JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

200Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsa humanity doing the Good is impossible. But, what is more, the quality of universalityof the Good necessarily implies the positing of the Other. If the Other and I were tomelt into a single human reality, humanity conscious of being a unique and individualhistorical adventure could no longer posit the Good except as the object of its ownwill. Or to rediscover the universal structure of the Good, it will have to postulateother human realities, on the Moon or on the planet Mars and therefore, once again,Another person.Note that the universal structure of the Good is necessary as that which gives it itstranscendence and its objectivity. To posit the Good in doing it is to posit Others ashaving to do it. We cannot escape this. Thus, to conclude, it is concrete subjectivity(the isolated subject or the group, the party) that has to do the Good in the face ofothers, for others, and in demanding from the diversity of others that they do it too.The notion of Good demands the plurality of consciousnesses and even the pluralityof commitments.If indeed, without going so far as to presuppose the synthetic totalization ofconsciousnesses and the end of History, we simply imagine a unanimous accordoccurring about the nature of the Good to be done and furthermore an identity ofactions, the Good preserves its universality, but it loses its reality of “having-to-bedone,”for it has at present, for each concrete subjectivity, an outside. It is always forme what I have to do, but it is also what everyone else does. Which is to say that itappears as natural and as supernatural at the same time. This is, in one sense, theambiguous reality of what are called customs. So the Good is necessarily the quest ofconcrete subjectivities existing in the world amidst other hostile or merely diverselyoriented subjectivities. Not only is it my ideal, it is also my ideal that it become theideal of others. Its universality is not de facto, it is de jure like its other characteristics.Monday 17 DecemberIt follows1st, that no man wants the Good for the sake of the Good;2nd, no man wants to do the Good so as to profit from it egoistically (amourpropre).In both cases it is wrong to assume that man is initially fully made and thatafterward he enters into a centripetal or centrifugal relation with the Good. Instead,since it is from this relation (which is the original choice) that both man and the Goodare born, we can set aside both hypotheses. The interested man of the ethics ofinterest, for example, chooses, due to motivating factors that have to do with existential