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Sartre’s student had to choose between his mother and the Free French. Why did Sartre say no ethics could decide for him?

Vũ Quốc Bảo Contributor
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Moral theoriesContinentalExistentialismJean-Paul Sartre#existentialism#filial-duty#moral-dilemmas#sartre
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Its coordinates: 3.2 Normative Ethics · 3.2.1 Consequence-Based Approaches · 3.2.2 Duty-Based Approaches +3 more

I am translating Existentialism Is a Humanism into Vietnamese, and the passage about the student stops me every time.

During the Occupation a young man comes to Sartre. His brother has been killed in 1940, his father is close to the collaborators, and his mother lives only for him. He can go to England to join the Free French, or he can stay with her. Sartre runs through the doctrines. Christian charity: love your neighbour, but which one? Kant: treat people as ends, but whichever he chooses, someone is treated as a means. Feeling: you only learn how much you love someone by what you do. His conclusion: "You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent."

What troubles me is that Sartre never tries consequences. And he almost gives a consequentialist the material: staying is a concrete help to one person, he says, while joining the Free French aims at something much larger but is ambiguous; the young man might never reach England, or end up behind a desk.

Is that not exactly a calculation, which Sartre then refuses to finish? And in my family's Confucian ethics the answer would come at once: filial duty. Is Sartre right that no ethics can decide, or only that none can decide for him?

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4 answers

  1. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    The word you will fight with is délaissement, usually rendered "abandonment" or "forlornness". Sartre means that no sign and no doctrine comes to settle it for us, and even the adviser we choose already betrays our answer: he says that by choosing to come to him, the student already knew roughly what he'd hear.

    On your question, I think Sartre would say the calculation cannot be finished, not that it must not be started. The probabilities are unknowable and the goods are not on one scale. Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity takes this further and is gentler about it.

  2. Ji-woo Ryu

    Fellow

    The Confucian answer is less automatic than it looks. In Analects 13.18 the Duke of She boasts that in his land a son would testify against his father for stealing a sheep, and Confucius replies that among his people fathers cover for sons and sons for fathers, and uprightness lies in that. Filial duty wins there. But later Confucians argued endlessly about loyalty to the ruler against duty to parents, which is close to your student's case.

    So the tradition has an answer for the ordinary case and a long argument for this one. Sartre may simply have picked the case where every ethics runs out.

  3. Rowena Abellana

    Fellow

    I teach this passage to sixteen-year-olds and they always say the same thing: "He already decided, he just wanted permission." Which is Claire's point about choosing the adviser. I used to correct them. I've come to think they have found the deepest line in the lecture.

  4. Walt Kowalczyk

    Reader

    I'm new and I never went to college, so take this as a view from the cab. I heard this passage on an audiobook somewhere in Tennessee and pulled over at the next rest stop to hear it again.

    What hit me was not the doctrines. It was that the young man went to Sartre. He picked his adviser. My father was a steelworker who told me to take the mill job; my uncle told me to drive. I knew which one I'd go to before I asked either of them.

    So when Sartre says no ethics can decide for him, I hear: you'll find the ethics that agrees with you, so own it. Rowena's students are right. That doesn't make the choice arbitrary. It makes it his.