The Ethics Of Ambiguity

In this section, de Beauvoir outlines six different archetypal “ways of being,”from artist to intellectual to nihilist. She finds that certain archetypes reject their freedom and the paradox of existence, while others embrace it. The defining feature of each archetype is largely defined by its relationship to freedom.

De Beauvoir looks at the nature of childhood, again, with an eye toward freedom:

The child’s situation is characterized by his finding himself cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish, which has been fashioned without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit. In his eyes, human inventions, words, customs, and values are given facts, as inevitable as the sky and the trees. This means that the world in which he lives is a serious world, since the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as ready-made things(37).

Children accept everything as truth, and they are therefore enslaved by their facticity. De Beauvoir’s understanding of childhood is crucial, because she goes onto compare lesser-evolved humans to “grown-up children” (40). As the child moves into adolescence, he begins to question the world around him. He wonders why he behaves this way or that, as well as whether the way he behaves is “good” or “bad.” The burden of freedom is not present in children. De Beauvoir contends life is easier as a child: “The misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know its exigencies” (43).

The first of the six archetypes, and the lowest rung on the ladder of all the archetypes, is the “sub-man,” who rejects his freedom. In many ways, he has not matured from childhood (45). The sub-man has “eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire” (45). De Beauvoir then explains why the sub-man behaves in this apathetic way:

This apathy manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies. The sub-man rejects this ‘passion’ which is his human condition, the laceration and the failure of that drive toward being which always misses its goal, but which is there(45).

The sub-man cannot deal with life’s difficulties, and therefore buries his head in the sand. De Beauvoir reaches a grave conclusion about the sub-man, finding him to be a dangerous creature: “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 among the sub-men” (47).

The next of the archetypes is the “serious man,” whose main goal in life is external. Riches, power, station, conquest—he concerns himself with achieving these goals to validate his existence. To De Beauvoir, Christiansand communists both fall into this category. The serious man denies his human freedom and instead devotes his life to a false higher value, what de Beauvoir refers to as an “Idol”:

As soon as the Idol is no longer concerned, the serious man slips into the attitude of the sub-man…As soon as he leaves his staff, the old general becomes dull. That is why the serious man’s life loses all meaning if he finds himself cut off from his ends(55).

De Beauvoir considers the serious man to be another dangerous archetype.

The next two archetypes, “the nihilist” and “the adventurer,” are different sides of the same coin. The nihilist “is conscious of being unable to be anything” and so“decides to be nothing” (56). The adventurer “enjoys action for its own sake” and“finds joy in spreading through the world a freedom which remains indifferent to its content” (62). Both the nihilist and the adventurer are united in rejecting traditional values. Money, wealth, and power have no meaning for them, though their rejection of these values manifest themselves quite differently.

The “independent man” and “the artist” are the final two archetypes. The independent man “understands, dominates, and rejects, in the name of total truth, the necessarily partial truths which every human engagement discloses” (74). The independent man knows that the values the serious man upholds and the sub-man serves are not absolute. Truth is subjective, according to the independent man. The artist, meanwhile, attempts to “pin down existence” through their art “and “make [existence] eternal” (74). De Beauvoir says more about the artistic way of life in Part III, but this archetype, as well as the archetype of the independent man, are closest to the ideals of existentialism.

De Beauvoir’s discussion of archetypes leads her to believe that “passion, pride, and the spirit of adventure” can lead to tyranny, but “existentialist ethics condemns” those practices (77). Existentialism, de Beauvoir emphasizes, is intrinsically concerned with the well-being of others: “How can I worry about what does not concern me? 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” (78).

De Beauvoir also sees existentialism not merely as an abstract philosophy. In existentialism, she sees a practical guide to life that calls for “concrete action,” which can be deemed either morally right or wrong (78). The next section builds upon how and why existentialist ethics call for concrete action in the face of tyranny and oppression.