To be is to be: Jean-Paul Sartre on
existentialism and freedom
"Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it
is."
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre is one of the
most important philosophers of all time.
Despite his work garnering considerable flak
over the years, his theories on existentialism
and freedom cement his place among the most
influential Western philosophers of the 20th-
century and beyond.
The anguish of freedom
"Man is condemned to be free; because once
thrown into the world, he is responsible for
everything he does."
Jean-Paul Sartre believed that human beings
live in constant anguish, not solely because
life is miserable, but because we are
'condemned to be free'. While the
circumstances of our birth and upbringing are
beyond our control, he reasons that once we
become self-aware (and we all do eventually),
we have to make choices — choices that
define our very 'essence'. Sartre's theory
of existentialism states that “existence
precedes essence”, that is only by existing and
acting a certain way do we give meaning to
our lives. According to him, there is no fixed
design for how a human being should be and
no God to give us a purpose. Therefore, the
onus for defining ourselves, and by extension
humanity, falls squarely on our shoulders.
This lack of pre-defined purpose along with
an 'absurd' existence that presents to us
infinite choices is what Sartre attributes to the
“anguish of freedom”. With nothing to restrict
us, we have the choice to take actions to
become who we want to be and lead the life
we want to live. According to Sartre, each
choice we make defines us while at the same
time revealing to us what we think a human
being should be. And this incredible burden of
responsibility that the free man has to bear is
what relegates him to constant anguish.
Living in bad faith
"Everything has been figured out, except
how to live."
Jean-Paul Sartre decried the idea of living
without pursuing freedom. The phenomenon
of people accepting that things have to be a
certain way, and subsequently refusing to
acknowledge or pursue alternate options, was
what he termed as "living in bad faith".
According to Sartre, people who convince
themselves that they have to do one particular
kind of work or live in one particular city are
living in bad faith. In Being and Nothingness,
Sartre's renown discourse on
phenomenological ontology, he explains the
concept of bad faith through the example of a
waiter who is so immersed in his job that he
considers himself to be first a waiter rather
than a free human being. This waiter is so
convinced that his present job is all that he
can do, that it's all that he's meant to do, that
he never considers the option of doing
anything else in life. Sartre believed that we
alone are responsible for everything that we
really are, and by not exploring the myriad
possibilities life presents to us we alone are
responsible for restricting our freedom. "We
are left alone without an excuse, " he said.
Rage against the machine
An ardent believer in the Marxist school of
thought, Jean-Paul Sartre touted money as the
one factor that restricts a person's freedom.
The need of money, he reasoned, is the excuse
people give themselves when the y shut down
the idea of exploring unconventional life
choices. Society's acquiescence of money
infuriated Sartre and capitalism was the
political system he blamed for the
phenomenon. He likened capitalism to a
machine that traps people in a cycle of
working in jobs they don't like so that they
can buy things they don't need. This necessity
of material things, he argued, did not exist in
reality but rather was a man-made construct
that led people to deny their freedom and
consider living in other ways as foolhardy.
Sartre was a vocal opponent of capitalism and
took part in several Parisian protests in
1968 against the system. As a Marxist, he
greatly admired Fidel Castro and Che
Guevara, both of whom were vehemently
against capitalism and were establishing a
communist state in their respective countries.
“We do not know what we want and yet we
are responsible for what we are — that is the
fact.”
Ultimately, Sartre was a humanist who wanted
us to break free of our self-fastened shackles
and attain our massive potential. He wanted
us to acknowledge our freedom, to not be
restricted by the popular definition of reality,
and live life as we wished to live it. And
despite people uncovering several flaws in the
way he presented his ideals, his ideals
themselves are certainly worth considering.
________________________________
Freedom
The concept of freedom, central to Sartre’s
system as a whole, is a dominant theme in his
political works. Sartre’s view of freedom
changed substantially throughout his lifetime.
Scholars disagree whether there is a
fundamental continuity or a radical break
between Sartre’s early view of freedom and
his late view of freedom. There is a strong
consensus, though, that after World War II
Sartre shifted to a material view of freedom,
in contrast to the ontological view of his early
period. According to the arguments of Being
and Nothingness human freedom consists in
the ability of consciousness to transcend its
material situation (p. 563). Later, especially
in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre shifts
to the view that humans are only free if their
basic needs as practical organisms are met (p.
