The Ethics Of Ambiguity

“But their attempts to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice doesn’t pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.” 

De Beauvoir is against any philosophical system (she refers to Hegel in this instance) that neatly tries to reconcile paradox and ambiguity. 

“I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I cannot appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession.”

De Beauvoir’s writing can be quite poetic at times. Here, Beauvoir’s poetic prose is employed to convey a complex idea about the paradoxical nature of existence. 

“Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.” 

This is the quintessential sentiment for the existentialist, who puts human freedom at the center of their philosophical beliefs.