JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

198Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsnot be able to move us, for God does not do the Good: he is it. Otherwise would wehave to refuse to attribute perfection to the divine essence?What we can take from the examination of this idea that “the Good has to be done”is that the agent of Good is not the Good. Nor is he Evil, which will lead us back in anindirect way to posing the problem of the being of the Good. He is poor over againstthe Good, he is its disgraced creator, for his act does not turn back on him to qualifyhim. No doubt, if he does it often, it will be said that he is good or just. But “good”does not mean: one who possesses the Good, but: one who does it. Just does notmean: who possesses justice, but: who renders it. So the original relation of man to theGood is the same type as transcendence, that is, the Good presents itself as what hasto be posited as an objective reality through the effort of a subjectivity. The Good isnecessarily that toward which we transcend ourselves, it is the noema of that particularnoesis that is an act. The relation between acting subjectivity and the Good is as tightas the intentional relation that links consciousness to its object, or the one that bindsman to the world in being-in-the-world.The Good cannot be conceived apart from an acting subjectivity, and yet it isbeyond this subjectivity. Subjective in that it must always emanate from a subjectivityand never impose itself on this subjectivity from the outside, it is objective in that itis, in its universal essence, strictly independent of this subjectivity. And, reciprocally,any act whatsoever originally presupposes a choice of the Good. Every act, in effect,presupposes a separation and a withdrawal of the agent in relation to the real and anevaluating appraisal of what is in the name of what should be. So man has to beconsidered as the being through which the Good comes into the world. Not inasmuchas consciousness can be contemplative but inasmuch as the human reality is a project.This explains why many people are tempted to confuse the Good with what takesthe most effort. An ethics of effort would be absurd. In what way would effort be asign of the Good? It would cost me more in effort to strangle my son than to live withhim on good terms. Is this why I should strangle him? And if between equally certainpaths that both lead to virtue I choose the more difficult, have I not confused meansand ends? For what is important is to act, not to act with difficulty. And if I considereffort as a kind of ascetic exercise, I am yielding first to a naturalistic ethics of exercise,of the gymnastics of the soul. I have the thinglike [choisiste] idea of profiting from anacquisition, like the gymnast who does fifteen repetitions today so as to be able to dotwenty the day after tomorrow. But in ethics there is neither trampoline nor acquisition.Everything is always new. Hero today, coward tomorrow if he is not careful. It is justthat, if effort has this price in the eyes of so many (aside from an old Christian aromaof mortification), it is because in forcing myself I experience my act to a greater degree