Even the atheistic Sartre showed a desire for a new way of thinking about values. He had been scathing about traditional ethics in Nausea, writing in Levinasian terms of how 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.
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