Abstract
In recent years, three posthumous texts by Sartre have been published concerning the problem of the foundation of a non-normative ethics. All of them have allowed us to discover an underground work that Sartre pursued between the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. In many ways, that was a crucial time in his intellectual life, because, at that time, he was confronted with a new stage of continental philosophy, particularly in France, where structuralism started to compete with existentialism for cultural hegemony. In the same period, he was breaking his fairly brief companionship with the French Communist Party. This huge endeavor—that appears to the researcher’s eyes like a real building site—corresponds somehow to the promised development of the Critiqueof Dialectical Reason, whose second volume was dedicated to comprehension of the ‘concrete’ in history and to a renewed philosophical anthropology. Nevertheless, the second volume was never completed by Sartre, even if—as we know following its publication in 1985—it achieved a substantial and ultimately consistent elaboration of its main themes.
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Notes
- 1.
Mainly after the publication of The Elementary Structures of Kinship by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Lévi-Strauss 1969), Levi-Strauss’s book had been reviewed in 1949 by Simone de Beauvoir in Les Temps modernes and had been hailed as a pivotal work in contemporary ethnographic research (see Beauvoir 1949). Later on, in the last chapter of The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss declared that Sartre’s interpretation of his masterpiece had been nothing but a misunderstanding: structuralism could not be referred back to a dialectical reason (see Levi-Strauss 1966, pp. 245–269).
- 2.
In fact, the typescript of the debate has been published only partially because of an editorial choice that preferred to offer just an abridged version of the long and dense discussion between Sartre and the Italian communist intellectuals (see Sartre 2013). The Italian edition offers a broad résumé of the debate (see Sartre 2015).
- 3.
Enzo Paci (1911–1976) was one of the most prominent phenomenologists in Italy. Following the path of the rationalist thinker Antonio Banfi, he studied Husserl’s phenomenology, which he reinterpreted as an endless project of foundation of an encyclopedia of science. He taught theoretical philosophy at the State University of Milan and was the founder of the philosophical journal “Aut Aut”. Among his most relevant publications are the essays Tempo e verità nella fenomenologia di Husserl (Time and Truth in Husserl’s Phenomenology, 1961), Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (Functions of Sciences and the Meaning of Man, Bari: Laterza, 1963) and Idee per una enciclopedia fenomenonologica (Ideas for a Phenomenological Encyclopedia, Milan: Bompiani, 1973).
- 4.
See Rovatti (1987, p. 202) “The dialogue becomes fully explicit around 1960, in the horizon of phenomenology, when Sartre is, in Paci’s eyes, the philosopher who rethinks Marxism critically by closely approaching the phenomenological themes of the subject and meaning, but without a complete awareness of them”.
- 5.
“the intelligible reason of History’s irreversibility”. “The orientation of the totalization is… the sense of History and its truth” (Paci 1961, p. 110).
- 6.
Typewritten document of the Gramsci Institute in Rome (=DGI), sheet 77; see also Sartre (2015, p. 148).
- 7.
Paci (1963, p. 364). Rovatti comments on Paci’s important quotation in this way: “Sartre rests still in debt toward Husserl: actually, he doesn’t appear aware of the fact that his analysis of the subjectivity is wholly founded on this crucial theoretical difference that Husserl calls ‘reduction’. Paci insists: it’s not Heidegger’s ontological difference. Rather, it’s a matter of understanding the philosophical revolution which is implicit in epoché as an ‘artificial’ exercise: the modification of thought that it requires” (Rovatti 1987, p. 208).
- 8.
Rovatti quotes some unpublished pages taken from Paci’s Journal about the meeting that took place with Sartre after the end of the conference: “‘This morning I met Sartre at the bar Pont-Royal…’. Paci and Sartre start to discuss the situation of the Italian left, then Sartre goes on to speak about the translation of his anthology of political writings (he does not like the choice of the title that has been chosen: Il filosofo e la politica [The Philosopher and Politics]; the discourse then shifts to the next conference at the Gramsci Institute dedicated to the moral, to which Sartre has been invited, but Paci has not. There is a gradual approximation to philosophical themes, a long round, a politesse that makes them hesitate: they speak at length about Merleau-Ponty, then about Heidegger, on whom they share their criticism; finally, they discuss ideology. It is only at the end of their talk that some essential points seem to emerge: ‘but then comes out the discourse on Husserl: Sartre confesses that he knows him thanks to Ideen I and the existentialist versions. I give a real lecture about the last Husserl” (Rovatti 1987, p. 210).
References
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Kirchmayr, R. (2020). Toward an Ethics of Singularity: Temporality, Irreversibility, and Need in the Dialogue between Jean-Paul Sartre and Enzo Paci. In: Betschart, A., Werner, J. (eds) Sartre and the International Impact of Existentialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38482-1_9
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