Sartre's Ethics of Engagement: Authenticity And Civic Virtue (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement: Authenticity and Civic Virtue

T Storm Heter

Continuum

Sartre's Ethics of Engagement

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Sartre's Phenomenology David Reisman Deconstruction and Democracy Alex Thomson Derrida and Disinterest Sean Gaston Heidegger and the Place of Ethics Michael Lewis Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History Jay Lampert

Sartre's Ethics of Engagement:

Authenticity and Civic Virtue T Storm Heter

continuum O N D O N • NEW YORK

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © T Storm Heter 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. T Storm Heter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 0 8264 8781 5 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Aarontype Limited, Easton, Bristol Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

for Miriam

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Contents Preface Abbreviations

viii ix

1. Introduction

1

2. Freedom

8

3. Self

22

4. Recognition

35

5. Bad Faith

63

6. Authenticity

75

7. Engagement

102

8. Recognition in Groups

118

9. Civic Virtue

133

10. Morality

144

11. Conclusions

155

Index

160

Preface This work is a defence of Sartrean ethics. As is well known, Sartre's ethical thoughts are scattered and incomplete. He promised his readers a full investigation into the existential virtue of authenticity, but never carried out this promise. Lamenting this failure is unproductive. Instead we should engage in the creative, synthetic work necessary to build an existential theory of ethics. Some may say this is risky business. If Sartre never wrote his ethics, who are we to speak for the master? One solution would be distinguishing 'Sartre's ethics' from 'Sartrean ethics'. If this distinction were made, then the current work would best be characterized as a construction of Sartre's ethics as a means towards the goal of defending a Sartrean ethics. But I will not make much of this difference. Instead, I simply note at the outset that a living dog is better than a dead lion. My project is two-fold. I systematize Sartre's major ethical claims based on a survey of his most important published and unpublished works of the 1940s and '50s. But I also go beyond Sartre's own remarks, critically challenging and sometimes rejecting his weakest ideas, and exploring, developing and advancing his most promising ideas. My hope is to persuasively combine historical scholarship and original philosophy. Newcomers to Sartre will find this work a solid introduction to existential basics such as freedom, bad faith and authenticity. Audiences familiar with Sartre will note my relentless and effective attack on the misconception that existentialism is an individualistic, subjectivist philosophy. My claim that Sartrean existentialism is deeply intersubjective is an important departure from the standard view. I would like to extend my gratitude to Belden Fields, Craig Matarrese, William Schroeder, Steven Wagner and James Wallace who have all helped substantially with the development of this project. I thank my peers in the Philosophy Department at East Stroudsburg University where I enjoy the benefits of a true intellectual community. I also thank my family for their abiding love and support, especially my mother Jean and my father Tom. Lastly I thank my colleague and wife Katharine Bullard, for her encouragement, conversation and scepticism. T Storm Heter

Abbreviations WORKS BY JEAN-PAUL SARTRE ASJ BN CDR EIH NE WIL

Anti-Semite and Jew Being and Nothingness Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1 'Existentialism is a Humanism' Notebooks for an Ethics What is Literature?

WORKS BY ARISTOTLE Nic. Ethics Nicomachean Ethics

WORKS BY HEGEL PR PS

Philosophy of Right Phenomenology of Spirit

WORKS BY THOMAS ANDERSON FSSE STE

The Foundation and Structure of Sartre's Ethics Sartre's Two Ethics

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1

Introduction Sartrean existentialism is an ambitious and systematic philosophy. Behind Sartre the iconoclast whose thinking appears at first radical and unprecedented lies a philosopher concerned with the most classical of philosophical questions. My purpose is to reveal Sartre's concern with and answer to the moral issue that the ancients so eloquently posed as this: What is the good life for humans? Of course, I am not able to give Sartre's answer to this question straight away. I must offer a slow and careful survey of the most important concepts in existentialism and show the ethical relevance of these various concepts. Because I intend to present an unconventional portrait of existentialism - one that emphasizes sociality, community and intersubjectivity - it is important to start with the most fundamental Sartrean themes and depart from there. With my eventual goal of socializing Sartre in mind, let me describe the principal tenets of Sartrean existentialism as I understand them. First, there is no such thing as human nature; there is only a human condition. The human condition is expressed in the tension between opposites that we live daily - we are both subjects and objects; we both shape our lives and we are subject to external forces; and our self-identities are both created by us and yet dependent upon others. The human condition is, in short, the lived ambiguity between freedom and fact. Many traditional philosophical approaches in ethics begin with a conception of our nature and attempt to derive ethical standards from this nature. Sartre denies that humans are intrinsically good, selfish, altruistic, etc. Nor do humans have a natural function from which a notion of virtue could be derived. In place of a human essence Sartre offers a portrait of what it means to be human, that is, a philosophical anthropology. The human condition is 'ontological' in the sense of being universal and necessary. Indeed, Sartre's ethical statements rely on his anthropology. But he does not offer a functional argument a la Aristotle or a derivation of natural law from human nature a la Hobbes. Second, the primary ontological condition for humans is freedom. Our ontological freedom consists in the fact that so long as we are alive, we are conscious. Ontological freedom is the freedom of

2

Sartre's Ethics of Engagement

consciousness. The two main qualities marking human consciousness are temporality and intentionality. Also, consciousness is not subject to physical causality. Because ontological freedom is a permanent quality of humans, being ontologically free is compatible with coercion, oppression and slavery. This highly esoteric and technical sense of freedom bears little resemblance to traditional philosophical notions of free will. Third, Sartre comes to depict a second type of human freedom distinct from ontological freedom. Freedom of this second kind - we might call it practical freedom, political freedom or liberty in the ordinary sense - is indeed limited by coercion, slavery and oppression. All humans should value practical freedom, both their own practical freedom and that of others. The precise reason that we should value the freedom of others is contentious. Some commentators suggest that Sartre offers Kantian reasons for caring about the freedom of others. I will show that Sartreans are on much stronger ground when they appeal to Hegelian reasons. Fourth, humans should embrace rather than flee the human condition. Existentialism is both a clarification of human existence and an appeal to each of us to live this existence fully, openly, decidedly and authentically. If humans make a habit of evading the human condition, then they are in 'bad faith'. Bad faith is, I will claim, equivalent to a vice in the classical sense - a harmful character trait of an individual agent. Existential ethics begins with the claim that we should not evade our own freedom (we ought to embrace the human condition) and moves to a richer, more complete understanding of lifestyles where bad faith is minimized or eliminated. Such lifestyles are existentially authentic. Authenticity is the primary existential virtue. Fifth, Sartre views the self as having both a subjective and an objective dimension. Our 'social selves' (or 'being-for-others') consist in the qualities others see in us. Being seen by others, as Sartre vividly shows with the 'look', has a deep effect on our personality. The degree to which an individual can reconcile his self-conception and the conception others impose upon him is open to debate and forms one of the most important themes in this work as a whole. In his early writings Sartre says the subjective and objective sides of the self are always alienated. In the post-war period Sartre abandons this claim, and for good reason. Humans are objectified by the look of others; but the look can be uplifting. Sartre's theory of the self was never monistic. But the degree to which Sartre fully embraced intersubjectivity is a topic analysed further below.

Introduction

3

Sixth and finally, as Sartre discovers in his post-war thinking, the key to solving the riddle of the look is mutual recognition. If the look is objectifying, then why are not all human relations alienating? The answer is that while other people may be hell, they are also our only hope of salvation. We establish our own personalities, projects and our practical freedom only through the recognition of others. Recognition is thus the cornerstone of an interpersonal and social ethics of existentialism. These six themes provide us with an existential framework for developing an ethics of engagement and recognition. Our starting point is existential: we must first analyse what it means to be human. The existential conception of the human is that we are a complex interplay of freedom and fact. Out of this interplay we carve our identity, personality, or our 'self, as existentialists say. The most important point about the process of shaping the self is that it is intersubjective. The social self is both a curse and a blessing. We need others because only they confer objectivity on our projects. But others can also deny us the recognition we seek. Marx was right: humans make themselves out of the conditions which are made for them. What existentialism adds is the ethical insight that we ought to confront the project of self-shaping with honesty, openness and lucidity. The desire for absolutes is strong. We wish to be able to assert who we are regardless of what others say and believe. But such self-assertion is ultimately mythical and unsustainable. We then float to the other pole. We attempt to be purely what others see in us. Here too is deception and error. Instead we must attempt, though it is typically unpleasant, the uneasiness of needing the recognition of others, without being able to trust their recognition unconditionally and without the assurance that we will receive their recognition. The dynamic I have just described is the struggle for existential authenticity. Authenticity is primarily a story about self-shaping. Existential authenticity must not, however, be confused with the popular notion of authenticity as 'being true to one's roots and heritage'. This popular notion invites the project of bad faith. Individuals will be pigeonholed into colloquial, stereotypical notions of genuineness. Existentialist are not, for the most part, interested in disputes like these: Are Catholics more authentically Christian than Lutherans? Are Hassids more authentically Jewish than reconstructionists? Is an African-American who goes to school at Booker T. Washington College and listens to Blues more authentically black than others? Can a white person be an authentic jazz musician? These disputes invoke authenticity as a mere stand-in for 'orthodox'. Which

4

Sartre's Ethics of Engagement

person best conforms to the historical, traditional, stereotypical pattern? This is not the question that interests existentialists.1 Further, the present work shows that existential authenticity does not reduce to simply acting with gusto, reflection, passion, vigour or enthusiasm. If authenticity meant only 'sticking to one's guns' then the most common objection would be true. There would be authentic killers, authentic Nazis and authentic torturers. The strong individualism associated with Sartre's earliest works has mislead many. We must recall that in addition to asserting the importance of individual freedom, Sartre also hoped to show the strong interconnection between self and other, between my freedom and your freedom. This interconnection provides a definitive answer to the authentic Nazi objection. I cannot be free if I oppress, dominate or subjugate others. If self and other are interdependent, then authentically embracing my own freedom requires authentically embracing the other's freedom. There is a subjective moment in the project of authenticity, but this is not the whole of the story. Authenticity also requires embracing and respecting the freedom of others. Authenticity is, I claim, an important moral virtue. Authenticity is a virtue in the broad sense that it is a valuable disposition of an individual agent. Sartre did not use the language of virtue ethics in describing authenticity. Moreover, Sartre was openly critical of the enterprise of moral philosophy as traditionally understood. However, for several reasons it is fruitful to understand authenticity along the lines of classical virtue ethics. First, virtue ethics is distinguished by its claim that ethics requires judgements about the character of agents. Claims about duties, rights and moral action derive from character analysis. Sartre performs extensive character analysis throughout his entire oeuvre. The study of bad faith is perhaps the most striking example. To be in bad faith is to adopt an improper disposition towards one's own fundamental condition, that is, one's freedom within a situation. Likewise, the positive ideal - authenticity - is a 'mode of being' or an ongoing, concerted attempt to embrace the human condition. Thus like classical virtue theorists, Sartre describes typical dispositions of individual agents, and evaluates these dispositions according to an ideal, normative standard. Second, the standard Sartre advocates is not the Aristotelian mean state between excess and deficiency. But Sartre does have a rough equivalent. Authenticity is a master standard. Individuals must embrace and not flee the human condition. They must live the tension between freedom and fact. This standard may appear (like

Introduction

5

the mean) to be empty and formulaic. In fact, Sartre is often accused of presenting an abstract, content-less ethics. Aristotle provides content to the doctrine of the mean by appealing to our biological and social nature. Sartre explicitly rejects the appeal to human nature, and Aristotle's functional argument in particular.2 Further, Sartre does not appear to endorse Aristotle's thesis that moral virtues are habituated social techniques. Thus, while Sartre offers a standard by which to evaluate character dispositions (embracing vs. fleeing), he does not spell out authenticity in terms of controlling the bodily appetites and following conventional social norms. One of the most pressing questions in the study of existential ethics is how to provide substantive content to Sartre's moral injunctions 'invent', 'create', 'commit yourself, 'be authentic'. Sartre distinguished two kinds of ethics: abstract and concrete. Sartre's own concrete ethics are best expressed in his situational pieces in Les Temps Modernes. While I show that there is more weight to the notions of authenticity, commitment and recognition than typically admitted, I am sensitive to the charge of ethical formalism. The difference between abstract and concrete ethics is that the former takes abstract, universal standards as sufficient guides to moral conduct, while the latter only uses abstract ideals as guideposts, points for departures and blueprints subject to change. To make an aesthetic comparison: concrete ethics is to abstract ethics as jazz is to classical music. The jazz musician must follow the chord progression and the basic melody, but he must also depart from the score and improvise. Another way to mark the abstract/concrete distinction is through Plato and Aristotle. Both virtue theorists, their respective notions of proper ethical standards are as different as night and day. Sartre, though anti-Aristotelian in other respects, is decidedly in favour of a practice-based, social ethics, which locates normative standards in the messy here and now, not in a transcendental, ideal realm. The deepest objection to using traditional virtue vocabulary to describe authenticity is likely to be Sartre's arguments against 'character', especially in Transcendence of the Ego.3 Sartre denounces character traits as bad psychology. There is no self or ego which causes action. There are no internal psychological states. So how could there be virtues of character? Obviously, we must take Sartre's substantive claims seriously and evaluate them. But Sartre's criticism of 'character' is best understood from within the tradition of character analysis. Existentialists must, in fact, embrace a weak notion of character in order to make judgements of the sort 'James is

6

Sartre's Ethics of Engagement

inauthentic'. Indeed, Sartre's concerns with the nature of the self, voluntary action and proper dispositions echo those of Aristotle. More important than the drama with which Sartre states his position is the fact that he is engaging with these important (and classical) questions with new insight. In short, while Sartre does not use the vocabulary of virtue ethics to explain authenticity, doing so is justified on the grounds of both utility (we can understand and defend existential ethics better) and pedigree (Sartre does in fact engage in character analysis in, roughly, the classical sense; authenticity is a praiseworthy character trait and bad faith is a condemnable character trait). One final point to address is the social, civic nature of authenticity. Like the classical virtue of justice, authenticity implies a particular relation with other people. My reading of authenticity clashes with the standard view, according to which authenticity is an a-social virtue, requiring only internal, rational consistency. If we accept the interrelation of subjects - as I claim Sartre does beginning in the post-war period - then the notion of a proper relation to one's own freedom must shift as well. The ontological thesis that humans are deeply intersubjective supports a practical politics of recognition. 'Engagement', as Sartre calls it, is equivalent to political authenticity. Existential engagement requires a disposition to respect the practical freedom of oneself and others. Engagement requires respecting 'liberty' in the ordinary sense of the term, namely the absence of oppression, slavery, torture, domination and similar conditions. The mantra of Sartre's political works, 'resist oppression', is simply an expression of this deeper concept of engagement. Existential engagement is rightly associated with the notion of negative responsibility, that is, moral liability for omissions. Unfortunately, Sartre frequently stretches the notion of liability for omissions to absurdity, arguing, for example, that writers are responsible for all the evils in the world they do not actively 'combat'. If we supply a philosophically defensible notion of responsibility in place of Sartre's rhetoric, we are left with a compelling portrait of existential engagement. Engagement refers to an individual's basic disposition to care about the liberty and suffering of other members of her community. The unengaged, apolitical agent lacks the basic disposition to care about the liberty of others. I take it to be uncontroversial that such a disposition is vital to modern liberal democratic societies. The debate is whether existentialism has the resources to explain why we should adopt a disposition to care about the liberty of others. Ultimately, I reject Sartre's claim that negative

Introduction

7

responsibility can explain a generic obligation of respect for others. I suggest a more plausible basic existential justification for civic respect. I need the recognition of other members of my community; others who are oppressed and un-free are in a poor position to recognize me. So even though I may not cause another citizen's loss of freedom, I do lose something when the other loses freedom. Thus, independent of my liabilities, I have a reason to care about the freedom of others. I have said enough to give the reader an indication of the argument of this work as a whole. Each subsequent chapter is based on a major theme in Sartrean ethics. My central claim, that Sartre is an intersubjective thinker whose major contribution in ethics is to have depicted the moral virtue of authenticity, builds slowly through the course of the entire book. NOTES 1 See S. Z. Charme, 'Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity', Jewish Social Studies (Vol. 6, No. 2, Winter 2000). Charme helpfully distinguishes between 'essentialist authenticity' (the notion that a person is genuine only if he aligns himself with a cultural and historical orthodoxy) and 'existential authenticity' (which concerns a person's honesty with respect to the formation of the self). 2 See 'Existentialism is a Humanism', in Essays in Existentialism (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1977). Hereafter EIH. 3 New York: Hill and Wang, 1991.

2 Freedom In Being and Nothingness (hereafter BN) Sartre famously depicts human beings as radically free.1 From the standpoint of developing a Sartrean ethics and politics, there are several initial concerns. First, does Sartre offer only one notion of freedom in BN or does he trade ambiguously on several different notions?2 Second, to what extent is Sartre's notion of the freedom of consciousness continuous with traditional discussions of liberty and free will (for example, the notions of liberty in Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise, Kant's Grounding or Mill's On Liberty)? If Sartre uses the term freedom to discuss the same phenomenon as Hobbes, Locke, Kant and Mill then his view seems implausible. If he intends to radically shift the debate (which is my view), then we must carefully consider the relevance of his conclusions to standard views of freedom. Freedom, for Sartre, is the freedom of consciousness. We can begin to understand freedom of consciousness by focusing on two qualities of consciousness.3 First, consciousness is intentional. That is, consciousness always has a target or object; consciousness is always consciousness of something. This distance that consciousness maintains from its object Sartre calls a 'negation' or 'nothingness'. Because consciousness is a negation or separation from brute matter, Sartre concludes that it is outside the network of physical causes and effects. As he puts it 'nothing external to consciousness can motivate it'.4 Second, consciousness is temporal. Consciousness is perpetual flux, constant activity. Not only are human beings subject to the passing of time (so are inanimate objects such as rocks and chairs); rather, human existence is a 'projection' of the self through time. Such projection amounts to freedom in the sense that consciousness is never identical to its own past; it constantly surpasses itself in anticipation of the future. Human consciousness is essentially future oriented. As Sartre says, 'It [consciousness] is free because it is perpetually wrenched away from itself and because it has been separated by a nothingness from what it is and from what it will be'.5 The resulting notion of the freedom of consciousness is ontological in the following sense. Consciousness is free because it is intentional

Freedom

9

and temporal. Intentionality and temporality are necessary and universal features of consciousness. Consciousness can never fail to embody these features. Thus consciousness is necessarily free. Consciousness is free in that it is a rupture or negation of brute matter (not subject to cause and effect), and because it is perpetual flux, wholly under-determined by its own past. Let me turn to the implications Sartre draws from the freedom of consciousness. I will attempt to state these implications such that their relevance to common understandings of free will and liberty can be readily seen and evaluated. First, past decisions do not limit a person's freedom or cause a person's current actions.6 Individuals are essentially active, perpetually projecting themselves into the future. Of course, their projects take place on the basis of their past. But the importance and meaning of one's past appears on the basis of one's current projects. The weight of past decisions is contingent upon my current values.7 For example, 'the marriage I made earlier may ... limit my possibilities and dictate my conduct ... but precisely because my projects are such that I reassume the marriage contract'.8 Our past may have force for us - but it is never sufficient to cause us to act in this or that way. It is our current project, those ends we are trying to achieve now, that determines the relevance and weight of past decisions, actions and values. Second, brute nature does not limit a person's freedom.9 Sartre's famous example is that the mountain is only an obstacle to my freedom if I want to see the meadow on the other side. If mountaineering is my project, the mountain is an instrument, not an obstacle. Sartre admits that I am not free to 'determine whether the rock "to be scaled" will or will not lend itself to scaling'.10 So humans are limited by brute nature only in a relative sense. 'There is no obstacle in an absolute sense', only an obstacle relative to a person's projected ends, desires and purposes.11 Third, other people do not limit my freedom, at least not in an absolute sense. Sartre is ambivalent about this point. Other people are both free (because they, too, have consciousness), but they are like brute nature because of their power to objectify me. The other brings a 'factual limit' to my freedom by imposing on me meanings, definitions, images and assumptions.12 While my freedom consists in giving meaning, the encounter with others entails receiving meaning. 'I myself see a meaning conferred upon me .. .'13 The 'new dimension of being' that the other brings upon me is 'a dimension of alienation' because it comes from outside my project.14 Yet, other people limit

10

Sartre's Ethics of Engagement

me only to the extent that I allow them to limit me. The limit imposed 'does not come from the action of others' but instead from my own choice of ends.15 For example, even if others see me as avaricious, I choose whether to accept or reject this label. Fourth, social and historical circumstances do not limit my freedom.16 One is born into particular circumstances, which are beyond one's immediate control. Nobody chooses whether to be born in fourth-century Athens or sixteenth-century France. So if the Athenian is not free to be a medieval serf, and the serf is not free to be an Athenian statesman, why are these not limits to freedom? Sartre writes: 'To be free is not to choose the historic world in which one arises ... but to choose oneself in the world whatever this may be'.17 Feudalism would limit the serf's freedom only if he were to attempt, anachronistically, to lead the life of the Athenian. Similarly, if we were to compare the serf's life to our own and see him as lacking our freedom (e.g. freedom to choose a career), we would be making an error; he can only lack something that appears to him as a real alternative to his current situation.18 These four points illustrate Sartre's view in BN that 'no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself'.19 Sartre admits the paradox. Freedom of consciousness requires being free in and against one's situation (one's past, brute reality, others and history). One's choices are limited to those possible in the situation. But since I do not choose my situation, I do not choose the objective limits to my freedom. Sartre counters by claiming that 'objective limits' only have their meaning and value on the basis of an individual's projects, plans and desires. I choose whether to see the objective limits of my situation as limiting or liberating. 'My freedom by freely choosing itself chooses its limits ... the free choice of my ends includes the assumption of the limits of this choice .. .'20 The mountain is an obstacle if I want to see past it, but an aid if I want to climb it. Let me sketch the shortcomings of Sartre's view before criticizing the above four points in turn. The underlying assumption driving Sartre's view is that there are no absolute limits to freedom because all limits are relative to the individual's project. Because individuals choose their projects, they choose the limits to their freedom. A first worry is that Sartre underestimates the involuntary dimension of human desires, projects and purposes. To have a project at all presumes that one values life. The notion that one could always choose death is a poor reply. Death is not a project, but the termination of all human projects. So to the extent that one has a project, the project implies the value of life. The value of life imposes

Freedom

11

objective limits to the situation. There may be other ends, like life, that are involuntary. A second worry is that Sartre's view makes it impossible to explain coercion (and related phenomena including oppression). Intuitively, coercion requires being forced into action, typically by threats of bodily harm or death. On Sartre's view the victim chooses what relevance and weight to give to such threats. However, if the victim chooses, she is not forced. The very phenomenon of coercion is erased. Now let me turn to a closer analysis of Sartre's four claims. First, he says that past decisions and actions do not determine current actions since the weight of past actions is dependent upon current projects. The claim is suspect. Projects are continuous. The seamlessness of yesterday's decisions and today's decisions indicates that my current actions are a continuation of the past. Sartre misses the inertia past decisions can have, especially in the form of physical reminders and other people (for example, deadlines, wedding rings, half-written books, etc.). In many cases breaking the continuity of a current project is more difficult than sustaining it. Think of bad habits like going to bed too late, reading in dim light or interrupting others before they have finished speaking. Sartre is correct to reject a mechanical, causal notion of past actions. But there is a large leap from the fact that consciousness is temporal and intentional to the claim that behaviour patterns are sustained at every new moment through acts of free will. Sartre's second claim is that brute nature does not impose an absolute limit on freedom, since brute nature only appears on the basis of a project. Sartre overlooks the extent to which involuntary elements, especially need, condition human projects. Physical needs, such as the need for food, air and water, require that humans adopt the project of attaining food, breathing clean air and hydrating themselves. Sartre holds that a person 'lives' her physical needs differently, based on her projected ends. While most humans do not like the pain of hunger, a Buddhist, for example, may embrace the pain caused by hunger. What this example misses is the fact that even the Buddhist's project is structured by an unavoidable, involuntary need - the need for food and water. The choice of how to react to unavoidable, involuntary needs is not the same as the choice of whether to have such needs. Need is beyond choice. If we assume that freedom is identical with having a choice, then we are not free from needs (because we cannot choose not to have needs).

12

Sartre's Ethics of Engagement

Sartre's reply would be that one does choose one's needs. I may deny my need for water and food by starving myself.21 Biological need loses the 'force of compulsion' since 'in certain particular cases death is preferable to certain kinds of life'.22 Sartre repeatedly returns to this notion - since suicide is a possible alternative to any kind of life, if I do not commit suicide then I choose to live the kind of life I have. Thus, physical needs are voluntary. I choose the need to eat because I live rather than committing suicide. Assume for now Sartre is correct that all living humans have chosen life over suicide. It remains true that human life is necessarily structured by physical needs, which are beyond control. Humans lack the freedom of leading a life exempt from need. What then, of the underlying choice of life over death? Sartre is correct that suicide is always an option.23 Does it follow that brute nature, need, for example, never imposes an absolute limit on me? Classical contract theorists such as Hobbes and Rousseau addressed this issue by asking whether contracts that required one's own death are void. They suggested that it would never be rational for a person to choose his own death. Underlying this claim is the assumption that no fate is worse than death (even suffering, cruelty and torture) and no good is as valuable as life (no good could justify an exchange of one's life). To prefer death to life would be a sign of insanity, irrationality. Life is, strictly speaking, a choice; yet it is the only choice consistent with sanity and rationality. A similar conclusion could be garnered from Sartre's own theory of consciousness. If consciousness is always a projection into the future, then life is its prerequisite. The projection of consciousness assumes that consciousness is alive. Thus the value of life is presupposed by the nature of consciousness. To put the point another way: suicide is not and cannot be a project. A project must be pursued through time and must also be an encompassing end. Thus the very concept of a project assumes that I value life not death. To return to the notion of a limit imposed by brute reality - my physical body, through need, imposes an external limit. If I do not take care of my body then I die. I must be alive to have a project. I cannot have a project and choose to reject the physical needs of my body. The limit (the need to eat, etc.) does not appear or disappear depending on my project. In sum, physical needs impose limits on freedom and these limits are not self-imposed. Sartre's third claim is that other people do not impose an absolute limit on my freedom. While I do not control the meaning and interpretation others give to my actions, I do control how these meanings

Freedom

13

affect me. My central worry with this claim is that it makes coercion (and similar phenomena) impossible. Coercion requires being forced into action by threats or compulsion. Cases that would strike most people as intuitively coercive, Sartre says are not genuinely coercive: 'even torture does not dispose us of our freedom; when we give in, we do so freely'.24 Sartre's rationale is as follows: 'In fact according to the free possibilities which I choose, I can disobey the prohibition, pay no attention to it, or, on the contrary confer upon it a coercive value which it can hold only because of the weight which I attach to it'.25 Sartre has two strategies. First, he could deny that coercion exists. He suggests this in the first passage, where he says that torture is not coercion. But the latter passage refers to the 'coercive value' of the situation, suggesting that Sartre intends to explain the phenomenon. Unfortunately his explanation is fatally flawed. He says that coercion exists only because I 'confer' on the situation the quality of being coercive, through my project. But this is impossible. The concept of coercion requires being forced to act by another person. To choose to be coerced is a contradiction in terms. For example, assume a rapist threatens to kill his victim unless she ceases struggling and allows him sexual access. On Sartre's analysis this situation is not inherently coercive. Only if the victim values her life and her bodily integrity is the situation coercive. The victim is not genuinely forced to act. Sartre would either describe her as acting freely or describe her (using paradoxical language) as freely allowing the other to force her into action. Under either description, the actual phenomenon of coercion is erased. To note that the victim could have allowed the rapist to kill her is painfully unconvincing proof that the intercourse was freely chosen. Sartre's view is similar to that of Hobbes, who in the Leviathan famously remarks that 'fear and liberty are consist'.26 Hobbes gives the example of a man throwing his goods overboard to avoid sinking his ship and dying. The man acts freely in throwing over his goods, Hobbes says, because he could have done otherwise. The threat of death does not diminish the man's liberty, which consists in his having a choice of action. As I have shown, Sartre agrees that humans are fundamentally free because they have a choice of whether to endure their situation or commit suicide. Like Hobbes, Sartre of BN identifies freedom with choice of action. The primary difference is that Hobbes' mechanistic view of freedom as the 'absence of external impediments' allows him to diagnose cases of physical coercion. On Hobbes' view, if the rapist overpowered his

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Sartre's Ethics of Engagement

victim physically, then he would present an 'external obstacle' and hence diminish the freedom of his victim; the rapist would genuinely force the victim to act, thereby making her unfree. The Hobbesian view draws a bright line between physical force and the mere threat of physical force. The former is sufficient for coerced, un-free action; the latter is not. As we have seen, on Sartre's view, neither physical force nor the threats of physical force are sufficient for coerced, unfree action. Hobbes' view seems faulty for drawing a sharp contrast between physical force and the threat of physical force, both of which intuitively suffice for coercion. Sartre's view appears faulty as well, for failing to acknowledge either force or threat of force as sufficient for coercion. The case of the rape victim illustrates a common moral intuition. According to this intuition, freedom of choice is not synonymous with a deeper sense of freedom. I can have two options, neither of which promote my freedom. A gallows' choice of whether to be hung or shot is not freedom promoting. Giving a kosher Jew a choice between shellfish or pork is not freedom promoting.27 Both the Sartrean and the Hobbesian conception of freedom of choice fail to conform to this common intuition. Sartre's fourth claim is that historical circumstances do not impose an absolute limit on my freedom. Sartre is correct in saying that we make ourselves out of circumstances which are beyond our immediate control (e.g. one's place of birth, mother tongue or ethnic background). Because Sartre identifies freedom with choice, no historical circumstance makes a person un-free in an absolute sense; one always has options, no matter how bad the situation. But if freedom is choice, and if particular choices are blocked, then we are not free to make the blocked choice. The Athenian is not free to be a medieval serf because he cannot choose to be a medieval serf. Several comments are in order. First, Sartre's view is not that the quantity of choices makes one more or less free.28 If, for example, the serf had numerically fewer choices than the Athenian, it is not by virtue of this that he is less free (or the Athenian more free). Second, Sartre also rejects the notion that the quality of one's choices determines the extent of one's freedom. Sartre explicitly defends the view that the victim of torture, detention or slavery is free because he can choose how to 'assume' his torture, detention or slavery. 'There is no situation in which the for-itself would be more free than in others.'29 I think this aspect of Sartre's view is untenable. There is an obvious qualitative difference between the choices available to a torture victim relative to the choices of a non-victim. Namely, the

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victim's choices are coerced and the non-victim's choices are not coerced! Further, none of the choices available to the rape or torture victim are good.30 These qualitative differences are of utmost ethical importance. Otherwise we cannot make sense of cases like rape and torture in particular, and cruelty, abuse, slavery and oppression more generally. Sartre's view, again, is that no objective fact about quality of choice limits my freedom.31 Only through a project is an objective situation revealed to an agent. Thus a person's situation is only oppressive if she allows the situation to oppress her. She is free to regard any situation as non-oppressive. But it is rather implausible to say, for example, that a black slave born on a plantation in Virginia in 1800 can choose whether his enslavement limits or expands his freedom. Why is Sartre's view implausible? First, there is an important difference between the mountaineer and the slave. The mountaineer turns the mountain from a freedomlimiting obstacle into a liberating pathway by making mountaineering his project. The black slave in Virginia in 1800 could, on Sartre's view, turn his slavery into a liberating pathway. Assume the black slave affirmed his slavery (not as his fate or duty), but by adopting the project of being the best slave he could be. Let us call this the case of the 'happy slave'. The happy slave would see the master's commands as a liberating path, not an obstacle.32 The relevant difference is that the happy slave's project requires a total (or in some cases, near-total) alienation of agency. The slave is unable to author his own actions. The slave also sacrifices particular liberties (e.g. liberty of motion, association, property, thought, speech, etc.). The issue is not simply the quantity of costs and restrictions implied by the happy slave's project. Mountaineering also involves heavy restrictions: accepting the potential for death, sequestering oneself in a confined area and putting oneself at the mercy of the elements. Slavery is qualitatively different from mountaineering in so far as the slave is completely and permanently under the authority of the master.33 Sartre is wrong that the slave could choose to embrace slavery as liberating. To make one's slavery a project is contradictory. Having a project requires agency in the minimal sense of authoring one's actions. The slave is divested of his agency; the master authors his actions. A happy slave would be contradictory: he would have to author the action of divesting his agency. Moreover, projects are sustained throughout time. So the slave would, over time, author the ongoing divestment of his agency. The deeper contradiction is that

16

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embracing the fact that my actions are authored by the master, not me, is an expression of my agency. To embrace the master's will requires that I distance myself from the master enough to contemplate his will as worthy of affirmation. In short, embracing, affirming, choosing and accepting are expressions of one's agency. But slavery is the alienation of agency. Happy slavery is thus the selfdefeating attempt to erase one's agency and to simultaneously affirm this erasure. In contrast to slavery, there are some situations in which a person makes a project of submission to another, thereby choosing to limit his own freedom. In joining the military, a soldier agrees to submit to the authority of his commanding officer. (Other examples of this kind could be cited. In accepting a job I agree to follow the commands of my superiors.) In this case a person could indeed embrace the fact that his actions are directed by another person. The relevant differences are: (1) I join the military voluntarily, whereas slavery is rarely if ever voluntary; (2) I can exit the military without threat of death or bodily harm; and (3) a master's control over a slave's life is more extensive than a commander's control over his soldier's life.34 So, I have shown that slavery cannot be affirmed as a project. Slavery is the erasure of agency, and agency is required of a project. Sartre's standard reply is that consciousness can exercise itself in any situation, no matter how qualitatively impoverished the choices; consciousness is agency; therefore agency is possible in any situation. This reply amounts to a dispute over the concept of agency. On Sartre's view, the mere fact of being alive not dead entails agency, in so far as consciousness is temporal and intentional. Even granting Sartre's claim that the human imagination cannot be placed in chains, there is a large gap between imagination and agency. Even a minimal, non-controversial notion of agency would imply being able to act to bring about change. Ultimately, Sartre's conception of freedom in BN is unsatisfying because it fails to connect with the ordinary notions of agency and liberty. My strategy in analysing ontological freedom has been to draw distinctions corresponding to common moral intuitions, and to show that that these distinctions cannot be recognized on Sartre's view. The most important distinction I have made is between coercive and non-coercive situations. The moral intuition I draw upon most heavily is that coercion is freedom limiting. Stated differently: it is important for our ethical thinking that we develop a concept of

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freedom that can account for the difference between coercive and non-coercive situations. I have argued that situations like slavery and torture are coercive and thus freedom diminishing. Further, I have argued that these situations are intrinsically coercive and freedom diminishing, not coercive and freedom diminishing only because the victim happens to value liberation. From an external perspective, the resulting view may be yet unsatisfactory. I have only shown that the most egregious forms of coercion limit human freedom by diminishing agency. What the previous discussion has shown is that freedom in the ordinary sense requires agency or authoring one's own actions. Freedom requires not being coerced, not being enslaved and not being oppressed. I have yet to explain how the positive notion of freedom that has emerged gels with familiar cases from classical liberal theory such as arbitrary seizure of property, restriction of motion, or limitations of speech and association. The view that freedom is non-coercion is still a 'thin' view. Freedom is identified with agency. Coercion is taken to be the root phenomenon where agency is undermined. I mean to contrast a thin view of freedom with a thick view, where freedom is identified with particular liberties, such as property, life and the pursuit of happiness. One may worry that there is nothing left of the existential approach to freedom. But I do not share this view. Freedom as noncoercion is an existential conception because it addresses only the fundamental conditions of human action, agency and selfhood. What I am resisting is the conflation of the freedom of consciousness with the freedom of agency. There is a large gap between imagining an action and being free to carry out that action. The freedom to carry out action requires, as I have shown, the baseline condition of non-coercion. Let me summarize my claims against Sartre's view that freedom is the freedom of consciousness and the only limits to freedom are selfimposed. My purpose in these critical remarks is constructive. First, there are objective limits to freedom, because there are agent-independent limits to what can be a project. Death cannot be a project. Slavery cannot be a project. In principle, any situation which undermines my agency limits my freedom. Second, coercion limits freedom. Sartre's view in BN implies that coercion is impossible since all situations are chosen. Such a view rules coercion out by fiat. But coercion is not a confused concept; if it were, Sartre would be right to define it out of existence. Neither is

18

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coercion an empirical falsehood. Slavery and rape prove the point. The rape victim does not choose to be raped; she is forced into rape. This is true even if the rapist presents her with a devil's choice. 'Your body or your life' is not a recipe for freedom. Third, the resulting view is that freedom is not merely the freedom of consciousness (the ability to imaginatively transcend the situation). Even if freedom is defined as having a choice, freedom as choice requires agency, that is, the ability to author and initiate one's own projects. The above criticisms - that slavery and coercion are freedom diminishing - are internal criticisms of Sartre's view. By showing slavery and coercion undermine choice, these criticisms show that slavery and coercion demote freedom. I have also attempted to introduce considerations external to Sartre's views that question the sufficiency of choice for freedom. These external considerations primarily take the form of common intuitions about richer, thicker senses of freedom. For example, there is a strong intuition that we are free only if the choices available to us express our humanity, dignity and our particular liberties. A devil's choice is not freedom promoting because all the victim's options are dehumanizing. Fourth, it does not follow from my discussion that Sartre's notion of the freedom of consciousness (ontological freedom) should be dispensed with. The problem is Sartre's attempt to cash the chips of ontological freedom in terms of classical notions of free will and liberty. Let us grant the descriptive veracity of Sartre's notion of ontological freedom. Consciousness is temporal and intentional; these structures are ontological, that is, necessary, universal features of being human. I contend that ontological freedom is insufficient for the morally basic notion of freedom as agency, that is, freedom as authoring one's actions (non-coercion). Ontological freedom is, however, a necessary condition of freedom as agency. Being an agent requires a break, rupture, upsurge or nothingness separating the actor from the situation. Consciousness is the imaginative transcendence of the given situation. To be an agent is to attempt to transform the world according to a perceived lack. Thus, agency requires consciousness. Sartre's mistake is to reduce agency to consciousness, to see consciousness as sufficient for agency. If my master commands me to X, I do not gain agency over my Xing by Xing with this or that attitude. It is irrelevant that I control (that is, exercise agency over) the attitude. On the other hand, I would not be able to exercise agency over my Xing unless my consciousness were in-kind distinct from a physical being, which the master could put in motion

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through a causal chain of events. Free action requires the freedom of consciousness, but does not reduce to it. As clearly as any other post-war work, Saint Genet (1952) evinces Sartre's turn to concrete freedom. Sartre rejects what he calls 'Spinozistic', 'abstract freedom'.35 Speaking about the avenues open to victims of oppression, Sartre argues that a change in attitude is insufficient for liberation; the social institutions and the real relations of power must change. Jean Genet (the French writer who is the subject of Sartre's biography) hoped to liberate himself by changing his inner disposition; Genet thought the power of consciousness would make him free. But Sartre charges Genet with bad faith. A change of attitude does not amount to liberation. Those who '... aim as Descartes advises, to change themselves rather than the universe' are duped into an 'abstract', toothless and misguided notion of freedom.36 Retreating to 'Cartesian' freedom is a strategy of escapism, and thus bad faith. By changing consciousness, a person does not become free in the substantial, concrete, political or ordinary sense. A change in consciousness remains 'idealistic' since it 'entails no real improvement in the condition of the pariahs'.37 In contrast to the view in BN that one remains free in any situation, Sartre says that the only 'means of acting on others directly', which is to say the only way to affect the freedom of others, is through 'physical coercion'. Sartre writes, 'However there is no means of acting on others directly, except physical coercion, which Genet cannot practice. I act upon the person with whom I am speaking only by constructing a trap in which his freedom can be caught.'38 Freedom, Sartre admits, is limited by what Beauvoir would later call the 'force of circumstance'. This glimpse into the view of freedom Sartre holds in the post-war period will suffice for now. As should be apparent, the criticisms offered above (of freedom in BN) harmonize well with the direction later taken in Sartre's own works. The view of freedom I defend - freedom as non-coercion though distinct from the view portrayed in BN, is nonetheless an existential notion, since it is a description of the baseline conditions of action, and since it is consistent with the claim that human consciousness is temporal and intentional. I do not reject freedom of consciousness, since such freedom is a necessary, though not sufficient condition of agency. Freedom, as I use the term in the rest of this work, refers to authoring, directing or originating one's actions, which requires, at a minimum, both consciousness and an absence of physical coercion. As I show in subsequent chapters, especially in the polemical writings of the post-war period Sartre moves away

20

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from the Cartesian view of freedom in BN and comes to embrace a politicized conception of freedom as non-coercion.

