A Despairing Duty

Abstract

The taste for risk... is taste for employing one's to reveal destructive forces in a field of freedom.1 In late 1940s, Sartre sets in motion his quest for an ethics. This pursuit alters his negative account of social ontology from and Nothingness,2 leaving him with many dynamic but undeveloped positions. With hope of showing inherent logic of Sartre's work, I offer an explanation and justification for one of his most dynamic positions: obligation to assist those who cannot provide help in return. To set stage, Sartre's concern for (from What is Literature?) is introduced. The most obvious evidence for Sartre's other-regarding ethic surfaces here, seeing that very function of committed writer is to emancipate oppressed. Yet Sartre does not offer a comprehensive argument for why committed writers should devote their art to such a project. The problem is especially vexing since logic of reciprocal respect, which Thomas Anderson shows to be a basic rationale for Sartre's ethics, breaks down in writer/oppressed context.3 Due to dire circumstances, oppressed people either cannot read or do not trust what writer has to say, leaving writer without her intended audience. I look to two related notions as means to overcome this problem. The first, elaborated in Truth and Existence, is dialectic between humanity's verifying mission and willful ignorance. I take this dialectic as a centerpiece to Sartre's socially inspired ethics. second, logic behind the gift is explored as a way to reinforce argument that writers, indeed, all intellectuals, have an obligation to aid in eradication of oppression, even in a climate of non-reciprocal respect. The Opacity of Common World In What is Literature? Sartre describes positive and productive relationship between reader and writer. Accordingly, we see Sartre distancing himself from negative opposition between subjects as described in and Nothingness. The issue of is one of most obvious differences between two texts (WL, 61-65; cf. TE, 6, 45, 65). Sartre's treatment of generosity is a departure from his earlier view in at least two ways. First, taking work of literature as an intersubjectively accessible object, Sartre offers a description of genuine cooperation and sharing. The text presents itself as a pact of generosity, originating from unity of trust and effort required from each participant in creation of textual world (WL, 51, 63). Sartre does not limit bond between author and reader to infra-referential world of text. He takes us back to reality when he emphasizes that prose-not poetry-is authentic mode of expression for a committed writer (WL, 34-38). The writer can and should try to advance reader's concrete by exposing a situation to which reader is an accomplice yet of which reader may be ignorant. The writer has thereby an important destabilizing role to play in society of readers (WL, 81). The topic of ignorance is interesting, and widely discussed in this phase of Sartre's career,4 for it surmounts a problem in analysis of consciousness in and Nothingness.5 In an attempt to hold subject in total responsibility for being in world, Sartre claims that consciousness is transparent and/or translucent to itself (BN, 49). He raises this point particularly in context of faith. Thomas Busch explains problem: Being and Nothingness assumed that there were only two types of people, those in bad faith, attempting to flee their freedom, and those who were authentic, accepting and shouldering burden of their freedom. The assumption of both attitudes was that everyone knew that he or she was free.6 Fortunately, Sartre comes to realize how untenable this position appears; freedom is simply too radical of a thesis. …