Making Morals Fun

...Though she maintains a sharp classical rationality, Miss Barnes is not condescending toward the current philos-ophizings, as if viewing them from the height of the great systems, including Being and Nothingness...

...So she is a sophisticated technician among the traditional abstractions, and that in itself can make her writing a pleasure...

...Miss Barnes is not shy of these arduous difficulties...

...While reading it I got into several ethical situations by accident, including jury duty on the one hand and arraignment in traffic court on the other, and my reading made these rather routine situations remarkably vivid and intellectually exciting...

...But Miss Barnes is a meticulous philosopher with a genuine calling for contemporaneity and I am nothing of the kind...

...Not the least of her resources is affection, which tempers the rather frigid individualism of Sartre's on-tological "for-itself" and allows a much subtler analysis of human interrelations...

...Miss Barnes deals more abundantly with the intermediate areas, where indeed most human action is carried on...

...Hazel E. Barnes has at last come out with An Existentialist Ethics, which derives its main instrumental ideas from Sartre's early ontology but at the same time situates itself right in the midst of the issues of the current convulsive decade?space age and the rest of it...

...It is not and does not intend to be the ethics Sartre might have written, partly because it is naturally occupied with American situations and written by a woman from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, residing in Colorado and traveling all over the place, but also because it has a fuller perspective on the world than his...

...Aside from the immediate pleasure of reading it...

...Also, the consciousness is perpetually free to make new choices, of ethics, of its kind of being, of its ground of justification if any...

...Ethics, operating in so complex a world and at so many distances, becomes a more difficult calculus by far than the hedonistic, since freedom and authenticity for oneself or for others are far more ambiguous goods than pleasure...

...She may be short on the traditional Anguish of Existentialism, although realizing its due importance in the free act, but I for one welcome the change of mood toward a more positive courage, even buoyancy...

...she keeps up the professional civilities????not without some salt, it is true????toward the gross assertive-ness of Ayn Rand, the resignations of Heidegger, or the sonorities of the New Theologians, which I would damn outright...

...For Sartreans and admirers of Sartre one of the most discouraging effects of that lack is to make his authoritarian manner not only tiresome but suspect...

...It could happen to you...

...She handles them with great concern and delicacy, as the freely chosen ground on which many other people feel they actively exist, and thus as a vivid part of her own actual world...

...she was very good with a hula-hoop in its day...

...To take up a sort of millennial post-Communist cause as a general imperative over and above immediate response to clear and present atrocities, as Sartre has done, is a good instance of existentialist freedom of choice and leaping in the dark?valid enough for the individual case ????but it does nothing for the problem of an existentialist ethics at large and is obviously not binding on other existentialists, even those of the Sartrean branch itself...

...But things are better now, at least for Sartrean existentialists and their fellow-travelers like myself...

...One's chances are of course very slight, since philosophers from Plato on have had a terrible time coaxing a plausible imperative out of purely philosophical description, and when something does come it is usually so simple or so general it is more an irritation than a guide in the midst of complex concrete action...

...I have not really taken to heart any philosophy since that of the younger Seneca...

...If her choices are limiting and make her ethics not the existentialist ethics in full, they still make it extraordinarily broad and more central to the general doctrine than any I can imagine...

...Her wit can be amiable as well as sharp...

...Choosing to be passive or perfunctory or selfless is a free enough choice but it makes little of the individual's essential freedom, while choosing to be malevolent or even resigned toward humanity is to make little of the freedom of others, if not to deny it altogether...

...Given this very wide range of choices, Miss Barnes has written not the but an existentialist ethics...

...She chooses to be ethical, she chooses to be active, she chooses the good of humanity as well as the justified individual life...

...Some years ago Miss Barnes translated Being and Nothingness, rendering its involuted terminology and logical refinements with singular precision, for she is also trained in Greek philosophy of the most intricate sort, especially Plotinus, and had a depth perception around the French wording...

...He has applied his early dogma widely enough and to some extent elaborated it, but he has not got around to writing an ethics, and apparently has now renounced all interest in such a work...

