exploratory manner, and, as in the present case of the “dialectical” ethics,
he was willing to pursue lines that did not seem to converge. One might
object that a dialectician, a totalizer such as we saw at work in the two
previous chapters, should be in search of convergence; that the accept-
ance of incompatible, if not outright contradictory claims, would be
taken as a sign of defeat. But we should remember that this same author
described the Hegelian insistence on unity as an implicit appeal to
violence.^2 In the case of Sartre’s first ethics, unity was achieved with
explicit use of the phenomenological ontology formulated inBeing and
Nothingness: his ethics of authenticity.
As Sartre’s thought matured and his concept of freedom and respon-
sibility “thickened,” his ethics and politics did so as well. We witnessed
his four-year period of fellow-traveling with the French Communist
Party – a period of “amoral realism,” as he admitted to his “Maoist”
friends. With the help of the dialectical ontology elaborated in the
Critique, Sartre developed a social ontology to accommodate his growing
sense of socioeconomic conditioning, historical agency and collective
responsibility.^3 As we observed above inChapter 13 , this ontology
supported an existentialist emphasis on free organic praxis, social wholes
both positive and negative, and the practico-inert, which is both free-
dom’s birthplace and its grave. The historical and its conditions of
possibility were missing in Sartre’s earlier attempt, which he set aside
as idealist – “an ethic by a writer for writers.”^4
But these attempts at a dialectical ethics in the 1960 s seemed to
be either repressed or rejected in the 1970 s. When he was asked in
an interview less than four years before his death whether the regres-
sive analysis developed inCDRis the foundation for every future ethic
and, if so, what that ethic on the basis of theCritiquewould look like,
Sartre responded by naming several concepts to be elucidated in the
so-called “ethics of the We” on which he was working “with a friend”
toward creating a society in which such infanticide will never again be called for. Though
denying either approval or disapproval of such actions, he clearly respects the anguished
creativity of their choices. It seems that, for Sartre, an authentic moral choice is an anguished2 one – the emotion being a sign of its creative nature.
3 SeeNE^184 and^193.
SeeSMEchapter 7 , “The Conditions and Range of Collective Responsibility. The Theory
4 Reconstructed,”^124 –^150.
MAEA 1250.
356 A second ethics? 0