Simone de Beauvoir on Negativity, Freedom, and the Possibility of Evil

From The Ethics of Ambiguity:

Only, unlike Kant, we do not see man as being essentially a positive will. On the contrary, he is first defined as a negativity. He is first at a distance from himself. He can coincide with himself only by agreeing never to rejoin himself. There is within him a perpetual playing with the negative, and he thereby escapes himself, he escapes his freedom. And it is precisely because an evil will is here possible that the words "to will oneself free" have a meaning. Therefore, 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. For, in a metaphysics of transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error; and in humanistic philosophies it is impossible to account for it, man being defined as complete in a complete world. Existentialism alone gives - like religions - a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which make its judgments so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet, it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.

Therefore, in the very condition of man there enters the possibility of not fulfilling this condition. In order to fulfill it he must assume himself as a being who "makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being." But the trick of dishonesty permits stopping at any moment whatsoever. One may hesitate to make oneself a lack of being, one may withdraw before existence, or one may falsely assert oneself as being, or assert oneself as nothing.. ness. One may realize his freedom only as an abstract independence, or, on the contrary, reject with despair the distance which separates us from being. All errors are possible since man is a negativity, and they are motivated by the anguish he feels in the face of his freedom. Concretely, men slide incoherently from one attitude to another.

When I was an undergraduate, studying philosophy, I took several courses on existentialism, and we covered mostly the same thinkers: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, Miguel de Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Buber, Marcel, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, with a few others thrown in here and there for good measure (Kleist and Berdyaev come to mind). Do you see a pattern with these folks (listed roughly chronologically)? They're all dudes! But the first time I read The Ethics of Ambiguity (I'd already read The Second Sex in a course unrelated to existentialism), right after reading The Myth of Sisyphus, I was absolutely blown away. This woman seemed to have hit on something all of the men had missed, or at least misplaced: a necessary corollary to the absurd, which figures so centrally in existentialism, is the ambiguous. Without the latter, the former leaves us with little of life to live, no matter how strongly Camus believes we should just keep rolling the rock back up the hill. What's more, placing the ambiguous alongside the absurd makes possible a bunch of interesting answers to long-standing philosophical questions, about ethics for example, which de Beauvoir explores at length. I thought then, as I do now, "If only I had read this philosopher earlier, a lot of things would have been clearer to me." Oh well. In a lot of ways, philosophy is still just an old boys club.