Simone De Beauvoir's The Ethics Of Ambiguity

The influence that her time period had on Simone de Beauvoir’s thought process was minimal in her writing and person, as her countercultural ideas were radical and far ahead of her time, but they do provide some important context in her philosophy, the paramount example of which is shown through her book The Ethics of Ambiguity. She discusses whether or not existence is a possibility, she states that it is not necessary that we exist, and concludes from that that there therefore can be no predetermined values or spirit for a human. She also famously stated in this book that one person's freedom requires the freedom of others for it to be. She also began to burden her thought with the aforementioned notion of freedom, along with oppression, writing "to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision." She concluded therefore that if one acts either alone or with no consideration for others they are not tuly free at all.
As this book was written after World War II, it is not so surprising that Beauvoir would be concerned with oppression, liberation and the ethical responsibility that each of us has to each
With The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote what is now considered to be the bible for second wave feminism, introducing revolutionary ideas that spurred on feminists for generations to come. Beauvoir draws parallels with oppressions of blacks and jews, with a significant difference: women struggle to create solidarity or separatist groups due to the vastness of their issue, and yet depend on men for a sense of accomplishment, companionship, and economic stability, under concepts created by the patriarchy.“One is not born but becomes a woman” She was the first to say on a broad scale that physical differences don’t explain social differences when it pertains to gender, something that is an integral and base platform for all feminism since