327). Let us look at these two different
notions of freedom in more depth.
Early Sartre views freedom as synonymous
with human consciousness. Consciousness
(“being-for-itself”) is marked by its non-
coincidence with itself. In simple terms,
consciousness escapes itself both because it is
intentional (consciousness always targets an
object other than itself) and temporal
(consciousness is necessarily future oriented)
(Being and Nothingness, pp. 573-4 and 568).
Sartre’s view that human freedom consists in
consciousness’ ability to escape the present is
“ontological” in the sense that no normal
human being can fail to be free. The subtitle
of Being and Nothingness, “An Essay in
Phenomenological Ontology,” reveals Sartre’s
aim of describing the fundamental structures
of human existence and answering the
question “What does it mean to be human?”
His answer is that humans, unlike inert
matter, are conscious and therefore free.
The notion of ontological freedom is
controversial and has often been rejected
because it implies that humans are free in all
situations. In his early work Sartre embraced
this implication unflinchingly. Famously,
Sartre claimed the French public was as free
as ever during the Nazi occupation. In Being
and Nothingness, he passionately argued that
even prisoners are free because they have the
power of consciousness (p. 622). A prisoner,
though coerced, can choose how to react to
his imprisonment. The prisoner is free
because he controls his reaction to
imprisonment: he may resist or acquiesce.
Since there are no objective barriers to the
will, the prison bars restrain me only if I form
the will to escape. In a similar example, Sartre
notes that a mountain is only a barrier if the
individual wants to get on the other side but
cannot (Being and Nothingness, p. 628).
Sartre’s ontological notion of freedom has
been widely criticized, from both political and
ontological standpoints. An important
contemporary critic of Sartre’s work was his
colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose
essay “Sartre and Ultrabolshevism” directly
attacked Sartre’s Cartesianism and his
ontological conception of freedom (Merleau-
Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 1955).
While Sartre never renounced the ontological
view of freedom, in later works he became
critical of what he then called the “stoical”
and “Cartesian” view that freedom consists in
the ability to change one’s attitude no matter
what the situation (Notebooks, pp. 331 and
387; Critique, pp. 332 and 578 fn). It is an
open question whether and how to reconcile
the early, ontological conception of freedom
with the late, material conception of freedom.
However, it is undeniable that in his political
phase Sartre adopted a new, material view of
freedom. Several points stand out in
particular. In later works he never again used
the notion of consciousness to characterize
human existence, preferring instead the
Marxist notion of praxis. Further, he came to
emphasize the “situation” (i.e. structural
influences) in explaining individual choice
and psychology (Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 59-
60). Finally, he criticized all “inward” notions
of freedom, claiming that a change of attitude
is insufficient for real freedom.
Sartre’s shift to a material conception of
freedom was motivated directly by the
holocaust and World War II. Anti-Semite and
Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946),
published just after the war, was the first of
many works analyzing moral responsibility
for oppression. The fact that Sartre’s view
in Being and Nothingness seemed to leave
little room for diagnosing oppression did not
stop him from articulating a forceful
normative critique of Anti-Semitism. His
analysis of oppression would, in fact, use the
same dialectical tools as those in the section
on “concrete relations with others” in Being
and Nothingness. Anti-Semite and Jew argues
that oppression is a master/slave relationship,
where the master denies the freedom of the
slave and yet becomes dependent on the slave
(pp. 27, 39 and 135). Sartre modified his
notion of “the look” by arguing that only
some, not all, interpersonal relations result in
alienation and loss of freedom.
Sartre’s new appreciation of oppression as a
concrete loss of human freedom forced him to
alter his view that humans are free in any
situation. He did not explicitly discuss such
alterations, though clearly abandoning the
view that humans are free in all situations.
“[I]t is important not to conclude that one can
be free in chains,” and “It would be quite
wrong to interpret me as saying that man is
free in all situations as the Stoics claimed”
(Critique, pp. 578 and 332). Sartre’s basic
assumption in his political writings is that
oppression is a loss of freedom ( Critique, p.
332). Since humans can never lose their
ontological freedom, the loss of freedom in
question must be of a different sort:
oppression must
compromise material freedom.
