Simone de Beauvoir — The Ethics of Ambiguity

142 published claims from this book.

• A child’s face moves us because it affirms transcendence as a project
• A completed act collapses into inert thinghood without ongoing reaffirmation.
• A life that only maintains itself is indistinguishable from vegetation
• A proletariat free to betray is real; a defined ‘real’ proletariat is an abstraction.
• Abstract philosophical systems offer only the consolations of death
• Accepting and rejecting the given are radically different modes of surpassing
• Acting for a cause is inseparable from acting for oneself
• Acts that respect one person’s freedom can tyrannize another’s.
• Adventure always unfolds in a human world and affects other people
• Ambiguity differs from absurdity in that meaning must be won, not denied
• An individual justifies himself only through a future-oriented project, never through present facticity
• Any self-pronouncement is already false in the moment it is made
• Art redeems existence precisely by not striving to attain being
• Authoritarian movements demand members surrender their own freedom for a promised liberation.
• Authoritarian parties suppress reflection because thought exposes their arbitrariness.
• Bad faith arises because humans as negativity face anguish before their freedom
• Bad faith lets spontaneous projects remain unfounded flights from freedom
• Beautiful art can transfigure atrocity and thus justify suffering aesthetically
• Bilndly pursued goals lose their meaning because goals are defined along the way
• Broadening the scale of projects shifts value from lived time to quantified centuries.
• Capitalist production confines workers so thoroughly they fall victim to offerings
• Careerist opportunism is the opposite of true adventure, not a variant of it
• Childhood’s promise of divinity explains why serious-mindedness is the most common bad faith
• Childhood’s temporary natural limits differ fundamentally from man-made oppression.
• Choice is the moment spirit passes into nature and morality is realized
• Choice precedes and helps fashion knowledge rather than awaiting it.
• Collectivism erases actual death by treating everyone as interchangeable
• Construction of distant ends forces violence that revolt can avoid.
• Degradation of the oppressed strengthens oppressive regimes by breeding self-disgust
• Denying that one freely chooses ends makes one enslaved to those ends
• Enlightened capitalism captures workers with diversions that dissipate their transcendence
• Error itself is the abortive movement through which a person asserts freedom.
• Ethics is only possible given a gap between oneself and oneself
• Ethics that erase human separation are invalid because that separation is real.
• Even self-assertion requires others to confer lasting meaning on it
• Every action for humanity is also an action against some humans
• Every age’s art and science will itself as absolute, not as preparation
• Existentialist ethics condemns tyranny because self-justification requires other men
• Facing ambiguity honestly is the source of strength to act
• Flight into contemplation masks a refusal to face worldly ambiguity
• Forcing choice between vivisection and cruelty frames the modern tragedy of animal nature
• Forcing meaningless acts on a person produces existential disgust and despair.
• Freedom aims to disclose being, not to capture or fix it.
• Freedom can objectify its own past, rupturing temporal continuity with the instant
• Freedom exists only by being conquered from original spontaneous existence
• Freedom has concrete content only when engaged in the world
• Freedom is meaningful only as engaged by free choice of ends
• Freedom requires temporal continuity, not isolated instants of choice.
• Freedom that withdraws into self-interest denies its own nature
• Fulfilling every individual’s will is impossible because some wills seek enslavement of others.
• Genuine freedom requires accepting permanent tension rather than seeking rest
• Genuine heroism costs an absolute renunciation unrecoverable by any future
• Grounded, engaged generosity outranks abstract Kantian virtue.
• Hegel’s aufheben conflates accepting and rejecting the given, hiding real revolt
• Human means cannot be treated as pure instruments because man is himself an end.
• Individual freedom is achieved only through the freedom of others
• Ineluctable failure does not prevent winners and losers, truths and errors
• Intention cannot be separated from act, as thought cannot be separated from its language.
• Lack of economic and social power makes the world appear to be given
• Legitimate causes can require fighting against other valid causes
• Liberating the mystified slave requires external intervention to build consciousness
• Liberation appears immediately necessary only to the oppressed
• Long-range projects must justify themselves without appeal to a mythical future
• Losing oneself in an object is secretly the emptiest assertion of subjectivity
• Man’s failure and self-distance are preconditions for any ethics
• Maniacal passion denies others’ freedom and slides into fanaticism and oppression
• Marxism defines aims from within a rejected situation, not from absolute archetypes.
• Meaning requires affirming the concrete thickness of individual life
• Meaningful action requires finitude; total knowledge dissolves meaning.
• Means cannot be judged apart from the ends that give them meaning.
