At long last, Truth and Existence allows us to read Jean-Paul
Sartre's analysis of knowing and truth. This brilliant
epistemological sequel to Being and Nothingness was found among
Sartre's unpublished manuscripts by his adoptive daughter and
executor, Arlette Elkaim-Sartre. Posthumously published in France
in 1989, the work dates to 1948, shortly after Sartre's
controversial call for the writer's political commitment and his
celebrated public lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism". Truth and
Existence, written in response to Martin Heidegger's The Essence of
Truth, is a product of the years when Sartre was reaching full
stature as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, essayist, and
political activist. This brief, coherent, and engaging text
presents Sartre's ontology of truth in terms of his characteristic
key moral questions of freedom, action, and bad faith. While
stressing the intuitive and personal dimensions of truth, Truth and
Existence also explores the argument that ignoring is an
intentional act starting, like all knowledge, from the primary
ontological condition of ignorance. Thus, at the heart of Sartre's
discussion are explanations of ignorance (as resulting from the
choice to ignore), phenomenological descriptions (of behavior
seeking to avoid the truth), and the reasons why one chooses to
avoid the truth. Sartre explores why one Madame T., afflicted with
tuberculosis, should choose to ignore the disease that is killing
her rather than take responsibility for it. Here is Sartre the
existentialist at his most original and most provocative: this work
of epistemology, based on ontology, becomes a work of ethics. At
the same time, Truth and Existence foreshadows and lays thebasis
for some of the most important insights of the Critique of
Dialectical Reason. Truth and Existence is introduced by an
extended biographical, historical, and analytical essay by Ronald
Aronson.
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