Notebooks for an Ethics

Book excerpt: In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented here for the first time in English, Notebooks for an Ethics is Sartre's attempt to articulate a moral philosophy. In the Notebooks he addresses any number of themes and topics relevant to an effort to formulate a concrete and revolutionary socialist ethics, among them the differences between force and violence, the relationship of means and ends, and the relationship of oppression and alienation. Most important, he tries to show that there can be an authentic mutual recognition among free individuals where no one steals another's freedom. While remaining committed to the basic principles of Being and Nothingness, Sartre here seeks to locate the foundation for action in history and society. The Notebooks thus form an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre grapples anew with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. In dealing with fundamental modes of relating to the Other, among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt, he highlights the notions of conversion and creation as they figure in the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two appendixes, one on "the good and subjectivity", the other on the problem of blacks in theUnited States as a case study of oppression.