The Revindication of an Existential Ethics From the Philosophical Perspective of Benjamin Fondane

Abstract

Benjamin Fondane’s existential philosophy turns around the concept of “unhappy consciousness” through which the philosopher tried to recover the tears before the tyranny of reason; the suffering before certainties, the faith before science; giving continuity to the ideas of Kierkegaard, Shestov or Nietzsche, whom they considered to be his spiritual teachers. Starting from the features of this existential philosophy characterized by the experience of an interior hiatus of subjective consciousness, we propose to raise the possibility of an existential ethic. Fondane never wrote an ethics, but behind his work there is a deep concern in this sense that he expresses in dialogue with Kierkegaard, Shestov or Nietzsche, philosophers who dared to create a “transvaluation of values”; that is to say,
thinkers who dared to question the deep and true meaning of an ethical life.