14

A second ethics?

A

swecontinueour investigation of Sartre’s intellectual life, we
must keep in mind that, despite the nearly life-long hovering of
ethical concerns over his political commitments and written work, Sartre
never produced an ethical theory. Rather, he offered “sketches” for what
such a theory might entail, as he did with hisSketch for a Theory of the
Emotionsin the 1930 s.^1 But this was always done in a hypothetical,

(^1) Francis Jeanson readsSketch for a Theory of the Emotionsas Sartre’s initial glimpse of an
ethics (Francis Jeanson, “De l’Alie ́nation Morale a`l’Exigence E ́thique,”LTM, Te ́moins de
Sartrenos. 531 , 532 , 533 (Oct.–Dec. 1990 ): 890 ; hereafter “L’Exigence.” InEmotion in the
Thought of Sartre, Fell confirms the moral significance ofanguishinSketch for a Theory of the
Emotionsand inBN. To elaborate the purifying function of anguish, he cites Sartre’s play
Kean. Kean, a famous English actor in the early nineteenth century, is depicted as someone
who, in Sartre’s version, cannot be anyone but the characters he portrays on the stage.
Though the play is an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’sKean, ou De ́sordre et ge ́nie, Sartre’s
theme is not only the ambiguous identity of the actor – we are all playing at being whoever we
are, he seems to imply, and his example of the “perfect waiter” inEHconfirms it. Rather,
Sartre insists apropos Denis Diderot’s famous treatment of a parallel topic inThe Paradox of
the Actor, “Diderot is right that the actor does not really experience his characters’ feelings;
but it would be wrong to suppose that he is expressing them quite coldly, for the truth is that
he experiences them irreally. Let us concede that his real personal feelings...serve him as an
analogonand through them he aims at the passions that he has to express” (ST, 163 ). Our
study of Sartre’s aesthetic inThe Imaginaryindicated how he characterized the aesthetic
imaginary as “the irreal,” not the unreal: “The occurrence coincides with the beginning of
purification, and anguish hence is an emotion of moral significance. Kean, like many another
Sartrean hero, becomes a moral agent at the moment of anguish, the moment when he moves
from the unreflective level on which he suffers from his own emotional self-deceptions to the
reflective level on which he realizes that he is a free agent victimized by emotion because he has
chosen to be so victimized” (Fell,Emotion in the Thought of Sartre, 231 ). The morally purifying
function of anguish recurs in Sartre’s analysis of the Belgian mothers who killed their babies
that were born horribly disfigured by a medication for morning sickness, Thalidomide,
prescribed during pregnancy. Sartre sees this as an “anguished” choice/invention of a way
355