His examples of the inauthenticmoraleinclude Kantian deontology:
an ethic of duty and principles that must be “universalizable” in the
sense of allowing for no exceptions, including for oneself. Sartre’s
anarchist tendencies emerge when he repeats an expression he has used
over the years to the effect that “duty,” like “authority,” is the Other in
us: “Duty inhabits my soul like phlogiston inhabits fire. It is the purely
abstract presence of the Other.”^26 It is alienating in the sense of “objecti-
fying” and so, in terms of theCritique, is a function of the practico-inert.
Of course, the same objection could be raised against Sartre himself
when he later describes “obligation” as the prime concept in an ethics.^27
At the other extreme, another class of the inauthentic is what
Sartre calls “positivist ethics.” He likens it to structuralism in that
both approaches ignore the historical dimension of properly ethical
normativity; rather, in his view, they collapse normativity into moral
imperatives – that is, into the practico-inert. Sartre had been combating
structuralism since it emerged in the 1950 s and began to supplant
existentialism in the French philosophical scene. He remarked to Michel
Sicard that the Cornell lectures, which they were discussing, had been
intended to address Le ́vy-Bruhl and Le ́vi-Strauss, especially the former,
because Sartre wanted to treat the concept of moral constraint among
these sociologists and anthropologists, whose views on the concept he
considered “lamentable,” but that he set the project aside and never
returned to it.^28
Sartre’s position is still “Marxian” insofar as it considers need, labor
and class struggle to be “the motors of history.”^29 He states “that the
root of morality liesin need, that is to say in the animality of man. It is
need which posits man as his own end, and praxis as domination of the
(^26) This is most obvious in theNotebooks: for example, sounding like Nietzsche, Sartre
proclaims: “The ethics of duty is the ethics of slaves” (NE 267 ). For authority as the Other
27 in us, see my “End to Authority,”^50 –^65.
SeeHope 69 , where he seems to be speaking of ethics in general, making no distinction
28 between the authentic and inauthentic as he does in the Rome and Cornell lectures.
29 Jean Paul Sartre, interview with Michel Sicard,Obliquenos.^18 –^19 (^1979 ):^14 b.
Elizabeth Bowman and Robert Stone, “Making the Human in Sartre’s Unpublished Dia-
lectical Ethics,” in William L. McBride (ed.),Sartre and Existentialism,vol.v, Existentialist
Ethics(New York: Garland, 1997 ), 274. Asked about his claim that theCritiquewas opposed
to Communism but endeavored to be Marxist, Sartre responded: “Marxist is a word that
I used a bit lightly then...Today, I consider that in certain areas, theCritiqueis close to
Marxism, but it isnota Marxist work.” Schilpp, “Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” 20.
364 A second ethics? 0