Existentailism assingment

The second section of Simone De Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity I feel gets a little more complex than the first half. I had to read part of this section a few times and some of my favorite quotes that made me laugh or that stood out and got to me were, “The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity” and the second that jumped at me was, “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 can not attain itself if it denies itself at the start; action can not seek to fulfill itself by means which would destroy its very meaning”.

These two quotes jumped at me because I was trying to understand the meaning behind them. The first quote I believe is really funny because the meaning of ambiguity and the meaning of absurdity is very different but I can see how some people would think that life being ambiguous and something that is absurd and unreasonable can confuse the two because as explained later that something absurd cannot be given meaning but something ambiguous has meaning but the meaning is not fixed and it is open to interpretation.

She goes onto say that a man’s condition is ambiguous, it involves failures, and outrageous things to save his/her existence. What I took from this is that every person has their own circumstances and it is very difficult from someone else to interpret what is the right path for one person might not be the right path for another.

The example of painting and art was also interesting, Simone de Beauvoir states that a painting which is complete and all the problems in it is resolved is not conceivable, because each painting is a movement towards its own reality. In the end she stated that it is failure that takes us towards the success and it seems that without failure and the process there is no success.

This was very interesting, again while reading, I kept connecting these ideas to my own life and thinking that sometimes the path for me is quiet different than path for someone else, but in the end it is the ambiguity of it that makes everything different. A thought I was thinking about is who justifies what is absurd and what is ambiguous for anyone.