NOTES 1 New York: Washington Square Press, 1956. Translated by H. Barnes. 2 See D. Detmer, Freedom as a Value: Critique of the Ethical Theory of JeanPaul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court, 1986). 3 BN 584. 4 BN 584. 5 BN 568. 6 BN581. 7 BN581. 8 BN 640. 9 BN 625-8. 10 BN628. 11 BN 628. 12 BN 671. 13 BN 671, emphasis added. 14 BN 672. 15 BN 672. 16 BN 668. 17 BN 668. 18 Sartre gives the example of a worker in 1830 who doesn't revolt because he doesn't see his situation as unbearable. (BN 561) 19 BN 567. 20 BN678. 21 BN 672. 22 BN 672. 23 Of course, one could imagine a counterexample in which a person is prevented from committing suicide. This would be a rare case. 24 BN 672. 25 BN 672, emphasis added. 26 London: Collier Books, 1962. 27 See F. Bergman, On Being Free (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). 28 See Detmer, Freedom, at 70-6. 29 BN 701. 30 For simplicity I am assuming that the torture victim is unjustly tortured. 31 BN668. 32 The issue here is not bad faith. 33 Rousseau is a classical spokesperson for this view: 'To renounce one's liberty is to renounce one's quality as a man, the rights and also the duties of humanity ... Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature, for to take away all freedom from his will is to take away all morality from his action.' See Book I, Chapter 4, On The Social Contract (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

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34 Of course, certain empirical examples exist of armies that are de facto slave armies. I am considering the notion of a genuinely voluntary army. 35 Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York: George Brasiller, 1963), at 60. 36 Saint Genet 54. 37 Saint Genet 54-5. 38 Saint Genet 420.

3

Self The existential conception of freedom is closely related to concept of the self. As we have just seen, existential freedom refers to noncoerced agency. The term self, as I use it, is roughly synonymous with the term agent. Thus to inquire about the self is to ask about agency, and the conditions of action in general. My main purpose in this chapter is to begin laying the meta-ethical groundwork for an existential virtue ethics by analysing Sartre's view of agency. In particular, I must show that the existential self is social, not monadic. Further, I must suggest how existential selfhood can be made compatible with project of character formation, which is central to any virtue ethics. Let me begin with some general comments about the concept of the self and its relation to moral theory.1 A classical strategy in ethical and political theory, dating at least to Aristotle, is to describe human nature and to develop ethical implications from this description. Aristotle's functional argument in the Ethics is paradigmatic: humans are by nature rational, political animals; virtue consists in embracing one's nature and performing acts well that accord with this nature; so virtue for humans is a life of reason and sociality, lived well.2 The concept of human nature as evoked in Aristotle's functional argument differs from the concept of a self. First, the self is typically a non-moral or morally thin notion. Whereas the notion of human nature implies that humans are distinct from and more valuable than other creatures in the universe, the notion of the self aims only to describe the conditions of human action. An ethics may be developed from a conception of the self; however, the starting point of such an ethics presumes far less about substantive values. Second, the self has an individuating function. To have a self is to be able to distinguish oneself from others and from raw matter. In the tradition of continental philosophy, this issue has roots in Hegel's attempt to explain the emergence and development of human consciousness.3 Third, the self is sometimes called the ego, for example in Kantian and Husserlian philosophy. The ego is responsible for organizing an

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individual's experiences and for connecting these experiences to a particular individual. Again, the ego is a morally thin, or even premoral notion. No moral oughts or moral values follow directly from the fact that a person organizes her experience through an ego. Fourth, the concept of human nature is often used to describe universal human desires, motivations and dispositions. For example, some philosophers claim that humans are essentially self-interested (e.g. Hobbes), or essentially disposed to seek pleasure (e.g. Mill). Describing the self requires no stand on the issue of whether humans have universal desires. Sartre rejects the idea of universal desire. Fifth, the main concerns with selfhood are the same as those regarding agency, for example Aristotle's canonical discussion of the conditions of voluntary action. To ask about the self is to ask what kind of structural features humans must have to be praised or blamed for their actions. Thus the notion of the self has application to moral issues, but the notion of the self is, strictly speaking, prior to any conception of value or obligation. The distinction between the self and human nature is important because Sartre adamantly rejects of the concept of human nature. But we must not be misled into thinking that the concept of the self has no application to existential ethics. While Sartre (especially in BN) divests the self from any positive, substantive value, I claim the Sartrean self is a morally thin notion. There are moral implications that can be developed from an analysis of the existential self. These implications are neither as direct nor as substantive as the implications Aristotle draws from the human function. There is, however, a relevant similarity. The structure of the self implies that certain patterns of human action and practical rationality are confused, contradictory, futile and misguided. While Sartre rejects the formula that virtue is excellence of function, he offers a somewhat similar alternative: authentic human existence requires embracing rather than fleeing the essential structures of the self. Sartre's ethics is a logic of action. Existential virtue requires embracing the structures of human action. Sartrean ethics requires a conception of the self, not merely as a starting point, but as a fundamental touchstone. Other ethical systems develop a conception of the acting subject preliminarily, and then move to questions of duty and obligation. Sartrean morality is centred on the virtue of authenticity and the vice of bad faith. Authenticity, as we will see shortly, requires properly understanding and embracing the self, while bad faith is fleeing from the self. Authenticity can be imbued with substantive value, but at the outset

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authenticity is a formal virtue, that results from an analysis of a morally thin notion of selfhood. Because Sartrean virtue is a matter of understanding and affirming the nature of the acting subject, a clear description of selfhood is indispensable.4 Sartre's concept of virtue is wed to his concept of the self. Let me begin with the question of whether in BN Sartre holds a monadic view of self. By monadic I mean that the self is essentially, ontologically independent from others. A monadic self is not constituted by its relation to other selves. By intersubjective I mean the following: the self is what it is only in relation to other selves; the self is, at least in part, constituted by other selves; and others can affect and modify the self. The locus classicus of the intersubjective conception of the self is Hegel, but a similar view is held by Aristotle (we are political animals) as well as Marx (the human essence is the ensemble of social relations). In summary, my view is that in BN, Sartre holds a largely, but not exclusively monadic view of the self. While Sartre characterizes the self as first and foremost a consciousness or 'being-for-itself, there is an important dimension of the self called the 'social self (or 'beingfor-others'). The social self is the side of us that others constitute through observation, judgement and social interaction. So even on Sartre's view, where the self is primarily a consciousness (being-foritself), consciousness has an outside that is constituted by other people. So far, Sartre's view seems logically consistent with an intersubjective self as defined above. However, the twist is that, Sartre says, there is an irreconcilable duality between being-for-itself and being-for-others. On the one hand there is the self as agent; on the other hand there is the self as object; never shall the twain meet. In BN Sartre denies the possibility of integrating the two dimensions of selfhood. Further, the self as agent is not constituted by others. In contrast to Hegel, Sartre suggests that consciousness could exist and be itself even if there were no other consciousnesses. Finally, others remain causally inert with respect to the self as subject, hence Sartre's claim that others do no limit one's freedom. Let me begin with the self as subject, or what Sartre calls being-foritself. This dimension of human reality corresponds with Heidegger's notion of Dasein. Being-for-itself is synonymous with human consciousness.5 Sartre contrasts consciousness with 'being-in-itself, which is raw, inert matter.6 Consciousness is 'nothingness' in the sense that it negates, or separates itself from inert matter.7 Consciousness is the perpetual surpassing of inert matter by acts of imagination or transcendence.

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By defining consciousness as the transcendence of inert matter Sartre makes it difficult to account for how one consciousness could have another consciousness as its object. If by definition consciousness is the surpassing of the given, of matter, then any encounter between two consciousnesses must reduce one consciousness to matter. This is the lesson of 'the look'.8 There is a dependency between consciousness and inert matter since consciousness is defined as a negation of matter. If there were nothing to negate, there would be no consciousness. But consciousness does not depend on any particular inert matter for its existence. Thus in one sense consciousness is defined in terms of a relation: the relation between itself and what it is not (namely inert matter). Consciousness is perpetual 'nihilation'. This sense of dependence is consistent with (what I am calling) a monadic view of the self. The important issue is whether the self has an essential relation to other selves. Sartre's view is complex. Consciousness (being-for-itself) is a relation between itself and inert matter, and if this relationship is self-sustaining, then the self is monadic. If, on the other hand, consciousness can have a negating relation to raw matter only after, in or through social relations, then the self is not monadic. To answer this question we must more closely explore Sartre's notion of beingfor-others. The relevant points are as follows. First, others add a new, real dimension to consciousness. 'Thus the Other has not only revealed to me what I was; he has established me in a new type of being, which can support new qualifications.'9 If others did not exist, then the social self would not exist. The experiences of shame and pride are proof that others have a deep effect on our sense of self.10 Shame implies being ashamed in front of another person. When I experience shame I experience another person looking at me and judging me. The social self is not fictitious, imaginary, or epiphenomenal, but real. Second, although the other establishes a new dimension of my reality, I am not capable of completely becoming or identifying with this reality. There is an insurmountable gap between 'what I am for myself and what I am for Others'.11 There are two basic reasons that I can never close this gap.12 First, I can never know the other's image of me and compare it to my own self-image. Second, for-self and for-others are mutually exclusive modes of being; I either look at the other or he looks at me. Sartre's claim that the objective and subjective dimensions of the self are permanently alienated is an attack on Hegel. To better

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understand Sartre's view on the self, let me contrast it with Hegel's master/slave thesis of the self. Hegel's famous thesis is that the self is constituted intersubjectively, through the recognition of others.13 This thesis is illustrated through the metaphor of the master and the slave. Hegel assumes that prior to the master/slave relationship, two people have the attitude of 'desire', which is the attempt to establish a secure, stable and explicit sense of one's selfhood by consuming raw matter. This project is futile: one cannot gain a stable, explicit sense of selfhood by dominating raw matter. Realizing the futility of desire, the person turns to the project of dominating other people. The confrontation between two people who attempt to dominate one another will, Hegel tells us, either lead to the death of one party or to a master/slave relation. In killing the other, I would receive no more satisfaction than from raw matter. If the other lives, then perhaps I will gain a stable sense of self from his recognition of my mastery. The irony of the master/slave relation is that the slave, not the master, receives a stable, explicit sense of selfhood. The master/slave relationship involves intersubjective recognition, but not mutual, pure recognition. The recognition is one-sided. While master/slave relations demonstrate non-mutual recognition, Hegel explains what mutual recognition would look like. Each party would mirror the other party. There would be a fundamental sameness or equality. I would see myself in the other and the other would see herself in me. There would be a perfect matching or identity between the other and me. Further, I would be capable of identifying wholly with the other's image of me, and vice versa. (This point is crucial for understanding the difference between Sartre and Hegel.) I would not be alienated from myself or from the other. There are two essential moments of pure recognition: self-loss and selfrecovery. Self-recovery is mediated by the other, and thus the self is enriched. It is this enriched self that is, according to Hegel, most fundamentally and fully who one is. We are now in a position to understand Sartre's major disagreement with Hegel. By accepting the existence of the social self Sartre agrees with Hegel that there is an internal relation between the self and other. But Sartre denies Hegel's claim that fully realized subjectivity requires others to recognize me as a subject. Sartre claims that (1) since there is an irreconcilable duality between the self as agent and the self as object, then (2) the self as subject is independent of the look of others. Sartre's only proof of the latter claim seems to be the former claim. If subjectivity and objectivity are

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radically distinct, subjectivity must be prior. Otherwise there would be no 'me' for the other to objectify. After BN Sartre's view of the self changes significantly. I contend that Sartre abandons his main anti-Hegelian thesis, namely that reconciling the subjective and objective dimensions of the self is impossible. What is my evidence? In the post-war works, especially What is Literature?14 (hereafter WIL) and Notebooks for an Ethics15 (hereafter NE), Sartre claims that the look of the other is not inherently alienating. The look does objectify me, but I can simultaneously grasp myself as an object and as a subject. I can see others seeing me. As Sartre says of the French writer Jean Genet, 'In a certain sense, Genet the poet knows himself as being, for the other, identical with what he is to himself'.16 Sartre's intersubjective conception of the self is expressed in his new theory of interpersonal relations. The pact between reader and writer is not a 'hell' based on domination. Mutual recognition is possible! Sartre's Hegelian turn, especially in WIL and NE, is evidence of a revised, intersubjective notion of the self. Expressing his social conception of the self Sartre writes, 'For a long time we believed in the social atomism bequeathed to us by the eighteenth century, and it seemed to us that man was by nature a solitary entity, who entered into relations with his fellow men afterward ... We now know that this is nonsense. The truth is that "human reality" "is-in-society" as it "is-in-the-world"; it is neither a nature nor a state; it is made.'17 (Sartre's reasons for this Hegelian turn are the subject of the next chapter.) We have seen that on the Sartrean view there is a split between the objective and the subjective sides of the self. Sartre, however, is opposed to the more classical psychic dualism according to which the soul is divided into rational and non-rational elements. Not only the ancients, but also many subsequent theorists in the tradition of virtue ethics hold that virtue consists in rational control of the appetites. By exploring Sartre's opposition to the classical dualism of reason and emotion we kill two birds with one stone. First, we gain a better portrait of what the acting self is according to Sartre - most importantly, the self is necessarily active not passive. Second, we can distinguish the existential virtue of authenticity from the classical notion of virtue as controlling the appetites. The ancient view of the self holds that the soul is divided into reason, appetite and spirit. Plato, for example, argues for the division of the soul by citing cases of inner conflict: I desire to look at a corpse (appetite) but I know that I should not (reason) and I feel ashamed

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(spirit).18 The similar, Aristotelian view holds that the human soul is divided between rational and non-rational, and the non-rational is further divided into parts obedient and not obedient to reason. The substantive disagreement between Sartre and the ancients is whether the psyche is divided between controlling and controlled elements. The ancients see appetites and emotions as largely involuntary reactions, which ought to be controlled by the exercise of reason. Sartre sees appetites and emotions as voluntary actions, which are themselves forms of control. Sartre denies the distinction between voluntary and non-voluntary psychic elements. Feeling ashamed about a desire I know I should not have is not a battle between passive and active, chosen and un-chosen elements of the soul, but a tension between equally voluntary, equally intentional yet distinct modes of consciousness. A serious criticism of Sartre's view is that appetites are not voluntary. (I voiced a similar objection to Sartre's view of freedom in Chapter 1.) Appetites spring from bodily needs, which are not voluntary. For example, I do not choose whether to feel hungry when my body needs nutrition, whether to feel thirsty when my body is dehydrated or whether to desire sex when I have had no recent sexual stimulation. Sartre's familiar strategy is to say that these appetites have no intrinsic power over me, because my project is a filter that determines the weight and meaning of the need. Hunger does not affect me; I live my hunger in this or that way. Sartre's mistake is conflating the appetite with the way it is lived. Appetites are involuntary in the sense that a human cannot choose a life unconstrained by bodily needs. Sartre's claim that I could never know 'thirst-in-itself outside of my way of living my thirst is beside the point. I cannot choose whether or not to experience thirst when my body is dehydrated. Similarly, Sartre overstates the degree to which emotions are voluntary. Take anger for example. Sartre's thesis is that anger - like any mode of consciousness - is a way of living and in fact choosing one's relation to the world.19 One does not 'give in' to anger; anger is chosen. However, to choose anger is not to reflectively distance oneself from one's anger and then embrace it after weighing alternatives. This would be to assume a split between the rational and emotional sides of the soul. Disagreeing with the ancients, who claim that choosing and directing are actions unique to reason, Sartre would say that emotion chooses and directs. Reason does not stand back and choose my emotion; emotion chooses to reveal the world. So, for Sartre emotion is voluntary. I control whether I am sad or not sad.

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The primary weakness of Sartre's view of emotion is similar to the weaknesses of Sartre's view of ontological freedom. Sartre cannot explain the common effort of shaping and cultivating one's emotional life. Anger management, for example, is the attempt to reshape one's inappropriate or undesirable tendency to become angry. Tremendous effort and time are required to manage one's anger. Depression is similar. A person with mild or serious, but not debilitating depression might reasonably be said to choose his depression if he refuses treatment. But this is not a choice in Sartre's above sense. The depressive person who seeks treatment acknowledges that his sadness spirals out of control, that it is disproportionate and that in a deep sense, he does not desire to be sad. The shortcomings of Sartre's view of emotion are familiar, for they are essentially the same shortcomings as his view of ontological freedom. There are involuntary dimensions of selfhood, most importantly, physical needs. Further, because we project ourselves through time there is a strong continuity between our past, present and future; this continuity is not best understood as a matter of constant choice. To his credit, Sartre forces us to think harder about the intuition that all emotions are irrational and non-voluntary, while all acts of thinking, willing and believing are rational and voluntary. Sartre may be right to shift our notion of discrete psychic acts to the discussion of consciousness as a single structure of all psychic acts. But we must amend the Sartrean view to account for the nonvoluntary aspect of psychic life. I am making headway towards an existential conception of selfhood that would support a theory of virtue. The existential self is not monadic (which would make explaining any social virtue difficult). Nor is the existential self radically voluntary (which would rule out the cultivation of proper habits of character). I would like to provide further defence for this latter claim. Existentialism can, I claim, embrace character judgements, which are required for a theory of ethical virtue. Early Sartre is highly critical of the notion of character, as well as similar concepts such as drive, impulse, personality and psyche.20 Sartre worries that these concepts imply passivity and inertness. As we saw above, Sartre denies that past acts 'build up' into psychic dispositions that cause action. Sartre makes several related points. Most judgements of character are mistaken. We look at someone's past actions and assume the person will never change. 'After my anger yesterday my irascibility survives as a simple latent disposition

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to become angry.'21 We thereby attribute 'an innate or acquired disposition' to others.22 What is worse, we assume that the person's disposition is causally effective.23 We say that 'John acted out because John is an angry person'. But if character is just a poor label for judgements others apply to me, then there is no internal psychic reality to character. Dispositions cannot cause actions for the same reason that emotions cannot cause actions. Emotions are intentional, chosen acts. I am not caused to be angry because I am an angry person. Anger is my chosen relation to the world at this particular time. Sartre develops these ideas in his early work Transcendence of the Ego,24 where he argues that the 'ego' is a philosophical illusion. Philosophers have been duped into believing that the ego is 'inside' the psyche, but it is not. The ego, the psyche and character are mere narratives, labels and patterns that we impose on our experience after the fact as convenient explanatory tools. But an explanatory tool has no psychic weight and cannot be construed as an internal, psychic mechanism with causal power. Sartre's main worry, then, is that even if character judgements are descriptively and predictively accurate, character is never a cause of actions. 'To be ambitious, cowardly, or irritable is simply to conduct oneself in this or that manner in this or that circumstance.'25 But notice that given Sartre's worry, one can still accept character judgements of a limited type. As long as the judgement is purely descriptive of past behaviour and/or predictive, the judgement would not face Sartre's above objections (namely positing a causal, inner psychic force). 'James has acted bravely in the past' is acceptable. As is 'We can reasonably expect James to act bravely in the future'. We could even judge that 'Since James has reliably, consistently acted bravely in the past, he is likely to act bravely in the future'. What is prohibited is this: 'James acts bravely because he is a brave person', I will call character judgements of the latter kind 'strong'. Are strong character judgements important for virtue ethics? Aristotle, in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, claims that virtue requires performing virtuous acts from a particular state of character. James' act is not genuinely brave unless James is a brave person. Thus, Aristotle says, full-blooded character judgements are necessary for ascribing virtue, because a mere description of one's act is insufficient for virtue. Said differently: 'James is brave' is a stronger judgement than 'James acts bravely'. Aristotle goes on to name three conditions necessary if we are to say an agent is virtuous: he must know that his action is virtuous; he must decide on his action; and

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his action must flow from a firm character.26 The last condition is the most important for current purposes. First, Aristotle is concerned to rule out one-off wonders, flukes and accidents. James is only brave if he acts bravely in all the relevant circumstances, over a long period of time. Further, acting from character implies the action comes naturally to one, or flows. This is why Aristotle emphasizes that virtuous actions cannot be unpleasant. For example, if I am an 'early bird' it is insufficient for me to wake up early every day; I have to find no overwhelming discomfort in so doing. Nothing precludes Sartre from making judgements of the sort just specified. Sartre can make the judgement that 'In all the relevant circumstances, over the course of time, James has acted bravely'. Compare Sartre's discussion of the homosexual in BN. Sartre claims that the homosexual must see his past actions as forming a pattern, not as mere flukes. 'To the extent that I have adopted this conduct, I am a homosexual. But to the extent that human reality cannot be finally defined by patterns of conduct, I am not one.'27 As the second half of the quotation illustrates, Sartre's worry about character judgements is that they imply a once-and-for-always quality. Judgements about past patterns of actions are acceptable and indeed useful, necessary and honest. But too often these judgements suggest an unchangeable essence that causes future conduct. Sartre can also accept the judgement that 'The action came naturally to James; it flowed'. Resistant to the word character (for reasons just explained), Sartre would say that an action flows from one's project, not from one's character. A project is an encompassing end, and refers to a basic, underlying structure expressed in one's actions as a whole. Sartre's example in BN is the mountaineer who enjoys the physical strain intrinsic to mountaineering.28 The mountaineer's equally fit partner does not enjoy the frostbite, dehydration and lack of oxygen. Aristotle and Sartre are making a similar same point: the true mountaineer has made a sustained commitment to the project of mountaineering. He has practised and become used to the physicality of the pursuit, such that he no longer finds it disturbing or unpleasant. Moreover, the mountaineer does not experience his actions as forced, but as flowing naturally. The remaining issue is whether character is a causal force. Aristotle believes that past actions build up and form one's character. Just as the mountaineer becomes a mountaineer through climbing, and the builder becomes a builder by building, a brave person becomes brave by repeatedly performing brave acts.29 Once a character trait is built up, it is difficult to get rid of. 'The person who

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is unjust or intemperate was originally free not to acquire this character, so that he has it willingly, though once he has acquired this character, he is no longer free not to have it.'30 We are responsible for our characters because we have chosen the actions which, over time, cemented our characters. '[E]ach type of activity produces the corresponding sort of person.'31 Despite these claims, Aristotle is not, I contend, committed to the view that character causes action. Acts that spring from character are voluntary; otherwise it would absurd to praise such acts as virtuous. Praise implies the action could have been omitted.32 However, character strongly conditions one's action, making it likely that one will repeat past behaviours and unlikely that one will break out of these patterns. Hence character is a disposition, A disposition is not a cause. A window may be disposed to break if a stone is thrown through it, but the stone (not the window's disposition) is the cause of the window's breaking. Similarly, a person may be disposed to acting bravely, but the cause of his brave action, even on Aristotle's view, is choice. The significant difference between Sartre and Aristotle is whether past actions build up and dispose one to current actions. Sartre would deny Aristotle's claim that our dispositions are only initially voluntary, and subsequently involuntary. The dispute comes down to whether and how much habit, practice and past actions condition an agent's current actions. Sartre's notion of a project implies continuity between past and present acts but Sartre (in BN, at least) refuses to conclude that continuity amounts to conditioning. Just as the mountaineer may give up mountaineering, the man who has acted bravely in the past may abandon the project of bravery. '[T]he project in order to be must be constantly renewed. I choose myself perpetually and can never be merely by virtue of having-been-chosen.'3 Sartre overstates his position and misestimates the power of habits and routine action. Consider once again power of habit, especially bad habits. Habituated bad actions come naturally and must be resisted. Sartre's view does not account for such resistance. For example, if I wish to correct my bad habit of interrupting other speakers, I will have to stop myself from my first instincts. If I am inattentive, I will forgetfully lapse into interrupting others. If over the course of time I manage to cultivate a new habit of allowing others to speak without interruption, I will no longer need to restrain myself from interrupting. Sartre must revise the notion of a project along the lines I have suggested in order to account for the

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difference between actions that flow from habit and those that contravene habit. Projects are not 'perpetually renewed' in the literal sense implied by Sartre's passage above. Projects are not abandoned every instant and then renewed in the next instant. For example, a person may have the project of being a mountaineer even if he fails to enjoy his last few climbs, or if he forgoes a few climbing opportunities. Likewise, the brave person may have an off day and still be properly described as brave. A genuine project cannot be gained or lost in an instant, or even in a short period. A project implies commitment over time. Thus despite Sartre's own analysis, there is inertia implied by the existential notion of a project. Let me now take stock by asking what have we learned about the possibility of reconciling the existential conception of the self with virtue ethics. First, the existential notion of a project does not reduce to a series of discrete, disconnected actions. Thus an existentialist is not forced into a narrow consequentialist view according to which ethical judgements could only be made about actions, not persons. People's actions reflect and express their projects, and we can judge their projects. For example, the claim that a person is in bad faith is a judgement about his basic project, not about discrete actions. Second, the ancients were concerned with whether virtue could be taught and cultivated. If virtues are character traits they can be cultivated. What if a virtue is a project? Strictly speaking, Sartre's position in BN implies that projects cannot be cultivated in the classical sense. 'Perpetual renewal' is inconsistent with habit. While habits need to be maintained, their semi-self-sustaining nature is what makes them habits. Minus the revisions I advocate, Sartrean existentialism is unlikely to provide a viable theory of ethical improvement, moral education or self-perfection. Third, the ancients saw a strong connection between the individual who was virtuous and the social institutions that supported his virtue. One's character is formed and sustained through socialization, that is, through collective habit or custom. In BN Sartre rejects the claim that projects are formed and sustained through socialization. An individual's project is informed by custom only in the sense that custom presents a 'co-efficient of adversity', or a feature of the situation that I may choose as a limit or a liberating pathway. Sartre cannot accept custom because he denies the power of habit. Once we allow for an existential notion of habit, then custom is a welcome cousin. Custom need not be alienating. Custom,

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just as the look, can be uplifting and freedom enhancing. In fact, custom is a sustaining force for habit. If existential virtues, like their classical forerunners, are good habits, then the existentialists need good customs just as much as the ancients needed them.

NOTES 1 For a comprehensive treatment of the concept of the self see C. Taylor's Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 2 See Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge: Hackett, 1999), Book I, esp. Chapter 7. Hereafter Nic. Ethics. 3 See Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Hereafter PS. 4 I use 'nature' only loosely, and not in the sense of human nature, for reasons specified above. 5 See Part Two of BN, 'Being-for-Itself. 6 BN 24-33. 7 BN 49-56. 8 BN 340-401. 9 BN302. 10 BN 301. 11 BN 302. 12 BN 327-9. 13 See 'Section B. Self-Consciousness' in PS. 14 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 15 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 16 Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York: George Braziller, 1963), at 553. 17 Saint Genet 590. 18 See Book IV of the Republic (Cambridge: Hackett, 1992). 19 See The Emotions: Outlines of a Theory (New York: Citadel, 1948). 20 See BN 211-38. 21 BN227. 22 BN227. 23 BN227. 24 New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. 25 BN 613. 26 Nic. Ethics Book II, Chapter 4. 27 BN 108.1 have altered the Barnes translation by replacing 'paederast' with 'homosexual'. 28 BN 584. 29 '[W]e become builders, for instance, by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. Similarly we become just by doing just actions.' Nic. Ethics Book II, Chapter 1, 18. 30 Nic. Ethics Book III, Chapter 5, 38. 31 Nic. Ethics Book III, Chapter 5, 38. 32 See Nic. Ethics Book III. 33 BN 617.

4

Recognition My claim that existentialism is a deeply social philosophy is rooted largely in Sartre's view of mutual recognition.1 For too long, Sartre's only contribution to mutual recognition has been taken to be his claim in BN that recognition is impossible. But the post-war works reveal a dramatic reversal of Sartre's initial pessimism. Not only is mutual recognition possible, mutual recognition is the single most important mechanism for promoting human freedom. Freedom is not best achieved alone, in isolation, through radical self-assertion and honesty. Being free requires that other humans recognize me as free. Existential ethics is best understood, I claim, as an ethics of mutual recognition. Most readers are familiar with Sartre's poetic claim that 'hell is other people'. No Exit is the literary depiction of Sartre's argument in BN that mutual recognition is impossible.2 Hegel was wrong, Sartre tells us. There can be no reconciliation between the self and the other, and no reconciliation between the self as agent and the self as object. Therefore, mutual recognition is an unachievable ideal. Conflict is the inescapable maxim of all of human relationships. Most readers are somewhat less familiar with the post-war writings where Sartre rethinks recognition. Using the relationship between readers and writers of literature as his first model, Sartre argues that mutual recognition is both possible and valuable. Since mutual recognition flourishes in the reader-writer relationship, it is only a short step to other social relationships where solidarity, not conflict, can be fostered. The post-war works also reveal a second, striking move towards the Hegelian account of recognition. Sartre begins to employ the concept of non-mutual recognition as a way of explaining the phenomenon of oppression. Oppression is the denial of recognition to certain classes of human beings. Sartre's full view of mutual recognition does not blossom until the late 1950s when he composes the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1 (hereafter CDR). In that work, Sartre has made the full Hegelian turn. He argues that group life is the best expression of

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human freedom. Mutual recognition is the central concept through which Sartre analyses human community. Sartre's revised view of mutual recognition holds tremendous potential for developing a cogent existential ethics. My hypothesis is that just as recognition is a cornerstone of Hegelian ethics, recognition ought to be a cornerstone for Sartrean ethics. Recognition serves two purposes. First, recognition provides an explanation of why we should respect others' freedom, and not simply our own freedom. In other words, recognition rescues Sartrean ethics from subjectivism. (I will argue in a subsequent chapter that existential authenticity requires recognizing the freedom of others.) Second, recognition provides a mechanism for introducing substantive ethical content into Sartre's formal ethics. The distinction between mutual and non-mutual recognition is a benchmark for ethical relations. Relations and institutions that embody mutual recognition are preferable to relations and institutions that fail to embody mutual recognition. One of my goals in this work as a whole is to inspire a new appreciation of Sartre's view of mutual recognition. I am especially concerned with the ethical implications of recognition. While I believe that Sartre advances the concept of recognition beyond its original form in Hegel's work, the lion's share of my analysis draws Sartre closer to Hegel. My intention is to overturn the prevailing view that Sartre is an individualist who, even if he wanted to, could not consistently embrace human community and solidarity. Let me now turn to Sartre's view of recognition in relation to Hegel's view. Hegel's view of recognition was surveyed in the previous chapter. Hegel claims that human agents only become fully self-conscious through the recognition of other agents. Recognition, we saw, comes in two forms: mutual and non-mutual. The master/slave relation exemplifies non-mutual recognition. Non-mutual recognition is still recognition because each party sees the other party as like itself in some way, as exhibiting some form of agency. Thus I might recognize that another person is a human, is a worker, or is an American like me. Yet there is an imbalance between the two parties: I do not wholly see myself in the other; the other does not wholly see herself in me. According to Hegel, the dynamic of mutual recognition has several ethical implications.3 First, mutual recognition is important for the development of full self-consciousness (that is, a fully stable and explicit self). Hegel offers a teleological theory according to which full selfhood is preferable to incomplete selfhood. By analogy,

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think of a person reaching adulthood and looking fondly back at his childhood. Once one has developed, one cannot but see earlier stages as forms of immaturity. A socially recognized self is preferable because it is more mature - that is, more stable and objective because solidified through the judgements and reactions of others. The value of complete selfhood is illustrated best by the selfdefeating nature of the un-developed self. A person who claims that his self-identity is stable and explicit, but who remains in the standpoint of what Hegel calls 'desire' sets himself up for failure. Desire, recall, is the attempt to establish one's self through annihilating, dominating and consuming everything in one's path, including other people. Desire is domination. Why is desire self-contradictory? Most basically, the less one gives, the less one receives. I may dominate an inert object, proving my superiority. Say I cut down a thousand trees. To whom am I proving my superiority? The trees do not confer on me the recognition of superiority I seek. If I (metaphorically) cut down people (treating them as objects, unworthy of respect), then they too will fail to confer on me the status I am trying to achieve. Thus, the ethical value of a complete self in Hegel's sense arises at least in part due to the self-defeating nature of desire. The person who tries to avoid recognition has at best an internal and therefore a weak sense of self. Strong selfhood must be explicit and socially verified. For my purposes, the most fundamental ethical implication is that recognition explains why I ought to value and respect other human agents. I ought to respect them because my selfhood depends on their recognition. If I did not receive the recognition of others, then I could not achieve a stable, socially verified sense of self. I take it to be obvious that a rational person values her own selfhood. If she did not, this would make action absurd, gratuitous or perhaps pointless. Only in a pathological state would this happen. So if the self is internally tied to the other, then in valuing the self I must also value the other. This internal connection between self and the other is not merely a prudential expectation that if I help others, others will help me. The Hegelian view makes an ontological claim about the nature of selfhood. I could not achieve my status as an acting agent unless I encountered other acting agents in relations of recognition. The more mutual these relations of recognition, the more stable and explicit my selfhood. Thus, I should value other people because who I am is determined by how they see me and react to me. If I could ignore them without any loss of selfhood, then I would not need to value them. And I may, in fact, choose to value them less than I should.

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The notion of having an 'acting self may sound overly philosophical and thus disconnected from everyday experience. Instead I will often use the concept of one's 'self identity'. The Hegelian point is that identities are necessarily social. Identity is negotiated interpersonally. Consider how the Hegelian account fits with common notions of religious identity. I could not meaningfully declare by fiat that I am a Catholic, Jew or Muslim. I am a Catholic/Jew/ Muslim only if I am seen by and accepted by others as such. But as Sartre points out, there may be a gap between how I think of myself and how others see me. I may have a social identity from which I am utterly alienated. Such an identity is 'unstable' in Hegel's sense. If others see me as a Muslim (because of my last name, my physical appearance and my background), but if I myself do not identify as Muslim, then I am alienated from my social identity and there is an unsteadiness I experience every time my identity clashes with others' expectations. As illustrated in the previous chapter, the major point of contention between Sartre (in BN) and Hegel is precisely this issue of whether we can close the gap between how others see me and how I identify. The importance of this issue lies in the fact that mutual recognition is possible only if this gap can be closed. I contend that Sartre's arguments against the possibility of mutual recognition are poor. Subsequent to BN Sartre abandons his arguments and accepts the possibility of mutual recognition. Accepting the possibility of mutual recognition is essential, I will argue, for a viable existential ethics. Let me now carefully discuss Sartre's criticisms of mutual recognition in BN. Sartre claims that Hegel's master/slave thesis of the self contains a fundamental truth.4 The self is, in fact, ontologically dependent upon other selves.5 Famously, Sartre claims that Hegel was 'optimistic' in two ways. First, Hegel was epistemologically optimistic. Hegel claims that recognition can be simultaneous and reciprocal. However, simultaneous, reciprocal recognition would require a common measure between what I am for 'him, what he is for me, what I am for myself, what he is for himself'.6 This common measure is impossible. Sartre's rationale is the mutual exclusivity of 'the look'. I cannot both look and be looked at. I cannot both be subject and object. If I look at the other person, then I turn the other into an object. The same is true if the other looks at me - I become an object. Between two people all relations are forms of the looking/looked at dynamic. Mutual recognition would require both parties to look at each other simultaneously and reciprocally.7

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For mutual recognition the following must occur. I must look at the other and the other must look at me. But this is insufficient. Compare a situation in which I have friendly feelings for another person, and the other person has friendly feelings for me. If I am unaware that the other has such feelings, and if the other is unaware that I have such feelings, there is no friendship. The friendly feelings are not genuinely reciprocal. Both parties must openly acknowledge the feelings. So for mutual recognition we must add that I see the other looking at me, and the other sees me looking at him. Now Sartre's objection is clearer. If I cannot both look and be looked at, then I cannot see the other looking at me. By 'seeing the other looking at me' Sartre must mean something different from becoming aware of another person's feelings for me (as in the case above). Otherwise mutual recognition would have the following, rather easily satisfied dynamic. Moment one: I see you as a friend and you see me as a friend. Moment two: I see you seeing me as a friend, and you see me seeing you as a friend. Presumably this last moment is easily accomplished when the two parties break down and talk to one another about their feelings. But if 'I am incapable of apprehending for myself the self which I am for the Other' then I can never know precisely how the other person thinks of me, or what he means when he declares that I am his friend.8 Surely this is a poor objection. True, many interpersonal conflicts involve discrepancies over how the other sees me and how I believe the other sees me. However, such discrepancies can be settled through conversation, negotiation and action. This is why we say friendship requires constant maintenance. Sartre's object resembles the worry that we could never know if we mean the same thing as another person when we use the same words. But it would become clear over time and through the course of ongoing activities whether we genuinely share an understanding or not. Sartre could reply that I have misunderstood the ontological nature of his objection. He is making a claim about the deep structure of consciousness, not about ordinary social relations. This reply is not satisfying since Sartre tests his own theory through ordinary social relations. Genuine friendships require us to do what Sartre says we cannot: openly and simultaneously acknowledge the way we see each other, namely, as friends. If this open acknowledgement is possible in friendship, then there is strong evidence that, at least in some interpersonal relationships, mutual recognition is possible. Sartre's second criticism accuses Hegel of 'ontological optimism'.9 Mutual recognition requires an identification of self and other.

