We can edit out what we want in the next few weeks. I think having far too much is better than not having enough. Besides, as long as there is ample contribution from us all, then we can pick the best bits and structure a dialogue that is cohesive from it.

Anyway, whilst reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense I have come across the best explanation of Sartre's ontology in Being and Nothingness that I have yet encountered. It is very easy to understand I think.

After this, I think I have said my point. I stand in defence of his Philosophy.

"...Sartre thinks that liberty is exactly nothing - but a nothing which is everything. It is like a curse and at the same time the source of all human grandeur. It is indivisibly the principle of chaos and the principle of human order. If, in order to be subject, the subject must cut himself off from the order of things, man will have no 'state of consciousness', no 'feeling' which is not part of his consuming freedom and which is purely and simply what it is, the way things are. From this follows an analysis of ways of behaving which shows them all to be ambiguous. Bad faith and inauthenticity are essential to man because they are inscribed in the intentional structure of consciousness which is presence both to itself and to things. The very will to be good makes goodness false, since it directs us toward ourselves at the moment we should be directed toward the other" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.74). Furthermore, "The principles of good and evil are therefore but one principle. Man wretchedness can be seen in his grandeur and his grandeur in his wretchedness. Sartre's philosophy, wrote another critic, 'starts by putting out the light of the spirit'. Quite the contrary: it makes it shine everywhere because we are not body and spirit or consciousness confronting the world but spirit incarnate, being in the world" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp.74-75).

I think that the last exert helps also in some way to defend Sartre's philosophy against certain moral criticisms which could be aimed his way. For example, it defends it against the critique that stipulates that if we embrace a philosophy that tells us we have no obligation to our past, or indeed to who we are to be in the future, and only to recreate ourselves in the moment of constant flux, then we have no obligation to the moral goodness of the 'who-we-are'. Sartre's philosophy contests that this 'who-we-are' is itself an act of bad faith, and a projection of of the static into the transient flux. In our constant recreation of ourselves, we are the masters of our destiny. We must only justify our actions to ourselves, not to the external world (including a deity external to ourselves). However, in such self justification, we must also justify our actions in the face of the reality that we can seek support from nowhere else but ourselves. There is no get out clause. And, in addition, when we fashion ourselves, we fashion the world, and in doing so we must also justify this to ourselves. I find it a moral principle not dissimilar to Kant's categorical imperative.

"In morality as in art there is no solution for the man who will not make a move without knowing where he is going and who wants to be accurate and in control at every moment. Our only resort is the spontaneous moment which binds us to others for good or ill, out of selfishness or generosity" (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p.4). Sartre's ontology in Being and Nothingness exhibits the fundamental importance of the importance of the philosophical emphasis of this spoantaneous moment.