JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Responsibility199in its relation to the Good. The less I make an effort, the more the Good toward whichI strive seems to me given, to exist in the manner of a thing. The more I make an effort,the more this Good that oscillates and fades and bumps along from obstacle to obstacleis something I feel myself to be making. It is in effort that the relation of subjectivityto the Good gets uncovered for me. By escaping destruction, I sense that the Goodruns the risk of being destroyed along with me; each time one of my attempts miscarries,I sense that the Good is not done, that it is called into question. Effort reveals theessential fragility of the Good and the primordial importance of subjectivity.Thus it matters little whether the Good is. What is necessary is that it be throughus. Not that there is here some turning back of subjectivity on itself or that it wants toparticipate in the Good it posits. Reflective reversals take place after the fact andmanifest nothing other than a kind of flight, a preference for oneself. Rather, simply,subjectivity finds its meaning outside of itself in this Good that never is and that itperpetually realizes. It chooses itself in choosing the Good and it cannot be that inchoosing itself it does not choose the Good that defines it. For it is always through thetranscendent that I define myself.Thus, when someone accuses us of favoring whims, they are following the prejudicethat would have it that man is initially fully armed, fully ready, and that thus hechooses his Good afterwards, which would leave him a freedom of indifference facedwith contrary possibilities. But if man qualifies himself by his choice, caprice nolonger has a meaning for, insofar as it is produced by an already constituted personalitythat is “in the world,” it gets inserted within an already existing choice of oneself andthe Good. It is an instantaneous attention to the instant. But for there to be attentionto the instant, there must be a duration that temporalizes itself, that is, an originalchoice of the Good and of myself in the face of the Good.This is what allows us to comprehend that so many people devoted to the Good ofa cause do not willingly accept that this Good should be realized apart from them andby ways that they have not thought of. I will go so far as to sacrifice myself entirelyso that the person I love finds happiness, but I do not wish that it come to him bychance and, so to speak, apart from me.In truth, there is incertitude about subjectivity. What is certain is that the Goodmust be done by some human reality. But is it a question of my individual reality, ofthat of my party, or of that of concrete humanity? In truth, the Good being universal,if I could melt into the human totality as into an indissoluable synthesis, the idealwould be that the Good was the result of the doing of this totality. But, on the onehand, this concrete humanity is in reality a detotalized totality, that is, it will neverexist as a synthesis—it is stopped along the way. With the result that the very ideal of