ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the last triad of categories, composed of paradox, tension, and ambiguity. The existent is a man who is the battleground of contrary tendencies; he is a man who unites in himself the different ages of life by an existential contemporaneousness, who unites the pathetic, the dialectic, and the comic in an indissoluble moment. In his Phenomenology of Perception and in what he writes on behaviour, Merleau-Ponty throws into relief the idea of ambiguity. For Sartre, as philosophers saw in their discussion of freedom, there is always some ambiguity between the interpretation of our acts in terms of the situation and the interpretation of the same acts in terms of freedom. No doubt in going from the idea of a paradox to that of ambiguity existential thought loses some of its acuity; but perhaps on the other hand it gains in amplitude.
