Remarks like these abound in the Notebooks. They can be read as
ambiguous evidence: first, in support of Sartre’s dismissal of the text
as “idealist” and “mystified”; but in retrospect, from the perspective of
the Le ́vy interviews, these statements render less than shocking what
could be read as a return of the repressed in his final months. At this
point it must suffice simply to foreground the ambiguity.
My choice to help another freedom, in Sartre’s view, expresses my
basic project to maximize concrete freedoms (read possibilities) in a
finite world. He later states this in Heideggerian terms as “unveiling”
and manifesting Being.^18 In contrast, Sartre dubs “inauthentic” our
original, prereflective “Choice” to be in-itself-for-itself or God. This
project, he claims, “is first in the sense that it is the very structure of
my existence” (NE 559 ).
Such an “ontological” characterization of our “original” condition
leaves problematic what Sartre will soon be “historicizing,” namely,
the sense that our individual “conversion” could enable us to embrace
our contingency and spontaneity even as we take distance on – or even
learn “to live without” – our egos. Our seemingly inevitable immer-
sion in bad faith is countered by the possibility that a collective change
in the bases and structures of our social choices (most notably the
emergence of a society of material abundance) might yield a condition
where “the possibility of inauthenticity” is reduced, if not abolished
all together. Sartre had left the door open in BN for a possible
“conversion” which entailed the liberation from bad faith and a self-
recovery of being “that we shall call authenticity” (BN 70 n.). And in
Transcendence of the Egohe had already distinguished between the
“self ” (which is prereflective) and the Ego and the me, which
are the products of our reflective consciousness. Now he informs us
that the authentic individual must learn “to live without the Ego” (NE
414 ) or a Me and that “the ipseity [selfness] of calling things into
question must take its place” (NE 478 ). As he recommended earlier:
“Get rid of the I and the Me. In their place putsubjectivityas a lived
(^18) Note the striking parallel between these phrases and similar claims made by Beauvoir in
Ethcs of Ambiguity, where there is an open-future argument ( 82 and esp. 91 ) that parallels
Sartre’s maximization of possibilities choice, and her remark that “to will oneself free and to
will that there bebeingare one and the same choice” or “man also wants to be a disclosure of
being” ( 70 , 23 ).
Notebooks for an Ethics 271