Coping With Existentialist Ambiguity
Posts in this series. Please read this first, at least the section on ambiguity.
Preface
The point of this series is to examine The Ethics Of Ambiguity by the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir as a reaction, in part, to the horrors of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. My hope is that we can learn something that will help understand and possibly to derail the drive towards fascism by the Trump Administration.
Existentialism’s core principle is radical freedom accompanied by radical responsibility. In Chapter 2 de Beauvoir shows how people become conscious of their freedom, starting with childhood. She then gives some examples of how people respond to their awareness of that freedom.
I think it helps us to understand this material to think about how it applies to people we know or know about, whether from real life or from books or from the internet.
The origins of awareness of freedom
De Beauvoir starts with a discussion of childhood. She says the child experiences the adult world as a given, a fixed and immutable environment, just like a stage set. The child is expected to take a specific role in that world, a place that is stable and certain. The rules and goals are set by the adults in the child’s world.
At the same time, at play and with its peers the child experiences a completely free world. It is open to all possibilities, even those beyond the child’s physical limits. It’s as if the child is free in a room, with walls, ceilings and floors that protect it from actual danger. Adults provide shelter and safety to go with that apparently unlimited freedom.
As the child grows older, it begins to notice that adults aren’t statues, that they aren’t gifted with perfect foresight, that they make mistakes, and that they say things are one way when the child sees that they are another. At this point the child begins to see that the world is not a given, that it is made by other people and begins to realize it will have to take a role in that making. This can be traumatic.
… [I]t is not without great confusion that the adolescent finds himself cast into a world which is no longer ready-made, which has to be made; he is abandoned, unjustified, the prey of a freedom that is no longer chained up by anything. P. 39.
It is in this moment, says de Beauvoir, that we have to form our own justifications and take responsibility for our actions. At this moment we cross into the plane of morality.
In the next section, de Beauvoir discusses some of the possible responses the newly aware person might have to the moral questions presented by thee discoveries.
Responses to freedom
Infantile people. De Beauvoir says that some people are not allowed to make this transition. She gives two examples. First she talks about certain of the people enslaved in the US Antebellum South who have not “raised themselves to consciousness” of their enslavement (p. 37).
Second, she talks about women who do not separate themselves from the domination of men. Many, she says, were trained from birth to accept it, for religious or cultural reasons, and do not have the means of forming a different view.
In these examples, the person remains in an infantile state, unable to recognize either their own freedom or their responsibility.
Sub-men. Sub-men are people who blind and deafen themselves against consciousness of their freedom. De Beauvoir thinks the underlying problem is fear of existence and a desire to hide from it. Sub-men experience only a dull pointless world, which hands them no reason to exist, and they refuse to use their freedom to create their own justifications, their own reasons for living. They demonstrate the absurd facticity of a creature in the shape of a human but without the fundamental will to exist that drives the fully human person.
De Beauvoir thinks that other people respond to the sub-man with contempt, recognizing the indifference to freedom and responsibility as a failure of human existence. But sub-men are dangerous:
He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody can get control of. 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. P. 44.
Serious people
Sub-men have not connected with the world or with other people, and have no way to deal with the future. It seems dark and foreboding, full of unknown but real terrors. That forces some of them to realize that the source of their anguish is awareness of their freedom. To solve that terror they grab hold of the solutions that society gives them, abandoning their freedom for the comfort of a fixed existence. These are the serious people.
The givens that governed serious people as children, adjusted for adulthood, become real things, so that their freedom and responsibility, which should be the drivers of individual action, are replaced by aggressive rule-following. The goals of the given norms are absolute ends for these people.
This state of being is justified in people described above as infantile, people with no real choice. In the same way, those with little ability to act on the world are more likely to move toward this state. Such people still have access to their own freedom, even though it may be difficult to achieve it.
Those who havve the intellectual and material means to accept their freedom but choose to subject themselves to the givens of their societies become slaves of the ends those givens dictate
I read this as saying that these givens are of human construction built for an earlier time by earlier humans. It’s one thing to accept them provisionally, and to adjust them as circumstances reveal their imperfections, but another to adhere to them rigidly, surrendering your personal freedom to other people with different experiences and unstated purposes.
De Beauvoir thinks this is dangerous because serious people ignore their own subjectivity; but more importantly because they ignore the subjectivity of other people. They are self-righteous in pushing the thing to which they have subjected themselves onto other people, tyrannically hammering them into submission.
