Self-justification sought outside oneself collapses into perceived absurdity.
Evidence
The serious man wills himself to be a god; but he is not one and knows it. He wishes to rid himself of his subjectivity, but it constantly risks being unmasked; it is unmasked. Transcending all goals, reflection wonders, “What’s the use?” There then blazes forth the absurdity of a life which has sought outside of itself the justifications which it alone could give itself. Detached from the freedom which might have genuinely grounded them, all the ends that have been pursued appear arbitrary and useless. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 49
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism of ‘the serious’ — grounding one’s value in an external thing rather than one’s own freedom — fails by design, since only freedom can ground ends; a genuinely dense paradox worth sitting with.
Related
- Losing oneself in an object is secretly the emptiest assertion of subjectivity (similarity 0.84)
- Denying that one freely chooses ends makes one enslaved to those ends (similarity 0.81)
- Ethics is only possible given a gap between oneself and oneself (similarity 0.80)
- The serious man submits his freedom to supposedly unconditioned absolute ends (similarity 0.80)
- The critic who denies his own subjectivity falls back into the serious (similarity 0.79)
- Moral judgments require presupposing human freedom in oneself and others. (similarity 0.79)