Introduction

Sartre’s account of freedom is correct to the extent that it acknowledges limitations to our practical freedom. Indeed, this point has been missed by many commentators, who have caricatured Sartre as espousing a God-like omnipotence. Sartre acknowledges that our facticity and situatedness are limitations to our practical freedom, whilst also, seemingly paradoxically, being the ground of our freedom. Our freedom, as a philosophical and ontological concept, is absolute for Sartre, whilst our freedom of action varies according to contingent factors outside of our control. The term ‘freedom’ is not unambiguous; and the fact that Sartre uses the term in these two different senses has mislead many commentators, who have resultantly misrepresented Sartre’s views to the point of absurdity.

Nonetheless, I have the controversial belief that we have a complete lack of freedom, in any ontologically significant sense of the term ‘freedom.’ I do not believe in the freedom ‘to have done otherwise,’ and this, to me, is the most ontologically significant sense of the term ‘freedom.’ In analytic terms, I would be described as an ‘incompatibalist psychological determinist,’ whilst Sartre (although he would reject these labels) would be called an ‘incompatibalist liberatian.’ It is the project of this essay to demonstrate that Sartre has not provided an adequate defence of his own position.

This essay has three sections. The first is a defence of Sartre from critics as well as an assessment of his account of facticity. The second is a critique of Sartre’s use of the negating power of consciousness as an argument for freedom, and the third is a critique of Sartre’s idea of an initial choice as a means of escaping determinism.

Section 1: What Sartre gets right: Facticity

As mentioned in the introduction, a great number of commentators have criticised Sartre for adopting the view that man’s freedom is entirely unconditioned. These critiques undoubtedly owe themselves to some undeniably audacious statements from Sartre, such as ‘freedom is identical with my existence,’[1] ‘we choose the world… by choosing ourselves,’[2] ‘each one of my acts, even the most trivial, is entirely free,’[3] and ‘our existence is taken up and willed even in its tiniest details by an absolute freedom.’[4] These are bold statements that seem to imply that we can do anything we will.

Commentators have pounced on this apparent absurdity. For example, Reinhold Grossman writes: ‘Sartre claims that man is totally and unconditionally free. Nothing whatsoever restricts his freedom. This claim clashes with everything we know about human behaviour. And it clashes with everything we do.’[5] Similarly, Wilfrid Desan points out the fact that ‘it may happen, and it does happen, that I am free in deciding to act but not in executing it,’ concluding, ‘whatever Sartre may say, this is a limitation of my choice.’[6] Finally, Mary Warnock says in an interview ‘I think he (Sartre) was wrong in two ways. I think he was wrong to discount all the influence from one’s childhood or past, and equally from one’s genetic makeup.’[7] These critiques are unmerited for two reasons: first, they fail to draw a distinction between ontological and practical freedom; second, and largely as a result of the first point, they ignore the abundance of examples in which Sartre acknowledges limitations to our freedom.

Sartre makes a distinction between ‘the empirical and popular concept of “freedom” which he says is ‘equivalent to “the ability to obtain the ends chosen.”’ and ‘the technical and philosophical concept of freedom,’ which he says ‘means only the autonomy of choice.’[8] The former freedom is called ‘practical freedom’ in the literature, hence I have and will continue to call it this throughout the essay, whilst Sartre calls the latter ‘ontological freedom,’ and I will follow suit. Sartre writes that he is only interested in this latter sort of freedom. This explains why Sartre often makes seemingly outlandish statements with regards to our freedom: we do have absolute freedom, but only in the sense that we are always free to make a free choice, it does not mean that we are always free to perform any act we will. This distinction explains Sartre’s example of the prisoner: ‘we shall not say that a prisoner is always free to go out of prison, which would be absurd… but that he is always free to try to escape… that is, whatever his condition may be, he can project his escape and learn the value of his project by undertaking some action.’[9] In other words, the prisoner’s imprisonment has not diminished his ontological freedom, just as his release will not increase it. This is because, no matter what situation we find ourselves in, we are always absolutely free to make choices and form new projects, and this is all Sartre means by our absolute freedom. This illustrates how Desan’s critique is unjustified: when he objects that there are certain acts that we cannot execute, he is in fact in agreement with Sartre. However, an important difference between them is that Sartre is not considering the freedom to obtain chosen ends.[10]

