Shah Jahan's third surviving son and successor, Aurangzeb, is generally considered the last effective Mughal ruler. Under his successors the Mughal domain diminished. Even in Aurangzeb's reign, persistent warfare in the Deccan and increased factionalism among the nobility had an impact on the empire's stability. Most believe that a lack of vitality in artistic production paralleled this military and political instability. As a result, the architecture of Aurangzeb and the later Mughals has largely been ignored. It should not be.

All the same, under Aurangzeb and his successors the framework of earlier architectural patronage was changed. That is, under the earlier Mughals the emperor was the model patron. The nobility generally regarded the type of structures he built and the styles he favored as the ideal to emulate. Under Aurangzeb, and especially under his successors, that changed. There was no dynamic imperial patron, so the nobility and other classes built independently of strong central direction, often employing styles and motifs that still echoed those established in Shah Jahan's reign.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS DURING AURANGZEB'S REIGN

When Shah Jahan became ill in 1657, most believed that he would not survive. This sparked a war of succession among the imperial princes with Aurangzeb emerging as victor. He first celebrated his coronation in Delhi's Shalimar garden in 1658 and again the same year in the palace of Shahjahanabad, then adding to his name the title cAlamgir (World Seizer). Although Shah Jahan recovered and lived until 1666, he remained a prisoner in the Agra fort for the rest of his life.

BABUR

Babur before his conquest of India

Born in what is today the southern Soviet province of Uzbekistan, the Timurid Babur inherited the throne of a small principality known as Ferghana in 1494. He was then eleven years old. By the time he was twenty-one, he twice had held neighboring Samarqand, albeit briefly. For two years after his second loss of Samarqand, Babur, homeless and supported only by a tiny band of loyal followers, sought a principality. In 1504 his luck improved, and he captured Kabul and surrounding territories. In 1511, Babur tried for a third time to extend his rule to Samarqand, this time with support from the Safavid king Shah Ismacil. The Safavid extended his support only because Babur, a Sunni, had agreed to adopt trappings of the Shia creed, a heretical notion to the orthodox Sunni Muslims of Samarqand. Babur was able to enter the city and establish himself as its ruler. But within less than a year, the Sunni subjects of Samarqand withdrew support from Babur. After unsuccessful attempts to gain Bukhara, Babur returned to Kabul in 1512, once again holding only this province, nothing more.

While Babur's tenure in Samarqand had been short, the city's impact upon him was profound, shaping his attitude toward architecture and, even more significantly, toward landscape. Samarqand, embellished by Timur and his immediate successors with splendid char bagh gardens, mosques, madrasas and tombs, was one of the wonders of the fifteenth century. Babur was also deeply impressed by Herat, the seat of most cultured Timurid princes, which he had visited in 1507.

PAINTING BEFORE I540

Few recent studies of Indian painting have considered the established traditional Indian styles out of which Sultanate, Rajput, Mughal, and Deccani painting developed and in the context of which they should more frequently be seen. Douglas Barrett and Basil Gray, Indian Painting, Geneva, 1963, did discuss the earlier traditions of wall-painting, and their discussion provides a framework for very necessary future studies; otherwise, however, their survey study - although the best currently available - has long been out of date. Ajanta Murals, edited by A. Ghosh, New Delhi, 1967; C. Sivaramamurti, South Indian Paintings, New Delhi, 1968; Amancharla Gopala Rao, Lepakshi, Hyderabad, 1969; and C. Sivaramamurti, Vijayanagara Paintings, New Delhi, 1985, all provide important information about and reproductions of earlier wall-paintings at major sites.

Several studies provide an overview of the various regional styles of manuscript painting that immediately preceded the advent of Mughal influence. The most thorough survey, and the best introduction to the subject, remains Karl Khandalavala and Moti Chandra, New Documents of Indian Painting-A Reappraisal, New Delhi, 1969. Many of the ideas presented there are further expanded in Moti Chandra, Studies in Early Indian Painting, London, 1974. Pramod Chandra, The Tuti-Nama of The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Origins of Mughal Painting, Graz, 1976, thoroughly discusses how these pre-Mughal styles affected and directed early Mughal manuscript illustrations. It is essential reading.

