can be undermined by bad faith if the society is rent by divisions of class
or caste. “In an alienated society,” he insists, “all behavior must be
alienating, even generosity” (NE 368 ). In other words, individual and
interpersonal authenticity depend on what in Anti-Semite and Jew
he called the “bases and structures” (the “situation”) of choice. “An
authentic appeal therefore has to be conscious of being a surpassing
of every inequality of condition toward a human world where any
appeal of anyone to anyone will always be possible” (NE 285 ). “When
the gift is given between equals without reciprocal alienation,^15 its
acceptance is as free, disinterested and unmotivated as the gift itself.
Like the gift, it is freeing. This is the case in an evolved civilization for
the gift of the work of art to a spectator” (NE 370 ). Again, this resembles
Beauvoir’s concept of “an open future.”^16
Returning to the example of authentic love, consider the following:
Here is an original structure of authentic love (we shall have to describe many other
such structures): to unveil the Other’s being-within-the-world, to take up this
unveiling, and to set this Being within the absolute; torejoicein it without appropri-
ating it; to give it safety in terms of my freedom, and to surpass it only in terms of the
Other’s ends.
(NE 208 )^17
(^15) As in the Potlach ceremony of mutual destruction by outdoing each other by gift-giving till
one is totally ruined (a famous example from French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss’sThe
Gift[New York: Orton, 1967 ] that Sartre quotes several times).
(^16) “To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the
given toward anopen future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is
even the condition of my own freedom” (Beauvoir,Ethics of Ambiguity, 91 ).
(^17) Attempting to describe once more “whatlovingsignifies in its authentic sense,” Sartre
observes:
IloveifIcreatethe contingent finitude of the Other as being-within-the-world in
assuming my own subjective finitude and inwillingthis subjective finitude, and if
through the same movement that makes me assume my finitude/subject, I assume his
finitude/object as being the necessary condition for the free goal that it projects and that
it presents to me as an unconditional end. Through methere isa vulnerability of the
Other, but I will this vulnerability since he surpasses it and it has to be there so that he
can surpass it. Thus one will love the gauntness, the nervousness of this politician or that
doctor, who pushes aside and overcomes this thin, nervous body andforgetsit. For it is
made to be forgotten by him (and for rediscovering itself transposed into his work) yet,
on the contrary, to be thematized or objectified by me. This vulnerability, this finitudeis
the body. The body for others. To unveil the other in his being-within-the-world is to love
him in his body.
(NE 501 )
270 Ends and Means: existential ethics