Sartre is usually misunderstood as having an exaggerated view of human freedom, no doubt because of the claims in the Existentialism and Humanism lecture that there is no determinism; we are free, we are freedom, we are condemned to be free. The only sense in which we are not free, it seems, is that we are not free not to be free. After the war Sartre caused outrage by saying that the French people had never been so free as during the Nazi occupation. In his play Men Without Shadows (Morts sans sepulture, 1946) French resistance fighters confront their own freedom in being tortured by Nazi collaborators. How can this be?
In Being and Nothingness Sartre draws a crucial distinction between freedom and power Although my freedom is absolute my power may be severely constrained. There is no situation in which I do not have a choice, no matter how unpleasant. Indeed in Sartre’s examples, the reality of choice is frequently agonising; a resistance fighter under torture may choose to betray comrades or remain silent for a moment longer. Freedom, for Sartre, is not comfortable. It is a capacity to choose that never leaves us so long as we exist. Scientific determinism is a theoretical abstraction when put by the side of the lived reality of human dilemmas. Even if scientific determinism were true, it would be of no practical help to us in making our commitments.
Sartrean freedom can not be understood without understanding the situation. (Sartre calls his volumes of literary, political and philosophical essays that appeared from 1947 Situations.) A human being is not separable from the human condition. A person divorced from the totality of their situations is an intellectual abstraction that can only be partly achieved. I am what I am only in relation to my situations. The totality of situations is the world and the kind of being that I have is being-in-the-world. What I make myself is inseparably bound up with my projects, with my surroundings as I take them to be. Situations obtain in hierarchies: Sartre’s being about to smoke depends upon the existence of smoking as a practice in mid-twentieth-century France. Keeping an appointment depends upon friendships or meetings. These in turn depend upon the existence of human beings, their projects and situations. All of these depend fundamentally upon being-in-the-world, the situation of all situations.
Sartre’s concept of a situation is anti-Cartesian. Descartes thinks a person could in principle exist in abstraction from their physical and social environment and it makes sense to specify someone’s mental states without reference to the ways in which those states are embedded in the world, without reference to what they are typically or paradigmatically about. Sartre’s use of ‘situation’ and ‘being-in-the-world’ is sharply opposed to this picture. As a mental and physical agent what I do only makes sense if I am existentially related to an external and public world populated by other people who are similar agents.
In our unreflective taken-for-granted living we do not think of the situation as constituted by our freedom. It is my acquiescence in authority, rather than any objective constraint, that determines my behaviour. Once I recognise my freedom to disobey, to rebel, I am deconditioned. The fixed cognitive contribution of my acquiescence is stripped from the world and the possibility of my changing it is opened up.
In Sartre’s existentialism, human being and human situation form a mutually dependent totality. The relations between a human being and his or her situation are dialectical or reciprocal. The situation presents the agent with a range of possibilities. The agent acts to realise some of these possibilities and this action alters the situation and thereby presents a new range of possibilities. Agency constitutes both the agent and the situation. The situation only exists as a situation for some agent. The agent only exists as an agent in some situation so to be in a situation is to choose oneself in a situation. It follows that the relation between agent and situation is very close. The reciprocal relation is not only causal. It is not even only constitutive. Agent and situation may only be adequately understood as two aspects of one reality. Sartre does not put it this way, but it is as though the agent is the inside of the situation and the situation is the outside of the agent.
In order to reconcile this dialectical relation between agent and environment with Sartre’s absolute libertarianism we need to invoke his distinction between freedom and power. Although our freedom is absolute, our power is limited. Although there is no situation in which we do not have a choice, there is no situation which does not limit our power. Sartre spells this out clearly in the 1947 essay Cartesian Freedom (La Liberté Cartésienne in Situations I) when he insists that the situation of a person and their powers can neither increase or limit their freedom. Although what I can do is limited by where as well as when I am, that I can do something rather than nothing is in no way affected. I retain the dispositional property of being a choosing agent even though which choices I may exercise varies from situation to situation. Clearly some choices may be unpleasant to me but, logically, an unpleasant choice is nevertheless a choice. The expression ‘I had no choice’ is misleading.
The theme that freedom is unimpaired by constraints on power pervades Sartre’s literature. Sometimes his characters are horribly constrained: the tortured resistance fighters in Men Without Shadows, Mathieu and his comrades trapped in the clock tower in the 1949 volume of The Roads to Freedom; Iron in the Soul. As their power is reduced their awareness of freedom increases.
