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ABSTRACT
This article examines the ethics of ambiguity formulated by existentialist authors in the 1940s, linking it to turn-of-the-century debates on ethics between philosophy and the social sciences. The underlying thesis is that, rather than representing a radical conceptual novelty, the ethical thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, strained between freedom and situation, constitutes a revisiting and updating of philosophical positions from the landscape of the Third Republic. To demonstrate this, the thought of Frédéric Rauh is examined. Indeed, anticipating what de Beauvoir would later call “ambiguity”, Rauh sought to develop an ethics of action that would constitute a third way between sociological objectivism and the empty abstractions of idealism and rationalism. By reconstructing the transitions from one generation and historical context to the next, the article shows how, and through which mediators, the existentialists were well aware of this debate and, in their own way, developed a philosophy of action, of ethical experience, similar to Rauh’s.
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Notes
1 Cf. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 30.
2 Cf. Lukács, Existentialisme ou marxisme?, 184–6.
3 See Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality.
4 De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 9. Hereafter referred to as EA.
5 See Langer, “Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Ambiguity”; De Waelhens, Une philosophie de l’ambiguïté. The first to draw attention to this topic was his classmate at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, Ferdiand Alquié, in his article “Une philosophie de l’ambiguïté”.
6 Deutscher, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, 7. For an overview, see Keltner, “Beauvoir’s Idea of Ambiguity”.
7 As Merleau-Ponty wrote in Le Temps modernes in 1945, “No one’s hands are clean … We have unlearned ‘pure morality’ … We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it” (“The War Has Taken Place”, 147).
8 See Duclert, Savoir et engagement.
9 De Beauvoir, “Moral Idealism and Political Realism”, 177.
10 Cf. Lukács, Existentialisme ou marxisme?, 153–6.
11 EA, 134.
12 Cf. Nizan, The Watchdogs, 28–9.
13 Rauh, L’Expérience morale, 247. Hereafter referred to as EM.
14 Cf. Piazza, “L’engagement come passione francese: l’affaire Dreyfus”, 545.
15 Cf. Prochasson, “Frédéric Rauh, le socialisme, la réforme et la morale”, 42–4.
16 Cf. Soulié, “Expérience morale, démocratie et socialisme”, 64–5. Soulié’s essay is the best account of Rauh’s life, work and reception.
17 For an overview, see Loeffel, La Question du fondement de la morale laïque sous la IIIe République (1870–1914). The average was forty books published per year, as Massimo Borlandi reports. Cf. his “Durkheim, Rauh et la partie qui revient à l’individu dans la genèse des phénomènes sociaux”, 19.
18 See Blais, “La Science de la morale: une théorie des fondements du droit et de la justice”.
19 Cf. Keck, “Le débat sur La Morale et la science des mœurs de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl”, 375.
20 On the debate, see the abovementioned article by Keck; and Merllié, “Lévy-Bruhl et la philosophie morale”.
21 For an analysis of this work, see Keck, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, entre philosophie et anthropologie, 25–49.
22 Cf. Ibid., 150.
23 See Loeffel, La Question du fondement de la morale laïque sous la IIIe République, 167–92; Isambert, “Durkheim: une science de la morale pour une morale laïque”.
24 See Terzi, “L’esprit collectif entre philosophie scientifique et sociologie”.
25 Cf. Durkheim, “The Determination of Moral Facts”, 59–62.
26 Cf. Parodi, Le Problème moral et la pensée contemporaine, 47–51.
27 Keck, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 147.
28 Rauh, “La morale comme technique indépendante”, 275.
29 Parodi, La Philosophie contemporaine en France, 363.
30 Ono, “Lucien Lévy-Bruhl et Frédéric Rauh”, 72.
31 Cf. Rauh, “Science et conscience”, 257.
32 As Borlandi has shown (“Durkheim, Rauh et la partie qui revient à l’individu dans la genèse des phénomènes sociaux”, 23), Rauh seems to side with Gabriel Tarde and his individual-centred sociology against Durkheim.
33 Cf. EM, 206.
34 Cf. Ibid., 214.
35 Ibidem.
36 Ibid., 221.
37 Cf. Ibid., 227.
38 Cf. Rauh, “La morale comme technique indépendante”, 280–1; Bouglé, “La philosophie de l’expérience morale”, 27–8; Brunschvicg, “25ème anniversaire de la mort de Frédéric Rauh”.
