Compare And Contrast The Ethics Of Ambiguity

It is often difficult to understand others, seeing as everyone understands things different. Other beings shape our behavior and even our perception of the world and our surroundings. The ability to be free and differentiate ourselves from only living in a factual state affects our relationships with others. Human nature is a strange and mysterious thing, something we still do not fully understand. Exploring these ideas given by Faulkner and De Beauvoir are essential to trying to understand the nature of humans and our relationship to not only self but others. I found the Ethics of Ambiguity to put into words some ideas that we have a hard time explaining. De Beauvoir does a great job explaining that ambiguity between an individual’s past
We see this is De Beauvoir’s examples of different person characteristics. The sub-man avoids freedom and merely lives through facticity. He is easily controlled and seems to pretend there is no freedom. The serious man dismisses his freedom by letting someone else tell him what to do. The example she gave in the book was the army man, who is told what to do, rejecting his freedom. These are great examples because these men do not have their own will to be free, unphased by if others are free as well. The nihilist is the man who literally wants and has to live for nothing. Often times the serious man like the army man will turn into the nihilist after realizing what he had to live for is no longer. He rejects not only his own existence, but the existence of man kind because this is what confirms his own existence as a whole. He is also not completely free. We have to have the will and the understanding of our own freedom before we can will for the freedom of others. In The Sound and the Fury, the past is what keeps this family from being free. Caddy becomes physically free when she leaves her life and home behind and runs away. She leaves her family stuck in the facticity of her disappearance though. They have no will to be free as they become trapped in the past, like mentioned before especially Quentin. He is stuck in the facticity of his past and unable to get through to his present self. He has no moral freedom and exhibits such behavior as the sub-man. This is what ultimately leads him to his suicide