======THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY====== =====CONCLUSION, pp. 156-159 and INDEX===== **by Simone de Beauvoir** //translated from the French by BERNARD FRECHTMAN// Published by Citadel Press, A division of Lyle Stuart Inc. 120 Enterprise Ave. Secaucus, N.J. 07094 Copyright 1948 by Philosophical Library ISBN 0-8065-0160-X =====Conclusion===== Is this kind of ethics individualistic or not? Yes, if one means by that that it accords to the individual an absolute value and that it recognizes in him alone the power of laying the foundations of his own existence. It is individualism in the sense in which the wisdom of the ancients, the Christian ethics of salvation, and the Kantian ideal of virtue also merit this name; it is opposed to the totalitarian doctrines which raise up beyond man the mirage of Mankind. But it is not solipsistic, since the individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of him. This individualism does not lead to the anarchy of personal whim. Man is free; but he finds his law in his very freedom. First, lie must assume his freedom and not flee it by a constructive movement: one does not exist without doing something; and also by a negative movement which rejects oppression for oneself and others. In construction, as in rejection, it is a matter of reconquering freedom on the contingent facticity of existence, that is, of taking the given, which, at the start, is there without any reason, as something willed by man. A conquest of this kind is never finished; the contingency remains, and, so that he may assert his will, man is even obliged to stir up in the world the outrage he does not want. But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite. Yet, isn't this battle without victory pure gullibility? It will be argued that this is only a ruse of transcendence projecting before itself a goal which constantly recedes, running after itself on an endless treadmill; to exist for Mankind is to remain where one is, and it fools itself by calling this turbulent stagnation progress; our whole ethics does nothing but encourage it in this lying enterprise since we are asking each one to confirm existence as a value for all others; isn't it simply a matter of organizing among men a complicity which allows them to substitute a game of illusions for the given world? We have already attempted to answer this objection. One can formulate it only by placing himself on the grounds of an inhuman and consequently false objectivity; within Mankind men may be fooled; the word "lie" has a meaning by opposition to the truth established by men themselves, but Mankind can not fool itself completely since it is precisely Mankind which creates the criteria of true and false. In Plato, art is mystification because there is the heaven of Ideas; but in the earthly domain all glorification of the earth is true as soon as it is realized. Let men attach value to words, forms, colors, mathematical theorems, physical laws, and athletic prowess; let them accord value to one another in love and friendship, and the objects, the events, and the men immediately have this value; they have it absolutely. It is possible that a man may refuse to love anything on earth; he will prove this refusal and he will carry it out by suicide. If he lives, the reason is that, whatever he may say, there still remains in him some attachment to existence; his life will be commensurate with this attachment; it will justify itself to the extent that it genuinely justifies the world. This justification, though open upon the entire universe through time and space, will always be finite. Whatever one may do, one never realizes anything but a limited work, like existence itself which tries to establish itself through that work and which death also limits. It is the assertion of our finiteness which doubtless gives the doctrine which we have just evoked its austerity and, in some eyes, its sadness. As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men. I think that, inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. Taking on its own account Descartes' revolt against the evil genius, the pride of the thinking reed in the face of the universe which crushes him, it asserts that, despite his limits, through them, it is up to each one to fulfill his existence as an absolute. Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: "Do what you must, come what may." That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death. =====Index===== Abraham, 138 Adventurer, the 58-62, 68 Alencon point, 94 Alexandria, 76 Algeria, 101 Ambiguity, 57, 68, 68, 129, 189, 142, 152-154 America, 68, 90 Anti-fascism, 154 Arabs, the 101 Aragon, 182 Arrivisme, 59 Athens, 75, 76 Atom, 26 Barren, 182 Bataille Georges., 70, 126 Baudelaire, 58 Bolshevism, 45 Breton, 55 British Empire, the 98 Buchenwald, 9, 74, 101 Bukharin, 146 Byzantium, 75 Carolinas, the 85 Catholic Church, 132 Catholics, the 50 Cezanne, 129 Childhood, 141, 142 Claudel, 188 Cleopatra, 147 Coimbre, 98 Comte, 116 Cortez, 59 Crevelf 54 Christ, 66 Christian charity, 185 Christian Church, 48 Christian myth, 71 Coliseum, 75 Communist Party, 48 Cromwell, 147 Dachau, 101 Descartes, 28, 35, 105, 159 Don Juan, 60, 61 Dos Passos John, 151 Dostoievsky, 15 Driev la Rochelle, 56, 57 Egoism, 70 Elvira, 60, 61 England, 124 Epicurean cult, 135 Ethics, 23, 32-34, 55, 59, 95, 126, 129, 131, 134, 154, 156 Ethics of autonomy, 33 Existentialism, 10, 18, 34, 59, 72, 78,153,159 Fanaticism, 66 Fascism, 45, 62, 138, 154 Fichte, 17 Florence, 76 France, 132, 140 French, the 139 French Union, the 140 Future, the 115, 116, 118-120, 123, 124, 126-128, 180-132,136, 144 Germany, 150 Germans, the 76, 126 Gilles, 56 Giotto, 129 Girondists, the 149 Goering, 42 Goethe, 132 Greece, 124 Hegel, 8-10, 17, 18, 22, 46, 62, 69, 70, 84, 103-105, 112, 116, 117, 122, 153, 158 Hegelian ethics, 104 Heidegger, 102, 116 Hitler, 98 Hitlerians, the 103 Humanism, 21 Humanists, the 92 Husserl, 14 Hysteria, 25 Ibsen, 143 India, 150 Indians, the 60, 61 Individualism, 156 Intelligence, 41 Isaac, 133 Italians, the 75 Italy, 31, 61 Jew, the 103, 144 Joubandeau, 53 Kant, 17, 18, 22, 33, 69, 105, 188 Kantian moralism, 135 Kantianism, 144 Kantism, 33 Kierkegaard, 9, 46, 138 Koestler, 110, 132 Korai of Athens, 130 Lawrence, 61 Lenin, 22, 23 Lespinasse, Mademoiselle de, 66 Lyons, 150 Malaparte, 153 Marx, 18, 20, 21, 84, 85, 87, 118 Marxism, 18-20 Materialism, 20 Mathematics, 79 Marseilles, 92 Maurras, 85 Metaphysics, 34 Middle Ages, the 92 Montaigne, 7 Moralism, 21 Moscow trials, 146 Mythomaniac, the 47 Nazis, the 95, 101, 158 Nazism, 56 Nietzsche, 46, 72 Nihilism, 54, 56, 58, 65, 68, 100 Nihilist, the 52, 55, 57, 61 Nirvana, 8 Nuremberg, 42 Obidos, 93 Palestine, 124 Paris, 76, 125, 150 Passion, 64, 66, 72 Passionate man, the 63, 64, 66 Paternalism, 138 Philosophy, 46 Physics, 79 Pierrefeu, 129 Pizarro, 61 Plato, 33, 80, 157 Pompeii, 92 Ponge, 88, 115 Portugal, 93 Proust, 50 P. R. L. (Parti Republicain de'la Liberte) 90 Protestantism, 133 Rauschning, 56 Realism, 21 Reformation, the 133 Renaissance, the 93 Revolution, Of 46, 49 Robespierre, 149 Rome, 76 Roque dela, Colonel 163 Rousseau, 141, 142 Rousset David, 114 Russia, 68, 125, 146 Saint-Just, 108, 111, 149 Salazar, 93 Sartre, 10-12, 24, 58, 122 Scepticism, 58, 59 Science, 46 Serious man, the 45-62, 64 Sickness, 45 Signification, 31, 41, 71 Socialism, 154 Socrates, 33 Spain, 124, 144 Spaniard, the 144 Sparta, 76 Spartacus, 182 Spinoza, 33 Spontaneity, 26, 41 Stalingrad, 91, 146 Stalinists, the 125 Steinbeck, 150-152 Stoicism, 81 Stoics, the 29, 144 Subman, the 43-47, 58, 56 Surrealism, 54 Syracuse, 75 Technics, 79, 80 Titian, 129 Tristan Flora, 86 Trotsky, 119 Tyrant, the 62, 71 United States, 151 Universe, the 121 U.S.S.R., 146 Vache, 54 Valery, 121 Van Gogh, 29 Vichyites, the 131 Vigilantes of America, 60 War, 45 Wright Richard, 89 Yankees, the 90