ethical ambiguity was the ambiguity of thenormitself: it can guide both
autonomous and heteronomous moral actions, the authentic and the
inauthentic.
Sartre now speaks of a blossoming of unconditionality so that it
“would render the historical act and the ethical act homogeneous”
(MH 353 ). “But such an opening out of unconditionality does not
seem possible in the current state of affairs...unlesswe discover/create
adialectic of the unconditional and the conditionalby a praxis, whether
successful or not, that would affirm itself as ethical while rediscovering
its historical [condition]” (MH 354 – 355 ). As an example of such conflu-
ence of the ethical and the historical, Sartre cites the Resistance
movement during the Nazi occupation of France. Read in this regressive
stage of the argument, it appears that “the ethical is a constitutive
moment of the historical action – that of creation/discovery (invention)
and that this moment presents itself as apure ethicsby opposing history,
that is to say, realizing certain ends regardless of their historical conse-
quences” (MH 361 ). The unconditionality shows itself in my willingness
to pursue this end or die trying. The nonnegotiables of life and death
underscore the absoluteness of the action at hand. (The battle may be
lost but I still have my honor.) The point of this regressive analysis was
“to put in relief the necessity of establishing the bases of a dialectic
of ethics and history as soon as the ethical appears and in practice claims
to be the essence of praxis” (MH 386 ).
To recapitulate briefly his argument thus far, the dialectical inter-
change just described would yield a historical action that was moral
and a moral action that was historical. This seems to be his vision of
the “revolution”: as the threshold whereby the practico-inert deviation
is checked, if not completely destroyed, by socioeconomic changes
(history) that render possible the “free future” that guides all action
insofar as it aims to an absolute end. This would constitute the end
of prehistory (in the Marxist sense), the dawning of one truth of
History (with a HegelianH,asintheCritique), the emergence of
“integral man” out of subhumanity, and the advent of “the ethical”
in its full sense.
Such a line of analysis leaves us with the question whether it is a
utopian dream, the expression of unrelenting optimism or a pessimistic
adieu. Or perhaps, as Sartre suggested at the close ofSaint Genet, the
reconciliation of the physical violence, moral evil, callous exploitation
374 A second ethics? 0