Ohnmächtige Ethik (English shop)

Psychoanalyse und Marxismus bei Jean-Paul Sartre

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Before normative ethics loses itself in the multiplicity of its theoretical justifications, Jean-Paul Sartre compels us to pose once again fundamental questions concerning the very possibility of morality within the framework of a ‘historical and structural anthropology’. He succeeds in doing so in his extensive study of Gustave Flaubert, which has hitherto received little attention in the secondary literature. For Sartre, the failure of an ethics of principles is rooted both in the subject-centred construction of his existential philosophy and in his reception of Freud’s psychoanalysis. Neither, however, causes him to resign. On the contrary: in his Flaubert he develops an ethics based on understanding rather than on knowledge, in that it considers the human being as an ‘individual universal’ and in this way unites Freud and Marx methodologically. Its being doomed to failure does not bend moral reason, but rather leads it onto the path of an ‘understanding non-knowledge’.