Violence in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Cahiers pour une morale

Abstract

This article rescues the original theory of violence that Jean-Paul Sartre developed in the late forties in Notebooks for an Ethics (1983). Notebooks is a posthumous and unfinished work in which the philosopher outlined the ethics promised in the last pages of Being and Nothingness. In this unfinished moral philosophy, violence is phenomenologically described as a human enterprise, freely chosen in an existential situation, which possesses the following essential features: the intransigent attitude, the destructive function, the dissociation of ends and means, the rupture of bonds of solidarity, the magical belief, the self-justification, the demand and the devaluation of the freedom of others. The main objective of this article is to reconstruct this theory so that it is possible to judge its value today in the philosophical problem of defining what violence is.