Beauvoir further distinguishes her conception of an ethics of ambiguity from Hegel's understanding of the progression of human relations by contrasting her articulation of a "conversion" to a "stoic" ethics, perhaps more explicitly to the Stoic stage of Hegel's dialectic. Beauvoir calls the practice of stoic indifference in reaction to life's disappointments a condemnation of "that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort" to accomplish something. In such a reluctance to make oneself vulnerable, "one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom . . . emptied of all content and all truth" (1948, 29). The phrase "emptied of all content and all truth" echoes Beauvoir's claim that, for Hegel, particularity is always vacated in favor of universality, ambiguity in favor of conclusiveness. [End Page 125]

Recall that stoicism is the form of consciousness that resolves Hegel's master/slave confrontation in the section "Self-Consciousness" of the Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, stoicism results from the internalization of the conflict between master and slave, the reconciliation of these two opposing modes of consciousness in the inwardly oriented person of reflection who is master of his or her own desire and who can rise above suffering and despair. An existentialist ethics, by contrast, retains a sense of particularity that refuses to be absorbed into a higher moment: "This conversion is sharply distinguished from the Stoic conversion in that it does not claim to oppose to the sensible universe a formal freedom which is without content. To exist genuinely is not to deny this spontaneous movement of my transcendence but only to refuse to lose myself in it" (Beauvoir 1948, 13-14). Nevertheless, Beauvoir maintains, this retention of particularity or separation does not necessarily imply a social ontology of discrete self-interested individuals whose primary concern is self-preservation. Rather, "an ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to deny a priori that separate existants can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all" (18). She insists:

Contrary to the formal strictness of Kantianism for whom the more abstract the act is the more virtuous it is, generosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less distinction there is between the other and ourself and the more we fulfill ourself in taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others. The Stoics impugned the ties of family, friendship, and nationality so that they recognized only the universal form of man. But man is man only through situations whose particularity is precisely a universal fact. (144)
This passage seems to directly confront and reject Hegel's description of "legal status" as the stage of consciousness that follows the discussion of ethical action symbolized by the Antigone story, a transition Hegel explicitly links to the move from the master/slave dialectic to Stoic consciousness