ABSTRACT
What I hope to show in this chapter is that the conceptions of the Other held by Sartre and Levinas are less antagonistic than they might at first appear, and more particularly that Sartre’s own view of the role and importance of the Other has an affirmative ‘Levinasian’ side almost ignored in L’Être et le néant, and for which new evidence is only now appearing. My argument will have three main thrusts: firstly, an attempt to show that Levinas’s description of relations with the Other is Sartrean in its nonevaluative aspect-in other words, that Levinas has formulated his description of the role of the Other in, for the most part implicit but none the less specific, response to Sartre’s analysis, and that it is a response which necessarily takes over much of that analysis. Secondly-and in consequence-that it is in their evaluations rather than their descriptions of relations with the Other that Sartre and Levinas come into conflict, and that this is in fact a conflict which is based on a curious paradox. And thirdly, that Sartre’s 600-page notes for an ethics, written in the late 1940s and published in April 1983 as Cahiers pour une morale, show a more creative, affirmative aspect to his view of the role of the Other, and moreover reply explicitly-and positively-to a couple of specific criticisms made of him by Levinas. Finally, I hope to suggest reasons why, despite the rapprochement, Sartre can never entirely embrace the optimism of Levinasian ethics.