39 Cf. Rauh, Études de morale, 1.
40 Cf. Ibid., 6.
41 Cf. EM, 163, 221.
42 Cf. Ibid., 224. It should come as no surprise that Rauh has been regarded, albeit improperly, as a kind of French pragmatist. See Horner, “A Pragmatist in Paris”.
43 Cf. EM, 225.
44 Cf. Ibid., 215–25.
45 Cf. Ibid., 217–18.
46 Rauh mentions in particular a series of articles published by Le Roy in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale between 1899 and 1901, titled “Science et philosophie”, where he targeted intellectualism and rationalism in the name of Bergson’s “philosophie nouvelle”. Le Roy’s views triggered a violent debate, involving all the major thinkers of the circle of the Revue and the Société française de philosophie. Bergon’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” was originally published in the Revue as a follow up to this quarrel. On Rauh and Le Roy, see Horner, “A Pragmatist in Paris”, 302–6.
47 Cf. EM, 231, 250 fn. 4.
48 Ibid., 219.
49 Cf. Ibid., 221.
50 Ibid., 192.
51 Cf. Collins, “The Durkheimian Movement in France and in World Sociology”, 115–18; Heilbron, “Les métamorphoses du durkheimisme, 1920–1940”.
52 Cf. Merllié, “La sociologie de la morale est-elle soluble dans la philosophie?”, 432; Foulquié, Précis de philosophie à l’usage des candidats au baccalauréat, 110–12.
53 For example, limiting ourselves to the years when Sartre was a high school and university student, the Éléments de philosophie morale: à l’usage des classes de philosophie et des écoles normales primaires (reprinted systematically between 1890–1923) by Félix Pécaut (1828–1898).
54 Cuvillier would be one of the main opponents of the penetration of Heidegger’s philosophy in France. See his Les Infiltrations germaniques dans la pensée française (1945). Cuvillier would later turn to sociology, collaborating precisely with Gurvitch.
55 Cf. Gurvitch, Morale théorique et science des mœurs, 34. The French “éprouvées” plays on the same semantic ambiguity of “expérience”, meaning both something that is felt, lived, and something that is tested.
56 Ibid., 147. Rauh had already been the subject of an in-depth discussion by Gurvitch in an earlier book from 1935, L’Expérience juridique et la philosophie pluraliste du droit, 33–44.
57 Gurvitch would become the dominant figure of French sociology from the 1940s to the 1960s. See Marcel, “Georges Gurvitch”.
58 See Gurvtich, Les Tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande.
59 Cf. Leroux, “Sur quelques aspects de la réception de Max Scheler en France”, 332–4. In the 1931 book that resulted from the Sorbonne lectures, Scheler is the philosopher who receives the lengthiest treatment. See also Dupont, Phenomenology in French Philosophy, 129–38.
60 See De Waelhens, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale, 7.
61 See De Beauvoir, Lacoin, and Merleau-Ponty, Lettres d’amitié. I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this aspect.
62 Sartre, “A New Mystic”, 81.
63 Cf. Ribot, “Psychologie”, 229.
64 Cf. Flajoliet, La Première philosophie de Sartre, 343–8.
65 On Sartre as a psychologist, see Fruteau de Laclos, La Psychologie des philosophes, 195–224.
66 Aron, German Sociology, 83.
67 Cf. Nizan, The Watchdogs, 37, 106–10, 156.
68 Heilbron, French Sociology, 129.
69 Ibid., 128.
70 Cf. Flajoliet, La Première philosophie de Sartre, 472–5, 760–1, 786–7.
71 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 305, 436.
72 See the essays gathered in Merleau-Ponty, Signs (1960), especially “The Philosopher and Sociology” (98–113) and “From Marcel Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss” (114–125); Fortuzzi, “Merleau-Ponty e l’istituzione: la radice sociologica”.
73 See Rodrigues, Le Problème de l’action. The intent of this text does not differ much from Rauh’s: to provide a “subjective moral methodology”.
