Sartre in Search of an Ethics
Author: Paul Crittenden
Date Of Publication: Nov 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1341-9
Isbn: 1-4438-1341-9
In the postwar years Jean-Paul Sartre set himself the task of writing a book on ethics. His concern was to take up issues raised by his existentialist ontology and to resolve problems in his bleak account of the human situation in Being and Nothingness. “I am searching,” he said, “for an ethics for the present time.” For several years he prepared background notes, but then put the material aside as too abstract and idealistic, leaving it for publication after his death. Years later he returned to ethics, this time in the hope of developing an account related to the Critique of Dialectical Reason. But once again he left the inquiry incomplete. There was yet a third attempt towards the end of his life when Sartre was blind and weak, a poignant witness to his abiding interest in ethics. This took the form of interviews with Benny Lévy, which appeared in a controversial publication just before his death. Sartre in Search of an Ethics is a study of each of these stages in his ethical quest, with a focus on the major themes of his existentialist and dialectical ethics in the context of some of his main philosophical and literary writings.

Paul Crittenden is an emeritus professor of philosophy and former dean of the faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney. He writes mainly on topics in ethics and epistemology, Greek philosophy, and modern European philosophy from Nietzsche to Sartre. He is the author of Learning to be Moral: Philosophical Thoughts about Moral Development (1990) and has recently published a memoir Changing Orders (2008).

In discussions towards the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre said that he was searching for an ethics, hoping to find “the moment when ethics will be simply and truly the way in which human beings live in relation to one another.” More than thirty years earlier, in 1948, he had written “I am searching for an ethics for the present time.” Midway between these points, he announced in a lecture in 1964 that “the historical moment has come for Socialism to rediscover its ethical structure, or, rather, to unveil it.” Sartre in Search of an Ethics is a study of each of these stages in Sartre’s ethical quest.

Part One focusses on his attempt in the late 1940s to develop an existentialist or ontological ethics that would deal with issues raised by his work Being and Nothingness (1943). The central idea of the Notebooks for an Ethics – drawn from notes written in 1947–48, but not published until after his death in 1980 – is the prospect of a radical ethical conversion that would turn around the original human situation. This is the picture of human consciousness and freedom caught up in bad faith, broken relationships, a futile desire for absolute transcendence, and a history of alienation and oppression. The outcome of conversion would be authentic ethical existence marked by a freedom that acknowledges its limits and recognises the freedom of others in an ethics of generosity and truth. Some of these ideas found a place in his writings at the time especially in Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), What is Literature? (1948), the play The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), and Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952). By 1949, however, Sartre had decided that the book on ethics he had hoped to write was not coming together satisfactorily and he set the project aside.

A little over a decade later he began to think again about a work on ethics, this time in the context of his second major philosophical work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). The Critique is a study that attempts to marry existentialism with Marxism to give an account of basic social phenomena and the ways in which human history is dominated by inhuman necessity. Apart from brief, pungent remarks in the Critique, his new approach to ethics is found in two main sources: notes prepared for the paper he gave at the “Ethics and Society” conference in Rome in 1964 (work still largely unpublished), and a set of notes written for a series of lectures to be given at Cornell University in 1965 – subsequently cancelled in protest over the war in Vietnam – on the topic “Morality and History” (published in 2005).

Part Two of Sartre in Search of an Ethics deals primarily with these sources over the years from Sartre’s essay Search for a Method (1957) to his ideas about the conditions of moral development in childhood in the first volume of his study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971). Sartre is concerned in these sources to analyse the nature of ethical (normative) experience and to expose the problems that confront diverse moral systems in history. The great question for him is to explain the relationship between ethics and history, and to show how a true ethics “that founds and dissolves alienated moralities” might reflect the direction of history towards the satisfaction of needs in human fulness.

The study concludes with a consideration of the main themes of Hope Now, The 1980 Interviews, discussions with Sartre late in his life on ethics and Jewish messianism, conducted, recorded, and later published by his secretary Benny Lévy. Sartre was blind and very weak by this time, and the work is unsatisfactory in many ways. Even so, his voice comes through in a final expression of belief in a common humanity and hope for a society in which “relations among human beings are truly ethical.”

“Paul Crittenden’s new book develops Sartre’s ethics in the light of his vast oeuvre, including those texts either published after his death or still unpublished. The focus is on Sartre’s ontological or existentialist ethics; his socialist or dialectical ethics; and briefly, on his final ethics of reciprocity. Crittenden argues that Sartre was right to claim that morality was a dominant preoccupation for him. Sartre’s further claim that ethics is both inevitable and impossible is borne out by his own labour to develop an ethics. Crittenden argues against a common misconception that Sartre advocated a relativist ethics; rather, he maintains that Sartre took an ‘absolutist … view of good and evil’ a conviction that is defended throughout the book. (6) He also examines Sartre’s hints in Being and Nothingness that an ethics of deliverance and conversion may be possible, tracing the evolution of his thought in Notebooks for an Ethics and finding this reference to conversion throughout his texts. While Sartre may posit a goal like the Kantian kingdom of ends, his focus is on concrete ethics for a specific historical time and place. Crittenden highlights Sartre’s ethic of generosity and his concern with freedom, creativity, love and truth, presenting an inspiring and hopeful side to Sartre’s ethical outlook.

The book is both a sympathetic reconstruction of Sartre’s scattered works on ethics and a critical inquiry into whether Sartre succeeds by his own lights, unstintingly examining the problems with the different ethics he proposes. Paul Crittenden gives a thorough and rigorous analysis of Sartre’s unending search for ethics, identifying the weak points and the gaps that require reconstruction in such a way that it can help those in search of an ethics in general. Sartre’s attempts to delineate an ethics are placed in historical context, and fascinating comparisons with other ethics, such as virtue ethics, and Kantian ethics are made. Crittenden provides an illuminating discussion of Sartre’s ‘Cornell Lecture’ or ‘Morality and History’, one of the first extended treatments of this text. He finds that both Sartre’s existentialist ethics and the dialectical ethics could have been taken further if he had developed a more Aristotelian conception of ethical action. Nevertheless, he demonstrates how Sartre had a powerful vision of the meaning of ethics, including the importance of unconditional ethical norms. The book is a significant achievement and an invaluable source for both Sartre scholars and those new to Sartre.”

—Marguerite La Caze, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Queensland

"...for any Sartre scholar, or even those of us relatively new to Sartre's work and the study of ethics in general, the possibilities presented to us by the chance to re-consider the fundamental bounds of enquiry in this field are made vivid in a way not previously available to those wishing to enter the discussion. In this respect, the reader is bound to welcome Crittenden's not un-timely omission of the stricture and the 'second-guessing' of Sartre's authorial intent in seeking out an ethics, present in other accounts".

Steven Churchill, La Trobe University in SOPHIA Journal (2010) 49: 329-332

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