Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → ethics → existentialism and ethical thought experiments

I recently finished Hazel Barnes’s book An Existentialist Ethics (1967). Barnes wrestles with the question of whether an ethics can be derived from humanistic, atheistic existentialism or whether instead such an existentialism is ethically agnostic or nihilistic, as its critics have often claimed. She argues that there is an existentialist ethics that can be derived from the commandment not to be “in bad faith” combined with some of the philisophical assumptions or conclusions of the existentialist worldview.

Along the way, she compares and contrasts existentialism with a variety of other attempts to cope with the modern condition or come up with new guidelines for living, such as: Ayn Rand’s objectivism, the New Left and so-called American Existentialists of the Norman Mailer school, Eastern religion and Zen in particular, and New Theologians and the later Being-centered work of Heidegger.

She also comes down to earth from time to time and tries to show how one might apply existentialist principles to particular ethical problems or conundrums, such as: how to reform the education system, what to think of the sexual revolution, whether anything matters in the face of our own deaths or of the inevitable death of our universe, and what steps society might reasonably and ethically take to ward off the problems of overpopulation.

I found the book to be thought-provoking throughout, but strongest when Barnes is explaining existentialism and how to derive ethics from it and weakest when she is working through then-hot topics or matching up existentialism against other contenders. Part of this is just the passage of time (I don’t really care what Norman Mailer was on about, and the vital issues of the sexual revolution circa 1967 seem pretty passé today). But part also is that Barnes knows Sartrean existentialism extremely well (and it is Sartre’s existentialism that she means, chiefly, when she writes of existentialism), as it’s the philosophy she lives by, but she only has a tourist’s familiarity with things like Zen or objectivism, so her comparisons reflect this as much as they do the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the respective worldviews.

I like existentialism. It seems to be a strikingly sober and practical point of view, least prone to making stuff up or wishing stuff away. That it has an ethical component doesn’t strike me as particularly controversial, but it was still nice to have someone as methodical and clever as Barnes walk through the steps.

Barnes did seem to have a disturbingly fundamentalist tendency to dismiss challenges to conscious free will. That we have free will is one of the difficult-to-justify leaps of faith existentialism is willing to take, and I don’t have a problem with that. But I think that there are a lot of caveats that you have to attach to the idea of free will to take it seriously today: the various subconscious choices we make and the ways such choices can be manipulated, as demonstrated again and again not just in the anecdotes in the Freudian line but in a multitude of experiments that seem to clearly demonstrate that our conscious, intended, explicit intentions do not tell the whole story of how our choices are made.

Barnes seems afraid to consider this, as though to accept it would be to unravel the whole existentialist project. Existentialism, to her, denies “subconscious choices” and says that the only alternative to choices that are explicit, intended, and conscious are those that are done in willful ignorance, or “bad faith.”

I think she must have backed off from this a bit in later years. In a 1998 commencement address (poignantly flavored throughout with defensiveness against the sad po-mo trends of the time), she set out free will as the first of her guiding principles, and put it this way:

[D]espite all the claims of geneticists and deterministic psychologists, I am convinced that at the core of each individual there is a significant degree of responsible freedom. In the very face of Postmodernist claims that what we fondly call a self is nothing but the reflection of the language of others, I stubbornly maintain that — except perhaps where there has been severe brain damage — we are ultimately free agents. We are not just, as some Marxists say, the product of our product. We are our own product. I do not deny the pressure of all that twists and distorts our life worlds. But in spite of everything, I hold that we make ourselves. This is both the agony and the glory of our existence.

“A significant degree” seems to me to be easier to defend than the absolutism in An Existentialist Ethics, and I don’t think it does any real damage to the existentialist project (the way a complete denial of free will would). An absolutist free will already confronts all sorts of limitations, frustrations, and vicissitudes that make it madly difficult to steer a course — why not add sociobiological nudges and subconscious back-seat drivers to the mix? You still end up having to figure out what to do with the freedom that remains.

I’ve been re-reading The Plague, giving it a closer read this time as I’m going to be facilitating a small discussion group on the book early next month. Today I’ll write up some of what I noticed this time around.

The Plague was published in 1947, but Camus had been working on it throughout the period of the Nazi occupation of Paris, during which he was also for a time the editor of the underground resistance newspaper Combat.

The Plague as Allegory?

The story — about a horrifying plague that traps and butchers the people of a town — suggests a parable about the Nazi scourging of Europe. And it sometimes seems as though that’s more or less what it is. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that’s what Camus had in mind when he began the project: an allegory in the Animal Farm vein (in fact, it would be no waste of time to try unraveling the various animal references in The Plague). But he ended up writing a book that’s more interesting and more difficult.

The plague is a symbol of the fascist catastrophe, and it is also a symbol for something lurking in people that the fascist catastrophe is just one particular eruption of. But the plague is also sometimes simply one particular plague. Sometimes it is also a symbol of, and an example of, the fatal destiny we each share as mortals: the plague is mortality itself. And sometimes I think it is a symbol of the post-God Is Dead, cold, mechanistic universe, the end of traditional ideas of free will and meaning, and the threat of isolation and nihilism that results from this. I could not manage to stick with one of these interpretations from start to finish. I had hop from wire to wire as I read.

So I don’t think it’s best to read the book as a parable about any of those things in particular. The book is called The Plague, but it’s really about the people who confront the plague in various ways. Before the plague, the townspeople live in a “feverish yet casual” way: bored, habitual, commercial, “without intimations” of anything more meaningful. During the plague, people have to more consciously decide how they are going to live and what they are going to value.

Depending on which aspects of these responses Camus wants to highlight from case to case, he makes one or more of the symbolic facets of the plague more prominent. There are four cases in particular that are most-developed and most-interesting: those of Bernard Rieux, Jean Tarrou, Raymond Rambert, and Father Paneloux.

Father Paneloux

Paneloux is a Jesuit — an intellectual, but also a true believer. When the plague begins to strike, he reads it as a warning from God, and sees his task as articulating this warning to the town. He delivers a sermon in which he says God is using the plague as He has used similar calamities in the past — to humble a proud and negligent people into fearing God and renewing their piety.

The plague here represents the problem of evil and Paneloux addresses it in an orthodox way: though the plague seems like an evil thing, it is actually a scourge of wickedness and a goad of faithfulness that will leave things better than they were — in other words, the plague is not evil at all, but actually part of a wholly good divine plan.

