Towards Two Accounts of Sartrean Authenticity
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Abstract
Motivated by Jonathan Webber's recent work, this article addresses what I call ‘the normative bridge problem’ in the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre: What justifies the move from an agent explicitly recognising and affirming her freedom to an obligation to respect the freedom of others? Many sympathetic Sartre commentators have argued that Sartre lacks resources to justify this obligation (Anderson, Heter, Webber) and, hence, that Sartre fails to traverse the normative bridge. This article hypothesizes that Sartre does not need to explicitly justify the bridge obligation. In correctly grasping one's metaphysical nature, a Sartrean agent cannot fail to realise that the affirmation of the freedom of others cannot but follow from the affirmation of one's own freedom. I test the hypothesis by sketching two competing interpretations of authenticity and try to show that only under one interpretation can one see why the normative bridge amounts to a theoretical illusion.
Contributor Notes
Matthew Eshleman is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the lead editor of The Sartrean Mind (Routledge, 2020) and has published numerous essays on Sartre, most recently ‘Against Theological Readings of Sartre’ in the European Journal for Philosophy (2023).