Sartre: Freedom as Imprisonment

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness has been subjected to considerable critical scrutiny over the years, not least by Sartre himself his later thinking; but it is still capable of generating intriguingly diverse interpretations. Recently, Christina Howells has argued that the Sartre of Being and Nothingness is far from being philosopher of unrestricted freedom and lucidity. She points out that he always insists that consciousness is not separable from its embodiment or the world. The transparency of consciousness is contrasted with the opacity of the body, with the facticity and of the subject as instantiated the world.1 Freedom does not enable me to escape this and facticity. On the contrary, as Howells points out, Sartre himself tells us that fmitude is an ontological structure of the for-itself which determines freedom.2 On the other hand, we find another recent commentator, Thomas Anderson, suggesting that Sartre insists that freedom is and total his early thought, and that he is able to do it because he variously ignores, or any limitation of freedom by situation and circumstances.3 So what are we to make of such divergent interpretations? Is one or the other a misreading? In this essay I want to suggest that both these readings are partly correct. As Howells suggests, Sartre does indeed want to articulate a conception of freedom as and in At the same time however, as Anderson points out, he also wants to say that that freedom is absolute and total. Sartre insists that freedom is no sense a matter of degree: Man can not be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all.4 Or again: 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.5 So how is this possible? How is Sartre able to assert this absolute freedom, and yet portray this freedom as only existing a concrete situation? It is not, I would suggest, because he denies, ignores or effectively minimizes the role of circumstances. I want to argue that he does so precisely by maximizing freedom, by rendering it absolute. That is, our freedom is made into an absolute principle, and the world is subordinated to this all-embracing freedom. As a result there is nothing to limit or condition our freedom. In this essay I will present a reading of Sartre these terms, and look some detail at the way which Sartre carries out this process of subordination, the means by which he effectively sacrifices the world to freedom. Through this discussion of Sartre I also want to point to some of the problems and dangers associated with a view of the world that allows the world to be consumed by a single, all-embracing principle, even if that principle is a certain conception of freedom. Freedom The short answer to the question of how Sartre is able to assert an absolute freedom, and yet portray this freedom as existing the midst of a concrete situation is that, for Sartre, freedom is never really located within a situation. The situation is invoked only insofar as it is also reduced to a product or function of our freedom. There is a double movement Sartre's Being and Nothingness. First, there is the complete withdrawal from the world, from all external determinations, order to maximize freedom as self-determination. Second, the world is restored to us, but only insofar as we reveal it through our choices of ourselves. We are responsible for the world of which we are supposedly a part. Our involvement the world, our embodied situatedness, is thus reduced to a function of the subjective activity of our choices, through which the world and our situation is revealed. …