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Taken literally, mutual recognition would require the self and other to become the same being. Sartre denies the ontological identification of consciousness, first, because he claims to have proven the individuality of consciousness. Secondly he accuses Hegel of assuming the unity of consciousnesses rather than proving it. Hegel has unfairly adopted a God-like standpoint external to individual consciousness. Let us recall what Sartre is willing to grant to Hegel. The self is internally related to the other. But only one dimension of the self is internally related to others, namely being-for-others. There is an ontological gulf between being-for-self (my subjectivity) and beingfor-others (my objectivity). Assume that Sartre is correct that I cannot literally become another person, thus I cannot be ontologically one in number with another. The more important claim, it seems, is how there can be a dimension of being which is both mine, but from which I may remain permanently alienated. Hegel claims that in mutual recognition we become identical with (what Sartre calls) our being-for-others. Sartre claims that we can never be identical with our being-for-others. Who is correct? I believe Hegel is correct. Neither Sartre nor Hegel mean by ontological identity a literal physical fusing of one object into another (as in, for example, the combination of helium and oxygen gas).10 Identity in this context means fundamental sameness. The question is whether my social self can be fundamentally the same as my self as agent. Sartre denies the possibility of sameness. However, Sartre's reason for denying sameness reveals a mistake. He claims that merely because the social self is objectified, it cannot exhibit sameness. Sartre conflates alienation with objectivity. But alienation is more properly understood as objedification plus otherness. We must grant that being-for-others implies obj edification; the very concept of the social self refers to the way I am seen by (objectified by) others. The crucial point that Sartre misses is that I can see my subjectivity expressed in the image that others reflect back to me.11 If I see my subjectivity expressed in my being-for-others, then I am not alienated from this aspect of myself. True, I do not directly control how others see me, and I am objectified under their gaze. But in BN Sartre fails to see the positive possibilities of the objectifying gaze. Far from being always negative, becoming an object for others can reinforce and support my projects. Let us look more carefully at Sartre's claim that the social self is necessarily alienated. The social self is created by the objectifying look of others, for example when others see me as filling a particular

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role or as exhibiting a particular character trait. When I am objectified by another person 'I do not "recognize" myself and yet I know that "it is me". I accept the responsibility for this stranger who is presented to me, but he does not cease to be a stranger ... This Me, which is not to be compared to the Me which I have to be, is still Me but metamorphosed.'12 I am alienated from my social self, first, because I cannot control the way others see me. Second, the other's look reduces me to a fixed, static being. (In Sartre's vocabulary, the other reduces my transcendence to facticity.) The other's image of me pigeonholes me into a particular role or character type. If the other sees me as a 'civil servant' or as 'evil', he sees me as wholly, inescapably and merely a civil servant or an evil person.13 Finally, the social self is produced from a perspective that is outside of my own perspective. I can only approximate, but never adopt this perspective.14 Sartre is mistaken to claim that these conditions make it impossible for me to be reconciled with my social self. We can grant to Sartre that we never have direct control over the other's gaze.15 Being objectified implies a loss of direct control over how one is seen by others. But why assume that a loss of control is debilitating, freedom limiting and degrading? Objectification can be uplifting and freedom enhancing. For example, the other sees me as a friend and treats me accordingly. Or the other sees me as a fellow academic and engages me with philosophical conversation. Or perhaps the other sees me as a fellow rock climber and we make plans for the Eiger. In each case, the other's gaze furthers my project and hence enhances my concrete freedom. Moreover, if we were always equally alienated from our social selves, there could be no distinction between oppressive and nonoppressive social selves. For example a common racial stereotype in the USA is that young black males are violent and uneducated. Such stereotypes clearly degrade and limit the freedom of most young black males who, because of the stereotype, face discriminatory treatment. Negative stereotypes do not limit the freedom of their victims simply because of the victim's lack of control over the stereotype. The image is degrading because it is over-generalized and causes unfair treatment. The stereotype that young white males are trustworthy and non-violent is an over-generalization, but it has positive benefits for most young white males. So being objectified is not the distinguishing factor of negative and positive stereotypes. Objectification, which implies a loss of control, can be either negative or positive.

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Sartre's claim that I am never simply my role, nor simply my character is important, but this claim does not suggest that the objectified self is necessarily alien. We can grant to Sartre that if others refused to recognize me outside of particular social roles then I may well be alienated from my social self. I am more that just a waiter or a civil servant or a bad tennis player. If others lock me into these identities, no matter what the social context, then I would find their judgements alienating. The reason I need to be seen (objectified) differently in different contexts is because I fulfil many different social roles. Humans have complex, not simple, identities. To recognize me along one dimension of my social self (as waiter, as teacher, as citizen) does not preclude my being recognized differently in different social contexts.16 Sartre's mistake is to assume that one dimension of my identity must be alienating, since that dimension is necessarily incomplete. But I am not alienated from my social self unless I am (for some reason) precluded from enjoying a multidimensional social self, where I am recognized across many social axes. With respect to character judgements, the same considerations apply. We ought to be sceptical of global judgements such as 'James is brave', because these judgements suggest a once-andfor-always assessment. Further, such judgements may not be context sensitive. Perhaps James is brave in some contexts (such as war and sports), but cowardly in others (such as interpersonal relationships). Recognition is a context-bound activity. I recognize another person as such-and-such in such-and-such a context. For example, I recognize the other members of my jazz band as fellow musicians. Or I recognize the students in my class as members of the university community. Seeing the other as musician or student should not imply a once-and-forever character judgement such as once a student, always and only a student. Let me draw to a close my criticisms of Sartre's view of mutual recognition in BN. Sartre's pessimism is unwarranted. Everyday social interactions, such as the experience of a genuine friendship, suggest that mutual recognition is possible. We do in fact intuit other people's image of us, and we are able to negotiate this image through action and dialogue. More importantly, the mere fact that others form images of us and impose these images is not sufficient for alienation. Objectification can be freedom enhancing. Sartre is right to warn that the social self should not turn into a straitjacket for my identity. I have shown that as long as my identity is negotiable intersubjectively, and across many social contexts, then there are

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no structural barriers preventing mutual recognition and dooming me to alienation. Existentialists should not find it distressing that Sartre's arguments against mutual recognition are so poor. His arguments must, I think, be taken seriously. They allow us to more clearly articulate the dynamic of mutual recognition and acknowledge some of its particular pitfalls. As I said earlier, Sartre himself abandons the thesis that recognition is impossible, turning to an analysis of recognition in artistic relations. Sartre does not bother to revisit the claims in BN; he simply changes his tune. One of the values of my commentary, then, is to show which substantive theses Sartre must revise in order to offer a cogent view of recognition. Now I would like to turn to the principal text of the postwar period in which Sartre expresses his new theory of recognition. What is Literature? (hereafter WIL) is one of Sartre's best and most important works, especially with regard to existential ethics. Abandoning his Hegelian pessimism, Sartre eloquently describes an ideal of mutual recognition. Artists and their audiences are far from the ontological conflict characteristic of masters and slaves. Readers and writers are bound together in a 'pact of generosity' of mutual, freedom-enhancing looks. As I will show, the reader/writer dynamic is of broad importance, since it can be used as a template for mutual recognition in a variety of important social relationships. Sartre's main thesis in WIL is that reader and writer recognize one another other by mutually appealing to the freedom of the other.17 Authors write texts for the sake of audiences. But texts are incomplete until they become 'objects' through the look of the other, that is, the reader.18 The objectivity that the other confers on my consciousness (my text) is not alienating; rather, this objectivity is necessary if I am to reach my goal. By its nature, the project of writing requires the objectifying look of others.19 When a reader reads my text he recognizes me as a writer. He 'looks' at me through my text, bringing to life a story or narrative that I intend. Thus, the look of the other and the objectivity it produces do not alienate me from my self, but enhance and complete my project. The reader also appeals to the freedom of the author. The reader assumes that the text she reads has a meaning, and that this meaning was intended by another agent. In reading she anticipates that a plot, story, argument or idea will unfold. The reader assumes that the author has created something for her to reveal. Reading is necessarily active; it is 'directed creation'.20

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Finally, reader and writer are aware of the mutual interdependence of their endeavour. Here is how Sartre summarizes the dynamic: Thus, the author writes in order to address himself to the freedom of readers, and he requires it in order to make his work exist. But he does not stop there; he also requires that they return this confidence which he has given them, that they recognize his creative freedom, and that they in turn solicit it by a symmetrical and inverse appeal. Here there appears the other dialectical paradox of reading; the more we experience our freedom, the more we recognize that of the other; the more he demands of us, the more we demand of him.21 Sartre might have just as easily used the model of conversation to describe mutual recognition. Speaking requires someone to be spoken to, and listening requires listening to someone. The structure of these relationships is based on each person's acceptance that the other person is an acting, intentional subject. Since each person requires the cooperation of the other person to complete his own act, each person has a reason to solicit and care about the other's cooperation.22 The reader/writer relationship is mutual because each party accepts his need for the other and rather than demanding cooperation, he requests it. The act of requesting preserves the other's independence, since a request builds in the possibility of refusal. Let us assume that Sartre has a plausible view of the mutual recognition between readers and writers. If mutual recognition is to serve as the basis for an ethics, then recognition must be possible in a wide variety of social relations. Can the aesthetic model be generalized? I suggest that it can be. The important step is to see the writer as fulfilling a social role. Not only does the writer depend on his audience for making his works genuine objects of art, he also depends on the audience to recognize him as a writer. To be a writer is not simply to write and to think of one's self as a writer; others must also see one as a writer. Which others? Both one's audience and a community of other writers. If mutual recognition is a phenomenon that applies to social roles, not just to writing per se, then mutual recognition of many sorts is possible: recognition of one's social identity as mother, brother or father (family roles); social recognition as a businessperson, philosopher, carpenter or medical doctor (professional and

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economic roles); social recognition as a Jew, atheist or Catholic (religious roles); recognition as an American, Mexican or Canadian (political roles); and so on. A useful way of describing these different spheres of social identities and their accompanying patterns of recognition is to follow Hegel's description of familial, civil-social and state-based roles.23 While each sphere of ethical life has a particular set of norms for recognition, there is a universal pattern: in order to establish one's social identity one must appeal to others whose recognition validates this identity. A comment is in order. For recognition to be mutual I must appeal to others who are my equal. Sartre describes mutual recognition between authors and readers, not among writers. My analysis might suggest that mutual recognition takes place only among members of the same social group (e.g. among writers, among Jews, among philosophers). How then, we might ask, is a relationship between a reader and a writer mutual? The mutuality springs from seeing one another engaged in a joint project. Reader and writer are equal in so far as both need each other for the project at hand, the project of bringing into existence a work of art. As a further example, consider a family. A father and his daughter recognize each other as members of a particular group, for example 'the Buxbaums', although their respective roles within the group are different (one is father, the other daughter). Here the joint project (and the source of mutuality) is 'being a family' although the particular family roles are different.24 In short, the Sartre of WIL presents us with a clear and persuasive portrait of mutual recognition. Sartre now agrees with my major criticism of BN. Objectification is not the same as alienation. The look can be uplifting. We can compare our self-image and the social self. And most importantly, the social self and the acting self can be reconciled. Because I have set up Sartre's new position by way of a thorough analysis of BN, there appears to be nothing new or shocking in WIL. But the departure from the view of just a few years earlier is impressive. The second work of the post-war period that is of utmost importance for existential ethics is Anti-Semite and Jew (ASJ). WIL and ASJ fit together as two pieces of a larger puzzle. WIL is Sartre's exploration of mutual recognition and ASJ is Sartre's exploration of non-mutual recognition. Sartre's turn to Hegel, then, is marked not only by the fact that solidarity is within reach of the existentialist's grasp. Hegelian recognition also provides the existentialist with an

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explanation of concrete political forms of domination such as antiSemitism, racism and colonialism. If existential ethics is to employ mutual recognition as an ethical benchmark - as I claim it should - then the existentialist must be able to mark the difference between mutual and non-mutual recognition. We must depart from Sartre's view (in BN) that nonmutual recognition is an ontological and therefore inevitable condition. Non-mutual recognition must be seen as a political condition. ASJ says just this. The master/slave dynamic is avoidable because it exists in real, historical situations. Oppression is a concrete manifestation of master/slave relations. In a work written a few years after ASJ, Saint Genet, Sartre is even more explicit about the difference between the 'reciprocal recognition' that takes places between reader and writer and the nonreciprocal recognition that characterizes alienated social relations.25 Some 'looks' are necessarily one-sided, non-reciprocal and therefore alienating. When Jean Genet is branded as a 'thief, for example, he is stamped, labelled and 'named'.26 Others have passed a sentence in the form of a negative, once-for-always judgement. Such a judgement, because it is one-sided, cannot be a basis of reciprocal recognition. But, Sartre says, it is possible that 'If I am named, I name in turn. Thus naming and named, I live in a state of reciprocity.'27 For example, if rather than branding Genet a dirty 'thief, '... I say that Genet is blond or short or French, this re-establishes reciprocity, for, after all, he can say about me what I say about him'.28 The role of French citizen makes Sartre's point well: mutuality is obtained when two parties establish an equality of position, when their exchanged 'looks' are with respect to the same role, position or term. Finally, in Saint Genet Sartre sees recognition as a social, rather than an ontological condition. Regarding the alienation experienced in non-mutual recognition, Sartre says 'This type of alienation is widespread. Most of the time, however, it is a matter of partial or temporary alienation.'29 In contrast to BN, where non-mutual, alienating social relations seemed to exhaust relations to others, in the post-war works, Sartre historicizes the dynamic of recognition, and describes patterns of both mutual and nonmutual recognition. In ASJ Sartre also moves beyond the value-neutrality of BN. His phenomenological description yields to normative analysis. Sartre commits himself to the desirability and ethical value of the social relationships he describes. The master/slave dynamic is not just a tool for descriptive analysis, but also a prescriptive benchmark.

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Master/slave relations, specifically oppressive relations, are ethically undesirable because they are self-refuting and freedom demoting. If Sartre did not intend to use recognition as an ethical and political notion, there would be no sense in describing oppression as a type of master/slave relation, that is, a form of non-mutual recognition.30 Master/slave relations explain the oppressiveness of oppression. Let me turn then to Sartre's view of non-mutual recognition in ASJ. The anti-Semite, Sartre tells us, occupies the position of the master; he chooses dominance as an attempt to validate his selfidentity. Paradoxically, the oppressor depends upon the other whom he hates. The anti-Semite 'finds the existence of the Jew absolutely necessary. Otherwise to whom would he be superior?'31 The Jew, then, is in the position of the slave: dominated politically, but with a subversive power over his dominator.32 But we must recall that non-mutual recognition is still a form of recognition. Oppression is the absence of mutual recognition. The master, Hegel claims, chooses to dominate another person rather than inert nature because dominating inert matter is self-defeating, while dominating other people is marginally more satisfying. Sartre concurs, claiming that the oppressor has a paradoxical attitude - he dehumanizes his victim, but one can only dehumanize a human. Thus oppression implies a limited recognition of the humanity of the oppressed.33 The distinction between mutual and non-mutual recognition is of utmost importance. An example of what can go awry if this distinction is missed or underemphasized can be found in the work of Sartre scholar Thomas Anderson. To his credit, Anderson attends to Sartre's (and Beauvoir's) use of recognition in the post-war works.34 In fact, Anderson finds the recognition argument for obligations to others 'very strong' and 'far more satisfactory' than alternatives.35 Yet Anderson believes that the appeal to recognition cannot condemn domination. '[E]ven a man that I enslave can freely choose to give meaning to my existence, and it is not impossible for it to be a meaning involving respect and admiration.' 'The master could truly value the slave's ability to create value .. .'36 Anderson, it seems, misstates the basic premise of the Sartrean-Hegelian view of recognition, which is that master/slavery, indeed a form of recognition, is a partial, incomplete, mutually unsatisfactory form of recognition. To his credit, Anderson reaches a conclusion similar to that of Hegel and Sartre: '... I especially desire recognition value from those who offer it freely and not because of dire need or

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extreme dependency .. .'37 The crucial point for both Sartre and Hegel is that domination distorts the process of self-validation through the look of others. The master does not receive an explicit, stable or coherent sense of self from the look of the slave, precisely because the slave's look has been rendered nugatory in advance. Recognition does, then, give us strong reasons to prefer relations of reciprocity and equality over relations of domination. Relations of domination are mutually frustrating; neither party receives the validation they seek. The difference between mutual (equal) and nonmutual (non-equal) recognition must be marked, for this difference forms the core of the normative theory of interpersonal and institutional relations for the existentialist. So, Sartre uses the master/slave metaphor to describe the oppressive relationship between anti-Semites and Jews. I have made the additional claim that the master/slave metaphor helps explain the oppressiveness of oppression, in particular the reasons that oppression is an ethical harm. To defend my claim I must depart from the letter of Sartre's view, for Sartre offers little explicit help in this area. I begin with an uncontroversial fact: Sartre holds that oppression is an evil that degrades human freedom. None of Sartre's post-war political engagements make sense unless we grant this fact. Sartre's lifelong obsession with combating oppression even led his political mentor Merleau-Ponty to remark that Sartre was not a true Marxist because in his works 'the idea of oppression always dominates that of exploitation'.38 The mere fact that Sartre opposes oppression and contrasts oppression with freedom is not difficult to accept. The difficulty lies in explaining how this normative disposition fits with Sartre's scepticism of traditional moral categories, his subjectivist theory of value in BN and his claim that freedom has no limits. As I have already said, in BN Sartre does not see the master/slave relation as a type of oppression. The domination of the 'look' is purely ontological. In trying to defend a cogent existential ethics, I am in the following position. I assume it is a fixed point of moral theorizing that oppression is a grave, freedomdemoting harm. I assume that existential ethics must reconcile itself with this fixed point. Now I must provide what Sartre did not provide, namely an existential justification for the claim that oppression is an ethical harm. First, existentialists can appeal to what I earlier called full selfhood. Master/slave relations preclude the emergence of stable, explicit selves who ratify their sense of self through others. Both parties in master/slave relations are alien to themselves - there is a

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gap between their inner sense of self and the judgements others make of them. Master/slavery is a recipe for permanent self-alienation. Consider how self-identities are formed in oppressive situations, according to the master/slave hypothesis. Neither oppressor nor victim establishes a stable sense of selfhood. The oppressor attempts to confirm his self-identity by forcing the victim to recognize him as master. But the more the oppressor dominates, the less confirmation of his selfhood he receives from the victim. Mastery is self-defeating. Even if the victim receives a more stable sense of self-identity than the oppressor, as Hegel claimed, this sense of self is highly impoverished. The victim has little ability to engage in the full range of social contexts and social relations that allow for a normal, healthy and stable sense of self. Let me emphasize that 'selfhood' - which on the current hypothesis is validated only through recognition - includes the category that in BN Sartre called being-for-others (the social self). Recall Sartre's heavy insistence that the social self is an ontological reality, not just an epistemological phenomenon. If recognition were interpreted only or primarily as an exchange of knowledge, then the real weight and normative importance of recognition would be lost.39 Assume mutual recognition confers only an awareness of selfhood, rather than creating a real dimension of the self. On such a view, selfhood would be a 'given', established independently of the look of others. Such a position would retreat not only from Sartre's insights of the post-war period, but the insights of BN as well. Existentialists have never held that the social self is a mere epistemological projection. In BN Sartre granted half of Hegel's master-slave thesis: the other does radically change my being and introduce a dimension of the self that is impossible alone. In the post-war works, Sartre comes to agree with the other half of Hegel's thesis: the dimension of the self that is created by others can and should be reconciled with the subjective, largely other-independent dimension of the self. A further explanation of Sartre's use of the master/slave concept to explain oppression appeals not to the constitution of the self, but to liberty as ordinarily understood. The straightforward political explanation of the ethical harm of master/slave relations is this: domination diminishes the liberty of the victim. The master is a dominator who limits the freedom of the other in order to accomplish his own goals. In literal cases of slavery such as US slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the master promoted his own economic goals by forcing his slaves to work. The slave is un-free in precisely the sense elucidated in

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Chapter 1 - the slave is coerced. The slave is forced by another person into a situation where none of his options are humane. The revised existential notion of freedom as non-coercion fits well with the analysis in ASJ. A critic may charge that I have distorted Sartre's thesis in ASJ that oppression is a form of bad-faith. 40 But it would be a drastic mistake for an existentialist to reduce an analysis of oppression to a psychological study of the mindset of oppressors. The primary ethical harm of oppression is not that the oppressor makes a psychological error about his own freedom. The primary ethical harm of oppression is the victim's loss of freedom, dignity and selfhood. Even if Sartre understates this obvious point, subsequent existentialists must not follow his tracks. We must refocus attention on the fact that the harm of oppression lies in the harm done to the victim.41 I am proposing that the distinction between mutual and non-mutual recognition provides precisely the tools needed to diagnose this harm. Oppression is a denial of mutual recognition. The victim ought to be, but is not, recognized as a person. Lest I be accused of inventing a Sartre that more plausibly answers to common objections than the real Sartre himself, I would like to turn to the third of Sartre's immediate post-war works, namely his posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics (hereafter NE). NE provides overwhelming evidence in favour of Sartre's status as a deeply intersubjective thinker. Sartre composed NE as a preliminary sketch of the systematic work on ethics he never provided. Late in life Sartre remarked, 'Published after my death these texts will remain unfinished and obscure. It will be up to my reader to decide where they might have led me.'42 As should be obvious at this point, I have fully embraced the spirit of this quotation and attempted to develop an existential ethics, even if doing so requires me to reject some of Sartre's published claims. NE represents a speculative, experimental approach to ethics. If Sartre were to have published a systematic ethics, I have no doubt that he would have integrated the major theses of NE. This is no surprise since NE draws on and deepens the themes of the published works. There is a strong continuity between all the major post-war works on ethics, especially ASJ, WIL and NE. Most pertinently, NE provides a fuller picture of recognition, oppression, value and authenticity. Sartre's discussion of recognition in NE is illuminating. As in WIL, mutual recognition is modelled on the aesthetic relationship. 'The work of art, for example, demands that its content be recognized

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materially by the freedom of a concrete public. It is a gift and demand at the same time, and only makes demands insofar as it gives something ... Relations among men must be based upon this model if men want to exist as freedom for one another.'43 Sartre does not abandon the idea of aesthetics as central to understanding mutual recognition, but he no longer limits mutual recognition to aesthetics. He uses the aesthetic metaphor to remind us that recognition must be concrete. There must be a medium through which recognition takes place.44 Some form of mediation or 'work' is essential if recognition is to be concrete rather than abstract.45 But Sartre's most important contribution to the topic of recognition is his claim that an 'appeal' is a freedom-preserving relation to others. The notion of the appeal is likely the most promising ethical concept in Sartre's NE. An appeal is a general comportment to another person's freedom that simultaneously 'looks' at that freedom and yet does not alienate it. As the name implies, an appeal is a way of soliciting another person's cooperation. An appeal is something that is given to another, but with the implicit understanding that she may refuse. 'In every appeal there is a gift.'46 Aesthetic creation is an appeal because writers offer texts to their readers hoping they will be read. Reading is a completion of the act of the writer. The reader objectifies the writer's actions, but at the request of the writer. Such objectification is freedom promoting, not alienating. By drawing out further features of the aesthetic relationship, Sartre generalizes the notion of an appeal. The appeal is fundamental to ethical relations because it is a way of looking at others without alienating them. That is, the appeal recognizes the freedom of the other. 'The appeal is the recognition of a personal freedom in a situation by a personal freedom in a situation.'47 Let us understand how the appeal differs from the 'look' as described in BN. Recall that mutual recognition requires not just seeing the other and being seen by the other, but also seeing the other see me. Sartre considered this impossible in BN, since to grasp another person's end would be to turn her into an object. If the other is an object, then she loses her subjectivity, and hence her ability to look back at me. If the other asserts her subjectivity and looks at me, then I am turned into an object and lose my ability to see her. So, seeing the other see me is impossible. But the appeal breaks this looking/looked at dynamic. To appeal is to look at the other differently. The appeal allows the other to assert her own subjectivity, and in three ways. First, I acknowledge the other may refuse my appeal.48 Second, 'I recognize his ends as well founded'. 49 Last, the appeal is flexible and

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contextual. The result is that 'I am put in such a position that I recognize the other's freedom without being pierced [by] a look' and without piercing the other with my look.50 The key to the appeal is cooperative action. As mentioned, reader and writer engage in a concrete, mediated group project: the creation of a literary text. Similarly, every appeal is based on cooperative action. 'It is an appeal for a common operation, it is not based on a given solidarity but a solidarity to be built through the operation in common.'51 The concept of group action marks an important shift in Sartre's view of recognition. Instead of the notion of looking at the other, Sartre speaks of recognition as the act of properly willing, positing and grasping the other's ends. Looking at the other gives way to acting on the other. The question Sartre now asks is how I can act to embrace rather than deny the ends of the other, where the other's ends refer to her desires, purposes, goals or projects. Since 'freedom exists only in pursuing an end', affirming the other's project is tantamount to embracing the freedom of the other.52 I can act on the other and not negate her subjectivity if I appeal to the other to join me in action. By requesting rather than demanding her cooperation, I respect her as a subject. 'The only authentic form of willing [the other's end] consists in wanting the end to be realized by the other. And wanting here consists in engaging in the operation.'53 Cooperative action is the basis of Sartre's understanding of mutual recognition in NE. Joint action explains how two people can simultaneously and reciprocally look at one another. Because they have the same goal, they further, that is recognize, their own goal by furthering the goal of the other. Each agent can identify as the same with respect to the common endeavour. Thus each agent can see himself in the other. '[T]he appeal, in effect, is a promise of reciprocity. It is understood that the person I appeal to may appeal to me in return.'54 Sartre's major objection to recognition in BN is that I am always alienated from my social self. Thus, accepting another person's help turns me into an object for the other, and I cannot recuperate my objectified self. I showed above that it is a mistake to identify objectification with alienation. In NE Sartre acknowledges that cooperation requires objectification, but he no longer sees objedification as synonymous with alienation. 'In a word, I am both outside and inside this end. The other's freedom is both the prolonging of my freedom in the dimension of otherness - since it pursues the end that I pursue - and what separates this end from me, takes it up, and maintains it.'55 If the other shares my project, then his turning me

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into an object is freedom enhancing, not alienating. (For example, if I cannot finish a chapter on time, then my co-author takes over.) Appealing to others is accepting the fact of being objectified, but seeing objedification as potentially liberating. '[T]he appeal is a recognition that the project has an outside, that is, that it exists for others.'56 The arguments of NE deepen Sartre's published comments on recognition in two further ways. First, Sartre buttresses his thesis that oppression is a master/slave relation. Second, as I will show below, Sartre makes a far-reaching claim about master/slave relations and ethics generally. In NE Sartre devotes considerable space to an explanation of his Hegelian diagnosis of oppression. In a lengthy section, Sartre describes five 'existential' conditions of oppression. 1st, oppression comes from freedom. The oppressor and the oppressed must be free ... [2nd] The fact of oppression is grounded on the ontological relation of freedoms to one another. 3rd, oppression can come to one freedom only through another freedom - only one freedom can limit another freedom. 4th, oppression implies that neither the slave nor the tyrant fundamentally recognizes their own freedom. One oppresses only if one oppresses himself. The oppressor is oppressed by the oppressed and by himself. If I fully recognize my freedom, I also recognize that of others. 5th, there is a complicity of the oppressor and the oppressed.57 These five conditions strikingly demonstrate Sartre's use of the master/slave dialectic as the model for oppression. The first two conditions require that we understand oppression as an interpersonal relation, not merely as a relation imbedded in inert matter. Such analysis does not preclude the institutional dimension of oppression, but in the first instance, oppression is an interpersonal relationship.58 Human action stands behind the 'structures' of oppression. We can understand the action of the oppressor as a form of Hegelian domination. The master attempts to secure his own identity by dominating others. Oppression is a project.59 Further, just as in Hegel's original dialectic, the master does not attempt to assert himself over raw nature; the oppressor oppresses other human beings. The irony is that oppression is an objectifying relation to another person. The master turns the slave into a tool, instrument or object. The nature of oppression is, however, that the tool is a human

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tool. The oppressor needs the freedom of the other in order to negate and suppress this freedom. The last three conditions Sartre names are perhaps the most promising from an ethical and political perspective. Since the oppressor needs to dominate a human object (not raw matter), he implicitly recognizes the subjectivity, humanity and freedom of the oppressed. (Recall that Sartre makes exactly this same point in ASJ.) Oppression is not the absence of recognition. Rather, oppression is the absence of genuinely mutual recognition. Let us be careful. Sartre is painfully clear in noting that even in oppressive relations recognition is bi-directional. The oppressor recognizes the oppressed because he needs a human tool to dominate, not inert matter. And the victim, of course, recognizes the subjectivity of the master by carrying out his demands. This bi-directionality is not, however, the same as mutuality, which requires a fundamental sameness (or rough equality) between parties. Sartre is sometimes criticized for the claim that oppression implies the complicity of the victim. However, we now see that he is using the master/slave dialectic to draw this conclusion. The master needs a human tool, a tool that exhibits some degree of subjectivity and freedom. In this weak and unobjectionable sense all oppression implies a degree of complicity.60 Finally, note that Sartre uses the master/slave dialectic to explain the interdependence of the oppressor and the oppressed. Sartre agrees with Hegel that the dialectic is ironic: the master frustrates his own goal of establishing a stable, explicit self-identity. The master fails to see that his selfhood depends on the selfhood of the slave he dominates. The more he dominates, the more he loses. His sense of selfhood is directly proportional to the freedom he grants to the other. Thus the 'oppressor is oppressed' and he must recognize the other's freedom if he is to recognize his own freedom. a In his concrete analysis of oppression Sartre comes to offer his most direct and eloquent affirmation of human interdependence, 'If I fully recognize my freedom I also recognize that of others'.62 The last topic of direct importance for Sartre's ethics of recognition is his discussion of 'demands' as instances of master/ slave relations. We have already seen that Sartre characterizes mutual recognition as a reciprocal appeal between agents. His notion of a demand is a way of further marking the distinction between mutual and non-mutual recognition. Sartre's discussion has tremendous implications for ethics. Most notably, Sartre shows that an entire genre of moral theorizing - namely natural law theory, especially Kantian ethics - is predicated on non-mutual recognition.

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Kantian ethics requires 'perpetual alienation'.63 If Sartre is right, a genuine alternative to an 'ethics of demands' would require integrating relations of mutual recognition into everyday social institutions and rethinking our basic ethical vocabulary. So what precisely are demands and why are they alienating? Demands are the opposite of appeals. Demands fail to recognize the other's freedom.64 Like the look of BN, demands necessarily turn others into static, submissive, wholly objectified beings. If I demand something from another person I treat his projects as 'secondary, vain or troubling for my values'.65 Demands are also inflexible. Think of classical moral commands: 'never X', 'always Y' or 'thou shalt Z'. Finally, a demand does not accept the possible refusal of the other. In short, unlike appeals, demands fail to respect the agency, independence and subjectivity of the other. A demand is a refusal to recognize the other as a free being. Sartre's primary example of a demand is moral duty. Sartre traces moral duty back to the master/slave relationship. Sartre's argument is as follows. To demand that another person follow a duty (ex. 'never lie') is to assume the position of the master in a master/slave relation. 'The demand stems from a master ... He acts on the world through his command by means of interposed persons.'66 Only a master would issue an un-conditional, absolute imperative.67 The Kantian hope to define a duty as an expression of one's own freedom is 'is doomed to fail'.68 This is because duties, unlike other voluntary moral obligations, are said to be 'encountered' in nature not merely 'upheld' through personal projects.69 The morality of duty masks the real truth about moral obligation: '[A]ll obligatory forms originally imply, therefore, a relation of one person to another'.70 The only relation, Sartre contends, that would issue unconditional imperatives is a master/slave relation.71 What I perceive to be a duty is simply an experience of the master's objectifying look. 'The end of an obligation is a real and alien bumper over against which I will have to give way.'72 Acting from duty requires 'perpetual alienation'. Sartre summarizes by saying that 'the ethics of duty is an ethics of slaves'.73 Sartre's analysis of demands is of obvious importance in ethics. First we have learned that existentialism is opposed to an ethics of duty and natural law such as Kantian ethics. Beneath the criticism of Kant, there is a suggestion of a positive conception of moral value and moral obligation. Moral obligations come from human relations.74 Second, there is a form of non-mutual recognition that falls short of the egregious domination of oppression. Making

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demands on others in the name of absolute value, natural law or any other form of fixed authority is an example of failing to recognize the other as free.75 Lastly, if both oppression and certain moral theories are instances of non-mutual recognition, then we have been given a historical, not ontological account of recognition. Recognition is a social, institutional concept, not merely an I-thou dynamic. The post-war works, which culminate in NE, provide the foundation for an existential ethics. We now have a basic distinction between mutual and non-mutual recognition, and we understand that this distinction is of normative importance. We also know that recognition is both historical (not merely ontological) and institutional (not reductively interpersonal). At this point I would like to briefly indicate how Sartre develops his view of recognition in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 (hereafter CDR). Later in this work I return to a fuller discussion of CDR and its implications for existential ethics. For now, I would simply like to point out that there is no radical break in Sartre's view of recognition between the immediate post-war works and CDR, which was written in the late 1950s and published in France in I960.76 Sartre continues to place recognition at the forefront of his philosophical concerns. Recognition is, in fact, the chief concept used to explain both solidarity and conflict. For the moment, I will reduce Sartre's claims about recognition in CDR to three. First, all human relations (including oppression and exploitation) involve recognition. Second, recognition, though an intersubjective relation, requires validation through an external or 'third' perspective. Last, all recognition is concrete, not abstract. We have already witnessed Sartre's claim that oppression is a form of non-mutual recognition. In CDR the claim is taken one step further. 'The mere act of speaking, the simple gesture, and the elementary structure of perception ... imply mutual recognition. And capitalist exploitation and oppression are no counterexample to this.'77 Sartre's point (as we saw above) is that relations between humans differ from relations among matter. The fact that exploitation is de-humanizing must be explained. 'This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man.'78 Oppression consists in non-mutual recognition.79 The master needs to dominate a person (not a thing), and he implicitly recognizes that his victim is a person, but this recognition does not preclude severe violations of freedom. The recognition is non-mutual because it is un-equal: the

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master sees the slave as a subject who must give up his subjectivity; the slave sees the master as pure subjectivity. Sartre's second claim is that recognition implies the existence of a 'third party'.80 Sartre suggests that third-party mediation solves the problem of seeing the other look at me. If two agents 'respect one another, there will always be two of them, each integrating the entire universe'.81 A third party, external to the dyad, allows recognition to become 'visible to itself'.82 The third party allows me to see the other seeing me. Above, I used the common intuition that friendship is a relation of mutual recognition to reject the thesis that I cannot see the other seeing me. I suggested that open discussion, communication and collective action are means of reconciling the social self and the objectified self. In CDR Sartre develops the concept of the third to give a deeper theoretical underpinning to these common intuitions. Sartre's last claim is that all recognition is concrete not abstract. Recognition must take place through an actual social interaction. Sartre rejects idealistic notions of recognition, for example the Kantian notion of respect. Recognition '... cannot be based on a universal abstract bond like Christian "charity"; nor on an a priori willingness to treat the human person, in myself and in the Other, as an absolute'.83 Instead, recognition must take place on the basis of a specific project such as group action. Since these themes are developed at length later, I make only one concluding comment about Sartre's view of recognition in CDR. Recognition is the central concept of CDR. The main difference between the immediate post-war works and CDR is not in the dynamic of recognition or its importance, but merely the unapologetically moral tone of the former works versus the latter. Let me take stock of the chapter as a whole. We now have before us an existential theory of mutual recognition. Sartre, I have shown, abandons his claim (in BN) that mutual recognition is impossible, and for good reason. Objectification is not the same as alienation. Objectification, unlike alienation, can be freedom promoting. The social self can express one's basic projects and one's humanity. The possibility of reconciling the self as agent and self as object makes all the difference for mutual recognition. In affirming my objectified self, I see the other looking at me. Not only in the aesthetic relationship is this possible, but in all forms of genuine community. The importance of mutual recognition for ethics must not be understated. Just as mutual recognition is the centerpiece of Hegel's ethical system, mutual recognition must become the centerpiece of

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an ethics of Sartrean existentialism. Sartre's transitional works are exploratory and therefore fraught with tensions and incomplete ideas. However, out of Sartre's scattered remarks, a plausible, rich view of mutual recognition has been constructed. In this chapter I have laid the groundwork for an existential endorsement of an ethics of recognition d la Hegel. The most important feature of Sartre's ethical Hegelianism is his use of recognition as an evaluative concept. The post-war works all employ mutual recognition as a normative standard. Mutual recognition is synonymous with positive, ethically desirable relations. The postwar works also show Sartre employing the master/slave dynamic (non-mutual recognition) to diagnose ethically undesirable relations including oppression, exploitation and alienation. While more work needs to be done defending the centrality of mutual recognition to ethics, and refining the concept of mutual recognition, the essence of a defensible ethical view is now on the table. Relations of mutual recognition are preferable because they are freedom enhancing and because they lead to stable, explicit, socially validated selves.

NOTES 1 Sartre prefers the term 'reciprocity' rather than 'recognition'. For ease of analysis, I use the term 'recognition' throughout. 2 No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1946). 3 These are spelled out in Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). Hereafter PR. 4 ' ... Hegel's brilliant intuition is to make me depend on the Other in my being. I am, he said, a being-for-itself which is for-itself only through another. Therefore the Other penetrates me to the heart.' (BN 321) 5 Noting the advantages of Hegel's view over Husserl's view Sartre says the following. Hegel sees that the '... negation which constitutes the Other is direct, internal and reciprocal'. Second, each consciousness has a deep, ontological (not merely epistemological) relation to the other. Last, Hegel saw that'... being for others appears as a necessary condition for my being for my self. (BN 321-2) 6 BN 327. 7 'The Other is not a for-itself us he appears to me; I do not appear to myself as I am for the other. I am incapable of apprehending for myself the self which I am for the Other, just as I am incapable of apprehending on the basis of the Other-as-object which appears to me, what the other is for himself.' (BN 327) 8 BN 327. 9 BN328.

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10 Even in Saint Genet (1952), a work where Sartre embraces recognition and the sociality of the self, he rejects a monistic view of self and other. 'Man, says Marx, is an object to man. That is true. But it is also true that I am a subject to myself exactly in so far as my fellow man is an object to me. And this is what separates us. He and I are not homogeneous: we cannot be part of the same whole except in the eyes of a third person who perceives us both as a single object.' (BN 590) 11 Later, Sartre will abandon his claim that the objective and subjective sides of the self cannot be reconciled. In 1952, speaking about the French author Jean Genet, Sartre writes 'Genet sees his own freedom when he sees his readers seeing him'. (Saint Genet 552) The look is not mutually exclusive, as Sartre thought in BN. Genet can see his readers seeing him, and this is an experience of freedom. 'In a certain sense, Genet the poet knows himself as being, for the other, identical with what he is to himself.' (Saint Genet 553) 12 BN 366. 13 BN 365. 14 'I cannot confer on myself any quality without mediation or an objectifying power which is not my own power and which I can neither pretend nor forge.' (BN 366) 15 According to Sartre, love is an attempt to control the way the other sees me. See BN 474-94. 16 The political implication of this fact is that we ought to favour societies rich in social groups where individuals can be recognized in a diversity of social roles and contexts. See Chapter 9. 17 WIL 54-8, 60-9, 218, 221. 18 'Since the creation can find its fulfillment only in reading, since the artist must entrust to another the job of carrying out what he has begun, since it is only through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard himself as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal. To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language. And if it should be asked to what the writer is appealing, the answer is simple ... [T]he writer appeals to the reader's freedom to collaborate in the production of his work.' (WIL 54) 19 WIL 51. 20 WIL 53. 21 WIL 58. 22 In Saint Genet Sartre remarks that prose is essentially written conversation. 'The writer of prose speaks to the reader. ... The writer of prose uses language as a middle term between himself and the Other ...' There is 'reciprocal recognition' between reader and writer, just as between partners in a conversation. (Saint Genet 553) 23 See Hegel's PR. 24 I discuss recognition within groups more fully in Chapter 8. 25 Saint Genet 553. 26 Saint Genet 42. 27 Saint Genet 41. 28 Saint Genet 42. 29 Saint Genet 34.

