The Ethics of Ambiguity

Introduction

Beauvoir wrote the essay in 1946 and published it in 1947, after Pyrrhus and Cinéas (1944), as a reply to the charge that existentialism could ground no ethics. Human existence is ambiguous: we are free subjects and at the same time bodily, dependent beings among others, and every attempt to escape this ambiguity is a flight. Beauvoir sketches attitudes in which people evade freedom – the “sub-man”, the “serious man” devoted to fixed values, the nihilist, the adventurer – and discusses violence and political action in the post-war situation. Long overshadowed by Sartre’s work and by The Second Sex, the essay is now read as an independent contribution to existentialist ethics.

Connections

Builds on

• Being and Nothingness1943 · Jean-Paul Sartre

More works by Simone de Beauvoir

• 1949The Second Sex