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Ambiguity and Absurdity
The Problem of Absurdity; Issue №1
To start this series, I believe it is wise to start with philosophers who dealt with the issue of Absurdity directly: Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone deBeauvoir, Heidegger.
This series will start with Simone deBeauvoir, for no other reason than I have one of her books the most available to me right now. I do think she will provide a well-established foray into absurdity. The text I will be using is The Ethics of Ambiguity.
This article is going to give us her argument as to how an ethical life to be lived. She is a founder of post-modern thought; she believes that in order to achieve a sense of true freedom, we must battle against those who oppress us. We will investigate the validity of these beliefs as we move on.
We will also investigate the link between the ambiguity of human existence and the absurdity that we can so often feel in the world. For example, we may ask ourselves if absurdity is the natural way of being in the world. We can possibly even claim that to embrace ambiguity is to embrace absurdity, for if we embrace the ambiguity of the self, then we are no longer in a well-established natural order of things. We would no longer be living in this type of mythological structure that would help ground us in society.
