Against the Robots

“To declare that life is absurd is to say that it will never have meaning. To say that it is ambiguous is to decide that its meaning is never fixed, that it must always be earned.”*

A formidable declaration of powerlessness draped in an expression of the will to power, or how envy must govern and rule life. This sentence is, of course, a revolutionary manifesto. Simone de Beauvoir defines the class struggle and all the actions of the left since the French Revolution: envy as an act of faith. Envy is always the daughter of immanence. Simone de Beauvoir tells us: "God is dead; let us now know that we are masters of our lives and that they are fulfilled through action." By acting in this way, Simone de Beauvoir disregards religion but also ancient philosophy; she affirms that the permanent struggle is the only path. This permanent struggle is fueled by envy; envy possesses this inexhaustible force, feeding as much on its defeats as on its victories. It is the quintessential evil force. It confronts life.

Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy of life is adolescent, as Tony Anatrella would say, and in fact, it is a negation of life because it denies its quality and depth in order to resolve it into a permanent and pathetic struggle.

We also see here the form of modernism. This action immediately becomes a negation of inner life. Or rather, it aims to replace inner life, since it is common to hear, in a spectacular reversal of meaning, that action is the activist's inner life. We also understand that this declaration in no way seeks to find a solution; appeasement would be its end. It revels only in clamor and violence.

*An Ethics of Ambiguity.