ON FREEDOM IN SARTRE’S EXISTENTIALISM

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I am reading "Existenstialism is a humanism", the text of the famous conference by Sartre in which
he explains his own version of existentialism. I think is full of logical inconsistencies, but maybe it's
just because I don't understand it or I don't know enough about existentialism. Anyway, my question
is about a specific passage. After having "demonstrated" that there is no way one can derive an ethics
outside of Man (God does not exist and reason is insufficient), he asks himself according to what
principle a person should behave and he says:

"For I declare that freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no other end and aim but
itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness
he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values. That does not mean
that he wills it in the abstract: it simply means that the actions of men of good faith have, as their
ultimate significance, the quest of freedom itself as such."
So it seems Sartre says that when deciding a course of action, people will always choose "freedom,"
(and also, elsewhere, that "freedom" is always a good thing). That is for him the only principle, the
only moral that governs or should (because we can do wrong judgments about what is freedom)
govern our action.

My questions are:

1) do I understand correctly Sartre's thinking?

2) He says: a) freedom is absolute; b) the values that man chooses are also absolute because no God
or reason can tell him what to do, c) therefore man will choose freedom. Is there any logic in this
statement? If I replace freedom with X where X is "pleasure" or "justice" or "pain" or "zero
temperature", wouldn't I "demonstrate" by this logic that man will choose X?

3) assuming what I said makes any sense, how can existentialism ever find a rule of moral conduct?
and if it does, what is it and how can be demonstrated? and if it cannot, why is or has been important
at all as a philosophy?

Thanks!

existentialism sartre

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asked Aug 23 '16 at 15:13

luca a.
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I am not up to answering the rest of it but 3 is easy. Kant goes to pretty much exactly the same place from
a totally different angle and creates a very productive version of ethics based entirely on 'autonomy',
another word for 'freedom'. So does Libertarianism. So do various forms of rule-utilitarianism focussed on
intention rather than outcome. If anything, it leaves too many ethical options by being too
vague. – jobermark Aug 23 '16 at 16:32
 Thanks very much. Are you saying that for Kant or the other schools that you mention, freedom or
autonomy is the highest moral principle? And how can they demonstrate (or at least support) this
statement? – luca a. Aug 23 '16 at 16:44
 1
Its worth pointing out that the essay is polemical so it will be 'full of logical inconsistencies'; he justifies his
position elsewhere. – Mozibur Ullah Aug 23 '16 at 16:52
 1
That is a totally different question, which you should ask or search if you really want an answer, and
would require a long answer in each case. The point is that Sartre is not original in this, he has several
predecessors who have hung their whole ethics on the notion of mutual autonomy or other interpretations
of 'freedom'. He is just trying to get there without the same shortcuts. – jobermark Aug 23 '16 at 17:16
 Part of the reason to choose freedom is that you are choosing, and you want it to be ethical for you to
choose to be ethical. It has a sort of 'cogito ergo sum' quality to it. If you choose a basis other than
freedom of choice for an ethical criterion, then there is a lot more work to prove you should have bothered
to choose anything at all. And for most of us, we do subjectively feel like we are choosing, when we make
an ethical determination, and not being guided or creating something new. – jobermark Aug 23 '16 at 17:35
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3 Answers
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You did not understand Sartre correctly. When he says people will choose freedom (of actions) he
means in that passage that they are better to appreciate/recognize the fact they are already free,
instead of haunting their "bad faith" which conceals the fact of freedom in order to escape anxiety
and responsibility. For, to Sartre man is condemned to be free. In honesty (authentity) or in bad faith
(self-deception) - no matter, a man remains free; he cannot exist otherwise but free.

So, "the quest of freedom as such" is simply the project to be honest and get along with that (only)
human nature, the freedom. It is logical and practical sane call, in Sartre's view. We don't choose
freedom, he says, so let's appreciate that we are free.

Somebody who in their lives had occasional insights that, for example, their lover or a friend or a pet
is worthy only thanks to them (the subjects) and through them, will understand Sartre saying "values
depend upon himself".
Sartre's existentialism always has had problems with ethics. Positive morals are not easy to derive
from basically a "nihilistic" philosophy. Sartre called up to respect everyone's not only my freedom.
He also held that a man should be acting, re-doing his self.

Somebody very keen has proclamed the moral maxima of any phenomenologic-based existential
system as "act such as if you were not", because for Sartre and his philosophical peers a man has no
access to his own being since he's free.
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edited Aug 8 '17 at 6:31
answered Aug 7 '17 at 19:53

ttnphns
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 I have read both of the answers you have given on Sartre, and they are good answers! However, as you
probably know, Sartre changed his views later on this topic of man's freedom. At least in my opinion, it
was a real change, a real break as Sartre began to see the idea of man's (complete) ontological freedom
as simply naive. This gives some information on this topic. iep.utm.edu/sartre-p/#H3 – Gordon Aug 8 '17 at
12:36
 Thank you much for your comment and the link. However, I don't think that Sartre ever quit his basic
postulates. Despite yes, he, by late 40s, turned to see man as very constrained by real circumstancies. In
his second large book, on dialectical reasoning, many things were reformulated terminologically, but the
pivot remained recognizable as it were in Being and Nothingness. – ttnphns Aug 8 '17 at 13:14
 On your second comment about unremovable different constraints in people. Actually, it is unfair to
demand from a philosopher to account for differences so that the system suits everyone equally easy.
Similar unfair claims had been done against Heidegger, for example; which didn't devalue his
system. – ttnphns Aug 8 '17 at 13:20
 After all, an antropologic-oriented philosophy is always an intimate experience of its author sole. It is our
individual choice to borrow it to believe and live and use, or not to. – ttnphns Aug 8 '17 at 13:23
 Additionally - would stress this obvious fact - Sartre's "absolute freedom" never meant "effective caprice".
The freedom always occurs here-and-now in concrete circumstances and vis-a-vis these. The word
"absolute" means not I do what I fancy but that the circumstances are processed by mind in the manner
that while they are taken in full they are here just not to meddle (in strict causality sense) in the decision
made. The freedom is not psychological or subjective freedom, it is philosophical ontologic
one. – ttnphns Aug 8 '17 at 13:35
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I guess I am answering the rest of it anyway... (Inauthentic of me...)

1) No. I don't think you properly understand Sartre's position.

People don't always choose freedom. Inauthenticity is also an option. So one can choose against
freedom, but only hypocritically. From a certain point of view, we generally do so. Evasive
rationalization is very natural in a complex society with a lot of determining forces like government,
the opinions of others, the possibility of violent disagreement...

We often justify our actions and pretend we have not chosen, because we don't like the result and
would rather disown it.

Freedom is not always good. I can be pointless: we can need to decide when it won't affect any
relevant outcome. It can be horrifying: we can be asked to make decisions no one should make
knowing that we cannot make them well. It always presents the risk of choosing wrong, which can be
as bad as possible.

But it is literally inescapable, if one is truthful. Truthfulness is not always good, it can have all the
same problems. But habitual lack of truthfulness is a widespread disease.
Lying is not necessarily bad, but it makes things more complex and degrades the sense of meaning in
one's actions. We can choose to lie to ourselves about our freedom. That can even be good. It just has
a price. Too many people are not aware of the price because they are so used to choosing to be
inauthentic that they do not know what a sense of meaning is, anymore; and that is a widespread
form of mild insanity.

2) That is not really a fair way to put it. It puts a syllogism in his mouth that has an undistributed
middle. Point a implies c: freedom is absolute, you will choose freedom because absolute freedom
does not permit any other option.

What it comes down to is that whether and how to choose is one thing in life, perhaps the central
thing, over which one ultimately has no choice. You will do it, and you will choose freedom. You
can do so consciously or subconsciously. You might as well be honest with yourself.
Yes that contradicts everything I said in 1), but this is to some degree a theory about lying and not
lying, aimed at a herd of people steeped in lies. It is not hard to see that the contradictions themselves
are superficial, but inescapable -- that there are two senses of 'choice' at play, but that they can't really
be separated.

3) As pointed out in the comments Kant purposely takes autonomy as the only value, and builds from
there. So clearly Kant is an option for an Existentialist ethics. That is, as long as one realizes that it is
an option, and that Kant's own choice to claim he is basically coerced into it by logic is dishonest and
evasive. So the whole remainder of Kant's philosophy is not an option, and you need a different way
to look at your motivation to frame things in this way.
Cynicism is another system based entirely on freedom as a goal. It adds contrarianism as a subgoal,
with the added insight that we can all create more consciousness of our options by subverting
patterns of assumptions that are too popular.

Within a Nietzschean worldview power and freedom form a direct feedback loop. So within an ethic
of power, freedom is a value equal to the primary value, giving yet another option for ways of
choosing ethical priorities.

Existentialism can be used to sew all of this together and prune it for efficiency.

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edited Jun 8 '17 at 23:33
answered Jun 8 '17 at 23:26

jobermark
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More or less right, but not quite.

in that state of forsakenness

We are not all in that state! Or rather, we do not always experience it.

For Sartre, self-deception and bad faith are the same, and, in what 1 call the weak sense of these
terms, we can say that we cannot escape self-deception, or bad faith, because we go from one self-
deception to another.
William Leon McBride -- Existentialist Ethics, p119.

Think, all humans are inauthentic, but some are more inauthentic than others. Anyway, you're surely
right that we can't

ever find a rule of moral conduct.

To claim that we can find a moral conduct for one and all would be to condemn them to inauthentic
choices, which is surely self refuting, and so itself an example of self deceit in us too.
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edited Aug 25 '17 at 0:40