Conclusion

Summary

Just as much as Beauvoir converted the resources of her philosophical context, her own concepts converted each other as she progressively considered the relationship between alterity and race, sex and aging. The Ethics of Ambiguity provided several concepts of ambiguity. As she drew on the resources of her philosophical context, however, ambiguity also underwent conversion and contestation. Differentiations in its meaning embodied resistance between variations she proposed of associated concepts such as bad faith, authenticity, and ethics.

Beauvoir referred to, and also converted, the role of sexuality in the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. She offered alternatives to the master-slave dominated Sartrean depictions of sex, and formulated an ethical dimension not articulated by Merleau-Ponty. But eros had limitations as a threshold of ambiguity privileged by Beauvoir. Further resources in her work resisted and nuanced the conceptual dominance of eros in the exploration of an ethics of reciprocal vulnerability. As her equally innovative focus on the ambiguity of age intersected with the earlier theorization of the ambiguity of sexuality, Beauvoir's conversions extended most satisfyingly to an articulation of the ambiguity of an embodied temporality as aging.

The Second Sex associated sexuality with the risks and the hope of an ethics of generosity, a positive prospect for simultaneous states of being as subject and object, for and with another. Asking what made eros ambiguous, Beauvoir also asked under what circumstances the ambiguity of eros was ethical? The preoccupation with ethics continued throughout her work.