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30 For an excellent account of oppression in Sartre's work see L. R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism (Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books, 1995). Gordon's main concern is to elucidate contemporary racism as a form of bad faith. My work differs from Gordon's primarily because I claim that bad faith and inauthenticity entail a misrecognition of others' freedom, not just one's own freedom. 31 ASJ28. 32 'What, in his [the Jew's] eyes, makes his situation even more incomprehensible is that he has the full enjoyment of his rights as a citizen, at least so long as the society in which he lives is in equilibrium. In periods of crisis and of persecution, he is a hundred times more unhappy, but at least he can revolt, and, by a dialectic analogous to that which Hegel describes in his Master and Slave, he can regain his liberty by opposing oppression and denying his accursed "Jewish nature" in armed resistance against those who wish to impose it on him.' (ASJ 79) 33 ASJ 39. 34 See The Foundation and Structure of Sartre's Ethics (Lawrence: Regent's Press of Kansas, 1979), hereafter FSSE; and Sartre's Two Ethics (La Salle: Open Court, 1993), hereafter STE. 35 STE 74 and FSSE 93 respectively. 36 FSSE 87. 37 STE 76. 38 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), at 155. 39 Thomas Anderson is guilty of the epistemological reading of recognition. According to Anderson, Sartre holds that 'a person's awareness of his or her freedom is to some degree dependent on others'. (STE 74, emphasis added) Again Anderson writes that in recognition 'I attain truth about myself through the mediation of others'. (FSSE 85, emphasis added) The interdependency that underlies recognition is, on Anderson's view, a dependency of 'knowledge'. (FSSE 83) 40 See Gordon, Bad Faith. 41 The textual ambiguity of ASJ is a result of its transitional nature. On the one hand Sartre is committed to the claim that oppression is freedom limiting and ethically harmful. But Sartre was still attracted to the claim (from BN) that freedom can never be limited. To find his way out of this bind, Sartre begins experimenting with different meta-ethical reasons that oppression is ethically objectionable. 42 From Life/Situations reprinted in translator's introduction to NE. 43 NE 141. 44 NE 141. 45 NE 141. 46 NE281. 47 NE274. 48 NE274. 49 NE274. 50 NE279. 51 NE274. 52 NE275.

Recognition 53 54 55 56 57 58

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60 61

62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

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NE279. NE284. NE280. NE281. NE 325. 'There is oppression when one class or group of individuals finds itself in a situation that is materially difficult to bear and that they cannot change because of other people's will. This oppression is resented subjectively because they set the situation into relation with the others' freedom. It is not the discomfort that they suffer, it is the discomfort as willed and maintained by other people? (NE 330, emphasis added) Hegel scholar Robert R. Williams is mistaken when he says that 'Unlike Hegel, for Sartre master/slave is not a contingent historical condition but rather ontologically constitutive of intersubjectivity'. (Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, 376) As I have shown, Sartre's view of the master/slave relation changes dramatically in the post-war period. Sartre no longer views conflict as ontological; instead, conflict is seen as a historical, social affair. Conclusive proof of Sartre's turn to the concrete is his diagnosis of oppression as a form of Hegelian mastery. If Sartre had died in 1943 after the publication of BN, then perhaps Williams' statement would be accurate. To his credit, Williams does not focus monolithically on recognition in BN; he includes an analysis of NE. What is odd is that after noting Sartre's discussion of recognition in NE, Williams claims that 'Sartre fails in the Notebooks to resolve the fundamental question of whether mutual recognition is possible'. (Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition, 378) As I have shown, Sartre's view in NE is unambiguous: the appeal is a mutually recognitive, freedom preserving relation to the other. NE elaborates and strengthens the claim in WIL that group cooperation - for example the cooperation between readers and writers - is a relationship of Hegelian mutual recognition. 'In all slavery there is a contract.' (NE 384) Many readers will be familiar with Sartre's controversial claim in the preface to F. Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that 'to kill a colonizer is to kill two birds with one stone'. (New York: Grove Press, 2005) Sartre's point is that the oppressor is also a victim of his own oppression, since his own freedom is lost when he denies the freedom of the other. NE 325. NE258. Regarding the nature of a demand see NE 237-74. For the comparison of a demand and an appeal see NE 238. NE274. NE239. NE258. NE239. NE251. 'Hence for the slave, the order/look of the master creates the immense field of the looked at: (NE 259) NE261. NE251.

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73 NE267. 74 I explore this further in Chapter 10. 75 The analysis of an ethics of demands does, however, suggest an expanded notion of existential freedom, beyond the baseline condition of noncoercion. Following a Kantian imperative is not coercive in the literal sense (unless there is another person forcing me upon the threat of violence to follow the commandment). 76 For reasons that are now obvious, I disagree substantially with Thomas Anderson who claims that in the immediate post-war works, and in NE in particular, Sartre does not utilize intersubjective recognition as a principal concept. 'The most one can say about Notebooks is that Sartre is increasingly coming to recognize that a person's awareness of his or her freedom is to some degree dependent on others.' (STE 74) In short, my argument has been that the only obstacle to Sartre's acceptance of the full Hegelian theory of recognition was the claim in BN that the social self and the self as subject could not be reconciled. In WIL Sartre accepts the possibility of mutual recognition, basing this possibility on the mutual appeal between readers and writers. NE elaborates the notion of a mutual 'appeal', showing that the objedification of the self through the look 'enriches' rather than degrades the self. Finally, Sartre's use of master/slave relations to explain the historical fact of oppression shows that Sartre has accepted the normative distinction between mutual and non-mutual recognition. 77 CDR 110. 78 CDR 111. 79 In Sartre's vocabulary recognition can be either 'positive' or 'negative'. See CDR 113. 80 CDR 106. 81 CDR 114. 82 CDR 116. 83 CDR 110.

5 Bad Faith In a scant section at the end of BN, entitled 'Ethical Implications', Sartre remarks that the concept of human freedom is purely descriptive and not ethically prescriptive. 'Ontology can not formulate ethical precepts.'1 Elsewhere Sartre remarks that bad faith implies 'no moral blame'.2 And though he uses morally loaded language to describe bad faith, Sartre claims that bad faith is a descriptive and not prescriptive term. These considerations must be balanced against the obvious tone Sartre takes in describing bad faith. Bad faith is a form of deceit and lying to oneself. Bad faith is a conscious misapprehension of one's freedom. In so far as freedom is the source of value as well as the necessary condition of all action, bad faith is a radically misguided practical attitude. Beneath Sartre's esoteric vocabulary is a thought very similar to the Socratic injunction 'know thyself. Self-understanding is a paramount concern for Sartre, and one that brings with it all the implications of a life lived well. In those last pages of BN Sartre hesitantly admits the ethical current beneath his ontology. He says that his ontological description of human freedom 'is a moral description, for it releases to us the ethical meaning of various human projects'.3 The concept of human freedom will 'allow us to catch a glimpse of what sort of ethics will assume its responsibility when confronted with a human reality in situation',4 Since my aim is to construct a workable existential ethics I do not hesitate to label bad faith a moral concept. I view existential ethics as a form of virtue ethics. The chief virtue of this ethics is existential authenticity. The chief vice is bad faith. Characteristically, Sartre devoted many more pages to explaining the pitfalls of bad faith than he did to explaining the possibilities of escaping bad faith via authenticity. In the following discussion of bad faith I will be able to work closely with Sartre's texts, especially BN and ASJ. I begin with BN. The concept of bad faith is parasitic on Sartre's concept of human freedom. I define bad faith as a lived misrecognition of one's own freedom. Bad faith is 'lived' in the sense that it is expressed through actions, as well as beliefs and attitudes. The fact that 'A person can

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live in bad faith' implies that bad faith has the status of a project, that is, a sustained, endeavour pursued over the long term. While Sartre rejects full-blooded character judgements, he asserts that bad faith is a 'constant and particular style of life', suggesting that bad faith is a character trait in the weak sense defended earlier.6 I use the term 'misrecognition' (which Sartre does not use) to illustrate the parallel between bad faith and disrespect for others. Just as one can fail to recognize the freedom of others by disrespecting them, one can fail to recognize one's own freedom by disrespecting one's self. I prefer to use the technically more accurate but less common notion of 'misrecognizing' one's own freedom rather than 'disrespecting' one's own freedom. I have already discussed the shortcomings of Sartre's ontological notion of freedom. Because of my substantial revision of existential freedom, it might appear implausible for me to embrace bad faith as Sartre originally understood it. Luckily, Sartre's discussion of bad faith reveals a subtler, more material concept of human freedom than is suggested by the concept of ontological freedom in BN. Bad faith involves either over or under emphasizing one's plasticity, subjectivity and temporality. If existential freedom were a purely ontological notion, then overemphasizing one's subjectivity would be impossible; subjectivity would always dominate objectivity. Instead, Sartre claims that treating oneself as entirely unconditioned and free from one's past is a common pattern of bad faith! Humans are not only future-orientated beings; they are beings with a past. In Sartre's vocabulary, humans have two dimensions: 'transcendence' (agency, subjectivity, future) and 'facticity' (objectivity, interness, past). Bad faith consists in a denial of either of these dimensions. 'The basic concept which is thus engendered utilizes the double property of the human being, which is at once a facticity and a transcendence. These two aspects of human reality are and ought to be capable of a valid coordination. But bad faith does not wish either to coordinate them or to surmount them in a synthesis.'7 On my revised conception existential freedom consists in noncoercion, which is a basic condition of free action. Bad faith, then, consists in misunderstanding the basic outlines, conditions or structures of one's agency. My revised conception of existential freedom, then, preserves the root phenomenon of bad faith. Misunderstanding the conditions of one's agency has two variations: either I identify wholly with myself as a subject (deny my objectivity) or I identify wholly with myself as an object (and deny my subjectivity). Let me turn to these two strategies of bad faith.

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The first type of bad faith is the denial of one's subjectivity. Sartre's often-quoted examples are the flirting woman who refuses the implications of her flirtation and the waiter who tries to identify completely with his role. The relevant features of this type of bad faith are as follows.8 First, I restrict the implications of my actions (and others' actions) to the present, refusing to accept that my acts signify something about the future. Second, I attribute to myself (and others) character traits that cause actions. Thus action becomes disarmed, dead and inert. Finally, I attempt to identify wholly with a social role that I occupy, or a character trait that others see in me. Sartre's waiter example has been misread as implying that all social roles involve bad faith. Alasdair Maclntyre writes: 'For Sartre the central error is to identify the self with its roles, a mistake which carries the burden of moral bad faith as well as intellectual confusion'.9 But clearly Sartre does not claim that occupying a social role implies bad faith. Particular roles invite bad faith because the occupants are under social pressure to hide their subjectivity. The waiter 'plays' his role because he tries to be nothing other than a waiter.10 Bad faith enters only when one attempts to let the role subsume one's entire self-identity. Only social roles that 'imprison a man in what he is' invite bad faith. a 'A grocer is not wholly a grocer', presumably because he is also a father, citizen, mountaineer and so on.12 The second type of bad faith is the denial of one's objectivity. Sartre's controversial example is the homosexual who refuses to identify as homosexual. The relevant features are as follows. First, one denies that one's past actions express any coherence. Each act is seen as a 'difference' and 'exception'.13 Second, in examining one's past actions one 'refuses to draw from them the conclusions which they impose'.14 Namely, one refuses to accept even weak character judgements that accurately describe one's conduct. The homosexual, while 'recognizing his homosexual inclination ... refuses with all his strength to consider himself "a homosexual'".15 Notice Sartre's insistence that the homosexual embrace his pattern of past conduct. This case would not be an instance of bad faith unless there were reasonable grounds for asserting a weak notion of character. Yes, some character judgements must be rejected, namely strong character judgements. The man in Sartre's example 'has an obscure but strong feeling that a homosexual is not a homosexual as this table is a table'.16 He is in bad faith precisely because he misunderstands the difference between weak and fullblooded character judgements. 'To the extent that I have adopted

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this conduct, I am a homosexual. But to the extent that human reality cannot be finally defined by patterns of conduct I am not one.'17 The character judgement 'James is brave' or 'Jack is a homosexual' is only objectionable if it implies a once-and-for-always trait that is causally efficacious. Notice Sartre's main point in this second type of bad faith: if we refuse to distinguish weak from strong character judgements, and if we refuse to accept weak character judgements where they are appropriate, then we make a serious ethical mistake. Not only are weak character judgements acceptable, they are necessary. If we do not employ weak character judgements then we fail to recognize human action for what it is. After BN, Sartre's longest explicit discussion of bad faith comes in ASJ.18 Sartre shifts from speaking merely of bad faith to speaking of 'inauthenticity'.19 Sartre appears to use the terms inauthentic and bad faith interchangeably. My thesis, however, is that authenticity requires a recognition of not only one's own freedom, but other people's freedom as well. Bad faith is misrecognition of (at least primarily) one's own freedom. In the transitional works, as Sartre begins to adopt the intersubjective, Hegelian notion of the self, he also begins to speak of bad faith as a misrecognition of other people's freedom. The link is clear: if my selfhood depends upon the gaze of others, then properly embracing my own selfhood requires embracing the selfhood of the other. I admit the tension between the claim that bad faith is self-regarding and the claim that bad faith is otherregarding. As Sartre says, the anti-Semite misunderstands both his own freedom and that of the Jewish other. My solution is as follows: I continue to use the notion of bad faith as a primarily but not exclusively self-regarding character trait. However, I fold the otherregarding condition that Sartre alludes to - namely understanding and respecting the freedom of others - into the positive character trait of authenticity.20 In ASJ there are two portraits of bad faith. First, there is the bad faith of the anti-Semite. The anti-Semite misrecognizes his own freedom by denying his subjectivity. By seeing himself innately superior to Jews, the anti-Semite attributes to himself a fixed, unchanging essence. Second, there is the bad faith of the inauthentic Jew. Sartre claims that Jews are in bad faith either if they evade their Judaism or if they internalize negative stereotypes. Needless to say, this claim is controversial and has been contested since the publication of Sartre's essay in Les Temps Modernes in 1945.21 Both portraits of bad faith are insightful, even if problematic. Sartre weakens his case, I believe, by explaining the dynamic of bad faith

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using the difficult example of oppression. Nevertheless, a viable notion of bad faith as a generic human vice (not one specifically tied to oppression) emerges from Sartre's discussion. The first portrait of bad faith is that of the anti-Semite. In describing the anti-Semite Sartre assumes that anti-Semitism is not merely a passing attitude but a project in the fullest Sartrean sense of that term. 'Anti-Semitism is a free and total choice of oneself, a comprehensive attitude that one adopts not only towards Jews but towards men in general, towards history and society; it is at one and the same time a passion and a conception of the world.'22 AntiSemitism is an encompassing end. The anti-Semite's project is to escape the ambiguity of being both agent and an object. 'AntiSemitism is, in short, fear of the human condition.'23 Of the two strategies of bad faith, the anti-Semite chooses to deny his agency. Anti-Semitism is thus a project that necessarily embodies bad faith. In concrete terms, the anti-Semite thinks of himself as naturally, innately good, powerful and pure. His self-identity is predicated on a contrast with the Jew, who is naturally, innately vicious, weak and corrupt.24 The anti-Semite believes 'There is nothing I have to do to merit my superiority, and neither can I lose it. It is given once and for all. It is a thing.'25 The anti-Semite is painfully guilty of employing full-blooded character judgements about himself and others. The anti-Semite attributes to himself a character so complete and totalizing that he 'chooses the permanence and impenetrability of stone'.26 Sartre's metaphor of desiring to be a 'stone' nicely captures the sense in which character judgements can imply a once-and-foralways stamp. The second portrait of bad faith is that of the Jew. Note that unlike the anti-Semite, who is necessarily in bad faith, Sartre depicts Jews as capable of transcending bad faith. ASJ offers the most extensive published treatment of Sartre's concept of the authenticity. While I reserve the discussion of authenticity for later, here I would like to explain why, according to Sartre, Jews are susceptible to the vice of bad faith. Having already studied Sartre's concept of the social self we are in a good position to understand Sartre's claim about Jews in bad faith. Being Jewish is not merely a subjective self-identity, but a manifestation of the social self. To be a Jew one must be seen by others as a Jew. As Sartre puts it, to be Jewish is to occupy a social 'situation'. 'To be a Jew is to be thrown into - to be abandoned to - the situation of a Jew.'27 Keep in mind that Sartre is only analysing the situation of Jews in oppressive, anti-Semitic

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cultures. In oppressive cultures, Jews are seen through the lens of 'poisonous' stereotypes. The social self of the Jew is therefore predefined. So not only does the social self come from the look of others, but this look is oppressive. It is not just any other, but the 'antiSemite who creates the Jew'.28 As one would expect, the look of the anti-Semite is degrading, dehumanizing, condescending, obnoxious and offensive. The social self of a victim of oppression is 'poisoned' because it is a trap that limits or obliterates the humane options of the victim. In an anti-Semitic culture I am not free to live my Judaism according to will. Like the role of the waiter, which restricts the waiter's possibilities for expressing his subjectivity, the role of being Jewish restricts the freedom of those seen as Jews. Sartre even suggests that the role of being Jewish in an anti-Semitic culture invites bad faith. 'Inauthenticity is no doubt more tempting for him than for other men, because the situation which he has to lay claim to and to live in is quite simply that of a martyr.'29 Sartre describes two interrelated forms of bad faith into which a Jew in an anti-Semitic culture might fall. Thus the anti-Semitism and the masochism of the inauthentic Jew represent in a sense the two extremes of his possible behaviour: in anti-Semitism he denies his race in order to be no more than a pure individual, a man without blemish in the midst of other men; in masochism, he repudiates his liberty as a man in order to escape the sin of being a Jew and in order to seek the repose and passivity of a thing.30 The first strategy is to 'deny his race' through assimilation. This is bad faith because it is a denial of one's objectivity. Others will see me as a Jew, even if I do not identify as a Jew. My mistake is to wish to declare my self-identity by fiat. If I declare that I am simply a person and not a Jew, but if others continue to see me as a Jew, then I deceive myself about my identity. How others see me co-constitutes who I am. The 'inauthentic Jew wants to lose himself in a Christian world'.31 'He hopes to become "a man", nothing but a man, a man like all other men ... He cultivates himself in order to destroy the Jew in himself.'32 The second strategy is to affirm my Judaism so totally, that I am 'poisoned by the stereotypes' others have imposed on me.33 So I act in the stereotypical ways Jews are said to act, but I do not accept responsibility for my actions. I claim my acts express an inner principle which I am unable to refuse. I try to become wholly identical with the object that the other sees me as.34

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There are several reasons to be unsatisfied with the particular analysis Sartre offers of Jewish bad faith. I do not think these reasons discredit the notion of bad faith generally. Sartre makes the untenable generalization that all acts of assimilation require denying the social self. But, first, asserting one's humanity is compatible with an open acknowledgement of one's particular identity. For example, I may assert the importance of a document like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a means of protecting my particular religious or cultural affiliations. Second, if I am a victim of serious oppression there may be a very compelling reason for me to assimilate if I can: survival. Lying to an unjust attacker in order to preserve my life or other weighty goods is surely justified. So is assimilating for the sake of achieving a better life. Is Sartre right that ignoring negative stereotypes is disingenuous? If I can 'pass' then there is no basis for saying I must acknowledge the stereotypes; these stereotypes do not apply to me, so my social self is not constructed through them. Sartre's premise that others will see me as a Jew, even if I do not see myself as a Jew is problematic. As Karen Brodkin has pointed out, Jews in the USA, for example, have 'become white'; Judaism is largely a voluntary self-identity.35 Presumably Sartre is thinking of cases where Judaism is a nonvoluntary identity, where a minority's social self is always structured by negative stereotypes. But even in such cases, there may be good psychological reasons to think past stereotypes. Sartre is right to point out that a person's self-identity is conditioned, indeed coconstituted by how others see her. But we must leave room for victims to construct identities that are not degrading, humiliating and self-effacing. The agent is not in bad faith if she is aware of the facts just described. It is not, then, always bad faith for a victim of oppression to look past negative stereotypes. Sartre also claims that allowing oneself to be 'poisoned' by negative stereotypes is disingenuous. Sartre overlooks several possibilities. First, at least some negative stereotypes can be turned on their head and embraced by oppressed groups. For example, the epithet 'queer' has been embraced by some members of the gay community as liberating, not debilitating.36 Second, the thesis that victims turn into the caricatures of themselves propagated by their masters has been largely discredited among psychologists as well as historians. This so-called 'Sambo thesis' was most famously defended by the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, whose research turned out to be largely fraudulent. 37 Internalizing negative stereotypes is possible, of course - think of Sander Oilman's concept of

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'Jewish self-hatred'.38 But the phenomenon is not as prominent as Sartre suggests. Third, Sartre critic Stuart Z. Charme suggests that agents in oppressive roles may be 'insulated ... from certain temptations of bad faith'.39 Members of powerful majorities tend to naturalize their own identities, whereas members of marginalized groups are forced to confront the contingencies of their identities.40 W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, made famous the notion that blacks in the USA exhibited a 'double-consciousness', that is, a simultaneous awareness of an inner sense of selfhood and an external, imposed sense of selfhood.41 In sum, Sartre underestimates the power of victims to see through and challenge negative stereotypes. My reservations do not indicate that the concept of bad faith is bankrupt as a whole. Sartre's general point is both accurate and important: the human self is both subject and object; but we often flee from the ambiguous tension between these two dimensions of selfhood. Sartre's claim can be expressed in the language of identity. Bad faith is the adoption of dishonest, insincere attitudes towards the formation of self-identity. The two common mistakes are (1) attempting to define the self wholly through self-assertion, without the social validation of others and (2) attempting to become identical with the image others have of one, without accepting responsibility for becoming this image. Bad faith also can be understood as a mistake about character analysis. If I am in bad faith, then I misjudge my own character. And since my self-image is often intimately tied to my image of others, I often make the same mistakes in judging the character of others. Either I employ strong character judgements (which are faulty in principle) or I fail to employ weak character judgements (which are often appropriate). One serious ethical implication of bad faith concerns moral responsibility. Agents in bad faith have a distorted portrait of their moral responsibilities; they have a systematic tendency to place blame in the wrong place. If I impose strong character judgements upon myself then I tend to evade my responsibilities. Strong judgements assume that character is a causal force. If my character causes my actions, and if I do not control my character, then I do not control my actions. (Even if we allow that I indirectly control my character, the presumption of moral responsibility shifts. I am presumed not to be responsible until proven otherwise.) Passing strong character judgements exculpates me. I tell myself 'That's just how I am'.

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Further, since strong judgements are once-and-for-always, there will be little motivation for me to alter bad habits or work to improve and correct my character. I may easily sink into a selfperpetuating cycle. I tell myself I will never change, which has the effect of reinforcing the behaviour I ought to change. In short, the employment of strong character judgements is a strategy of bad faith since character is neither permanent nor causal. The effect of this version of bad faith is to make the agent systematically prone to errors about his own moral responsibilities. The second form of bad faith involves the failure to make weak character judgements where they are appropriate. This version of bad faith leads to a different sort of ethical problem, namely a dramatic impoverishment of one's moral vocabulary and a tendency to misunderstand an entire class of behaviour (namely habit). To begin with a clear case of the importance of diagnosing habitual behaviour: some actions are healthy and permissible once in a while, but if habitual they are unhealthy and destructive. If for example I treat repeated acts of drinking heavily, overeating or not getting enough sleep as isolated incidents, then I fail to see what is really happening to me. I am becoming an alcoholic, becoming an overeater or becoming an insomniac. Making weak character judgements is necessary if we are to confront such behaviours openly and see them for what they really are, namely, habits. Further, many important moral judgements require evaluating a person's dispositions and tendencies. Trustworthiness, dependability and loyalty are obvious examples. Calling someone a good friend, good neighbour, good spouse or good parent also requires looking at action over time and evaluating the person's tendency to act this way or that way. A final illustration of the ethical importance of character judgements is the fact that we can say when a person acts 'out of character'. We routinely discern fluke actions from routine actions and we apply ethical weight to the distinction. If John goes back on his word once or twice, but not perpetually, I do not call him an unreliable, flaky person. If my spouse routinely ignores my needs and then suddenly tries to make up for it with one grand gesture, I do not say my spouse is a loyal, caring, good spouse. Aristotle was right: one swallow does not make a Spring. Important ethical assessments such as 'John is not trustworthy' or 'James is loyal' require weak character judgements, which are precluded by the second strategy of bad faith. I began this chapter with the declaration that bad faith is a decidedly moral notion. Bad faith is parallel to the ancient notion of

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self-ignorance in one important sense: without an honest, open, accurate self-image we are susceptible to a whole range of poor behaviour. Self-understanding frames our basic dispositions, especially with respect to moral praise and blame. Bad faith (selfmisrecognition) is vicious because it causes us to distort the truth about ourselves and to act irresponsibly. Further, bad faith is vicious because it is a form of self-alienation. All humans are simultaneously and irreducibly agent and object. But the insincere person flees into only one of these dimensions of selfhood, denying the ambiguity and tension of the human condition. For the person in bad faith, the two dimensions of selfhood remain disconnected, un-reconciled and hence alienated. The existential view of freedom holds that being free requires, at a minimum, acting without being physically coerced. We have seen that misrecognizing one's basic freedom of action has two characteristic forms. I may think I am free when I am not. Sartre gives the example of those oppressed individuals who idealistically strive for liberation via an 'inner', 'Cartesian' revolution. This escape into the subjective is insincere since it denies the objective, material conditions of freedom. The alternative pole is an escape into objectivity: I think I am unfree and determined, when in point of fact, I am free. The most common error is to imagine that my actions are caused by a 'nature' or an 'essence' that I do not control. This chapter has shown that the concept of bad faith, like the classical vice of ignorance, has significant moral weight. Bad faith is truly a vice of character. In making the case for the viciousness of bad faith, I have also demonstrated how existential virtue ethics carries out its brand of character analysis. The first requirement of the transition from bad faith to authenticity is clarifying and purifying one's reflections about human agency. As I will show in the next chapter, self-awareness is a major component of authenticity. But let there be no mistake: the existentialist does not fall into the pit of over intellectualizing the moral virtues. Awareness is only part of the bargain. Authenticity also requires adopting a disposition of concern for oneself and for the other human beings upon whom one's sense of self depends. NOTES 1 BN 795. 2 ASJ 93. I disagree with L. A. Bell who claims that Sartre distinguishes between Jews in bad faith (who are not blameworthy) and non-Jews who

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16 17 18

19 20

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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are in bad faith (who are blameworthy). Sartre's comment that bad faith implies no moral blame is a blanket comment. See 'Different Oppressions: A Feminist Exploration of Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew', in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. J. L. Murphy (University Park: Penn. State Press, 1999). BN 795. BN 795. BN 90. BN 90. BN 98. All of these points come from BN at 98-104. After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), at 32. BN 101-2. BN 102. BN 102. BN 107. BN107. BN 107. Readers of Hazel Barnes' translation of BN will notice that I have altered the translation by using the neutral term 'homosexual' rather than the term 'paederast' which has a wholly different implication in English. BN 107. BN 107. Sartre's existential biographies often revolve around character analysis and bad faith. Saint Genet is, among other things, a study on the patterns of bad faith and the struggle for authenticity of Jean Genet. See Saint Genet (New York: George Braziller, 1963). ASJ 44, 93, 96-7, 109. For discussion of the relation between authenticity and bad faith see R. E. Santoni, Good Faith, Bad Faith and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). See among others S. Z. Charme, 'Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity', Jewish Social Studies (No. 6.2, 2000); D. N. Smith, 'The Social Construction of Enemies: Jews and Representations of Enemies' (Sociological Theory, November, 1996); M. Walzer, 'Preface' to Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1995); and J. Sungolowsky, 'Criticism of Anti-Semite and Jew', Yale French Studies (1962, No. 30). ASJ 17. ASJ 54. ASJ 27. ASJ 27. ASJ 53. ASJ 89. ASJ 143, emphasis added. ASJ 91. ASJ 109. ASJ 100. ASJ 98. ASJ 95.

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34 ASJ 109. Jean Genet also falls into this trap of bad faith according to Sartre. When the hostile French public brands him as a 'thief, he tries to escape into the role of 'criminal' and become wholly identical with the image imposed on him by others. See Saint Genet, especially the section entitled 'I decided to be what crime made of me', 59-73. 35 How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 36 Sartre is sceptical of the claim that members of victimized groups could attain liberation through embracing negative stereotypes. Nonetheless, in the 1948 work Black Orpheus Sartre claims that the poetry of negritude is an attempt at liberation through the affirmation of blackness. The black '... has his back up against the wall of authenticity: having been insulted and formerly enslaved, he picks up the word "nigger" which was thrown at him like a stone, he draws himself erect and proudly proclaims himself a black man, face to face with white men'. See WIL at 296. Four years later, in Saint Genet, Sartre worries that those who attempt to appropriate negative stereotypes 'continue to view themselves with the concepts and according to the pattern furnished by their persecutors ... Their rebellion, unable to express itself by concrete action, remains within the framework of a "dependency complex" and takes the form of an inner break.' (Saint Genet 54) Sartre's growing concern with institutional change reveals that if collective images (or 'objective spirit' as he says in Saint Genet) can be changed, then there is a political side to the inner revolt, which on its own is an empty, indeed 'Cartesian' gesture. (Saint Genet 54) 37 For a review of the major flaws of Bettelheim's research see C. Fleck and A. Miiller, 'Bruno Bettelheim and the Concentration Camps', Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (Vol. 33:1, Winter 1997). 38 S. L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 39 Vulgarity and Authenticity: Dimensions of Otherness in the Worlds of Jean-Paul Sartre (Amhurst: UMass Press, 1991), at 120. 40 Vulgarity and Authenticity, at 106, 119, 129. 41 See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (New York: Penguin, 1996).

6 Authenticity Authenticity is the chief moral virtue of existential ethics, just as bad faith is the chief vice of existential ethics. We have seen the pitfall of bad faith involves misrecognizing one's own freedom. It would be tempting to see authenticity as simply an affirmation of one's own freedom. In fact, this is a common reading of Sartre. However, such a definition of authenticity leaves out the allimportant social dimension. Authenticity, as I will show, is a deeply social project that requires, in addition to transcending bad faith, respecting others. All too often, existential authenticity is said to be a form of ethical subjectivism. Such a view is unfortunate for two reasons. First, a careful reading of Sartre proves that, as he conceived of it, authenticity is a social, other-regarding virtue. Further, even if Sartre himself underemphasized the social dimension of authenticity, this should not cause us to do so. By doing so we would rob ourselves of an important moral virtue. While emphasizing the vital social dimension of authenticity, I retain the insight that authenticity is 'fully embracing one's condition'. I offer one fundamental corrective to the standard view. Since the self is essentially social, that is intersubjectively constituted, authenticity requires embracing the other in the same moment that one embraces the self. To be authentic I must respect others because others make me who I am. I need the recognition of others for my selfhood and my freedom. So, my reasons for respecting others are simultaneously self- and other-regarding. The canonical Sartrean definition of authenticity comes in ASJ where Sartre lists two conditions of an authentic existence: lucid consciousness and accepting responsibility.1 However, these two conditions do not fully capture the phenomenon of existential authenticity. Lucidity and responsibility are necessary, but not sufficient conditions of authenticity. The third condition of an authentic existence is respecting others. Thus, existential authenticity entails a basic obligation to others. Sartre limits his formal definition of authenticity to lucidity and responsibility because he is in the midst of working out the reasons that an authentic person must respect

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others. In his own mind, Sartre would have seen himself as deriving obligations to others (condition three) from a clear awareness of and acceptance of one's own freedom (conditions one and two). I begin my analysis with ASJ, which is Sartre's classical essay on authenticity. Sartre defines authenticity as 'having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation' and 'assuming the risks and responsibilities' the situation involves.2 This definition has led many readers to believe that authenticity is a subjective ethical ideal. Authenticity is believed to consist in acting with gusto, or being true to one's self or reflectively and consistently embracing one's actions. All of these formulas are inadequate; authenticity requires positive relations to others. Admittedly, Sartre is tentative in his endorsement of the social conditions of authenticity. Sartre's hesitation springs from dissatisfaction with his attempts to provide a meta-ethical justification for the social conditions of authenticity, not from scepticism that authenticity is a social project. Sartre's intention, I submit, was to find an existential value theory that was not narrowly subjectivist. Simone de Beauvoir is even clearer than Sartre at spelling out the social dimension of authenticity. In her Ethics of Ambiguity she argues persuasively that authenticity is not a 'solipsistic' ethic.3 There is a difference between an ethics that respects individual subjectivity and an ethics that cannot see beyond the individual subject. By reading Sartre carefully and creatively I show that the ethical virtue of existential authenticity is deeply social. Let me begin with the standard view of Sartrean authenticity, according to which authenticity is a subjective moral standard that consists in acting with gusto and reflection. On this view, the only ethical measure of one's lifestyle is internal consistency. For example, in his influential book After Virtue, Alasdair Maclntyre makes Sartre the foil of modern virtue ethics. Sartrean authenticity is, Maclntyre tells us, the paradigmatic expression of ethical subjectivism in twentieth-century philosophy. Sartre's view is that while 'an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational; all are subjective directions.'4 Authenticity is a subjective ethical ideal because its sole demand is internal consistency. A second example of the subjectivist reading of authenticity is found in the work of Sartre scholar Thomas Anderson. Anderson's work on Sartre's ethics is provocative and important. But I am highly

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sceptical of the adequacy of Anderson's treatment of authenticity. Anderson agrees with me that Sartre sees authenticity as ultimately a social, other-regarding virtue.5 However, Anderson says Sartre fails miserably to justify the other-regarding condition of authenticity.6 Indeed, Sartre's view permits the existence of authentic serial killers.7 Since authentic serial killing is obviously vicious, authenticity is not an ethical virtue. I agree with Maclntyre and Anderson that ethical subjectivism is a badly mistaken position. If existential authenticity (as is very commonly charged) allows for the existence of authentic serial killers, authentic Nazis, authentic racists, and so on, then authenticity is not an ethical virtue. Reflecting on one's lifestyle is not sufficient to make that lifestyle ethically praiseworthy. By invoking the concept of 'ethical praiseworthiness' I am making an assumption about ethical value. I base this assumption on what I take to be the uncontroversial moral intuition that purposely thwarting the freedom of an innocent person is ethically condemnable. I have in mind behaviours such as murder, torture, enslavement and oppression. A different way to state the basic moral intuition I am after is this: other people deserve respect. Murder, torture and oppression do not respect others. I will assume then, that 'respect others' is a fixed point of our collective moral outlook. There should be a heavy presumption against any ethics that runs counter to this basic moral intuition. Since ethical subjectivism is a dead end, I wish to salvage authenticity by showing that it is not a form of ethical subjectivism. Existential authenticity does not license authentic serial killers or authentic Nazis. ASJ would be a terrible failure had its central ethical standard turned out to endorse the very behaviour it meant to condemn! The main aim of ASJ is to show that anti-Semitism (and racism more generally) is ethically vicious. Anti-Semitism is a vice not a virtue. Authenticity is not the colossal disappointment it would seem to be if Anderson's view were accurate. Let me turn to Sartre's text. Sartre's famous definition of authenticity is the following: If it is agreed that man may be defined as a being having freedom within the limits of a situation, then it is easy to see that the exercise of this freedom may be considered as authentic or inauthentic according to the choices made in the situation. Authenticity, it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the

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Sartre's Ethics of Engagement responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.8

This passage is usually cited as proof that, in the words of one Sartre commentator, authenticity consists only in 'devoting oneself to one's freely chosen project with full reflectiveness'.9 Clearly, overcoming bad faith by attaining a lucid awareness of one's actions and situation is one dimension of authenticity. Inauthenticity involves bad faith, for it is a failure to 'live up to' one's situation, a failure to live one's condition 'fully'.10 Inauthentic people 'conceal certain parts of themselves from themselves'.11 So the 'lucidity' Sartre refers to above is the self-awareness involved in overcoming bad faith. Sartre uses the term lucidity, rather than knowledge. He hopes lucidity will capture the idea of a personal disposition that is both cognitive and volitional. Just as bad faith is a lived misrecognition of one's freedom, self-lucidity requires a lived recognition of one's freedom. To be lucid about one's freedom requires embracing one's freedom in actions. Thus Sartre also characterizes authenticity as 'self-assertion'.12 'The authentic Jew is the one who asserts his claim in the face of the disdain shown towards him.'13 'The Jew does not escape this rule: authenticity is for him to live to the full his condition as a Jew; inauthenticity is to deny it or attempt to escape from it.'14 Let us not be lulled into the terribly mistaken idea that selfawareness is a solipsistic, solitary project. It is no wonder Sartre is often saddled with the view that authenticity is subjectivist. The first condition of authenticity is se/^-awareness. A shallow reading could easily conflate self-awareness with introspection. But as Sartre writes in the passage above, authenticity requires awareness of the self in a social situation. The authentic Jew embraces rather than flees his 'condition as a Jew'; inauthenticity is flight from one's 'situation', 'Situation' is a term of art in Sartre's writing, and refers to the 'ensemble of limits and restrictions' conditioning a person's actions.15 A situation is a synthetic whole and includes the 'biological, political, economic, [and] cultural' conditions of action.16 Famously, Sartre claims that the category 'Jew' is socially created by the institutionalized gaze of an anti-Jewish culture.17 Understanding one's situation therefore requires understanding the social self. So, the target of one's self-awareness is not merely one's actions, but one's situation, especially one's being-for-others. A person exhibits selfawareness only when he acknowledges that self-shaping is a social

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process that requires a negotiation between the subjective and the objective dimensions of the self. One of Sartre's main purposes in ASJ is to show that dominators (Hegelian masters) are in bad faith.18 The dominator thinks that he is independent of others, but in reality he is dependent upon them. He needs the recognition of his victim, though he dishonestly and inauthentically pretends he does not. So the dominator fundamentally misunderstands himself because he attempts to define himself in isolation from the other. He thinks his domination proves his superiority and hence his independence from the other, but to be superior to the other is to need him. A closer look at the long passage above reveals that in addition to self-lucidity, an authentic person assumes the 'risks and responsibilities' that the situation involves. Sartre emphasizes repeatedly that accepting one's responsibilities is a necessary condition of authenticity. 'The anti-Semite flees responsibility as he flees his own consciousness.'19 'Authentic liberty assumes responsibilities, and the liberty of the anti-Semite comes from the fact that he escapes all of his.'20 Similarly, the authentic Jew is 'responsible for himself, like all men', despite being oppressed.21 Sartre is far from precise about the nature of responsibility. Not only in ASJ but also in other works of the period, Sartre floats between very different notions of responsibility. This is no surprise given that Sartre's published works in ethics were outlines and sketches, rather than systematic treatises. Sartre's works should be seen as a point of departure for existential ethics, not as the final word on the subject. (Sartre of all philosophers would have been horrified at the thought of us treating his statements on ethics as final!) So towards the goal of defending existential ethics (not merely expositing Sartre's text), let me suggest a distinction among three types of responsibility relevant to authenticity. Sartre employs each of these notions of responsibility (at some point or another) during his discussion of authenticity and in his political and ethical works more broadly.22 The first notion of responsibility is the standard, causal notion of moral responsibility according to which a person is morally responsible for some event X if he intentionally causes X. Since this notion of moral responsibility is similar to criminal liability (with its two conditions of mens rea and actus reus), I will also speak of it as the notion of moral liability. In BN, in a short section titled 'Freedom and Responsibility', Sartre defines responsibility in terms of liability. 'We are taking the word "responsible" in its ordinary