Tarrou and Dr. Rieux, both unbelievers, are dismissive of the speech. Tarrou thinks Paneloux is just repeating cant, and if the plague builds to a real disaster, Paneloux will be silenced by the awful reality of it. Rieux says “Christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They’re better than they seem.” He too thinks that should Paneloux turn his face away from doctrine and toward the visceral suffering of plague victims, he would change his tune.

This is indeed what happens, but the tune change is remarkable and unexpected. Paneloux has thrown himself into work with plague sufferers (of this, Rieux remarks: “I’m glad to know he’s better than his sermon”). In one example, which Camus describes particularly thoroughly, the doctors are testing a new serum on a young boy. The treatment seems somewhat promising, but Paneloux, who has been observing the child’s death agonies, says of this: “So if he is to die, he will have suffered longer.” He begs God to spare the child, to no avail.

After the boy dies, Dr. Rieux uncharacteristically blows his cool and confronts Paneloux about how his sermon put the blame for the plague on the townspeople: “That child, anyhow, was innocent.” Paneloux is clearly troubled with the same thought, but in trying to find a way out that preserves his faith, he utters this odd idea: “perhaps we should love what we cannot understand.” (Rieux answers: “I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”)

But Paneloux decides to see how far out on that limb he’s able to go. If the plague cannot be understood to be a good thing as he originally thought, seeing as how it causes such horrible and pointless suffering in the innocent, then the argument in his original sermon is flawed. He composes a second sermon to try to rescue the first one.

In his second sermon, he puts the argument this way: If the universe were comprehensible and just, faith would be easy and of no merit. Because the universe defies comprehension and seems wholly unjust, faith requires you to abandon your aspirations to understand and to judge. Faith requires everything of you: “All or Nothing,” Paneloux says. You have to decide to love God with no hope of understanding Him and with no pretensions to judge aspects of His creation as good or bad. If God wills that an innocent child is to suffer, a Christian must do more than accept it, but must love it and even will it.

This reminds me of Nietzsche’s “amor fati”, and also of Kierkegaard’s infatuation with the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham’s unflinching willingness to sacrifice his son at God’s command was evidence to Kierkegaard that faith requires a “suspension of the ethical” and an answer that is “absolutely either yes or no.”

(William S. Burroughs had a more cynical perspective on the suspension of the ethical that sometimes accompanies religious faith: “Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain’t worth shit — not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.”)

But Paneloux is serious about this: he encourages his listeners to go all the way out on that limb with him, and, privately, he is trying to work out the ramifications. He’s working on an essay titled “Is a Priest Justified in Consulting a Doctor?” and he evidently concludes that the answer is “no.” If God has willed that a Christian be sick, that Christian should adore being sick.

Paneloux soon has an opportunity to put this to the test. He comes down with a newly-developing variant of the plague, refuses medical help or even the comfort of friends, and dies gripping and gazing at a cross.

Raymond Rambert

Rambert first confronts the plague with denial & bargaining. He’s a journalist who happened to be in town on assignment when the plague hit and the town was sealed. His response: “I don’t belong here.” I’m not from this town, its plague is not my plague. He devotes himself to schemes to escape: first exhausting the unhelpful official bureaucracy and then turning to smugglers.

He begins to develop a guilty conscience as he notices Rieux, Tarrou, Paneloux, and others putting their shoulders to the wheel while he plots to get away. He defends himself by explaining that it isn’t cowardice that’s making him want to flee (he says at one point in his defense that he fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War), but his devotion to his wife.

He has decided that only deeds that are motivated by profound emotion are worthwhile. So he is willing to risk everything to be with his wife again, and is left “cold” by the methodical battle against the plague — a calamity that Rambert characterizes as “the same thing over and over again.”

The others don’t press the point. Rieux, in particular, goes out of his way to say that he does not judge Rambert for his choice: “Rambert had elected for happiness, and he, Rieux, had no argument to put up against him. Personally he felt incapable of deciding which was the right course and which the wrong in such a case as Rambert’s.”

But in fact, Rieux is in such a case, and he did decide on a course. Rieux’s wife was out of town when the plague hit, and they have been separated throughout — and nearly unable to communicate because mail between the town and the outside world has mostly stopped. Furthermore, his wife was in poor health when she left to visit a sanitarium. He later says: “For nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves. Yet that is what I’m doing, though why I do not know.” When Rambert eventually learns that Rieux shares his plight, this increases his feelings of guilt.

The night before Rambert is to leave on his long-plotted escape he stays at the home of two accomplices and is left with their mother. Rambert explains to her that he’s leaving in spite of the risk to himself (and possibly to his wife, if he carries the plague with him), because “if he stayed in the town, there was a fair chance of their never seeing each other again.”

The old woman smiled. “Is she nice?”

“Very nice.”

“Pretty?”

“I think so.”

“Ah,” she nodded, “that explains it.”

Rambert reflected. No doubt that explained it, but it was impossible that that alone explained it.

The old woman went to Mass every morning. “Don’t you believe in God?” she asked him.

On Rambert’s admitting he did not, she said again that “that explained it.” “Yes,” she added, “you’re right. You must go back to her. Or else — what would be left you?”

Rambert decides at the last minute to stay and help fight the plague after all. At first, he explains this using the same devotional worldview he had before: “if he went away, he would feel ashamed of himself, and that would embarrass his relations with the woman he loved.”

But Rieux insists that there’s “nothing shameful in preferring happiness” (Rieux has been privately rooting for Rambert’s escape, perhaps as an embodiment of his own path-not-taken). Rambert replies that “it may be shameful to be happy by oneself”:

Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.

I saw Rambert as something like a secular equivalent of Paneloux. Instead of devoting himself to God above all else (including above ethics), he devotes himself to his wife — or perhaps to his devotion to his wife (he notes at one point that he’s become so wrapped up in the quest to get back to her that he’s almost stopped thinking of her). “The old woman” points this out to him: Rambert must go back to his wife because, since he has no god, she’s the only thing that makes anything matter: without her, he’d be adrift, without purpose and a stranger to everyone.

But while Paneloux decided to push on, make his devotion ever more encompassing, and renounce the world, Rambert turns back, decides to take responsibility for the world, and situates his devotion in a worldview that also allows for ethics and camaraderie.

