A Recovery of Innocence: The Dynamics of Sartrean Radical Conversion

Abstract

Sartre failed to publish a finished ethical treatise during his lifetime, 1 in spite of the fact that he filled hundreds of manuscript pages in at least two attempts at a projected Morale.* This failure on his part to produce a systematic moral theory has occasioned a great deal of confusion as regards the structure and even the possibility of a Sartrean ethic. The prevailing sentiment is that the ontology of Being and Nothingness effectively precludes the possibility of a consistent ethic. This rejection of the possibility of a Sartrean ethic, I would suggest, is unwarranted from both a textual and a philosophical perspective. To be sure, Sartre never did publish a treatise devoted exclusively to ethics; nevertheless, it can hardly be denied that the overall tenor of his work is moralistic—and, according to some commentators, even puritanical. 3 In addition to this general moralistic attitude, the Sartrean corpus lends itself to the enterprise of discovering just what the parameters of Sartre's ethic would have been had he in fact completed one. Sartre's oeuvres are full of references, explicit or otherwise, to the foundation and structure of such an ethic, ready-to-hand for anyone with the patience (or freedom from bias) to search them out. At least three commentators have done so, in fact, each producing lucid and consistent accounts of a Sartrean ethic* The primary reason for the ubiquitous but mistaken opinion that a Sartrean ethic is impossible lies, I suspect, in a misreading of Being and Nothingness. All too often, commentators have taken passages in that treatise which are phenomenological analyses of bad faith to be representations of necessary human relations. An inevitability is read into such demoralizing descriptions as Sartre's infamous characterization of love as sado-masochism,* and it is assumed that it and other equally dreary portrayals of intersubjectivity in Being and Nothingness as necessary entailments. Such, however, is not the case. Sartre makes it clear in Being and Nothingness' that his analysis of human rela-