hundreds of pages in which Sartre recorded notes for a single lecture and a
set of lectures. The single lecture was delivered at the Gramsci Institute in
Rome on May 23 , 1964 as part of a symposium – with prominent Marxist
humanist intellectuals such as Roger Garaudy, Karel Kosik and Adam
Schaff as participants – on the theme of “Ethics and Society.”^9 The set of
lectures addressed the topic of “Morality and History” and was scheduled
for April 7 to 14 , 1965 at Cornell University but was canceled, despite
elaborate preparations by the host institution, because of the American
escalation of the war in Vietnam.^10
Sartre was working on the Rome lecture when the invitation arrived
from Cornell to give a set of five lectures on Flaubert and ethics
(la Morale).^11 So though the typescript for the Rome lecture is not
simply duplicated in the notes for the Cornell lectures, the two are
sufficiently intertwined (with terms from theCritiqueappearing in both)
to warrant our referring to both, together with the disorganized collec-
tion of papers that seem to overlap with them, as Sartre’s “Dialectical
Ethics.” Sartre’s friend, the ethicist Francis Jeanson, noticed the large
manuscript from which Sartre delivered his lecture and asked him how
he could give a single talk from such a sheaf of papers. “It was simple”
Sartre replied, “I turned the pages ten at a time!” Jeanson said he would
thereafter refer to that mass as “Notes on the relations between morality
(la morale) and history.”^12 This captures in brief the spirit of both the
single lecture and the set. It resonates with Sartre’s claim in theCritique
that a concrete ethics must be historical, that is dialectical, whereas his
view inBNwas that the concrete had to be existentially psychoanalytic,
(^9) See “Determinism and Freedom,” Contat and Rybalkaii: 241 – 252 ), translation from French
version of the Italian version (of the original talk in French), “Determinazione e liberta”in the volumeMorale e Societa, ed. Galvano della Volpe (Rome: Editori Riuniti, Instituto
Gramsci, 1996 ), 31 – 41. Neither the French original nor the translations were reviewed by
Sartre, though the Gramsci Institute states that “I testi qui riprodotti sono stati rivisti e
autorizzati dagli autori, in particulare la relazione de Galvano della Volpe.” Michel Rybalka
warns us that Sartre’s contribution, at least, was not reviewed by him. We have consulted
this collection of papers and discussions from the colloquium, “Determinazione e Liberta`,”
presented at the Gramsci Institute in Rome, May 22 – 25 , 1964 , but shall cite the more
10 accessible English translation with this caveat.
He assumed leadership from Bertrand Russell of the war crimes hearings at the end of the
11 war (see below,note^38 ).
12 ORlxxxvi.
“L’Exigence” 557 ,n. 2.
358 A second ethics? 0