passionate act but rather afoundationwhich is strictly contemporary
with the will or the passion and whichthese manifest, each in its own
way” (BN 444 ). The priority of “Choice” to “choices” is ontological not
temporal. In the following pages, Sartre telescopes Choice, project,
profound intention and original, ontological freedom into the very
“being of the For-itself ” (BN 453 ) This will enable him to prescribe a
“hermeneutic” of our everyday actions toward the end of the book, in
order to uncover our life-defining project – the goal of existential
psychoanalysis whereby we finally understand the concrete – for
example, Gustave Flaubert as the author ofMadame Bovary.^27
Sartre’s concept of original Choice, the choice which we discover
ourselves having made, he later likens to what psychologists call con-
sciousness as “selection, or selective perception.^28 One is in fact
reminded of the “choice” that Kierkegaard’s moralist, Judge William,
proposes to the young aesthete inEither/Or: First choose the goodand
bad, that is, play the ethical game, and only then can you choose the good
orbad.^29 What Kierkegaard has been criticized for as proposing “criter-
ionless” choice in such an instance resembles Sartre’s concept of original
Choice. But in both cases, I suggest, we are dealing with criterion-
constitutingchoice, not unlike what British ethicist R. M. Hare labels
“decisions of principle that are themselves unprincipled.”^30 In the
first two cases, at least, it seems one is dealing with a “conversion”
experience where a new set of criteria for subsequent choices is
“Chosen.” This would correspond to the “radical conversion” to which
Sartre referred earlier and resonate with the several references he
makes to “conversion” inWD,inBN,especiallyinNEandinhis
interviews. This is “choice” in the sense of “commitment” in the sense
that the freedom of the for-itself is alwaysengage ́”(BN 479 ). But in
WD, it is worth noting that, after explaining “conversion” in its
traditional Aristotelian sense of a logical exchange of one proposition
for another by the mutual transposition of subject and attribute,
he insists “the primary value is not authenticity but substantiality”
(^27) SeeL/S 123 : “I can show the importance of the social factors in the formation and
28 personalization of Flaubert the individual who wroteMadame Bovary...”
BN 462. But Sartre explains that they are working at the psychological level that presupposes
29 this ontological foundation.
KierkegaardEither/Or,ii: 173.^30 Hare,Language of Morals, “Decisions of Principle.”
“Partiv: Having, Doing and Being” 217