part0011

Existentialists insist that human freedom or free will is not optional. A person does not choose to be free. She is free whether she likes it or not because life constantly presents her with the obligation of having to choose between various options, situations and courses of action. This obligation to choose is unavoidable because ‘not choosing’ is still, in fact, a choice. It is the choice not to choose, the choice not to take decisive action and so on.

The existentialists argue that each conscious human being is necessarily free . Dramatising as usual, Sartre says, ‘I am condemned to be free’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 462); damned to unending freedom by the very fact that I am an ambiguous, indeterminate being existing in a perpetual temporal flight away from the past towards the future. Indeed, it is the existentialists’ view of temporality, their firm conviction that human consciousness is essentially temporal, that implies their view that human consciousness is necessarily free.

Human consciousness can never coincide with itself or, to put it another way, unlike tables and chairs a person can never simply be what she is. She is always beyond herself towards the future, always aiming at completion in the future. In a sense a person is her future, but that future is always not-yet. It is in the future at which a person aims that she is free, or rather, she is free in so far as she aims at the future. If a person was simply a fixed entity like a table, something given all at once, then she could not be free. A person possesses a range of possibilities and has options precisely because she is an incomplete being constantly moving towards the future. You cannot have possibilities and options, cannot have freedom, unless you have a future.

Look at it this way. The present is the presence of consciousness to the world. As seen, consciousness is nothing in itself; it is nothing in the present. As such, consciousness stands outside the causal order of the physical world. The causal order, that which is, that which cannot be other than it is once it has happened, belongs to a past which consciousness realises by making itself the future of that past. Although the meaning of the past can change, the past is fixed in so far as it is that which has been given. However, the past is given to consciousness in terms of the future possibilities that consciousness realises for this given past. Indeed, consciousness consists entirely of these future possibilities.

Consciousness is the possibilities of being-in-itself; possibilities that being-in-itself cannot realise for itself but which must be realised for it from the point of view of its negation. Consciousness requires a fixed and given being in order to be that which temporally transcends it towards the future; to be that which renders that being past as it transcends. There is no past except for that which is a flight towards the future and no being towards the future except as a surpassing. As seen, future and past are internally related, they necessarily require one another.

As nothing but a being towards the future, as nothing but the future possibilities of the being of which it is the negation, consciousness has to be these future possibilities. It cannot not be an opening up of possibilities. The freedom of consciousness consists in this perpetual opening up of the possibilities of being, the world, the situation. That is, consciousness continually discovers itself in a world of possibilities which it realises by virtue of its being a temporal surpassing towards the future. If it were not a surpassing, a flight, a transcendence, it would not find itself in a world of possibilities, but rather in a strictly determined world. Of course, as it is nothing but the temporal surpassing of what has been given, it could not exist in such a world.

That which is free – consciousness as a flight towards the future – and that which is not free – being-in-itself that consciousness renders past by surpassing it towards the future – are internally related in that consciousness necessarily requires being-in-itself in order to be a free surpassing of it. This is the all important relationship between what existentialists call facticity and transcendence .

Facticity is the world around a person in so far as it presents a constant resistance to her actions and projects. Difficulties, obstacles, entanglements, snags, distances, heaviness, instability, fragility, complexity and so on. Yet this constant resistance is the very possibility of a person’s actions in that her actions are always a striving to overcome facticity. As Simone de Beauvoir says, ‘The resistance of the thing sustains the action of man as air sustains the flight of the dove’ (The Ethics of Ambiguity , p. 81).

It is only as a free surpassing of facticity that consciousness exists. If there were no facticity to be surpassed and overcome there would be no consciousness. As a free transcendence towards its own future, consciousness necessarily requires something to transcend. Consciousness is, so to speak, perpetually striving to escape from the prison of facticity without ever being able to do so. For consciousness, to be escaping and to be are one and the same. Furthermore, when consciousness escapes to the future it renders the future past as it reaches it, renders it facticity for a further escaping, for a further transcendence.

As seen, it is necessary that consciousness be a free surpassing of being if it is to be at all. This is the necessity of freedom . The existence of consciousness is contingent, meaning that it is not necessary, but given that consciousness exists, it is absolutely necessary that it be free. Consciousness is essentially free and it is a necessary condition of its existence that it is not free to cease being free.

Consciousness can never surrender its freedom. It can never render itself an object causally determined by the physical world, for the very project of surrender, the very attempt to render itself causally determined, must be a free choice of itself. Consciousness cannot render itself determined by the world, for whenever or however it attempts to do so, it must choose to do so.

We have arrived back where we began at the start of this chapter, making the all important existentialist point that human freedom is not optional. It is not optional because, as Sartre eloquently puts it, ‘Freedom is the freedom of choosing but not the freedom of not choosing. Not to choose is, in fact, to choose not to choose’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 503). An absolute necessity lies at the very heart of human freedom. A person cannot not choose; she cannot not be free; she is condemned to be free.

As a further way of emphasising that people cannot not choose, existentialists are fond of saying that freedom is unlimited . This claim has often been misunderstood by critics who take the existentialists to be saying that there is no limit to what a person can choose to do – walk on water, walk through walls, drink the oceans dry. The critics ought to give the existentialists credit for not being quite so stupid and make the effort to understand what it is they actually mean. What the existentialists actually mean when they say freedom is unlimited is that there is no limit, no end, to the responsibility of having to choose a response to every situation. Freedom is unlimited because the obligation to choose is unrelenting.

So, for example, when Sartre famously said, ‘I choose to be a cripple’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 352) – which on the face of it sounds rather politically incorrect – he did not mean that every physically disabled person chooses to have the physical disability that they have. Rather, he meant that a disabled person must choose the meaning of their disability and their response to it, just as an able-bodied person must choose the meaning of their able-bodiedness and their response to it. It is amazing how many disabled people choose to maximise their activity, while so many able-bodied people choose to minimise their activity, but that’s another issue.

Disabled people may be pleased to know that in the existentialists’ view a physical disability does not limit a person’s freedom. Disability is a facticity in face of which a person must constantly choose her own personal path of transcendence. If a person who has lost her legs chooses to give up on everything and sink into inactive resentment of the world, that is no less a choice for which she is responsible than if she chose to pursue some form of positive transcendence not requiring legs – like writing novels, fundraising or winning wheelchair marathons. Do you call this view harsh? Existentialists call it empowering.

The relationship between freedom and facticity is at one with the relationship between consciousness and the world. Freedom is not a capacity of consciousness; freedom is of the very nature of consciousness. Consciousness is free and cannot avoid being so. Freedom is not an essence, just as consciousness is not an essence. Freedom is not a potential that exists prior to being exercised. Freedom is its exercise. Understanding action and choice, therefore, is the key to understanding the existentialist view of freedom.

The defining feature of an action, as distinct from an accidental act, is intention . An intention, a chosen end to be realised in the future, gives meaning to the present actions that aim at it and are a means to it. When intentions are realised and ends achieved however, they themselves immediately become means to further ends, with no achieved end ever able to fully and finally satisfy, define and determine a person. As a being that must be a perpetual flight towards the future, a person must always surpass whatever chosen ends she realises for herself towards further chosen ends.

Each word you read here, for example, is surpassed by the sentence, each sentence by the page, each page by the book and so on, with each larger chosen end giving meaning to the complex of actions that serve it. Ultimately, your myriad projects aim at realising an unachievable, godlike state of fulfilment and completion in which you would cease yearning and striving to be at one with yourself and truly be at one with yourself.

Each person aims to be at one with herself in her own way. The particular fulfilment and completion at which an individual person aims depends upon her own particular fundamental choice of herself; the type of person she chooses herself as. Fundamental choice is considered in detail in Chapter 11 on Children and Childhood. Fundamental choice is a choice by which a person aims to establish herself as a being that is no longer in question. However, as the fundamental choice must be continually affirmed or denied, or possibly abandoned for an alternative fundamental choice, it does not serve to place a person’s being beyond question. It remains the case that the nature of a person is to have no nature other than to be a perpetual questioning of her nature. As the existentialists repeatedly argue, human nature is to have no fixed nature or essence. Consider, for example, the nature of cowardice.

