Willing freedom and willing moral selfhood are one and the same

Evidence

But man also wills himself to be a disclosure of being, and if he coincides with this wish, he wins, for the fact is that the world becomes present by his presence in it. But the disclosure implies a perpetual tension to keep being at a certain distance, to tear oneself from the world, and to assert oneself as a freedom. To wish for the disclosure of the world and to assert oneself as freedom are one and the same movement. … At the same time that it requires the realization of concrete ends, of particular projects, it requires itself universally. It is not a ready-made value which offers itself from the outside to my abstract adherence, but it appears (not on the plane of facility, but on the moral plane) as a cause of itself. It is necessarily summoned up by the values which it sets up and through which it sets itself up. It can not establish a denial of itself, for in denying itself, it would deny the possibility of any foundation. To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 20

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the load-bearing move of the whole book — freedom as cause of itself, freedom that cannot deny itself without denying all foundation. This is the passage that the reader’s question about whether ‘willing yours requires willing mine’ is derived or smuggled hinges on.
• QUESTION: The reader’s core question: is the universality claim (‘it requires itself universally’) derived here or smuggled? This passage shows Beauvoir asserting it as following from freedom being a cause of itself — worth tracking whether the inference holds.
• XREF: Directly addresses the reader’s stated key idea: freedom is not a possession but a relation; your freedom is incomplete until others are free. This passage sets up freedom as self-grounding, the foundation for the interpersonal claim.