By projecting myself towards my ends, I preserve my ends, I preserve the past with me, and by action I decide its meaning. Who shall decide whether the period which I spent in prison after a theft was fruitful or deplorable? I—according to whether I give up stealing or become hardened. Who can decide the educational value of a trip, the sincerity of a profession of love, the purity of a past intention, etc.? It is I, always I, according to the ends by which I illuminate these past events.41
The common lament “if I had only” testifies to the relation of present to past. What, at the time, seemed “trivial” or “too difficult to be worth the effort,” becomes illuminated as “what I should have done at all costs.” Likewise, the urgency and weight of past engagements depends on present commitments. The gravity of a manger's professional and organizational commitments, the sanctity of her marriage, duties to her children, obligations to pay debts and carry the mortgage, and the like, may seem like unbreakable chains to the past. But, “suppose,” asks Sartre, “that…I radically modify my fundamental project…my earlier engagements will lose all their urgency.”42 Consider “Moonie” religious converts. Bonds to family and old friends dissolve as their indoctrination crystallizes. Thrown out of relation to present commitments, the expected emotions are absent; we are not moved. In such cases, writes Sartre, “the past falls back as a disarmed and duped expectation; it is ‘without force.’”43
What Is Character?
Character and temperament are often depicted in discussions of business as givens about a person. James Cramer, cohost of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer show and cofounder of TheStreet.com portrays his high-octane disposition as if it is a kind of fixture of his being in his bestselling autobiography.44 For Sartre, however, a fixity of character only means that the person persists in a certain projection of himself. He argues that “character is a vow. When a man says, ‘I am not easy to please,’ he is entering into a free engagement with his ill-temper, and by the same token his words are a free interpretation of certain ambiguous details in his past. In this sense there is no character; there is only a project of oneself.”45 The aim of Sartre's description of various “givens”—past, environment, character, and so forth—is to clarify the human situation, and his conclusions set the stage for an explicit return to the opening question in this chapter, whether reasons or attitude ought to be the priority in business ethics. While we live among various existents, it is we who give meaning and bearing to existents by the manner of our being. The situation—not the things themselves—comes into being only as we transcend the given toward some end. Yet the situation is neither merely subjective nor merely objective. It is neither my impression of the mountain I want to climb, nor the mountain itself. “The situation,” writes Sartre, “Is a relation of being between a for-itself and the in-itself which the for-itself nihilates. The situation is the whole subject (he is nothing but his situation) and it is also the whole ‘thing’ (there is never anything more than things). The situation is the subject illuminating things by his very surpassing, if you like; it is things referring to the subject his own image.”46 It is the qualities of the mountain as to-be-climbed, and such hypothetical qualities as difficult, impossible-to-climb, and so on, which reflect the condition of my body. The “silly” choice of this mountain in spite of my condition indicates a certain state of determination to persist.
As the situations exist in the light of my projection of myself, as an individual, Sartre concludes that there is neither any privileged situation nor privileged point of view. To say there is a “privileged situation” is to say that the objective facts demand a certain countenance toward them. Yet, as Sartre argues, “the world gives counsel only if one questions it, and one can question it only for a well-determined end.”47 In respect to a projected end, the circumstances will indeed be more or less felicitous, but that is already to evaluate circumstances from some vantage point. Furthermore, the point of view a person assumes is, in the adopting, his own. And each situation, by virtue of the person being a certain way, amongst certain things, is to be thought of as eminently concrete.
Which Should Drive Moral Choice: Reason or Emotion (or Freedom)?
It is time now to summarize this discussion in terms of our question whether intellect or emotion should be business ethics' priority, and which is more likely to promote personal happiness and economic success. Those who argue for the priority of emotions stress the potency of emotions and attitudes in guiding what we do and what we believe. Similarly, those who argue for the priority of reason do so in terms of the importance of having good reasons as the grounds for our actions. Sartre transforms our way of responding to the question with the argument, which I have outlined above, that both reasons and emotions or motives are derivative from something more basic in human action, namely, our free projection of ourselves in our mode of being. If a priority for business ethics is concern for the ultimate ground of action, then, according to Sartre, our primary attention should somehow be with our freedom of choice. Thus, Sartre's view diminishes the status of rational character, if “rational” takes on the restricted sense of evaluating objective conditions as means to given ends. Evaluation may be objective, but it is necessarily done in the light of some end, argues Sartre, and such ends emerge with the free projection of oneself in this or that way. “It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation.”48
Authenticity: The Ultimate Ethical Value?
There is, however, a distinguished sense of being rational in Sartre, which is highlighted by a discussion of the status of happiness, security, and success—goals often stressed by those advocating virtue approaches to business ethics.49 Bluntly put, happiness, as something like a utilitarian idea of surplus of pleasure over pain, security, and success, even the attainment of Aristotelian well-being or eudaimonia, all carry no special priority for Sartre. As one scholar puts it, “In its more common usage, the term ‘happiness’ finds no place in the authentic life prescribed by Sartre. The best that can be hoped for in terms of reward, end, or goal showing authentic existence is the satisfaction and dignity that arises from the individual's assertion of his freedom in the face of an absurd universe.”50 The aim of Sartre's analysis is not to liberate us from suffering, but rather to awaken us to authentic existence. If authenticity is the ultimate ethical value, and being rational means the conscious and deliberate acceptance of our human condition of freedom in our manner of being, then the chief barriers to being rational will be found in those ways of being that undercut such an acceptance. “Bad faith” stands for the ways we run away from acceptance of our freedom; discussing it will clarify what is involved in this sense of being rational.
This passage from Nausea, Sartre's well-known novel, expresses the spirit of bad faith: “For the most trivial event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.”51 What such stories give us is a pattern to which to conform our lives. We say that the sense and direction of our lives is given in the story, while refusing to recognize that it is we who tell the stories. Insofar as we persist in living our life as a story, we make ourselves thing-like in denying our responsibility for our actions. We say that we are essentially the story we tell, but as Walter Kauffman explains Sartre's view:
A man is not…a waiter, or a coward in the same way in which he is six feet tall or blond…. If I am six feet tall, that is that. It is a fact no less than that the table is, say, two feet high. Being a coward or a waiter, however, is different: it depends on ever-new decisions. I may say: I must leave now—or, I am that way—because I am a waiter, or a coward, as if being a waiter or a coward were a