Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity | Existentialism as Philosophy of Ambiguity | Core Concepts

hi this is dr gregory sadler i'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called reason i o where we put philosophy into practice i've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years and i find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated and that's where i come in to help students and lifelong learners i've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to youtube many viewers say they find them useful what you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text i hope you find it useful as well in a work entitled the ethics of ambiguity we can expect that this notion or concept or term ambiguity is going to play a really central role in the work and indeed it does now ambiguity was around for a very long time before debevoir started talking about it other people invoke ambiguity as well in philosophy and even in the existentialist movement so we want to try to provide a preliminary clarification of the term before we jump in and this is particularly important because she is using it in a way that's a little bit different than what you might find if you go to a dictionary definition particularly if your dictionary doesn't have a wide range of definitions because ambiguity originally is viewed as something that is is primarily about language and meaning so it's about expressions that can be interpreted in multiple ways they have more than one sense a prime example of this sometimes we call this equivocation right but ambiguity would be not exactly the same thing as equivocation but could include it if we use the word seal that can mean the animal it can mean the action of sealing something it can mean the stamp that we use to impress on wax and it can mean a british pop singer among other things we might come up with other terms as well so ambiguity can happen at the level of single terms it can happen at the level of entire sentences we can talk about even you know whole chapters of a work being ambiguous particularly if you're not sure precisely what they're referring to hegel's phenomenology is a prime example because he so rarely names names so you're reading through a dialectic and you're like what is this actually referring to i guess it could be this or it could be this think for example about the famous master slave dialectic that has been used like the proverbial wax nose that can be bent in so many different ways to signify so many different things including by de bevoir herself right so there's there's a lot of ambiguity in language but we can also talk about ambiguity within situations how do you read a situation can it be interpreted in more than one way and you know you can think about all the different uh dodges that people have when they get caught oh i wasn't stealing i was putting the money back right you just happened to have caught me as i was getting it out to to you know brush off some dust off of the dollar bills or something like that oh there's more than one reading of the situation obviously one of them is probably false but it is ambiguous right actions what is a person doing this is a fundamental problem in ethics you know when a manual con invokes the maxims of your action you have to be able to say what the maxim is and the same action could be described in in different ways thomas aquinas in the middle ages talked about the need to zero in on the moral species of the action and a similar sort of thing we use the term proper description in the 20th century in analytic philosophy to talk about that motivations a lot of different ways we can interpret the way in which a person talks about themselves what they value you know it's not it's not always so straightforward and simple and then we can also talk about our human condition itself is that perhaps ambiguous or is it you know straightforward and so when something is ambiguous we have the capacity for multiple interpretations and those interpretations can be very crude uh not well thought out they can be very refined very nuanced take other interpretations into account and say why they're bad interpretations but according to de bouvoir ambiguity is something that we we cannot get rid of and as a matter of fact she is going to criticize other philosophers for ignoring the ambiguity of our situation she talks about her human condition as involving tragic ambiguity so here's a good place to go to the text what is this tragic ambiguity well in her first paragraph she describes some of the we could call the modes or high notes of this she says um rational animal thinking read the human beings escape from their natural condition without however freeing themselves from it we are part of this world of which we are a consciousness so we're something within the world but we're also something that discloses that understands the world we assert ourselves as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold you know when we engage in willing and choice in deciding for ourselves but we also experience ourselves as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things so we have the paradox or the problem of you know freedom and and determinism uh at every moment he the person can grasp the non-temporal truth of their existence but between the past which no longer is in the future which is not yet this moment when we exist is nothing this privilege which we alone possess of being a sovereign and unique subject among a universe of objects is what we share with all of our fellow human beings in turn an object for others we are nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which we depend so these are you know some prime aspects of our human condition they're not reducible just to one type of ambiguity this situation is ambiguous in in many ways we could look at a person's action and say is that genuinely a free action or are they being pushed by forces beyond their control or below their level of consciousness or by the way we've nudged them in setting up the situation perhaps one perhaps the other perhaps both you