Overview

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.

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9781443813419

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Reviews

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, SOPHIA Journal, 49 (2010) 329-332.

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, SOPHIA Journal, 49 (2010) 329-332.

Author Information

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).

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