Notebooks for an Ethics

1. Introduction

Notebooks for an Ethics (Cahiers pour une morale) presents Jean-Paul Sartre’s most sustained attempt to formulate an existentialist ethics in the years immediately following Being and Nothingness. Composed as working manuscripts rather than a finished treatise, the text records Sartre’s effort to move from a largely descriptive ontology of freedom and bad faith to a normative account of how one ought to act in concrete, social, and historical situations.

The notebooks are particularly concerned with whether, and how, an ethics can be grounded without recourse to divine command, pre-given human nature, or timeless moral laws. Sartre explores the possibility that freedom itself could be the source of value, while also trying to accommodate material conditions, institutions, and collective life.

Because the work remained unpublished until 1983 (and in English until 1992), it functions both as a missing link within Sartre’s own development and as an important document in postwar debates about existentialism, Marxism, and moral philosophy. Readers encounter a transitional Sartre revising his earlier positions and sketching concepts—such as the fundamental project, authenticity, we-subject, and scarcity—that will shape his later political and social theory.

2. Historical Context and Intellectual Background

Written in 1947–1948, the notebooks emerge from the specific social and intellectual climate of post–Second World War France. Politically, Sartre is responding to the experience of occupation, resistance, and liberation, as well as to the early Cold War and the rising influence of the French Communist Party. These circumstances raise acute questions about responsibility, collaboration, violence, and collective struggle.

Philosophically, the project continues and revises themes from Being and Nothingness (1943), where Sartre had analyzed consciousness as freedom and interpersonal relations as marked by conflict. Critics had charged that this ontology could not yield a positive ethics; the notebooks may be read as an attempt to address that challenge.

Sartre’s background in phenomenology and Hegelian dialectics remains central, but he is increasingly engaged with Marxism, particularly its analysis of class, labor, and material conditions. He also confronts Catholic personalist ethics and neo-Kantian moral philosophy circulating in postwar France, sometimes adopting their vocabulary of personhood and duty while rejecting their metaphysical presuppositions.

The work thus stands at a crossroads where existentialism intersects with emerging debates about historical materialism and political engagement.

3. Author and Composition of the Notebooks

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), already a prominent novelist, playwright, and philosopher by the late 1940s, composed Notebooks for an Ethics during a period of intense public and political activity. Fresh from his wartime experiences and the success of Being and Nothingness and No Exit, he set out to produce a large, systematic ethical treatise that would complement his earlier ontology.

The surviving text consists of working cahiers—handwritten notebooks—drafted mainly between 1947 and 1948. These manuscripts were not prepared for publication, and Sartre later abandoned the precise plan they sketch, turning instead toward new projects, including the eventually published Critique of Dialectical Reason. His adopted daughter and literary executor, Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, reconstructed and edited the material for Gallimard’s 1983 French edition.

Scholars generally agree that the notebooks capture Sartre in mid-transition: rethinking earlier claims about absolute freedom, experimenting with new categories (such as scarcity and the we-subject), and testing possible outlines for the unwritten ethical treatise. Their fragmentary character reflects this exploratory, provisional mode of composition.

4. Structure and Organization of the Work

Because Notebooks for an Ethics consists of working papers, its organization is less systematic than that of a completed book, yet editors and commentators discern a broad internal architecture. The material is typically read as unfolding in five main movements that track Sartre’s attempt to pass from ontology to a historically grounded ethics.

Within each movement, Sartre proceeds by short sections, thought-experiments, and conceptual digressions, often circling back to earlier problems. The notebooks do not present a linear argument; instead, themes such as bad faith, authenticity, and collective praxis reappear under shifting angles. Editorial notes in modern editions indicate breaks, overlaps, and conjectural ordering, signaling that the “structure” is partly imposed retrospectively on heterogeneous drafts.

This organization allows readers to trace how Sartre’s focus gradually shifts—from individual consciousness, to patterns of life-choice, to social relations and historical structures—while remaining within a single, evolving project.

5. Central Arguments and Key Concepts

The notebooks articulate several interlinked arguments about ethics, each anchored in distinctive concepts that both extend and revise Sartre’s earlier philosophy.

Freedom and the Fundamental Project

Sartre maintains that human reality is characterized by freedom, understood as the capacity to transcend given situations. Ethics, on this view, concerns how one chooses and sustains a fundamental project—a basic orientation that gives unity to a life. Proponents of this reading emphasize that values are not discovered but constituted through such commitments.

Bad Faith and Authenticity in the Moral Sphere

Reworking his earlier analyses, Sartre describes bad faith as ethically salient when individuals disavow their responsibility by appealing to roles, nature, or social necessity. Authenticity is characterized as lucid acknowledgment of one’s freedom and facticity, along with commitment to projects that affirm both one’s own freedom and that of others.

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“We are condemned to be free, and it is from this condemnation that the demand for a morality arises.”

— Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics (paraphrased thematic claim)

Intersubjectivity and the We-Subject

Moving beyond dyadic conflict, Sartre introduces the we-subject, a collective agency emerging when individuals unite in a common project. This concept supports the argument that ethical life cannot be reduced to isolated choices; it must address group praxis, institutions, and forms of domination and solidarity.

Scarcity, History, and Political Engagement

By foregrounding scarcity (rareté), Sartre contends that limited resources structure social relations and often deform freedom into competition and violence. An ethics adequate to such conditions must be historical and often political, concerned with transforming structures that hinder collective liberation.

These arguments collectively frame ethics as an ongoing project grounded in freedom yet inseparable from material and social conditions.

6. Legacy and Historical Significance

Although unpublished during Sartre’s lifetime, Notebooks for an Ethics has exerted substantial influence on the interpretation of his work and on postwar moral and political philosophy. When released in 1983, the notebooks were quickly seen as clarifying the transition from Being and Nothingness to the Critique of Dialectical Reason, illuminating how Sartre moved from an emphasis on solitary consciousness to historical, collective praxis.

Historically, the notebooks have shaped debates about the compatibility of existential freedom with Marxist materialism, influencing later French thought on subjectivity, institutions, and liberation. They have also prompted re-evaluations of common claims that existentialism is inherently relativistic or incapable of grounding norms.

Scholars and critics disagree on the success of Sartre’s endeavor. Some regard the work as a promising but unfinished blueprint for an ethics of freedom and solidarity; others see it as revealing unresolved tensions between radical responsibility and structural constraint. Nevertheless, the text remains a central reference for discussions of postwar French philosophy, the ethics of commitment, and the relationship between individual agency and historical structures.