Ambiguity

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare
that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say
that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must
be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished
rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man’s
condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to
save his existence. Thus, to say that action has to be lived in its truth, that
is, in the consciousness of the antinomies which it involves, does not mean that
one has to renounce it. In Plutarch Lied Pierrefeu rightly says that in war
there is no victory which can not be regarded as unsuccessful, for the objective
which one aims at is the total annihilation of the enemy and this result is
never attained; yet there are wars which are won and wars which are lost. So is
it with any activity; failure and success are two aspects of reality which at
the start are not perceptible. That is what makes criticism so easy and art so
difficult: the critic is always in a good position to show the limits that every
artist gives himself in choosing himself; painting is not given completely
either in Giotto or Titian or Cezanne; it is sought through the centuries and is
never finished; a painting in which all pictorial problems are resolved is
really inconceivable; painting itself is this movement toward its own reality;
it is not the vain displacement of a millstone turning in the void; it
concretizes itself on each canvas as an absolute existence. Art and science do
not establish themselves despite failure but through it; which does not prevent
there being truths and errors, masterpieces and lemons, depending upon whether
the discovery or the painting has or has not known how to win the adherence of
human consciousnesses; this amounts to saying that failure, always ineluctable,
is in certain cases spared and in others not.

-- Simone de Beauvoir 1949