In Sartre’s existentialism, the recognition of freedom is a lonely first person singular phenomenon for which recourse to others provides no respite. For example, also in Iron in the Soul, Sartre has Odette shift swiftly from the first person plural thought ‘What ought we to want?’ to the first person singular thought ‘What ought I to want ?’ (p. 185) against the background ‘situation’ of the May 1940 invasion of France. Odette is expressing the ethical tenet of Being and Nothingness that ‘It is I who sustain values in being’. Sartre did not write ‘It is we who sustain values in being’. For all his repudiation of Descartes in ‘Cartesian Freedom’ the primacy and inescapability of the first person singular exercise of, and confrontation with, freedom remains thoroughly Cartesian.
Sometimes, the existence of freedom is depicted as dependent upon its acknowledgement or recognition by the agent. For example, in The Flies Sartre has Zeus say of Orestes ‘Orestes knows that he is free’ and Aegistheus replies ‘He knows he is free? Then to lay hands on him, to put him in irons, is not enough’.1 Although, as we shall see, Sartre thinks there is a pervasive human tendency to deny one’s own freedom, it is the fact of a person’s freedom not their knowledge of it that makes freedom unconstrained. Freedom is entailed by knowledge of freedom but not vice versa. An agent aware of their freedom can act authentically.
Sartre endorses Heidegger’s view that we are ‘thrown’ into the world. We are but we did not choose to be. Seemingly inconconsistently with this, he says in Being and Nothingness that in a sense I choose to be born. Clearly, any kind of Platonic pre-existence is out of the question here. Sartre thinks it is false that we pre-date (and post-date) our empirical existence. Drawing a distinction between existence and essence, Sartre means that what my birth is, or is to me, largely depends on how I freely think of it. Its significance is the significance I bestow upon it. Freedom does not pre-date existence. Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes the essence we freely choose.
In Being and Nothingness a person is their freedom. Sartre identifies the upsurge of freedom, choice, and the person himself, as one and the same being. One existent is subsumed under three descriptions. I do not have my freedom. I am it. The will has no role in the exercise of Sartrean freedom. The moment the will operates, the decision is already taken. Sartre’s libertarianism entails that human actions are unpredictable. The only respect in which I am not free is that I am not free not to be free. I am not able not to choose.
We could refrain from action, or omit to act. Would this not be a way of escaping one’s own freedom? Sartre’s position is that refraining from action pre-supposes the choice not to act. This is what refraining is. There exists an infinity of actions I am not performing. I am only refraining from doing some of them. In Iron in the Soul Sartre has Ivich and Boris agree about the French soldiers caught up the May 1940 invasion of France ‘they chose to have this war’ (p. 69). They did nothing to prevent it.
Sartre believes those who live in the developed countries are causally responsible for the death, by starvation and malnutrition, of those who live in the Third World. To fail to save life is as causally efficacious and as morally culpable, as to actively take life. This kind of reasoning leads Sartre to justify political violence by, or on behalf of, oppressed groups, for example in the Preface he wrote for Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961) and to support the Baader Meinhof gang in the early 1970s. Sartre denies that the distinction between our acts and our omissions marks a distinction between what we are and are not responsible for.
How is Sartre’s libertarianism to be reconciled with his post-war Marxism? A human individual retains the capacity to choose whatever their situation, whatever the constraints on their power. Our power is constrained because we are alienated. He endorses the view of the early Marx that members of capitalist society are psychologically estranged from their work, the products of their work, nature, and each other. This alienation is an obstacle to the construction of what Sartre would call a free society: a society we would freely choose rather than historically inherit. Our dispositional capacity to choose continues to ontologically differentiate us from naturally occurring objects and artefacts even though we are denied the power to create a free society in Sartre’s sense.
Freedom is exercised in history. It is not an option for me to freely act in the situation of a late-nineteenth-century German coal miner if I am a mid-twentieth-century French intellectual. My historical location opens for me a range of actions I may perform but there is an infinity of actions which are closed. There is a dialectical dependency between freedom and truth. There is no truth without freedom and no freedom without truth. A human being is free but at the same time in bondage; a chooser whose power is politically and historically constrained. It is only at the moment of death that a human being is complete. Before death a brave person could become a coward or a coward could become brave. Only death brings an end to freedom.
