A review by paul_viaf
The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

4.0

As the title suggests, de Beauvoir keenly delves into the murkiness of ethics, beyond the Janus of humanity’s psychological face, & into the multidimensional contours of this edifice. Admittedly, this was my first bit of philosophy in quite some time. I am by no means a philosophy major nor do I claim to be. Enigmatic at first, the loop de loops of language began to grow on me & the premise slowly began to bear its form. It begins with the natural state of man which immediately ignites the fuse to the question of the nature of free will. As this is unequivocally from an existentialist perspective, one must not allow preconceived notions to cement its reputation. It is hinged on the realistic of clear observation. The reflection in the mirror scolds the observer with unequivocal truths. This is not a tale of dark peril. On the contrary, it is a tale which sheds light on truth & asks society to realize that if it chooses, in its innate nature, to actuate atrocities or noble feats, the individual is solely accountable. Much of the primary concern seems to deal with identifying the delusion of self, embracing it, becoming onerous to the denial, diagnosing it & taking steps towards changes, if one wills that way. It is quite the poignant lesson in self-identification. It does not suggest how to curtail one’s behavior. Merely to state why it happens & that it does indeed happen. She proposes that all human beings possess weapons of will to combat against the gauntlet of our world, focusing on the individual operating in its particularity while submersed in the apparatus of the collective in the pattern of a Venn diagram affecting & coexisting in a symbiotic & inseparable fashion. She splays out finely sliced situations to reveal the intricate flavors involved to conceive the flavorful life we endure. Yet no one ever said that cornucopia of flavors did not incorporate the bitter or even the acrid. The highly deductive text expresses, with piercing language, all the goodies. Consciousness. Morality. Primal urges. Evil. Motive. Social roles. Justice. Revolution. On blatant frames her articulation strokes these structures with eloquence & clarity. Accompanied by a superlative didactic, her linguistics sharpen ethics & morals with the adze of her wisdom. She works as a crafty metallurgist pounding this amalgam of ores into something meaningful; into a coherent design. A compass to navigate towards a well-informed path. By far one of my favorite segments was Freedom & Liberation. It stirred me so with feelings of fervor yet without the slightest hint of sensationalist language. The blatantly coherent summation of what occurs betwixt these very living entities is enough to make me want to carve revolution into my chest. It revives in me something very fiery. It startles me & sickens me. There is a tinge of despair. Of pessimism. The dichotomy between the oppressed & oppressor was dissected so pellucidly, I could see the hearts of each persona stirring with self-fulfilling desires only made possible by calculated incisions into this delicate tissue, unveiling the deepest buried gears of sociological cognition, revealing the operative motions to the cogs themselves. Uncovered from a convoluted soil are the organs which sustain the life force of motives. They are philosophically photographed as objects which spring forth the action which we experience daily on our chaotic sociopolitical plains. In short, a fantastic read.

I leave this review on a great explanatory quote from the author herself, “I think that, inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, & it then appears as he only proposition of salvation which one can address to man.”