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sense as "consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or of an object".'23 To see that Sartre uses the notion of responsibility as liability, we need only think of his polemics against colonialism, racism and all forms of domination, in which Sartre blames others for the harms caused by their actions. Just as he says, Sartre often uses responsibility in its 'ordinary' sense, especially in his frequent moral and political critiques. Spitting fire at Europeans who were complicit with the Nazis, Sartre writes 'there is not one of us who is not guilty and even criminal; the Jewish blood the Nazi's shed falls on all our heads'.24 The notion of 'guilt' Sartre invokes is simply an alternative way of expressing moral liability. Only if an agent has caused a harmful action can we blame him or find him guilty. All oppressors are liable for the harm that they cause their victims. Appealing to the ontological freedom of those victims is not exculpatory. 'The prisoner is always free to try and run away, it if is clearly understood that he risks death in crawling under the barbed wire. Is his jailer any less guilty on that account?'25 It is obvious that a primary sense in which Sartre uses the term 'responsibility' is as a substitute for 'moral liability'.26 Corroborating my view are Sartre's claims that agents are responsible for omissions and unintended consequences of action. Let us take omissions first. An omission is an abstention from action. We can only make sense of responsibility for an omission if the omission is a form of action (or passive inaction). A person is held liable for their omissions. Thus the notion of responsibility for an omission is a specification of moral, causal liability. Sartre's claim that people are responsible for omissions is well known. Admittedly, in BN Sartre makes a wildly implausible claim about the scope of liability, suggesting that responsibility goes far beyond causal liability. 'Man condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.'27 In other works Sartre reigns in the scope of liability, by explicitly endorsing liability for omissions. 'One is always responsible for what one does not try to prevent.'28 Elsewhere Sartre gives an example of a citizen of a nation at war, claiming that the citizen's passivity (that is, omitting the act of protest) amounts to causing the war; the citizen thus incurs liability for the existence of the war.29 Sartre hopes that his remarks on liability for omissions will address the ethical problem of complicity. Being complicit in the commission of an evil, he contends, is a blameworthy act. For example, 'A young bourgeois is an oppressor without exercising any

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violence on a worker. This in no way signifies that he is not morally responsible for the oppression in question.'30 (Below I question the plausibility of Sartre's notion of liability for omissions.) In addition to liability for omissions, Sartre argues that agents are liable for unintended consequences of their actions. In BN Sartre gives the example of a careless smoker who accidentally sets a fire. The smoker, though he did not intend to set the fire, is nonetheless blameable. In NE Sartre also claims that agents are liable for the unintended consequences of their actions.31 Rather than physical consequences of action, Sartre focuses on the case of the social meaning of action. If I speak and am misunderstood by another person, for example, I still must own up to my words. No matter how disparate intention and outcome, 'the action is mine and I must assume responsibility for it, that is accept being defined by it'.32 So one type of unintended consequence is misinterpretation of one's actions. Again, whether or not this is a plausible view is not my concern at this point. I only wish to show that Sartre utilizes the causal notion of moral responsibility. I believe this has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. I now turn to a second notion of responsibility, distinct from responsibility as liability. Especially in WIL, but on occasion elsewhere, Sartre appeals to the notion of role responsibility. I will define a role responsibility as an obligation or duty that attaches to an agent via her occupancy of a social role.33 A teacher's responsibilities include lecturing and grading; a police officer's responsibilities include serving and protecting; a parent's responsibilities include taking adequate care of one's children. Sartre claims that writers have a responsibility to combat oppression. He argues that writers qua writers (not writers qua humans) must combat oppression. For the moment we should bracket the implausibility of claiming that the social role 'writer' carries a unique obligation to combat oppression. The relevant issue is to appreciate the philosophical move that Sartre attempts, namely to locate important ethical obligations in social roles, rather than human nature, natural law or universal duty. Finally, there is a third sense of responsibility that permeates all of Sartre's ethical and political writings, but which has no definitive textual statement. I have just mentioned Sartre's attempt to lodge the responsibility to combat oppression in the role of writing. Sartre also writes as though all humans, no matter what their station, are obliged to combat oppression. Sartre's claim that all humans ought to 'will the freedom of others' is well known.34 I am suggesting this is a third notion of responsibility because it resembles a natural duty

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rather than a role obligation or a causal liability. A natural duty applies to all humans, regardless of their roles or their voluntary acceptance of the duty.35 While Sartre is opposed to the traditional Kantian notion of duty, he appears sympathetic to the claim that respect for others is an ethical requirement binding all humans, irrespective of their particular ends. Assume it is true that everyone must will the freedom of others, and in particular combat oppression as a concrete limitation of freedom. Cashing out this obligation in term of either roles or liabilities is difficult (although Sartre gestures towards both approaches). Take role responsibility first. Intuitively, the obligation to 'combat oppression' would attach to the role of a union organizer but not a carpenter. Most social roles have no direct relation to the obligation of combating oppression.36 Further, most social roles would generate obligations to a small range of particular individuals, not to others generally. For example, the role of a medical doctor is to heal patients. Just as the ancients posed the question 'Can a person be a medical doctor without being paid?' we can pose the question 'Can a person be a medical doctor without combating oppression?' Clearly the answer is yes. In fact, even if we ask the stronger question 'Could a person be a good medical doctor without combating oppression?', the answer is yes. To draw this conclusion is not to divest social roles of all moral obligations, but to show that 'combat oppression' or 'respect others generally' is not an intrinsic responsibility of most ordinary social roles. Sartre might point out everyday effects of oppression that are experienced in ordinary social roles. Many roles involve racial exclusion, gender bias, class bigotry, etc.37 For example, a teacher's primary role obligation is to lecture, grade and meet with students; but what if one teaches in 1957 in Little Rock High School, where blacks are denied their constitutional and moral right to attend de-segregated schools? The issue is whether the teacher has an obligation qua teacher to see that the educational rights of black students are met, and whether this obligation is best understood as an obligation to 'combat oppression' or 'respect others'. It strikes me as accurate to say that the teacher is obligated qua teacher to see that her students are treated justly, and not discriminated against or oppressed in classroom. But these obligations do not add up to the generic obligation to 'combat oppression' or 'respect others'. Role obligations do not provide a reason for average

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citizens in average roles either to become crusaders for justice or to treat all other humans with respect. A different possibility would be to attempt to define the obligations to 'respect others' and 'combat oppression' as causal liabilities. Sartre suggests this direction, not only in ASJ, but also in his anti-colonial writings.38 Average French citizens are causally liable for the unjust suffering of native Algerians because they are complicit in the government policy of colonialism. Sartre summarizes his view in the pithy phrase: 'We are All Assassins'.39 The rhetorical effect of Sartre's view is one thing, its philosophical defensibility another. The self-described purpose of Sartre's political essays was to make his readers feel guilty about systematic social harms.40 His aim was not to provide a precise theory of causal liability. From a philosophical perspective, the main shortcoming of Sartre's view is the blanket ascription of individual liability for systematic social harms. For example, Sartre blames all French citizens equally for the actions of the French government and the French settlers in Algeria. Thus the sentiment 'we are all assassins'. But one cannot attribute a causal liability in absence of a causal mechanism. As stated above, liability for omissions can be accounted for on the model of causation. But crucially - and this is the point Sartre misses - the omitted act has to be both possible and reasonable for the agent. For example, I can only blame a person for not 'preventing social harm X', if (1) his actions could have prevented social harm X and (2) it was unreasonable for him not to have prevented social harm X. By the term reasonable I mean that the omitted act would be judged by most people as the right and necessary thing to do in the situation, given the overall consequences. I mean to rule out cases of heroic acts such as suicide, losing one's family, permanent poverty, etc. Sartre might rejoin that preventing the social harm is a sufficient but not necessary condition for ascribing liability. Perhaps the power to minimize a given social harm is sufficient for incurring liability. But the following statement does not seem accurate: 'John, a US citizen, is morally blameworthy for the existence of poverty in the USA because John has the power to minimize poverty in the USA'. Judgements of this type are too vague to be helpful or accurate. In sum, Sartre's error is to stretch the notion of moral liability for omissions too far. 'We are all assassins' is not a helpful or accurate view of moral responsibility. A more precise account of liability for omissions is needed. Once this account is given, the initial question

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remains: Can the obligations 'respect others' and 'combat oppression' be viewed as moral liabilities? On this line of thinking my basic reason for caring about others would be as follows. Others are being harmed and I can reasonably prevent this harm. Therefore, I ought to prevent this harm. This argument is fair enough. There is no shortage of systematic social harms of the sort Sartre was quick to point out (racism, poverty, violence, etc.). But the argument is unsatisfying as an attempt to ground a basic obligation of respect. My respect for others should not be contingent upon my ability to reduce harm done to them. Further, a basic obligation of respect should instruct me to do more than abstain from harming others. In short, Sartre presents us with a substantial difficulty to resolve if we are to make good the promise of an existential ethics: if there is a general obligation to respect others, the source and nature of this obligation must be established. Sartre's gestures towards a role account and a causal liability account are unsatisfactory. My reason for distinguishing three variations of responsibility has been to provide a clearer analysis of existential authenticity. Authenticity requires accepting responsibility. In discussing the notion of responsibility I have already brought us to (what I call) the third condition of authenticity, namely respect others. Recall that the standard view takes authenticity to consist in (1) lucidity and (2) responsibility. My main revision to the standard view is to include respect for others as a third condition of authenticity. However, my attempt to revise the second condition of authenticity led me to discuss two particular responsibilities respect others and combat oppression. So why am I calling respect a third condition of authenticity, rather than simply a moment of the second condition? My first motivation is clarity. For too long existential authenticity has been assumed to be a subjectivist ideal that is incompatible with obligations to others. Thus I wish to show that respecting others is as important to authenticity as awareness and responsibility are. Second, Sartre's attempt to derive the obligation of respect from causal and role responsibilities is questionable. I claim that the intersubjectivity of the self and the need for the self to be recognized through others provides a strong justification for the obligation of respect. Let me now turn to a fuller description of the third condition of authenticity. In addition to having a lucid self-awareness and a disposition to accept one's personal responsibilities, an existentially authentic person must have a basic disposition to respect and care

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about other people. Authenticity is, therefore, incompatible with behaviours like murder, torture and domination, which are all paradigm instances of disrespectful, dehumanizing treatment of others. Using my revised existential notion of freedom, I can state that respect for others requires abstaining from direct and indirect forms of coercion. To respect another person I must not coerce him. However, I am adding a slightly stronger condition, which is that I must desire that he not be coerced. Such a desire is, I take it, implicit in the notion of a 'disposition' to respect others. It is not necessary to attempt to pin down the exact time, place and manner in which this disposition should become active. Since authenticity is so frequently said to be a subjective ideal, my initial goal is to show that Sartre believes authenticity requires respecting others. If we look only at Sartre's formal definition of authenticity, cited above, then we will miss the third condition of authenticity. By taking a wider view of the text of ASJ, however, the third condition comes into clear relief. The anti-Semite, who is inauthentic, misrecognizes the freedom of the Jew. Anti-Semitism consists not just in bad faith (misrecognizing one's own freedom) but in making the same mistake about the other's freedom. The two phenomena are related: I attribute a thinglike essence to myself and the other in order to maintain my sense of superiority. Just as I am innately, biologically superior to the Jew, the Jew is innately, biologically inferior to me. Neither of us have to prove our status through action; neither of us merit our status; this status is a pure given, as static as a stone. So, the anti-Semite misrecognizes Jews by attributing to all Jews an unshakeable, fixed, biological essence that drives them to take typically Jewish actions. The anti-Semite makes inaccurate, unreasonable character judgements about the Jew. 'The Jew, he says, is completely bad, completely a Jew.'41 Every action a Jew takes is said to be a Jewish action, 'contaminated' with an undesirable, but often unnamable quality.42 The anti-Semite indulges in a vicious form of stereotyping. He views Judaism as a biological character trait, not a socially constructed role. 'For the anti-Semite, what makes the Jew is the presence in him of "Jewishness", a Jewish principle analogous to phlogiston or the soporific virtue of opium.'43 The anti-Semite has a deterministic, biological view of race. The Jew, who performs evil actions, is caused to perform evil actions by his essence. 'But everything is made clear if we renounce any expectation from the Jew of a course of conduct that is reasonable and in the conformity with his interests, if, instead, we discern in him a metaphysical

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principle that drives him to do evil under all circumstances, even though he thereby destroys himself.'44 Assume for the moment that Sartre accurately describes one pervasive form of anti-Semitism. It is clear how the anti-Semite fails to respect the freedom of other people. He treats other people as things, not as persons. He makes wildly implausible character judgements that harm others. We must remember Sartre's insight, following Hegel, that oppression, mastery and domination are human phenomena. There is a limited, non-mutual recognition of the victim. Thus, while there is a 'metaphysical principle' that drives the Jew to be evil, the Jew is responsible for his evildoing.45 Echoing Hegel's transition from desire to mastery Sartre says, On the other hand, it is necessary in order to be able to have the Jew - for one does not have natural phenomena like earthquakes and plagues of locusts - that it also have the virtue of freedom. Only the freedom in question is carefully limited: The Jew is free to do evil, not good; he has only as much free will as is necessary for him to take full responsibility for the crimes of which he is the author; he does not have enough to be able to achieve a reformation. Strange liberty, which instead of preceding and constituting the essence, remains subordinate to it, is only an irrational quality of it, and yet remains liberty.46 The dominator needs to recognize a minimum of humanity in the victim in order to attain his implicit goals. The anti-Semite could not sustain a sense of superiority if he were to compare himself to a rock or stone, so he must recognize the Jew as a person. I have now shown that, on Sartre's view, authenticity requires respect. The master is inauthentic because he fails to respect his victim. True, the master implicitly recognizes the humanity of his victim. But this distorted, minimal, non-mutual recognition does not suffice for respect. Respect, as I have defined it, is incompatible with torture, murder and oppression. Respect requires abstaining from coercion and desiring that the other be free from coercion. Let me take stock. Existential authenticity requires three conditions. First, authenticity requires overcoming bad faith. A person must have a lucid awareness of himself and of his situation. Since the self is intersubjective, an authentic person must understand the networks of social dependency that are necessary for self-identity, including the major social roles he occupies. Second, an authentic

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person must embrace his responsibilities. He must accurately understand his causal liabilities and own up to these liabilities. He must also understand and perform his role duties. Finally, and most importantly, an authentic person must be disposed to respect the freedom of other human beings. An authentic person must not pursue his own freedom at the expense of the freedom of others. The main message of ASJ is that oppressing others is inauthentic. Any attitude towards the other that amounts to domination in Hegel's sense - attempting to reduce the other to a servant or tool in order to establish one's selfhood and freedom - is inauthentic. Mastery is always inauthentic. The reason mastery is inauthentic is not merely because it is a form of bad faith, but because mastery is a failure to respect the other's freedom. At this point I would like to give more content to my view of existential virtue by replying to the common worry that authenticity would tolerate obviously vicious behaviours such as murder, torture and domination. Properly understood authenticity requires overcoming bad faith through the project of self-awareness, embracing all of one's responsibilities and respecting others. But the standard view reduces existential authenticity to the first two of these three conditions. In fact, this standard view is so pervasive that it is difficult to find philosophers who take authenticity seriously enough to defend its merits as an ethical ideal. Even the Sartrean Thomas Anderson, who has devoted two books to Sartre's ethics, believes authenticity is an indefensible form of ethical subjectivism. Anderson endorses what is undoubtedly the most frequently and persistently voiced objection to existential authenticity, namely that authenticity licenses authentic torturers, murders and Nazis. Anderson writes, if a mass murderer like Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, has a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, namely that he has lured to his apartment, killed and dismembered over a score of gay males, and has accepted personal responsibility for it, as he finally did by confessing to these crimes, he would fit Anti-Semite and Jew's definition of authenticity!47 The fatal flaw of Anderson's reading is that he overlooks the third condition of authenticity, respecting others. The third condition provides a decisive answer to the authentic murderer objection. The murderer is inauthentic because he fails to respect others. By any standard, murder is a failure to respect the victim.

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Anderson also fails to capture the substance of the first two conditions of authenticity. Dahmer does not escape bad faith simply by knowing that he has killed others. And while Dahmer does meet the condition of embracing responsibility, the reason he meets the condition is different than Anderson suggests. Let me first discuss self-awareness. Dahmer does not achieved self-awareness by acknowledging that he has killed other people. First, he would have to understand his 'situation' as a killer, which includes his being-for-others. He would have to understand that his acts are perceived as vicious and immoral. (Some sociopaths are said to be incapable of understanding the social meaning of their actions.) Let us assume Dahmer does understand that others perceive him as ethically vicious. Dahmer is not yet self-aware in the existential sense. Self-awareness requires understanding the intersubjective constitution of the self. Dahmer misunderstands himself because he attempts to assert himself through domination. Domination is an internally contradictory attempt to establish a stable, explicit self-identity. As a dominator, Dahmer fails to acknowledge that his selfhood and freedom depend on the selfhood and freedom of others. Dahmer is literally in the position of Hegel's master who kills his slave - the corpse does not recognize the master and thus the master's implicit aim of a stable, explicit self is frustrated. Note that Dahmer may in fact believe that he is self-aware. Dahmer may believe his sense of self is best confirmed through killing. But the sense of power received from killing is a 'false independence', an attempt to define himself for himself, and not through others. Thus Dahmer cannot be existentially authentic; he fails to meet the first condition of authenticity, overcoming bad faith through self-awareness. What about the second condition of authenticity, embracing one's responsibilities? Anderson suggests that by confessing Dahmer assumes his responsibilities in Sartre's sense. Several comments are in order. First, the verb 'to assume' is ambiguous. To assume could mean to fulfil rather than flout one's responsibilities. To assume could also mean to admit to or own up to one's responsibilities, which does not entail fulfilling those responsibilities. Further, as mentioned above, responsibility could refer to a causal liability, a role duty or an obligation of all humans. If authenticity only requires admitting to one's responsibilities, rather than fulfilling them (as Anderson claims), then Dahmer's confession may be regarded as an assumption of his responsibilities.

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(Dahmer's confession consists in him saying that he did in fact kill others though he knew, or now knows, that he should not have done so.) Such a reading strikes me as inadequate. Talk is cheap. Existential character analysis goes deeper than verbal assent or cognitive attitudes and judges people on their actions. Authenticity must be expressed in action. So, assuming one's responsibilities requires both admitting to and acting according to one's responsibilities. Through a mere confession, Dahmer would not assume his responsibilities in this more stringent sense. Thus Dahmer would also fail to meet the second condition of existential authenticity. Let us take the analysis of responsibility a step further. Notice that assuming a responsibility has a different meaning depending on whether we are employing a causal or a role notion of responsibility. To assume one's causal liabilities could only mean to own up or willingly accept the appropriate praise or blame for one's past actions. It could not mean to fulfil a liability. Speaking of fulfilling a causal liability makes little sense. A liability is something one simply has. I am morally liable for an event X if I intentionally cause X, but to intentionally cause X is not to fulfil X. A role responsibility, on the other hand, is something one both has, and something one may either fulfil or not fulfil. In my role as a teacher I have the responsibility to give lectures and grade assignments. Say I am too lazy or drunk or preoccupied to teach and grade. Then I do not fulfil my responsibilities. In addition to failing to fulfil my role responsibilities, I may also try to deny that these responsibilities are mine. I claim that as a teacher I need not grade papers and lecture. I thereby fail to own up to my role responsibilities. (Keep in mind that these previous remarks go beyond anything Sartre says explicitly. My hope is to offer a more explicit and coherent answer to the question of what existential authenticity requires of an agent. Sartre's analysis of authenticity is fecund, but it is up to us to sort out the weeds from the flowers. With this in mind, let us return to the case of the serial killer and ask whether he assumes his responsibilities.) Take causal liability first. Since it is meaningless to speak of fulfilling one's causal liabilities, assuming one's causal liabilities amounts to owning up to, that is, explicitly recognizing and accepting one's liabilities. If authenticity requires owning up to one's causal liabilities, then authenticity requires admitting to one's actions and accepting appropriate praise for good actions and blame for bad actions. So Dahmer assumes his liabilities if he admits what he has done (he admits that he has killed others), and if he accepts the

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judgement of others (he accepts the fact that he is seen as a murderer, and admits that murder is seen as a vicious, ethically condemnable behaviour). So if Dahmer admits his past actions of killing others, and fully accepts society's judgement that he is ethically vicious, then he meets the condition of assuming his causal liabilities. However, merely admitting that one has acted but not admitting the praise or blame that others attach to one's action would not suffice for assuming one's liabilities. Owning up to one's liabilities in the existential sense means fully accepting the judgements of others, that is, accepting the fact that these judgements condition one's selfidentity. It is no surprise that the existentialist is concerned with the assumption of liability as a mark of character. Let me rehearse why others' judgements condition self-identity before we examine the Dahmer case. Self-identity is a social project. I cannot meaningfully give myself an identity in a vacuum; others must recognize my identity. With respect to an analysis of action, the same considerations apply. The meaning of an action is defined socially, intersubjectively, not simply through the intention of an agent. Writing is a useful model of intersubjectivity: my intentions alone do no define what my words mean; the other's look is required. Just as miscommunication is possible in speaking and writing, others may misunderstand any of one's actions. However, the agent must accept the fact that action is a public affair and that others will judge the meaning of his acts. The validity of other's judgements can be challenged. For example, a speaker may blame his audience for misunderstanding him. But there is a difference between challenging the validity of another's judgement and dismissing the effect of this judgement. Assuming a liability requires admitting that the way others see my action is coconstitutive of the meaning of the action. Intention is insufficient. Just as the meaning of a text is socially negotiated, action in general is socially negotiated. So, to meet the condition of liability, Dahmer must accept the fact that others see him as ethically vicious, and accept the fact that his self-identity is negotiated publicly. Dahmer appears to meet this condition. Or rather, the mere fact that Dahmer performs vicious, ethically condemnable acts does not preclude him from accepting his liabilities in the existential sense. Dahmer may well accept the fact that others judge him as a vicious serial killer. If he is honest about the fact that his self-identity is, at least in part, constituted by the way others see him, then Dahmer meets the condition of assuming his liabilities.

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Is this conclusion worrisome? I think not. I have already shown that a reflective and repentant murderer (like Dahmer) would fail decisively the third condition of existential authenticity. He does not respect others' freedom. Showing that a reflective murderer meets one of three necessary conditions of authenticity is not a compelling reason to reject authenticity as an ideal. The force behind the authentic murderer objection comes, at least in part, from the intuition that we should not praise honesty inand-for-itself, without further consideration. Being honest about a vicious lifestyle does not make a person ethically virtuous. This is a very old worry raised and answered most decisively by Aristotle. A person may exhibit appropriate fear in the commission of a horrendous crime. Either we say that he was not genuinely brave, not in the strong, moral sense of the term brave; thus we define bravery as appropriate fear only in the commission of just ends. Or else we say bravery simply is appropriate fear, and we should only praise some forms of bravery, namely those forms that are exhibited justly. Further, as Aristotle eloquently says, one swallow does not make a Spring. Just as one bad act does not suffice for the character judgement 'bad person', exhibiting one ethical virtue does not suffice for the judgement 'ethical person'. Aristotle's remarks quickly deflate the worry behind the authentic murderer objection. Even if authenticity reduces to honesty (it does not; honesty is necessary but not sufficient for authenticity), the character judgement 'James is honest' is not equivalent to the character judgement 'James is, all things considered, a good person'. Authenticity is one important ethical virtue; it need not be viewed as the only ethical virtue. I think authenticity is more properly understood as a template for virtue rather than a discrete virtue (just as the mean is Aristotle's template for particular virtues such as justice, wisdom, moderation, etc.). Further, by calling Dahmer an honest serial killer, we are taking a narrow view of honesty (parallel to the claim that bravery is 'appropriate fear' rather than 'appropriate fear in the commission of a just act'). The main difference is the further intuition that we ought to be honest about the bad acts we have performed, not only honest about the good acts we have performed. If we are not merely looking retrospectively at past actions, but also at ourselves in the moment, the question becomes 'Should we perform bad acts honestly, openly and with reflection?' The clear answer is no. The existentialist view I defend is consistent with this answer. First, honesty and clarity are ethical virtues, but they are not the sole measures of morality. Second,

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authenticity requires honesty and respect for others. So I embrace both of Aristotle's strategies. Just like the wider view that bravery requires just acts, authenticity requires honestly embracing acts that respect others. Even so, authenticity is not a complete virtue in Aristotle's sense. The judgement 'James is a good person' goes beyond the judgement 'James is existentially authentic'.48 A further driving force behind the authentic murderer worry is that the murderer may be fully aware of how others see him, and yet he may refuse to allow this judgment to affect his self-image. A historical example of this phenomenon is the Nazi Adolf Eichmann who, as Hannah Arendt has shown, admitted his complicity in killing millions of Jews.49 Further, Eichmann was lucidly aware that international society saw him as a mass murderer. However, Eichmann steadfastly denied the validity of society's judgement. He identified as a soldier, not a murderer. So, Eichmann owns up to his causal liabilities because he admits what he has done. Eichmann also acknowledges the social meaning of his action: he accepts the fact that society sees him as a mass murderer and he allows others' judgements to condition his self-identity. He says to himself, 'I am a hero, though others think I am a monster'. The Eichmann case also allows us to consider role responsibility. Eichmann believed himself to be dutifully executing his role responsibilities. And horrifyingly, Eichmann was in fact dutifully executing his role responsibilities. As the head of the division of the Gestapo devoted to Jewish Affairs, Eichmann's primary role was to coordinate the transportation of Jews. He performed this role well. During the Anschluss, Eichmann's career-boosting 'success' was the forced expulsion of 150,000 Jews out of Austria in only 18 months. Later he would be just as 'successful' at his job of sending hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps. So despite the obvious horror and immorality of the role that Eichmann occupied, he did in fact accept the responsibilities of his role and perform these responsibilities with reflection. Is Eichmann existentially authentic? Obviously not! Most decisively, Eichmann is inauthentic because he fails to respect others. Murder, torture and oppression do not respect other human beings. Eichmann was not merely complicit in mass murder, torture and oppression; he was an active and leading organizer of these crimes. Existentialists have a quick and decisive answer to the 'reflective Nazi' worry. Just like Aristotle, the existentialist says we must look beyond honesty and reflection when we make judgements

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of moral character. And just like the judges at the Nuremberg trials, the existentialist can reject the defence of 'just following orders'. What about the first condition, self-awareness? It is tempting to offer the same analysis of Eichmann as I offered regarding Dahmer. Eichmann is a dominator. He is in bad faith about his own freedom. He wished to define himself as a hero, but only by annihilating those who fail to see him as a hero. Thus the other who is dominated is not only the Jew, but anyone who is an enemy of 'Germany' and of 'Germanness'. Yet, if we accept Arendt's portrait of Eichmann, our analysis must change. As Arendt paints him, Eichmann does not fit Sartre's psychological portrait of the anti-Semite. Eichmann did not hold deeply anti-Semitic opinions or base his identity on the innate inferiority of 'the Jew'. The 'banality' of Eichmann's crimes consisted in his overly technical, exclusively bureaucratic outlook on his actions and his role. Perhaps Eichmann saw himself as a killer, but definitely not a murderer. (On trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann never denied his complicity in mass murder, but was outraged when accused of beating a Jewish boy with his own hands.) There are two lessons here. First, a role responsibility is not sufficient to guarantee the morality of the act or the actor. The role itself must be just. The National Socialist Party was a vicious, criminal, unjust organization. 'Dutifully' fulfilling one's role as a Nazi does not exculpate one's crimes. Thus not all role responsibilities are alike. Basic justice appears to be a background condition for a role to issue genuine moral obligations. This conclusion is consistent with the view of existential authenticity as outlined so far. Second, Eichmann's denial that he was a murderer is an act of bad faith. Nazi crimes required massive bureaucracy to coordinate efforts of hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of whom could claim to be 'just doing my job' without dirty hands. The problem of complicity is precisely that each person passes the buck and fails to accept responsibility for his own part in an orchestrated crime. It is as though Eichmann admitted to pulling the trigger on a loaded gun pointed at a victim's head, but then denied responsibility for the fact that the bullet killed his victim. The intersubjective theory of the self has political implications: if I do not honestly and openly confront the social nature of my actions, then I will have a wildly distorted image of my moral responsibilities. I have now offered an answer to the authentic murderer objection. The murderer fails to be authentic on a number of grounds. Most importantly, the murderer necessarily fails to respect his victim.

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Further, the murderer may fail the tests of self-awareness or responsibility. The common mistake is to try to define one's actions in a vacuum, irrespective of the judgements of others. Last, I have addressed the worry that honesty is insufficient for complete virtue. Authenticity is a more complete virtue than honesty, since authenticity requires a basic disposition to respect others. Having decisively answered the authentic murderer objection, I turn to the issue of how the third condition of authenticity (respect others) can be justified from within the existential framework. It will be helpful to look more closely at Sartre's arguments in NE. NE corroborates my claim that the intersubjectivity of the self is the root justification for the obligation to respect others. An extended commentary on Hegel's master/slave dialectic provides Sartre with the conceptual tools to better explain why authenticity is a social project. Sartre employs (what I will call) a basic 'recognition argument' to ground the obligation of respect. In simple terms the argument is this: since I am what I am through the enriching, recognizing look of the other, an authentic relationship to my own being requires me to embrace my sociality. As a socially, intersubjectively constituted creature, there is no radical separation between the other and me. To fully understand and embrace my self, I must also understand and embrace the other. Authenticity requires fully embracing my self as an object for others.50 In a long section near the end of NE, Sartre offers a two-page outline of his 'Plan for an Ontological Ethics'.51 The subsequent 45 pages is an explanation of the 'conversion' from bad faith to authenticity.52 Sartre repeats his basic definition of authenticity as lucidly embracing freedom and transcending bad faith. '[I]t goes without saying that authenticity lies in unveiling being through the mode of nonbeing. If it is false that I am courageous and false that I am not so, we have to make our concepts more subtle to the point that I can grasp myself in terms of my original tension.'53 In a fruitful nine-page section Sartre explains why authenticity requires embracing the freedom of others.54 Since others 'enrich' my being by constituting me as an object, in embracing my existence (including my objectivity) I simultaneously embrace others' existence.55 Thus '... in authenticity I choose to unveil the Other'.56 The basis of an authentic relation to the other is recognition. 'Note, first of all, that this [authentic relation to the other] cannot be (although we shall discuss this further below) except on the foundation of the recognition of the Other as an absolute freedom.'57 Authenticity

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cannot be a solipsistic project for the simple reason that 'within the world there are other men'.58 NE solidifies the claims I have been making all along: authenticity is a social project; existential virtue takes its mark from the intersubjectivity of the self. The justification for the obligation to respect others is the fact that selfhood is partially constituted by the recognition of others. The recognition argument distinguishes my view of existential ethics from most of its predecessors. A further source for existentialist recognition arguments is Simone De Beauvoir's work Ethics of Ambiguity. Beauvoir's effort to provide a foundation for existentialist ethics is closely related to my own project. In fact, Beauvoir's main theme is the social dimension of authenticity. Unlike Sartre, Beauvoir makes respect for others the point of departure of existential authenticity. [O]ne of the concrete consequences of existentialist ethics is the rejection of all the previous justifications which might be drawn from the civilization, the age, and the culture; it is the rejection of every principle of authority. To put it positively, the precept will be to treat the other (to the extent that he is the only one concerned, which is the moment that we are considering at present) as a freedom so that his end may be freedom; in using this conducting-wire one will have to incur the risk, in each case, of inventing an original solution.59 Beauvoir's recognition argument appeals, unsurprisingly, to the public nature of identity formation.60 '[E]very man has to do with other men. The world in which he engages himself is a human world in which each object is penetrated with human meanings.'61 The objectivity others confer on my actions is necessary for these actions to be meaningful. 'No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to the existence of others.'62 'No project can be defined except by its interference with other projects.'63 Intersubjectivity is primitive ontological fact. '/ concern others and they concern me. 'There we have an irreducible truth.'64 To explain the 'irreducible truth' of intersubjectivity Beauvoir invokes Hegel's master/slave thesis of the self. The futility of domination proves the dependence between self and other. '[E]very man needs the freedom of other men, and in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant; the only thing he fails to do is to assume honestly the consequences of such a wish.'65 Because the

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self is essentially related to the other, 'To will oneself free is also to will others free'.66 Sartre and Beauvoir both suggest recognition arguments as the best means of justifying obligations to others. As a general rule, humans need the recognition of others, ergo they should respect others. If the thesis that the self is deeply intersubjective is accepted, then there is strong reason for each of us to be disposed to respect others. We need the social ratification of others to be fully who and what we are. Let me draw this chapter to a close by reviewing the new portrait of existential authenticity I defend. The struggle for authenticity is a social endeavour. Authenticity does not reduce to ethical subjectivism. Authenticity is much more than a call of conscience or a rally for reflective awareness. Further, existential authenticity has nothing to do with affirming one's roots or heritage. Rather, existential authenticity consists in an open affirmation of the ambiguity of selfhood. In addition to self-awareness and accepting personal responsibilities, authenticity requires embracing our interdependence on others. We are all social creatures. We may choose to shrink from our sociality, but only at a heavy cost. Even egoists, hermits and dominators need the social recognition of others. Authenticity requires accepting the need for mutual recognition. This chapter has shown that the virtue of authenticity, properly understood, is not susceptible to the authentic murderer objection. Authenticity is a substantive virtue, more 'complete' (in the Aristotelian sense) than honesty or self-awareness. Because authenticity requires respect for others, we can say conclusively that murder, torture and coercion in any form are incompatible with authenticity. Even the element of self-awareness required for authenticity goes beyond mere thinking before acting or reflecting upon past actions. An authentic agent must properly understand the intersubjectivity of the self and the practical implications of the need for recognition. The analogy between existential authenticity and virtue in the classical sense has helped us identify the difference between praiseworthy, yet incomplete, character traits like honesty and the more substantial, social character trait of treating others with respect. Genuinely social virtues, those that require positive relations to others, do not fall prey to the standard objection of emptiness, formalness and lack of content. The question that arises is not whether, but how existentialism provides content for and justifies the richly social virtue of authenticity.

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Recall that the defence of authenticity began with an anthropological portrait: the existential self has both subjective and objective dimensions. The error of bad faith involves denying either or both of these two sides of selfhood. Authenticity is the project of properly embracing the self for what it is - an intersubjectively constituted being; a being that is not what it is alone; a being that requires, in a word, recognition. The recognition argument moves existentialism into the category of a truly social ethics. In the past, insufficient attention has been paid to the potential for constructing a Sartrean social ethics around the master concept of interpersonal recognition. Commentators have long noted Sartre's claims that other humans deserve respect and that all humans should be free; yet just as many commentators subsequently charge that Sartre has no meta-ethical justification for these claims. I have critically assessed Sartre's inchoate strategies for justifying obligations of respect, arguing that neither negative liability nor role obligations fit the bill. The best defence for a generic obligation of respect is the argument that we should care about others as a matter of practical rationality. We need the recognition of others; whether implicitly or explicitly, we all solicit recognition from others. Others will only be in a position to recognize us if their basic freedoms are, in turn, recognized by us. Keenly aware of the possibility of slipping in abstract metaphysics, I have emphasized that recognition is a concrete, interpersonal phenomenon, not merely a metaphor or a Kantian abstraction. (The subsequent chapter further demonstrates the concrete nature of Sartrean ethics by defending the recognition argument in the practical context of domestic citizenship.) I noted at the beginning of this study that Sartre sometimes displays what Nietzsche called a 'Dionysian' approach to ethics. The measure of a person's character is the amount of brutality that he is willing to endure. A person's responsibilities are 'total'. This Dionysian approach would render authenticity a virtue suitable for gods and angels, not for mortals. My approach has been very different. I have shown that there is a wide gap between an impressionistic theory of virtue and a philosophically cogent theory. I have tempered the Dionysian moment in Sartrean ethics with a thorough pragmatism. Whereas Sartre exaggerated, for example, the liabilities of average citizens, I claim that liabilities exist only when there is evidence of a distinct causal mechanism. Authenticity is, I admit, a demanding virtue, for it requires lucid awareness, a disposition of basic respect, and a disposition to accept causal liabilities and role obligations. But authenticity is not such a demanding virtue that it is fit only for gods.

