JEAN-PAUL SARTRE. FREEDOM, VIOLENCE, AND RACISM

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Department

Department of Psychology and Human Factors

Abstract

If there is a topic that continues to draw forth debate today as much in philosophy as in other human and social sciences, it is incontrovertibly violence. Philosophy, human and social sciences have toiled to address the problem of violence to date, but the problem still go unanswered. The omnipresence of violence in political history—whether it is wars, revolutions—seem to reduce to nothingness the utopia of non-violence. In contemporary French thought, Albert Camus rejects violence by resorting to the absurd and revolt. Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls for action, Claude Lévi-Strauss raises the problem of violence faced with human diversity. Gilles Deleuze thinks the ultimate dimension of being as difference. Michel Foucault attaches himself to intolerable confinement. Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida analyze the transition from metaphysics to ethics. Vladimir Jankélévitch examines the question of forgiveness(pardon), the unforgivable and the imprescriptible. Several fundamental questions are at the heart of these disciplines. Should the specificity of human violence be considered? Is the idea of human nature relevant when it comes to thinking about violence? Can we ever think of eradicating violence, as the Enlightenment philosophy hoped, or should we accept the idea of an intrinsic ambivalence of human beings who, subject to contradictory impulses are never totally good, totally bad? The inquiry focuses on Sartre’s attempt to address the moral issue of violence via freedom, political violence and the violence of racism bedeviling the modern world.

Publication Title

Dialogue and Universalism

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