Sartre rejected mere tolerance as an inadequate basis for ethics

Evidence

In Being and Nothingness, he went on to say that the placid old ethical principles based on mere tolerance did not go far enough any more. ‘Tolerance’ failed to engage with the full extent of the demands others make on us. It is not enough to back off and simply put up with each other, he felt. We must learn to give each other more than that. Now he went even further: we must all become deeply ‘engaged’ in our shared world. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 636

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Sartre’s ‘engagement’ — the demand to give more than tolerance — as a core existentialist ethical concept for the reader’s orientation.
• SEED: An essay on ‘beyond tolerance’ as a moral ideal — tracing how Sartre’s rejection of mere tolerance anticipates our current debates about allyship and meaningful engagement.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre explicitly denied any pre-existing moral path for human choice. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1136; Sartre held that no legal or professional achievement lets Jews enter the ‘real’ society — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 15

Broader Connections

• Sartre explicitly denied any pre-existing moral path for human choice. #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1136