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Authenticity is a moral virtue that is both possible and important to embrace in contemporary contexts.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

ASJ 90. ASJ 90. Ethics of Ambiguity (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 2000), at 17, 61, 142. A. Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), at 27. STE at 65, 66. STE 68. STE 55. ASJ 90. W. McBride in Sartre's Political Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), at 63. ASJ 90. ASJ 90. ASJ 135. ASJ 91 ASJ 91. ASJ 59. ASJ 59. ASJ 68, 69, 72, 76-8. See L. Gordon, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism (Atlantic Highlands: Humanity Books, 1995). ASJ 27. ASJ 32. ASJ 107. Thomas R. Flynn, in his important work Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), catalogues and analyses several different concepts of 'responsibility' found throughout Sartre's corpus. I wish to explain why my view of Sartrean responsibility differs from Flynn's. Flynn argues that Sartre's basic concept of responsibility is a non-legal, non-causal and nonstandard notion according to which responsibility is 'authorship'. (At 13) Flynn offers an original schema for categorizing the senses in which Sartre uses the term responsibility; for example, Flynn distinguishes 'noetic responsibility', 'dispositional responsibility' and 'ontic responsibility' as different variations of the 'authorship concept'. (At 13-16) Flynn's discussion is illuminating, but I disagree with Flynn on three substantial matters. First, Sartre is not opposed to the common, causal notion of responsibility as Flynn suggests. The blame that attaches to agents who commit crimes such as racism and oppression can best be understood according to the common causal notion of responsibility. Second, by claiming that Sartre does not adhere to a causal notion of responsibility, Flynn underemphasizes the ambiguity, indeed contradictions, in Sartre's

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view of responsibility. Sartre frequently states that a person's responsibilities extend as far as that person's power (this is clearly a statement of a causal view of responsibility). Sartre just as quickly turns around and says that a person is responsible for some effect, absent awareness and ability to prevent the effect. Because the latter type of claim not only contradicts the causal notion of responsibility, but because it is highly dubious in its own right, I choose to defend Sartre's causal theory of responsibility and jettison what Flynn eventually admits is an overly demanding, indeed 'angelic' theory of responsibility. (At 197) Third, if Flynn is correct, that Sartre's view diverges widely from the 'common' notions of responsibility, then Flynn (and Sartre) cannot appeal to common intuitions about the implications of 'being responsible' for some effect. On the view that Sartre has a non-causal view of responsibility, the claim that person X is 'responsible for Y' is stripped of its normal meaning. An ascription of responsibility implies that specific moral and legal judgements are appropriate. Praise and blame, punishment and reward attach to responsibility. Flynn writes, for example, that '... Sartre is saying, the serialized individual is responsible for the violence that his leaders choose to exercise against the Other', but without a description of praise/blame, punishment/reward or the particular moral judgements that apply to the serialized individual, claiming that this individual is 'responsible' does not help advance a moral theory of responsibility. (At 149, emphasis added) BN 707. ASJ 135. ASJ 75. As stated above, Flynn disagrees, claiming that Sartre chooses '"authorship" in place of "causality"' as the core meaning of responsibility. (At 14) Note that if 'authorship' is used in the ordinary sense, then 'authoring' X amounts to intentionally causing X. The basic case of responsibility is, I submit, responsibility for some event, effect or consequence. Assume the event is a war (one of Sartre's favourite cases). To 'author' the war is to bring about the war through one's purposeful actions, for example, by voluntarily joining the military. Even when Sartre stretches the notion of responsibility to cases of collective action (no single individual can cause a war), he need not abandon the basic concept of causal liability in favour of a non-causal notion of 'authorship'. Further, most of the plausible ascriptions of responsibility that Sartre makes, for example, responsibility for one's selfhood or values (see Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism at 14, footnote 29) can be understood as liability for one's character, which is consistent with the causal sense of responsibility. Undoubtedly, Flynn would charge that my view does not account for the 'pervasive' character of Sartrean responsibility, that is, the idea that one is responsible for 'the world and every feature in it'. (At 14) First, the pervasiveness of responsibility can be an extension of the causal notion; witness Sartre's frequent claim that if a person does nothing to stop a harm (a war, for example), then she is responsible for the harm. Causal responsibilities can indeed be pervasive. But second, as I have emphasized from the outset, I have no investment in defending the wildly implausible thesis that humans have a 'total', all-pervasive responsibility, even if Sartre himself, at some

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point or another, defended this thesis. Flynn admits that his own work 'refrain[s] from critical assessments of Sartre's work' yet he also claims that Sartre has a 'coherent and adequate theory of collective responsibility'. (At 196 and xi, respectively) I suspect even had Flynn carried out a serious criticism of Sartre's view of responsibility, he would be more sympathetic to the 'total' view of responsibility that I reject. In sum, what we would gain by adopting Flynn's 'authorship' concept, we do not want, namely a view of responsibility that makes us liable for what we do not cause, answerable for what are powerless to change, and responsible for what is not ours. BN 707. WIL232. BN 708-9, NE 490 and WIL 232. NE347. NE 107. NE 107. On the notion of role responsibility see M. O. Hardimon, 'Role Obligations', Journal of Philosophy (Vol. XCI, No. 7, July 1994). See 'Existentialism is a Humanism', in Essays in Existentialism (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1977). 'Now in contrast with obligations, it is characteristic of natural duties that they apply to us without regard to our voluntary acts. Moreover, they have no necessary connection with institutions or social practices.' J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 114. I thank James D. Wallace for helpful comments regarding social role obligations and oppression. See 'A Plea for Intellectuals', in Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1974). See Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2001). On Flynn's view, Sartre's writings evince a non-causal view of responsibility, according to which 'each is answerable for the injustices perpetrated by the "others, elsewhere"'. (At 144) Flynn calls this 'serial responsibility' and says that if we are serially responsible we are ' "passive accomplices" in whatever evils the respective collective inflicts-endures'. (At 145) Flynn, following Sartre's lead, shoots from the hip. If we are to retain the moral sense of responsibility, then we must carefully and accurately apply moral judgements, especially when these judgements are extremely serious accusations of murder, oppression and the like. 'We are all assassins' is a vague, impressionistic, unhelpful and mostly likely counterproductive bit of rhetoric. Further, complicity is, in fact, best understood as an application of the causal notion of responsibility. Despite their limits, legal concepts overlap significantly with the ethical concepts here in question. The problem of complicity with the Nazis was, for example, systematically, thoroughly and fairly addressed at the Nuremberg Trials, where the prosecution utilized the concept of 'accomplice liability', familiar in domestic criminal law. (For a philosophically interesting, but ideologically disturbing criticism of the extension of legal categories such as accomplice liability to the case of the holocaust, see the work of accused Nazi war criminal August von Knieriem, The Nuremberg Trials (Chicago: H. Regnery Co, 1959).)

Authenticity 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

WIL 81. ASJ33-4. ASJ 33-4, 89. ASJ 37. ASJ 39. ASJ 39. ASJ 39.

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47 STE 55. 48 I do not offer a full portrait of the virtues in this work, which is devoted to clarifying the foundation of Sartrean virtue ethics. 49 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Faber and Faber, 1963). 50 Other commentators mention in passing the importance of recognition for an existentially authentic lifestyle. (See in particular, Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, at 40-1, and Anderson's STE.) However, the present work is the first monograph devoted overwhelmingly to the theme of recognition and authenticity. 51 NE468. 52 See NE 471-516. 53 NE474. 54 NE 499-508. 55 NE499. 56 NE 500. 57 NE 500. 58 NE499. 59 EA 142. 60 EA71. 61 EA74. 62 EA67. 63 EA71. 64 EA 72, emphasis added. 65 EA71. 66 EA73.

7 Engagement Most readers are familiar with Sartre's concept of litterature engage. The writer, Sartre tells us, has a responsibility to speak to the political themes of his times. If he does not, then he is implicitly recommending the status quo, which is likely to contain at least some measure of ugliness and brutality. Sartre places an enormous burden of personal responsibility on the shoulders of writers, suggesting that they bear a unique liability for the social ills of their era. As the previous chapter shows, Sartre's view of responsibility is deficient on several counts. Sartre has an implausibly strong theory of negative responsibility (liability for omissions). Further, the attempt to locate generic obligations of respect in social roles is unpersuasive. I will argue that despite these shortcomings existential engagement is an important ethical virtue. Engagement, as I depict it, is a species of the broader existential virtue of authenticity. Engagement is simply authenticity with respect to the political. (I use political to refer widely to any domain of power, coercion and justice; this definition includes but is not limited to state power as an instance of politics.) Engagement is not, then, simply a virtue for writers and intellectuals. Engagement is similar in kind to familiar democratic virtues such as public spiritedness, civic loyalty, Aristotelian justice and Rousseaun participation. The vice that accompanies engagement is apoliticality. But politicization is appropriate only at particular times, in particular manners and in particular places. The sentiment that 'everything is political' is a dead end, just as the sentiment 'we are all assassins' yields no workable theory of responsibility. I mean to distance myself from the view that existential engagement reduces simply to 'getting involved politically'. The cry 'get political' is vastly too indiscriminate to be of real use. If we want a viable existential virtue, then we must not attempt to cut butter with a butcher knife. Aristotle was right: exercising a virtue is a subtle, context-sensitive craft that requires independent judgement and practical wisdom. An ethics of engagement can, at best, adumbrate character types that are either deficient or promising, not furnish exact recipes.

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As a species of authenticity, engagement has three main conditions: awareness, responsibility and respect. In Sartre's original case of engaged writers, here is how the three conditions would work. Engaged writers reflect upon and disclose a political situation for the sake of readers (condition one, awareness). The writer fulfils his responsibilities by doing what he can to reduce the suffering of others, namely using his writing to spread awareness; hopefully his writing will invite others to accept their personal responsibilities (condition two, responsibility). Finally, the writer has both a formal respect for his audience (he writes for them and needs them as readers) and a concrete respect for the suffering of those he hopes his writing will aid (condition three, respect others). My main aim in this chapter is to show that existential engagement, a concrete variant of authenticity, is a social virtue that entails obligations to others. Engagement instructs us to care about the civic conditions through which our identities are shaped and sustained. To be engaged means, among other things, to be willing to identify as a citizen in the relevant contexts and to accept the burdens and benefits of citizenship. The most important burden of citizenship is the willingness to work to insure the equal and just treatment of one's fellow citizens. This basic obligation, which I will call the obligation of civic respect, includes the responsibility to do what we can, as Sartre says, to reduce the systematic social harms that cause suffering to others. I begin my analysis with Sartre's original portrait of engagement in WIL. Sartre writes about engagement as first and foremost an ethics of writing. The first moment of engagement is awareness. The writer should strive to reflectively embrace his vocation and all that it entails. 'I shall say that a writer is engaged when he tries to achieve the most lucid and the most complete consciousness of being embarked, that is, when he causes the engagement of immediate spontaneity to advance, for himself and others, to the reflective.'1 As we have seen, existential self-awareness requires knowledge of the intersubjective conditions of identity formation. Awareness, Sartre reveals in WIL, requires a comprehension of one's social roles. Contrary to BN where Sartre associates roles with bad faith (recall the waiter), in WIL roles are seen as necessary to the full formation of self-identity. When Sartre becomes engaged as a writer he does not mask and flee his freedom; he embraces his freedom.2 Sartre's insight is not limited to the one case he examines in depth (French writers), but extends to social roles and institutional identities generally.

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Sartre's claim that social roles can be embraced authentically is ah logical application of his thesis that the self is intersubjective. The main difference is that the master-slave metaphor implies an I-thou relation, rather than an impersonal, institutional relation. Social roles are impersonal. To be engaged, then, requires an awareness of one's situation, including the impersonal social roles one occupies. But engagement, as distinct from authenticity, is specifically a political ideal. An engaged person is aware of the networks of coercive power into which he finds himself thrown. Engagement requires a broad concern with 'injustice in all its forms'.3 The second moment of engagement is embracing one's personal responsibilities. I have discussed three relevant types of responsibility: causal liability, role duty and universal obligation. In WIL Sartre utilizes the strategy I discredited above, namely, defining generic obligations of respect as role obligations and causal liabilities. 'The writer's duty is to take sides against all injustices, wherever they may come from.'4 The writer's duty comes, Sartre says, from his unique ability to expose social problems widely and effectively. That is, the writer who does not combat injustice is negatively responsible for omitting the act of combating injustice, which it is reasonable to expect of him. What explains Sartre's attraction to such implausible theses? A partial explanation is Sartre's literary temperament and flair for drama, which he used to shock the French public. More basically, though, Sartre fell into a common trap among left-wing intellectuals: he overestimated the role of intellectuals in creating social change.5 Idealistically, Sartre hoped that intellectuals could be the driving force behind mass movements for social improvement. With the great power of intellectuals, came great responsibility. So Sartre thought.6 To correct Sartre's view, political engagement must be seen as a virtue for all people. All of us, not merely writers, have a civic obligation to care about the justice and injustice, poverty and prosperity, the harm and the flourishing of our fellows. This, in my view, is the primary sense of political responsibility that is required of a politically engaged agent. An engaged agent must care about the suffering of others, and do what he can to prevent and alleviate this suffering. This responsibility is political, first, because it concerns coercive power, namely the coercive power involved in systematic social harms like racism and poverty. Second, engagement is a political virtue because to be engaged requires caring about the

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suffering of other members of the polis. Engagement is thus similar in spirit to familiar democratic civic virtues which instruct us to respect our fellow citizens by treating them as equal members of a democratic community. The generic obligation to treat other members of my polis with civic respect is the third condition of engagement. There is a seamless connection between the second and third conditions. To embrace one's basic political responsibility is to care about the suffering of others. To care about the suffering of others is to treat others with civic respect. As I have shown in the case of authenticity, there is clear evidence that as Sartre conceived of it, existential virtue requires respect for others. The difficulty is justifying obligations to others from within the existentialist ontology. My hypothesis is that the intersubjectivity of human selfhood holds the key. If human selves are conceived of as deeply social creatures, ratified and make explicit only through the uplifting look of others, then there is an obvious reason to respect others. I should respect others because my selfhood depends upon them. The current discussion of engagement will allow me to offer a more concrete defence of my hypothesis. Because of the crucial nature of the claim that recognition justifies obligations to others, I spend the bulk of the rest of this chapter on that topic. I suggest that obligations of civic respect can be justified through recognition arguments. The civic version of a recognition argument concerns one's civic identity. I hinted at the need to specify a determinate identity in my discussion of recognition earlier. Recognition must be concrete. I recognize another as an X, where X is a friend, colleague, family member, teammate, etc. Not only must recognition be concrete - that is, relative to some determinate social relation or role - but mutual recognition requires that its parties are both members of the same role or group. The person who best recognizes me as a friend must be another friend. So recognition takes place according to determinate social roles and I am recognized with respect to a determinate social identity. I submit that citizenship is the social role (and social identity) most fundamental to obligations of civic respect.7 In the democratic tradition citizenship has always carried with it the requirement of treating other citizens justly, respectfully and equally. A citizen is a free and equal member of a community. This assumption about the nature of citizenship, as Rawls has pointed out, is intrinsic to all democratic theory.8 Moreover, in classic democratic theory all the particular virtues (such as justice, civic pride and public spiritedness)

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fall under the broad umbrella of good citizenship. A final test of the connection between citizenship and civic respect is to take the first person standpoint and reflect on the implications of thinking of oneself as a citizen of a democratic nation. Surely this identification carries with it the expectation to be treated as a free and equal person, deserving of a minimum of respect. And surely identifying as a citizen implies that I ought to treat other citizens as free and equal persons, deserving of the same minimal respect I expect from them. So, in trying to locate the social identity that is most relevant to a basic obligation to treat others with civic respect, citizenship is the obvious choice. An existentially engaged person must be willing to recognize others as citizens and treat them as free and equal members of the community. Recognition arguments are a unique strategy for justifying obligations of civic respect. I should respect others civilly, that is, recognize them as citizens, because I seek a similar recognition from them. I, too, desire to be seen as a citizen. For my own implicit goal to be achieved (to be recognized fully as a citizen), I must be willing to recognize others as citizens. Non-mutual recognition is an unsatisfying and ultimately self-frustrating attempt to coerce the other into recognizing me. Non-mutual recognition fails because the dominated other is not in a position to grant the recognition I desire. I desire to be seen as a citizen by another who is equal to me, that is, by another who is a citizen. Mutual recognition requires a rough equality between parties: I must be willing to recognize the other as a citizen in order for the other to be able mutually to recognize me as a citizen. Since my purpose is to describe how recognition yields obligations of a particular sort, namely civic obligations, I can be more concrete. The relevant social role is citizenship. My hypothesis is that since citizens need other citizens to affirm their social identities (as citizens) there is a basic obligation of respect entailed by identifying as a citizen. The history of citizenship in the USA bears out this hypothesis. First, and most basically, the US case illustrates that citizenship is a category of social recognition, not merely a mechanism for asserting legal rights.9 Secondly, however, the US case shows that there is a strong connection between identification as a citizen and civic obligation. In describing the role of citizenship in the USA, I appeal to what scholar Judith Shklar calls the 'quest for inclusion', namely the attempt by disenfranchised groups to attain social recognition of their status as Americans.10 I agree with Shklar that one of the best vantage points for understanding citizenship is to ask what

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citizenship means for groups who struggled to attain the position of citizen. Historical analysis strikingly reveals that for marginalized groups who have been previously denied citizenship, becoming an American was understood primarily as an attempt to gain social standing, not legal and political power. The essence of citizenship is recognition. In the language of T. H. Marshall, 'social citizenship' is just as important as political and civic citizenship.11 Being a social citizen means having the status of a full, equal person, not merely legally, but culturally as well. In the everyday institutions, especially those of civil society (education, commerce, leisure and religion), one must be seen as having equal standing. Voting rights, for example, cannot be understood only as legal instruments that give citizens the power to change policy. 'The ballot has always been a certificate of full membership in society, and its value depends primarily on its capacity to confer a minimum of social dignity.'12 Citizenship '... has never been just a matter of agency and empowerment, but also of social standing as well'.13 Consider low voter turn out in many Western democracies. For most citizens, the importance of a right to vote is social status, not the power to change policy. Legal rights are important. However, one of the main reasons excluded groups struggle for inclusion is to attain social citizenship. Recognition is at the core of democratic citizenship. The implications of conceiving of citizenship as recognition are vast. The civic recognition argument assumes that when we identify as citizens, we seek recognition from others of our status as citizens. The obligation to respect others is then derived from our desire for recognition. Do we in fact seek such recognition? The struggle for inclusion is strong historical and empirical evidence. Our need for recognition is revealed most powerfully when thwarted: being marginalized, misrecognized and denied equal standing is a serious harm. Suffrage, emancipation and the civil rights movement testify to the importance of social recognition. Equal standing, which is to say basic social membership, is perhaps the most fundamental of all social goods.14 So, the need to be recognized by others as an equal member of society is pervasive and fundamental. Given the evidence that citizenship is a category of social recognition, what remains is the connection between identifying as a citizen and being obligated to respect other citizens. Put differently: Why must the existentially engaged citizen respect others? In an effort to be concrete, let me remain with the case of American citizenship and the quest for inclusion. I propose to show

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that both excluded minority citizens and established majority citizens have strong reasons to respect one another. I begin with the reasons that majority citizens have for respecting the marginalized minority. The parallel I am drawing to Hegelian master/slave relations should be obvious. Citizens in the established majority are in the position of Hegel's master: they claim to be independent of the dominated other, while actually being dependent upon the dominated other; in bad faith they deny this dependency. The historical facts I am assuming are as follows. Until the post-war Amendments, US citizenship was defined both legally and culturally through the institution of slavery.15 To be a US citizen was to be free (not-aslave) and white (not-a-black). The Naturalization Act of 1790, invoked by the Supreme Court in 1857 to deny citizenship to blacks, defined citizens as 'free white persons'.16 As Shklar argues, 'The value of citizenship was derived primarily from its denial to slaves, to some white men, and to all women'.17 For example, the enfranchisement of property-less white males was achieved, in part, through the argument that to maintain property restrictions on voting reduced whites lower than black slaves; but even propertyless whites deserve better treatment than black slaves. The social category of citizen was constructed though an opposition to a racial other. To identify as an American citizen was (for most Americans) to implicitly identify as free and non-black.18 These historical facts suggest that the majority of Americans were in the position of Hegel's master. The white citizen claims his humanity by asserting the sub-humanity of the black slave. But to define oneself as a citizen in opposition to blackness and slavery is to depend on the black slave for one's identity. The obligation of civic respect is derived from this dependency. If I define myself through the other, then I ought to respect the other. Further, systematic inequality between white citizen and black other illustrates the self-defeating nature of non-mutual recognition. This self-defeat is the basis of my claim that the white citizen has a strong reason to respect the black other. The white citizen should respect the black other because the white citizen implicitly desires this recognition, but subsequently precludes it from occurring. When the white citizen demands that the black other recognize him as a citizen, he contradicts his own ends. The black other is not in a position to confer this recognition because his 'look' is discredited in advance. The black is assumed to lack the qualities necessary for citizenship, including humanity, rationality, education, civility, restraint and self-ownership. If the other is incapable of

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embodying these qualities, then he is also incapable of recognizing and affirming these qualities in others. A possible worry about the foregoing analysis is that a white citizen might not in fact solicit recognition from the black other. While I explore this objection more decisively below, the short answer is that American whites did in fact solicit recognition. Consider the institutionalization of black deference to whites (for example, blacks knew not to look whites in the eye). The number of blacks in America by the middle of the nineteenth century necessitated social contact between whites and blacks. The attempt to cordon off blacks could only go so far. Social policies like Plessy v. Ferguson arose from the prevailing view that it was insulting for blacks to share public spaces with whites unless there was a systematic, public acknowledgement of white superiority. In short, it is clear that American whites did solicit recognition from black Americans. A second way of explaining why the dominating citizen should respect the dominated other is to point out the instability of the self that results from a systematic misrecognition of others. Thomas Jefferson is a case in point. Jefferson was a lifelong slave master, but he implicitly saw through the thin logic of contemporary racism. '... [W]e shall probably find that they [Africans] are formed in mind as well as in body on the same module with the "Homo sapiens Europaeus".'19 Jefferson would condemn as a 'moral and political evil' his own practice of slaveholding. Clearly in bad faith, Jefferson hoped that future generations would not make the mistake of his generation, namely slavery. '[T]he minds of our citizens may be ripening for a complete emancipation of human nature.'20 The internal contradiction of Jefferson's self-image is apparent: he was a master to slaves, which required him to believe that there was a rational justification for the inferiority of blacks; yet as a scientist and enlightenment thinker, Jefferson knew that he was biologically and politically equal to his black slaves. Jefferson is truly an 'unhappy consciousness', that is, a person whose self-image oscillates unstably between irreconcilable poles. Jefferson's story illustrates the cost of forming a self-image predicated on domination. One's beliefs contradict one's behaviour. In bad faith one exploits the tension between an inner, subjective self and an outer, social self. Jefferson's hope that the future will bring 'complete emancipation' is an insincere effort to excuse himself from his current crimes. The result is psychic instability and disharmony.

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Expressed in terms of civic obligations the point is this: Jefferson should recognize the humanity of his slaves because he implicitly recognizes them already; it is only through bad faith that he hides this recognition from himself in the vain attempt to reconcile his actions with his conscience. Existential engagement requires honestly embracing the political conditions of self-formation and accepting the need for recognition. Accepting the need for recognition entails a basic respect for others upon whom one depends for recognition. Jefferson approximates the existential virtue of engagement, as evidenced by his claim that black slaves are just as human as white Europeans. But Jefferson slips into bad faith and psychic discord to the degree that he continues the project of domination and rationalizes his position as a slaveholder. Let me turn now to the third relevant factor illustrated by the struggle for inclusion. I am arguing that the need for recognition explains why citizens should respect other citizens. The previous discussion revealed that a majority citizen has a reason to respect an excluded citizen. But the excluded citizen also has a reason to respect the majority citizen. Minority citizens have a straightforward reason to respect the majority: they need their recognition. To become Americans, blacks had to be seen by whites as free and equal members of the polis. 'Civil freedom' is US Supreme Court Justice Harlan's term for such social recognition.21 Civil freedom is denied, for example, by precluding blacks from riding in white train cars, and by segregating public institutions generally. Harlan's phrase 'badge of servitude' also captures nicely the harm of systematic public misrecognition. If black citizens are to be recognized as free and equal persons, then they must be recognized as citizens not only legally and politically, but culturally as well. Who has the power to grant this civil freedom, this recognition of social citizenship, if not the established majority? From this dependency comes the obligation of respect. The excluded citizen ought to respect the established citizen, since it is the established citizen who is in the position to recognize the excluded individual. The excluded individual desires to be recognized. Perhaps it sounds odd to suggest that a victim of injustice is obligated to respect the perpetrators of injustice. Let me clarify. The slave's obligation of civic respect is not an obligation to obey the master's commands. Further, to establish a basic obligation of civic respect does not rule out the possibility of other, conflicting obligations, which may well override the obligation of civic respect. I take it as obvious that victims of coercion have rights of self-defence,

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for example. The simple point is that if you desire recognition from another person, then you must be willing to respect the basic freedom of the other person. The other will only be in a position to satisfy your desire for recognition if he is free. So whether I am a member of a dominant group or a member of a minority group, I have a compelling reason to recognize other citizens as free and equal members of the polis. In sum, the quest for inclusion demonstrates the pervasiveness and importance of the desire for recognition in civic life. Citizenship is more than a legal instrument; citizenship is a category of mutual recognition. The civic version of the recognition argument shows why citizens should respect other citizens. I should respect others as citizens because my standing as a citizen depends on them. Others will only be in a position to recognize me if they, too, are recognized as citizens. The motivation for the foregoing discussion of civic obligation has been to develop a clear picture of existential engagement. Existential engagement requires awareness, responsibility and civic respect. The most important of these three conditions is the last. The original Sartrean theory was weak in one crucial respect: it did not offer a plausible explanation of why an authentic, engaged individual ought to care about others. What I call the 'recognition argument' addresses just this weakness. Many questions remain unanswered, including the exact shape and extent of civic respect, the situations where civic respect should yield to other considerations and a careful description of which determinate behaviours are consistent with civic respect. But these questions cannot be posed unless existentialist virtue is first squared with the basic ethical insight that other people deserve respect. The democratic equivalent of this basic ethical claim is the notion that citizens are free and equal members of the polis. My goal in this chapter has been to show that the virtue of civic engagement, as conceived of by existentialists, coheres with the normative basis of democracy, namely the conception of the citizen as a free and equal person who respects others. To bring this chapter to a close, I would like to address two possible objections to my view of existential engagement. My primary claim is that obligations of civic respect can be derived from the need for intersubjective recognition. The following two objections challenge this claim. A first objection is that recognition is merely a dressed up description of tit-for-tat bargaining. My real reason for respecting others is instrumental gain: I will be more likely to be respected by them in the

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future. If this were the case, then the existentialist story about self-formation would contribute little to our understanding of civic obligation. Recognition arguments, however, in contrast to instrumental bargaining, require the thesis that humans are deeply intersubjective. For example, assume recognition were merely an instrumental exchange. I would then care about the civic standing of others because I would be worried that a reduction in others' liberties would lead to a reduction in my liberties. I might make a slippery slope argument. Eroding your liberties now might lead to eroding my liberties later. Since I care about my liberties, I should not allow your liberties to be eroded. I might be next. By contrast, a recognition argument assumes that eroding your liberties is an intrinsic loss for me, not a merely instrumental loss. This can be shown if we think of the category of citizenship as a publicly defined institution. Eroding your liberties as a citizen changes the meaning of citizenship. Say, for example, the government legislates that all blonde citizens will be disenfranchised. According to the recognition thesis, this injustice is an intrinsic blow to me. The disenfranchisement affects the entire category of citizenship. My self-identity as a citizen is compromised. Like Jefferson, I cannot claim to be a citizen without assuming the social meaning of my citizenship, including its contradictions. I am citizen qua brunet. The contradiction is that my citizenship should have nothing to do with my hair colour. So unlike an instrumental exchange, which posits a future loss of my liberties as a reason for me to care about your loss, the recognition argument says that an erosion of any citizens' liberties is an inherent loss for all other citizens. Changing the social meaning of the category of citizenship changes the conditions of self-identity for all citizens. In replying to the above objection I have introduced the socialinstitutional dimension of recognition.22 Recognition takes place according to public rules and roles. The role that is most relevant to civic respect is citizenship. The institutional dimensions of citizenship are multiple and complex, but undoubtedly law, culture and custom inform our everyday, interpersonal patterns of recognition. The immediate point is that social customs (including law) affect interpersonal recognition. For example, when black Americans were granted equal civic standing by the XHIth, XlVth and XVth Amendments the social meaning of 'American citizen' was altered. Legal customs ratified and in some cases presaged the equal treatment (i.e. mutual recognition) of blacks in everyday social relations.

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But we should not conclude that obligations based on recognition reduce to the golden rule. The main difference is that recognition arguments ground obligations of respect in concrete social relations. My reason for respecting the other is the fact that my self-identity depends upon the other. For me to be treated by others as an equal citizen of our polis, I must be willing to treat others as equal citizens. If instead, I reduce the other to a non-citizen or a non-equal, I nullify his ability to recognize me. The unrecognized other does not count as someone who can recognize me. Perhaps the golden rule is not different in spirit from the recognition argument just offered. But recognition arguments are grounded in an intersubjective theory of the self that is independent of the golden rule. Thus recognition arguments offer a reason for civic respect that is unique and that does not reduce to a mere instrumental exchange. Not only does existentialism have the resources to justify basic obligations to others, the justification provided is significantly different from commonly asserted instrumental obligations. A second potential objection is that recognition arguments do not deliver what they promise, namely a generic obligation to respect others. Even if the intersubjective thesis of the self is true, it does not follow that all or most other people must recognize a given individual's social identity. Most social identities are supported by small groups of others, not others at large. Thus, I would only have an obligation to respect those others upon whom I depend for my self-identity, not others generally.23 This is an important objection, which I foreshadowed above. (I claimed that white Americans did in fact solicit the recognition of non-whites.) By way of reply, I refer to the concept of an explicit and stable self introduced earlier in this work. A self is explicit when it is expressed not merely in an inner disposition, but through the external material world. The social self is the most obvious and important form of explicit selfhood. Others turn me into an object through their gaze. My selfhood is richer, less alienated, when the look of others affirms my subjectivity, freedom and projects. An inexplicit self would remain trapped in an inward life, claiming never to be understood by others. This would be an alienating life indeed. Further, the self is made explicit through physical matter (one's property) and custom (one sees one's projects expressed in the legal codes one must live under; these laws are freedom enhancing, not merely freedom limiting). The objection claims that a self can be established independently of most other people, rendering obligations to generic others false.

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But the cost of such a narrow self is alienation. The narrow self is alienated from itself (the social self), alienated from others (one does not find oneself ratified by the looks of others), and alienated from social institutions such as legal customs (the law is seen as foreign imposition on my will). So non-alienated identities do in fact depend on the recognition of a wide range of others. A further reply is to reflect on the instability of self-identities that are not ratified widely. If, for example, I see myself as a great poet merely because I have a circle of three friends who worship my poetry, I have an unstable, shallow self-image. I isolate myself from the world of publishers, other poets, potential readers and the public at large. Such isolated, sheltered identities are fragile and immature. Jefferson's guilty conscience also illustrates the instability of a self caught between conflicting subjective and objective realities. So the objector is correct. Narrow self-identities can be formed, which would minimize social dependence and minimize obligations to others. But the costs are high. A narrow self-identity is inexplicit, unstable and alienated. A final reply to the objection draws on the institutional dimension of identity. Citizenship is a social identity that, by its very nature, depends on a large group of others. Because of this dependence, citizens have obligations to a large number of others. Which others? Clearly those who can mutually recognize me as a citizen, namely other citizens. In modern democracies, which are large and impersonal, citizenship is an anonymous social category. Any member of the relevant social role, in this case citizenship, ought to be in a position to mutually recognize me, which requires me to be disposed to recognize any other citizen. An implication of this proposal is that the scope of civic respect is limited to other citizens. I am only obligated to treat other citizens with civic respect, not other humans generally. But this is not an objectionable conclusion. Let me explain. Existential ethics seeks a non-transcendental justification for respect. The social category of citizenship is a first and important approximation of a universal obligation. Obligations of civic respect are universal with regard to the given members of a nation, not universal with regard to the members of the human species. The worry about recognition based on one's humanity, not one's citizenship, is that one might relapse into a formal, idealistic and non-social ethic that is not based on intersubjective recognition.24 As humans we do identify as members of a global world, not merely as members of national communities. Thus we do recognize

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others as 'world citizens' and 'humans'. What the existentialist needs is a set of social customs and legal instruments where recognition takes place. International law, human rights legislation in particular, fits this bill. The existentialist, I think, would have a convincing case about the structure of mutual recognition in international society. Just like the case of national citizenship, world citizenship is a bond tested and affirmed only in particular contexts. The most likely context of asserting one's recognition of world citizenship is human rights abuse and international injustice. I may have good reasons to care about another person's suffering even though that person is not a member of my nation. For example, I may assert that all humans are entitled to such and such treatment (perhaps as described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The recognition argument works just as it does in the case of domestic citizenship. For me to be recognized as a world citizen, I must recognize others as world citizens. Violations of world citizenship affect me because they affect my ability to identify and to be recognized as a world citizen. My primary goal in this chapter has been to reconstruct the virtue of existential engagement in light of my foregoing analysis of existential ethics. Engagement is, I have shown, the political version of authenticity. An existentially engaged person must be aware, responsible and respectful of others. My portrait of engagement has contributed to a new understanding of Sartre and described an important contemporary civic virtue. Three points stand out in particular. First, the civic respect required of engaged citizens is based on the concept of freedom as non-coercion. Basic respect amounts to respecting others' freedom from coercion. I must not be disposed to coerce others and I must be disposed to care about others when they suffer through coercion. I must do what I reasonably can as a citizen to prevent other members of my polis from being tortured, murdered, oppressed and otherwise harmed through injustice. Second, I criticized Sartre's attempt to ground universal obligations of respect in role duties and moral liabilities. Instead, I have argued that universal obligations of respect are based on the need for intersubjective recognition. Obligations of citizenship are (quasi-) universal, since these obligations are owed to all citizens equally. I have gestured towards the possibility of a truly universal obligation of respect that would extend to world citizens. Finally, and most generally, I have shown that existential engagement is not just for writers anymore. Engagement is a generic civic virtue that should be embraced by citizens of democratic

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communities. Existential ethics is indeed compatible with the basic insight of democratic theory: citizenship is a universal social category that carries with it the obligation to treat others as political equals. Existentialism contributes to the democratic tradition by supplying a novel justification for obligations of civic respect. Existentialism locates the justification for civic respect in the dynamic of mutual recognition.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5

WIL 77. WIL 48. WIL 229. WIL 22, emphasis added. M. Walzer offers a refreshing contrast to this elitist portrait of social change. See The Company of Critics (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 6 Later in life Sartre admitted his exaggerated view of intellectuals. See Sartre By Himself (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). 7 See R. Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Dagger writes, 'Unlike personal autonomy, which relates to the abstract notion of the self, civic virtue refers to a particular role that a person may occupy - the role of citizen. Someone exhibits civic virtue when he or she does what a citizen is supposed to do. In this respect civic virtue is like the other virtues, which typically relate to the performance of some role or the exercise of a particular skill.' (At 13) 8 See J. Rawls, 'Lecture I: Fundamental Ideas', in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 9 On the importance of recognition for democratic politics generally see C. Taylor, 'The Politics of Recognition', in Multiculturalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 10 American Citizenship: The Question for Inclusion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 11 'Citizenship and Social Class', in Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). 12 American Citizenship, at 3. 13 American Citizenship, at 3. 14 See M. Walzer, Spheres of justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), Chapter 2, 'Membership'. 15 American Citizenship, at 12-16. 16 See Dred Scott v. Sanford 60 US (19How.) 393 (1857). 17 American Citizenship, at 16. 18 A second example of the construction of citizenship through exclusion is Justice Harlan's justification for his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. Excluding blacks from the white public institutions, Harlan argued, was absurd given that Chinese would be legally allowed in white institutions; since blacks are obviously more American than the unassimilable Chinese, blacks should be

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allowed in public institutions. In Harlan's argument, we see a shift in the definition of American citizenship; citizenship is predicated on the difference between white and Chinese, not white and black. T. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1955), at 61-2. Note 87. See Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 US 537 (1896). I devote a subsequent chapter to describing how recognition is more than an I-thou dynamic. See Chapter 9. T. R. Flynn hints at this objection when he writes that recognition only establishes a 'formal' interconnection between concrete individuals which 'leaves unanswered the objection that the recognition of everyone's freedom does not seem required'. (Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, at 42) A critic might accuse me of overlooking Sartre's criticism of universal identities such as citizenship. In ASJ, for example, Sartre warns against the bad humanism implied by invoking categories such as 'humanity' for moral purposes. (ASJ 111-13, 117, 121) Sartre also expresses scepticism about citizenship in his famous essay 'Election: A Trap for Fools'. (See Life/ Situations, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977) However, Sartre's primary criticism is that liberal democracies have an abstract rather than a concrete understanding of social identities. My proposal turns the social category of citizenship into (what Sartre would call) a 'concrete universal'. Mutual recognition is an actual social practice, not a conceptual or mythical relation among citizens. Citizenship and its accompanying rights and obligations are rooted in concrete social relations. Lastly, I note that any politics of recognition (not just Sartre's) must strike a balance between universal, abstract identities and particular identities. For one possible resolution see C. Taylor, 'The Politics of Recognition', section II. Taylor claims that the basic liberal principle of equal, universal rights for all can be infused with a 'politics of difference' that preserves rather than erases particularity.

8 Recognition in Groups At this point I have provided a clear picture of the existential virtue of authenticity, and its cousin, engagement. We have seen that mutual recognition serves triple duty for existential ethics. The non-mutual recognition of the master/slave relation expresses the ontological starting point of existential ethics, namely the intersubjectivity of the self. The desire for recognition and the failure of non-mutual recognition justify obligations of respect. Finally, mutual recognition has emerged as a normative standard for evaluating the ethical desirability of human relationships. In my attempt to provide a basic defence for an existential ethics of engagement and recognition, I have focused primarily on interpersonal relations. This emphasis, necessary for expositional clarity, should not confuse us into thinking that existentialism provides only an interpersonal ethics. The social self is formed through both personal and impersonal processes. Many important social identities are impersonal. Engagement, as we have just seen, requires embracing the (quasi-)universal identity of domestic citizenship. The main aim of the current chapter is to show that existentialism has an account of the institutional dimension of mutual recognition. Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 (hereafter CDR) provides just such an account. Sartre argues in CDR that mutual recognition is a group phenomenon. Group life is a spectrum, Sartre tells us. At either end of the spectrum lie social structures where recognition is largely absent. Sartre calls such structures 'serial'.1 In serial social structures, humans are related to each other like 'peas in a can'. There is no active recognition of other members or sense of group unity. Recognition is most alive in social structures where there is a concrete, common goal that all members openly acknowledge and work towards. Such 'group praxis', as Sartre calls it, dissolves seriality. Cooperative action is the best, purest form of mutual recognition. The most important ethical contribution of CDR is Sartre's expansion of mutual recognition beyond I-thou relations such as the reader-writer pact. Action groups of all kinds - political protesters,

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soccer teams, leisure groups, even corporations - exhibit mutual recognition. While Sartre's primary concern with mutual recognition in CDR is sociological rather than ethical, he provides a muchneeded meta-ethical backdrop to support the existential virtues. Expanding mutual recognition beyond an I-thou dynamic is of critical importance for existential ethics. As an I-thou relationship, recognition provides, at best, a normative guide for interpersonal relationships such as love and friendship. But recognition would be a poor guide for the impersonal social groups that make up so much of modern life, including universities, business groups, voluntary associations and nation states. If recognition is, as Sartre claims, the central phenomenon of group life, then existentialist ethics can take on the Hegelian project of discovering the ethical substance immanent in human communities. This Hegelian turn provides existentialism with a strong line of defence against the charge of empty formalism. Two considerations should guide our discussion of recognition within groups. Both considerations are implications of developing a truly concrete ethics. First, we must avoid lapsing into abstract idealism where recognition is merely a superimposed idea and not a social practice. For example, moral rights must be understood as human conventions, not natural, transcendental possessions. Second, recognition must not be seen as a monolithic goal. Existential ethics does not imply simple communitarianism, which desires to transform all impersonal relations into face-to-face relations. Recognition is a complex, diverse phenomenon. There are many different social relations and group types that exhibit recognition. I turn now to a brief description of Sartre's view of mutual recognition in CDR. Sartre makes the striking claim that all human relations imply recognition.2 This does not, however, contradict the basic argument of the CDR, which is that mutual recognition is synonymous with group praxis, and that seriality is the distortion or absence of mutual recognition. Only in cases of extreme disunity is there an absence of recognition. In general, the more serial are the relations within a group, the less mutual is the recognition within the group. At some non-discrete point in the continuum, there no longer is any recognition at all, because there is no longer any human relationship (there is merely an external relationship, a relationship among things not people). So 'serial' relations, as Sartre calls them, imply an absence of mutual recognition. Sartre uses many metaphors to describe seriality. The series is characterized by 'inertia' and 'exis'; humans are related

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'passively' not actively; individuals become 'massified', 'atomized', 'fungible' and 'other-directed'.3 Sartre's memorable examples include a queue standing at a bus stop, a radio broadcast and the phenomenon of public opinion.4 In each example, there is a degree of unity between the members of the series, but this unity is imposed externally, for example through the physical landscape. The dispersed listeners of a radio broadcast are alike only because they are impotent to change the message that they all hear. Likewise, public opinion is a mere statistical account of individual beliefs, not a phenomenon that is holistic in the strong sense. The public does not opine in concert. The public is not a group in the strong sense. So, the series lacks mutual recognition because there is no social interaction among the members which would support the identity of the members. The identity of the members of the series is abstract and conceptual because imposed from the outside. The more dispersed a population, the less mutual recognition is possible; mutual recognition requires the possibility of an identity-affirming interaction among members of the group. An illustration will help. As members of a crowd the people at a bus stop shuffle past one another; they know they are in the presence of other humans, but they do not cooperate with each other.5 Admittedly, there is a weak sense in which impersonal, socially coordinated activity implies cooperation. In the sideways glance that I give another stranger at the bus stop I may 'see myself in the other'. In the other's sideways glance at me I might discern the sentiment, 'you and I are in the same boat'. Like me, the other is waiting for the bus. We are identical in this limited sense. And we both have the goal of getting a seat. But there are two reasons why the limited recognition in a series lacks mutuality. First, I do not 'freely become a means for the other' because I do not help the other attain her goal. We do not share the same goal. The other is trying to get a seat for herself, and I am trying to get a seat for myself. Secondly, mutuality requires equality. I must see other as like me and see myself in the other. In serial relationship the similarity between individuals is unlikely to produce the sense of identification necessary for mutual recognition. One of Sartre's important contributions to the topic of recognition is to show that mutual recognition requires cooperative action. The interpersonal case is just one instance of group cooperation (for example the reader-writer pact). Impersonal groups such as voluntary associations also exhibit mutual recognition to the degree that the members of these associations see themselves in one another and share a fundamental equality as members with a common goal.

