Quotation
Last reviewed:
“To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world.”
Simone de Beauvoir · Existentialism · Modern · 1947
What does it mean?
To exist is to make oneself a lack of being, to cast oneself into the world. Consciousness is not a thing that then acts. It is the lack, the surpassing. A rival reading hears a glamorous void, existence as mood. She is setting up an ethics. The lack becomes moral when freedom wills itself and wills the freedom of others. Another reading thinks she is only repeating Sartre's ontology. The ontology is his, and she says so. The ethical question, what to do with the lack, is the book he had not written.
Did Simone de Beauvoir really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Frechtman's English is in this territory. She also quotes Sartre: man is a being who makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being. The card compresses her opening movement. It is not a detached motto.
Where it comes from
The Ethics of Ambiguity, in Bernard Frechtman's translation
Approximate date: 1947.
How to use it
A person in a new city, Bristol or anywhere, feels unfinished and calls the feeling a personal failing. The sentence says the unfinishedness is the structure, not the failing. What you cast yourself toward is the ethical question. The structure does not tell you the direction. The book tries to. A feeling of lack is not yet an ethics of ambiguity, and it is not nothing.
A mindset reading
Name Sartre where she names him. Then watch her leave the useless passion for a freedom that has to will other freedoms. That leaving is The Ethics of Ambiguity. The lack sentence is the shared starting block, not the finish.
Understand the philosophy
Bernard Frechtman translated the 1947 essay. The opening also refuses the serious man and the nihilist. This sentence is neither of those refusals. It is the description of existence they both misunderstand.
- freedom
- self
- meaning
FAQ
What does it mean?
To exist is to make oneself a lack of being, to cast oneself into the world. Consciousness is not a thing that then acts. It is the lack, the surpassing. A rival reading hears a glamorous void, existence as mood. She is setting up an ethics. The lack becomes moral when freedom wills itself and wills the freedom of others. Another reading thinks she is only repeating Sartre's ontology. The ontology is his, and she says so. The ethical question, what to do with the lack, is the book he had not written.
Did Simone de Beauvoir really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Frechtman's English is in this territory. She also quotes Sartre: man is a being who makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being. The card compresses her opening movement. It is not a detached motto.
Which work is it in?
The Ethics of Ambiguity, in Bernard Frechtman's translation Approximate date: 1947.