[…] at the outset we can see what is lacking in those tedious discussions between determinists and the proponents of free will. The latter are concerned to find cases of decision for which there exists no prior cause, or deliberations concerning two opposed acts which are equally possible and possess causes (and motives) of exactly the same weight. To which the determinists may easily reply that there is no action without a cause and that the most insignificant gesture (raising the right hand rather than the left hand, etc.) refers to causes and motives which confer its meaning upon it. Indeed the case could not be otherwise since every action must be intentional; each action must, in fact, have an end and the end in turn is referred to a cause. Such indeed is the unity of the three temporal ekstases; the end or temporalization of my future implies a cause (or motive); that is, it points toward my past, and the present is the upsurge of the act. To speak of an act without a cause is to speak of an act which would Jack the intentional structure of every act; and the proponents of free will by searching for it on the level of the act which is in the process of being performed can only end up by rendering the act absurd. But the determinists in turn are weighting the scale by stopping their investigation with the mere designation of the cause and motive. The essential question in fact lies beyond the complex organization “cause-intention-act-end”; indeed we ought to ask how a cause (or motive) can be constituted as such.
Now we have just seen that if there is no act without a cause, this is not in the sense that we can say that there is no phenomenon without a cause. In order to be a cause, the cause must be experienced as such. Of course this does not mean that it is to be thematically conceived and made explicit as in the case of deliberation. But at the very least it means that the for-itself must confer on it its value as cause or motive. And, as we have seen, this constitution of the cause as such can not refer to another real and positive existence; that is, to a prior cause. For otherwise the very nature of the act as engaged intentionally in non-being would disappear. The motive is understood only by the end; that is, by the non-existent. It is therefore in itself a négatité. If I accept a niggardly salary it is doubtless because of fear; and fear is a motive. But it is fear of dying from starvation; that is, this fear has meaning only outside itself in an end ideally posited, which is the preservation of a life which I apprehend as “in danger.” And this fear is understood in turn only in relation to the value which I implicitly give to this life; that is, it is referred to that hierarchal system of ideal objects which are values. Thus the motive makes itself understood as what it is by means of the ensemble of beings which “are not,” by ideal existences, and by the future. Just as the future turns back upon the present and the past in order to elucidate them, so it is the ensemble of my projects which turns back in order to confer upon the motive its structure as a motive. It is only because I escape the in-itself by nihilating myself toward my possibilities that this in-itself can take on value as cause or motive. Causes and motives have meaning only inside a projected ensemble which is precisely an ensemble of non-existents. And this ensemble is ultimately myself as transcendence; it is Me in so far as I have to be myself outside of myself.
If we recall the principle which we established earlier—namely that it is the apprehension of a revolution as possible which gives to the workman’s suffering its value as a motive—we must thereby conclude that it is by fleeing a situation toward our possibility of changing it that we organize this situation into complexes of causes and motives. The nihilation by which we achieve a withdrawal in relation to the situation is the same as the ekstasis by which we project ourselves toward a modification of this situation. The result is that it is in fact impossible to find an act without a motive but that this does not mean that we must conclude that the motive causes the act; the motive is an integral part of the act. For as the resolute project toward a change is not distinct from the act, the motive, the act, and the end are all constituted in a single upsurge. Each of these three structures claims the two others as its meaning. But the organized totality of the three is no longer explained by any particular structure, and its upsurge as the pure temporalizing nihilation of the in-itself is one with freedom. It is the act which decides its ends and its motives, and the act is the expression of freedom.
We cannot, however, stop with these superficial considerations; if the fundamental condition of the act is freedom, we must attempt to describe this freedom more precisely. But at the start we encounter a great difficulty. Ordinarily, to describe something is a process of making explicit by aiming at the structures of a particular essence. Now freedom has no essence. It is not subject to any logical necessity; we must say of it what Heidegger said of the Dasein in general: “In it existence precedes and commands essence.” Freedom makes itself an act, and we ordinarily attain it across the act which it organizes with the causes, motives, and ends which the act implies. But precisely because this act has an essence, it appears to us as constituted; if we wish to reach the constitutive power, we must abandon any hope of finding it an essence. That would in fact demand a new constitutive power and so on to infinity. How then are we to describe an existence which perpetually makes itself and which refuses to be confined in a definition? The very use of the term “freedom” is dangerous if it is to imply that the word refers to a concept as words ordinarily do. Indefinable and unnamable, is freedom also indescribable?