Take the case of the prisoner. The prisoner is
ontologically free because she controls
whether to attempt escape. On this view,
freedom is synonymous with choice. But there
is no qualitative distinction between types of
choices. If freedom is the existence of choice,
then even a bad choice is freedom promoting.
As he will put it later, an attacker who gives
me the choice of “what sauce to be eaten in”
could hardly be said to meaningfully promote
my freedom (Notebooks, p. 331). The early
view is subject to the charge that if there are
no qualitative distinctions between types of
choices, then the phenomena of oppression
and coercion cannot be recognized.
In Anti-Semite and Jew and Notebooks Sartre
implicitly addresses the abo ve criticism,
arguing that oppression consists not in the
absence of choice, but in being forced to
choose between bad, inhumane options
(Notebooks, pp. 334-5). Jews in anti-Semitic
societies, for example, are forced to choose
between self-effacement or caricatured self-
identities (Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 135 and
148). In Critique Sartre uses the example of a
labor contract to illustrate the claim that
choice is not synonymous with freedom
(Critique, pp. 721-2). An impoverished person
who accepts a degrading, low wage job for the
sake of meeting her basic needs has a
choice—she may starve or accept a degrading
job—but her choice is inhumane. He does not
claim that diffuse social structures like
poverty have the literal agency of individual
human beings, but that class structure is a
“destiny” and we can speak cogently of social
forces which exert causality and turn us into
“slaves” (Critique, p. 332).
In the political period as a whole Sartre
developed his material view of freedom by
contrasting the free person with the slave.
Though his notion of slavery is derived from
Hegel, Sartre, unlike Hegel, diagnosed literal
cases like American chattel slavery. Sartre
follows Hegel in portraying slavery as a form
of “non-mutual recognition” where one person
dominates the other psychologically and
physically. A slave, he argues, is un-free
because he is dominated by a master
(Notebooks pp. 325-411). Material freedom
requires, therefore, non-domination, or
freedom from coercion. He adds that in
master/slave relations, t he self-conception of
the victim and perpetrator are intertwined and
distorted; both parties are in “bad faith”; both
fail to fully understand their own freedom.
Though both perpetrator and victim are in bad
faith, only the slave is coerced physically
(Notebooks, p. 331).
Sartre’s view of material freedom is
independent of any notion of human nature.
He consistently rejects the existence of a pre-
social human essence or a set of natural
human desires (“Existentialism is a
Humanism”; Anti-Semite and Jew, p.
49; Search for a Method, pp. 167-181). The
material view of freedom assumes a thin set
of universal human goods, including positive
human goods (food, water, shelter and
education) and negative goods (freedom from
all of the following: slavery, poverty,
discrimination, domination and persecution).
While Critique elaborates an economic
understanding of human goods (the essential
needs are those of the physical organism),
elsewhere Sartre defends a wider spectrum of
human needs including cultural goods and
access to shared values ( Notebooks pp. 329-
331). In sum, we can say that a person is
materially free in Sartre’s sense if (a) she
enjoys basic material security; (b) she is un-
coerced; and (c) she has access to cultural and
social goods necessary for pursuing her
chosen projects.
The foregoing definition casts Sartre as an
ally of political liberalism, and suggests that
material freedom is a version of liberal
autonomy. Liberals who defend the primacy
of autonomy typically claim that positive
notions of freedom assume substantive,
controversial conceptions of the good life.
Indeed, Sartre’s rejection of human nature and
his thin conception of universal human goods
are consistent with liberalism. However,
Sartre criticizes classical liberalism,
especially in Critique, arguing against asocial,
atomistic notions of selfhood (p. 311).
Further, like civic republican philosophers
(such as Aristotle and Rousseau), Sartre
contends that controlling the social forces to
which one is subject is a valuable type of
human freedom. Republican philosophers
variously call such freedom “self-
government” or “non-domination.” Whether
Sartre’s view of freedom is a better fit with
contemporary liberalism or civic
republicanism is a matter of speculation.
Sartre’s discussion of freedom in Critique is
highly abstract and does not translate simply
into one public policy or another. However,
his preference for mass movements and
bottom-up social organization suggest that he
would favor radical participatory democracy.
After the student re volts of May 1968 Sartre
told an interviewer: “For me the movement in
May was the first large-scale social movement
which temporarily brought about something
akin to freedom and which then tried to
conceive of what freedom in action is”
(Life/Situations, p. 52).