He assured us: “We shall devote to them a future work” (BN 628 ). The
574 pages ofNotebooksconstitute Sartre’s initial attempt to make good
on that promise.
Sartre left this material unpublished in his lifetime, probably because
he considered it too idealist in nature (Ce ́r 234 ). He saw it as “completely
mystified” due to its insensitivity to the materialist dimension of
the ethical (Film 103 ) – “an ethic by an author for authors, pretending
to write for those who did not write,” as he put it.^8 By then he was
already moving into the dialectical stage of his thought. Still, these pages
contain a wealth of insights that complement and in important respects
revise the popular image of existentialist ethics gathered from the con-
flictual relations analyzed inBeing and Nothingnessand dramatized in
his popular play,No Exit. Rather than a close and extended reading
of the entire text,^9 I shall discuss several theses and themes that consti-
tute what I take to be the major contributions of this work to what we
understand as Sartre’s “existentialist” ethics.
AuthenticityLet us begin with the signature term of that ethics. Earlier we contrasted
it with bad faith and likened it to good faith, while admitting that the
relationships are problematic in Sartre’s own usage.^10 But authenticity is
clearly a moral value for Sartre. Like good faith, it carries a cognitive
dimension that excludes self-deception. But it also resists the inertia
of “the spirit of seriousness” that relies on formulae and ethical ready-
mades to cloak its freedom and the anguish that accompanies it.
In effect, the authentic individual^11 embraces his contingency the way
Nietzsche’s individual embraces the Eternal Recurrence and Heidegger’s
“authentic” individual resolutely grasps his mortal temporality (his
(^8) MAEA 1250.
(^9) For an initial move in that direction, see Gail Evelyn Linsenbard,An Investigation of Jean-
Paul Sartre’s Posthumously Published Notebooks for an Ethics(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen
10 Press,^2000 ).
11 See above,Chapter^7 , “Authenticity: Initial Sketches.”
At this stage, it is primarily the individual that is in question, despite Sartre’s initial gestures
toward the social as we observed inEH 41. But we are about to witness inNotebooksSartre’s
elaboration of the “situation” of the authentic individual who lives in a state ofpositive
reciprocitywith the Other – something barely conceivable inBeing and Nothingness, except
perhaps psychologically.
266 Ends and Means: existential ethics