The Ethics Of Ambiguity By Simone De Beauvoir

A majority of people that chose to accept freedom believing it would give them better opportunities in life soon realised that life as a free person wasn’t as positive as they initially thought.

One of the greatest and more fundamental gifts of life is the autonomy that comes with being a sentiment human being. This hasn’t always been considered a human right, however, and many eastern hemispheres are struggling to catch on to the concept that people should be allowed to make the decisions they choose without the external pressure to do otherwise. Thus, the question that should be asked is whether or not every human being on this planet is free, whether they should be free and what does free really mean. For many, freedom is all about that ability to to choose what they want, make their own decision and be able to move around as they please. Freedom is about equity, free speech and the guarantee of life, no matter how good or bad.

Morality in its basic definition, is the knowledge between what is right and what is wrong. In Joan Didion’s essay, “On Morality,” she uses examples to show how morality is used to justify actions and decisions by people. She explains that morality can have a profound effect on the decisions that people chose to make. I think that morality is an idea that is different for every individual based on morals and background.

Although the fundamentals of existentialism can be applied to numerous works throughout history, existentialist thought, which places emphasis on authenticity and the ability to control one’s own growth, largely rose to prominence in the 18th and 19th centuries. Notable among these works are Voltaire’s Candide, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. Although all three texts span dramatically different time periods, the themes of existentialism and free will remain consistent in opposition to the despair and pessimism that life ultimately imposes on us all. According to The Second Sex and Candide, we must work towards our happiness and fundamentally seek it out on our own, while Coates claims in

Jim Morrison has once said, “The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.” We as human being are free from birth. We are given the ability to choose. This freedom makes us who we are as human being. Each individual make choices and learn through consequences. Through the consequences, we learn and the learning becomes experience. Through experience we slowly shape into who we want to be as human. This is the reason why we as humans are so special. Each individual is unique from others. Each of us has different ethical moral rights and wrong. Each of us has something we like and dislike. Each of us are different. Therefore,

One’s individuality and freedom are questioned when it does not conform to society’s ideals. This is often demonstrated in real life, as well as in popular literary pieces.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the unalienable human rights given to all human beings by their creator. These are ideals that everyone is born with and everyone strives to achieve. Life is pursuit of safety and stability of a family. Liberty is the pursuit of land and other possessions. In turn, once you possess those ideals, the person will have achieved ultimate happiness. In Jean- Baptiste Moliere’s Tartuffe and in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the main characters, Tartuffe and Ivan Ilyich, strive to attain the life ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness using the ideas of strengths, weaknesses, morals and ideas, and the respect of others to at first achieve success but eventually succumb to

Freedom is something that people take for granted. They think little of it until it is snatched away from them. That moment is when they realize how precious freedom is. In Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a lottery that has been going on for many years is held and a woman named Tessie Hutchinson “wins” and she is stoned to death. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a summer festival is held and there is happiness everywhere except for one child who is locked away in a basement or cellar. The child is naked, alone, and miserable. In Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” they state how the suffering of one lone person is needed to keep the rest of the people happy and free because of tradition, chaos control, assumptions.

For Simone de Beauvoir, the expansion of human freedom and our ability to transcend despite the obstacles or challenges life throws at us, is vital. For if we do not realize and engage in our projects, then our freedom is used in a deconstructive manner. In Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir asserts that when individuals acknowledge their “lack of being” (12) it is when they begin to aspire for success and aim to reach a goal they have set in mind, consequently, finding significance in things relating to their goal thus fulfilling their lives in positive ways. For instance, as a college student, I made my decision quite some time ago that I want to pursue a Master’s of Science in Nursing, so that one day, I can become a neonatal

In the center Simone de Beauvoir’s understanding of freedom is the understanding that people cannot achieve an authentic existence if they do not help others achieve and understand freedom. For her a person lives in a word full of other people and he or she cannot live his or her life if he/she does not respect the freedom of others. For De Beauvoir freedom is an ambiguity. The ambiguity is the fact that people make their own choices and they them self judge if they are right or wrong. A person can make a decision he thinks is right in the moment but that decision can later on look wrong.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her 1949 text The Second Sex, examines the problems faced by women in Western society. She argues that women are subjugated, oppressed, and made to be inferior to males – simply by virtue of the fact that they are women. She notes that men define their own world, and women are merely meant to live in it. She sees women as unable to change the world like men can, unable to live their lives freely as men can, and, tragically, mostly unaware of their own oppression. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir describes the subjugation of woman, defines a method for her liberation, and recommends strategies for this liberation that still have not been implemented today.

From the continental European perspective shared by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, two groups would have stood out as the most historically marginalized; women and Jews. For much of European history, both Jewish people and women were denied the rights and privileges afforded to even the least privileged Christian men. They could not hold their own lands, were barred from all but a select few professions, and lived with the constant threat of organized violence ready to be turned against them if they ever stepped out of line. In a sense, both woman and Jew are used as an other for their outgroups, male and Gentile respectively, to define themselves apart from. Accordingly de Beauvoir and Sartre manage to illustrate substantial similarities between the two groups in their respective analyses that greatly affect their ultimate treatment, even as through their limited scope and personal biases. Chiefly among these similarities is how both the idea of “woman” and “Jew” are created classes, social constructs made in bad faith. While there will obviously be female humans and Jewish people, the identities of woman and Jew exist only because those who were not female and Jewish have labeled them as such. “If the Jew did not exist,” writes Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew, “the anti-Semite would invent him.” (8) However, one key difference exists between the two: Jews present a hidden and existential threat to their foes that women never will. Even the most strident opponent

In the chapter of her book The Second Sex entitled “the Woman in Love,” Simone de Beauvoir characterizes the romantic ideal of the relationship with a man as a woman’s purpose as a form of self-deception (translated here as “bad faith”). The self-deception de Beauvoir describes is based in the thesis of The Second Sex. This is the idea that women have been deceived into believing that they are second-class humans. Western culture, according to de Beauvoir, teaches us that women are missing some elusive element of the self that endows men with freedom- a concept essential to the existentialist definition of the conscious being. Therefore, a woman can never find fulfillment as a thinking person as

It may be possible to imagine a place where no one would make a fuss over the differences between a white or a black man, but unfortunately, it is likely impossible to imagine a society that would not comment on the differences between a man and a woman (Heinämaa, 127). Simone de Beauvoir was quite determined to give society a glimpse into what it meant to be a woman within her time period, and did so by writing her novel The Second Sex which brought many controversial topics to light. There are four concepts I will be mentioning in different sections of this paper, and it is best to know how Beauvoir personally defines these terms. Firstly, “alienation” refers to the action of projecting oneself into a different person or object, thereby losing all responsibility for yourself (Moi,

By contrast, “the ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the [individual’s] wish … to be his own master” (178). Exponents of positive liberty focus on internal factors rather than external actors by painting the self as essentially divided, typically into a higher and lower self. The higher of these selves, distinguished perhaps by rationality or length of outlook, represents in some sense the true realization of an individual’s potential, nature, or entity. This being is marked by possessing full self-consciousness, bearing full responsibility for one’s choices, and not being a slave to one’s nature or “unbridled