He seeks to fashion an ethic (une morale) for himself, one free from the
vain pursuit of happiness (le bonheur) and from the many rules and
principles that hobble so many moral philosophers. “I worry little about
ethics provided it sometimes restrains my passions and allows me enough
leisure to discover a goal that by itself will harmonize my faculties. If it
can’t give me much solace, at least it won’t do me any harm.” Then he
anticipates a famous theme from his post-war humanism lecture when he
says to those who appeal to human nature as their criterion for good and
evil: “‘In which direction should I go?’ What will help me decide?
Nothing. Good and evil are mingled beyond recognition...Principles
are powerless and conscience acts like a dead god.”^40 Continuing
his attack on the abstract principles of ethical humanism, he concludes:
“I look into these unappealing mirrors and I see the image of Man, not
that of Er the Armenian.”^41 Challenged that if he’s a man, he should
think like one, Er utters a full-throated Nietzschean response: “What
does it matter to me to be a man? I wish to be God” (EJ 303 ).^42
The dialogue on evil presages Sartre’s subsequent interest in, if not
fixation on, individual responsibility: the claim that it is our actions alone
that constitute us as the kind of persons we are (the famous “existence
precedes essence” of his vintage existentialist years). The assumption is
that we are free in a contra-causal sense, and hence the moral of the story
is that there is always a moral to the story. Sartre’s task will be to draw
that moral, at least implicitly, in every case. But it will always be a
function of our radical freedom and the responsibility that it engenders.
Freedom is emerging as the prime value to be fostered.
(^40) EJ 302 and note.
(^41) Ibid., 303. One can read this as an anticipation of Roquentin’s disgust with “bourgeois”
humanism inNausea. What bothers him as it does Er in the present text is the humanistic
tendency to “homogenize”; that is, to ignore or even melt individual identities in the noble
ideal of “Humanity.” See Jean-Paul Sartre,Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New
Directions, 1964 ), 118 ; hereafterNausea. AlsoOR 140. This is an implicit appeal to the myth
of “solitary man” that emerges inThe Legend of Truth. But it remains a persistent feature of
Sartre’s critique of a certain kind of “humanism,” a feature we shall find him continuing
to reject in his attack on “analytic” reasoning both inAnti-Semite and Jewand at great length
in theCritique of Dialectical Reasonas his moral concerns reveal their epistemic dimension.
In effect, this failure to adopt a “spirit of synthesis” blinds Er/Roquentin/Sartre to the
social aspect of individuality and of collective identity. Nothing short of the dialectic, with its
42 “singular universal,” Sartre seems to believe, will correct this handicap.
The futile desire to be God will make its famous appearance as man’s most basic drive
toward conscious self-identity inBeing and Nothingness(BN 566 ;EN 653 ).
34 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher