much as he had spoken inSearch for a Methodof moving beyond Marxism
at some future time. His reasons are the usual ones – its association with
bourgeois values, class identity and racism. But then he restates his
position, admits that we are all “submen,” and speaks of a presumably
“true” or “authentic” humanism as something to be achieved:
If one considers living beings as finished, closed totalities, humanism is not possible
in our time. If, on the other hand, one considers that these submen have in them
principles that are human – which is to say, that basically they have certain seeds in
them that tend toward man and that are in advance of the very being that is the
subman – then, we can describe as humanism the act of thinking about the relation-
ship of man to man in terms of the principles that prevail today. Essentially, ethics is
a matter of one person’s relationship to another.
(Hope 68 )
When Benny Le ́vy interjects that Marx too said that in the end man
would be truly whole (integral?), Sartre deftly uncovers the
Machiavellian assumption latent in that claim: “Ah, well, yes, but that’s
absurd. It is precisely the human side that already exists in the subman,
precisely those principles that tend toward the human being, that forbid
his being used as raw material or as a means in order to achieve an end.
Ethics begins exactly at that point”(Hope 69 , emphasis added). He
elaborates: “We experience humanism only as what is best in us, in other
words, our striving to live beyond ourselves in a society of human beings.
We can prefigure people in that way through our best acts” (Hope 69 ).
That goal called “humanity” (as an achievement word) will be realized
when we have “true fraternity,” understood as the actualization of our
“self for the other” (soi-meˆme pour l’autre), which is precisely what Sartre
calls conscience (la conscience morale),^54 a truly remarkable expression in
its implicit correction of the socially handicapped ontology ofBN.
Then occurs the quiet existential contradiction that has been the
Achilles heel of all three Sartrean attempts at an ethics. It can be
summarized as “fraternity versus terror,” and is perhaps the major flaw
in his sketch for a theory, as he finally confesses:
So there are two approaches, and both are human but seem not to be compatible; yet
we must try to live them both at the same time. There is the effort, all other
(^54) “L’Exigence” 568.
380 A second ethics? 0