This is a very incomplete account of Ethics of Ambiguity, made because this writing of de Beauvoir’s is one of the few ethical texts that take ambiguity seriously, although perhaps not seriously enough. It may also be one of the most interesting ethical texts of the last century. I’m not going to claim that at this stage I’ve noticed everything and understood everything, so this account is likely to be incomplete or even incorrect.
Making an ambiguous binary: determination vs freedom
The book starts with the distinction between ‘determined’ and ‘free’ which is, for humans, ambiguous (and essential) because:
- past actions to a large extent determine what we feel, experience and can choose (the affects of the past are largely unchangeable givens – although some psychotherapists insist not completely);
- we live amidst what appear to be determined processes (or, perhaps more accurately, processes we do not appear to have direct influence upon, which can include world and bodily processes);
- <I’d add that we also experience the affects of unconscious processes, which may influence our thinking and freedom – but existentialism seems to have a problem with recognising these>
- while we experience some freedom of choice.
Or as she says, in the language of the translator, “[Man] 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.” This ambiguity cannot be accurately removed. I would add that culture seems to be another source of ambiguity, it gives tools teaching us what, and how, to think and thus both restricts and enables freedom.
Humans are part of the world of which we are conscious (EA: 7) and so we cannot escape being ‘messed’ by the world. Indeed attempts to escape the world are possibly harmful or limiting to both ourselves and others.
De Beauvoir argues that people (“philosophers”) often try to “mask” this essential ambiguity, by reducing reality to one side of a binary such as ‘determination’ or ‘freedom’; ‘mind’ or ‘matter’ etc, and establish a hierarchy of dominance whereby one side of the binary is, or should be, more significant than the other (and dominant) – mind over matter etc.
Or as de Beauvoir says: “It has been a matter of eliminating the ambiguity by making oneself pure inwardness or pure externality, by escaping from the sensible world or by being engulfed in it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment” (EA:8).
We might wonder if the idea of freedom may be ambiguous itself? I’d suggest that it is a significant reduction when “philosophers” reduce the world to a binary of freedom and determination rather than a possible plurality, or continuum. Seek the third to destabilise the binary – which in this case might be those necessary and responsive natural processes, which we need to take account of to live…
Freedom as source of value
Let us accept, for the moment, the binary, but be aware of its possible reductionism, then de Beauvoir asserts that freedom “is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence” (EA: 24). To “will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (EA: 24). There also seems to be an assumption that freedom and openness are morally related “My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it” (EA: 30). I will later suggest that for de Beauvoir ‘disclosure of being’ does not seem to explicitly include the non-human world, and that further complexity and ambiguity would be recognised, if this was the case….
We have the usual problem of why we should select freedom as the basis of ethics, without a previous ethical assumption that freedom is good. We also know from de Beauvoir’s opening, that freedom is never total, we are splitting reality into a opposed binary of free and determined and making freedom the dominant and valued pole. We could imagine someone arguing that enthusiastically embracing our fate is the real basis of virtue, or that only certain people are entitled to be free and that virtue is about accepting, or earning, these limits.
However, it certainly appears that we seem free to make choices, and most people would agree that virtue and ethics have to do with choices, or argument over correct choices in particular situations, so let us assume that this freedom to choose, is one basis for ethics, and see what happens. What is the role of the ambiguity that de Beauvoir points to?
Freedom implies an ability (to some extent) to make ourselves up as we go along, so that we become the path of our choices, and that path is open to change as we are free to choose to go in a different direction at this moment, now. However, we are not free of the consequences of that choice. Or in existentialist lingo: “To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence, freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to existence in a movement which is constantly surpassed” (EA: 78-9). We make our being through our choices; perhaps it is better to say ‘in the interplay between choices and the world,’ to make the freedom less absolute, and to emphasise the relationships involved.
Moving into relationship
Given her position, de Beavoir can suggest:
Freedom is the source from which all significance and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else. At the same time that it requires the realization of concrete ends, of particular projects, it requires itself universally.
(EA: 24)
Or Freedom requires that others be free. And:
the constructive activities of man take on a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom; and reciprocally, one sees that such a movement is concrete: discoveries, inventions, industries, culture, paintings, and books people the world concretely and open concrete possibilities to men.
(EA: 80)
So again, we have the moral proposition that freedom should lead to the opening of freedom for others.
