Unlike “bad faith,” “inauthenticity” seems to be a moral disvalue for
Sartre just as “authenticity” is explicitly assigned moral meaning – at
least until now. Referring to the “inauthentic Jew,” he cautions “the term
‘inauthentic’ implying no moral blame, of course” (Anti-Semite and Jew
93 ), whereas he continues to insist that “the choice of authenticity
appears to be a moral decision” (Anti-Semite and Jew 141 ).
He begins by reminding us that man is defined first of all as a being
“in situation.” That means that he forms a “synthetic whole with his
situation – biological, economic, political, cultural and so forth. He
cannot be distinguished from his situation, for it forms him and decides
his possibilities; but, inversely, it is he who gives it meaning by making
his choices within it and by it” (Anti-Semite and Jew 59 – 60 ). This is an
important development of the concept of situation that we have been
tracing since its introduction inBeing and Nothingness. There the relation
between transcendence or freedom and facticity was admittedly ambigu-
ous. But the ontological priority was clearly reserved for transcendence,
that is “choice.” We have been observing a gradual “thickening” of
Sartre’s concept of freedom as it becomes increasingly “concrete” with
the “factical” dimension of the situation growing apace.Anti-Semite and
Jewmarks a threshold where Sartre addresses thereciprocal conditioning
of facticity and freedom, the “given” and the “taken” in the human
situation. That reciprocity will evolve further into “dialectical” relation-
ships inSearch for a Methodand theCritique. At issue is the ontological
and explanatory “weight” that can be assigned to the factical dimension
of any situation. This has been a bone of contention between existential-
ists and Marxists and later between existentialists and structuralists. At
the levels of ontology and methodology this debate is subtending many
of the philosophical works that Sartre will henceforth produce. It will
surface most clearly in the short concluding chapter of this essay.
“The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple
truth from which we must start” (Anti-Semite and Jew 69 ). This rather
outlandish assertion will surprise no one familiar with the ontology of
being-for-others formulated inBeing and Nothingness. They will recog-
nize it as an abstract claim that Sartre could apply to all of us. Remember
that one form of bad faith inBNwas precisely to let another’s view
determine who we choose to be (consider the “perfect waiter”). But
when one descends from ontological heights to the concrete reality of our
social being and our cultural, religious and generally historical traditions,
Reflections on the Jewish Question (Anti-Semite and Jew) 245