Jean Tarrou

So if Paneloux suspended the ethical in the name of faith, and if Rambert reintegrated the ethical that he’d set aside for chivalric devotion, what happens to the person who puts ethics first from the get-go? You might think: ah-hah! this must be the hero of the story. But Jean Tarrou is a hero with strange quirks and blemishes, and this suggests that Camus was not satisfied with such an ethical response either.

We first encounter Tarrou as an aloof, independent eccentric from out of town. He loves the banality of pre-plague Oran, and how its people are preoccupied with down-to-earth things like business. “The only thing I’m interested in,” he says, “is acquiring peace of mind,” and Oran seems like the place to be for that, at least at first.

He closely observes the townspeople and takes special interest in one who has a habit of going out to his balcony and trying to spit on the cats who gather in the shade underneath.

When the plague first starts to spread, he’s blasé about it, but when someone suggests that this means he’s a “fatalist,” he denies it. (Paneloux had also denied being a fatalist, but corrected this less definitively and more paradoxically, saying that he was instead an “active fatalist.”)

Tarrou meets one of Dr. Rieux’s patients, a man with asthma who spends his days in bed (from choice, not from illness or handicap) marking time by moving dry peas one by one from one pan to another. Tarrou asks himself the bizarre question: “Is he [the patient] a saint?” and answers: “Yes, if saintliness is an aggregate of habits.”

Dr. Rieux tends to mention habits with some contempt. He describes the townspeople as people who from boredom devote themselves “to cultivating habits” — with simple pleasures on the weekends and business during the week. “In the evening, on leaving the office, they forgather, at an hour that never varies, in the cafés, stroll the same boulevard, or take the air on their balconies.”

But to Tarrou, habit is a delightful thing to find: he likes the habit of the man who spits on cats, and he finds the pointless repetitive task of the old asthmatic saintly. When he reflects on Paneloux’s first sermon, he says that such thought is to be expected at the beginning or end of a calamity because “habits have not yet been lost [or] are returning” — in other words, habit is associated with periods of safety and peace.

And yet he’s also troubled by the idea that habit is deadening and breaking a habit can be enlivening. When the plague comes on, he observes “the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every great calamity,” and anticipates that “If the epidemic spreads… we may see again the saturnalia.” Here is an excerpt from his journals:

Query:

How contrive not to waste one’s time?

Answer:

By being fully aware of it all the while.

Ways in which this can be done:

By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.

That reminded me of an earlier incarnation of myself. Before I threw myself into tax resistance, my big interest was “culture jamming” — an intentional violation of habits and expectations as a way of heightening awareness. Here’s how I described it at the time:

For me, it’s all about helping people discover the unwarranted assumptions they’re making, particularly in role-based and mediated social interactions. The assumptions are pointed out by creating a situation in which they are most pointedly invalid or absurd.

A whole lot of the evil of the last century was conducted by people who followed rather sheep-like the twisted consensus reality of their societies. What the trickster does is to find flaws in that consensus reality and to construct creative performances to exploit and uncover those flaws. If this happens enough, perhaps people will come to develop an instinctive distrust of consensus reality and will be more likely to see reality as it is.

For a while, I was advertising meetings of the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission as though it were an avant-garde play in which actors were playing the parts of a government board having a meeting. I don’t know if anyone ever sat through a meeting interpreting it as a piece of theater, but if even one person did, that would be wonderful.

So I began to feel that in Tarrou I’d found something of a kindred spirit, a feeling that increased as the book went on.

As the plague worsens, Tarrou learns that the authorities are considering conscripting people to undertake the various dangerous but necessary tasks involved in combating the spread of the disease. They’re even considering using prisoners for the job. Tarrou instead organizes a voluntary sanitary squad on his own initiative.

When Rieux asks him why he’s taking this on, Tarrou asks Rieux the same question. Rieux tries to articulate an answer, to which Tarrou is largely sympathetic, but when Rieux returns the question, Tarrou answers:

“I don’t know. My code of morals, perhaps.”

“Your code of morals? What code?”

“Comprehension.”

Toward the end of the book, Tarrou is given several pages to explain himself at length, and we learn his backstory. Again he strikes notes that harmonize with my own thinking.

He explains that at an early age he learned that his father was a prosecutor of death penalty cases. His father had invited him to watch a trial at which he successfully condemned a man to death. Tarrou instinctively identified with the condemned man and eventually became unable to live under his father’s roof as a result. He left home and, the disgust at the death penalty still burning in him, joined forces with people throughout Europe fighting to undermine the existing order that justified such things.

But he came to doubt the reasons given by these revolutionaries (or propagandists of the deed or whatever they are; Tarrou is vague on this point) for their own inflictions of death. By supporting these causes, Tarrou inadvertently strengthened the same demon that occupies the executioner. “I came to understand that I… had plague through all those long years in which… I’d believed… I was fighting it… I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people; that I’d even brought about their deaths by approving of acts and principles which could only end that way.”

His comrades disagreed, saying that the killings they carry out are justified, for the usual reasons people give. But Tarrou concluded, and says history proved him right, that this sort of thinking only ends in a “competition who will kill the most.”

As time went on I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live; and that we can’t stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody. Yes, I’ve been ashamed ever since; I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace.

I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken… So that is why I resolved to have no truck with anything which, directly or indirectly, for good reasons or for bad, brings death to anyone or justifies others’ putting him to death.

But this, he says, requires “keep[ing] endless watch” with “a vigilance that must never falter” and can only succeed with “the fewest lapses of attention” — “tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind.” This leads to a “desperate weariness.”

“I know I have no place in the world of today,” Tarrou concludes. “Once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end.” The world of today is a competition between sides that have made murder an indispensable ingredient in their recipes, and they constantly insist that you must choose a side.

Tarrou calls these sides “plagues” and says that rather than choose between plagues, you should remember that there are plagues and also victims, and you should choose with that in mind: “I decided to take, in every predicament, the victims’ side, so as to reduce the damage done.”

Tarrou wants to learn how to be a saint. “Can one be a saint without God?” he asks. But remember the people he’s identified as candidates for sainthood earlier: the old asthmatic counting his peas over and over, and the man who spits on cats from his balcony — social isolates with mostly harmless but pointless habits who do no harm because they do very little at all.