Earlier when we wanted to describe nothingness and the being of the phenomenon, we encountered comparable difficulties. Yet they did not deter us. This is because there can be descriptions which do not aim at the essence but at the existent itself in its particularity. To be sure, I could not describe a freedom which would be common to both the Other and myself; I could not therefore contemplate an essence of freedom. On the contrary, it is freedom which is the foundation of all essences since man reveals intra-mundane essences by surpassing the world toward his own possibilities. But actually the question is of my freedom. Similarly when I described consciousness, I could not discuss a nature common to certain individuals but only my particular consciousness, which like my freedom is beyond essence, or—as we have shown with considerable repetition—for which to be is to have been. I discussed this consciousness so as to touch it in its very existence as a particular experience—the cogito. Husserl and Descartes, as Gaston Berger has shown, demand that the cogito release to them a truth as essence: with Descartes we achieve the connection of two simple natures; with Husserl we grasp the eidetic structure of consciousness.2 But if in consciousness its existence must precede its essence, then both Descartes and Husserl have committed an error. What we can demand from the cogito is only that it discover for us a factual necessity. It is also to the cogito that we appeal in order to determine freedom as the freedom which is ours, as a pure factual necessity; that is, as a contingent existent but one which I am not able not to experience. I am indeed an existent who learns his freedom through his acts, but I am also an existent whose individual and unique existence temporalizes itself as freedom. As such I am necessarily a consciousness (of) freedom since nothing exists in consciousness except as the non-thetic consciousness of existing. Thus my freedom is perpetually in question in my being; it is not a quality added on or a property of my nature. It is very exactly the stuff of my being; and as in my being, my being is in question, I must necessarily possess a certain comprehension of freedom. It is this comprehension which we intend at present to make explicit.
In our attempt to reach to the heart of freedom we may be helped by the few observations which we have made on the subject in the course of this work and which we must summarize here. In the first chapter we established the fact that if negation comes into the world through human-reality, the latter must be a being who can realize a nihilating rupture with the world and with himself; and we established that the permanent possibility of this rupture is the same as freedom. But on the other hand, we stated that this permanent possibility of nihilating what I am in the form of “having-been” implies for man a particular type of existence. We were able then to determine by means of analyses like that of bad faith that human reality is its own nothingness. For the for-itself, to be is to nihilate the in-itself which it is. Under these conditions freedom can be nothing other than this nihilation. It is through this that the for-itself escapes its being as its essence; it is through this that the for-itself is always something other than what can be said of it. For in the final analysis the For-itself is the one which escapes this very denomination, the one which is already beyond the name which is given to it, beyond the property which is recognized in it. To say that the for-itself has to be what it is, to say that it is what it is not while not being what it is, to say that in it existence precedes and conditions essence or inversely according to Hegel, that for it “Wesen ist was gewesen ist”—all this is to say one and the same thing: to be aware that man is free. Indeed by the sole fact that I am conscious of the causes which inspire my action, these causes are already transcendent objects for my consciousness; they are outside. In vain shall I seek to catch hold of them; I escape them by my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free. To the extent that the for-itself wishes to hide its own nothingness from itself and to incorporate the in-itself as its true node of being, it is trying also to hide its freedom from itself.
The ultimate meaning of determinism is to establish within us an unbroken continuity of existence in itself. The motive conceived as a psychic act—i.e., as a full and given reality—is, in the deterministic view, artienated without any break with the decision and the act, both of which are equally conceived as psychic givens. The in-itself has got hold of all these “data”; the motive provokes the act as the physical cause its effect; everything is real, everything is full. Thus the refusal of freedom can be conceived only as an attempt to apprehend oneself as being-in-itself; it amounts to the same thing. Human reality may be defined as a being such that in its being its freedom is at stake because human reality perpetually tries to refuse to recognize its freedom. Psychologically in each one of us this amounts to trying to take the causes and motives as things. We try to confer permanence upon them. We attempt to hide from ourselves that their nature and their weight depend each moment on the meaning which I give to them; we take them for constants. This amounts to considering the meaning which I gave to them just now or yesterday—which is irremediable because it is past—and extrapolating from it a character fixed still in the present. I attempt to persuade myself that the cause is as it was. Thus it would pass whole and untouched from my past consciousness to my present consciousness. It would inhabit my consciousness. This amounts to trying to give an essence to the for-itself. In the same way people will posit ends as transcendences, which is not an error. But instead of seeing that the transcendences there posited are maintained in their being by my own transcendence, people will assume that I encounter them upon my surging up in the world; they come from God, from nature, from “my” nature, from society. These ends ready made and pre-human will therefore define the meaning of my act even before I conceive it, just as causes as pure psychic givens will produce it without my even being aware of them.
