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showing an ethics is possible than where it ought to go. We saw how, from the most minimal points about consciousness, we can derive an ethics of responsibility which regulates our actions, and neither ignores the Other, nor lacks purchase on the physical/material or objective. The question has to be where to go from here: since an ethics is possible, and the world demands ethical decisions from us all the time, what can we take away from this account? Historically, of course, Sartre moved towards Marxism, reflected in his writings through the Search for a Method and the Critique(s) of Dialectical Reason, the second of which was never finished. His interest later shifted to colonialism and imperialism550_{, although he grew frustrated by the incompetence of the leftwing political} movements he engaged with.

In terms of an alternate progression from the early ethics, we can see a therapeutic angle reflected in Sartre’s influence on R.D. Laing. Laing’s Reason and Violence551 _{contains a foreword by Sartre,}

attesting that Laing’s understanding of mental illness is broadly right. We can also see a lineage of allied thought in the work of Erich Fromm; although written before Being and Nothingness his seminal Fear of Freedom552 _{dealt, as the title suggests, with individuals’ desire for less freedom (not}

more) helping open the door to fascism. Insofar as Being and Nothingness has the resources to explain inferiority projects and the like, this historical development was somewhat predictable. In more modern context, Zheng’s emphasis553 _{on catharsis through pure reflection might also suggest a} cross between a self-cultivational and therapeutic ethics derived from authenticity.

We are not without dedicated works spelling out concretely where the ethics will go; Barnes’ An Existentialist Ethics is notable for having been written before the Notebooks were available. It impressively covers how Sartre’s existentialism stands compared to, and vis-à-vis engaging with, political movements as diverse as Zen Buddhism, Marxism, Tillich’s theology and Randian

Objectivism. More recently, T. Storm Heter has proposed a reading of authenticity which stresses

550 _{See Arthur, Paige Unfinished Projects. Verso: London, 2010 for an enlightening description of how this}

mapped onto his substantive work.

551 _{Laing, R.D., Reason and Violence(with D.G. Cooper). Tavistock: London, 1959. p.7. Note, however, that this} comment appears in context of a work on the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

552 _{Fromm, Erich, Fear of Freedom. Routledge: London, 1942.}

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the significance of recognition in other-relations and the possibility of existentialist virtues, drawing on a wider canon than Sartre alone.554

Having drawn on the Sartrean account of knowledge more than usual, I would like to sketch what an ethics of ignorance, of avoiding ignorance, would tell us about how to explore a concrete, real ethics. In a minimal form, our awareness of the world demands that we explore it world and our lives to find out what the ethical looks like. As we saw, we are always and forever interrogating the world; every time the world is made present to us our knowledge is tested and challenged in some way. Moreover, our projects form and disperse along rational lines, which is (empirically) visible due to the formation of our characters behind us. The creation and disruption of our projects, seeing which projects can lock or cohere and which can’t, is genuinely revelatory about the structure of value since that structure is its condition of possibility. We can, and do, learn about value and the ethical by seeing what works in our lives and what doesn’t; we are immediately aware, at least on some level, when we are wide of the mark. The best thing we can do, if we want to discover a concretely ethical life, is to allow our knowledge and received truths to be tested as often as possible, and genuinely tested at that. This continual testing applies both on a small and a large level, in our daily routines and the way we go through life as a whole. It does not, and should not, apply only to big- ticket moral questions but to the frameworks of action that contextualise them and make them possible; there is a reciprocal relationship between the small-scale problems which we face and the larger commitments which ground them. Every (accurate) revision improves our truths, it gives us a more adaptive picture of the world which will allow us to prosecute our goals. One route to finding what authenticity concretely means is simple but arduous: to open ourselves to experience (and to the experiences of others) and try to learn from them as much as possible in good faith.

Maintaining a lifestyle of genuine responsibility, moreover, would be a test of faith. A test of our faith in ourselves to deliver that future, and of faith that destiny will not interfere. There is nothing which can compel us to do anything, except actually doing what has to be done. Yet those actions occupy a basically mysterious space, a present which has no reality except as something that will come or which has happened. The best and only defence is to accept that our (major) projects are all “undertakings”, that they require time to execute and will be challenged over and over again. We can look at the past with a critical eye and see how we or others were successful in the past,

whether we really acted coherently or not. Nonetheless there is always scope to be afraid of a future

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where we make mistakes; there will be, as a matter of empirical certainty, a time when we make them. All we can do against destiny is prepare, and be ready to ask what went wrong afterward, no matter how painful the process is.

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