1 Sartre on Authentic Freedom

According to Sartre’s phenomenological ontology, I, as a for-itself - that is to say, as an existing human being - am always and ineluctably free; indeed, “freedom is very exactly the stuff of my being”.3 This original ontological freedom is described and elucidated in often excruciating detail in Being and Nothingness in terms of the profoundly negative relationship between the for-itself and the in-itself and the inevitable failure of the former to heal its original ontological wound, its inability to patch “the hole in being” represented by the utterly contingent and unfounded original “upsurge” of the for-itself.4

By virtue of their shared freedom, all for-itselfs also share the same original project: namely, becoming a for-itself-in-itself - that is to say, God. In addition, each individual person, each particular for-itself, discovers that it has always already made a free and original choice of its own individual project, its own distinctive way of existing in the world. This individual project is not chosen prior to one’s voluntary acts or particular choices, but is contemporary with them and manifested through them; its content - that is, who one has chosen to be – is revealed only by reflecting upon and interpreting the overall shape of the series of one’s particular choices, through what Sartre calls existential psychoanalysis.

The original upsurge of nothingness through which any for-itself inserts itself into a world, like the particular situation within which this upsurge occurs and into which the for-itself is therefore hurled:5 all of this is something that just happens, something utterly contingent and ungrounded, and therefore both unjustified and unjustifiable. And the same applies to each particular happening of nothingness, to each individual for-itself and its particular choice of how it proposes to exist its own existence. “For human reality”, according to Sartre, “to be is always to choose oneself”.6

This choice of one’s original project as a particular individual is not only radically ungrounded, it is also forced. Given its original ontological freedom, i. e., its “nothingness” in the face of the being of the in-itself, the for-itself cannot not choose. “We are”, Sartre memorably declares, “a freedom that chooses, but we do not choose to be free. We are condemned to freedom”.7

To be sure, this is a decidedly odd kind of choice, inasmuch as it is supposed to occur without any reflection or deliberation on the part of the for-itself, and is therefore described as pre-reflective or non-thetic. Deliberation is no more than a process through which the for-itself considers and evaluates possible means for an always already chosen end, of which it becomes only gradually aware - if indeed, it ever becomes aware of it at all.8

But though it is pre-reflective and therefore involuntary,9 this choice is not altogether unconscious, inasmuch as what one is aware of whenever one is self - consciousness is nothing but the product of this choice, even though one may not be aware of it as a choice.10 Indeed, as Sartre stresses, the for-itself goes to great lengths and adopts multiple strategies precisely to avoid such an awareness, and many of the most memorable pages of Being and Nothingness are devoted to describing the various ways in which the for-itself actively avoids and resists becoming explicitly conscious of its own pre-reflective original choice of itself. And even if and when it does succeed in raising its project to the level of reflective awareness, it still tries to hide from itself the contingency of the same and its freedom to alter it - by, for example, reflecting upon itself as a particular ego with a determinate character. This kind of reflection, since it depends upon, serves the interests of, and is incapable of calling into question the original choice of the for-itself is called by Sartre “complicit” or “accessory” reflection (la réflexion complice).11

Such strategies, however, cannot ultimately succeed in preventing the ontological freedom of the for-itself from announcing itself, if only indirectly and obscurely: namely, through the feeling of anguish or anxiety (l’angoisse).12 It is through this feeling that the for-itself becomes aware that what it discovers itself to be is what it has already chosen to be, and that its original choice of itself is, as Sartre puts it, “absurd, as being beyond all reasons”.13 Typically, however, no sooner does the for-itself glimpse this disquieting truth about itself than it rushes to obscure it and to cover it up by adopting still more elaborate ruses of bad faith. Thus, even as it becomes aware of its freedom, it seeks to deny it, preferring to exist, in Sartre’s term, inauthentically rather than to confront the disturbing implications of its own fragile condition, as revealed through anxiety.

There is no inconsistency between the freedom of the for-itself’s original choice and its inauthentic denial of this same freedom. On the contrary, this is the default position of every for-itself, the one that is so memorably and dramatically described near the conclusion of Sartre’s magnum opus, where the human being is described as “a useless passion”14 who loses himself in vain, a creature who, no matter what he chooses and no matter how he acts, seems forever doomed to live inauthentically and whose deepest insight into his own condition can lead only to despair. Yet the final pages of Being and Nothingness hold out a tantalizing glimmer of hope by raising – albeit in the form of a series of questions – the bare possibility that there may yet be a way of choosing that does not doom one to an inauthentic existence, an attitude toward value and free choice that does not inevitably involve bad faith and thus does not necessarily lead a reflective person to despair. This possibility, Sartre promises, will be explored in a future work on the topic of ethics (sur le terrain morale).15

The new attitude toward freedom and value associated with an existentialist ethics will, suggests Sartre, be unburdened by that spirit of seriousness which assigns more value to things than to human freedom. This will be an ethics neither of interest nor of duty. Instead of treating values as transcendent givens, allegedly grounded in an ens cause sui, independent of human subjectivity, it will make human freedom itself the source and standard of value; in other words, it will posit a kind of freedom that takes freedom itself as its end.16 For this to become a real possibility, however, hints Sartre somewhat mysteriously, the for-itself will have to engage in a new,...