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Sartre's notion of recognition as 'freely, reciprocally becoming a means for the other' leads naturally to the thesis that recognition is best realized in group cooperation. Sartre's other main formula for describing recognition, namely 'reciprocally seeing oneself in the other', emerges from the first formula. There is no recognition without collective action. Solidarity must be forged, not discovered. What form then, does mutual recognition take, when mapped onto diverse social groups? Sartre introduces a new concept in CDR, what he calls 'third party mediation', to account for group recognition. Third parties 'mediate' the relationships between group members by providing a common measure and a practical means of collective awareness. Recall that in BN Sartre denied the possibility of simultaneously seeing and being seen. The look was mutually exclusive. While I have shown that Sartre abandons the mutual exclusivity of the look as early as WIL, I have also criticized Sartre for failing to acknowledge that in common interpersonal phenomena such as friendships, we do 'see the other seeing me' because we openly acknowledge our feelings for one another. In CDR Sartre claims that group cooperation requires a third party who stands outside and unifies the group though a look.7 Only 'the third party makes reciprocity visible to itself'. 8 Recognizing the other members of the group as like me requires, Sartre says, a common measure. The typical source of this common measure is a person who stands outside the group and sees everyone in the group as identical. The identity is initiated externally, and must be subsequently brought into the group.9 Therefore, the third must be a member of the group who stands outside the group temporarily.10 Sartre comes to refer to recognition as 'mediated recognition' since the third is a common measure (mediator) between group members.11 With this brief outline of Sartre's view of recognition in CDR, I turn to the ethical implications of group recognition. Surprisingly few Sartreans have attempted to use CDR to formulate normative ethical conclusions. My thesis is that CDR is a defence not only of the value of mutual recognition, but of a particular type of group, namely democratic, non-hierarchical groups. In nondemocratic groups, which is to say groups with centralized structures of authority, mutual recognition is diminished. In democratic groups, where there is power sharing and collective control, a basic equality is established among members. This basic equality allows for the flourishing of mutually recognitive relations among members. Each

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member can see himself in the other. Further, this identity is forged, not found, since it comes about through collective action. Let me explain how Sartre moves from a description of the ontology of group cooperation to the conditions of democratic leadership. The third, as we have seen, is temporarily external to the action of the group. How, then, does the third unify the group externally? One possibility is to take the metaphor of the 'look' literally. In visual perception, a third would unite two collaborators by seeing them both at once. This literal interpretation misses unification through what Sartre calls 'praxis'. Praxis refers to practical activity, work or action. The action of an enemy, for example, can unify a group, but since the enemy remains radically external to the group, the enemy cannot be a third. A third is a group member who through work creates a sense of unity and common purpose for the group as a whole. The position of the third is best realized, then, by those individuals who temporarily direct the action of the group. A third is a 'temporary leader'.12 Like enemies, leaders relate to their groups as complete units, as organisms.13 When Sartre says that leaders mediate the recognition between group members, he means that the leader gives the member a sense that he is the brother or sister of every other member. The leader mediates - stands between - members by providing a common measure. I see myself in you, because you and I have been given task X by our leader. Sartre is, of course, aware that spontaneous group unification may be based on primitive leadership.14 Leadership is one method, not the only method, of providing a common measure between the members of a group. Group oaths and contracts also establish commonality.15 In fact, Sartre claims that stable, long-term groups must be united by an underlying commitment of loyalty, which is often made explicit in a pledge that codifies rights and duties.16 Let me explain Sartre's basic claim, namely that recognition flourishes best in egalitarian, non-hierarchical groups. First, seeing oneself in others requires a measure of sameness between the self and the other. In egalitarian groups, where each member is an equal with respect to a determinate end, there is a basis for recognition. Second, recognition requires freely, reciprocally becoming a means for the other. I am a means when I work towards the group goal. I do so freely if I am not coerced. In egalitarian groups, we must assume that I enter the group voluntarily. I voluntarily accept my role and the rights and responsibilities of that role. By performing my role I am a means for the sake of the group end. Reciprocity requires that other group members also become a means. Others must act for the sake of

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the group goal. When I direct others in action, then they become such means. Reciprocal recognition requires that the other is a means for me, within the same project for which I am a means for him. In egalitarian groups where I have an equal say and equal status, such reciprocal recognition is achieved. Further, the case for recognition within egalitarian groups can be made by examining the absence of recognition in non-egalitarian groups. Recognition breaks down when there are permanent leaders, strict hierarchies, rigid roles and large divisions between the rank and status of members. Sartre labels such groups 'institutions'.17 Sartrean institutions, such as standing armies, are not merely large and stratified. Rather, there must also be no effective communication or dispersion of power between sub-groups and functionaries. Roles must not only be specialized, but rigid and inflexible, where individuals are indeed 'caged' and where they lack the power to creatively shape, refine or restructure the role. Recognition breaks down because the functionary becomes completely regulated and dominated, and there is no reciprocity of power. The functionary is so cut off from the other members of the group that he cannot see himself expressed through their work. The history of modern democracies corroborates Sartre's claim that mutual recognition flourishes in egalitarian groups. There is a strong historical connection between democracy and recognition. Think of social movements against monarchy, aristocracy and slavery. These movements presuppose the value of mutual recognition. To be a full member of a democratic society requires having equal dignity. Democracy requires that each be recognized as an equal 'citizen' or 'person'. Shklar's work (cited earlier) shows effectively that in the USA, social movements for inclusion have primarily been about recognition, self-respect and civic dignity.18 Citizenship is a measure of standing, dignity and equal status. Sartre's view fits with the history of democratic nations for a very good reason. By identifying mutual recognition as the underlying phenomenon of all group cooperation, Sartre implicitly commits himself to the value of democracy. I say 'implicitly' because Sartre never formally identified himself as a 'democratic' theorist. He was openly critical of what he called 'bourgeois justice' and famously said that elections (the mainstays of modern democracies) were a 'trap for fools'.19 Yet he also criticized Europe's treatment of colonized populations who were blocked from participating in democratic elections and who were unfairly excluded from the protections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.20 Sartre's criticism of liberal

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democracy, I contend, is best seen as a dispute within the family of democratic theory. Indeed, Sartre favours radical, socialist democracy.21 But his insight into the nature of recognition and democracy does not turn on his economic convictions (thus I have not defended them here). I defer to the deeper insight of CDR: the purest, most ideal group would exhibit perfectly mutual recognition; mutual recognition flourishes best in democratic groups; thus other things being equal, there is a strong reason to favour a society of democratic groups. 'Perfect' recognition is obviously a philosophical abstraction. But this abstraction provides a normative vision for modern social life. In a nutshell: democratize, decentralize and debureaucratize; strive for groups with flexible roles and revolving leaders; try to foster mutual recognition in groups. From the current perspective, we can see that Sartre's view of mutual recognition within groups deepens traditional democracy theory rather than dismissing it. Existentialists have both an ethical reason for supporting democratic groups (they foster mutual recognition) and a model of ethical life towards which to strive (a society of egalitarian, decentralized groups). A large challenge to Sartre's democratic theory of groups is that some of the most important groups in modern democracies are not, and should not be, egalitarian. Arguably, egalitarianism is not an appropriate generic goal. There is, for example, an important difference between consensual hierarchy and slavery. Democracy may be appropriate for the assembly, but inappropriate for families, religious groups, business corporations and other groups. Michael Walzer, in his work Spheres of Justice, makes a similar point about equality as a standard of distributive justice: the ideal of 'simple equality' would be disastrous.22 And while Aristotle famously says in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics that inequality destroys the egalitarian relationship of friendship, many other social relations are naturally and justifiably hierarchical, for example the relations between teachers and students, patient and doctor or parent and child. Sartre seems to face a similar problem. To begin to reply to this worry, I would like to distinguish two different types of groups. Broadly speaking, voluntary groups are based on contract-like oaths or commitments. Parties are free to join and leave voluntary groups at their will. Examples would include business firms, sports teams, universities, most religious organizations, professional associations, and so on. Traditionally, voluntary groups are associated with the domain of 'civil society', as opposed to the state.23

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In non-voluntary groups, such as the family, membership is attained by birth. One 'joins' a family only metaphorically. Admittedly, even the family is voluntary in several respects. Members can dissociate themselves from their parents. Children can be adopted. One can be 'treated like family' despite not sharing blood, and so on. Yet the typical case of the family involves being born into a group and having little real capacity to leave the group until the age of adulthood. Even in adulthood, there is the sense that 'blood runs thicker than water' and that special obligations are owed to members of one's family. With this rough distinction between voluntary groups and groups that are family-like, we can return to Sartre's democratic group theory. Sartre offers no serious discussion of the family in CDR. His primary examples of groups - soccer clubs, protest groups, business firms, and armies - are all examples of voluntary groups. (I will ask below whether Sartre's group theory can adequately account for non-voluntary groups.) So what is Sartre's reply to the worry that egalitarianism is not an appropriate ideal for voluntary groups? Sartre does not make the claim that radical communitarians make, namely that all social relations should resemble face-to-face, smallscale groups such as town hall meetings. Large, organized groups with structured divisions of labour can allow for high levels of recognition.24 Functional specialization does not inherently prevent mutual recognition. Roles can mediate relations of recognition between individuals in large groups. For example, I can recognize a coworker as a member of the same firm. Can mutual recognition take place between workers who are not equal in rank? Think of the boss-employee relationship. This seems to be a case of a natural hierarchy in Aristotle's sense. There is a justification for the boss's position as master and the employee's position as underling. There may even be a mutual benefit to the relationship. (Recall Aristotle's claim that all master/slave relations entail mutual benefit.) But the inequality prevents mutual recognition: I see you as my boss and you see me as your employee. You (the boss) do not allow me to regulate your behaviour, so there is no reciprocity; you are not a means for the sake of the group goal. Mutual recognition is blocked. One point Sartre overlooks is the possibility of mutual respect between boss and subordinate. The boss may respect his employee's work, even if the boss does not allow the employee to direct the boss's work. The relationship is not the same as a master/slave relationship for several reasons. The boss does not try to dominate

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the employee in the sense of Hegel's master who treats his slave as sub-human. Further, we are assuming that the employee is a voluntary member of the group. The boss directs the employee, but the employee has agreed to be directed (by freely accepting the job). Thus, the boss respects his employee in a way that the master does not respect his slave. But the master/slave metaphor still instructs: in extreme situations boss/employee relations can become master/slave relations. Industrial working conditions in England and USA before child welfare and labour legislation attest to this possibility. Mutual respect within a hierarchy is not the same as mutual recognition within an egalitarian group. What distinguishes the boss/ employee relation from the master/slave relation is not hierarchy (both relations are hierarchical), but mutual respect. The master/ slave relation is coercive, whereas the boss/employee relation is non-coercive. The boss has a basic respect for his employee, which is institutionalized in the form of the employment contract; the employee is there voluntarily. Recognition, as I have maintained all along, is a continuum. The idea of mutual recognition gives us a rational explanation for our intuition that the abusive boss is unjust. The abusive boss distorts the pattern of recognition that is appropriate, expected, normal and healthy, given the particular context. In a non-egalitarian group, such as a traditional business firm, we should not expect perfectly mutual recognition, which would require revolving leadership and radical democracy. At this point in the discussion of recognition within voluntary groups, two questions naturally emerge. Sticking to the example of the boss/employee relation in business firms, we might ask, first, how can the natural hierarchy of business firms be diminished? But given my claim that some hierarchical relations are justified, we must ask: should the natural hierarchy of business firms be diminished? I begin with the 'how' question. The most obvious way a firm could foster mutual recognition would be to eliminate fixed leadership. Nobody would be a permanent boss. Leadership would rotate among employees. This would be a vast departure from the current business norm.25 A less radical proposal would be this. Even if subordinates were not given temporary leadership positions, they could be empowered in their role as subordinates. Like the midfielder who passes to the forward, the employee is an instrumental part of the success of the firm, even if he is not the star. Similarly, boss and employee form a team. Aristotle is correct, that even in natural hierarchies there is dependence. Though the surgeon knows more about surgery than his

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orderly, he depends on the orderly for conducting a successful surgery. The ground for recognition is this dependency. The boss recognizes the employee when he acknowledges his (and the firm's) dependency upon the employee. Now the 'should' question: why should business firms be egalitarian? First and most basically, the moral basis of labour and child welfare law is the fact that free labour is not the same as slavery. Aristotle was wrong: slavery is not a mutually beneficial relationship. Respect - which is to say recognition of the humanity and dignity of the worker - is the moral basis of laws restricting abusive working conditions. The issue is whether the same ethical rationale that prohibits slavery and mandatory 15-hour workdays can be used to support workplace democracy. I think this is unlikely. An appeal to the nature of voluntary group cooperation is unlikely to carry the moral weight of an argument against abuse, coercion, maltreatment and other grave forms of disrespect. Instead the argument for workplace democracy will have to be carried out by appealing to the instrumental and practical benefits of mutual recognition. If employees are seen as cooperative members of a team, then they will be more productive and devoted to the firm. If businesses are democratically run, their employees will be committed, engaged, aware and responsible. In short, mutual recognition is not a procrustean bed. Some hierarchical, but non-coercive, relations are justified. But even these hierarchical relations are often preferable when they are tempered by recognition; for example, we prefer the mutual respect between unequal parties in traditional business firms to relations of dominance. Further, the power and importance of mutual recognition is dramatized in those cases where it is absent. Abusive relations in the workplace and in other voluntary groups can be diagnosed as cases where recognition should be, but is not present. There are, then, good general reasons to prefer voluntary groups that embody mutual recognition over voluntary groups where mutual recognition is distorted or absent. I now turn to mutual recognition in non-voluntary groups such as families. There appears to be an even stronger case against democratizing the family. Families have long been thought of as natural hierarchies. Young children depend on their parents for basic life necessities, including material, social, psychological and moral support. Families are not voluntary groups, so there is no parallel to the basic respect that the boss has for his employee. Finally, there are many types of families, some more hierarchical, others more

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democratic. These considerations challenge the claim that democracy ought to be an ideal for family life. Unlike Hegel, Sartre offers no systematic discussion of recognition with families. Sartre does think the family is a fundamental social group, one that strongly influences the character of individuals.2 Yet non-voluntary groups like families do not obviously fit into the categories of CDR. Sartre ends up construing families as quasi-voluntary groups.27 He points to rites of passage as affirmations of one's place in the family and goes so far as to say 'birth is a pledge'.28 It is unfortunate that Sartre did not present a clearer picture of recognition within the family. The family is, in my view, a paradigm of mutual recognition. Earlier in this work I used the example of friendship to exemplify mutual recognition. I appealed to friendship because of the strong intuition that friendship is an authentic, reciprocal and ethical relationship to the other. I submit that there is an equally strong intuition that family bonds are bonds of mutual recognition. The family is one of the most important sites where individuals come to identify themselves with others and see themselves reflected in one another. Families are crucial for creating and maintaining our self-identities. Hegel labelled the project of developing into a fully explicit adult human Bildung (moral education). Hegel was right to focus on the family as the first and most important social group that shapes a person's sense of self. I think we can square the intuition that families are principal sites of mutual recognition with the Sartrean concept of mutual recognition. Recognition is seeing oneself in the other and freely, reciprocally becoming a means for the other. The members of a typical family do identify strongly with each other. For example, most of us believe that we have strong ethical reasons to treat our families differently than strangers. We think we have ethical reasons to promote our own interests rather than promoting the interests of all humans equally. This suggests a strong connection between selfidentity and family identity. We are also willing to make sacrifices and perform work for the sake of our family members. We expect a reciprocal willingness. Families can be contrasted with relationships of convenience, where we are more likely to 'keep score'. Reciprocity within families is not a 'tit-for-tat'; at least it should not be. The family is a realm where altruism is expected; we act for others assuming they would act for us, but with no demand that they do so. Reciprocity is inherent in the

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family relationship. We notice more when reciprocity is disrupted than when reciprocity is performed. Assume I am correct. The family is a source of genuine mutual recognition. A competing intuition is that families are natural hierarchies. Young children are dependants (slaves) and parents are masters. First, let me clarify what is meant by a family relationship. Among such relationships are spousal, parental, sibling and extended family relations. Even assuming we are speaking of parental relations, as Rousseau points out in the Social Contract, my child may be a nondependent adult.29 There is a strong case for mutuality in most of these relationships. Consider the doctrine of 'coverature' according to which a wife is incorporated into the legal personhood of her husband.30 This doctrine can be explained in terms of the failure of recognition. The wife is divested of her status as person. Legally and morally she is sub-human. Under coverature, quite clear violations of the dignity of women were commonplace. Rape within marriage was said to be impossible, since one could not rape one's self, and for the further reason that the wife was assumed to have already given her complete consent.31 The fact that we see coverature as a gross violation of dignity and basic respect corroborates the importance of mutual recognition within the family. Spouses are equal - equal with respect to their project of creating a family together. Aristotle's view of the family was flawed: the woman is not inherently inferior in the capacity of rational self-direction. The same cannot be said of children. They do lack the capacity of rational self-direction. There is a justification for the hierarchical relationship between parent and dependent child. The inequality between parent and child is much more basic and pervasive than, say, the difference between a midfielder and a forward in a soccer club. The parent-child difference cannot be subsumed under the similarity of membership in the same family. But while the parentchild relation is a natural hierarchy, this hierarchy is neither a master/slave relation nor a boss/employee relationship. The parental hierarchy is temporary and mutually beneficial. Young children are not like employees who can leave a firm. But neither are young children literal slaves. The slave is capable of rational self-direction; through coercion he is denied the power to exercise it. The slave does not benefit from slavery; the child does benefit from his parent's care. Most importantly, the parent directs the child in order to foster the

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child's autonomy; the master does no such thing. Further, it is a reproach to say that a parent treats his adult son or daughter 'like a child', suggesting the importance of recognizing equal status between parents and adult children. So while there is a natural hierarchy which prevents equality and blocks mutual recognition, there is an important difference between the natural hierarchy of parent-child relations and that of the master-slave relation. The parent treats the child as not yet fully human, whereas the master treats the slave as sub-human. Further, though the family relationship is not voluntary, since the young child cannot leave, there ought to be a mutual respect between parent and young child. The parent ought to respect the child as a potential adult. Finally, it must be admitted that a philosophical theory of recognition can make no precise prescriptions about the level and extent of mutual recognition among healthy, non-abusive families. Recognition is indeed an important ethical benchmark for family life. We implicitly use the concept of recognition to gauge the difference between abusive and healthy families. But our theory stops short of claiming that healthy families must be more like soccer clubs than traditional business firms. All our theory can tell us is that if we want to foster relations of mutual recognition within families, then families ought to be more like soccer clubs than businesses. My reason for discussing voluntary and non-voluntary democratic groups has been to show that mutual recognition is an important normative standard. Recognition is a subtle standard that does not reduce to simple communitarianism or undifferentiated equality. There are justified hierarchies. But more often than not, we desire that hierarchical relationships be tempered by mutual respect. I also argued that mutual recognition is tied to some basic ethical judgements about group life. These judgements are both negative and positive. On the negative side, abusive group relations, whether in the family or the firm, can be seen as failures of recognition. On the positive side, the benefits of mutual recognition include stronger, more explicit selves and affirmations of some of our deepest, and most central social identities. In short, mutual recognition is an important institutional standard. We do and should desire to live in a society characterized by egalitarian groups and non-hierarchical values. One main aim of this chapter has been to show that recognition is not merely an I-thou phenomenon. Social groups exhibit patterns of recognition, and thus can be evaluated as either conducive or nonconducive to mutual recognition. We have seen Sartre's defence of

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social unity is also a defence of democracy. Sartre's argument is best represented as a hypothetical imperative, 'If you want mutual recognition, then you ought to favour democratic groups'. But there are such strong reasons for favouring mutual recognition that Sartre ends up defending the classical claim that democratic groups are ethically valuable because they, better than alternatives, foster equality, dignity, mutual respect, selfhood and freedom. The importance of Sartre's contribution can be understood, first, by contrast with simple communitarianism, which would turn all social relations into face-to-face neighbourhood networks. Sartre's careful study of social groups reveals many false targets of criticism. Specialization and scale are not the key factors affecting mutual recognition. Rather, mutuality is created by the power to have an equal say in the action of a group as a whole, and in particular over the rights and duties of one's role. Second, Sartre's group theory has moved us one step closer to a truly concrete social ethics. Humanism is the hope that we will be able to recognize ourselves in all other persons, regardless of social context and particularity. But recognition is best understood as a concrete social phenomenon, not as a mere thought process connecting me to the species. The mutuality required for genuine recognition is attained through practical cooperation towards some joint end, not through a mythical, conceptual connection between all humans as members of the same species. Identity arises through solidarity. We can recognize each other as equals if we cooperate with each other towards some determinate goal. Recognition is therefore a concrete social relationship, exhibited in the practical social groups discussed above (families, business, etc.).

NOTES 1 CDR256.

2 CDR 110. He even writes - in what I assume to be a slip of the pen - that all relations imply mutual recognition. 3 See CDR 256-343. 4 See CDR 256, 270, 293. 5 By claiming that there is no group cooperation in such cases, Sartre is entering a debate ongoing since the sociology of Max Weber. Weber distinguished between such cases as hundreds of people in the same city opening their umbrellas simultaneously when the rain begins or two motorists passing each other and not crashing by obeying the principle 'drive on the right', from cases of genuine group action such as carrying

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6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

Sartre's Ethics of Engagement on a conversation or playing soccer. See M. Weber, Basic Concepts in Sociology (New York: The Citadel Press, 1962).

CDR 106. CDR 106, 115, 116. CDR 116. CDR 367, 374. CDR 95-105. CDR 374. CDR 382. CDR 370. Sartre uses the memorable example of the storming of the Bastille to exemplify spontaneous group praxis. See CDR 351. CDR 419. CDR 419-29. CDR 576-664. American Citizenship, at 3. See Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), at 198-210. See Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2001). See W. L. McBride, Sartre's Political Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), at 10-11, 74, 143-6. New York: Basic Books, 1983, at 3-31. This distinction, initiated by Hegel, has become very popular. See for example J. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT, 1992). CDR 445-505. See the subsequent chapter for a further discussion of this issue. See Saint Genet (New York: Pantheon, 1983), as well as The Idiot of the Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). CDR 487. CDR 486-7. See Book I, Chapter II, 'Of the First Societies' (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), at 18-19. See C. Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). J. H. Hasday, 'Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape', California Law Review (October, 2000, 88 Calif L. Rev. 1373).

9

Civic Virtue The previous chapter brought together the ethical concept of recognition and Sartre's group theory. I argued that mutual recognition is a vital measure of the health of social institutions like voluntary associations and the family. We learned that there is a close relationship between mutual recognition and democracy. In decentralized, democratic groups mutual recognition flourishes. In centralized, non-democratic groups, mutual recognition is deadened. In the current chapter I offer an argument of similar spirit. I return to the existential virtues of authenticity and engagement and ask about the social conditions that would best foster these virtues. Unsurprisingly, my claim is that authenticity and engagement are best supported in democratic social groups. The inquiry into the social conditions of virtue is classic. In the tradition of virtue ethics there has always been a strong association between individual traits of character and the social customs that support or thwart these traits. As Aristotle shows with respect to the moral virtues, character traits are learned from others and reinforced by existing social patterns. Hegel expresses a similar sentiment: 'When a father inquired about the best method of educating his son in ethical conduct, a Pythagorean replied: "Make him a citizen of a state with good laws"'.1 Rousseau remarks that custom is as important as positive law in the formation of good citizens.2 One classical rationale for connecting civic engagement with democratic customs runs as follows. Virtue and democracy are mutually reinforcing. Democracy depends on virtue since only an informed and active citizenry can run a nation well. But virtue depends on democracy since citizens need access to vibrant, participation-friendly public institutions in order to develop habits of good citizenship. Existentialists should embrace this dialectic of virtue and democracy. If we value the traits of authenticity and engagement, then we ought to create the social conditions that support them. I argue that existential virtue flourishes in democratic social groups where there are high levels of mutual recognition. Alternatively, we may start from the fact that egalitarian groups are valuable

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and ask what kinds of individual lifestyles these groups support. In general, we can expect democratic groups to promote respectful, engaged, aware and responsible citizens. Just as in soccer, even egalitarian teams produce the occasional ball hog and spoilsport. But, as I will argue, there is a reliable conceptual and empirical connection between democracy and virtue. Democracy is an institutional condition that is likely to produce and sustain existentially virtuous citizens. I begin with two worries about existentialism and character formation. Classical civic republicans like Aristotle, Rousseau and Hegel are associated with strong paternalism of the following sort. The state is to the citizen as the parent is to the child. Civic virtue is best taught through the state's heavy hand. The state may even be licensed to 'force us' into freedom, as Rousseau famously remarks. Existentialists, just like modern liberals, are unlikely to favour such paternalism. Further, the promotion of virtue may require a stronger conception of character than existentialism can accept. If human freedom is as plastic as existentialism suggests, then perhaps the oldfashioned notion of Bildung (moral education) is impossible. I will address these questions in reverse order. Recall that existentialists reject strong but accept weak character judgements. To say 'James is authentic' is to attribute a pattern to James' past action that has implications for the future. James is engaged in an ongoing project. By contrast, strong character judgements have a once-and-for-always implication and attribute causal force to character traits. The relevant question is not whether there can be existential character analysis, but rather, whether there is an existential equivalent to the classical claim that 'good laws and good customs make for good citizens'. Can an existentialist embrace at least a weak version of Hegelian Bildung? I distinguish two aspects of Bildung, First, there is the claim that political philosophers call 'perfectionism', namely that the state ought to foster particular ethical virtues, rather than merely playing the role of umpire.3 Aristotle and Hegel both offer perfectionist political theories. A related claim is that character traits, dispositions, habits and indeed selves are deeply conditioned by existing social institutions. For example, democratic institutions tend to foster democratic virtues. Existential ethics embraces the second claim, but not the first. Recognition illuminates the strong connection between social institutions and character. The self is intersubjective: it cannot be what it is alone. The self needs the recognition of others. Recognition, not

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merely an I-thou dynamic, takes place within groups and according to institutionalized norms. For example, being recognized as a Catholic means aligning one's self with a community of Catholics. Being recognized as a musician means filling a social function of playing music and being recognized by one's community as a musician. The existentialist can agree with Aristotle that virtues are social functions and skill-based practical activities. But the existentialist would reject perfectionism. Just as Hegel attempted to reconcile ancient community with modern liberty, we can attempt to reconcile a very weak concept of Bildung with the existentialist concept of freedom. Freedom is the opposite of coercion, mastery, slavery and oppression. Freedom is best expressed in egalitarian, decentralized social groups. These groups not only teach us the habits we need to be committed, authentic citizens; democratic groups are the media through which we express our freedom. Hegelian Bildung is weakened if we locate more of our important freedoms in civil-social democratic groups rather than statebased groups (such as houses of congress). We might call such a theory 'non-perfectionist civil republicanism'.4 On this view, the most important political goal is the democratization of civil society. Virtue is best promoted not through the state, but through civilsocial groups. Faith would be placed in mass movements, grassroots organizing, popular struggle and local networks. The state's primary role would be to coordinate and constrain the networks of civil society. Such a conception would offer a reply to the largest objection to republicanism - namely that republicanism requires coercion and therefore infringes on individual liberties. Civil-social republicanism would differ from contemporary liberalism mainly through more robust public support for democratic, grassroots organizations. Obviously, if civil-social republicanism were not to collapse into unregulated market capitalism and a war of all against all, there would have to be protections of the liberties of individuals as well as mechanisms for insuring equal footing to non-economic groups. (The precise nature of these mechanisms is not my current concern.) Existentialism is not, then, necessarily at odds with a weak, nonperfectionist version of Bildung. Let me turn to the dialectic between democratic civil-social arrangements and democratic virtue. The rally cry of civil-social republicanism is democratize, democratize, democratize. A nation is democratic not merely because of law, but when power sharing is institutionalized in everyday groups like workplaces and professional associations. Indeed, egalitarian

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associations may equip citizens to make good laws, but this is not their primary or only value. The central value of democratic associations is intrinsic.5 In existential language, democratic associations are arenas of mutual recognition. Tocqueville expresses the sentiment of civil-social republicanism when he writes in his classic study Democracy in America that 'Municipal institutions constitute the strength of free nations. Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a free government, but without municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.'6 The 'spirit of liberty' bids us to reject domination, exploitation and oppression in all of its forms. One of the most important forms the spirit of liberty takes is the exercise of collective association. The values embodied by particular democratic associations are as diverse as the various goals of various groups. 'Liberty of association' is a catch-all. For example, the value of religious groups relates to the importance of worship and spirituality. The value of professional associations lies in the importance of identifying with others who share similar trades, skills and talents. The value of labour unions relates to workers' ability to publicly express their collective needs and desires. The important point is that virtuous citizens need a vibrant social sphere where the liberty to associate for the various purposes is guaranteed.7 Since democratic civil-social associations are paramount sources of community and value, these associations should be fostered and protected. Healthy democracies ought to cherish and celebrate civil society and insure that citizens have access to the public spaces where collective self-organization is possible. The importance of civil society as a public space for criticism, dialogue and action has long been noted.8 Civil society has been seen as a primary realm where democratic habits are born and fostered.9 Democratic customs, Tocqueville says eloquently, are the 'interior of the social system'.10 Moral and intellectual characteristics are learned best when they are experienced daily in the routine institutions of public life such as the schoolhouse and the workplace. American republican Thomas Jefferson also emphasized the mutually reinforcing nature of civic virtue and republicanism. For democratic self-rule to succeed, the people must be politically aware, engaged and responsible.11 We should not mistake the obvious limits of Jefferson's well-known proposals for agrarian virtue12 for his deeper insight: democratic virtue is not practised only or best in the

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assembly; the habits of effective engagement and politically responsible action are supported best in the everyday, mundane workings of a citizen's life. A well-ordered democratic state depends not only or primarily upon good laws, but upon the disposition of average citizens to treat one another with civic respect. As recent republican theorist Richard Dagger argues, 'it would be a mistake to think that cultivating civic virtues is the exclusive province of the state. The nature of these virtues indicates that much of the cultivation must take place in families, neighborhoods, churches, the workplace, and voluntary associations of various sorts - in what has come to be called "civil society" '. Civil society is not merely a domain for the pursuit of narrow self-interest; the associations of civil society are institutions of solidarity that make possible the expression of democratic civic virtues. In sum, there is a solid intuitive case, corroborated by many civic republican theorists, for the existence of a mutually enhancing relationship between democratic groups and democratic habits.13 Citizens who participate in groups characterized by mutual recognition will, other things being equal, develop habits of awareness and respect. While I think the claim that democracy supports civic virtue is highly plausible, this claim can be strengthened considerably by examining contemporary sociological data. Sociologist Edward Greenberg studied the longest-established worker cooperatives in the USA and found that these democratic groups are far more likely than hierarchical workplaces to foster democratic virtues.14 Unlike traditional business firms, these plants are cooperatively owned and run. The traditional boss-employee relationship does not exist. Rather, jobs - including managerial positions - rotate among employees.15 Greenberg's study strongly supports existential virtue theory: the concrete experience of mutual recognition in the associations of one's daily life does in fact heighten civic virtue. Existential virtue theory holds that non-hierarchical groups, such as worker cooperatives, foster the virtue of political authenticity (engagement). Engagement requires a clear awareness of one's situation, a willingness to accept one's personal responsibilities and a disposition to treat others with respect. In the previous chapter I showed the analytical connection between non-hierarchical groups and mutual respect. Non-hierarchical relations are predicated on mutuality, because everyone is equal with respect to some determinate end. Basic respect is an institutionalized requirement for

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all participants in democratic, voluntary groups. As Greenberg's study reveals, this baseline of mutual respect fosters a new attitude among workers. Coop workers said that in contrast to traditional firms where bosses 'treat you like a kid going to school', coop managers treat their employees with respect.16 Managers are not concerned with forcing employees to work, but with 'broader, plant-wide issues'.17 Worker-managers are aware of and attempt to coordinate the functioning of the plant as a whole. Managers shape firm goals globally rather than micro-managing. Unlike ordinary workers, coop workers are in control of the products they make and the processes by which these products are made.18 So, to a much greater degree than the traditional boss-employee relationship, the coop relationship is based on mutual recognition. Coops dissolve the 'natural hierarchy' of the workplace. Greenberg finds the practical benefits of mutual recognition to be quite profound. Workers are more likely to take an interest in creatively shaping their role and more likely to suggest innovations for the plant.19 Coop workers take much more responsibility for their own jobs than do workers in traditional firms.20 In plain terms, this results in more work being done more efficiently. Astoundingly, the average number of managers in the coops is two versus seven in comparative traditional firms!21 Unsurprisingly, workers in the nonhierarchical workplace are not only more productive; they are happier, too. Worker satisfaction in coops is 'universally higher' due, the workers told Greenberg, to the 'genuine increase in ... decisionmaking power'.22 Coop workers feel a deep responsibility for their plant as a whole, a sentiment absent in most traditional firms.23 Greenberg's results are promising indeed. Democratic workplaces create loyal, respectful, responsible, aware and committed employees. Even if engaged, democratically empowered workers do not become crusaders for global justice,24 they exercise the existential virtue of engagement with respect to a vital arena of life - the workplace. The workplace is one of the most important spheres of civil society. Democratizing this sphere is therefore of utmost importance. Why is work so important? For most of us, work consumes a great portion of our time and energy. Work is more than a means of paying the bills, it contributes to our sense of self-identity. We come to identify as 'professors', 'printers', 'painters', and so on. Alienation at the workplace has a great effect on whether we are happy or depressed, satisfied or dissatisfied, alienated or liberated in our lives generally.

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In short, work is one of the most central elements of modern life. By democratizing the workplace we bring mutual recognition to practical fruition. We also foster the existential virtue of engagement. Workers in democratic plants are more disposed than workers in hierarchical plants to be aware, responsible and respectful. With Greenberg's study in mind, let me turn back to the general case for associating democracy with existential virtue. I have proposed several formulas for existential authenticity: affirming the human condition, respecting one's own freedom and that of others, being aware, responsible and respectful, and embracing social interdependence. Authenticity requires transcending the insincere attitude according to which humans are completely plastic or completely determined. Human self-identities are carved out of existing materials. Radical, solipsistic self-assertion is a myth. Rather, intersubjective recognition is the basis of an explicit, stable sense of self. Engagement, the political form of authenticity, requires caring about the concrete social relations between others and myself. To be engaged in the existential sense, I must be fundamentally disposed to treat others with civic respect. I must concern myself with the liberty and oppression of others, just as I concern myself with my own liberty and my own potential oppression. I must do what I reasonably can to prevent others from suffering through the direct and indirect effects of coercion. Our guiding metaphor for understanding both the abstract and the political conception of authenticity has been the master and the slave. Both symbol and reality, the master/slave relation teaches us the interdependence of subjects, the value of mutual recognition and the harm of domination. Obviously the slave is not free. He is not free because he is coerced. Ironically, however, mastery is a dead end for the master as well. Domination is a self-contradictory practical attitude. The master does not escape the rule: his selfhood also requires intersubjective recognition. The watchwords of political existentialism have become 'avoid domination', 'combat oppression', and 'seek mutual recognition'. We now see that these expressions are synonymous with 'engage yourself, 'be authentic'. From this light, we can also see that democracy and authenticity have a common enemy - the attitude of domination and the social practices that support domination. There is a clear link between democratization and authenticity. If we want authentic citizens, we must work for democracy. If we work for democracy, we are also working for authentic citizens. Let me explain.

