Jean-Paul Sartre: His Philosophy by René Lafarge (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 197 and make for relativity in certain moral decisions; Ralph Mcinerny's complementary paper, "Truth in Ethics: Historicity and Natural Law," offered basically a summary of Thomistic teaching on the permanent and the flexible aspects of natural law. In the panel discussions also the most voluminous material was devoted to ethics. The first paper, "Authority and Morals," by R. L. Cunningham, relied upon an exclusively naturalistic and functional view of authority in order to dismiss the binding force of papal teaching on moral matters, specifically contraception. Gerald Dalcourt, who some years earlier had proposed wisdom instead of prudence as the primary cardinal virtue (International Philosophical Quarterly, 1968), here suggested somewhat analogously that agape rather than justice should be listed as the principal moral virtue; actually his description of agape approximates what conventional Thomists would have called " justice and the allied virtues." The final paper in the ethics section, which is also the longest of all the panel discussion offerings, is John N. Deely's "Evolution and Ethics." The author argues that evolutionary thought has not reduced all ethics to relativity and that it has, in fact, served to vindicate the classical insistence on the continuity between the philosophy of nature and ethics. St. John's University Jamaica, N. Y. BRUCE A. WILLIAMS, 0. P. Jean-Paul Sartre: His Philosophy. By Rene Lafarge. Tr. by Marina Smyth-Kok. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. Pp. 208. $6.50. One more book has been added to the already densely crowded literature on Sartre. In less than 200 pages, widespaced with generous margins, Notre Dame University Press has translated Rene Lafarge's book, originally published in French two years ago. The author gives us a bird's eye view of Sartre's philosophy, covering everything from Nausea through the Critique de la Raison Dialectique with special emphasis upon Being and Nothingness. Since that road at that speed has been covered many times before, one cannot help wondering if the book has not come too late. In some ways this is indeed so, since much of the content has already been said, and at much greater length. However this would not do this latest excursion full justice. Lafarge, unlike some other summarizing commentators, knows his topic very well. I was impressed by the sharpness of his insights and by his great skill in showing the connection between the literary work and the purely philosophical publications. Much as we admire Nausea, its unstructured mode of presentation remains a 198 BOOK REVIEWS challenge. Lafarge has done an excellent job in situating Nausea m the general philosophy of Sartre. Indeed, the chapter on Nausea is m my opinion the best of the entire book. The author is French, ostensibly writing for a French audience. He writes in that fluent prose that seems to tackle difficult problems with such facility and ease, a style that the non-French reader may even find flippant. But this is not intended by the author. It is simply the way the French write for one another. Lafarge belongs to that class of French intellectuals who, consciously or unconsciously, still believe that most of the world's culture lies within their own borders. The result, of course, is that very few non-French writers are mentioned, with the exception of Hegel, Marx and occasionally Heidegger. I should add that Lafarge is a follower of Maritain. (Incidentally, the original French edition was published in Toulouse, where Maritain lives in semi-retirement in the house of Les Petits Freres de Charles de Foucauld.) To some this may appear to be a guarantee of orthodoxy; to others it may appear as a handicap. In the discussion on God Lafarge turns to a Thomistic approach to refute the atheistic existentialist. Whether the statement that "the contingent implies the Necessary" is cogent, however, can in my opinion be dealt with on the condition that the Necessary is distinct from the contingent. It seems to this writer that Thomism has still not faced its greatest foe, which is not so much atheism as it is pantheism. It seems futile to fight a fierce battle against atheism when a much more subtle enemy is at the...