bourgeois types, professing to be well-meaning humanists, had ‘never allowed themselves to be affected by the meaning of a face’. 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. The young French writer Frédéric de
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Sarte's turning