The person who chooses to believe she is a coward is likely to live her life seeking to refute this belief. She may perform many brave acts with the intention of overcoming her suspicion. She may even become a heroine in the opinion of others. Yet, for herself, she will remain unable to be at one with the label ‘courageous’. However many courageous acts she performs, once performed these acts will sink into her past. Contemplating the future she will say, ‘I was courageous, but will I continue to be so? In future battles I fear I will expose my cowardice. I fear I will run away; it is certainly possible.’ Equally, she is unable to be at one with the label ‘coward’ should she try to accept herself as a coward. In attempting to accept herself as a coward doubts would inevitably creep in. It might occur to her that accepting herself as a coward is a courageous thing to do if she must brave the shame of being a coward. Future circumstances might also throw her cowardice into doubt.

Suppose a bully picks once too often on a person who has always considered herself to be a coward and has always acted accordingly. Suppose the bully finally makes the person so angry that before she has had time to reflect upon her belief in herself as a coward she beats the bully senseless. Following this incident, the person might conclude that her anger temporarily overcame her enduring cowardice. Alternatively, she might conclude that she is not really a coward after all and has been mistaken all her life to think herself a coward.

The ever present possibility of transcending a label in the future necessarily prevents a person from ever permanently attaching a label to herself. To permanently attach a label is, in fact, to have to permanently re-attach it; a necessary condition of the possibility of re-attachment being that the person may choose not to re-attach it. Until she is dead a person can never arrive at a position where re-definition is impossible; a position where she is at one with herself with the possibility of redefining factors excluded. A person is what she has decided to be, but she cannot really be it because it is always possible to decide otherwise. Past decisions and past resolutions can always be overturned.

Consider another example. Yesterday, a person decided she would give up drinking alcohol. She redefined herself as teetotal. Today she finds there is nothing to bind her to her decision. Certainly not her determination to quit alcohol, for determination can only ever be based upon a free choice to be determined. Even her doctor’s warning that she will die if she continues to hit the gin cannot help her, for she must not only choose to take her doctor’s advice into account, she must choose to follow it. If she starts to drink again it does not even necessarily signify that she has dismissed her doctor’s advice, for she may respect her doctor’s opinion. Rather, it is the case that she is free to ignore good advice even in face of death. Good advice, in itself, has no causal efficacy. Advice may motivate action, but a motive is not an efficient cause.

What, then, can be said of a person who has never drunk alcohol; a person who never gives the possibility of drinking alcohol a serious thought? Surely, she does not perpetually choose herself as drinker or teetotaller? Recalling the existentialist view of lack provides the answer to this question. As seen, when a person chooses a particular course of action she must choose it in terms of a perceived lack.

The person who has never drunk alcohol and never thinks about the possibility of drinking it, as opposed to the drinker who wants to quit or the quitter who wants to resume, does not perceive lacks with regard to drinking alcohol – the lack of a gin or the lack of good health. Rather, she will be concerned with realising herself through the overcoming of other lacks that have nothing whatsoever to do with drinking or not drinking alcohol.

Committed drinkers of alcohol sometimes find it hard to comprehend what they see as the teetotaller’s incredible powers of restraint, as though every teetotaller was a former committed drinker actively fighting to maintain their abstinence. Some teetotallers are, of course, former committed drinkers or even reformed alcoholics fighting to maintain their abstinence, but most teetotallers are making no effort at all not to drink alcohol, they simply don’t drink it.

These remarks regarding lack suggest that once a person has been a committed drinker of alcohol she will always be a drinker of alcohol; either a drinker who drinks at present or a drinker who does not drink at present. Arguably, even a person who has quit drinking alcohol (so far) continues to be defined in terms of the lack of an alcoholic drink in a way that a person who has never indulged is not defined. For a one-time drinker, lack of alcohol is an existential lack. Alcohol is absent from her life in a way comparable to the absence of an expected friend or enemy. As for the true teetotaller, lack of alcohol is a purely abstract lack. Alcohol is absent from her life in a way comparable to the absence of a stranger who is not expected.

