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Simone de Beauvoir, the Paradoxical Intellectual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lawrence D. Kritzman
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Extract

In the ethics of ambiguity (1947), Simone De Beauvoir suggests that to be human is to be subject to change and contradiction. Paradox, she claimed, was the only truth concerning human existence because of the tension created between mortality and the desire to give meaning to life. “Death,” Beauvoir suggests, “challenges our existence. … [I]t also gives meaning to our life” (Prime 731). Unlike Albert Camus, however, she clearly refuses to conceive of existence as absurd. “To declare existence absurd is to deny that I can ever be given meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed” (Ethics 129). Recognizing the facticity created by the inevitability of death and the constraints death imposes on existence, she implores us, nevertheless, to seize our freedom and give meaning to it through ethical acts.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 206 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

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