At one point, Tarrou is talking with a scoundrel he’s befriended — Cottard — who, on the run from the law, feeling persecuted and friendless, had attempted to take his own life early in the book. But now that the plague has hit Oran, he begins to blossom: the heat is off, and besides that he no longer feels alone: now everybody is feeling hunted down. He understands people under threat and feels closer to them, though he expresses this in a haughty and grandiose way.

Having heard Cottard express these thoughts, Tarrou answers that in his opinion “the surest way of not being cut off from others was having a clean conscience.” Cottard answers: “If that is so, everyone’s always cut off from everyone else.” In his experience, sharing the experience of looming death brings people together in sympathy, but endeavoring to have our consciences clean toward one another as a precondition for sympathy is a recipe for isolation: a way to wind up hiding in your room counting peas or spitting at cats from a balcony.

Well this hit pretty close to home. I, too, became disgusted at state-sponsored murder, and opted for withdrawal over violent revolution. I am unusually cautious of inadvertently approving of violence by endorsing plans that have murder indelibly dyed into their fabric. And I fret over the remaining ways in which my life is inevitably entwined with violence and other harms, I despair of ever regaining innocence, and I fantasize of ways to approach secular sainthood. I also feel pretty alone in all of this and sometimes find it hard to relate to other people, and even sometimes isolate myself from close relationships because I obsess overmuch on my sins, flaws, and foibles.

Dr. Rieux is a character who runs parallel to Tarrou throughout the book: they share much of the same outlook on what takes place, they are interested in each other and confide in each other, they work closely together and become close friends. But the subtle differences between them suggest ways of overcoming some of the snags Tarrou encounters.

Bernard Rieux

Rieux is a tougher nut for me to crack than the other characters. He narrates the book, which means that there’s more material about his outlook and experiences to draw on, which is both a blessing and a curse. He also hides his role as narrator until the end of the book, a weird decision that makes me somewhat distrustful of what he says. He strikes me as a very good character — if anyone can be said to be the hero of The Plague, it’s him — but most of the story comes from his point of view, and he has a way of dropping things into the narration that reflect well on him, so we have to keep that in mind.

Rieux is a medical doctor, and when the plague comes he begins treating patients and advising on public health strategy without missing a beat. This is his role, his purpose, what he’s prepared for, and he steps right into it without question (though he later allows himself some internal doubts).

He sees himself as a world-weary man of common decency and integrity: “a man who was sick and tired of the world he lived in — though he had much liking for his fellow men — and had resolved, for his part, to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth.”

His response to the plague is methodical. “The thing,” he says, “was to do your job as it should be done.” When the ceaseless grind of dealing with dying people over and over erodes his pity so that he performs emotionlessly — with a “bleak indifference” — he welcomes this as it makes his job easier and more efficient.

Abstraction

As narrator, Rieux reflects on the progress of the plague and on how this affects the people of the town, and a handful of specific people in particular. In one of the more perplexing passages, he compares the divergent choices that he and Rambert have made by saying that Rambert chose “happiness” while he chose “abstraction.” Abstraction? It’s really difficult to know what he means by using that word.

Rambert introduced the term: angrily accusing Rieux of stubbornly sticking to dogmatic principles when Rieux refuses to give Rambert a certificate declaring him plague-free so that he can get out of the city (on the grounds that nobody can guarantee that any of them is plague-free): “You live in a world of abstractions,” Rambert says. But when Rieux turns that term over in his mind, this is what he comes up with:

Could that term “abstraction” really apply to these days he spent in his hospital while the plague was battering the town, raising its death-toll to five hundred victims a week? Yes, an element of abstraction, of a divorce from reality, entered into such calamities. Still when abstraction sets to killing you, you’ve got to get busy with it.

Once the epidemic was diagnosed, the patient had to be evacuated forthwith. Then indeed began “abstraction” and a tussle with the family.… Then came a second phase of conflict, tears and pleadings — abstraction, in a word.…

every evening mothers [of new plague victims] wailed… with a distraught abstraction… Rieux had nothing to look forward to but a long sequence of such scenes, renewed again and again. Yes, plague, like abstraction, was monotonous…

To fight abstraction you must have something of it in your own make-up. But how could Rambert be expected to grasp that? Abstraction for him was all that stood in the way of his happiness. Indeed, Rieux had to admit that the journalist was right, in one sense. But he knew, too, that abstraction sometimes proves itself stronger than happiness; and then, if only then, it has to be taken into account.

So the plague itself is kind of an abstraction because it takes people away from the reality they had grown used to and thrusts them into this alternate plague-reality. It also causes people to distance themselves emotionally and by denial from that new unpleasant reality, another sort of abstraction. Its victims are abstracted from their families and ultimately from the world itself. The mourners become preoccupied — “abstracted” — by their personal grief, and abstract themselves first through bargaining and denial and then by surrendering themselves to overwhelming emotion. Abstraction is also monotonous, potentially strong, and may have murderous intentions.

It’s tough to put all of these puzzle pieces together. Maybe if I knew French better that would help; from the way Camus uses the word “abstraction” it sounds like it shares some overlapping definitions with our “extraction” and “distraction” for instance (though French has those words as well).

At first I thought that Rieux was just being ironic. After all, it is Rambert who is trying to “abstract” himself from town, and trying to insist the plague isn’t his problem but their problem. Meanwhile Rieux is in the trenches. He might be straining the word “abstraction” to the breaking point just to show how inadequate it is as a criticism of his behavior.

But the way he contrasts abstraction and happiness, and often finds himself ambivalent choosing between the two, made me consider another interpretation: happiness requires a sort of egocentric, unquestioning immersion in life — almost like Paneloux’s leap of faith, but in the opposite direction. On the other hand, abstraction is the process of stepping back from life and trying to look at it objectively and see it from other viewpoints. The plague is a kind of abstraction because it forces people to abandon the perspectives from which happiness is available to them in order that they can cope with the crisis, which must be met objectively — this is part of what makes the plague terrible and part of how it torments its victims. Rieux is ambivalent about Rambert’s choice because he can’t decide if Rambert is being irresponsible by not confronting the abstraction of the plague head-on on its own turf or whether Rambert is refusing to be victimized by the plague in this way and so deserves Rieux’s help as an innocent who is under threat. In another context, Rieux (as the narrator) says: “to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness.” Rieux refuses to condemn Rambert’s choice and even gives him help in his plans to escape.

