In her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, feminist author Simone de Beauvoir discusses the idea of being trapped in a domino effect where the choices we make today are predestined by our pasts and the environments we grew up in. There is no choice so unfortunate that he cannot be saved.” - Simone de Beauvoir Only, we think that man has always a possible recourse to himself. Here too there is a sort of predestination issuing not from an external tyranny but from the operation of the subject itself. This contingency recalls, in a way, the arbitrariness of the grace distributed by God in Calvinistic doctrine. The drama of original choice is that it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime, that it occurs without reason, before any reason, that freedom is there as if it were present only in the form of contingency. He tranquilly abandoned himself to whims, laughter, tears, and anger which seemed to him to have no morrow and no danger, and yet which left ineffaceable imprints about him. He was ignorant of the disturbing aspect of this freedom which he was heedlessly exercising. Now, the child set up this character and this universe little by little, without foreseeing its development. He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative. Yet, it is always on the basis of what he has been that a man decides upon what he wants to be. The child does not contain the man he will become. “Moral choice is free, and therefore unforeseeable. Episode 8: “The Drama of Original Choice”
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