In 1526 a descendant of the Iranian house of Timur, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, better known today simply as Babur, defeated the last ruler of the Lodi dynasty in a battle at Panipat, about 90 km north of Delhi. The Lodis were one of many short-lived Islamic houses that had ruled over much of the Indian subcontinent since the Islamic conquest of this area in 1192. Babur and his successors, who continued to rule north India until 1858, were known as the Mughals, a term Babur would not have liked, for originally it had a pejorative connotation. In contemporary eyes Babur's victory over Ibrahim Lodi was no more consequential than the frequent campaigns that brought changes in ruling power. However, well before the year 1600, during the reign of Babur's grandson, Akbar, it was clear that Mughal rule made a substantial impact on the cultural, economic, and political development of the lands it controlled – an area then called Hindustan. In the realm of architecture, the Mughals achieved master-builder status, producing monuments such as the Taj Mahal, which even today is considered one of the world's most magnificent buildings.

Unlike the contemporary and powerful Islamic rulers of Iran and Turkey, the Safavids and Ottomans, the Mughals ruled a land dominated by non-Muslims, largely Hindus. Just as indigenous religions and traditions were tolerated and in many cases even respected by the Mughal rulers, so, too, they incorporated in their patronage of the arts, literature and music many indigenous elements. Over their 300-year rule, Mughal attitudes toward the indigenous Indian population – Hindu and Muslim – varied; so did Mughal adaptation of earlier Indian art forms.

SOME PRELIMINARY REFERENCE POINTS ON THE SUBJECT

Autonomous, independent, spontaneous foundation of knowledge, understanding, feeling, imagination? Alienating, idealist, bourgeois humanist, phallogocentric delusion? Does the subject lie between these two polar opposite descriptions of it, does it span them and, like a Pascalian paradox, fill all the space between, or does it lie elsewhere entirely, perhaps in a Utopia? Is belief in the subject a necessary alienation, an alienation heureuse, a transcendental illusion of the Kantian kind? Is the subject an outmoded peg on which humanism used to hang its credentials and which can be abandoned along with the rest of the humanist paraphernalia? Or, to change metaphor, would such a rejection involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Is the concept of the subject necessary to any meditation on ethics, and, if so, need it be more than an “operational concept”? Or should this idea be shunned as a manifestation of the worst kind of paternalism? Contemporary French philosophy returns incessantly to the subject - recent thinking on ethics and politics, and in particular on Auschwitz and on Heidegger, has made the issue a burning one once again - "through flame or ashes, but. . . inevitably, " to use Derrida's concluding words in De l'Esprit. Having deposed the subject so firmly and with such apparent haste and delight in the 1960s and 1970s, French philosophers are now seeming to repent at leisure. The "death of man" (Foucault) and the "ends of man" (Derrida) are now seen to have lacked the radical finality with which their celebration endowed them twenty years earlier.

In Sartre's ontology what differentiates human being from all other being is precisely nothing. Or more accurately, it is a nothingness. In rewriting the sentence I have subtly changed it. Human being is not the same as the rest of being but is distinguished from it by a separating nothingness. Have I merely effected a sleight of hand? Is this nothingness a futile hypostatization? Or is it in reality a disguised something?

When the Greek Atomists declared that reality consisted of atoms and void, it was easy to grasp that the void was real without being a substance. We can see a hole. Clearly, emptiness was necessary if atoms were to group and regroup themselves in the forms that make up the universe. But the Atomist's nonbeing does not do anything; it is being in the form of self-moving atoms that is responsible for both relative permanencies and change. By contrast, Sartre puts all signifying activity where there is nothingness. And where is this nothingness? He tells us that "Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being-like a worm" (p. 56). But this metaphor is something of an enigma and requires explanation. One thing is sure: Where there is nothingness, there is consciousness, but the two are not quite synonyms. And in one context Sartre speaks of "little pools of nonbeing" existing out there in the world (p. 53). Consciousness and nothingness are dependent on being, but they are not being. Sartre's ontology is a phenomenological description of the relation of this no-thing, which is consciousness, to the being on which it depends.

The purpose of this essay is to reflect on Sartre as a philosopher of the imagination in order better to describe and assess his approach to the philosophy of history. Sartre was, of course, an existentialist and we shall consider what it means to formulate an “existentialist” philosophy of history. But his was equally a philosophy of consciousness and the paradigm of consciousness for him was imaginative consciousness. Realizing this fact will open the door to a more adequate comprehension of his work as a whole, but especially his social thought, including his theory of history. For a basic thesis I wish to defend is that Sartre likens the intelligibility of history to that of an artwork because he considers the former as much the product of creative freedom as he does the latter. So we shall begin with a reading of major theses from his Psychology of Imagination and move through his posthumously published works, The War Diaries and the Cahiers pour une morale, in order to observe their expansion and application in both volumes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Family Idiot. In so doing, we shall try to make sense of Sartre's claim that history in general and his Flaubert study in particular constitute “a novel that is true” (un roman vrai).

