The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir
The continuous work of our life,” says Montaigne, “is to build death.” He quotes the Latin poets: Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora corpsit. And again: Nascentes morimur. Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. “Rational animal,” “thinking reed,” he escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.
The primary premise of de Beauvoir’s existentialism is that human existence is fundamentally ambiguous. Humans are simultaneously free and constrained, subject and object, individual and part of a collective, alive and moving toward death, and conscious beings who are nevertheless physical bodies. We cannot escape these contradictions because they are inherent to the human condition. Rather than attempting to resolve the ambiguity of existence, we must learn to live and act within these contradictions. The introductory paragraph of The Ethics of Ambiguity almost gives us the entire gist of Beauvoir’s conception of ambiguity.
Let’s try to break it down:
“The continuous work of our life is to build death.” — Montaigne
Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora corpsit — The first hour that gave us life began to take it away.
Nascentes morimur — As we are being born, we are dying.
This essentially means that being alive necessarily means moving toward death. It is something that everything living undergoes. Humans, however, have the ability to know and think about the fact that this is happening (“Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence…”). We have consciousness, which makes us the “rational animal” or the “thinking reed.” Yet despite our ability to intellectually rise above our biological condition, we can never completely escape it. We remain embodied beings, constrained by physical needs and limitations: we get hungry, sick, tired, old, and eventually die.
“He asserts himself as a pure internality…”
This means that within our consciousness, we experience ourselves as a free and unique “I.” We experience our thoughts, choices, and experiences from the inside, and no one else can completely experience the world exactly as we do. Yet Beauvoir immediately introduces the other side of this experience:
“…and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.”
Although we experience ourselves as free subjects, we are also embodied beings situated in a world that can act upon us. Other people can see us, judge us, define us, and treat us as objects. Thus, we are simultaneously subjects to ourselves and objects to others.
Humans can also step back from their immediate existence and think about existence itself (“At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence”). Through consciousness, we can reflect on our childhood, imagine our future, contemplate our death, question our purpose, and ask what it means to be alive.
However:
“Between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing.”
If we think about it, this is almost mind-blowing:
Past: already gone.
Future: hasn’t happened yet.
Present: constantly disappearing into the past.
Beauvoir is emphasizing how fleeting and fragile human existence is. We exist in time, but we never remain fixed in one moment. We are simultaneously something that is and something that is constantly becoming. We have a definite existence, but we are never finished.
This is where the ambiguity of human existence becomes especially important. We are not given a fixed meaning or essence that exists somewhere inside us waiting to be discovered. We create meaning through what we do, what we choose, and how we act while we are here in the world.
But even this freedom is ambiguous. We do not choose the basic conditions of our existence – we do not choose to be born, our mortality, our bodies, or every circumstance we encounter. Yet within these limitations, we still have the freedom to choose how we respond and what we make of our lives.
In this sense, Beauvoir’s opening discussion almost gives us the entire gist of The Ethics of Ambiguity: we are free, yet constrained; subjects, yet objects; unique individuals, yet part of a world of other people; conscious, yet embodied; alive, yet moving toward death.
The ambiguity is not something we can eliminate. It is the condition within which we have to live.
