The spirit of seriousness treats values as absolute rather than made by human freedom

Evidence

Serious. The “Spirit of seriousness” (l’esprit de sérieux) views man as an object and subordinates him to the world. It thinks of values as having an absolute existence independent of human-reality. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1520

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines seriousness as bad faith about the source of values.
• XREF: Beauvoir takes up l’esprit de sérieux directly as a central concept in The Ethics of Ambiguity. — connects to: Anguish is freedom’s self-apprehension, opposed to the serious man’s faith in external values — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 253; The serious attitude makes a person a passive consequence of the world — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1355; Appealing to transcendent values secretly denies one’s own freedom as the source of normativity. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 198 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Appealing to transcendent values secretly denies one’s own freedom as the source of normativity. #expands (0.95) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 198
• Values are inherited from the social world, not invented from nothing #contradicts (0.92) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 213