ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Sartre’s final ethics of the “we” (or reciprocity) remains controversial and less developed than his other ethics. Scholars have generally accepted the periodization of his ethics into three, as Sartre himself described them: the first ethics of authenticity, the second Marxist or dialectical ethics, and this final ethics, that considers the ontological basis of ethics, based primarily on the 1980 interviews in Hope Now (L’Espoir maintenant; Sartre 1991b, 1996). It has been suggested that Hope Now is not worth discussing as Sartre is expressing his interviewer Benny Lévy’s ideas, not his own, and Simone de Beauvoir’s distress at their content is well known. However, as Ronald Aronson argues in the introduction to Hope Now, we should take Sartre’s contribution here seriously and compare it with his other works, in spite of Lévy’s insistent questioning based on readings of Sartre’s work that are not entirely accurate or charitable. I will focus on Sartre’s responses in the interviews, rather than contributions of his interlocutor so that I can reconstruct the lines of his thought. Sartre’s comments in these interviews are also consonant with that in other earlier interviews, such as that with Michel Sicard (Sartre & Sicard 1979) and Leo Fretz (Fretz 1980). This article aims to show both the continuity with Sartre’s earlier ethics in his responses to Lévy and the potential of the original ideas of the final ethics. My interpretation is that Sartre draws ideas from his earlier ethics, introduces some new ideas, and makes some startling formulations in suggesting the form of an ethics of reciprocity. I will discuss first the basis of the ethics of reciprocity, then the concepts of fraternity and democracy, and finally, Sartre’s account of hope and messianism.
