The child’s world is serious because its values appear as ready-made absolutes.

Evidence

Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child. And indeed the unfortunate choices which most men make can only be explained by the fact that they have taken place on the basis of childhood. The child’s situation is characterized by his finding himself cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish, which has been fashioned without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit. In his eyes, human inventions, words, customs, and values are given facts, as inevitable as the sky and the trees. This means that the world in which he lives is a serious world, since the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as ready-made things. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘spirit of seriousness’ as a defining trait: treating values as ready-made givens rather than human products.
• XREF: The spirit of seriousness connects to the serious man typology later in the book and to religious/ideological framing of values as transcendent absolutes.