Rieux as Healer

Tarrou at one point asks Rieux: “Why do you yourself show such devotion [to your task], considering you don’t believe in God?” Rieux answers:

…that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God [this is before the second sermon]. And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Providence completely. Anyhow, in this respect Rieux believed himself to be on the right road — in fighting against creation as he found it.

Yes, you’re thinking it calls for pride to feel that way. But I assure you I’ve no more than the pride that’s needed to keep me going. I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment I know this; there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps, they’ll think things over; and so shall I. But what’s wanted now is to make them well. I defend them as best I can, that’s all.

When I entered this profession, I did it “abstractedly,” so to speak; because I had a desire for it, because it meant a career like another, one that young men often aspire to. Perhaps, too, because it was particularly difficult for a workman’s son, like myself. And then I had to see people die. Do you know that there are some who refuse to die? Have you ever heard a woman scream “Never!” with her last gasp? Well, I have. And then I saw that I could never get hardened to it. I was young then, and I was outraged by the whole scheme of things, or so I thought. Subsequently I grew more modest. Only, I’ve never managed to get used to seeing people die. That’s all I know. Yet after all… since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence?”

Tarrou says that the doctor is doomed never to win his battle. Rieux agrees: “A never ending defeat” he calls it, but says “it’s no reason for giving up the struggle.”

“Who taught you all this, Doctor?”

The reply came promptly:

“Suffering.”

Compare this to Tarrou’s one-word answer when he’s first called on to explain why he is also devoting himself to fighting the plague: “Comprehension.” But toward the end of the book, when Rieux asks him what he thinks the way to peace is, Tarrou replies that he thinks it’s “the path of sympathy,” which suggests that maybe he’s been studying, admiring, and learning from Rieux all along.

Heroism and Ignorance

But to turn this simple intellectual/emotional dichotomy on its head, Rieux goes on a strange digression in which he puts forward a kind of Platonic argument that evil is a form of ignorance:

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is that that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Those, like himself, Tarrou, and others, who risk their lives to fight the plague, Rieux thinks, are not being heroic, but are just seeing things as they are and making a cold objective calculation of what needs to be done.

If there was a hero to be found during the plague, Rieux thinks, it was probably Monsieur Grand.

Joseph Grand

At the beginning of the novel, Rieux (as narrator) describes Grand as “tall and drooping, with narrow shoulders, thin limbs, and a yellowish mustache” as well as “big, protruding ears” and a weak constitution, “lost in the garments that he always chose a size too large, under the illusion that they would wear longer,” with none of his upper teeth left so that when he smiled “his mouth looked like a small black hole into his face.”

He “seemed always to have trouble in finding his words,” which is a funny observation because it later turns out that this meek clerk has been trying to write a great novel in his spare time, but because of his perfectionist aspirations (and the fact that he doesn’t have much of a way with words in the first place), he’s never gotten past rewriting and rewriting the first sentence trying to get it right.

“[I]n short, he had all the attributes of insignificance.”

But although a meek, mousy, hesitant, somewhat comic figure, he has a wholehearted, unquestioning acceptance of “common decency” that Rieux admires.

From this angle, the narrator [Rieux] holds that, more than Rieux or Tarrou, Grand was the true embodiment of the quiet courage that inspired the sanitary groups. He had said yes without a moment’s hesitation and with the large-heartedness that was a second nature with him. All he had asked was to be allotted light duties: he was too old for anything else. He could give his time from six to eight every evening [after his clerk’s job]. When Rieux thanked him with some warmth, he seemed surprised. “Why, that’s not difficult! Plague is here and we’ve got to make a stand, that’s obvious. Ah, I only wish everything were as simple!”

Yes, if it is a fact that people like to have examples given them, men of the type they call heroic, and if it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a “hero,” the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal.

During the plague period, Rieux and Tarrou behave and express themselves in very similar ways: it can be difficult to distinguish their outlooks and the motivations behind the choices they make. But a big difference is that Tarrou sees his actions as part of a long-term project of attempted saintliness, which he seems to imagine will conclude in a withdrawal from the world’s morally-ambiguous decisions into a life of harmless triviality. Tarrou doesn’t think the world offers a “normal” to return to. To him, the plague, metaphorically, will always be with us. Rieux on the other hand sees the plague as an interruption, and has no aspirations for sainthood: he just wants to go back to being a man who lives more or less as other men do and gets pleasure out of life.

When Rieux and Tarrou discuss this, Tarrou concludes: “Yes, we’re both after the same thing, but I’m less ambitious.” Rieux at first thinks he’s being sarcastic, since being a saint is a more ambitious goal than being ordinary, but he sees that Tarrou is in earnest. I think Tarrou must have meant that Rieux, with his desire to return to a plague-free normality, is the ambitious one.

This helps explain what Rieux sees in Grand: a kindred spirit, who also wants to fight this finite plague to the finish so he can get back to living his life and pursuing his happiness (getting that opening sentence just right).

In Conclusion

There’s so much more going on in this book besides, so may other threads to pull and speculations to follow. Camus said that people today “have had to forge for themselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.” The Plague makes for a wonderful focus of meditation to help us in this task, and, should you discover that you are living in a time of pestilence, you will probably be glad if you have spent some time wrestling with it.

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“The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.” ―Simone de Beauvoir

Existentialism had an ethics problem, that is to say it inherited an ethics problem that had been festering since antiquity.

Particularly in the period after World War Ⅱ, existentialism appeared to be taking questions of ethics very seriously — to be a philosophy that was earnestly grappling with responsibility, value, conscience, taking sides, and the like — and yet if you tried to pin it down about what its ethics were based on, or which particular ethical decisions were the right ones and why, you were likely to run into a lot of obscure hand-waving.

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity attempts to make existentialist ethics intelligible — and to refute the caricature that since to an existentialist nothing is true and there is no God, everything is permitted and anyone’s values are as good as any others. Today I’m going to see if I can summarize this book, largely as an exercise in trying to understand it better myself.

