Existential Ethics in Sartre: Freedom, Gaze, and Otherness as the Tragic Condition of Responsibility

Jean-Paul Sartre never wrote his Ethics. While he extensively explored freedom, alienation, and intersubjectivity, he left the architecture of an existential ethics largely unbuilt. In The Existential Ethics in Sartre: Freedom, Gaze, and Otherness as the Tragic Condition of Responsibility, Noah Blake boldly steps into this unfinished space-not to speculate, but to reveal what was already latent within Sartre's own ontological framework. Blake's project is not a reinterpretation but a reconstruction. Through a meticulous re-reading of Being and Nothingness, Existentialism Is a Humanism, and Sartre's political writings, Blake exposes how the building blocks of an existential ethics are already scattered across Sartre's work. Freedom, for-itself, bad faith, the gaze of the Other, objectification, love, and political domination: each of these, when reassembled, outlines a fully-fledged ethical vision that Sartre himself never explicitly systematized-but inadvertently provided. What distinguishes this work is its central claim: that Sartre's ontology is already ethical at its core, not because it offers prescriptions, but because it exposes the tragic structure of responsibility itself. The gaze of the Other does not merely alienate-it creates the inescapable terrain where freedom must continually reassert itself. Institutions, ideologies, and power systems stabilize identities through collective forms of bad faith, but even here, the possibility of authentic freedom persists. Blake constructs a framework in which ethics emerges not from reconciliation or universal norms, but from the permanent struggle to sustain one's project of being in full awareness of its ontological vulnerability. In doing so, this book offers not simply a study about Sartre, but a work that completes what Sartre's own philosophy gestured toward: an existential ethics grounded in the very structure of being-for-itself. For scholars, philosophers, and readers of existential thought, this book invites a return to Sartre with new eyes-illuminating the ethics he left unwritten but structurally unavoidable.