She gives examples: the Inquisition; vigilantes lynching Black people in the US; and “…the political fanaticism which empties politics of all human content and imposes the State, not for individuals, but against them.” P. 50.
Discussion
1. As usual, this is a skeleton of de Beauvoir’s thinking, emphasizing the parts that seem relevant to the goal of understanding our current situation. There are other responses to freedom, followed by a discussion of the importance of other people which I will take up in the next posts in this series.
2. De Beauvoir starts her analysis with a discussion of the growing child. Other philosophical theories seem to start with the fully developed adult, as if we came into the world fully formed. Perhaps it helps that de Beauvoir didn’t think of herself as a philosopher, but as a more general thinker.
———-
The featured image is my photo of a work by Trevor Paglen titled De Beauvoir (Even the dead are not safe) Eigenface (Colorized), part of an exhibition titled The World Through AI at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Obviously, Simone was cataloging the personalities she may have been encountering during war torn Europe. Oddly, I have read that she was very controversial; allegations of sexual abuse, grooming teenage girls.
She obviously had to deal with people as a teacher and intellectual associated with Jean-Paul. The Serious Person character, probably was what she was constantly debating with, openly.
Understanding child development during her lifespan probably was exhausting for her or anyone. What she expresses is the basis for all true instructional endeavor; internal and external awareness. Basically, all of us learn skills based on the premise of internal and external awareness. There is no way around this understanding, it is fact. We learn to read based upon our internal voice reading, and external voice reading to others. All skills basically translate to adjusting our internal mental state to an external situation. The opposite is true to. We adjust the external to meet the needs of our internal state.
I am stunned that she understood child development. Laughingly, I am stunned that anyone does.
Living in 2025, explaining the above to anyone is profoundly difficult. Especially to a Serious Person. I can only imagine the reception she got back then. She had strength and courage.
This is rather remarkable. It is the sum of my life thus far that I never could quite quantify. That she begins in early childhood is of immense importance.
Fascinating. Thank you for this thought-provoking piece.
How is it possible for a slave to be unaware of his enslavement? Any slave can see that his “master” is not enslaved. Seems to me they were acutely aware but also aware that questioning or resisting resulted in punishment. Learned helplessness, yes. But unaware? I don’t see how.
MAGA’s favorite tool of oppression is Christianity. Which blows my mind because even the most submissive MAGA can see how Trump breaks all the rules. Somehow they’ve fooled themselves into believing that Trump is exempt because “God works in mysterious ways.”
“How is it possible for a slave to be unaware of his enslavement?”
They weren’t; the enslaved were wholly aware of their enslavement except when they had inadequate access to information (think of the continued enslavement after the Emancipation Proclamation up to June 19th in Texas). You know this. But you’ve also had the benefit of an education that assured you’d know this. De Beauvoir was both lacking in that education AND lacking intellectual rigor to question what she understands about enslaved persons’ lived experience. It’s this education now under attack by Trump’s Project 2025; we are supposed to assume the enslaved don’t know what’s good for them, by extension.
I cut de Beauvoir a small amount of slack here only to the extent that we don’t know exactly what she wrote in French versus what is being read in English, and both her translator and any editor also contributed to the book directly or indirectly.
As for MAGA’s use of Christianity as a cudgel: their flawed education and experience (based in no small part on GOP defunding public education for decades) tells them Christianity is oppressed and they must fight back by suppressing others. It’s part of DARVO at societal scale, the inversion of victim-abuser.
The belief that one is a part of an oppressed minority is central to Christianity, going all the way back to its earliest years. It has not mattered how big and powerful Christianity has become, its believers have always nourished themselves on believing they are cruelly bounded and hounded, beset on all sides by those who seek their destruction as they await eventual but certain rescue by their god.
Their need to believe themselves to be the oppressed minority is so powerful, so essential to their existence, that they will fracture, as they have done countless times, into sects that will oppose each other sometimes as their primary enemies.
This fractal splitting and off-shooting and growth seems almost biological, inevitable, and irresistible. Without this process — the mustard seed, as it were, from which grew this huge and convoluted faith — it seems likely Christianity could well have become some minor or even forgotten creed, known only to historians and specialists of similar stripe.
Biggest religion across Europe in 11-13th centuries, big enough that it felt it could take on Islam during the Crusades. Nah. I don’t buy that Christianity has always thought of itself as oppressed; it’s done its best to oppress other faiths and other points of view instead of following Christ’s teachings.
