The Cornell lectures: “Morality and History”
Because much of the Cornell material builds on the Rome lecture notes,
without precisely repeating them, I shall discuss briefly the remarks that
elaborate or add to what was presented the year before.^43 The manuscript
is divided into five sections, of which the fifth was scarcely begun.
(The Rome lecture notes were divided into four sections.) Sartre’s
introduction to the text lays out his intention to pursue his topic
according to the progressive-regressive method introduced inSearch
for a Methodand also used inSketch for a Theory of the Emotions.^44
The first two sections of this text offer a phenomenological description
of moral experience and its actual efficacy in our daily lives. The third
section offers a regressive movement to the basic structures of our ethical
conduct and their internal laws, while the fourth section elucidates the
factors that progressivelymediateour moral experience in a concretizing
synthesis. The final section seems intended to deal with the paradox of
structural causality (e.g. Le ́vi-Strauss or Althusser), as examples of the
then current confrontation of structure and history.^45 But this section
is quite brief and is followed by an appendix on need, desire, moral
negatives, “Man as the son of man” and the imperative.
“ 1. The Specificity of the Ethical Experience”As withBN and the pretheoretical ontological experience of Being
(inspired by Heidegger’sBeing and Time), the Cornell lecture begins
with a “preontological and immediate experience of the ethical as such”
(CSC 35 ). This implies that Sartre’s phenomenology in the first two
sections will behermeneutical, though he does not use the term here.
His reading of common usage reveals a kind of ambiguity, “perpetual
dialectic,” between fact and right (droit). He sees the categorical impera-
tive as irreducible to any set of facts. Such is the popular understanding
(^43) The Cornell lectures are presented as “Morale et Histoire” (MH): 268 – 414.
(^44) STE 96. One finds a similar distinction in Kant.
(^45) Robert Stone and Elizabeth Bowman offer the first reading of this text in English. See their
“Sartre’s ‘Morality and History’: A First Look at the Notes for the Unpublished 1965 Cor-
nell Lectures,” inSA 53 – 82. The other close reading, which I shall also consider, is by
Juliette Simont, who presented the uncorrected (ine ́dit) typescript of the text MH. See her
commentary on this material, “Autour des Confe ́rences de Sartre a`Cornell,” inSur les e ́crits
posthumes de Sartre(E ́ditions de l’Universite ́de Brussels, 1987 ), 35 – 54 ; hereafter CSC.
372 A second ethics? 0