De Beauvoir starts off by describing our delicate position. We want to be in the way that the objects around us exist, but instead we seem to be made of ephemeral stuff, becoming and evaporating, dangerously able to be first one way and then another at whim without any core identity to call our own.

To the extent we ever succeed in having a being, it is only in retrospect: we look back at the decisions we make and see patterns that resolve into virtues like patience, courage, or fidelity.

Our existence that strives for being and perpetually fails is a way of describing human freedom. Because we cannot successfully resolve it into something more solid, our best choice is to embrace this never-ending failure and choose it as our life-long path, acknowledging that our natural home is in this constant unresolved striving. This choosing of freedom is, according to de Beauvoir, the cornerstone of existentialist ethics.

Other possible choices include suicide, which has its obvious drawbacks, and various forms of dishonest hiding from our freedom: such as making believe that we have solidified into a being and that our choices are determined by this being’s nature, not chosen by us.

If you decide that your choices are not yours to make, that they don’t matter (or more precisely, that they don’t matter to you), you are acting in “bad faith” in existentialist terminology. De Beauvoir identifies this with the origin of evil because dishonest decisions are decisions nonetheless and they betray your values rather than represent them.

“Not only do we assert that the existentialist doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears to us as the only philosophy in which an ethics has its place.”

Part Ⅱ

In Part Ⅱ of Ethics of Ambiguity, de Beauvoir takes a closer look at temptation.

We start in the innocence of childhood. As children, we at first believe that grown-ups have got it all figured out, and that we too will eventually emerge from the chrysalis as fully-formed beings. As human larvae, we feel that our choices have no real significance — everything important about the world and our place in it was established before we got here, and we have merely to grow into our place and understand our part. Adults seem to have no trouble instinctively identifying certain of our behaviors as “bad” or “good,” and we expect that we too will grow to develop this sixth sense.

But in adolescence doubt creeps in. This sixth sense fails to develop, and there are hints that the grown-ups might be faking it. It dawns on children that they are not simply going to fit into a place ready-made for them, but that they will have to forge themselves into something of their own choosing. Different children confront this emerging awareness with different levels of generosity, good will, and attentiveness; those traits in turn emerge as vitality, intelligence, and sensitivity; and those virtues shape the values and goals that the child ends up choosing in their project of attempted becoming.

But there’s always the temptation to back away from this frightening project with its existential vertigo. The child is frequently invited to instead adopt ready-made values and roles and to lay down the burden of choosing his or her own. These ready-made values de Beauvoir calls “serious” values. To the serious world, people do not have to choose values and roles because these already exist for everyone: they are to be discovered, not invented, and the initial discovery has already been made.

People who give into this temptation to adopt the serious values without choosing their own never mature. They become “sub-men,” and they are worthy of contempt because they have chosen not to choose, have freely denied their freedom. They are also 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 among the sub-men. This is why every man who wills himself free within a human world fashioned by free men will be so disgusted by the sub-men.

“Serious” people never abandoned the illusion of finding those permanent, real, universal values that they assumed as children would eventually be revealed to them. Part of what makes serious people dangerous is that they don’t make much of an effort to choose wisely which values to subordinate themselves to: this is because it’s not the particular values they care about, but the ability to use those values to relieve them from the burden of choosing and being responsible for their own choices.

Unless you are actually in a hopelessly subordinate political position (such as a prisoner, slave, or schoolchild), you are not actually forced to adopt serious values as your own. The attempt by serious people to deny their freedom doesn’t actually work; the best you can do is to make-believe it’s working: You constantly choose the serious values and constantly pretend that it’s the values doing the choosing, not you.

Some people stick with serious values because the only alternative they can imagine is a nihilism in which there are no values at all. But de Beauvoir says that in fact nihilism is itself a form of seriousness — “disappointed seriousness which has turned back upon itself.” Whereas serious people pretend to find values written on the fabric of the universe and so give up on the frightening project of choosing the values they will live by; nihilists pretend that when they discovered there are no such ready-made values they also discovered an excuse for not having to choose any values whatsoever.

The serious and the nihilist also can form an alliance of sorts. Serious people can use nihilist arguments to deny the existence or validity of competing values, thereby further insulating themselves from having to question the serious values they have chosen to hide behind.

Heretics are also not the opposite of seriousness so much as they are equal and opposite forms of seriousness. So for instance Ayn Rand’s iconoclastic attacks on altruism were in the service of her own serious virtue of selfishness. Anton LaVey’s church of Satan, or (de Beauvoir’s example) Baudelaire’s contempt for churchly morality are mirror-images of what they oppose, and only survive with reference to their opposing seriousnesses.

It’s only existentialism, and not any of these things, that really drives a stake into the heart of seriousness.

But there are also some other, more subtle ways in which people can go astray:

For example, the man who gives himself to a cause which he knows to be lost chooses to merge the world with one of its aspects which carries within it the germ of its ruin, involving himself in this condemned universe and condemning himself with it. Another man devotes his time and energy to an undertaking which was not doomed to failure at the start but which he himself is bent on ruining. Still another rejects each of his projects one after the other, frittering them away in a series of caprices and thereby systematically annulling the ends which he is aiming at.

This adoption of values that are null-values was taken to artistic extremes (or perhaps was well-satirized) by Dadaism. (Post)modern deconstructionism strikes me as a more earnest and more ridiculous version of this same pathology.

Another dodge is that of the “adventurer” — “He throws himself into his undertaking with zest, into exploration, conquest, war, speculation, love, politics, but he does not attach himself to the end at which he aims; only to his conquest.”

Adventurers have almost figured it out. “[I]f existentialism were solipsistic, as is generally claimed, it would have to regard the adventurer as its perfect hero.” Adventurers do not deny their freedom, but this “freedom… [is] indifferent to its content.”

Adventurers are dangerous, too, because their grand plans (sometimes with hidden “serious” goals like fame and fortune) encourage them to seek out and make alliances with sources of concentrated power. How do you raise an army to become the Napoleon of your dreams without becoming symbiotic with a tyrannical state?

De Beauvoir asserts that the adventurer fails because freedom cannot genuinely be exercised with indifference to its effects on other free people. Unfortunately, this assertion, which seems so crucial to de Beauvoir’s purpose, isn’t justified so much as it is presented as self-evident. Sounding suspiciously like a “serious” person, de Beauvoir says “the freedom of other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it a content. Beyond the rejected seriousness is found a genuine seriousness.” But what makes this seriousness “genuine” and how do we know this — where does this “law” come from? De Beauvoir does not yet say.