Cause, act, and end constitute a continuum, a plenum. These abortive attempts to stifle freedom under the weight of being (they collapse with the sudden upsurge of anguish before freedom) show sufficiently that freedom in its foundation coincides with the nothingness which is at the heart of man. Human-reality is free because it is not enough. It is free because it is perpetually wrenched away from itself and because it has been separated by a nothingness from what it is and from what it will be. It is free, finally, because its present being is itself a nothingness in the form of the “reflection-reflecting.” Man is free because he is not himself but presence to himself. The being which is what it is can not be free. Freedom is precisely the nothingness which is made-to-be at the heart of man and which forces human-reality to make itself instead of to be. As we have seen, for human reality, to be is to choose oneself; nothing comes to it either from the outside or from within which it can receive or accept. Without any help whatsoever, it is entirely abandoned to the intolerable necessity of making itself be—down to the slightest detail. Thus freedom is not a being; it is the being of man—i.e., his nothingness of being. If we start by conceiving of man as a plenum, it is absurd to try to find in him afterwards moments or psychic regions in which he would be free. As well look for emptiness in a container which one has filled beforehand up to the brim! Man can not be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all.
These observations can lead us, if we know how to use them, to new discoveries. They will enable us first to bring to light the relations between freedom and what we call the “will.” There is a fairly common tendency to seek to identify free acts with voluntary acts and to restrict the deterministic explanation to the world of the passions. In short the point of view of Descartes. The Cartesian will is free, but there are “passions of the soul.” Again Descartes will attempt a physiological interpretation of these passions. Later there will be an attempt to instate a purely psychological determinism. Intellectualistic analyses such as Proust, for example, attempts with respect to jealousy or snobbery can serve as illustrations for this concept of the passional “mechanism.” In this case it would be necessary to conceive of man as simultaneously free and determined, and the essential problem would be that of the relations between this unconditioned freedom and the determined processes of the psychic life: how will it master the passions, how will it utilize them for its own benefit? A wisdom which comes from ancient times—the wisdom of the Stoics—will teach us to come to terms with these passions so as to master them; in short it will counsel us how to conduct ourselves with regard to affectivity as man does with respect to nature in general when he obeys it in order better to control it. Human reality therefore appears as a free power besieged by an ensemble of determined processes. One will distinguish wholly free acts, determined processes over which the free will has power, and processes which on principle escape the human-will.
It is clear that we shall not be able to accept such a conception. But let us try better to understand the reasons for our refusal. There is one objection which is obvious and which we shall not waste time in developing; this is that such a trenchant duality is inconceivable at the heart of the psychic unity. How in fact could we conceive of a being which could be one and which nevertheless on the one hand would be constituted as a series of facts determined by one another—hence existents in exteriority—and which on the other hand would be constituted as a spontaneity determining itself to be and revealing only itself? A priori this spontaneity would be capable of no action on a determinism already constituted. On what could it act? On the object itself (the present psychic fact)? But how could it modify an in-itself which by definition is and can be only what it is? On the actual law of the process? This is self-contradictory. On the antecedents of the process? But it amounts to the same thing whether we act on the present psychic fact in order to modify it in itself or act upon it in order to modify its consequences. And in each case we encounter the same impossibility which we pointed out earlier. Moreover, what instrument would this spontaneity have at its disposal? If the hand can clasp, it is because it can be clasped. Spontaneity, since by definition it is beyond reach can not in turn reach; it can produce only itself. And if it could dispose of a special instrument, it would then be necessary to conceive of this as of an intermediary nature between free will and determined passions—which is not admissible. For different reasons the passions could get no hold upon the will. Indeed it is impossible for a determined process to act upon a spontaneity, exactly as it is impossible for objects to act upon consciousness. Thus any synthesis of two types of existents is impossible; they are not homogeneous; they will remain each one in its incommunicable solitude. The only bond which a nihilating spontaneity could maintain with mechanical processes would be the fact that it produces itself by an internal negation directed toward these existents. But then the spontaneity will exist precisely only in so far as it denies concerning itself that it is these passions. Henceforth the ensemble of the determined πάθος will of necessity be apprehended by spontaneity as a pure transcendent; that is, as what is necessarily outside, as what is not it.3 This internal negation would therefore have for its effect only the dissolution of the πάθος in the world, and the πάθος would exist as some sort of object in the midst of the world for a free spontaneity which would be simultaneously will and consciousness. This discussion shows that two solutions and only two are possible: either man is wholly determined (which is inadmissible, especially because a determined consciousness—i.e., a consciousness externally motivated—becomes itself pure exteriority and ceases to be consciousness) or else man is wholly free.
