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Jean-Paul Sartre at 100

By Any Means Necessary?

Ian Birchall on a moral problem for Sartre.

When Jean-Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness in 1943, his conclusion promised a sequel. This was perhaps not the most enticing prospect for a reader who had just finished ploughing through 700 impenetrable pages. But in fact the book ended on a cliff-hanger. In a godless universe in which we are ‘condemned to be free’, it is all the same whether one becomes a leader of nations or gets drunk on one’s own. So did existentialism open the door to moral anarchy? Was Dostoevsky (as quoted by Sartre) right when he claimed: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”?

Sartre insisted this was not the case: an existentialist morality was not only possible, it would hit the bookstands shortly.

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