Reading Sartre's Second Ethics

Reading Sartre’s Second Ethics: Morality, History, and Integral Humanity provides a comprehensive, reconstructive, and critical interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mature dialectical ethics. Generally referred to as the “second ethics,” the key texts are two posthumously published lectures, one delivered at the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964, the other scheduled to be delivered at Cornell University in 1965 but cancelled by Sartre in protest of U.S. foreign policy. Though quite different in content, method, and intended audience, Sartre gave both lectures the shared title “Morality and History.” This is because, Elizabeth A. Bowman and Robert V. Stone argue, these texts comprise a single, systematic ethic in two parts. The first part (Rome) focuses primarily on the ends or goals of historical conduct; the second part (Cornell) focuses primarily on normativity and its ambiguous place in lived moral experience. The Cornell text argues that the ethical task of “making the human” cannot be properly understood apart from a regressive and phenomenological analysis; the Rome text argues that the progressive and dialectical goal of historical conduct is, precisely, “integral humanity.” Taken together, the two texts demonstrate that integral humanity is always possible because the means to it can always be invented.