A major event in the history of twentieth-century thought, Notebooks for a Ethics is Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to develop an ethics consistent with the profound individualism of his existential philosophy.
In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness, 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 Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980.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, the Notebooks reveal Sartre at his most productive, crafting a masterpiece of philosophical reflection that can easily stand alongside his other great works.
Sartre grapples anew here with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. Exploring fundamental modes of relating to the Other--among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt--he articulates the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. This work thus forms an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two additional essays, one on "the good and subjectivity," the other on the oppression of blacks in the United States.
With publication of David Pellauer's lucid translation, English-speaking readers will be able to appreciate this important contribution to moral philosophy and the history of ethics.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, and The Freud Scenario, both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press.
Philosopher, playwright, novelist, and correspondent, Sartre produced much during his working life that relied upon an ethical stance. During 1947 and 1948, he began to address the issue of formal ethics directly; the result of these initial but aborted efforts is this compendium of notes on the matter. Edited for publication in France in 1983 by his adopted daughter, Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, and smoothly translated here, Sartre's notebooks are clearly that: notes in need of reworking, expansion, reconsideration, and formalization. However, they are of great value to dedicated readers of Sartre, not only for their content but also because their raw state gives insight onto his formulating processes. The inclusion of two nearly finished essays, "The Good and Subjectivity" and "The Oppression of Blacks in the United States," serves to give the reader a sense of completion. For informed readers.
- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Written in 1947-1948, this unfinished treatise is Sartre's sketch for a revolutionary socialist ethics, and as such serves as a bridge between the existentialism of Being and Nothingness and the Marxist social thought of his later years. Sartre locates the roots of oppression in ignorance, stupidity, bad faith and mystification. He searchingly analyzes the oppression of women, children, slaves and, in an appendix, American blacks. He scathingly criticizes Frederick Engels, who, in his reading, absolved the oppressor of conscious responsibility by explaining oppression solely in terms of the interplay of economic forces. Deeming alienation to be a virtually inescapable condition, Sartre outlines a dialectics of choice and freedom in the spheres of work, religion and history. These lucidly translated posthumous notebooks contain a wealth of material on such topics as rights, violence, art, generosity, gift-giving, resignation and desire.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