But these observations are still not our primary concern. They have only a negative bearing. The study of the will should, on the contrary, enable us to advance further in our understanding of freedom. And this is why the fact which strikes us first is that if the will is to be autonomous, then it is impossible for us to consider it as a given psychic fact; that is, in-itself. It can not belong to the category defined by the psychologist as “states of consciousness.” Here as everywhere else we assert that the state of consciousness is a pure idol of a positive psychology. If the will is to be freedom, then it is of necessity negativity and the power of nihilation. But then we no longer can see why autonomy should be preserved for the will. In fact it is hard to conceive of those holes of nihilation which would be the volitions and which would surge up in the otherwise dense and full web of the passions and of the πάθος in general. If the will is nihilation, then the ensemble of the psychic must likewise be nihilation. Moreover—and we shall soon return to this point—where do we get the idea that the “fact” of passion or that pure, simple desire is not nihilating? Is not passion first a project and an enterprise? Does it not exactly posit a state of affairs as intolerable? And is it not thereby forced to effect a withdrawal in relation to this state of affairs and to nihilate it by isolating it and by considering it in the light of an end—i.e., of a non-being? And does not passion have its own ends which are recognized precisely at the same moment at which it posits them as non-existent? And if nihilation is precisely the being of freedom, how can we refuse autonomy to the passions in order to grant it to the will?
But this is not all: the will, far from being the unique or at least the privileged manifestation of freedom, actually—like every event of the for-itself—must presuppose the foundation of an original freedom in order to be able to constitute itself as will. The will in fact is posited as a reflective decision in relation to certain ends. But it does not create these ends. It is rather a mode of being in relation to them: it decrees that the pursuit of these ends will be reflective and deliberative. Passion can posit the same ends. For example, if I am threatened, I can run away at top speed because of my fear of dying. This passional fact nevertheless posits implicitly as a supreme end the value of life. Another person in the same situation will, on the contrary, understand that he must remain at his post even if resistance at first appears more dangerous than flight; he “will stand firm.” But his goal, although better understood and explicitly posited, remains the same as in the case of the emotional reaction. It is simply that the methods of attaining it are more clearly conceived; certain of them are rejected as dubious or inefficacious, others are more solidly organized. The difference here depends on the choice of means and on the degree of reflection and of making explicit, not on the end. Yet the one who flees is said to be “passionate,” and we reserve the term “voluntary” for the man who resists. Therefore the question is of a difference of subjective attitude in relation to a transcendent end. But if we wish to avoid the error which we denounced earlier and not consider these transcendent ends as pre-human and as an a priori limit to our transcendence, then we are indeed compelled to recognize that they are the temporalizing projection of our freedom. Human reality can not receive its ends, as we have seen, either from outside or from a so-called inner “nature.” It chooses them and by this very choice confers upon them a transcendent existence as the external limit of its projects. From this point of view—and if it is understood that the existence of the Dasein precedes and commands its essence—human reality in and through its very upsurge decides to define its own being by its ends. It is therefore the positing of my ultimate ends which characterizes my being and which is identical with the sudden thrust of the freedom which is mine. And this thrust is an existence; it has nothing to do with an essence or with a property of a being which would be engendered conjointly with an idea.