74 On Dufrenne’s early works in the 1940s and 1950s, see Saison, La Nature artiste, 49–70.
75 Cf. Dufrenne, “Existentialisme et sociologie”, 167. Dufrenne even reverses the traditional phenomenological account of the primacy of the foundational subjective pole over objective reality:
Any knowledge of the subjective is only possible against a backdrop of objectivity. If one wants to grasp the ties that bind him to the world, he must first separate himself from the world and make a spectacle of it [se le donner en spectacle]; existentialism is quite ready to say that there is no point of view from Sirius from which to fly over the world, and that we are always inside social reality. But this only means that an objective science is never complete, not that the effort towards objectivity is illegitimate or futile. (Ibid., 168)
76 Cf. Ibid., 169.
77 Cf. Ibid., 170.
78 See “Liste des emprunts de Jean-Paul Sartre”.
79 Cf. Sartre, “A New Mystic”, 65.
80 Cf. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 28.
81 EM, 153.
82 Cf. Gurvitch, L’Expérience juridique et la philosophie pluraliste du droit, 35; Gurvitch, Morale théorique et science des mœurs, 50.
83 Sartre, “A More Precise Characterization of Existentialism”, 157.
84 Cf. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 44–6.
85 Cf. Ibid., 30–1.
86 Ibid., 46.
87 Münster, Sartre et la morale, 28.
88 Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 54.
89 Cf. Pinto, Sociologie et philosophie, 54–80.
90 Cf. EA, 239.
91 See Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 57–9, 67.
92 See Naville, D’Holbach et la philosophie scientifique au XVIIIe siècle; Mailhos, “Pierre Naville et la philosophie matérialiste du XVIIIe siècle”.
93 Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 62.
94 Cf. Ibid., 64–5.
95 Cf. Ibid., 70–2.
96 Cf. Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, xxxix–xl.
97 Cf. Card, “Introduction”, 14–5.
98 Cf. EA, 45–6. Cf. also De Beauvoir, Pyrrhus and Cineas, 99; Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 63, 600, 646.
99 EA, 14.
100 Ibid., 42–5.
101 De Beauvoir, “Moral Idealism and Political Realism”, 188.
102 EA, 123; cf. also De Beauvoir, Pyrrhus and Cineas, 139.
103 Cf. Deutscher, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, 26, fn. 20.
104 Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 645.
105 De Beauvoir, Pyrrhus and Cineas, 139–40.
106 Cf. De Beauvoir, After the War: Force of Circumstance, I – 1944-1952, 67:
[In The Ethics of Ambiguity] I went to a great deal of trouble to present inaccurately a problem to which I then offered a solution quite as hollow as the Kantian maxims … .I was in error when I thought I could define a morality independent of a social context. I could write an historical novel without having a philosophy of history, but not construct a theory of action.
107 For a comprehensive analysis of these texts, see Bowman and Stone, Reading Sartre’s Second Ethics.
108 Sartre, “Les racines de l’éthique”, 47.
109 Cf. Ibid., 36–7. By “practical-inert”, Sartre means the products of human praxis – economic forms, political institutions – which have become autonomous, as if living a life of their own, and which now condition the subject’s actions from the outside by structuring the social and cultural relations in which he is embedded. Cf. also Sartre, “Morale et histoire”, 357:
Human action thus has its ethical moment, whatever the outcome, when, once the end has been set, invention presents itself as a reshaping of the practical field and the free linking of practico-inert structures as internalised means (pseudo-interiority) of achieving an end.
110 Sartre, “Les racines de l'éthique”, 39. Cf. Rauh, “Science et conscience”, 259: “The sociologist assumes that life does not begin again. I assume on the contrary that it is a continuous creation”.
111 Cf. Sartre, “Morale et histoire”, 359–60.
112 Cf. Ibid., 381; EM, 246.
113 Sartre, “Les racines de l’éthique”, 98, fn. 65.
114 Ibid., 45.
115 Cf. Ibid., 49–50.
116 “La Crise morale dans les sociétés contemporaines”, Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 8 (1908): 108.
117 Cf. Ibid., 124–8.
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Pietro Terzi
Pietro Terzi is associate researcher at the Institute de Recherches Philosophiques at the Université Paris Nanterre. He holds a Ph.D. from the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo in Modena (Italy) and the Université Paris Nanterre.