There are several problems here. One is whether absolute freedom is required for this ethics, as opposed to a moderate level of freedom. The other problem is what is a “valid meaning”? The construction of forts and killing machines has a meaning, and what makes that meaning invalid? De Beauvoir’s answer might be that they limit freedom by violence, but they might aim to protect freedom as well. Surely they could have both meanings, or both functions simultaneously? The meaning could be ambiguous and difficult to resolve, and indeed this is implied in her accounts of communist revolution…
It seems important to recognise that freedom of choice does not mean we can achieve exactly what we choose to attempt in the world, because of complexity, epistemological insufficiency, and unintended consequences. In other words, perhaps success involves some restraint and ambiguity itself? Freedom may even achieve its undoing, for some people, because of such factors – especially if the supposedly free being operates without paying attention to the world.
Part of the answer to these questions are that, more or less by definition, while individuals’ have ontological freedom (ie some inherent apparent freedom of choice) they do not have moral freedom by themselves alone. While you cannot probably force freedom, ontological freedom leads to the possibility of plural social and moral freedom, and the possibility of working towards it or against it. As is being implied, freedom always occurs in relationship with other people and other beings, and this may attack freedom of oppression. This sets up the “the paradox that no action can be generated for man without its being immediately generated against men.”
Sometimes increase of freedom can result in loss of some levels of freedom for oppressors. “I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.” But oppressors try to give up nothing.
To withdraw from this problem is “a way of fleeing the truth of the present” which is that we, by choice, are opening a future whatever we do. Acting now is not the same as contemplating what has already happened – “With regard to the past, no further action is possible”.
However, this misses the ambiguity of working towards freedom for, or better with, others, while perhaps undermining it, through lack of understanding etc., although she does discuss the ambiguities of Soviet Russia… A problem is that we cannot know the result of our actions until it arrives.
Some people try to will themselves unfree to justify their choices. ‘I could do no other’ and this could be their experience, even if it is ontologically incorrect. Death is always on the horizon. How would I know what they experienced without being in the same position? which is not something that I can do.
So freedom only occurs in relationship to other beings, and this relationship is not always easy.
Relationship occurs everywhere
Every human has to do with other humans. Consciousness itself is always about the act of being in relation to, or interaction with, something else – world, humans, non-humans. There is never a consciousness by itself. So we might again suggest that consciousness is not purely free but conditioned to a degree. Consciousness arises in complexity, and in a world with its own dynamics. Because of its origination in the world, human consciousness is never as we imagine pure consciousness to be, it is permeated by feeling, by understandings, by unrealities and so on.
While De Beauvoir recognises this fundamental existential issue that we are inevitably in relationship to other people and (we add) to the world by whether we help or hinder the freedom of other beings (and hence our selves), it is not clear she recognises the impurity of consciousness.
De Beauvoir argues that our freedom inherently involves an involvement with the freedom of others. Without the freedom of others we are unfree in the moral sense (and I suspect in the ontological sense as well, because we have made our being free in tandem with this lack of freedom in others). Again I suspect people could deny this, but we cannot live without interaction, and this interaction heavily influences our own capacities. Limits we impose on others (intentionally or otherwise) may impose on ourselves.
I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship… To will oneself free is also to will others free. This will is not an abstract formula. It points out to each person concrete action to be achieved
(EA 72-3)
One must “act to defend and develop the moral freedom of oneself and others” (EA 98). The attainment of my “moral freedom depends on others being able to attain it.” (Arp: 3) A community of free people can help us be free.
freedom always appears as a movement of liberation. It is only by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death itself and to realize itself as an indefinite unity.
“[W]e say that freedom can not will itself without aiming at an open future,” as opposed to a future of constraint. This is a problem if an open future may lead to destruction of others.
This opening may imply some level of equality or sympathy with others, otherwise our freedom may seem to depend on harming the freedom, or existential process, of others.
In which case equality, sympathy or empathy or compassion, or the ability to imagine the sufferings and restrictions of others are also bases of virtue, not just freedom. De Beauvoir has over-simplified in making the original binary of freedom and determination, although she also says ““I concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth” (EA: 78) – but it is an irreducible truth which suggests that more than freedom could be at stake. Freedom is not the all, and not the only, basis of ethics.