I had never thought of it this way. It has always seemed odd to me that Christians who are the. majority in the US need to playact ‘oppression’ — but I can remember teaching college students in the 60s who described any push back in the classroom from other students as ‘persecution’; don’t agree with my cult fundamentalist doctrine — I am being persecuted. The concepts of religious freedom or freedom of expression make no sense to people who think like this.
There is an excellent explanation of why groups break off into smaller groups by Robin Dunbar in his book Gossip, Grooming, and The Evolution of Language.
There is another excellent book by Catherine NIxey addressing the rise of Christianity and its dark side after its birth in her book The Darkening Age.
Very interesting and thought-provoking, thank you. A typo: Trevor Paglen’s last name should be spelled Paglen.
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Thanks. Corrected. I really hate to get names wrong.
“at play and with its peers the child experiences a completely free world”
Beg to differ. I think that’s a fantasy adults tell themselves about childhood because childhood means not having bills to pay and responsibilities to meet. Yet, even though that’s not what childhood is about (bills & responsibility); it’s still subject to the dictates of social development and relationships, and ingroups and outgroups and cliques and gossip and bullying and cheating and lying and winning and losing and victories and humiliation and parental punishment and reward; and I don’t think that’s nearly as “free” as it’s made out to be here.
Childhood seems to be the foundation for what comes next; mankind’s relationship to one another, individually and in groups.
I think humanity runs into trouble well before adulthood because the programming takes place in what is being looked at as “freedom”. It’s where the seeds of the rest of the story are planted.
Having been raised in a Baptist church I certainly did feel free as a child; the weight of expectations and guilt were heavy.
I think you may be misunderstanding the reference of the term “free”.
“At the same time, at play and with its peers the child experiences a completely free world. It is open to all possibilities, even those beyond the child’s physical limits. It’s as if the child is free in a room, with walls, ceilings and floors that protect it from actual danger. Adults provide shelter and safety to go with that apparently unlimited freedom.”
basically means when a child is at play, when adults have created a world from which a child can intuit, fail, succeed, jump higher, get caught doing something wrong… that world is in the bounds that the adults have created which is safe from the horrible conditions of a coal mine, a factory, harsh working conditions on a farm.
One could call school a pretend work environment. We nurture them past their failures. Where a true, lol job at the Trump administration is filled with brutality. This is where Serious People speak of our education environments as a waste of time.
This is the freedom Simone speaks of.
Mr. Walker, as usual you offer us challenging ideas and new frameworks for viewing and understanding the world. Thank you for that. I like the sub men idea although it sounds pejorative. Sociologists and political scientists have noted how men with domineering fathers tend to be conservative. I think Beauvoir’s analysis supports the empirical evidence that conservatism is really about constraints on freedom, NOT on freedom itself. I was lucky enough to live a feral childhood and I have treasured my own freedom ever since. Thanks again for this interesting analysis!
There is no doubt de Beauvoir uses sub-man as a pejorative. She’s really judgmental about this stuff. She says that they are the people who do the dirty work, and perhaps that explains a little.
She’s judgmental about all the categories we’ll see. That’s what makes the exceptions feel meaningful, exceptions like the women who aren’t able to escape their training, and people who can’t really affect the world.
Ed,
Thank you for this thread. The child in human development terms is seen to have a concrete view of reality correlating to an inability to formulate hypothetical outcomes of abstract thought before the age of twelve. De Beauvoir’s, construction of a child like concrete grasp of reality/freedom, aligns with an adult’s cult like following, of an authoritarian leader like Trump’s concrete proclamation of reality/freedom, which is patently false, yet followed by million’s.
I read De Beauvoir in French in college. My problem with her theories of child development applies across translation, from the original “l’enfant” to the English “the child.” There is no “the” (or “le”) child. De Beauvoir, out of anyone, should have known this. It seems to me she is trying to subsume the particularities of individual experience, including her own, in generalizations and abstractions that ultimately apply to no one.
Her discussion of childhood “freedom” sounds to me like a hallucination. Childhood was a prison for me. The guards, my parents, tried to convince me and my sisters I was “crazy” when I spoke about what was going on. My sisters learned to keep their mouths shut, and because my core goal had always been protecting them, I encouraged this. I finally escaped by opting for the most-distant of the colleges that had accepted me. I knew my parents would leave me holding the entire bag financially while complaining to anyone who would listen that their selfish daughter had insisted on making *them* pay for Princeton.
