Sartre's Middle Ethics: Progress in moral aesthetics

The aim of this dissertation is to make a case for the progress that Jean-Paul Sartre makes in what I have termed the "Middle Ethics," which comprises a series of plays, psychobiographies, his 1947 collection of essays published as What Is Literature?, and the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics. The dissertation forwards the argument that Sartre's concept of comprehension is, in many ways, analogous to Heinz Kohut's notion of empathy as vicarious introspection. In the Middle Ethics, Sartre develops an ethics of empathetic comprehension that relies on a moral aesthetic realized through what he terms "litterature engagee" or committed literature. Empathetic comprehension is a phenomenological, prereflexive mode of consciousness that anticipates or imagines the psychic life of the Other by proxy through the characters developed in litterature engagee. I argue that empathetic comprehension is a precondition for moral choice. This dissertation tests the theory that through engagement in the reader--writer dialectic, the reader can recognize fundamental moral problems through consciousness's mode of empathetic comprehension.