Being and morality

The purpose of this thesis is to develop Jean-Paul Sartre's account of an existentialist ethics based upon the phenomenological ontology that he sets out in Being and Nothingness. For a long time after the publication of Being and Nothingness in 1943, this was considered a difficult, perhaps even impossible task, in view of the apparently nihilistic implications of Sartre's understanding of individual reality. His concept of the 'unhappy consciousness,' his descriptions of the 'useless passion' of being and his suggestion that 'Hell is other people' have all been interpreted as ideas that are inimical to the possibility of meaningful moral action, ethical well-being and harmonious relations with others. However, three years after Sartre's death in 1980, Arlette Elkaim Sartre published the unfinished Notebooks for an Ethics, which contain some 500 pages of preliminary considerations of an existentialist ethics based upon the phenomenological ontology of Being and Nothingness. This book does not provide readers of existentialism with a fully-fledged ethical theory, but it does throw new light upon the direction that the development of a morality of freedom will take, and its publication has rejuvenated interest in existentialist ethics. In the twenty years since the publication of the Notebooks, the task of developing Sartre's preliminary considerations into a more developed form of ethical theory has become one of the central concerns for readers of his phenomenological ontology. It is this task which defines the purpose of this thesis. The distinctive feature of this thesis is that it uses a three stage. dialectical model of reflective development in the individual consciousness in order to develop Sartre's account of an ontological ethics. This dialectical model is applied to Sartre's considerations of the individual's relation to the world, to others, and to moral values. The first stage of this model refers to the level of the individual's unreflective being in the world of values in the presence of others. The second stage distinguishes the attitude of impure reflection in the individual's understanding of these relations. The third stage develops Sartre's account of the project of being in the world on the level of pure, or authentic reflection. This project of being on the level of pure reflection is developed by Sartre in the Notebooks, and it is here that he sets out a positive promulgation of his existentialist account of ethics. This positive account compliments and completes the negative critique of ethics that Sartre sets out in Being and Nothingness, and which comprises his considerations of the second stage of the dialectical model. In this way, by developing the dialectical model from the first stage of unreflection, through the second stage of impure reflection and to the third stage of pure reflection, we can arrive at a rounded conception of an existentialist ethics. In Chapter One of this thesis, the dialectical model is applied to Sartre's understanding of the individual's relation to the world. The focus here is upon such ontological and ethical matters as the nature of the individual's being in the world, the question of individual identity, and the possibility of fulfilment or justification to existence. In Chapter Two, the model is applied to the individual's relations with others. The purpose here is to make sense of Sartre's descriptions of conflict and domination that characterise relations based upon impure reflection, and to develop his account of the structure of relations of authentic love. Chapter Three concerns the individual's relations to values. By applying the dialectical model of reflective development to these relations, this thesis aims to elucidate Sartre's understanding of being and morality