![]() ![]() Because everyone confronts different circumstances but everyone is also free, each individual has the opportunity to construct their own identity through the way they apply their individual will to the world. ![]() Rather, people are both, and living ethically requires coming to terms with this tension or ambiguity at the foundation of human life. It is therefore ambiguous whether people are subjects with freedom or objects with facticity, but there is no real truth of the matter one way or the other. Ambiguity results from the paradoxes at the center of the human condition: people both have subjectivity and appear as objects to everyone else they recognize their own freedom as well as their powerlessness in relation to the world as a whole and they (at best) relentlessly pursue their goals even though they know they are going to die. She carefully distinguishes this from absurdity, or the notion that life can never have meaning at all. Most specifically, by talking about life’s ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir points to the sense in which life has no fixed meaning, but that rather its meaning is up to every individual, depending on their commitments, actions, and predilections. ![]()
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