simone de beauvoir the ethics of ambiguity sparknotes

Secondly, subjectivity is used to contrast with objectivity. For de Beauvoir, this is characteristic of all human life and one of the reasons people are fundamentally free. It's both a succinct summary of existentialist thought and a thorough interrogation of its ethical ramifications in the real world. First, subjectivity is the state of having an individual, particular perspective on the world and acting from that perspective. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) is one of the foundational texts of existentialist philosophy. The “existentialist conversion” is an allusion to the phenomenological thought of German philosopher Edmund Husserl, but what she essentially means is that ethics is not about whether one achieves what one imagines, fantasizes, or projects oneself to be, but rather about what people do with their projected imagined versions of themselves when they realize that these are mere fantasies. A term with two related but distinct uses. Viewing human life in terms of externality means denying transcendence: forgetting about one’s capacity for willful change and improvement. Viewing human life in terms of internality or will is equivalent to “losself in” transcendence, or defining oneself through one’s fantasies and not one’s realities. In contrast, she proposes seeing ambiguity as the solution and not the problem.

Here, she re-explains this in terms of transcendence, which essentially means overcoming one’s current self and becoming something new. De Beauvoir has criticized most philosophy for trying to eliminate ambiguity, or define people solely through their will or their world (their pure inwardness or pure externality). The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because. De Beauvoir has criticized most philosophy for trying to eliminate ambiguity, or define people solely through their will or their world (their “pure inwardness or pure externality”). In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoirs argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise.

Simone de beauvoir the ethics of ambiguity sparknotes