ABSTRACT
One of the most problematic parts of Sartre’s philosophy is certainly his ethics. No ethical treatise followed the famous announcement in the last lines of Being and Nothingness. There are only a few essays, e.g. Existentialism Is a Humanism, Anti-Semite and Jew, and What Is Literature?, that tackle ethical problems of one kind or another. The attempt at writing an ethics was abandoned after filling ten notebooks from 1947 to 1948. The Notebooks for an Ethics, two out of the ten notebooks that were published posthumously in 1983, contain an attempt at an ethics, one that Sartre retrospectively deemed a failure. The abandonment of the project has inevitably led to some speculation as to its cause. In his Sartre, le dernier philosophe, Alain Renaut explains it by pointing to the publication of The Ethics of Ambiguity by Beauvoir in 1947. Since this essay, according to Renaut, responded directly to the call for an ethics that concluded Being and Nothingness, there was no need for Sartre to continue working on his own answer. Because Beauvoir successfully elaborated an ethics on the ontological basis provided by Being and Nothingness the job was done and Sartre could devote himself to something different. I want to challenge this. I have argued elsewhere that it is possible to reconstruct a Sartrean ethics
if one carefully reads his essays of the 1940s along with the Notebooks for an Ethics (see Daigle 2005 and 2007). I think that Sartre is unfair to himself when he judges the content of the Notebooks to represent a failed attempt at an ethics. That he will later turn toward an ethics that emphasizes more the socio-historical location of the individual does not mean that the ethics of the 1940s is to be dismissed. In fact, I think it can be argued that the later ethics is merely an extension and complement of the earlier one, albeit a much needed one. That said, the sorry situation that is made for the individual in Being and Nothingness does not seem to provide much ground for an ethics. If authenticity is the ethical ideal one must aim for, and that is indeed the key of Sartre’s ethics, it is not clear how the for-itself that
emerges out of the ontological treatise is in any position to attain it. Sartre needs to revise some of his views for this to happen. I will argue that Beauvoir’s intervention, in ‘Pyrrhus and Cinéas’ and The Ethics of Ambiguity, is crucial in that regard. Her different appropriation of Hegel and Heidegger and her understanding of situation led Sartre to the path of conversion and reciprocity that are key to authenticity and the possibility of an ethical life. I will proceed by first explaining Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as it permeates much of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s thinking on the topic. I will then explain the conundrum of bad faith in Sartre as well as his views on interpersonal relations and authenticity. Following this, I will turn to Beauvoir’s understanding of authenticity. This will reveal that Beauvoir’s contribution was key to Sartre’s development of an ethics of authenticity as we find it in the Notebooks for an Ethics.