This recognition leads to another problem. While we can extrapolate that humans individuals exist in a network of human consciousness and culture, de Beauvoir does fully open and extended this interrelationship to non-humans and non-human world processes, perhaps because she does not regard non-human beings as free. If so, this could be said to be the use of ‘freedom’ to perpetuate a form of domination and suppression of the non-human. Perhaps this is inherent in the imagined idea of absolute human freedom? She is, perhaps, not open to enough ambiguity as to what consciousness involves?
It seems that if we recognise we live in interaction, then we probably have to recognise that we live in interaction with the sun, the planet, and all beings or processes on the planet. We may have to respect their ‘freedom’ to continue to exist. Forests may have to exist, to not be clear felled, not only to preserve human freedom, but to preserve the world. Water cycles have to exist, and not be dried out by boosting deglaciation or drainage, and so on. This too may be ambiguous, forests may be felled to make space for humans or feed humans, but at the same time we are endangering humans and their freedom. The ambiguity is huge…. and the temptation is to reduce that ambiguity by making humans, or some form of social system, more significant than the ‘other’ of the world, and to imply these humans should dominate, rather than respect the way the world’s ecologies work.
In other words, freedom (if limited to humans), can lead to the destruction of co-existing interactions and lessen the possibilities of human freedom…
I’ve argued elsewhere that ethics is primarily situational. It is a response to events, as well as an attempt to rectify, or improve those events, by some kind of measure. As people may interpret situations differently, then this also leads to ambiguity.
Moral development and conflict
De Beauvoir notes that people are not born with an innate moral sense which will lead them to agreement. This seems obvious. De Beauvoir tries to specify some kind of moral ‘styles’ and to show their inadequacies.
Children tend to take the world as they find it. Adults tell them what is moral and punish or reward is taken as being the nature of the world. “This means that the world in which [the child] lives is a serious world, since the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as ready-made things.”
Through social oppression some adults are forced into remaining children. “This is also the situation of women in many civilizations; they can only submit to the laws, the gods, the customs, and the truths created by the males.” This is ambiguous, as we can be complicit in our own oppression. We can try to make the oppression comfortable for ourselves, or even call it freedom. Similarly, as ‘freedom’ can be culturally defined then our views may be incompatible to begin with and without working together remain so. For example is it freedom to have to choose between working for a boss or starving, dying of easily preventable or treatable diseases, being shot or beaten by police for protesting against police violence, have homelessness thrust upon you, have the dominant classes be free to ruin your ecology and poison your air? It looks as if for many people in the US, this is the case.
Therefore it could be that working for others’ freedom might seem to be an imposition in a way that working with others for their own version of freedom might avoid. The difficulty of defining a common version of freedom, and the difficulties of arbitrating between different freedoms, adds to the ambiguities, uncertainties and negotiations we face in creating an open future.
If there is little oppression then: “With astonishment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks…, “Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?” Although there are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything.
Moral growth involves becoming aware that acts have consequences for others, as well as ourselves – and the skills to relate to those other beings and processes, which is why (for me) empathy, compassion, imagination etc seem as important for ethics as freedom.
Yet accepting that we bear the responsibility for exerting our freedom can be frightening, anxiety producing etc. and this can lead us away. Some people “have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This apathy manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies.”
People can attempt to remove this fear by arguing that they are compelled, or should be compelled to behave in a certain way to be moral. In this way the freedom of others is a threat. Their acts “are never positive choices, only flights.” This reduces ambiguity, but crushes morality, empathy, imagination and freedom.
The ‘sub-man’ (and the ‘serious person’) want to reduce ethics, and the world, to the static or ‘unconditioned’. They want a guarantee. They refuse to engage with ambiguity, flux and uncertainty, and suffer a “fundamental fear in the face of existence” (EA: 42). They do not want choice, but instructions/programs, and take orders and values from authority. As such people don’t have to think, or relate carefully, they can be dangerous.
In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from the sub-men. (EA 44)
(EA: 44)
The sub-man is not very clear about what he has to lose, since he has nothing, but this very uncertainty re-enforces his terror. Indeed, what he fears is that the shock of the unforeseen may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.
The serious person “gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to [agreement with] these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself.” Such a person fulfils a social role or persona: “no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party.” The serious person loses all meaning if cut off from these enforced social placements, they fail to recognise their freedom, or the responsibility of that freedom; they follow the rules.
Other more ‘advanced’ types include the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man and so on.
“The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and make himself exist validly” (EA: 57). The nihilist flies from life into nothingness, perhaps longing for something new to fill themselves with, and become serious.
