The Shift of Focus: From the Individual to the Collective

The early Sartrean tenet of the ontological impossibility of individual authenticity made Sartre rethink on the possibility of authenticity. As seen in the previous chapter, Sartre asserted the possibility of phenomenological authenticity in lieu of his initial vision of ontological authenticity. However, he likewise affirmed the obstacle to the realization of individual, phenomenological authenticity brought about by a society not conducive to authentic life. Faced with society that favors, and even rewards, acts of inauthenticity, the human person in quest of authenticity finds himself confronted with failure. Golomb says that when he realized the unfeasibility of the social implementation of his ontological approach to authenticity, "Sartre turned from phenomenological ontology to political action directed against the social conditions responsible for life-patterns of bad faith."

Towards the end of his Being and Nothingness, Sartre promised to compose a treatise on ethics. Upon asking several questions on the still unresolved relationship between freedom and situation, Sartre says, "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them in a future work." There are a great number of Sartrean scholars who claim that Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason is the realization of his promise to write an ethical treatise. However, Sartre asserts that while the Critique may be interpreted in an ethical perspective, it is not the treatise he promised to write in his Being and Nothingness. As Sartre says in an interview for his biographical movie:

I have, when you think about it, written two "Ethics": the first between 1945-1947, completely mystified - the "Ethics" I thought I could write after I had finished Being and Nothingness. The notes I had on that first version I've relegated to the bottom drawer. And then notes that date from 1965 or thereabouts, on another "Ethics," which related to the problem of realism as well as that of morality. I could have written a book using those notes as a basis, but I just haven't done it as yet.

Golomb opines that Sartre's refraining from writing his promised ethical treatise and his Spartan use of the term authenticity in Being and Nothingness were due to his realization "that a purely intellectual appeal to solitary readers was useless." This said, however, it must also be noted that even Sartre himself admits that the Critique is a sequel to Being and Nothingness.

What, then is the connection between Being and Nothingness and the Critique? Since this thesis focuses on the first part of the first volume of the Critique -- The Problem of Method, this researcher shall deal with this question on the basis of the latter book.

Reading Being and Nothingness in view of the problem of the relationship between freedom and situation, we find Sartre claiming that there is an interplay between them. Nevertheless, he asserted that such an interplay between the two does not enable the situation to curtail the reality of human freedom. While the pour-soi is essentially related to the en-soi, the en-soi is totally unrelated to the pour-soi. While consciousness counters with the world, the world remains unattached to consciousness. Moreover, we find one's own consciousness as totally foreign to the consciousness of the Other. The dualism between the en-soi and the pour-soi in Being and Nothingness resolves in a focus on individuality and individual authenticity.

On the other hand, we find in The Problem of Method the attestation of the essentially dialectic relationship between freedom and situation. The pour-soi is replaced in The Problem of Method by human agency, while the en-soi is replaced by matter. The dualism between the en-soi and the pour-soi affirmed in Being and Nothingness is ultimately superseded by the dialectic between the human agency and matter in The Problem of Method. Moreover, we also find in late Sartre the affirmation of intersubjectivity with the affirmation of the interaction that exists between human agencies. The dialectic between the human agency and matter in The Problem of Method resolves in a focus on collectivity and collective authenticity.

Short of admitting his mistake regarding his early thesis on existence, Sartre says:

I tried to offer a certain number of generalities about man's existence, without taking into account the fact that that existence is always situated historically, and that it is defined by that situation.

In assenting to an observation by Andre Gorz that his Being and Nothingness, with its unanswered questions at the end, seems to be a prolegomena to a libertarian moral philosophy, Sartre further says:

I have always thought that morality did exist. But it can only exist in concrete situations, therefore it presupposes man actually involved in a world, and one sees what happens to freedom in it.

With his admission of the existence of morality, even with his atheistic philosophy, we now ask how Sartre provided such a morality. In early Sartre, we may view his vain literary enticement towards individual authenticity as the answer to the present problem. However, the same does not hold true in late Sartre. Golomb has this to say about this matter:

Authenticity rooted in the ontology of 'human reality' can be attained neither by intellectual means nor by social revolution, but the impulse to act in bad faith can be subdued in appropriate social frameworks… Sartre emphasizes the negative as a foil to the positive patterns of justice and equality, which, though unable in themselves to guarantee authenticity, at least provide genuine morality and dignity. The direct political action Sartre envisages is aimed at reforming society to such a degree that bad faith is no longer rewarded and hence loses its appeal.