Abstract

This dissertation presents a constructive reading of Jean-Paul Sartre's Morale et histoire, the undelivered 1965 Cornell Lectures. My thesis is that this unpublished and largely unknown investigation of the relationship between morality and history provides significant resources for a novel Sartrean argument for human freedom. This argument begins with concrete moral experience and makes its way toward freedom, thus effecting an illuminating reversal of the conventional logic of philosophical inquiry. The argument achieves much of its persuasiveness because it stays close to lived-experience, adhering as nearly as possible to an ideal of methodological exemplarism by drawing its conclusions from analyses of concrete moral events. Briefly, the text of Morale et histoire presents Sartre's most systematic inquiry into the nature and significance of ethical norms and moral praxis. Sartre's dialectical-phenomenological account of moral praxis culminates in what he calls the "paradox of ethos." Careful examination of the paradoxical nature of morality, I argue, yields a vision of concrete, situated, historical freedom that surely counts among "the varieties of free will worth wanting" . The task of this dissertation is to defend these claims using Sartre's Morale et histoire as the chief philosophical resource