Freedom in a situation one did not choose

An opportunity on paper

Imagine that Elise works at the reception desk of a repair shop and wants to become a mechanic. The owner reserves workshop training for men; women, he says, are better with customers. An evening course is open to her, but it meets when she cares for her father, and she cannot afford to give up her wages.

“You can always choose,” says one friend. “You have no choice,” says another. Both miss something. Elise can weigh alternatives, ask for help or challenge the training rule, but no change of outlook will supply tuition, someone to care for her father or a place in the workshop.

Simone de Beauvoir’s account of freedom takes in both sides of Elise’s position. It asks how we act, and what we owe one another, when our possibilities are unequal.

Acting from a situation

A situation includes the body, history, resources and relationships through which someone meets possibilities; it is more than a list of external obstacles. Elise’s experience, obligations and ambitions help make the course appear as a possible future, while the shop’s rule blocks a nearer route. [2]

The previous lesson examined embodiment: how we experience and act through a living body. Beauvoir makes the social conditions of action central. Later feminist phenomenologists, including Alia Al-Saji, show why describing experience must also examine the power and habits that shape it, since what feels possible cannot be assumed to be the same for everyone. [4]

Elise can respond to her situation without having created it. Recognizing her agency means taking her purposes seriously, not assigning her responsibility for every barrier she faces.

What ambiguity means here

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir describes us as subjects who pursue purposes of our own and as vulnerable beings within a world we do not control. Our projects give things meaning, yet their success depends on conditions and people beyond us. Ambiguity names this inseparable tension. It does not mean being vague or refusing to judge. [1]

Elise plans a different working life, yet she is tired after a shift and depends on her wages. Her purposes matter, and so do her exhaustion and dependence: calling her a machine would erase the first, and imagining her will as unlimited would erase the second. She has to decide from within this life.

Sartre’s challenge, Beauvoir’s question

Jean-Paul Sartre shares Beauvoir’s concern with existentialism: an approach that begins from people living, choosing and taking responsibility for their lives. In Existentialism and Humanism, he argues that human beings are not manufactured to fulfill a preassigned purpose. We take shape through what we undertake, and no inherited definition of what we are can decide our lives for us. [3] The argument recalls a question that Becoming an individual raised through different thinkers: how does a commitment become a lived action?

Beauvoir develops her own account of the responsibilities that freedom creates between people. Sartre’s challenge is no promise that wishing makes anything possible, and Beauvoir should not be treated as merely adding women to a finished Sartrean system. Her analysis asks how the world itself can close off a person’s future. [5]

When a difference becomes a destiny

The Second Sex examines how women are made Other: treated as secondary beings whose purposes are measured against men’s, while men count as the ordinary human standard. It is a philosophical and social inquiry that draws on history, literature and lived experience, and its introduction asks how a pattern of dependence comes to seem like a natural destiny. [2]

The owner points to the shop’s experienced mechanics, all of them men, as proof that mechanics should be men. But he has withheld the training through which Elise could gain experience, so the arrangement manufactures part of the evidence offered in its defense. Wollstonecraft’s argument about education exposed a related circle; Beauvoir investigates the wider organization of women’s lives.

Beauvoir calls reaching beyond what is given toward new projects transcendence, and she contrasts it with immanence, a life held within the repetition and maintenance of what already exists. Her objection is to being forcibly confined there while others reserve new possibilities for themselves. [2] In our case, caring for her father may be a commitment Elise values; the point is not that care or routine work has no worth. The wrong lies in compelling her to serve others while denying her a say in the direction of her own life.

Oppression is a relation

For Beauvoir, oppression closes off people’s pursuit of their own projects while making their activity sustain a world organized for others. She distinguishes it from meeting an ordinary material obstacle: a difficult repair is one thing, and being shut out of learning repairs because one is a woman is another. [1]

Elise might come to doubt her ability, but that doubt would not prove that the barrier began in her attitude. Conversely, becoming confident would not abolish the rule. And calling every accommodation cowardice would overlook what resistance may cost.