This collection of essays, by some of the foremost interpreters of Sartre from Europe and the United States, was composed specifically for the new series of Cambridge Companions to Major Philosophers. None of the essays has been published previously elsewhere. The contributors range from the most senior and established Sartrean scholars to some of the most promising and lively of the younger generation of critics. As editor, my task was to commission a broad range of essays, covering the major aspects of Sartre's philosophical work and its implications, in line with the purpose of the new Cambridge series. What struck me most forcibly on receipt of the typescripts, was the originality, density, and cohesion of the interpretations. They not only present a generous and balanced view of the wide variety of Sartre's philosophy, but also all make a contribution to the “new” Sartre, that is to the view of Sartre which has been gradually emerging since his death in 1980, as a figure whose diversity was far from being mastered, who could not, without distortion and impoverishment, be identified with the “classical existentialist” of the 1940s, and whose relationship to Structuralism and Post- Structuralism, as well as to psychoanalysis, Marxism, and literary theory, was far more complex than had been generally supposed. Suffering, since the 1960s, from the backlash of rejection that exceptional popularity and fame brings in its wake, Sartre was commonly used as the humanist target against whom nascent Structuralist, Marxist, and Deconstructionist critics could test their arms.

The title of the present study represents a philosophical wager. After all, Sartre never produced a completed ethical system even though his entire work is shot through with the ethical problematic. It will consequently be necessary for this study to account for the insistent recurrence of the moral question in Sartre's works as well as for the reasons why he was never willing to answer this question in any definitive manner.

To be sure, Sartre did, in fact, write on ethical questions. His Notebooks for an Ethic (1947) are subsequent to Being and Nothingness (1943); two other texts (1964 and 1965) are subsequent to the Critique of Dialectical Reason (i960). The first of these are notes for lectures given by Sartre at the Gramsci Institute in Rome (1964); the second (1965) are notes intended for a lecture at Cornell University canceled at the last moment by Sartre in protest against American bombings in Vietnam. The Notebooks for an Ethic, published posthumously in 1983, are a collection of fragmentary comments or aphorisms without any single emphasis. The two other texts (1964 and 1965) remain unpublished. I shall refer to these latter works as The Rome Lectures and The Cornell Notes. These are coherent texts that set forth fully developed lines of reasoning. Moreover all three of these texts have in common the fact that they were never published by Sartre and consequently, in Sartre's eyes, offered no satisfactory philosophical solution to the ethical question.

“A life develops in spirals: It always passes through the same points, but at different levels of integration and complexity” (CRD I, p. 71). This observation, which underpins Sartre's synthesis of biographical and historical methods in studying the individual and society, might also apply to the preoccupation with committed writing that characterized his own life and work. The reader cannot fail to note the persistence and the far from linear development of the concepts and methods which articulate that preoccupation. The range of concepts itself promises complexity. Psychological, moral, social, political, historical, linguistic, literary, and aesthetic issues must all be integrated through a correspondingly intricate method that draws its inspiration, without lapsing into eclecticism, from a number of different intellectual traditions. The tracing of the spiral is fascinating, frustrating, and exemplary - fascinating because of the commitment and tenacity of Sartre's arguments, frustrating because those arguments reach no conclusion, exemplary because the inconclusiveness is itself inherent in the problem analyzed and in the method of analysis: Sartre's open-ended writing itself enacts an open dialectic.

Two of the major theoretical points through which Sartre's spiral passes are Qu'est-ce que la littératuie? (1947), usually taken to offer the classic description of "committed" literature, and "Questions de méihode" (i960), which presents a more complex view of the interaction of individual, society, and history, prescribes a method for revealing the dialectical relationship of social conditioning and individual project, and prepares the reader for the potentially surprising claim that a writer as apparently uncommitted as Flaubert may be considered to be "engagé."

In reflecting upon Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical writings in their entirety, the question arises as to whether these writings constitute a harmonious development or rather provide clear evidence of breaks. Generally, the critical literature assumes that the ontological, epistemological, and anthropological positions that are taken in the early philosophic-psychological writings are further elaborated and deepened in the first major work Being and Nothingness. Consequently, there would seem to be no grounds to suppose that in the period between 1934 (the year during which Sartre, in Berlin, worked on The Transcendence of the Ego) and 1943 (the year when the first major work was published) alterations in Sartre's philosophical conceptions occurred of such a magnitude as to interfere with the continuity of his thinking.

