At the same time, I ask that this freedom recognize my freedom and my ends and
that, through this reciprocal recognition, we bring about a certain kind of
interpenetration of freedomswhich may indeed be the human realm.
(NE 290 emphasis added; in his dialogical ethics, it is called “the ethical realm”)
In sum, “the appeal, in effect, is a promise of reciprocity” (NE 284 ).
Authentic and inauthentic loveSartre has not abandoned the inauthenticity depicted inBeing and
Nothingness. Indeed, he seems to build upon it. Consider his account
of “authentic love,” which advances us significantly beyond the limita-
tions of being-for-others explained in the earlier work:
No love without that sadistic-masochistic dialectic of subjugation that I described
[inBN]. No love without deeper recognition and reciprocal comprehension of
freedoms (a missing dimension inBN). However, to attempt to bring about a love
that would surpass the sadistic-masochistic stage of desire and of enchantment would
be to make love disappear, that is, the sexual as a type of unveiling the human.Tension
is necessary to maintain the two faces of ambiguity, to hold them within the unity of
one and the same project. There is no synthesis given as to be attained. It has to
beinvented.
(NE 414 – 415 , emphasis added)
And this invention is an ongoing process. It is a project of “doing” and
not the stasis of “being,” which would betray the ontology of inauthen-
ticity found inBN.
We must remember that the Sartrean ontology, based on consciousness
inBeing and Nothingnessand on praxis in theCritique, is dynamic and
processive. The moral virtue of authenticity embraces this dynamism in
its concrete occurrence while resisting the tendency to flee the anguish
which such freedom and contingency entail toward inauthentic identity
and thing-like permanence. TheNotebooksamplify the meaning of the
“situation” in which we find ourselves exactly as Sartre recommended in
“Materialism and Revolution.”^14
Authentic love builds on the claim ofEHthat “concrete” freedom
requires that everyone be free. Sartre admits that the “appeal” or “gift”
(^14) See above,Chapter 9 , pages 248 ff.
Notebooks for an Ethics 269