The adventurer takes “delight in living” (EA: 58) but is insensitive to needs of others, or the freedom of others. They remain “indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, [and] thinks he can assert his own existence without taking into account that of others.” Even ‘worse:’ “He carries the seed of [a tyrant] within him, since he regards mankind as indifferent matter destined to support the game of his existence.” He “will enclose himself in a false independence which will indeed be servitude.”
The adventurer is like the passionate man, but de Beauvoir asks, in regard to the disposition of the passionate man, “why not betray, kill, grow violent?” (EA 66).
It seems to me, that all of these deficient types are deficient primarily in their ability to empathise with others, have compassion for others, or ability to imagine what it is to be another. They also do not move beyond themselves, into their mutuality with the world. They interact with others, but these others are source of authority, or objects for their own actions. If these ways are freely chosen then it takes other processes than freedom to lift the person into another choice. And it seems that an ethics should recognise it cannot be completely driven by one ultimate alone…
Precarity of morals
As implied morality is both ambiguous and precarious. It requires work, and attention to what is happening and likely to happen. “[C]oming to recognise and accept oneself in one’s ambiguity is the necessary pre-condition of the moral life” (EA: 81).
The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.
Why can’t ambiguity remain without being fixed or won?
Partly this had to do with inevitable insufficiencies: “man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it only through the resistance which the world opposes to him”
“There is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve” and we might add, disagreement on solving the problem – ethics is also political – ‘what should we do, in this situation?’. Given different views and complexity, there is likely to be failure: “the freedom of man is infinite, but his power is limited” (EA 28), “ “without failure, no ethics.”
“moral consciousness can exist only to the extent that there is a disagreement between nature and morality” (EA 10)
From my point of view, ethics tends to be revealed in these conflicts and problems. Conflicts produces the ethical justifications, and the attempts at persuasion. Ethics is social, and ethical ambiguity and uncertainty cannot be escaped, as every situation and every problem is slightly different.
Because of complexity moral actions are always ambiguous and uncertain, we can never know whether our choice and actions are the best ones possible. There is no unambiguous guide to correct choice. every attempt in some way is a failure “Art and science do not establish themselves despite failure but through it”, the same is true of ethics.
Ethics is open to the constant tension inherent in the “perpetual contestation of means by the end and the end by the means” (EA 155).
People have to confront the contradictions: “what distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good will is that the first rests in the certainty of his aims, whereas the second keeps asking himself, “Am I really working for the liberation of men? Isn’t this end contested by the sacrifices through which I aim at it?” In other words it is the ambiguity, uncertainty, struggle and unfinished nature that makes ethical thought ethical. Because situations are ambiguous, and non-repeated, and escape understanding there are not guaranteed ethical formulas. “The movement of the mind, whether it be called thought or will, always starts up in the darkness… at each particular moment we must… maneuver in a state of doubt” or recognised uncertainty, and we cannot see what results, whether we did the right things, until afterwards.
“Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art.’ It is the failure of this realisation that ethics is never complete, never avoids risks or failures, that is one cause leading to tyranny over others (human and non human) and harm.
Conclusion
Main points of contention are:
- The freedom/determination distinction sets up a false binary, and leads to the imposition of human freedom as the valued part. This leads to the implied value that human freedom involves domination over the world.
- The reduction of the non-human to an inherent, pre-determined essence, rather than to independent processes, or apparent passivity before humans, essentially puts the world into the devalued pole.
- For freedom to be any basic part of ethics, we may need to encourage the cultivation of empathy, compassion, sympathy and imagination. By itself freedom leads to a temptation to dominance, even when people recognise that the freedom of others is valuable for their own freedom.
- Freedom is ambiguous. What is it? Does it have limits? What influences our conceptions of freedom?
- Freedom needs to be able to enter into dialogue, and is thus not the entire basis of ethics.
- We need to recognise the consciousness and freedom are not transcendent, they emerge out of interaction in the world. Hence we may need to recognise the nature of that world and its importance, and the importance of ethically oriented relationships with it.
- We still do not have a basis for ethics, even though it is a useful position.
- Ethics is difficult, and political.
- Ethics occurs within dispute, uncertain and ambiguous situations and with uncertain and ambiguous outcomes.
- It appears that we cannot escape these realisations without losing ethical awareness.
Tags: complexity, ethics
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