'Unappropriable' Freedom Santoni, Sartre and the Question of Authenticity - a Response to Karsten Harries

Abstract

According to Harries, 'Sartre ... has to reject whatever belongs to facticity as binding my freedom in an essential way.'1 Indeed, he argues that Sartre's commitment to such a radical freedom results in a profound misinterpretation of the human condition that places consciousness at odds with its own embodiment, ultimately demon ising the sensuous. This misinterpretation is exacerbated by Sartre's insistence that human freedom is destined to the futile task of pro ducing the missing synthesis of consciousness and being, a destiny that sends consciousness on the impossible quest of providing its own foundation. The 'fundamental project', as Sartre calls it, appears to be ruled by the demand for complete self-possession, even if that unrealisable demand renders human being a 'useless passion'. This, in turn, provides the basis for Harries's provocative claim that Sartrean existentialism expresses the 'spirit of revenge' about which Nietzsche speaks. Furthermore, Harries concludes that Sartre's com mitment to 'a freedom that refuses to be bound' by any contingency precludes the possibility of an 'existential' ethics: 'this leaves us only with a freedom so abstract that, far from generating what one might call moral imperatives, it does not even allow for a robust sense of self (Harries p.35). Sartre's conceptions of freedom and responsibil ity therefore lack the concreteness and measure required to ground authenticity and morality. In his recent book on Sartre, Ron Santoni picks up these matters by a different handle.2 There he carries out a series of patient and thoughtful readings of texts from Sartre's early philosophy that cul minate in a refined treatment of the concept of authenticity that sub tly works to recognise the ways in which Sartre both binds freedom