Matters are quite different with respect to the period between 1943 and i960, the year when the second major work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, was published. Whereas Being and Nothingness represents an existentialist conception of man, in which the unique individual - essentially still free even when in chains - is master of his own fate, in the Critique the superiority of a historical-materialistic view of man and history is defended, while existentialism is reduced to the status of an enclave within the tenets of Marxism. Evidently, during the course of - and after - the Second World War, Sartre's ideas altered to such a degree as to necessitate a radical revision of his anthropological viewpoints.

Across its long history moral philosophy has been as concerned with the cultivation of certain moral dispositions, or traits of character, or moral psychologies, as it has been with establishing the validity and universality of moral rules and principles. Moral psychology begins with the inner person: not how we outwardly conform to external moral rules, but how we are in our hearts and souls and, particularly, how we are when we are truly flourishing as human beings. It is therefore concerned with the ethics of virtue, and a casual glance at the respective moral psychologies of Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and the existentialists would reveal analyses of such virtues as integrity, justice, prudence, courage, magnanimity, sincerity, and authenticity. These are not innate dispositions, or inherited traits of personality like shyness or cheerfulness. They are acquired by teaching or practice or reflection, and to a certain extent reveal what we have made of ourselves; thus they express our moral way of being, and our fundamentl moral outlook, and not just something we happen to have.

Sartre's concern with the ethics of character, the conditions of self-determination and human agency, and the phenomenology of moral life, places him within this tradition of moral and philosophical psychology. This essay is concerned with elaborating and clarifying a number of interrelated aspects of Sartre's moral and philosophical psychology, particularly as they are developed in Being and Nothingness: self-determination and agency, responsibility for self, the unity of a life, moral reasoning, and self-knowledge.

INTENTIONAL ANALYSIS

The title of one of Sartre's essays, Questions of Method, is perhaps a sufficient reminder of how remote from us he was as a philosopher. Questions of methodology, Charles Taylor long ago pointed out, are “usually thought to be a waste of time” in England, where most philosophers prefer to adopt “the stance of the inarticulate gardener with a green thumb being interrogated by the agronomist - I just plants it and it grows.” Sartre takes over from Husserl's phenomenology two methodological procedures, “intentional analysis” and “eidetic analysis.” Intentional analysis is a procedure for analyzing consciousness with respect to its “meaning-endowing” acts, by which I identify something as being what it is. Thus I am conscious of it as “a triangle,” as “a table,” as “anger.”

Sartre takes over from Husserl's phenomenology two methodological procedures, "intentional analysis" and "eidetic analysis." Intentional analysis is a procedure for analyzing consciousness with respect to its "meaning-endowing" acts, by which I identify something as being what it is. Thus I am conscious of it as "a triangle," as "a table," as "anger." Phenomenological analysis is in-tentional in the etymological sense that it follows out the identifying reference of the "act" to the object "aimed at" as the "target" of the reference. Sartre's dedication to intentional reference is manifest in the succession of two titles: Having reviewed traditional theories of the imagination under the title L'Imagination, he conducts his own analysis under the title L'Imaginaire. The difference in title indicates a change from the traditional analysis in which the imagination is one of the faculties of the mind, to an intentional analysis in which characteristics of the imagination are determined by following out the reference to the imaginary object. I shall offer an example of this intentional analysis as soon as I have brought out how an intentional analysis is also "eidetic."

THE CURVE OF THE EPOCH

By the time of Sartre's death in 1980, Structuralism, as a movement, had evaporated, and various forms of Post-Structuralism were in full swing. At the beginning of his career, in the 1920s and 1930s, Structuralism was just beginning to be thought of, in a few localities remote from Paris and existentialism in disciplinary and in geographical space - for example technical linguistics in Prague. There is a sense, then, in which Sartre's life and that of Structuralism run in parallel, a tempting observation enough in the light of his theory of oracular lives, of the “curves” of epochs, in the third volume of L'Idiot de la famille. The conjecture that Sartre and Structuralism might have had a serious affinity seems at first glance however to be a nonstarter, given the lack of apparent overlap between his concerns and those of the major structuralists (whether by avowal or attribution): Althusser, Barthes, Dumézil, Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss.

What the structuralists had in common was a preoccupation with embodied relationships - whether political, literary, religious, historical, psychoanalytic, or ethnological - taken to be objective, sharing or borrowing the structure of language, and reflecting the unconscious structure of mind. What Sartre emphasized, in contrast, was the complete lucidity of the conscious subject as free to enter or not into relationships, and the responsibility of the agent for the constitution and maintenance in practice of the group structures to which he or she might belong.