know there's there's all these aspects to the human condition which are you know capable of of multiple interpretations multiple ways of grasping them multiple ways of looking at them this is part of what makes ethics possible in the first place this ambiguity according to devoir so she criticizes philosophers for uh having ignored or having tried to downplay this ambiguity in favor of something else they they didn't just say oh ambiguity get rid of it you know oh it's bad or something like that no they wanted to propose something else in its place so you know she says as long as there have been men and they have lived they felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought most of them have tried to mask it they've striven to reduce mind to matter or to reabsorb matter into mind we have materialism and idealism there right or to merge them within a single substance a kind of monism and these are all reductive or there is a dualism those who have accepted the dualism have established a hierarchy between body and soul which permits of considering as negligible the part of the self which cannot be saved they've denied death either by integrating it with life or promising to man immortality or they've denied life considering it is a veil of illusion beneath which is hidden the truth of nirvana now of course she's getting nirvana a bit wrong there from a buddhist perspective but you understand what she's what she's after there a lot of philosophers responses have been rather reductive and why why be reductive because they don't like the ambiguity that's there and and it's difficult to deal with and it means that everything that you've written is never quite finished so there's a impulse to get rid of it she also criticizes those who attempt to reconcile all of this together she talks about hegel as a prime example right she says before that though she says it's been a matter of eliminating ambiguity by making oneself by working upon oneself by taking a stance on what one is pure inwardness or pure externality by escaping from the sensible world or being engulfed in it by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment so every one of these we could call them speculative choices also has a practical upshot what we do as human beings philosophy is philosophy as a way of life now what else she says hegel with more ingenuity tried to reject none of the aspects of the human condition and to reconcile them all according to his system the moment is preserved in the development of time nature asserts itself in the face of spirit which denies it while assuming it the individual is again found in the collectivity with when within which he is lost and each person's death is fulfilled by being canceled out until she uses capitals life of mankind one can repose in a marvelous optimism and you know she talks about this and this could be an emblem for so many other viewpoints attempting to have like the the system that reconciles everything that makes sense out of everything there are many different varieties of this devoir doesn't want to go that route and she thinks that existentialism as a movement is a refusal of that route and a criticism of that route she says that we should look the truth in the face what is the truth the truth of our tragic ambiguity of the human condition that we're actually caught in and she says that we should assume our fundamental ambiguity and she then she says it's in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting so it's not just about you know managing to find something that'll work for us and continuing on and then stopping thinking after that there's a continual process where we have to reinterpret ambiguity hereby becomes you could say productive and in a certain sense guiding and she talks about existentialism as being from the start from kierkegaard onward a philosophy of existentialism she also you know says well other people say that it's a philosophy of the absurd a philosophy of despair she's going to contest that later on in the work particularly in the section towards the end where she says that ambiguity is not the same thing as absurdity and she's she's uh prioritizing ambiguity and so we can ask about existentialism and notice that there's an ambiguity here as well well is it a philosophy of the absurd and despair or is it a philosophy of ambiguity of hope perhaps or at least a commitment and freedom it's it's up to the existentialists to interpret to decide and not all existentialists will necessarily go the same way de bevoir is trying to provide a reason for why to go her way with this and she begins by talking about sartre her you know lifelong companion and collaborator now interestingly this book is by many viewed as accomplishing what jean-paul sark was unable to pull off and she does in fact criticize being in nothingness a little bit here saying that it's true that in being and nothingness sartre insisted on the abortive aspect of the human adventure it's only in the last pages he opens up the perspective for ethics now opens up the perspective for ethics is not the same thing as provides an ethics right which is what she in fact is attempting to do here in this work so she is completing something that starts in in sart's philosophy you could really say in in their philosophy right so she goes on and she she talks about here we go um sartan being in nothingness fundamentally defined man that being whose being is not to be that subjectivity which realizes itself only as a presence in the world that engaged freedom that surging of the for itself which is immediately given for others right so that already includes a lot of ambiguity how do you what do you make of freedom what do you make of this surge this presence into the world what do you make of the fact that others can interpret you as well that's part of the dynamic that's worked out in sart's uh uh work and and she goes on and and talks about here we go this failure described in being in nothingness right the failure to attain the god-like status or object-like status of being in itself of having attained a completely stable not