The Ethics of Ambiguity

⚖The case for it

Sartre ended Being and Nothingness promising an ethics and never wrote it. Beauvoir did, in a hundred and sixty pages, and readers who bounced off him call her book “much more readable especially in the second part.” That part sorts people into ways of living, the adventurer, the passionate man, the serious man, the nihilist, and readers say the typology is where the argument turns recognizable. Where Sartre reads, in one critic's phrase, “often hard to follow,” Beauvoir's case that your freedom is bound to everyone else's cuts against reading existentialism as licence. Readers still call the pages on oppression “still highly applicable to today's world politics.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Some readers call the politics “incoherent in the extreme,” arguing Beauvoir extends more patience to Soviet communism than to fascism and never reconciles it. The vocabulary of the in-itself and for-itself arrives assumed rather than reintroduced, so skipping Sartre first costs you, and one reader who came in cold admitted “existentialist writings tire me” before the argument got moving. The prose itself keeps “zigzagging from grandiosity to brutal specifics,” and the ethics stays abstract exactly where it should turn concrete: willing the freedom of others gets asserted, but what that obligates you to do stays thin. The five archetypes read as schematic next to the earlier chapters, and a minority treat the whole book as minor, useful mainly for tracing her path toward The Second Sex.

— the honest librarian

3h

honest hours

4

sittings