‘This Is a Farce’
Sartrean Ethics in History, 1938–1948 – From Kantian Universalism to Derision
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Abstract
In his quest for an ethics, Sartre went from a universalism of a Kantian type (L’Existentianlisme est un humanisme) to inscribing ethical action in History, that is, in a dialectics of ends and means (Cahiers pour une morale). This dialectics, here studied in the period between 1938 and 1948, also constitutes the subtext of a number of his literary and dramatic works, where it recurs more insistently than in its philosophical developments: Sartre’s first intuition, contingency.
Contributor Notes
Juliette Simont (Ph.D., Philosophy) is Maître de recherches at the National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium) and teaching fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles. Her work mainly deals with Kant and Hegel, as well as with twentieth-century French philosophy. She has published, among others things, Les fleurs noires de la Logique : Essai sur la quantité, la qualité, la relation chez Kant, Hegel, Deleuze (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); Jean-Paul Sartre : Un demi-siècle de liberté (Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck, [1998] 2015); and Gérard Lebrun et les Critiques de Kant : Le moment de la ‘mort de l’homme’ (Bruxelles: Ousia, 2015); as well as numerous articles on Sartre’s thought, often published in Les Temps modernes, of which she is the assistant editor.