Being-towards-others

Sartre's category Being-for-others does not distinguish between my helping someone in need and my attacking someone who is vulnerable, for, on his view, ethical assessment is extraneous to phenomenological description. However, that rationale is less effective in justifying his Ontology's indifference to the contrast between one's performing either of those acts, and one's inertly being the object of another's observation. For, in this case, the contrast is between different sets of phenomenological data, one of which is an abstraction from the other, e. g. that one's spoken words are passively at the disposal of others is only because one has addressed those words to the others to begin with. Given that such an abstraction can seemingly not be justified on phenomenological grounds, Sartre's abstracted Being-for-others is more properly Being-towards-others, and, so his arena of fundamentally conflicting interpersonal relationships is transformed into a sphere based on the attraction of potential mutual enhancement. Such a transform thus obviates many of the psychological analyses that Being and Nothingness presents, as well as more solidly grounds the social theory of Critique of Dialectical Reason. Since Being-towards-others is, thus, a main Ontological category, and is a mode of existence that is subject to ethical assessment, Ethics can be regarded as an independent main division of Ontology. This revision of the relation between Phenomenological Ontology and Ethics thus challenges not only Sartre, for whom the latter is extraneous to the former, but Heidegger, for whom it is irrelevant to it, as well as Levinas, for whom it conflicts.