Most kids who grow up in prisons like mine lack the privileges I had in the form of books and schools. Most kids who grow up in childhood unfreedom end up–as I did briefly–on the streets, pregnant, or dead. They don’t write philosophy, or “general interest” books. De Beauvoir seems only to imagine “the” generic child–not me, but not her either. Which undermines whatever else she has to say…in this form. I find her other work much more persuasive.
In my English translation the translator uses “he” where I use “the child”. I didn’t know she used l’enfant, so that was serendipity. I only know a bit more than tourist French: I can get along in simple transactions like restaurants and boulangeries, but that’s about it. I think your point stands, though. She is talking in the greatest generalities.
But it seems to me that all children experiences the limitations imposed by the adults in their lives, whether those are strict or loose, religious or cultural. De Beauvoir thinks so too. One way to think about sub-men is that the joy of life was beaten out of them by domineering adults, leaving them unable to see the world as anything but miserable. You can trace similar roots in the other categories.
I think she’s saying that we are formed in our childhoods, and that those experiences may limit our possibilities. Still, she things we can and must will ourselves to overcome those things.
Adding, I don’t recall any discussion of childhood in other philosophical work. All the ones I can think of start with the full-grown adult. This seems like an important aspect of this work.
I have often wondered why conservatives are so rigid and frightened. I feel like a lot of what I’m reading here is explanatory. They are fearful. Maybe it’s hell-fire, maybe it’s displeasing the all-powerful adult, maybe it’s fear of losing something or everything or maybe it’s something else. But at the root it seems like fear. I’m pretty sure de Beauvoir thinks so too,
“It seems to me she is trying to subsume the particularities of individual experience, including her own, in generalizations and abstractions that ultimately apply to no one.’
One could say that about anyone. I do understand how her writings could illicit horrible memories of our childhood. I was neglected. I was arrested for marijuana possession twice at age 13. Lovely, back in the 70s.
Conflicts between parent and child are a result of states of awareness. Child sees it one way, parent sees it another. No doubt, my son was easier to raise than my daughter. If a parent understands the states of awareness, that “my” child is unaware of what I am directing them to do, it becomes the job and effort of the parent to raise the awareness of the child, or as you said come to an agreement about the differences.
Indeed, some children actually release ego to the parent; I will follow you, you are my guide, BUT some children refuse to release ego to the parent, and conflict happens. And, it’s a spectrum across the divide. It’s human nature.
Parents who do not think of their children as “mine” reflect upon the work required to guide a child to play, learn, grow, accel much better than those who seem to possess their children. That could be the prison you refer to.
It’s interesting to look at De Beauvoir, but I see her as a product of her time. She made a significant contribution (no argument there) but she had her limitations as well. And there was a substantial amount of self editing, as well as by others, that took decades to be revealed after various people died. Consequently, it might be worthwhile to get some viewpoints from Epstein and Maxwell survivors about how they might perceive certain aspects of her politics, writing, and life.
Also, De Beauvoir and Sartre had distinctly different viewpoints than their literary peers about the firing squad execution of Robert Brasillach for fascist “intellectual crimes.” They were all in for it while their peers opposed it. Brasillach died at the age of 35, which seems relevant to our own current events.
So, considering just the things I mentioned in the above two paragraphs, I suspect her language, categories, and representations may have worked for the time she wrote, but maybe fresh interpretations are in order. Literature classes I took rarely, if ever, discussed the political and personal lives of the writers. As we learn what was left out, our opinions may shift.
That is true for Gertrude Stein as well. During the time she lived in France she would have been 34 when De Beauvoir was born. And I only recently learned this:
“Certain ideas of France: Gertrude Stein’s latest biographer continues the debate about her wartime activities” – September 2025
https://insidestory.org.au/certain-ideas-of-france/
As seen in the article cited below, the parallels to today are clear. A martyr in his own time, Brasillach was called the James Dean of French fascism:
“…Brasillach was essentially executed for what we would now call “hate speech.” “The issues are profound and irresolvable,” Kaplan writes at the end of her book. “Why was a writer punished for what happened in France between 1940 and 1945? Why this writer and not others? When are words as noxious as actions? Did Brasillach deserve to die for his words?”
https://www.salon.com/2000/03/29/kaplan_2/