Is it Possible to Construct an Existentialist Ethics? (Translation, Foreword and norions by Faris Nofal)

Abstract

The present work is the first commented translation into the European language of treatise of leading existentialist of Egypt, historian, philosopher, writer and translator ʻAbdurrahman Badawī (1917–2002), which had been published in 1953th and entitled as “Is it Possible to Construct an Existentialist Ethics?”. In this work Badawi goes back to the ethical projects of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to analyze and criticize them. In opinion of thinker, ethics, in its classical understanding, cannot arise up on the existential field, which refuses every value or ethical “boarder”. Adaptation of religious ethics to the existential systems results in the submission of existential teachings to the “shackles” of captivity in face of the “Higher example”. Possible ethics of existentialism, in obedience to Badawī, is only the “ethics” of totally free, not-recurrent act.