Grossman charges Sartre with denying any restrictions whatsoever to our freedom, while Warnock charges Sartre with denying the role of our childhood, past and genetics. However, both of these accusations are in direct conflict with Sartre’s claim that ‘I am not “free” either to escape the lot of my class, of my nation, of my family… I am born a worker, a Frenchman, an hereditary syphilitic, or a tubercular.’[11] Indeed, these ‘givens’ that we are unable to do away with make certain tasks easier than others, and certain goals unobtainable: ‘the coefficient of adversity of things is such that years of patience are necessary to obtain the feeblest results.’[12] As a result, Sartre writes emphatically, ‘the history of a life, whatever it may be, is the history of a failure.’[13] These quotations prove that contrary to what Grossman says, Sartre acknowledges restrictions to our practical freedom. These restrictions exist in three related forms: facticity, coefficients of adversity and our situation. And contrary to what Warnock says, Sartre does acknowledge the role of our past and genetics in shaping our future. He writes, ‘man seems to “be made” by race and class, the individual circumstances of his childhood, acquired habits, the great and small events of his life,’[14] moreover, he includes lengthy sections in the chapter on freedom entitled ‘my place,’ ‘my past,’ and ‘my environment.’

It may be objected here that Sartre explicitly denies that givens (I use this term to refer to ‘coefficients of adversity’, ‘facticity’ and ‘situation’ as a set) restrict our freedom. The coefficient of adversity of objects is the resistance that objects pose to our free projects.[15] Sartre says they are only obstacles in the light of our free projects, such that ‘a particular crag, which manifests profound resistance if I wish to displace it, will on the contrary be a valuable aid if I want to climb upon it in order to look over the countryside.’[16] But as was made clear in the preceding paragraph, coefficients of adversity really do pose restrictions to our practical freedom, but it is senseless to say that they pose restrictions to our ontological freedom: a rock cannot be an obstacle in its own right, but only if our project requires moving or climbing over it. Of course, an important question is whether our projects are freely chosen, and I will later argue that Sartre has not proven this, and that it would be nonsensical to suggest they are. Facticity, the facts that we do not choose, are the basis of our ontological freedom: ‘it is thanks to… the brute in-itself as such that freedom arises as freedom.’[17] Sartre means here that it is owing to my birth that I can form free projects; owing to my present location in my house that I can leave my house etc. However, the important point is that our practical freedom is reduced by our facticity, even if our ontological freedom is not: Sartre elucidates in depth the role of our past, genetics and environment; hence this would not be an adequate response from the critic. The interdependence of freedom and facticity is such that the situation (which is ‘the product of the contingency of the in-itself and of freedom’[18]) is ‘an ambiguous phenomenon in which it is impossible for the for-itself to distinguish the contribution of freedom from that of the brute existent.’[19] In short, the givens that Sartre mentions enjoy an ambiguous relationship with freedom because they are inseparably interlinked; and most importantly, they do restrict our practical freedom.

In critiquing Sartrean freedom thus far, I have demonstrated that the large numbers of assessments criticising Sartre for ignoring any restrictions to freedom are unjustified. I have shown that Sartre has a subtler account of freedom than often given credit for, that he distinguishes between ontological and practical freedom, and that he acknowledges genuine restrictions to our practical freedom. He also has a very sophisticated account of the interplay between freedom and facticity. However, the positive aspects of Sartre’s account extend little further than this. In the next section I will criticise Sartre’s use of the concept of ‘negativity’ as a basis for freedom.

Section 2: Consciousness, Nothingness, and Negation

For Sartre there is an inextricable link, perhaps even identity, between freedom and nihiliation: ‘nihilation is precisely the being of freedom.’[20] This nihilation is the activity of the for-itself (consciousness). Without intentional objects, the for-itself is strictly nothing. This explains Sartre’s remark that ‘the being by which Nothingness comes into the world must be its own Nothingness.’[21] Thus we see a three-way unity of consciousness-negation-freedom.

