The Paradoxes of Moral in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomena of intersubjectivity and moral in Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy and reviews these topics on two levels of analysis: one ontological and one moral level. The main hypothesis in this paper is that it is possible to locate an ontological foundation for a tentative existentialistic moral of responsibility or a moral of freedom. Sartre’s theory of intersubjectivity is founded in a phenomenological ontology in which the self-conscious individual “is condemned to be free” and in which this individual confronts a contingent world of inanimate things whose meaning entirely depends upon what he freely chooses. Each consciousness is fundamentally self-constituting and is completely responsible for what it makes of itself. However, the subject stands opposed to other consciousnesses, and the social world for Sartre can be described as a conflict which is revealed in the experience of “the look” where the subject experiences itself as an object for others. This represents at the same time an aporia or a theoretical problem in Sartre’s philosophy, but the paper will still suggest that the intersubjectivity can have normative implications in which the ontological concept of freedom is connected to a moral concept of responsibility.

[T]he responsibility of the for-itself is overwhelming since he is the one by whom it happens that there is a world.

(Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness)