Teddy Larkin

Philosophy
Osman Nemli
11/28/12
Simone de Beauvoir: The Ethics of Ambiguity 35-50
Personal Freedom and Others, a passage in Simone de Beauvoirs The
Ethics of Ambiguity, examines and assesses numerous ways that people deny their
freedom. Beauvoir first attempts to explain that man's unhappiness is due to the fact that
he was once a child. The world is an unchangeable given, imposed upon the child. The
child considers parents as absolutes that grant him freedom and protect him. Thus the
infant's world is a hybrid of lack of control and complete freedom. The freedom to
choose entails the freedom to try to avoid one's freedom. This is the attitude of
"seriousness," in which the child "escapes the anguish of freedom" by thinking of values
as existing objectively, outside himself, rather than as an expression of his freedom.
Human beings in most civilizations face the same challenges as the child. Once
past childhood, one can be a sub-man who avoids all questions of freedom and assumes
himself not free. Next is the hierarchy is the serious man who "gets rid of his freedom by
claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned," in effect reverting to
a kind of childhood. These individuals live in servitude, with no means to shape their
world. Consequently, their capacities remain undeveloped, their freedom unrealized, their
moral lives unlived. She relates this to herself, as women are frequently in this situation.
Both the sub-man and the serious man refuse to recognize that they are free, in the sense
of being able to choose their own values.