Throughout the preliminary pages in the chapter on freedom in Being and Nothingness, Sartre puts forth arguments for the necessity of negation in free action. I can decipher three arguments that Sartre makes for the need for negation: (1) in order to act, we need to ‘withdraw’ from the state of affairs we are in, in order to assign a value to it. This ‘wrenching away’[22] from the world is a nihilation for Sartre. (2) nihiliation is necessary for seeing the current state of affairs as lacking, and hence requiring change. (3) nihilation is necessary for becoming aware of possibilities. Possibilities are not real states of affairs, and this is essential, for otherwise it would be impossible to aim towards their actualisation. It is not enough to see the current state of affairs as lacking; in order to act, we need to conceive of a new, better state of affairs and aim towards actualising it.

It is intuitive that we need to see situations as lacking in order to change them, and that we need to posit a superior, not yet existing state of affairs as an end to aim towards. Sartre provides many examples from workers in 1830s France, to Emperor Constantine, in proving the necessary role of negation in action. Unfortunately, expanding on these examples would be tangential to the task of my essay – we can, for the sake of argument, assume that Sartre is right here – that is, we can assume that nihilation is a necessary component of action.  Nonetheless, after establishing this, Sartre concludes ‘as soon as one attributes to consciousness this negative power with respect to the world and itself… we must recognise that the indispensable and fundamental condition of all action is the freedom of the acting being.’[23] However, it is evident that the negative power of consciousness does not a priori entail that freedom is a fundamental condition of all action. Moreover, Sartre makes little attempt to argue for this entailment.  

This is not to say that he makes no argument for this. Sartre writes, ‘no factual state whatever it may be is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not… No factual state can determine consciousness to apprehend it as a negatité or as a lack.’[24] The issue is with the final statement: Sartre has not validated the claim that no factual state can determine consciousness to apprehend it as a lack. He gives the example of workers who face great exploitation but do not revolt, concluding, ‘it is necessary here… to admit that the harshness of a situation or the suffering which it imposes, are not sufficient motives for conceiving of another state of affairs in which things would be better for everybody.’[25] A similar example is that of the hiker, who faces the same physical fatigue as his colleagues, but only gives in as a result of reflecting on his suffering, and resultantly placing a value on it.[26] He has at best shown that two groups can face the same levels of suffering and yet react in different ways. But this of course oversimplifies the situation. There could be many factors that explain why an exploited group do not rebel besides the suffering. The government may be more authoritarian, the workers may be less educated, or physically weakened. Even the smallest details such as differences in individuals’ beliefs, individual preferences, past history, and neurology will play a dramatic impact in what unfolds. Therefore, Sartre is not in a position to say that ‘no factual state can determine consciousness to apprehend it as a negatité or as a lack.’[27] Validating such a claim would require vast (perhaps impossibly vast) amounts of empirical data, and there are too many factors that Sartre ignores. It may be objected that to see something as a lack, you need to reflect upon it, and this act of reflection is itself a free act. However, there is no reason why this act of reflection could not itself be determined - I will address this point in greater depth shortly.

With regards to (1), the determinist has many ways of replying. He could say that the hiker really does suffer greater fatigue than his colleagues, and that this additional fatigue is enough to determine that the hiker throws down his knapsack and rests. Likewise, perhaps two equally suffering workers, if they really are equally suffering, will invariably respond in the same way, and perhaps if one suffers less than the other then it is simply inconceivable that he will revolt and the other will not. Since we cannot quantify levels of suffering there is no reason why this couldn’t be the case. However, this is not a particularly good response because I think that what Sartre says has phenomenological support. Indeed, I can add credence to what he says via my own example: some pains that we voluntarily endure, such as the pain experienced by the marathon runner, would be unbearable if the pain did not serve as part of our project (in this case of finishing the race), and if the pain was inflicted upon us against our will by a torturer, leaving us no inkling as to when it will stop. The same pain, experienced by the runner and the tortured man, is tolerably endured, albeit with a sick grimace, by the former, and suffered intolerably by the latter. Therefore, it seems that there is phenomenological support for what Sartre says.

