Quotation
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“He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.”
Simone de Beauvoir · Existentialism · Modern · 1947
What does it mean?
Ambiguity, at the opening, is this double experience: a pure internality that no external power can take hold of, and a thing crushed by the weight of other things. We are subject and object, and neither cancels the other. A rival reading picks one side, the stoic inner citadel or the materialist crushed body, and calls it the truth. She thinks the ethical problem starts because both are true. Another reading hears Sartre's in-itself and for-itself repeated. The pair is in the background.
Did Simone de Beauvoir really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Frechtman's English of the opening description of ambiguity. The human being is both a subject that nothing external can seize and a thing among things. The 'he' is the generic person of the 1948 English.
Where it comes from
The Ethics of Ambiguity, opening chapter, in Bernard Frechtman's translation
Approximate date: 1947.
How to use it
A carer in Swansea is told to be resilient, as if the inner life could not be touched by the rota, and is also treated as a body the rota can use up. Both speeches deny the ambiguity. She would not call either speech a description. The day really does contain both the freedom and the weight. An ethics that flatters only one of them is the seriousness, or the nihilism, the book sorts later.
A mindset reading
The generic 'he' is Frechtman's 1948. It is fair to notice it, given her own later work on who the generic human has been. The notice is not a reason to discard the description of ambiguity, which she will need in The Second Sex.
Understand the philosophy
The opening chapter sets the anthropological picture before the types of flight. This sentence is that picture. It is not a maxim. It is the situation an ethics of freedom has to be adequate to.
- self
- freedom
- mind
FAQ
What does it mean?
Ambiguity, at the opening, is this double experience: a pure internality that no external power can take hold of, and a thing crushed by the weight of other things. We are subject and object, and neither cancels the other. A rival reading picks one side, the stoic inner citadel or the materialist crushed body, and calls it the truth. She thinks the ethical problem starts because both are true. Another reading hears Sartre's in-itself and for-itself repeated. The pair is in the background.
Did Simone de Beauvoir really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Frechtman's English of the opening description of ambiguity. The human being is both a subject that nothing external can seize and a thing among things. The 'he' is the generic person of the 1948 English.
Which work is it in?
The Ethics of Ambiguity, opening chapter, in Bernard Frechtman's translation Approximate date: 1947.