The “passionate man” tries another mode of false freedom. Whereas to the adventurer it’s all about the doing, without regard of what is getting done to, the passionate man puts some object on a pedestal, wraps it in subjective robes, and then worships it as a sort of private altar. Like the case of the adventurer, the passionate man almost gets it right — he correctly sees himself as what creates values, but he incorrectly deifies those values and locks himself inside of them, excluding everyone else from a weird, private world.

The passionate man is unpleasantly monomaniacal: “The whole universe is perceived only as an ensemble of means or obstacles through which it is a matter of attaining the thing in which one has engaged his being.” And for this reason also, the passionate man can be dangerous: “If the object of his passion concerns the world in general, this tyranny becomes fanaticism.”

The passionate man is less in love with what he values than with his valuing, and so he does not really respect others’ freedom but instead sees others as obstacles or means-to-an-end (as with the adventurer) or as idols.

But it’s risky and frightening to try to live out your own free life and also to affirm the freedom of those around you. It’s mind-bogglingly complex and full of possibilities for hurtful failure.

Another way to try to escape from this complexity is the path of the “intellectual.” Intellectuals, “instead of building their existence upon the indefinite unfolding of time, propose to assert it in its eternal aspect and to achieve it as an absolute [and] thereby, to surmount the ambiguity of their condition.” The intellectual tries to stand outside of messy reality and to adopt a point of view where it can be viewed objectively. But this disengagement is ultimately impossible — we are hopelessly entangled with the reality we perceive and cannot successfully adopt as our defining worldview an “objective” one.

The “artist” tries another approach. Rather than trying to transform their own ephemeral existences into concrete beings, artists try to capture existence itself into lasting works of art — to give form to the churning maelstrom of becoming or to commemorate the ongoing project of existence. But the artist can fall into the same trap as the passionate man if art becomes an idol.

There are many varieties of tempting evasions like these, but when it comes right down to it:

There is no way for a man to escape from this world. It is in this world that — avoiding the pitfalls we have just pointed out — he must realize himself morally. Freedom must project itself toward its own reality through a content whose value it establishes. An end is valid only by the freedom which established it and which willed itself through this end. But this will implies that freedom is not to be engulfed in any goal; neither is it to dissipate itself vainly without aiming at a goal.

De Beauvoir then tries to explain more carefully why it is that the values and projects we choose must take into account other freedoms like our own, and must respect, choose, and defend those freedoms as freedoms. In part, she does this by imagining the solipsistic worlds the adventurer, passionate man, intellectual, artist, and so forth try to retreat into as though they really were worlds empty of other free individuals worthy of consideration: who would the adventurer be trying to impress? what would the passions of the passionate man be any good for? who would admire the profundities of the intellectual or the achievements of the artist? “If I were really everything there would be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. There would be nothing to possess, and I myself would be nothing.”

So: “Man can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men.” And thus ethics is necessary, and is necessary to the existentialist project.

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. But the others are separate, even opposed, and the man of good will sees concrete and difficult problems arising in his relations with them.

Part Ⅲ

In part Ⅲ, de Beauvoir tries to make clearer what “this positive aspect of morality” entails.

She reiterates that we must avoid the temptation to look at life purely aesthetically — to contemplate it from without as though it were a finished thing being presented to us for our appreciation. Life must be lived actively, and contemplated only retrospectively: “the present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action… to put oneself ‘outside’ is still a way of living the inescapable fact that one is inside; those French intellectuals who, in the name of history, poetry, or art, sought to rise above the drama of the age, were willy-nilly its actors; more or less explicitly, they were playing the occupier’s game.”

Although its critics accuse existentialism of demanding that we urgently make choices without giving us any guidance as to how or what for, de Beauvoir insists that the same freedom that prompts our need to choose also gives us the primary value our choices ought to defend: freedom against the oppressor and against ideologies that bolster oppression. “To want existence, to want to disclose the world, and to want men to be free are one and the same will” — “the supreme end at which man must aim is his freedom, which alone is capable of establishing the value of every end.”

Oppressive ideologies rarely forthrightly demand the “freedom” to oppress; after all, if the oppressor were really concerned with freedom, he or she would want to defend it for everyone. Instead the oppressor usually shows him or herself to be trapped in a mistake of seriousness: “rather than make an unvarnished demand for freedom to oppress he is more apt to present himself as the defender of certain values. It is not in his own name that he is fighting, but rather in the name of civilization, of institutions, of monuments, and of virtues which realize objectively the situation which he intends to maintain.”

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word “useful” an absolute meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.

…if one wishes to give the word useful a universal and absolute meaning, it is always a question of reabsorbing each man into the bosom of mankind…

De Beauvoir says that although the genuine interests of the oppressors lie in freedom for everybody, there’s little hope of convincing them of that. She dismisses the idea of a Gandhian conversion of the oppressor:

In order for a liberating action to be a thoroughly moral action, it would have to be achieved through a conversion of the oppressors: there would then be a reconciliation of all freedoms. But no one any longer dares to abandon himself today to these Utopian reveries. We know only too well that we can not count upon a collective conversion.

Instead we must bite the bullet, dehumanize the oppressors so as to treat them merely as obstacles, and crush them. If you are not the unflinching enemy of the oppressor, you become an unwitting collaborator. It’s just an unpleasant fact “that one finds himself forced to treat certain men as things in order to win the freedom of all.”

And it’s even worse than this. It’s one thing to be forced to acknowledge forthright oppressors as subhuman things — “[a] freedom which is occupied in denying freedom is itself so outrageous that the outrageousness of the violence which one practices against it is almost canceled out” — but it’s another thing to practice violence against good people who get in your way. Apparently, though, this is a necessary thing as well:

In order to win an urgent victory, one has to give up the idea, at least temporarily, of serving certain valid causes; one may even be brought to the point of fighting against them. Thus, during the course of the last war, no Anti-fascist could have wanted the revolts of the natives in the British Empire to be successful; on the contrary, these revolts were supported by the Fascist regimes; and yet, we can not blame those who, considering their emancipation to be the more urgent action, took advantage of the situation to obtain it. Thus, it is possible, and often it even happens, that one finds himself obliged to oppress and kill men who are pursuing goals whose validity one acknowledges himself.