There is however a legitimate reason why (1) does not provide support for the libertarian. The reason is expressed in this rhetorical question: ‘does the hiker freely choose to become aware of his fatigue, and does the worker freely choose to reflect on his poor working conditions?’ In both cases the answer is almost always no – focusing on our pain during exercise seems to be an event that just happens to us, and the same is true of any act of reflective consciousness. It would seem strange to suggest that freedom is at play here. A similar point can be made about values. Sartre makes it clear that a state of affairs by itself cannot bring about action, and only this state of affairs with a value can be a cause for action. But how much choice do we have over our values? Certainly the values of wanting to survive, wanting to procreate, eat, drink, and even socialise, are with us from birth - without our permission. Certainly we do seem to have control over some of our values, and indeed Sartre argues that our values derive from our freely chosen projects. Even if we accept that some of our values are freely chosen (an idea I will argue against in the next section when I criticise the idea of an ‘initial project’), it is clear that most are not.

The same form of argument can be used to undermine the libertarians’ use of (2) and (3). In the vast majority of cases we do not have any freedom in regarding our situation as lacking – the lack generally just presents itself to us. When we enter our cluttered kitchen, we are immediately aware that there is a lack, and the ideal state of a clean kitchen is not a freely chosen end – the ideal state presents itself as how the kitchen should be. Again, the Sartrean may argue that it is only because of our chosen projects that we believe the kitchen should be a certain way. But if freedom only exists in the domain of our chosen projects then we have veered dramatically from Sartre’s absolute ontological freedom (again, in the next section I will argue that we don’t even have freedom here).

I will finally use what Sartre says about the passions to undermine the idea that consciousness’ capacity (and need) to negate entails that freedom is necessary for action. We must bear in mind that passions and desires are nihilating. As Sartre says, ‘where do we get the idea that passion or simple desire is not nihilating?... 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 considering it in the light and end – i.e., of a non-being?’[28] He concludes, ‘if nihilation is precisely the being of freedom, how can we refuse autonomy to the passions?’[29] We can refuse autonomy to the passions because nihilation is not the being of freedom, as my previous arguments have shown.

Sartre believes that we freely choose our emotions as a way of responding to situations: ‘emotion is not a physiological tempest; it is a reply adapted to the situation; it is type of conduct.’[30] Sartre even says that when we faint through fear ‘there is an intention of losing consciousness in order to do away with the formidable world.’[31] It is very difficult to argue against this and the best I can do is point out that Sartre is the only human I know to have ever made such a claim. If a known killer were to walk into my room at night carrying a gun, I would be shot by fear before being shot by a bullet. Moreover, there is little doubt that every attempt to calm myself down would fail. Unquestionably, we have a degree of control over our emotions: phrases like ‘pull yourself together’ or ‘calm down’ would not exist if the man in fear was always a lost cause. Nonetheless, the idea that we choose our emotions, and even choose to faint, is absurd. One argument against the claim that emotions are freely chosen, besides the mere assertion of its absurdity, is this: if we choose our emotions then why are people ever sad, lonely or angry? After all, I don’t see why anyone would choose these negative emotions. Two points can be taken away from our analysis of Sartrean emotion: (1) Sartre greatly overemphasises the freedom of emotions (2) most of Sartre’s arguments for freedom are of this form: consciousness is nihiliating, and nihilation entails freedom. However, since emotions are nihilating, and since there is not a great deal of freedom exhibited in emotions, there is little reason to think that nihilation entails freedom.

The moral of this section is this: Sartre has demonstrated that negation is necessary for action, and that consciousness actively negates. However, he has not shown, and for the reasons I have given, it is not the case that, negation entails freedom (and therefore that acts are free). I have also demonstrated that Sartre significantly overemphasises the role of free choice in our emotions.

Section 3: Initial Project/Choice

Although Sartre is a libertarian, he does believe that free acts have some sort of explanation; otherwise acts would lose their intention: ‘to speak of an act without a cause is to speak of an act which would lack the intentional structure of every act.’[32] Nonetheless, Sartre would obviously not maintain that any state of affairs could determine an action; hence, determinists who allude to motives (‘generally considered as a subjective fact. It is the ensemble of the desires, emotions, and passions which urge me to accomplish a certain task.’[33]) and causes (‘the reason for the act; that is, the ensemble of rational considerations which justify it’[34]) as determining psychic ‘things’ have made a mistake.

