For Beauvoir, freedom, value-creation, and denying Being are one and the same act

Evidence

When Beauvoir writes that unveiling is the passage from being to existence, we must be cautious. Indeed, Beauvoir is not trying to describe a passage going from one point to another, or from one level of being to another, as when in the course of philosophical investigation we ignore the immediacy of the phenomenon to concentrate on its essence. Indeed, existence could not possibly add being to a being defi ned by its fullness; being could obviously not accept any addition to itself. Th e unveiling of being that Beauvoir describes is the realization that being’s only essence is its existence; freedom experiences itself through the denial of its own essence. To project oneself into the world, to defi ne our own values, to deny Being, are all synonyms. … To claim that being is not invested with any rationality is not at all the same as preaching irrationalism; rather, it is to put all the weight of rationality on human subjectivity. Whether the world is rational depends entirely on human subjectivity and its responsibility: according to the classic expression, “We are condemned to be free.” — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 443

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Beauvoir’s technical sense of ‘unveiling’ as not a movement between levels but the realization that being’s essence is its existence.
• XREF: Connects to the classic Sartrean formulation ‘condemned to be free’ (Being and Nothingness) and the broader Continental free-will tradition. — connects to: Freedom, choice, nihilation, and temporalization are one single act — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1122