Even worse, sometimes you have to consider your allies and even yourselves to be mere things — mere armaments to be deployed against the freedom-threatening foe.

“Thus one finds himself in the presence of the paradox that no action can be generated for man without its being immediately generated against men.” This paradox is so unpalatable that those who undertake it often lie to themselves about what they are doing. They make up euphemisms for the sacrifices they demand, they create a seriousness out of their cause and subordinate individual people to it.

Given that the world is messy, and that “in order to serve some men we must do disservice to others[, b]y which principle are we to choose between them?” De Beauvoir seems here to revert to a run-of-the-Mill utilitarianism, but with existentialist freedom in the place of the ultimate good. If we are genuinely and with good will trying to attain this good, we are justified in sacrificing the freedom of the few for the freedom of the many, or the less freedom-enhancing person for the more freedom-enhancing person, and so forth.

Is this just another form of the catastrophic utopian ends-justify-the-means thinking that has led to so many horrors? Not so quick: “The means, it is said, will be justified by the end; but it is the means which define it, and if it is contradicted at the moment that it is set up, the whole enterprise sinks into absurdity.” In other words: “Since the liberation aimed at is not a thing situated in an unfamiliar time, but a movement which realizes itself by tending to conquer, it cannot attain itself if it denies itself at the start; action can not seek to fulfill itself by means which would destroy its very meaning.” For example:

[T]he attitude of England in regard to Spain, Greece, and Palestine is defended with the pretext that she must take up position against the Russian menace in order to save, along with her own existence, her civilization and the values of democracy; but a democracy which defends itself only by acts of oppression equivalent to those of authoritarian regimes, is precisely denying all these values; whatever the virtues of a civilization may be, it immediately belies them if it buys them by means of injustice and tyranny.

And also, in more stark rejection of purely utilitarian calculations:

[W]e condemn a magistrate who handed over a communist to save ten hostages and along with him all the Vichyites who were trying “to make the best of things:” it was not a matter of rationalizing the present such as it was imposed by the German occupation, but of rejecting it unconditionally. The resistance did not aspire to a positive effectiveness; it was a negation, a revolt, a martyrdom; and in this negative movement freedom was positively and absolutely confirmed.

In general, “[t]hose who project themselves toward a Future-Thing and submerge their freedom in it find the [deceptive] tranquility of the serious.” We instead have to accept that conflict will always be with us, and so we cannot justify our choices today by weighing them, Pascal’s wager style, against an infinitely just and peaceful future kingdom. “The tasks we have set up for ourselves… must find their meaning in themselves and not in a mythical Historical end.”

This also means we can reject the excuse for injustice that says that because we live in exceptional times, we must adopt measures that could not be justified otherwise. These times of conflict and injustice are normal times, and if we cannot justify our actions without resort to exceptions we cannot justify them at all.

On the one hand we have to aim towards a future project that we may never live to see realized, and on the other hand we must not expect the success of that future project to retroactively justify the choices we make today. And we must also occasionally pause to respect that if we are fighting for freedom to live, we ought occasionally to take our eyes off of our future goals and enliven the present moment which does belong to us — to prove that we know what we are fighting for. “[T]he movement toward freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into pleasure, into happiness.… If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way.”

“That is the reason,” de Beauvoir writes, “societies institute festivals whose role is to stop the movement of transcendence, to set up the end as an end.”

That is the modern meaning of the festival, private as well as public. Existence attempts in the festival to confirm itself positively as existence. That is why, as Bataille has shown, it is characterized by destruction; the ethics of being is the ethics of saving: by storing up, one aims at the stationary plenitude of the in-itself, existence on the contrary, is consumption; it makes itself only by destroying; the festival carries out the negative movement in order to indicate clearly its independence in relationship to the thing: one eats, drinks, lights fires, breaks things, and spends time and money; one spends them for nothing. The spending is also a matter of establishing a communication of the existants, for it is by the movement of recognition which goes from one to the other that existence is confirmed; in songs, laughter, dances, eroticism, and drunkenness one seeks both an exaltation of the moment and a complicity with other men.

The foundation of a mature ethics is a situation de Beauvoir calls “ambiguity.” We can never learn the meaning of existence, but must always be in the progress of generating this meaning, a process that never reaches its goal. In this way, “through failure and outrageousness,” we save our existence. “Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art. One can merely propose methods.”

Revolt against injustice is the purest form of action (its positive counterpart, establishing justice, is messier and more compromised).

We ought to strive not to do what we think is best for people, but to free people to seek out what they feel is best for themselves. Paternalistic coercion (except with actual children or in certain other limited circumstances) is unwise: considering that we each save our existences through failure and outrageousness, “[t]o want to prohibit a man from error is to forbid him to fulfill his own existence, it is to deprive him of life.” While “the good of an individual or a group of individuals requires that it be taken as an absolute end of our action[, ] we are not authorized to decide upon this end a priori.” Every case is a unique case, and you cannot simply use a formula.

The fact is that no behavior is ever authorized to begin with, and one of the concrete consequences of existentialist ethics is the rejection of all the previous justifications which might be drawn from the civilization, the age, and the culture; it is the rejection of every principle of authority. To put it positively, the precept will be to treat the other… as a freedom so that his end may be freedom; in using this conducting wire one will have to incur the risk, in each case, of inventing an original solution.

Conclusion

This is the second time I’ve tried to read The Ethics of Ambiguity. It’s not easy reading. Maybe it’s the translation, or maybe it’s the way people philosophize in French, but there’s a lot of stuff that seems unnecessarily obscure. It also doesn’t seem particularly rigorous to me. I tried to read it as an argument, and I think I should have tried to read it as more of an impressionistic vision.

I thought the first two parts of the book were the strongest, where de Beauvoir describes our precarious position, the various ways we try to hide from it, and the development of our sense of existential vertigo as we emerge from childhood.

I had a hard time distinguishing de Beauvoir’s chosen prime directive in a coherent way from the other “serious” values she criticizes, and an even harder time unraveling the utilitarian means she sometimes advocates from those she harshly criticizes.

But it may just be a fact about the world that ethics is messy and resists systematization, and books that try to tidy and systematize it must necessarily have a lot of loose ends.