness" and extends it into an ethical system.There are two major parts to "Ethics of Ambiguity". The first part focuses on different degrees of personal freedom. Degrees of understanding range from: the sub-man, serious man, nihilist, adventurer, passionate man, and, finally, the independent man. The independent man understands his own freedom. He also understands the necessity of freedom for other men for him to be free.The second part of the book is a description of how to use personal freedom. Man must live for a concrete objective. This objective is constantly transcending and can never be captured. The object of transcendence is determined by individual freedom within the context of social freedom.Beauvoir's prescriptions to political change remain both critical and revolutionary. She constantly stresses the need to evaluate the situation and not act rash. The individual must not submit to dogma. However, a choice must be made. Many times the choice will not be ideal and blood must be shed. Beauvoir's Existentialism does not feign from making tough choices.

I first read this book forty years ago for an undergraduate class in social philosophy. I've re-read it five or six times since, and benefitted from each re-reading. Though it was not DeBeauvoir's intention to write an introduction to existentialism, this is the best one available.What is the meaning of life? It has none save that which we give it, an inescapable process which the author terms "disclosure of being in the world." This view is strongly relativistic, to be sure, providing no basis for preferring a painfully abscessed molar to good sex.Unlike the early Sartre, moreover, DeBeauvoir recognizes that we disclose being in the world -- learn what it means to be -- in very specific ways, in socially determined contexts. The meanings we discern are bounded by the social worlds of which we are the ongoing creations and which we help to create.DeBeauvoir's answer to what-is-the-meaning-of-life kinds of questions is not spiritually uplifting, but it's an answer, given without equivocation or hollow appeals to faith. As such, I think it's the right answer. She makes a compelling case.Can we organize our lives around "disclosure of being in the world?" I don't think so. Its much too abstract, fraught with anomie, positing a sort of Durkheimian nightmare. Still, at least we know where we stand: right in the middle of a universe that anticipates by two or three decades post-modern rejection of any sort of natural and durable foundation.

Required full attention and I often had to back up and re read.I canned ratings because I learned so much about existentialism no w perhaps I’ll have the courage to take on Sartre.

Fantastic translation and very good book. It’s a bit difficult to get through for the everyday reader, but worth it.

Just wonderful read on how we are all in different places and work with our own lives to make us happy

Great for work in femininity or women's studies - in my case, my dissertation

School. Learn. Stuff.

Very good

Great book!