ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the ethics found in the early period of J. P. Sartre’s thought, one that has been labeled by some as idealistic or abstract, in contrast to his later more concrete, materialistic, and realistic ethics. For Sartre, the starting point is always consciousness, that is, human consciousness. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre states that “the law of being in the knowing subject is to-be-conscious”. Sartre concludes by saying that, thus the assumptive conversion that presents itself as a value for consciousness is, therefore, nothing other than an intuition of the will, which consists in adopting human reality as one’s own. Sartre’s concept of authenticity is, as he says, “a double source of joy: through the transformation of gratuity into absolute freedom”. Sartre indicates that the realization of a project is a victory over fragility, which has an ethical value.
