Stoic,” probably alluding to a remark he made in a letter to Beauvoir:
“I’m writing at great length in my little notebook: the misadventures
of a Stoic. You can guess what kind: the circumstances are too ironically
easy and favorable for an honest Stoic such as me.” Sartre exposes his
problem in the third notebook:
“Conquer oneself rather than fortune.” Very well said. But a fine demonstration of
the guile of stoicism...If I’m passionately attached to some object that eludes me,
what can renouncing it mean to me? Do people think that I can continue to assert the
object’s value in the flesh, in short be a martyr to that value, andat the same timecut
off all my desire at its roots? Do they not see that I grasp that valuethroughmy
desire?
(November 27 , 1939 ,WD 50 – 51 )
In the first notebook he states his objective: “To know the war and to
know myself at war.” But this leads him to ask “whether stoicism and
authenticity are compatible. Isn’t stoicism the refusal of anguish – and
isn’t there the stoic’s trickery, a stoic optimism? And authenticity, on the
contrary, doesn’t it resonate with moaning (ge ́missements)? And isn’t
Gide, who often pursued authenticity, the worst enemy of stoicism?”
(CDG-F 69 ). So we are encountering the tension we witnessed between
Brunet and Mathieu in the novel now lodged in Sartre’s own soul: the
stoic versus the authentic individual.
Authenticity: initial sketches
Sartre is closely associated with an ethics of authenticity as distinct from
an ethics of rules or consequences. In a famous footnote toBeing and
Nothingness he promises to produce such an ethics. In the several
hundred pages of loosely connected reflections gathered in notebooks
(cahiers) written in 1947 and 1948 , he tries his hand at keeping that
promise.^7 In retrospect, he defends his abandonment of the project
because the ethical views expressed there were “too idealist.”^8 One
might view this project as a kind of purgation of the remaining idealist
(^7) SeeBN 70 n. and 412 n. His attempt to fulfill this promise was the posthumously published
Notebooks for an Ethicsthat we shall discuss inChapter 10. It constitutes the first of three
8 successive approaches to ethics that Sartre will sketch but never complete in his lifetime.
SeeMAEA 1250.
Authenticity: initial sketches 165