10

Ends and means:

existential ethics

O

nnovember1, 1946 , Sartre delivered a lecture entitled “The
Writer’s Responsibility” for the inaugural general conference of
UNESCO at the Sorbonne. In view of the auspicious nature of this
founding symposium, he concludes with a litany of recommendations
that he believes should guide the writer in our day:

1. To create a positive theory of liberation and freedom;


2. To put himself in a position to condemn violence from the viewpoint of oppressed
   men and classes;


3. To establish a true relationship of ends and means;


4. To immediately reject, in his own name – which, of course, will not prevent it –
   any violent means of establishing a regime;


5. Finally, to devote his thoughts without respite, day in, day out, to the problem of
   the end and the means; or, alternatively, the problem of the relation between
   ethics and politics.

Underscoring the timeliness of these remarks, he adds: “That is the
problem...of the present age, and it is our problem, it belongs to us
writers. That is our responsibility, not eternal but contemporary.”^1
This exhortation underscores the fundamentally moral character
of Sartre’s thought. He concluded his first major essay,Transcendence
of the Ego, with the prospect that “no more is needed in the way of a
philosophical foundation foran ethics and a politicswhich are absolutely
positive.”^2 And he ended his final attempt at an ethics, “an ethics of the

(^1) Reprinted inReflections on Our Age(New York: Columbia University Press, 1949 ), 82 – 83 ,
translation as emended in Contat and Rybalkai: 165. Repeated in words soon to appear in
2 What is Literature?: “One must write for one’s age” (WL^243 ).
TE-E 106 , emended and emphasis added.
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