Book Review — The Ethics of Ambiguity
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 adventurer 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.