...A typology is all very well, and the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle is hardly more, but after the description of behavior one does want some sort of imperative, if not for oneself at least for making other people behave themselves...

...author, "Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work" Jean-Paul Sartre, being no prisoner of his own philosophy or of himself as philosopher, has become, since writing his monumentally intricate ontological opus Being and Nothingness, variously a novelist, playwright, polite essayist, polemical journalist, man of politi cal action, and even word-man for a popular song...

...She and I are old friends and former colleagues in the Classics, but I contemplate her performance with objectivity and amazement...

...Simone de Beauvoir once contributed a very pleasant jeu d'esprit called The Ethics of Ambiguity, but it is only a typology...

...Though he may well be in good faith to himself, his factitious public figure as the voice of Sartrean Existentialism is in distinctly bad faith, behaving like the superego incarnate of the whole wide world, including Moscow and Washington, when it has no authentic ethics to its name, nothing beyond the makeshift conventional values of Christianity and amateur Marxism after all...

...It is very like the existing world, and though her minute analyses are of the utmost clarity it does not seem to be made up of ideas or types, but of people, and people not as "beings" but as potentials, in a perpetual struggle to get or use or evade their freedom...

...The present work goes, and insists, on the existentialist assumption that the individual consciousness, however conditioned by objects and habits, is essentially free...

...At the very least it makes for delightful reading, even if you are not especially interested in the subject of ethics, as I am not...

...The greatest excitement and illumination in her present book, however, is her unreserved commitment to the actualities of the present intellectual world, as against the great past or the far future...

...In the present world it is not Plato we have on our hands, but Ayn Rand, not Montaigne, but Norman Mailer, not Duns Scotus, but Zen Buddhism, not even Marx but the New Radicals...

...this book may not only improve your behavior but brighten up the vicissitudes of your day...

...she goes at them with all her vast resources...

...When one happens to be on the same side of an issue with him it is about as reassuring as having the blessing of Cardinal Spellman...

...It is free to choose any sort of ethics????hedonist, pragmatic, religious????or even not to be distinctly ethical at all, but it should not appeal for justification to any outer authority, since it will itself have arbitrarily constituted the outer authority????be it God, Necessity, Being, Pleasure, the good of Mankind, or what have you...

...And not for the first time...

...It is too bad, because his kind of Existentialism, rejecting the religious ground of traditional ethics and even the social ground, pragmatic or contractual, leaves the individual entirely free of obligations from outside and at a loss for any "authentic" rules of conduct????except perhaps the notoriously treacherous one of "good faith...

...Her patience with some of them is incredible, and once in a while a little too much for mine...

...The situation has been awkward and even painful, since on its ontological premises Existentialism can, like Anarchism, lead as well to the extreme Right????witness Heidegger's abject allegiance to Hitler?as to the extreme and equally lethal Left, if there is no articulate system of values and ethics...

...But this book makes rather a high adventure of ethical behavior and may force me to choose to be ethical after all...

...Several times in my life I have deliberately done something ethical and a few of the things I did turned out to have been ethical, so far as I could tell, but I disliked the feeling of justification in myself as much as I dislike the sound of it coming from others...

...Not that she neglects sexuality, drink, and the end of the world...

...These special choices are made, not because they perpetuate a liberal middle-class Protestant mentality????which in any case would not invalidate them????but because a life led according to them can make the most of Sartre's ontology in realizing itself and appreciating the structures of immediate situations...

...Likewise, where Sartre tends to go directly from his intimate friends to man in the mass or the mass "in fusion," Miss Barnes' world is full of many degrees of casual acquaintance and strangers????with whom one has after all most to do ????along with intimates and vast groups like races and nations and the poor...

...It is that as a professor she deals with the many variegated phenomena on the campus of the University of Colorado or Berkeley, with the racial questions in the South and elsewhere, with the problems of peyote or lsd, with Hip and Zen from coast to coast...

...Sartre tends to go from the private life (not expanded far beyond Simone de Beauvoir or the cafe table) directly to world politics and the millennium...

...Take Kant, or Marxist Necessity, or even Profit, as in business ethics...