Sartre's defense of subjectivity and freedo

This dissertation begins its inquiry by tracing the origin and evolution of Sartre's concept of consciousness in his critique of Descartes's idea of 'Substantial self' and Hussler's notion of 'Transcendental Ego'. After ejecting all possible content from consciousness he declared with the phenomenologists that consciousness is simply intentional. This study advances the position that Sartre's early philosophical venture resulted in a subjectivism which failed to accommodate the social and material world.;Some time later, after his experience in the war years and under pressure from critics, Sartre resolved to deal with what his long time companion (Simone de Beauvoir) called the "force of circumstance." Sartre himself described his earlier discourse as a philosophy of "interiority" implying that it was limited in scope and range to a narrow dimension of the human experience. Thus, in order to overcome the limitations of his earlier work, Sartre devoted a good part of his latter writings to the analysis of conditions which impose limitation, restriction or constraints on human freedom.;The reading suggested in this work is that Sartre's move from individualist theory to social ontology and also to Marxism should be seen as a step in the concretization and solidification of his early philosophy. But even here, as he tried to confront the main broader question of man's relation with the social and material world, his aim was to retain his earlier notion of consciousness (freedom from all determination) and also at the same time to posit a consciousness which is shaped by the environment. Thus against those who advanced the theory that there is a philosophical rift between the early and late Sartre the position advanced here is that there is ultimately a single project that pervades his entire work, vis. to establish a free, spontaneous, translucent consciousness in the early works and to demonstrate subjective the role of individual experience in history and politics in the latter works.;Towards the end of dissertation it is asked whether or not Sartre had succeeded in moving from abstract to concrete freedom, from individualist theory to social ontology, and from Existentialism to Marxism: the conclusion reached here is that, even thought Sartre's latter work gained a relative degree of concreteness and solidity, he did not achieve his projected aim because he failed to fully transcend the basic limitation of his early ontology.