For Sartre, ‘the determinists are weighing the scale by stopping their investigation with the mere designation of cause and motive.’[35] He goes on to write, ‘we ought to ask how a cause (or motive) could be constituted as such.’[36] In other words, causes and motives are not simply ‘givens,’ but presuppose something more fundamental, and this turns out to be a free project: ‘causes and motives have only the weight which my project – i.e., the free production of the end and of the known act to be realised – confers upon them’.[37] Human reality is therefore a series of subprojects that all emanate from a fundamental project: ‘the way in which my companion suffers his fatigue necessarily demands – if we are to understand it – a regressive analysis which will lead us back to an initial project.’[38] What Sartre is attempting to do here, and what for the sake of argument we can grant that he has achieved, is to show that our act is not determined by the preceding moment. There are no motives and causes that precede and determine our act, rather the motive and cause are unified within the act.[39]

Sartre says that the hiker’s giving-up and his companion’s continued walking is explained by a project, and through regressive analysis we see how this project relates to prior projects all the way to an initial project. Of course, these projects do not determine our actions; Anthony Manser says that they determine the manner in which we live, and that our original choice is revealed in all of our actions.[40] Hence, the determinist cannot go down this route of attack. It has been said previously that our projects are what provide us with motives and causes, and this is expressed in Sartre’s remark that ‘it is this present choice which originally creates all causes and all motives which can guide us to partial actions.’[41] But now we can pinpoint a great incoherence: how can we ever have an original choice of project if a project is required for causes and motives? In other words, prior to all projects, we cannot make a choice of project because we have no causes or motives, and thus no reasons with which to make a decision. If the choice is just some random, unexplained process, then it cannot really be called a choice, or a free decision, and if there are reasons to choose between, we must have already made a choice.  

Conclusion

Sartre’s objective of undermining psychological determinism and of erecting libertarianism in its place failed. Two of his most fundamental arguments for freedom - the argument from negation, and his argument for the necessity of projects over preceding psychic givens - does not live up to analysis. Nonetheless, I have also shown that Sartrean freedom is not as absurdly unbounded as many critics have taken it to be, and that Sartre does acknowledge genuine restrictions to practical freedom.

                                                References

Anthony Manser, Sartre a Philosophic Study, 1966, University of London, The Athlone Press

Jean Paul-Sartre, (1943), Being and Nothingness (an essay on phenomenological ontology),  Translated by Hazel E. Barnes (2003), Routledge Classics, London and New York

Reinhold Grossman, 1984, Phenomenology and Existentialism London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism, September 17, 2007 Philosophy Bites

Wilfrid Desan, 1954, The Tragic Finale, Harper Torchbooks

[1] Sartre (2003), p.466

[2] Ibid., p.485

[3] Ibid., p.475

[4] Ibid., p.393

[5] Grossman  (1984), pp.262-263

[6] Desan ( 1954), p.107

[7] Mary Warnock on Sartre's Existentialism, Philosophy Bites, September 17, 2007

[8] Sartre (2003), p.505

[9] Ibid., p.505

[10] Sartre (2003), p.505

[11] Ibid., p.503

[12] Ibid., p.503

[13] Ibid., p.503

[14] Ibid., p.503

[15] Sartre (2003., p.650

[16] Ibid., p.504

[17] Ibid., p.506

[18] Ibid., p.509

[19] Sartre (2003), p.509

[20] Ibid., p. 465

[21] Ibid., p. 47

[22] Sartre (2003), p.456

[23] Ibid., 458

[24] Sartre (2003), p.458

[25] Ibid., p.457

[26] Ibid., p.476

[27] Ibid., p.458

[28] Sartre (2003), p.465

[29] Ibid., p.465

[30] Ibid., p.465

[31] Ibid., p.467

[32] Sartre (2003), p., 459

[33] Ibid., p.468

[34] Ibid., p.468

[35] Sartre (2003), p. 459

[36] Ibid., p.459

[37] Ibid., p. 473

[38] Ibid., p. 479

[39] Ibid., p.471

[40] Manser (1966), p.121

[41] Sartre (2003), p.486