Matthew Ally

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 My thesis is that this unpublished and largely unknown investigation of the relationship between morality and history provides significant resources for a novel Sartrean argument for human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.

I argue that Sartre’s philosophy can be both broadened in its aspirations and deepened in its implications through dialogue with the life sciences. Section 1 introduces the philosophical terrain. Section 2 explores Sartre’s evolving understanding of nature and human relations with nature. Section 3 explores Sartre’s perspectives on scientific inquiry, natural history, and dialectical reason. Section 4 outlines recent developments in the life sciences that bear directly on Sartre’s quiet curiosity about a naturalistic dialectics. Section 5 suggests how these developments constitute progress toward an “ecologized” dialectical philosophy consistent with Sartre’s mature ontology of praxis and pertinent to addressing the burgeoning socioecological crisis.

This essay revisits the question of Sartre's method with particular emphasis on the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics, Critique of Dialectical Reason ( Volume II ), and “Morale et histoire.” I argue that Sartre's method—an ever-evolving though never seamless blend of phenomenological description, dialectical analysis, and logical inference—is at once the seed and fruit of his mature ontology of praxis. Free organic praxis, what Sartre more than once calls “the human act,” is neither closed nor integral, but is rather intrinsically open-ended and integrative. Thus a philosophical method that seeks at once to illuminate human experience and human history must itself be both a reflection and inflection of the essential openness and integrativity of praxis itself. In the conclusion, I argue that the openness and integrativity of Sartre's method are its core strengths and the sources of its continued philosophical worth.