freely chosen among others to realize this passion” (BN 626 , emphasis
added). Authenticity, then, will consist in embracing that passion while
acknowledging the contingency, responsibility and anguish one bears
for the empirical choices one makes/is to realize this ideal. Again, he
reminds us that most often we avoid that responsibility and the anguish
it entails by living in bad faith.
The less than three pages devoted to this “sketch” scarcely reveal
more than some of the “values” that Sartre is promoting and the
disvalues he is decrying along with the sobering reminder that we are
the beings by whom values exist. Repeating several major claims from
BNthat will find ethical elaboration in his promised work, he points out
that “existential psychoanalysis is moral description.” Thus far he has
neglected to distinguish moral from aesthetic values, for example. He
will be forced to do so when he draws an analogy between moral and
aesthetic creativity in his lecture on humanism ( 1945 ). But then it will
be done merely by implication in order to avoid the accusation of
“aestheticsm” that his analogy suggests. Nonetheless, Sartre concludes
with a question that is also an invitation to the “ethics” he is intending
to produce: “Will freedom by the very fact that it apprehends itself as a
freedom in relation to itself [the fruit of existential psychoanalysis]
be able to put an end to the reign of [this futile] value?” In particular,
is it possible for freedom to take itself for a value as the source of all value
or must it necessarily be defined in relation to a transcendent value which
haunts it? (BN 627 ). Such an authentic freedom “chooses then not to
recoveritself but to flee itself, not to coincide with itself but to be always
at a distancefromitself ” (BN 627 ). But this refers us to a “pure and not
an accessory reflection” and that places us on the ethical plane “to which
we shall devote a future work” (BN 628 ;F 722 ).
Two object lessons in (in)authenticity:The FliesandNo Exit
IfBarionawhetted Sartre’s appetite for “existential” theater, the next
pair of pieces moved him on to the Parisian stage and into the theatrical
spotlight.The Flies, written and produced under German censorship the
same year thatBNappeared ( 1943 ), employs the Euripidean tragedy
to communicate an existentialist message: the anguish of inauthenticity
(Electra) and the “lightness” of authentic existence (Orestes), already
exhibited by Bariona, as we saw. Though the play in which Olga
226 Bad faith in human life:Being and Nothingness