Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity

To begin the celebration of Women's History month properly, I can think of few things better than to point to one of my favorite works of Continental philosophy of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's little, but great, book, The Ethics of Ambiguity. de Beauvoir isn't my favorite modern woman philosopher (because she's not Hannah Arendt; Arendt and de Beauvoir's treatment by, respectively, Heidegger and Sartre is a darkly ironic witness to the tenacity of misogyny: women are supposedly inferior because unreasoning, but here were two supremely intellectual women who were both treated wretchedly by "lovers of reason") but she's one of my favorite French philosophers, and this is one of my very favorite books of all.

Man asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the non-temporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men...

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition...

Ethics of Ambiguity is the classic exposition of an existentialist ethic.