• Moral anxiety is intrinsic to existence, not imposed from outside
• Moral judgments require presupposing human freedom in oneself and others.
• Most philosophy has systematically masked rather than faced human ambiguity
• Mystification makes slavery seem natural and thus blocks even the dream of revolt
• Nihilism arises from failed attempts to become a fixed being.
• Nihilism is a form of failed seriousness rather than its opposite.
• No future reconciliation of human transcendences is possible because man is originary negativity
• Objective questions about a project’s worth remain transcendent and cannot trigger genuine anguish
• One person’s freedom often requires another person’s freedom to be curtailed.
• Only other humans, never material things, can oppress a person
• Opposition can contest means without rejecting a regime’s ends
• Oppressive parties mask sacrifice by denying the individual’s value
• Oppressors disguise human-made conditions as natural facts to block revolt
• Oppressors invoke their own freedom to justify oppressing others
• Other people open or close the future that my freedom requires
• Others take and give the world; projects interlock with other projects
• Others’ freedom is the condition of, not a limit on, my own freedom
• Particular solidarities must remain open to universal solidarity.
• Passion differs from seriousness by disclosing its object through subjective involvement
• Political abstractions have value only through the concrete individuals they serve.
• Political decisions resist calculation because human costs are incommensurable with future gains.
• Practical action is identical whether history is contingent or necessary.
• Progress means expanding existence, not approaching a fixed ideal
• Refusing a genuine possibility of liberation is a moral fault.
• Refusing to celebrate a victory reveals a weak wish for that victory
• Removing troop exposure dissolves the dialectic of sacrifice and makes heroism impossible.
• Revolt becomes real freedom only when it returns to positive action.
• Sacrificing a suspect is justified only when cheaper containment is impossible.
• Salazar’s Portugal chose monuments over living people in the name of the past
• Salvation must be secured in finite present action, not a mythical future.
• Self-hatred in the nihilist extends into hatred and destruction of all other men
• Self-justification sought outside oneself collapses into perceived absurdity.
• Serious-mindedness naturally makes one a tyrant who sacrifices others to the idol
• Serving abstract Man and serving this particular man do not overlap.
• Some adults live in an infantile world of imposed, unquestioned values.
• Technology cannot justify itself by saving time because existence exists only by being spent
• The adventurer arises from abundant vitality joined with reflective scepticism
• The adventurer’s fault is denying that his subjectivity necessarily transcends toward others
• The child’s world is serious because its values appear as ready-made absolutes.
• The critic who denies his own subjectivity falls back into the serious
• The ethical problem of Being and Nothingness always concerned collectivity, not individual style
• The festival confirms existence as an end rather than a means to future transcendence
• The inescapable residue of failure is the very condition of living freedom
• The nihilist errs by treating existence as a lack rather than a positive lack
• The oppressed class has only a negative self-definition, which is why oppression must end
• The oppressed face fewer temptations to bad faith than the privileged
• The passionate man fails where subjectivity, not content, cannot fulfill itself
• The passionate man, though admired from afar, cannot commune and readily turns violent
• The passionate man’s project depopulates the world and leaves him unfulfilled
• The past appeals to us and must be assumed, not idolized or denied
• The possible becomes real only through a person’s project, not as pre-existing logical possibility
• The serious man submits his freedom to supposedly unconditioned absolute ends
• The serious man’s devotion to an external idol breeds perpetual fear and disappointment.
• The sub-man refuses the risks and tensions of existing as a lack.
• The sub-man resists the projects of free men rather than enlarging the human realm.
• The sub-man’s fear is that the unforeseen will force self-awareness upon him.
• The tyrant’s sophism divides humanity into self-transcendence and others’ immanence
• The will’s bad faith does not oppose but expresses the fundamental project
• The world reveals itself only through engagement and rejection
• There is no purely contemplative stance; everyone is always already engaged
• True freedom collapses the separation between means and ends
• Values are created absolutely by human attachment, not discovered
• Violence can be legitimate when its purpose is creating meaning rather than material effect.
• Violence warps even justified struggle because it forces crushing victims
• Violent revolt infects the oppressed with the oppressor’s own evil
• Waiting for universal peace to justify one’s existence is a permanent deferral
• What befalls a person through others demands a side-taking that natural events do not
• Willing finite projects absolutely is how one fulfills oneself
• Willing freedom and willing moral selfhood are one and the same
• Willing one’s freedom and willing that being exist are one choice
• Willing one’s own freedom and willing others’ freedom are the same act
• Women confined to the male-created world remain in an infantile condition.