just identity but read on the world this failure she says is definitive but it is also ambiguous itself the failure is ambiguous the failure involves ambiguity how do you interpret it what do you make of it she says being a man sartre tells us is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being and so what does that mean that's that's a rather ambiguous phrase right there and she tells us that this has metaphysical and i use the word moral here just because i'm thinking of the you know nice way in which these are always tied together in french things there's the reviewed metaphysical morale which was one of the flagship philosophy journals we could say ethical as well um there's there's there's some dimensions to human being that are automatically metaphysical and moral and sart was exploring these in being in nothingness intentionality having some sort of direction towards goals but goals that are not fixed once and for all but goals that we in some respect once we become conscious of ourselves choose whether to keep as goals or whether to move away from as goals what this desire to disclose being right she goes on and says here we go sartre tells us that man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be be being the term in order that clearly indicates intentionality it's not in vain that that human beings nullify being thanks to the human being being is disclosed and humans desire this disclosure there's an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship wanting to be myself but rather wanting to disclose being and she says here there is not failure but rather success but it's it's a success that we don't dominate we don't control in revealing to myself as she says the landscape or in my case revealing to myself this chalkboard filled with notes on something i'm going to talk about but might have forgotten about at this point i'm struggling to make sense of it while i pick up the book and read it i am reinterpreting the situation and i am taking stances existential stances in a rather minor way by by doing so it's not affecting the totality of my life unless i'm investing you know my status as an intellectual at every single point or something like that and there's a few other things that need to be pointed out here that are very uh interesting and important for understanding the scope of ambiguity she talks about uh something that hegel uh brings up and and hegel is not the only philosopher who does this this idea that um you know if everything was solved if everything was clear there really would be no scope for for ethics ethics not understood as just like a set of rules or principles by which we then machine like operate and and solve things ethics understood is a distinctively human activity which involves us in in making choices and not just making choices at a low level but also prioritizing deciding do i think that the categorical imperative that can't put forward is really how i should guide my life i know what will be the case if i choose the categorical imperative provided i'm actually applying it properly and not being sloppy or making exceptions for myself but i don't yet know whether i should follow it or maybe i think i know because my parents were strict conscience and brought me up in that way and you weren't even you know explicit conscience just you know focused on on doing your duty and talked about universalization and not using people so when i read conte i was like this is perfect that from an existentialist perspective is still a choice there's there's still a fundamental ambiguity there involving our freedom involving our capacity to select more than one thing and then zero in on one of them to the exclusion of the others that is part of the ambiguity so the ethical exists for humans who are posed with situations with problems usually problems that are messy usually problems where we're already steering to one side but we're not sure about the things we've left behind so this is very important as well if we try to get rid of all the ambiguity we effectively rule out the ethical the last thing that i want to bring up is her refusal of a certain a priori and this is uh an important uh point in in the work where she's bringing in one of the key themes which is namely that of the freedom of others and whether i am going to be irrevocably opposed to the freedom of others and they to mine or whether it's possible for these to be brought together so she says an ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existence can at the same time be bound to each other that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all now when you look at that sentence it's it's rather confusing the way it's framed what she's saying is that many people do take it as an a priori as something that we just have to accept as given we can't think otherwise that um separate existence can at the same time be bound to each other this is this is what a priori people are denying right there can't be any sort of solidarity there can't be any way in which we can harmonize our freedoms that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all how can you go from the individual to to the uh collective as she's calling it to to you know the universal of human kind and she's saying and she's not saying an ethics of ambiguity is asserting this she's saying it's refusing to deny what is the difference between those it could be that it is the case that you really you can't bring this off we don't know until we try and we discover the truth you might say in a pragmatic way by trying and then reflecting on what our action or its failure has brought about and that is is integral to this this work and that too is part of what she's meaning by ambiguity so we're going way beyond ambiguity is a function of language of you know meaning of phrases to thinking about things that are much closer to who we are as moral and you might say metaphysical beings and so existentialism is going to be a philosophy that takes this this issue this this directive seriously you

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Published: Fri Nov 13 2020