is substituted acollective practiceaiming at the humanization of men
[inCDR].”^34 This humanizaton of man, or what Sartre elsewhere in
the same text calls “making the human” (faire l’homme), in Robert
Stone’s felicitous rendition, is the project of an authentic ethics as long
as one does not see “man” as a Platonic ideal, essence or form waiting
on the horizon. It is tempting to do so, especially when Sartre showcases
“integral man” (l’homme integral) as the counterconcept to our present
condition of “subhumans” and the end of incomplete man. Rather,
Sartre explains that man is “the end, not knowable but graspable as
orientation, of a being who defines himself by praxis – that is, the
incomplete, alienated man who we are.”^35 This resembles the practical
nonknowledge that was subjectivity in the 1961 lecture. “Our present
situation is this: we know more or less obscurelywhat whole man is not.
What he certainly is not isourselves” (MH 271 ).
Remember that Sartre is a dialectical nominalist in the sense that
“there are only men and real relations between men” (SM 76 ). So the
integral man is going to emerge by our directing our praxis toward
the minimization of practico-inert ethical principles and values as we
work toward creative autonomy, the “free future” mentioned above.
Given the impossibility of conceiving this end as Sartre observed in
Search for a Methodso long as we have not freed ourselves from the
institutions and systems that generate alienating ethics, it seems that our
only option lies with creative (and I would addimaginative) praxis. This
is Sartre’s much employed “as if ” that enables us to orient ourselves
Kant-wise toward the goal of “humanity” that we glimpsed in the group,
be it the athletic team or Sartre’s revolutionary cell, but which eludes
our collective grasp in our current condition.^36
With this dialectical, socialist humanism comes a concomitant
struggle against racism and the colonialism that assumes and promotes
it. We shall not pursue Sartre’s (and Jeanson’s) active involvement in the
Algerian revolution, except to say that the ethical discourse which is
being employed in these texts is directly relevant to the struggle for
social justice that brought Sartre further into the public eye. It led him to
visit Castro’s Cuba in 1960 and 1961 , to support the Algerian revolution,
(^34) “L’Exigence” 893 , emphasis his.
(^35) Ibid., 894.
(^36) See Peter Bu ̈rger,Sartre: Eine Philosophie der Als-ob(Frankfurt-on-Main: Suhrkamp, 2007 ).
368 A second ethics? 0