anguish: the imperative entails a “feeling of total and profound responsibility”
for all people. He likens it to what the commanding officer experiences who must
send others on a certain-death mission. In his version, each person ought to say
to himself: “Am I really a man who is entitled to act in such a way that the entire
human race should be measuring itself by my actions?” (EH 26 – 27 ).Unfortunately, in his urge to elicit the experience of existential
anguish from his audience, Sartre “psychologizes” a “logical” issue
that distinguished Kant from the Utilitarians and most other moralists.
This could be discounted as rhetorical license and even defended
by pointing out that existential “anguish” is more than merely psycho-
logical, as we know fromBeing and Nothingness. But like Hegel and
Scheler before him, Sartre’s aim in modifying Kant’s Categorical
Imperative is to overcome its abstract “formalism.” Kant, he explains,
“believes that the formal and the universal are adequate to constitute a
morality. We, to the contrary, believe that principles that are too
abstract fail to define action” (EH 49 ). Yet even in this “legislative”
argument the value image shows through: “I am constantly compelled
to performexemplarydeeds. Everything happens to every man as if the
entire human race werestaringat him and measuring itself by what he
does” (EH 26 , emphasis added).
- Having defended the generality of his moral imperative, he must extend his
argument to imply the freedom of all. He builds on the ontology of being-for-
others inBNbut with a new and quasi-Hegelian twist: appeal to mutual “recog-
nition.”^20 He claims that I am as certain of the existence of others as I am of
myself and adds that “I cannot discover any truth whatsoever about myself except
through the mediation of another. Under these conditions,” he continues, “my
intimate discovery of myself is at the same time a revelation of the other as a
freedom that confronts my own and that cannot think or will without doing so for
or against me. We are thus immediately thrust into a world that we may call
‘intersubjectivity.’ It is in this world that man decides what he is and what others
are” (EH 42 – 43 ).
6 .AsinBN, Sartre relies on the fundamental ambiguity of “situation.” This time he
employs it to render the universal humancondition, understood as our “funda-
mental situation in the universe” (EH 42 ) intelligible to every person without
(^20) Beauvoir will develop the concept of mutual reciprocity more fully than Sartre at this stage
in herAn Ethics of Ambiguitypublished in 1947.
“Is Existentialism a Humanism?” 239