Jean-Paul Sartre is often portrayed as a philosopher whose ethics would inevitably have subjectivist or relativist outcomes. Yet, even in Sartre’s early works there are several stances that blatantly belie this image, relying rather on an objectivist conception of value that he notably draws from Max Scheler. The aim of this paper is thus to investigate the influence of Scheler’s moral reflection on Sartre, arguing how it can represent an original and fruitful starting point to approach Sartrean ethics. To this aim, we will first report on and discuss some passages from Sartre’s early works where this debt is most noticeable. Then, we will provide an overview of the Schelerean legacy, arguing how it represents for Sartre the very opening of the ethical issue addressable in phenomenological terms, avoiding the dead end of Hume’s and Kant’s more classical positions, while at the same time being consistent with other peculiar themes of Sartrean philosophy, namely existence and historicity. Yet, even in Sartre’s early works there are several stances that blatantly belie this image, relying rather on an objectivist conception of value that he notably draws from Max Scheler. The aim of this paper is thus to investigate the influence of Scheler’s moral reflection on Sartre, arguing how it can represent an original and fruitful starting point to approach Sartrean ethics. To this aim, we will first report on and discuss some passages from Sartre’s early works where this debt is most noticeable. Then, we will provide an overview of the Schelerean legacy, arguing how it represents for Sartre the very opening of the ethical issue addressable in phenomenological terms, avoiding the dead end of Hume’s and Kant’s more classical positions, while at the same time being consistent with other peculiar themes of Sartrean philosophy, namely existence and historicity. keywords Sartre; Scheler; Ethics; Existence; Phenomenology. In this sense, we will try to show how Scheler’s moral reflection translates into Sartre’s question of “value-” or “moral qualities”, which on the one hand allows him to ground ethics in experience, opening up a fruitful avenue of inquiry in this field to his eyes flawed by impasses, and on the other hand reconciles with other distinctive themes of Sartrean philosophy, namely existence and historicity. Through this reading, whose interest will be more markedly theoretical 1 Some of those who have done so are Bell (1989), Charme (1991), Santoni (1995) and Cooper (1999, Ch. 10). For a more recent work in this direction, see also Russo (2018). Also, it is only against the background of such experience that one has an immediate understanding 8 It is no coincidence that the quoted passage appears precisely in a paragraph entitled “affectivity”. A similar approach can be widely found in the important 1939 text on emotions (see Sartre, 2014, especially from p. 34 onwards). However, we will not discuss here the positions advocated in that work, since the overlapping between the question of values and moral qualities and that of emotion – albeit to some extent transpiring in the present article – would risk being misleading in the absence of more detailed analysis. Rather, as we have just observed, this question permeates the author’s thought more transversally, crossing some of the most decisive reflections of the entire Sartrean philosophy. The second point is that through the discussion of moral qualities, Sartre seems to reveal his need to attribute a pre-judicative status to value. As Detmer (1988, pp. 135-6) sharply suggests, there would therefore be an important parallelism between the theme of nothingness and that of value. 103 THE ExPERIENCE OF VALUE That values admit of no further explanation means, then, that any moral theory that does not start from them can only be derivative and artificial. This is the breaking point that Scheler’s legacy yields in Sartre with the dead ends of Kantian morality, on the one hand, and that of Hume, on the other. Against Kant, it is important that “one renounces this error of reducing the being of values to oughtness, norms, imperatives” (Scheler, 1973, p. 241), for it is the “ought” that is grounded in value and not the reverse; indeed: “Whenever we speak of an ought, the comprehension of a value must have occurred. For instance, the property of “being slimy” can induce a reaction of repel and the slimy thing, says Sartre (1978), “in the disgust which it inspires can be explained only by the combination of this physical quality with certain moral qualities” (p. 605).24 Values thus not only arouse reactions or open possibilities in a generic sense, but they motivate, that is, they foster certain behaviours over 22 For a broader examination of Sartre’s critique of Kant, see Linsenbard 2007. 23 Other passages testifying to this can be found when Sartre (1978) says that “Value derives its being from its exigency and not its exigency from its being” (p. In particular, in order to fully frame the meaning that value takes on in Sartre, it is inevitable to investigate the specific role it plays in relation to other key concepts in his philosophy – notably to action, imagination, possibility, lack and, ultimately, to reality as inhabited by the nothingness that human consciousness is.28 (2007). Sartre’s Criticisms of Kant’s Moral Philosophy. Sartre Studies International, 13(2), 65-85; he writes that: “The object’s value […] is truly constitutive of the object” (p. 50). Other times, however, he seems to consider it as a sort of secondary quality, supervening on an already constituted matter, as when he (2004b) says of moral qualities that “when they disappear – as in the case of depersonalization – perception remains intact, things are not touched, and yet the world is singularly impoverished” (p. 69). 107 THE ExPERIENCE OF VALUE Münster, A. (2007). Sartre et la morale. Paris: L’Harmattan; Russo, M. (2018). Per un esistenzialismo critico.