Beauvoir’s own account also needs scrutiny. Her introduction makes sweeping claims about women’s history and uses racial comparisons whose limits scholars dispute, and we should not treat one description as every woman’s experience. Al-Saji emphasizes how gender, race and social position can shape experience together. [4] [5]

Making room for another person’s future

For Beauvoir, willing freedom requires supporting other people’s freedom. Because our projects take place in a shared world, the conditions we maintain affect what others can undertake, so freedom cannot mean an unlimited entitlement to dominate. [1]

Suppose the workers persuade the owner to offer paid training during working hours. Elise gains an opportunity she lacked, and she can still decline, struggle or change her mind. Success is uncertain, but something has changed that encouragement alone could not change.

An ally who dictated her new career would repeat the mistake of treating her as someone else’s project. The practical question is what support lets her take part in shaping her future. There may be disagreement and costly choices, and the principle does not choose a course of action for us.

Try the distinction

A friend says, “If Elise really wanted freedom, she would quit. If the shop trains her, she must become a mechanic, or the reform has achieved nothing.” Use situation, ambiguity and oppression to examine these claims. This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

The first claim ignores Elise’s situation, which includes wages, care, experience and a discriminatory training rule. Quitting has costs that determination cannot erase. Her agency survives in how she responds, but it does not give her unlimited power; ambiguity means holding together her capacity to undertake projects and her dependence on conditions she does not control. Nor can the rule’s injustice be explained away as her failure to want freedom, since that would mistake oppression for a weak will.

The second claim confuses opening a possibility with imposing a choice. Paid training changes a real condition of action. Its value does not depend on forcing Elise to use it: she should be able to reconsider her purposes, just as the men receiving training can. Supporting freedom opens possibilities while recognizing the person who will decide what to do with them. We would need more information to judge the best arrangement for this shop and for the care Elise values.

Carry this forward

Ask both what a person can do and how their possibilities have been organized. Can reason become a tool of domination? examines how reasoning itself can serve domination when institutions treat their purposes as beyond question.

Sources and limits

[1] Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), translated by Bernard Frechtman, for ambiguity, oppression and the difference between freedom and unrestricted power. Read the opening of Part I, “Ambiguity and Freedom”, from the Montaigne discussion through the paragraph ending “the freedom which projects them”; and the complete Part III, §2, “Freedom and Liberation”. Part I establishes the tension between subject and worldly being; Part III develops oppression, dependence and freedom’s difference from unrestricted power. This is a philosophical ethics written in the aftermath of the Second World War. The archive credits Frechtman and names a 1949 Citadel edition; its precise print basis was not independently verified.

[2] Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), introduction, in Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater, eds., The Continental Philosophy Reader, Routledge, 1996, pages 95–108, including notes 1–3, for the Other, transcendence and immanence. Read this complete anthology selection, particularly pages 97, 100–103 and 106–108. The corresponding arguments were checked in the online introduction, whose edition statement credits H. M. Parshley, Penguin, 1972, first English publication 1953.

The anthology credits Deirdre Bair as translator, conflicting with the linked edition and the scholarship cited below. This lesson follows the Parshley attribution. Parshley’s translation is abridged and has disputed philosophical renderings; no French text or newer translation was collated. The introduction’s historical generalizations are not adopted as verified findings.

[3] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (1946), translated by Philip Mairet, Methuen, 1948, selected in the same anthology, for existence and a preassigned essence. Read pages 65–70 and 75–76, with editorial context on pages 62–64. The lesson uses the argument on pages 67–69, ending at the first paragraph of page 69; the unfinished argument at the end of page 70 is not used. This public defense of existentialism does not represent Sartre’s whole philosophy, and the omitted middle and the original French were not read.

[4] Alia Al-Saji, “Feminist Phenomenology,” chapter 12 in Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader and Alison Stone, eds., The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, Routledge, 2017, for why social conditions and interlocking forms of oppression matter to descriptions of experience. Read the complete chapter, pages 143–154, including its references; the lesson draws on pages 148–152. Works cited by Al-Saji were not separately read.

[5] Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke, “Simone de Beauvoir”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 11 January 2023, for scholarly context on the two Beauvoir works, the material conditions of freedom, the disputed racial comparisons and translation. Read §§5 and 7 and the paragraph on translation in §2. Their accounts of other Beauvoir works are context, not direct reading of those works.

Sources consulted 18 September 2026. Selected anthology page images were checked against extracted text. No whole book or original French text was read. Elise, the shop, her father and the training reform are original teaching material. No independent scholarly review or learner testing is claimed.