As Fragile as Glass: Balancing the Individual and the Social

In order to embark on this examination, we must first do more to show how an individualistic (or, at the very least, individualized) concept of ethics fails to illuminate how resistance can be seen as not only normative but also ethical. Rather than dealing with authors external to this work, though, I feel it to be more productive to deal with an author whose later works are crucial for the development of this project—Jean-Paul Sartre. His early work, especially Being and Nothingness, displays what I would argue are the root problems with much of Ethical theory: a reliance upon the Cartesian dualism revolving around the cogito; the Kantian movement toward a universal, ahistorical concept of morality; and the reliance upon the presocial individual that makes problematic not only recent ethical theory, but also a good deal of social and political theory, especially that of the “social contract” or contractarian schools of thought. This early version of Sartre, the one that is usually criticized for being nihilistic or unproductive as far as social relations go, presents us with a way into the causes of the problems discussed in chapter 1.