The Ethics of Ambiguity
Simone de Beauvoir · 1947
"Freedom is not just a fact about human existence but an ethical demand — each person's freedom is bound up with everyone else's, so the existentialist project is not solitary self-creation but willing your own freedom in a way that also wills the freedom of others."
Beauvoir wrote this to answer a real gap in Sartre's Being and Nothingness — if existentialism says we're radically free with no given values, doesn't that make ethics impossible? Her answer: freedom isn't just a private fact about you, it's 'ambiguous' — you're simultaneously a free subject and an object in other people's worlds, and your freedom is only real to the extent it's exercised in a world where others are also free to act. That interdependence is where ethics comes from, not from an external rulebook.
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Existentialism Is a Humanism
"Sartre's central claim, 'existence precedes essence' — humans have no predetermined nature or purpose; we define ourselves entirely through the choices we make, and that total freedom is also total responsibility."