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First, democratic groups share power, so within democratic groups there is simply no space for the inauthentic attitude of domination. Domination is a one-sided power relationship: I look at the other but the other is precluded from looking at me. I command the other, but the other is precluded from commanding me. Domination violates the basic principle of democracy: power must be reciprocal; I submit to your rule only to the extent that you submit to my rule. Democracy precludes domination. One may worry that even if actions of domination are ruled out, there is still a space for persons to develop dominating attitudes. True. Nothing could preclude this possibility. But attitudes are supported or discouraged by social conventions. If the dominator has no social context where his behaviour can be recognized and legitimated, then at best he will be an outcast and a pariah, operating on the fringes of society. Second, since democracy is the sharing of power, there is a natural reason that members of democratic groups would embrace their responsibilities and be aware of their situation. If people are given the power to control their destiny, then they will rise to the occasion. Disempowerment leads to apathy and irresponsibility. Not only is there anecdotal evidence of this truth (many citizens in the USA say to themselves, 'My vote does not count, so why should I bother?'); Greenberg's coop study establishes as much. To state the obvious: power is empowering. In the arenas of life where we feel the most is at stake (we have the most to gain, the most to lose), we are very involved. For many of us, this is the economic realm. Note, however, that coop workers are more engaged than others not only for financial reasons, but because involvement in decision-making contributes to their well-being, happiness, sense of self and freedom. Thus in social spheres where we spend much of our time and stake out much of our identity, if we are given the power to control our destinies, we are likely to become engaged. Third, democratic civil society presents the best range of opportunities for the expression of authentic self-identities. Civil society is the social space where voluntary associations of all kinds go about their work. As all Western democratic nations acknowledge, individuals need the space to organize and express their identities collectively. Civil society is the institutional precondition of a politics of authenticity and recognition. Sartre and Beauvoir both had difficulty spelling out what an authentic identity would look like. There are no 'recipes', Beauvoir said. 'We can say nothing of what an authentic Jew would look like', Sartre said. The spirit behind these

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comments is pluralism. There are many equally authentic ways to live one's identity. What we can say is that all these lifestyles require community. We can also say that the ontological conditions for selfidentity (namely the fact that others must recognize me) give a strong reason to prefer democratic communities. Fixed, rigid, orthodox roles are much harder to live authentically than flexible, open, fluid roles. Democratic civil society is also important because it provides a tapestry where the multiplicity of an individual's identity can play itself out. The waiter in BN who is in bad faith tries to be just a waiter and nothing else. He denies the multiplicity of self-identity. Citizens of modern democracies need many spheres of life within which to express their many projects. A partial list would have to include communities to support work, leisure, religion, family, education, entertainment and culture. Rousseau was wrong when he wrote that democratically virtuous citizens must sacrifice their civil-social lives to the altar of the state. Quite the opposite is true. Democratic virtues prosper best when democratic groups thrive and multiply. Fourth, democratic groups are important for promoting existential virtue since these groups are the instruments through which political engagements are performed. No effective political goals are carried out by isolated individuals. The theory of recognition corroborates this political maxim. Our actions have to be recognized by others to become meaningful. Political struggles for inclusion prove again and again the importance of 'being seen'. The civil rights movement in the USA, for example, was an attempt by blacks to construct in the American mind a new notion of blackness. This alternative notion of blackness sounds mundane now: 'Blacks are people who deserve equal respect in the democratic community'. To engage in protest over the legal rights of black Americans was to make a claim about identity and its relation to power, a claim about recognition as a social and political good. The sense of empowerment a black might have felt among other blacks was a measure of recognition - he did not have to prove that he deserved respect. It was to the rest of the nation that this would have to be proven. The point of this example is that through associating with others, we express our political engagements. Groups are instrumental for supporting our engagement (without mass action, no civil rights legislation). But democratic groups - groups where recognition flourishes - are also intrinsic sources of engagement. Being a member of a group where mutual recognition flourishes is

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itself a democratic engagement, since members treat each other with mutual respect. As a whole this chapter has argued that there is a mutually reinforcing relation between existential virtue and democratic public groups. I have aligned existentialism with the tradition of civil-social republicanism, which is the view that the health of the republic depends, above all, on the habits of individual citizens. Far from a complete theory of society and the state, what I have offered is a principled direction in which to develop existential virtue ethics as a practical ideal. Greenberg's study of workplace democracy has given credence to the very old maxim that democratic empowerment invigorates citizens. Work is a major domain of contemporary life. The benefits of infusing mutual recognition into the workplace are substantial. On average, democratic workers work better and are happier. They are also more prone to be attentive, responsible and respectful in the workplace. Power-sharing leads to a creative and flexible approach to job roles. Democratic workers tend to embrace their interdependence on other workers and accept this interdependence as a blessing rather than a curse. Sartreans, I have shown, have strong reasons to favour democratic civil-social reforms generally, not merely in the workplace. Democracy is the condition that best fosters interdependence, rather than domination. The everyday networks of work, leisure and culture are home to some of our most important social identities. These identities are recognized best, that is, most mutually and reciprocally, in conditions of rough equality. Democracy must not, as I argued in the previous chapter, become a monolithic goal, insensitive to the plurality of civil-social values. But democracy is the single most important overarching value of civil society. The tradition of civic republicanism teaches us that one important reason to favour democracy is because democracy tends to produce individuals who have character traits of the sort we like to see. Existentialism has entered this tradition by demonstrating that the virtues of authenticity and engagement are supported best in democratic civil-social arrangements.

NOTES 1 PR, paragraph 153. 2 See Social Contract, Book I, Chapter VIII.

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3 See W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 4 For an excellent overview of civic republicanism see I. Honohan, Civic Republicanism (London: Routledge, 2002). 5 On the difference between the intrinsic and the instrumental value of civic virtue see W. Kymlicka, 'Liberal Egalitarianism and Civic Republicanism: Friends or Enemies?', in Debating Democracy's Discontent, ed. A. L. Allen and M. C. Regan, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 6 New York: Vintage, 1945, at 63. 7 C. Taylor, 'Invoking Civil Society', in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 8 See J. L. Cohen and A. Arato, 'Introduction' to Civil Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); and H. Arendt, section on 'Action' in The Human Condition (New York: Doubleday, 1959). 9 M. Walzer, 'The Concept of Civil Society', in Towards a Global Civil Society, ed. M. Walzer (New York: Berghahn Books, 1995). 10 Democracy, at 331 and 62 respectively. 11 See R. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 12 See M. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996). 13 For a fuller discussion see Honohan, Civic Republicanism. 14 Workplace Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 15 Ibid., at 42. 16 Ibid., at 45. 17 Ibid., at 46. 18 Ibid., at 93. 19 Ibid., at 43. 20 Ibid., at 39-40. 21 Ibid., at 43. 22 Ibid., at 73. 23 Ibid., at 39-40. 24 Greenberg finds that workers in democratic plants are only marginally more likely than workers in non-democratic plants to participate in politics outside the plant. See Workplace Democracy, at 97-8, 131-2, 169.

10

Morality At this point I have both surveyed Sartre's major ethical concepts and developed a unique account of existential ethics. In this chapter I describe in broad terms the resulting existential conception of ethical value and morality. Existential ethics is best construed, I claim, as a form of Hegelianism, not as a form of ethical Kantianism. The first issue is whether it is proper to speak of an existential morality at all. Sartre frequently distanced himself from traditional moral concepts, for example by denying that freedom, authenticity and bad faith are moral terms. But despite his rhetoric, Sartre's status as an 'inveterate moralist' is well established.1 Sartre opposes freedom to oppression; bad faith does imply moral blame; authenticity is an ethical virtue. The real question, as has become clear, is not whether Sartre has an ethical vocabulary, but rather, how to vindicate the meta-ethical foundation of existential value judgements. Sartrean ethics is not, in my view, best defended as a form of Kantianism. Sartre's Kantianism is only skin-deep.2 Sartre's fundamental social-ontological commitments are Hegelian, as is Sartre's approach to ethics generally. Hegel, not Kant, provides the existential justification for the claim that authentic self-relations require authentic relations to others. The justification is, in a word, mutual recognition. Humans are intersubjective creatures, creatures who need the 'look' of others in order to be most fully themselves. My view that existential ethics is best modeled on Hegel, not Kant, is both a historical and a philosophical thesis. I think that Sartre's primary intellectual debt is to Hegel not Kant. But more importantly, and irrespective of the question of lineage, for the purpose of a cogent ethics, the superior model is Hegel, not Kant. To set the stage for an assessment of existential ethics generally, let me begin with the question of moral value, starting with Sartre's theory of value in BN. While the value theory of BN is flawed, I suggest how a more acceptable theory of value can be garnered from my reinterpretation of Sartrean ethics. I remain faithful to Sartre's basic intuition which is that ethical values are this-worldly, not transcendental.

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In BN Sartre makes two claims about ethical value. He says that (1) values are immanent in human action and (2) values are 'lacks'.3 By claiming that values are lacks, Sartre means that values are states of absence that occur when an individual acts towards a goal. For instance, if I value justice, then justice is something I try to bring about through my action. Sartre contrasts his value theory with the 'spirit of seriousness'. A serious person treats values as objective, transcendental and inherent in nature. Sartre uses the term seriousness to illustrate that a theory of value is not only a philosophical thesis, but a way of life. Seriousness is a character flaw. The self-taught man of Nausea is one incarnation of seriousness.4 Rather than choosing what to read, the self-taught man begins with 'A' and works through the catalogue, thinking that any existing book is of value. The student in EIH who seeks moral advice also makes the mistake of seriousness. He thinks the answer to 'What should I do' lies outside of him, perhaps in a doctrine of Christianity, Utilitarianism or Kantianism. But even if one accepts, for example, the commandment 'do not kill', one still has to choose when, where and how to interpret and apply the commandment (e.g. self-defence). Finally, Beauvoir, in Ethics of Ambiguity, writes that the serious person is 'cast into a universe which has been formed without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit'. Two egregious forms of seriousness in ethics would be religious morality and Platonism. On both accounts, knowing the right thing to do consists in discovering timeless, mind-independent standards of conduct. God's commands are absolute injunctions that humans discern through revelation. Platonic forms are perfect, unchanging, transcendental guidelines. Both theories dismiss the creative, interpretive and this-worldly dimension of ethics. While Sartre's criticism of transcendental value is both important and accurate, his thesis that values are lacks is highly objectionable. I would like to suggest two main reasons to reject Sartre's thesis. First, value is unwittingly reduced to desire. Value is said to be the goal of an action. Thus to value X is to desire to bring about X. But it is implausible to reduce 'X is valuable' to 'I, in fact, value X'. A person may value that which is non-valuable or fail to value that which is valuable. Max Scheler aptly terms such mistakes 'value inversions'.6 Imagine how impotent our moral vocabulary would be if we were unable to say to an alcoholic friend who was destroying his family, 'You know, you really ought to value your health and your loved ones'.

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A secondly serious problem is that if values are construed as lacks, then we cannot account for why something we presently enjoy is valuable.7 For example, I may both have good health and value good health. My good health is not something I currently lack. Sartre could point out that good health is an ongoing project. But to say I 'lose' my good health every minute that I do not eat well, exercise, etc. is inadequate. Yes, maintaining good health is a project, but it does not follow that I lack good health now. Thus, the lack theory of value cannot account for goods that are both present and valuable. Assume that Sartre is right to look for a non-transcendental source of ethical value.8 If the lack theory of value is a dead end, where can we turn? My hypothesis is that an alternative, social theory of value is within close reach of the existentialist. My view that existentialism is an intersubjective philosophy opens the door to this new, social theory of value. Let me briefly characterize this alternative theory of value and then explain why it would be conducive to existentialism. Unsurprisingly, the core of this alternative value theory would be mutual recognition. Mutual recognition would be seen as the paramount ethical good. But recognition need not be a monolithic goal. A range of diverse ethical goods could be interpreted as concrete forms of recognition. Goods would be interpreted as relations, not things. Importantly, values would be seen as collective and institutional not individual. Values would be as plural (to paraphrase Aristotle) as the social practices of human communities. There would be as many values as there are concrete forms of recognition (family goods, civil-social goods, political goods).9 This alternative value theory can be glimpsed in Sartre's (and Beauvoir's) aesthetic approach to ethics. Ethics is like art because the authentic individual must be creative, inventive and flexible.10 But - and this is a point that Sartre did not emphasize as much as he should have - there are rules in both art and ethics. Even the most innovative artist inherits techniques and tools, and performs his craft according to social conventions.11 Ethics and art are both social, skill-based practical activities, or 'crafts' as the ancients called them. Aristotle developed the craft metaphor for ethics at length. Ethical knowledge is craft knowledge (techne). Just as a good doctor practises well the social technique of medicine, the ethical person practises well the social technique of virtue. There are several reasons that existentialists should find this alternative, social theory of value compelling. First, if values inhere in social practices, then values are essentially social, not individual.

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'X is valuable' no longer reduces to 'I value X'. 'X is valuable' means 'The human community, of which I am a member, values X'. Thus ethical subjectivism is cut off at its root. Second, we would be able to make ethical judgements like the following: 'While James does not value X, he ought to value X'. James ought to value X because he is a member of a community where X is valued. The source of this value is indeed external to the individual human. But this externality is very much different from Platonism or religious ethics. Value is located in social practices of which I am a member. By virtue of my participation in a community and its practices I implicitly value the goods of that community. Human community is not a radically transcendental source of value. Third, there would be no problem accounting for the presence of goods that I value. If values are construed as the purposes of collective projects, then in any ongoing social project or institution some good is presently valued. Fourth, the social theory of value avoids the disingenuous 'morality of demands', which mask the true source of ethical injunctions, namely other people.12 Human social institutions (not nature or God) would be seen as the source of ethical value. Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, the basis of communal values is explained by appeal to intersubjective recognition. Ethically positive relations are mutually recognitive relations. Mutual recognition is reciprocal respect actualized in diverse social relations such as the family and democratic civil social groups. Thus, my suggestion is to replace the thesis that values are lacks with the thesis that values are inherent in social practices. Would this new value theory throw us back to the spirit of seriousness? It could. If we were to assume that human institutions were as fixed and unambiguous as God's commands or Platonic Forms, indeed we would be in the spirit of seriousness. But human institutions (as Sartre argues in CDR) display a range of inertness. No human institution is so frozen and unchangeable that it fails to embody human purposes and intentions. No human institution is utterly devoid of recognition. Sartre never explicitly renounced the value theory of BN. But he does, in the post-war writings, arrest the drift towards ethical subjectivism implied by his early value theory. As we have seen, the major post-war works (especially ASJ, WIL and NE) are staunchly ethical and staunchly anti-subjectivist. The social theory of value sketched above is an important alternative to the individualistic value theory of BN.

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The major argument of this inquiry as a whole has been that Sartrean existential ethics is a form of virtue ethics, which takes as its ontological point of departure the deeply social nature of the human self. I have made my case through a careful analysis of Sartre's central moral concepts: freedom, recognition, bad faith, authenticity and engagement. I hope to have challenged several common misconceptions about existentialism. One central misconception is that Sartrean ethics is only a slightly modified Kantian ethics. To be precise, there are two relevant points. First, there is the issue of whether, all things considered, Sartre was committed to Kantian principles, in particular the categorical imperative. Second, there is the issue of whether an existential ethics ought to use as its model basic Kantian concepts such as universalization, imperative and duty. Was Sartre an ethical Kantian? If one reads EIH and nothing else, then it may appear so. Sartre, as is well known, makes the Kantiansounding claim that individual choices have universal, and therefore ethical, significance. There are even references to an 'aesthetic imperative' in WIL and hopes of a 'kingdom of ends' in NE. But the overwhelming majority of Sartre's comments on Kantian ethics are damning. Indeed, even in EIH Sartre articulates what is his most frequent and vehement criticism of Kant: Kantian ethics is objectionably abstract. Sartre repudiates all categorical, 'serious' approaches to ethics, Kant's included. Ethics does not consist in timeless, abstract rules that can be discovered in nature. In NE, Sartre's dissatisfaction with the abstract nature of Kantian ethics is a major theme.13 Sartre offers the following five major criticisms of Kant. First, the notion of 'humanity' required for Kantian respect is a myth.14 Human nature does not exist. Kant is a victim of bad humanism. Relations of mutual respect should be based on actual social relations, not on abstract conceptual categories such as 'humanity'.15 Second and similarly, for Sartre the 'kingdom of ends' is a concrete political community, not an imaginary community.16 'Respect others' is a concrete, practical ethical injunction only when there is an identifiable social relationship to which the injunction applies. 'In other words, by pursuing the city of ends in and through a wholly concrete goal, one marginally realizes it by proposing his work to other freedoms.'17 Third, Sartre is ambivalent about the notion of a Kantian 'right', since rights treat the person abstractly and not in his particularity.

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Sartre repeats Hegel's claim that rights are merely an abstract form of recognition. 'Each one is in turn the subject of rights ... she recognizes through his demand to be recognized.'18 The vocabulary of ethical rights is not wholly bankrupt, but rights should be grounded in social interaction, not in nature. Fourth, all ethical 'imperatives' are expressions of dominator, master/slave relations.19 'The ethics of duty is an ethics of slaves.'20 Recall that imperatives (demands) fail to respect the freedom of others. The assumption that a human 'must' follow an imperative, irrespective of his will, is a version of mastery. Ethical obligations should be based on non-coercive recognition of the freedom of the ethical subject. Fifth, Kantian ethics is disingenuous because it masks the true source of ethics, namely other people.21 'The ethics of duty is in fact a type of human and social relationship, that of alienation that spins in a cycle, of slavery without a master, of the sacrifices of man to the human.'22 Imperatives are commands issued from a human master, even when the master claims to merely be interpreting natural law. Democratic relations yield obligations, but not demands. Obligations should be based on mutual appeals, which, as we saw earlier, respect the freedom of the parties involved. Even more striking than the forcefulness with which Sartre attacks Kant is the degree to which every one of Sartre's criticisms echo Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Consider Sartre's main point: 'right' and 'imperative' are ethical abstractions, best understood as real social relations of non-mutual recognition and best replaced by real social relations of mutual recognition. The Sartre-Hegel parallel is overwhelming and undeniable. Sartre's criticisms position him, like Hegel, to claim that there is a limited truth in Kantian ethics, while offering a more concrete, and therefore superior, alternative. There is overpowering evidence, then, that Sartre was not an ethical Kantian. EIH is an immature, speculative work, hastily presented and often misunderstood. It is unfortunate that EIH is Sartre's most widely read essay!23 Sartre's use of a universalization argument in EIH is no cause for concern on my interpretation. Convinced that freedom is a basic moral value and in agreement with the conventional moral view that other people deserve respect, what Sartre lacked in 1945 was a clear meta-ethical justification for his ethical convictions.24 Kant, as it would turn out, could not help. Existentialism would need a stronger bridge between self and other than Kantianism could provide. Sartre never returned to the Kantian claim that the acting subject proposes a universal image of humanity

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in all of its choices. Instead, Sartre turned to a Hegelian-inspired view of intersubjectivity, according to which the self is what it is through the look of others. The Kantian categorical imperative could not take existential ethics where it needed to go, namely into the territory of intersubjectivity. However, Sartre does not (and should not) reject out of hand the Kantian injunction 'respect others' and 'do not treat others as mere means'. The notion of mutual recognition, which has become a centerpiece of existential ethics as I depict it, is a cousin to Kantian mutual respect. Recognition requires freely becoming a means for the other, and doing so reciprocally. The problem with the Kantian principle of respect is its abstract nature. We should not divorce respect from concrete human relations. Ethics must be moored in the social practices of existing human communities. Ultimately it is Hegel, not Kant, who provides existentialism with a model of ethics that is concrete, that is, based on mutual recognition and community. Now that I have shown clear evidence that Sartre was not an ethical Kantian, let me turn to the reasons why existentialist ethics should be developed along Hegelian lines. Sartre's debt to Hegelian ontology has been the subject of much scholarly inquiry.25 But insufficient attention has been paid to the ethical implications of Sartre's Hegelianism. As mentioned, Sartre's notion of 'concrete relations with others' in BN is a response to Hegel's master/slave dialectic. Sartre's claim that domination characterizes all interpersonal relations is indeed Hegelian recognition 'with its head cut off'.26 In the post-war works, however, Hegel is no longer merely a foil for Sartre's own pessimistic view of recognition. Sartre comes to agree with Hegel that the central concern in ethics is how to foster relations of mutual recognition.27 All of the major positive concepts in Sartre's ethical vocabulary authenticity, political commitment, group praxis - require the concept of mutual recognition. Bad faith, which has mistakenly been thought of as exclusively self-regarding, is an ethical character flaw that involves ignoring and discrediting the inter subjective dimension of selfhood. Oppression, Sartre tells us, is a systematic form of domination, and domination, even when systematic, is best understood as a master/slave relation. Expressing his discontent with Kant and his new faith in the intersubjective source of ethics, Sartre writes in NE that 'Any attempt to ground obligation (duty) on just the freedom of the subject is doomed to fail'.2 Ethics must be based on intersubjectivity, not subjectivity alone.

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Recognition arguments provide an existential justification for the basic ethical obligation of respect. The ground of respect is not that others, like me, are members of the abstract logical category 'human'. The ground of respect is the concrete interdependence between self and other. The lesson of the master/slave dialectic is that the more I treat others as things, the more thing-like I become. I should recognize others because I need others to recognize me. I am dependent. No matter what my particular action, my implicit aim is to create a stable, explicit and coherent self-identity. Selfhood must be socially validated through the non-alienating look of others. In sum, I should respect others because my selfhood requires that others respect me. The importance of Hegelianism for existential ethics can also be seen in the use of recognition as an overarching standard for ethical relations. Sartre begins to use recognition as an ethical standard as early as WIL, and he continues this line of thinking through CDR. The difference between mutual and non-mutual recognition is unabashedly normative. Relations of mutual recognition are more desirable than relations of non-mutual recognition. Mutual recognition preserves and promotes human freedom. Mutual appeals, for example those of democratic groups, should be the bases of human communities and the concrete ethical bonds between members of communities. Ethical rights and duties should be seen as social conventions, guarantees made between members of a polis. Appeals are indeed injunctions to other people to act in this way or that. Thus an ethics of recognition has the power to produce constraints on behaviour. But unlike demands, appeals recognize the freedom of the other. An ethics of mutual appeals - that is, an ethics of mutual recognition - would avoid bad humanism. Appeals are lodged in concrete relations, not an extra-social notion of identity. Mutual recognition 'is an appeal for a common operation, it is not based on a given solidarity, but on a solidarity to be built through the operation in common'.29 By mapping the master/slave relationship onto Kantian ethics, Sartre makes the quintessential Hegelian move. The existentialist, like Hegel, can claim that Kantian ethics contains a valuable though limited insight: other people should be respected; the notion of a right has a measure of positive ethical content. But ethics must be grounded socially, not transcendentally. The social theory of value suggested above provides another component of a genuinely concrete ethics. A concrete ethics, an ethics of appeals, an ethics of mutual recognition - all these phrases capture the connection between ethics and

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community, a connection Hegel labeled Sittlichkeit (ethical life).30 Existential ethics is best understood as a version of Hegelian Sittlichkeit, one that puts a heavy burden on the democratic groups of civil society and the civic engagement of everyday, ordinary citizens. NOTES 1 T. R. Flynn, 'Mediated Reciprocity and the Genius of the Third', in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle: Open Court, 1981), at 364. 2 I disagree substantially with R. Aronson who, in Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (London: Verso, 1980), claims that in WIL and elsewhere Sartre's guide for the concept of recognition was Kant. See page 138 in particular. 3 BN 133-47. 4 New York: New Directions, 1964. 5 EA 35. 6 See Formalism in Ethics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 7 See D. Detmer, Freedom as A Value (La Salle: Open Court, 1986), at 144-8. 8 An important book outlining the need for a non-transcendental value theory is J. D. Wallace's Ethical Norms, Particular Cases (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). See especially 'Chapter 2, Morality and Practical Knowledge'. 9 A value theory of this sort is found not only in Hegel and Aristotle, but also in John Dewey and more recently Michael Walzer. 10 See EIH. Also, in Saint Genet Sartre contrasts traditional morality with aesthetics, arguing that traditional morality 'submits to being' while, for the artist 'value is primary'. (At 371) Most traditional morality is, Sartre claims, 'serious', that is, predicated on the existence of objective value rather than the invention, creation and shaping of human value. 11 In WIL in particular, Sartre acknowledges the importance of social customs for the formation of a writer's project of writing. 12 In NE Sartre says 'The demand, the obligation, duty, come to the For-Itself from the Other'. (At 258) Sartre's primary ground for opposing Kantianism is that the categorical imperative masks the true source of ethical obligations, namely other people. 'The ethics of duty is in fact a type of human and social relationship, that of alienation that spins in a cycle, of slavery without a master, of the sacrifice of man to the human.' (NE 272) 13 NE 7, 103-4, 169, 426. 14 NE 7, 144, 426. 15 NE238. 16 NE 169-70. 17 NE 170. 18 NE 139. 19 NE 239, 267, 272. 20 NE267. 21 NE272.

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22 NE272. 23 Sartre himself expressed regret over the popularity of EIH in the interviews Sartre By Himself (New York: Urizon Books, 1978). 24 Sartre commentator David Pellauer hits the nail on the head when, in the Introduction to English translation of NE he writes, 'Sartre was more than willing in any situation to say what he considered right and wrong - his subsequent political and social commentary more than demonstrates this what he had to struggle with was why he could invoke the authority of ethics as a justification for what he said'. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 25 See for example, K. Harmann, Sartre's Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966). 26 See W. R. Schroeder, Sartre and bis Predecessors (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). 27 Most notably, see R. Williams, Hegel's Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Williams claims that because Sartre does not endorse mutual recognition, 'Sartrean ethics' is paradox in terms. 'In affirming the separation of subjects and denying any union, Sartre remains at the level of mechanism, the externality of consciousness that precludes any formation of a We. Sartre rejects the Hegelian "We" and retains nominalistic individualism to the end. Hence ethics is problematic if not impossible.' (At 378, emphasis added) Despite the inadequacy of Williams' interpretation of Sartre, his logic is revealing. If Sartre does grasp intersubjectivity, then ethics is within reach. Williams' work on Hegel corroborates my main thesis: mutual recognition is a master ethical concept, holding the key to a social, intersubjective ethics. As the current study has shown, Sartre does indeed embrace mutual recognition. Sartre first discovered the 'We' in the aesthetic pact between readers and writers. Soon after, he generalized the dynamic of mutual recognition to all democratic group cooperation. Using Sartre's basic model, I have developed a portrait of mutual recognition within civic life generally. The possibility of a Sartrean ethics does hang on acceptance of mutual recognition as a dynamic that turns an 'I into a We'. The current study has shown that Sartrean ontology has the goods to back up a robust - indeed a Hegelian - ethics. 28 NE239. 29 NE274. 30 A. Honneth, in his important study The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, argues for a reconstructed notion of Hegelian Sittlichkeit. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) I hope that the current work provides a satisfactory reply to Honneth's claim that Sartre 'was never able to provide a systematic justification for [his] normative presuppositions' about recognition and ethics. (At 158) To his credit, Honneth acknowledges that in the post-war works Sartre's understanding of recognition moves away from ontology and becomes a 'strongly historicizing approach'. (At 156) Honneth is correct, I think, to charge that originally Sartre 'failed to draw an analytically clear line between lawbased and law-transcending forms of mutual recognition'. (At 158) But it does not follow that imposing such a distinction would violate Sartre's

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11

Conclusions My purpose has been to defend the ethical dimension of Sartrean existentialism. I have argued against the common view that existentialism is philosophy of subjectivism and individualism. Unlocking the potential of Sartrean ethics requires a renewed appreciation of Sartrean social ontology. Sartre's turn to community and solidarity was neither as late nor unprecedented as many suggest. The immediate post-war works, as I have shown, prove definitively that existentialism is an intersubjective philosophy. Human selfhood is validated and enriched through the uplifting look of others. Non-alienated human relations are both possible and desirable. The vocabulary of existentialism is undeniably moral. We must not backpedal, as Sartre sometimes did, from the claim that existentialism is a humanism. Existentialism provides us with a distinctly normative vision of the human condition. Further, existentialism preserves and deepens the traditional moral injunction 'respect others'. The question for existentialism has never been whether respect is a basic moral value; rather, the question has been how to provide an existential account of the value of respect. By posing this latter question and by offering a novel answer, the current inquiry has advanced the debate over the nature of existential ethics. My unique strategy for justifying obligations of respect is the appeal to existential recognition arguments. Stated in general terms, recognition arguments hold that an agent's implicit aim of creating a stable, coherent self obligates him to respect others. Failing to respect others is an attitude of practical irrationality. I must respect others if others are to be in a position to recognize me. Since I desire others to recognize me, I ought to recognize them. Recognition arguments hold that selfhood is a deeply social affair and that we confirm our social identities only through the uplifting look of others. Unlike instrumental tit-for-tat exchanges, recognition arguments appeal to the nature of self-identity and the possibility of asserting one's identity meaningfully. The failure of isolated, asocial self-assertion is dramatized by the fable of the Hegelian master, who

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has the contradictory wish to define himself through domination. Domination is a vicious, irrational effort to circumvent recognition. We have seen that the master/slave metaphor is instructive on both ontological and political levels. For example, the existential obligation of civic respect was derived from the need to be recognized as a citizen. Others are in no position to recognize me as a citizen, unless their basic civil freedoms are secured. No social identity escapes the rule: the desire for recognition, which is universal, cannot be fulfilled except by others; others recognize me best in relations of mutual recognition, which require rough equality and reciprocal respect. I have located obligations of respect in the two chief existential virtues, authenticity and engagement. Both virtues require awareness, responsibility and respect. Thus existential virtues do have substantive ethical content. Existential authenticity is importantly different, however, from popular formulas like 'be true to your roots' or 'affirm your heritage'. Authenticity is the project of honestly embracing social interdependence. While the dominator dramatically fails the test of authenticity, there are many lifestyles consistent with the three basic conditions above (awareness, responsibility and respect). Most importantly, all authentic lifestyles require a disposition to respect others. Authenticity is, therefore, a more complete virtue than honesty, which in-itself says nothing about relations to others. Authenticity is necessarily a social virtue, requiring positive relations to other humans. The generic obligation to respect others is an organic outgrowth of embracing one's social identity and one's basic freedom of action. Because I need others to recognize me, I should be willing to respect the basic freedom of others. To label this project 'authenticity' is to, first, emphasize the simultaneous nature of affirming one's own freedom and that of others. But second, authenticity connotes the high premium placed on self-awareness, lucidity and understanding. Existential virtue, like the classical virtues, presupposes a high degree of self-knowledge. By showing that existential ethics is deeply social, I have addressed one of the oldest and most serious objections to existentialism. The socialized Sartre emerging from my analysis tackles head-on charges of ethical subjectivism, solipsism and individualism. The ontological basis for a renewed appreciation of Sartre - beginning from intersubjectivity rather than subjectivity - provides a decisive answer to the 'authentic murderer' worry. An authentic murderer is impossible; to authentically relate to my own freedom I must accept

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my dependence upon the other. Thus any behaviour that coerces the other (murder, torture, oppression and so on) is incompatible with authenticity. Existentialism harmonizes with broadly social conceptions of virtue and good conduct. Only some institutions invite bad faith, for example oppressive institutions. Far from rejecting a social conception of ethics, post-war Sartre turns to intersubjective recognition as the only means for avoiding the evils of human alienation. We have seen, in fact, that there is a master criterion for those group types which are freedom promoting. Democratic, decentralized groups are our best hope for fostering mutual recognition and for supporting the social virtues of authenticity and engagement. Existential virtue is best supported through grassroots democratic associations. Existentialists have good reasons to favour a civil-social republicanism, according to which the state's primary role is to coordinate and protect the plural, democratic associations of civil life. Worker cooperatives provide a promising template for a more democratic public life. From the outset I admitted that the Sartre depicted in this work would be unsettling. My contention that Sartrean ethics is a kind of virtue ethics is a case in point. By now, however, the case for existential virtue ethics is clear. Character analysis is a mainstay of Sartre's (and Beauvoir's) ethical commentaries. The moral vocabulary of existentialism requires judging individuals based on their dispositions and tendencies, not merely on their discrete actions. The judgement that a person is in bad faith, for example, is, and has always been, a judgement of character. The two typical forms of bad faith further illustrate the importance of character judgements for existential ethics. If I refuse to identify a pattern of activity and the underlying project to which my activities correspond, then I am in bad faith. If, on the other hand, I make once-and-for-always judgements and attribute a causal force to personality traits, I am once again trapped in bad faith. Authenticity requires avoiding both pitfalls of bad faith. Authenticity, just like the classical virtues, is predicated on a careful and systematic survey of character and an analysis of the conditions under which character judgements are properly employed. Further, like classical theories of virtue, existential ethics makes character judgements primary; duty, rights and obligations are derivative. One need not reject the category of rights and obligations to be a virtue theorist. Following Hegel, the existentialist can root rights and obligations in the phenomenon of mutual recognition,

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which in turn is moored in the actual social relations of existing human communities. Rights exist to the extent that individuals are disposed to recognize their fellow citizens as having rights. The disposition to respect the rights of others, in turn, is supported or thwarted by impersonal social norms. A democratic society, the existentialist tells us, is one where civic respect is both an institutional norm and a disposition of average, ordinary citizens. Finally, existentialists follow classic virtue ethics in preferring to outline patterns of ethical conduct rather than furnishing exact, rule-like prescriptions. For too long the plurality and flexibility of existential ethics has been seen as a liability rather than an asset. Pluralism has been mistaken for empty formalism. Now we are in a position to see the poverty of this mistake. Sartre was, as I have shown, a consistent and vehement critic of formalism, especially of the Kantian variety. A viable existential ethics must be, above all else, concrete. The current work had provided not a detailed agenda, but rather a broad outline for a concrete ethics. Mutual recognition is the master criterion of ethical relations. Authenticity requires a basic disposition to respect others; one important concrete variant of authenticity is engagement, which requires treating others with civic respect. Civic respect is a basic democratic virtue, which instructs us to treat others as free and equal members of the polis. A concrete existential ethics recommends an expansion of the sphere of civil society, which is home to the plural, democratic groups, which offer the best social-structural backdrop for authentic, engaged lifestyles. In an effort to show that Sartrean existentialism is a concrete philosophy, I have also addressed the worry that existential freedom is formalistic and vacuous. By distinguishing ontological freedom (freedom of consciousness) from practical freedom (freedom as non-coercion), and by arguing that the latter is much more plausible than the former, I have allowed the substantive, political insights of Sartre to drive and shape his social theory more broadly. Sartre did not have it right when, in BN, he claimed that the intentionality of consciousness translates into a substantive conception of human freedom. BN does not, and should not, unseat our deep moral intuition that freedom (in the ordinary sense of the term) can be lost or gained, diminished or increased. As Sartre came to see in the post-war period, in particular through his analysis of oppression, freedom is the opposite of slavery; freedom and coercion are incompatible. My modified vision of existential freedom as noncoercion has allowed me to make important headway towards a workable existential ethics. I have been able, for example, to show

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that existential freedom is best supported in democratic groups where mutual recognition is institutionalized. Recognition has always been seen as an important topic in Sartre's thinking. But I have established more than this well-known fact. I have shown that the struggle for recognition, which forms the core of Sartre's theory of self and human relations, is the socialontological underpinning of a defensible, intersubjective existential ethics. Mutual recognition is the basic ethical benchmark by which we should evaluate human communities and ethical relations. The failure of non-mutual recognition explains what existentialists have frequently been accused of being unable to explain, namely the ethical undesirability of coercion, oppression and hierarchy. The Sartrean self is neither monadic nor permanently alienated from itself and others. Community, democracy and freedom from coercion emerge as paramount values for the existentialist. My hope is that the present work has revealed new strengths of an old doctrine. The articulation of these new strengths has been possible, at least in part, because of the pervasive charge that Sartrean philosophy is objectionably subject-centred, unforgivingly Cartesian and at times unpersuasively Kantian. As I have defended it, Sartrean ethics is unapologetically Hegelian. Drawing Sartre closer to Hegel has its liabilities; but these liabilities, I believe, are far outweighed by the insights of the master/slave thesis of the self and the cogency of mutual recognition as a master ethical criterion. Placing Sartre in the context of Hegelian social philosophy also helps us understand why the appeal to virtue is, rather than an anachronistic throwback, an important ingredient of modern democratic life. The chief existential virtues of authenticity and engagement invite us to bolster the bonds of solidarity and reconcile ourselves with our fragmented, alienated self-images. Existentialism is indeed a philosophy of humanism, activism and hope.

Index alienation 40-2, 52-3, 55, 72, 114 Anderson, Thomas 47, 76-7, 87, 88 Anti-Semite and Jew 45-8,66-8,

75-81,85-6

anti-semitism 45-8, 66-7, 85, 93 appeal51-2 Arendt, Hannah 92-3 Aristotle 1, 4, 22, 23, 24, 28, 30-2, 71, 91, 102,124,125, 126,127,133, 134, 135, 146 art 146 authenticity 2, 3, 4, 6, 23, 66-70, 75-98, 133, 137, 139, 140-1, 156 authentic murderer objection 87-94 awareness 78-9, 80, 93 honesty 91-2 Jewish 66-70, 78 respect 84-6,94-6 responsibility 79-84, 88-91, 92

bad faith 63-72,78,79,109 homosexual 31,65—6 Beauvoir, Simone de 76, 95—6, 145, 146 Being and Nothingness 8-10, 38-9, 121, 144-5 being-for-others (social self) 2, 25-7, 40-3,49,67,78, 113 Bettelheim, Bruno 69 Bildung 134-5 Brodkin, Karen 69 character 29-34, 42, 64-6, 67,70-1, 85, 134 Charme, Stuart Z. 70 citizenship 105-11,112,114, 115-16 civic republicanism 134—42

civic virtue 133—42 civil society 107, 124, 135-6, 138-9, 140-1 coercion 13,17-19, 49-50, 115 colonialism 83 commitment see engagement communitarianism 125, 130, 131 Critique of Dialectical Reason 35, 56—8, 118-24, 125, 128

custom 33-4

Daggar, Richard 137 Dahmerjeffery 87-91 demands 54-6 democracy 105,111,115-16,121, 122-4, 131, 133-5, 139-42 workplace 126-7, 137-9 Du Bois, W. E. B. 70 domination 37,47-8,49,53,79,87,

88,93, 108-9, 139-41 duty 55-6,81-2

Eichmann, Adolf 92-3 emotion 27—9 engagement 6, 102-16, 133, 136-7, 139, 140-1, 156 ethical subjectivism 75—7, 87, 147 ethics 48, 54-6, 58, 97, 114, 121, 144, 155 Kantian versus Hegelian 144-52 theory of value 144-7 virtue ethics 4-6,22,23,27,29,

30-4,63,72, 133-42, 146,

157-8 'Existentialism is a Humanism' 148-50

145,

Index family 125,127-30 Flynn, Thomas R. 98n. 22, 99n. 16, lOOn. 39 freedom 1-2, 8-19, 13-14, 35, 49,

50-2, 53-4, 55, 63-4, 66, 72, 75,

77,85,95-6, 115, 135, 151, 156, 158-9

Gilman, Sander 69 Greenberg, Edward 137-9,142 groups 52,118-31 habit 11,32-3,71 Hegel, G. W. F. 2, 24, 25-7, 35-8, 45, 58, 86, 94, 108, 119, 126, 128, 133, 134, 135, 144, 149-52, 157, 159 Heidegger, Martin 24 Hobbes, Thomas 12,13-14 Honneth, Axel 153 human nature 1, 22-3, 148 Husserl, Edmund 22 identity 38, 40, 49, 70, 90, 95, 105, 120, 121, 138, 142 institution 123 intersubjectivity 25-7, 75, 94-7, 105 Jefferson, Thomas Judaism 66-70

109-10,136

Kant, Immanuel 2, 22, 54-6, 57, 82, 144, 148-52 liberty see freedom look, the 3,25,27,38-9,43,46,51,

68,108,121, 122 Maclntyre, Alasdair 65, 76 Marshall, T. H. 107 Marx, Karl 24 master/slave relation 26, 46—8, 53—4, 108, 125-6, 129-30, 139, 149, 151 see also recognition Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 48

161

Nausea 145 Nazism 77, 93 need 12,28,29 Nietzsche, Friedrich 97 No Exit 35 Notebooks for an Ethics 27,50—6,

94-5 oppression 83

41,47-50,53-4,67-8,

Plato 27, 145, 147 Plessy versis Ferguson praxis 122 project 31-4,67

109

rape 13-14 Rawlsjohn 105 reciprocity see recognition recognition 3, 26-7, 35-58, 94-6, 105-6, 144, 146, 149, 159 criticisms of Hegel 40-3 institutional 118-31 non-mutual 120-1,125 objections 111-15 reader-writer 43—6,103—4 recognition arguments 94-7, 105-11, 151, 155-6 respect 37, 57, 75, 77, 84-6, 94-6, 113-14, 126, 150 civic 103,105-11 instrumental bargaining 111-13, 128 responsibility 70, 75, 79-84, 98,

88-91,92-3,104 rights 69, 148-9 human 115 roles, social 40-1, 44-5, 65, 68,81, 82,92-3, 103-4, 112, 122-3, 125 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 12, 102, 129 Saint Genet 19,27,46 Scheler, Max 145

162

Index

self 2,21-34,48,113-14,128 ancient views 27-8

Hegelian 25-7, 36-7, 48-9, 53-4, 79,88,94-6, 109 intersubjective 24—7,66 series 118,119-20 Shklar, Judith 106, 123 situation 78-9, 88 slavery 15-16, 49, 108, 124, 125-7 social contract 12,122,124 social self see being-for-others

spirit of seriousness state 134-5

145,147

thirds 57, 121-2 Tocqueville, Alexis de

136

Transcendence of the Ego

30

Walzer, Michael 124 Weber, Max 131 What is Literature? 27, 43-6, 103-4 Williams, Robert 153