Sartre Studies International

Volume 6, issue 1 of Sartre Studies International, published at a moment when Sartre’s work is gaining increasing prominence in France, emphatically illustrates the full range and complexity of the Sartrean project. Sartre Studies International’s commitment to make available in English translation less well known texts by Sartre continues with the publication of Sartre’s 1945 articles on the American worker. Published initially in Combat, they appear for the first time in English translated by Adrian van den Hoven with a commentary by Ronald Aronson.

In early 1945, with the war not yet over, Sartre travelled to the United States for the first time. He travelled with a group of correspondents who were invited in order to influence French public opinion favourably towards the United States.1 Sartre was sent by his friend Albert Camus to report back to Combat, the leading newspaper of the independent left. Once invited, he arranged also to report back to the conservative newspaper, Le Figaro. Simone de Beauvoir reports that learning of Camus’ invitation in late 1944 was one of the most exciting moments of Sartre’s life.

Being and Nothingness opens with the claim that modern thought has sought to overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy in so far as their acceptance provides one with no way of explaining how there can be a relation between mind and world. The dualism of being and appearance is mentioned in this context.1 Sartre contends, however, that modern thought has failed to make good its aim, for the solutions in question have been set out within a framework that presupposes the dualism which was to have been transcended. So, for example, the idealist solution – that being is reducible to appearance – turns out to assume the very conception of appearance implied by the dualistic model (BN 5.iv). By doing so, it fails to provide a genuine alternative to those forms of realism that insist, in similar vein, that there is an insurmountable distinction between being and appearance, and is thus in no better position to explain how there can be a relation between mind and world.

If there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face, how, alas, does Sartre find out that Hell is other people? Because he was looked at? By them? Not necessarily, though no doubt he was. Because he was looked at, that’s how.

In this article I wish to discuss the problem of self-knowledge in Sartre’s early philosophy with regard to its consequences within the field of ethics. I shall not try to cover all aspects of self-knowledge in Being and Nothingness since all of the major doctrines expounded in that work concerning consciousness, identity, freedom and knowledge have implications for self-knowledge. I would be content if I could draw attention to aspects of Sartre’s thought which are interestingly different from other moral philosophies as well as from certain empirical conclusions it would seem natural to draw from Sartre’s own ontology in the sphere of moral psychology.

In my book, Sartre’s Anthropology as a Hermeneutics of Praxis (1998), I characterise the standpoint of the later Sartre – initially developed in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960, hereafter CDR) – as a ‘hermeneutics of praxis’. The primary aim is reconstructive: by means of generalising Sartre’s conception in a certain direction I hope to be able, so to speak, ‘to go beyond Sartre by means of Sartre’. This implies both emphasising the strengths and distinguishing the shortcomings of Sartre’s standpoint, but also a serious attempt to develop it. One of my aims here is to work out the options that are opened up by such a generalisation.

This article is about why moral praxis matters, and how it matters. My textual focus is Sartre’s unpublished and undelivered 1965 Cornell Lectures on ‘Morality and History’. In these Lectures, Sartre presents his mature understanding of moral praxis with a degree of systematicity not found elsewhere in his writings on the topic. Staying close to the idiom of the lectures, then, I discuss the materiality of the ‘ethical normative,’ and the historical efficacy of ‘moral conducts’. The discussion moves from a phenomenological account of normativity, temporality, and creativity, to a dialectical account of their generative interaction, which Sartre names, somewhat ambiguously, ‘ethos’. Sartre’s descriptions and analyses paint a picture of ethos as manifest through moral praxis. Moral praxis exists where ethical exigencies are taken up across time through creative invention, and ethos, as manifest moral praxis, results (for good or ill) in a transformation of the practical field.

In discussing Sartre’s contribution to a Marxist ethics of revolution, it is important first to note that it is the ethics of revolution that is under consideration and not the broader question of Marxism and morality. Much has been written in recent years on the question of morality in Marxism, focusing generally on moral theory and justice, for example, Rodney Peffer’s wonderful summation of discussions about Marxism’s moral vision regarding human action and social organization.

In commenting on the three previous diverse and interesting papers above, I have decided to take the ‘category route’. The categories that I have chosen are praxis, stasis, and ethos. (I am attempting to maintain some consistency in my categories!)

Michael Scriven, Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France, Basingstoke and London, The Macmillan Press, 1999, 193 pp., ISBN 0–333–63321–0. Review by David Drake

Sartre: Trois lectures – Philosophie, linguistique, littérature, Paris: Université Paris X, 1998, 203 pp., ISSN 1166–2212, 100FF. Review by Annette Lavers

Notes on contributors