simone de beauvoir the ethics of ambiguity sparknotes

There’s neither a higher power nor any other source for our values that cannot be challenged. Introduction – The World According to Existentialismīeyond us, there is nothing.

Obviously, de Beauvoir’s views are distinct from those of her fellow existentialists like Sartre or Heidegger, so here when I write “existentialism” I mean de Beauvoir’s particular take on it. The first essay is a kind of introduction, the second essay explains why people who do not follow existentialism’s tenets are likely to cause trouble in the world, and the final essay explores all the cool things about life under existentialism. The book’s structure is relatively simple. I certainly came away from the book with some understanding of existentialism, at least as de Beauvoir sees it, and this is what I will try to share in the following piece. However, I have heard many suggestions that de Beauvoir’s piece is a better introduction than her partner’s is to the existentialist project among primary sources. I cannot compare it with Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism, which was also written in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War and has a similar goal, because I have not read that work yet. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity is an essay, or rather series of essays, that aims to introduce existentialism to the common reader. For that reason it has appealed to many artists and people who are engaged in the business of being alive. Its focus is on the concrete, the practical, the real and the possible. Those questions are simple – what is a good life, what must we do, where does our meaning come from, and is it to be found at all? Existentialism appeals because it deals with questions relating to our existence, rather than that which may lie beyond it or beneath it. I myself am not particularly interested in questions about metaphysics or the meaning and origin of knowledge, even though plenty of thinkers believe that without understanding these things we cannot even begin to approach those questions which I do find interesting. I appreciate that most people are not much interested in philosophy.

Simone de beauvoir the ethics of ambiguity sparknotes