To draw from this consideration of drinkers and non-drinkers what is most important to the view that the self is indeterminate and free, consider the comically irresolute person who can neither accept herself as a drinker nor as a true non-drinker – a drinker who, for example, also chooses herself as another kind of lack to be overcome by good health. One day she will get drunk and worry about her health; the next she will take exercise and find herself looking forward to a bottle of wine at the end of her workout. This predicament will not be due to devil-like desires struggling within her, or even to shame at the weakness of her will, but to a distressing inability that results directly from her freedom to stick to whichever choice she makes. She is unable to stick to whichever choice she makes because she is unable to exercise choice in order to limit, once and for all, her freedom to choose.

The claim that a person cannot not be free sheds light on the nature of commitment. That a person cannot escape the necessity of choice implies that commitment is never a fixed anchor. Indeed it is nothing in itself. Commitment consists entirely in the constant re-affirmation of a certain choice set against the ever present, lurking possibility of a change of mind. Every lover knows this even if they prefer not to think about it.

Anna would have it that Vronsky’s love be given freely, for love that is purchased is not love. Yet at the same time, because Anna’s happiness depends upon the precarious love of Vronsky, a thought which makes her insecure and not as happy as she expects to be, she wants the love of Vronsky to be a determinate, assured thing; a love-in-itself. However, a love that could not not be given, a love that was not the result of a free choice to love but was simply there, would not be love and as such would be worthless. For more on the existentialist view of love see Chapter 14.

People are defined by what they lack. A person makes sense of herself and her world in terms of what she perceives to be presently lacking. A person always perceives her situation as lacking something. However, as situations do not lack anything in themselves, whatever the situation of a person lacks must, in fact, be a lack for that person. In short, a person introduces lack into her situation.

What a situation lacks constitutes the future possibilities of that situation. Therefore, the future possibilities of a situation – by virtue of which it is a situation – are really nothing but the future possibilities of a person in that situation. A situation is never its own situation, it is always a situation for, and the situation of, a person. The nature, meaning and value that a situation has is bestowed upon it by the person for whom it is a situation.

The nature, meaning and value of a hill, for example, depends upon the freely chosen ends of the person who encounters it. If the projected end goal of the person is to climb the hill, then the hill will manifest itself in the situation of that person as easy to climb, difficult to climb or insurmountable. The exact details of how the hill manifests itself will depend on further factors relating to the person. How determined she is, how healthy she is, her skill as a climber and the tools she has at her disposal. Perhaps it is only a small hill, but small hills are not so small if one is disabled or wearing high heel shoes.

The way in which these factors affect the situation depends in large part upon previous choices that a person has made. Her ability as a climber will largely be a result of past decisions to take regular exercise. Her overall determination in the past and at present in face of the hill will reveal her choice of herself as dogged or defeatist. On the other hand, the person who has no intention of climbing the hill will, if she notices it at all, view it only as an aesthetic object that she finds pretty or ugly.

Finally, as a way of further supporting the existentialists’ claim that a person cannot not be free, it is worth noting that choosing a particular course of action always involves not choosing another course of action that could have been chosen. Unless a person has, for example, been reduced to a mere object by falling off a cliff, there are always alternative courses of action that she can take.

When a person says, for example, ‘I have no choice but to act this way,’ she ignores the fact that she can choose to do nothing. This is not to suggest that inaction is always a sensible option, just that it is always a possible option. If someone says they will kill a person’s family if she does not cooperate, she is not thereby causally determined to cooperate! She can still choose not to. The decision to cooperate is still her choice.

The notion of compulsion , as applied in law, for example, still makes sense despite this claim. The notion of compulsion can be understood in the following way. To say that a person was compelled is to say that she chose to do what any rational person would do if severely threatened. Similarly, when people say, ‘I can do nothing,’ they ignore the fact that they can always choose to do something, even if all they can do for the time being is plot how they might escape from their real or metaphorical chains.