Volume 9, Number 8 · November 9, 1967
Self-Reliance
By Philippa Foot
An Existentialist Ethics
by Hazel E. Barnes
Knopf, 462 pp., $7.95
'From the period when I wrote la Nausée I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.' By 1964, when he spoke these words, Jean Paul Sartre had renounced his intention of writing an ethical treatise based on the philosophy of l'Etre et le Néant. Converted to a radical Marxism, and immersed in Marxist thought and Marxist action, he was impatient of his former preoccupations. '…I discovered suddenly that alienation, exploitation of man by man, undernourishment, relegated to the background metaphysical evil which is a luxury. Hunger is an evil: period.' Remembering the more fantastical aspects under which the concept of value appeared in Sartre's magnum opus, one might remark that the discovery was overdue. Mrs. Barnes, who as Sartre's translator once offered in a glossary heading under 'value' that it was 'more specifically' the 'beyond of all surpassings as the For-itself seeks to be united with its Self,' and who peoples her book with such dramatis personae as freedoms, consciousnesses, Being, Nothingness, and the Other, has, however, no such prejudice in favor of plainness, and she is one of those who regret that Sartre abandoned his earlier project. While naturally disowning any intention of writing Sartre's book for him, she wants to show the possibility of an existentialist ethics with Sartre's theory of consciousness as its base.
Review, 2171 words
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