Ethics is only possible given a gap between oneself and oneself

Evidence

But it is also claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost. Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that man is a “useless passion,” that he tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make himself God? It is true. But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 5

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The move is genuinely counterintuitive: failure and a self that is not coincident with itself are the very precondition of morality, not its obstacle. Ethics for God is meaningless.
• QUESTION: Worth tracking: does “having-to-be” here already smuggle in the normative force Beauvoir later needs for willing others’ freedom?
• XREF: connects to: Possibility exists only as an option on being that separates one from oneself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 381; Beauvoir’s threefold ambiguity defines the human as immanent-transcendent, free-yet-unmade, and conflicted-with-yet-requiring the Other. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 112; The ethical problem of Being and Nothingness always concerned collectivity, not individual style (+1 more)