ABSTRACT
In 1943, when Being and Nothingness was published, Sartre considered the philosophy of action to be essentially undeveloped, a view which-given that the major available work in this domain in French was Blondel’s L’Action of 1893-seems plausible enough. But such a philosophy was especially needed at that time as a propaedeutic to morality and the philosophy of freedom, because the dominant problems of the moment were problems of the possibility and authenticity of action. (Even though no mention is made in Being and Nothingness of occupation or collaboration their presence is often implicit.) Ontology is all very well, but ethics is immediate and pressing when bad faith is rampant and the salauds have taken over the world. The individual, Sartre came to see, is the sum of his actions; not the individual as a fleeting for-itself but the individual as a past and therefore frozen element of the in-itself, a personal facticity which is a principal component of the determination of the for-itself and reconciles the apparent inconsistency between its nothingness on the one hand and its effective instrumentality on the other (BN 201). The for-itself can, by the adoption of a new project, start again from scratch, but the constant necessity of choice will soon create a new set of actions-and even the new project cannot so easily get rid of the moral weight of the old actions, though it may be able to shed their ontological weight. (Sartre’s evangelism is in this respect the opposite of Bunyan’s.)
The essential characteristics of action as Sartre sees them are that it is always intentional and that it always responds to a lack. The latter implies that every action is a venture into non-being. It follows at the same time that no actual state of affairs can determine an action, that as such it cannot even determine that I should see in it the lack that might lead to action. For that matter I cannot even recognize a ‘state of affairs’ without invoking the power of negation/determination which we have seen to be the defining property of the foritself and which in the context of action is called its freedom. The latter part of Being and Nothingness is devoted to an analysis of ‘doing’ and ‘having’ in their relation to ‘being’, as they depend on and challenge the freedom of the for-itself and. constitute its project, i.e., its conscious intentionality towards the future. The book ends with a section entitled ‘Moral Perspectives’ and the promise of a work consecrated to the problem of morality.
