... the ethics of ambiguity

"Naughty"

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting"

... Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86)


The great love of de Beauvoir’s life was arguably not Sartre but the American novelist Nelson Algren (1909-81). She would visit him in Chicago, finding his small rundown apartment in the Polish section to be “refreshing, after the heavy odour of the dollars in the big hotels and the elegant restaurants which I found hard to take.” His friend, the photographer Art Shay, took a snapshot of her just after she had emerged from a bath, seen nude from the rear, with her rather elegant upper half and sturdy buttocks and legs. He wrote: “She had taken her bath. It was while she fussed at the sink afterwards that I had the sudden impulse. She knew I took it because she heard the click of my trusty wartime Leica Model F. ‘Naughty man’ she said”.



Buried beside Sartre with his ring

de Beauvoir observed of Sartre that he was “a warm, lively man everywhere, but not in bed”; but of Algren, her “Division Street Dostoievski”, she readily admitted that, at age 39, she had entered into the first sexually fulfilling relationship of her life. Their affair though intermittently intense over some 17 years was fitful. Algren was moody, undisciplined and insecure, and his literary star blazed briefly and then fizzled, while de Beauvoir moved on to enormous success.

The relationship had a nasty aftermath when de Beauvoir wrote about it in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, to Algren’s fury. Until his death in 1981, he was recalling the affair bitterly, although upon de Beauvoir’s death in Paris five years later, she was buried beside Sartre wearing a silver ring that Algren had given her nearly forty years before.

The ambiguous life ...

"The human mind has two main scales on which to measure time. The large one takes the length of a human life as its unit, so that there is nothing to be done about life, it is of an animal dignity and simplicity, and must be regarded from a peaceable and fatalistic point of view. The small one takes as its unit the conscious moment, and it is from this that you consider the neighbouring space, an activity of the will, delicacies of social tone, and your personality" Seven Types of Ambiguity William Empson (1906-84)