Sartre and Kant

Abstract

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason can be seen as the first step towards the realization of one of his earliest philosophical projects: that of authoring a theory of politics.¹ That Sartre was fully aware of the importance, for ethics and politics, of a conception of the person can be gleaned from his claims concerning the main task of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, namely that of developing a conception of the person that could incorporate the historical and social aspects of the human agent.² This is also evident from the way in which he dismisses, at 75 (1980), his earlier writings on ethics:

the new third attempt would have to be based on a new ontology of consciousness as interpenetrating with other consciousnesses, an ontology which would leave “nothing of Being and Nothingness and even of the Critique of Dialectical Reason standing, leading to an ethics of ‘we’ in contrast to the earlier ethics of the ‘I’ ”.³