Thus since freedom is identical with my existence, it is the foundation of ends which I shall attempt to attain either by the will or by passionate efforts. Therefore it can not be limited to voluntary acts. Volitions, on the contrary, like passions are certain subjective attitudes by which we attempt to attain the ends posited by original freedom. By original freedom, of course, we should not understand a freedom which would be prior to the voluntary or passionate act but rather a foundation which is strictly contemporary with the will or the passion and which these manifest, each in its own way. Neither should we oppose freedom to the will or to passion as the “profound self” of Bergson is opposed to the superficial self; the for-itself is wholly selfness and can not have a “profound self,” unless by this we mean certain transcendent structures of the psyche. Freedom is nothing but the existence of our will or of our passions in so far as this existence is the nihilation of facticity; that is, the existence of a being which is its being in the mode of having to be it. We shall return to this point. In any case let us remember that the will is determined within the compass of motives and ends already posited by the for-itself in a transcendent projection of itself toward its possibles. If this were not so, how could we understand deliberation, which is an evaluation of means in relation to already existing ends?
If these ends are already posited, then what remains to be decided at each moment is the way in which I shall conduct myself with respect to them; in other words, the attitude which I shall assume. Shall I act by volition or by passion? Who can decide except me? In fact, if we admit that circumstances decide for me (for example, I can act by volition when faced with a minor danger but if the peril increases, I shall fall into passion), we thereby suppress all freedom. It would indeed be absurd to declare that the will is autonomous when it appears but that external circumstances strictly determine the moment of its appearance. But, on the other hand, how can it be maintained that a will which does not yet exist can suddenly decide to shatter the chain of the passions and suddenly stand forth on the fragments of these chains? Such a conception would lead us to consider the will as a power which sometimes would manifest itself to consciousness and at other times would remain hidden, but which would in any case possess the permanence and the existence “in-itself” of a property. This is precisely what is inadmissible. It is, however, certain that common opinion conceives of the moral life as a struggle between a will-thing and passion-substances. There is here a sort of psychological Manichaeism which is absolutely insupportable.
Actually it is not enough to will; it is necessary to will to will. Take, for example, a given situation: I can react to it emotionally. We have shown elsewhere that emotion is not a physiological tempest;4 it is a reply adapted to the situation; it is a type of conduct, the meaning and form of which are the object of an intention of consciousness which aims at attaining a particular end by particular means. In fear, fainting and cataplexie5 aim at suppressing the danger by suppressing the consciousness of the danger. There is an intention of losing consciousness in order to do away with the formidable world in which consciousness is engaged and which comes into being through consciousness. Therefore we have to do with magical behavior provoking the symbolic satisfactions of our desires and revealing by the same stroke a magical stratum of the world. In contrast to this conduct voluntary and rational conduct will consider the situation scientifically, will reject the magical, and will apply itself to realizing determined series and instrumental complexes which will enable us to resolve the problems. It will organize a system of means by taking its stand on instrumental determinism. Suddenly it will reveal a technical world; that is, a world in which each instrumental-complex refers to another larger complex and so on. But what will make me decide to choose the magical aspect or the technical aspect of the world? It can not be the world itself, for this in order to be manifested waits to be discovered. Therefore it is necessary that the for-itself in its project must choose being the one by whom the world is revealed as magical or rational; that is, the for-itself must as a free project of itself give to itself magical or rational existence. It is responsible for either one, for the for-itself can be only if it has chosen itself. Therefore the for-itself appears as the free foundation of its emotions as of its volitions. My fear is free and manifests my freedom; I have put all my freedom into my fear, and I have chosen myself as fearful in this or that circumstance. Under other circumstances I shall exist as deliberate and courageous, and I shall have put all my freedom into my courage. In relation to freedom there is no privileged psychic phenomenon. All my “modes of being” manifest freedom equally since they are all ways of being my own nothingness.
1 Jean-Paul Sartrt Altona and Other Plays: Altona, Men Without Shadows, The Flies (Penguin, in association with Hamish Hamilton, Harmondsworth, 1962) p. 292.
2 Gaston Berger, Le Cogito chez Husserl et chez Descartes, 1940.
3 I.e., is not spontaneity. Tr.
4 Esquisse d’une théorie phénoménologique des émotions, Hermann, 1939. In English, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. Tr. by Bernard Frechtman. Philosophical Library, 1948.
5 A word invented by Preyer to refer to a sudden inhibiting numbness produced by any shock. Tr.