The concept of freedom according to Sartre

Résumé du document

The understanding of Sartrean freedom is quite easy. Sartre himself admits that human being is ?not free to cease being free' as he is drawn into a social and historical aspects. Nevertheless, taking these two points into consideration, Sartrean concept of freedom has some weaknesses. This conception remains indeed radical and emphasizes too much on the human mind, as the Stoics and Descartes did before. Eventually, Sartrean freedom destroys the idea of freedom.

Extraits

[...] is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way determine by itself what is not' 435). As a consequence, the determinists are right for Sartre insofar they consider that every action refers to a cause, because every action is necessarily intentional, that is negative. However, what is important for Sartre is above all to understand the origin of the cause. [...]

[...] Freedom makes only sense with a power to materialise it. The recurrent references made by Sartre to Descartes and the stoics seem to confirm this: ‘Descartes following the Stoics has given a name to this possibility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it it is freedom' 24-5). Even if Sartre claims then to distinguish himself from the Cartesian cogito ‘freedom is not a faculty of the human soul to be envisaged and described in isolation' 25) his theory remains actually very close to the long philosophical tradition, especially present in French philosophy, that emphasizes the superiority of the mind over the body, from Plato to Descartes. [...]

[...] ] We do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. 306) Thus, Sartrean freedom is more subtle than the introductory definition could allow thinking. Nevertheless, it remains a radical one, subject to important criticisms. The starting point of these critics was the last chapter of the Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception 1962). Indeed, though he was himself an existentialist and a friend of Sartre, he remains one of the most serious contradictor of his views. [...]

[...] Thus, albeit there is no such a thing as a human nature on the one hand and albeit it may exist infinity of different historical and sociological contexts on the other hand, humans share all the same being: Although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence that can be called human nature, there is nevertheless a human universality of condition . [Man] historical conditions are variable . But what never vary are the necessities of being in the world. [...]

[...] I am condemned to be free. This mean 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. 439) Man is not free to cease being free because freedom is the way he lives in the world. The one exception to that is death, because death is the only moment in the life when man is determined, and thus, not free. The second point that could mislead is that, for Sartre, complete freedom does not mean complete licence, or unlimited range of possibilities. [...]