No act of flight, even suicide, escapes the burden of choice

Evidence

Yet this responsibility is of a very particular type. Someone will say, “I did not ask to be born.” This is a naive way of throwing greater emphasis on our facticity. I am responsible for everything, in fact, except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. For I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibilities. To make myself passive in the world, to refuse to act upon things and upon Others is still to choose myself, and suicide is one mode among others of being-in-the-world. … Thus facticity is everywhere but inapprehensible; I never encounter anything except my responsibility. That is why I can not ask, “Why was I born?” or curse the day of my birth or declare that I did not ask to be born, for these various attitudes toward my birth—i.e., toward the fact that I realize a presence in the world—are absolutely nothing else but ways of assuming this birth in full responsibility and of making it mine. Here again I encounter only myself and my projects so that finally my abandonment—i.e., my facticity—consists simply in the fact that I am condemned to be wholly responsible for myself. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1292

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core ontological structure of radical freedom/abandonment that grounds Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity — the reader’s stated purpose is using this as Beauvoir’s backdrop. — connects to: Suicide cannot escape absurdity because it too awaits a future meaning it denies itself — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1257; Anguish cannot be hidden because flight from it is itself a mode of consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 259
• DEEPTHINKING: The identification of abandonment with the inapprehensibility of facticity — that facticity никогда appears directly but only through projective reconstruction — is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting move.

Broader Connections

• Suicide cannot escape absurdity because it too awaits a future meaning it denies itself #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1257
• Anguish cannot be hidden because flight from it is itself a mode of consciousness #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 259