Summary of Jean Paul Sartre’s Freedom

The most famous intellectuals of the 20th Century, one of the few intellectuals to
actually become a kind of international star, and that’s Jean Paul Sartre, a French
philosopher from a decade, the sixties, but whose career lasted longer than that and
started before that and in many ways whose journey as both an intellectual and an
activist marks out a certain search for meaning in the 20th Century in his own life. In
other words, his own life story is interesting in that regard apart from the works that
he wrote.

“The Roads to Freedom”, because Sartre is engaged in a project where what he wants
to make of himself is an absolutely free man in the sense in which Fidel
Castro told Barbara Walters that he was an absolutely free man, I mean, he wants to
become his own making, and Sartre thinks that this is not a personal choice. He
believes since God doesn’t exist we are (as he puts it) condemned to be free. We don’t
have any choice. We have to make our life a project. The only option we have is what
Sartre calls “bad faith“.

Bad faith for Sartre is when you treat yourself as a thing. You know, as something with
an essence created by another where you just act out of your upbringing and don’t
make your life a creation: this is bad faith. I think bad faith is one of the most useful
concepts of the early Sartre. It’s a quite common phenomenon, and it’s something you
can say of someone; they have acted “in bad faith”. Another way you might put that is
“out of character”, but that’s not strong enough. Bad faith is when someone makes an
excuse to you along the lines of “I couldn’t have done otherwise, don’t you see?” or “I
couldn’t have avoided that, don’t you see”, but on Sartre’s radical view of the freedom
of the human to construct himself, there is simply no situation in which you are
allowed to say “I couldn’t have done otherwise” I mean, even on pain of death you
could choose death, Sartre gives even that radical example. Even in prison, you could
refuse to be complicitous with the authorities.

Well, for Sartre we have this project of freedom from which one can fall, and you see
some formal similarity to Heidegger’s inauthenticity here. One can fall in bad faith, and
that’s by treating oneself as though you are a creature of necessity when actually you
are free to do otherwise. So this for Sartre is bad faith. On the other hand there is a
kind of an existential ethic in Sartre’s view of radical freedom, and that existential ethic
goes something like this.

When you do act freely, you still need to ask yourself a question that is styled in a form
that might have appealed to Kant. Namely, could others act as I do? Could everyone
choose as I have chosen? This is a test to which Sartre would like to put his own
actions, in other words, when you face a moral dilemma, you’ve got to put yourself –
he thinks in this perspective in which you can say “is this a rule that I want others to
adopt for their action, what I have just decided?” This is not a limit on your freedom as
long as and this is a key word for Sartre, it’s been a key word since Kant, and it is the
key word of some very interesting modern political movements – as long as such a
decision is made with autonomy.

In other words, not under the guidance of a moral postulate. In that regard, it’s
different than Kant. You asked yourself this question as part of your project, you go
“Well, could everyone do this?” You may go ahead even though everyone can’t, but this
is at least… at least this gives Sartre’s position some slight ethical dimension missing
from the position of Heidegger, where I discussed how you could be authentic in many
different ways. Well, similarly, you can be an existentialist and a humanist in many
different ways too, but there are some limits on how the project can go. In fact, the
humanist part of it means that without God, man is left all alone to create his or her
destiny in their own hands, and that’s the sense in which Sartre says we are
condemned to be free.

Not only is Sartre an atheist, but as I say, he is not a nature lover either. I mean, the
world of brute facticity, sort of, surrounds us. Everything that limits Sartre’s freedom
really pisses him off. It’s like Sartre discusses the wall, you know, or any other
objectivity as though it were an obstacle. Well, it is, if you think about it. I mean, you
know, perfect freedom, I guess, would be to float and fly and jump and zoom
anywhere, so the world, sort of, the subject/object world for Sartre, all the freedom is
on the subject side, and on the object side is the world of nature which also stands in
the way of our actions and our free actions. Now it’s bad faith to say that they always
do, see, follow me? Sometimes, you know, the biggest mountain, you could either
climb it, or better still, to follow the advice of my grandfather, walk around it. My
grandfather use to like to say the damn mountain had no business being there, which I
guess means he believed in God but thought he had a sense of humour, I am not sure.

Sartre’s account, though, of the brute facticity of nature being a block to freedom… I
mean, we are condemned to be free, but there are blocks to it like the facticity of the
object world around us. Unfortunately, the self is under siege in Sartre to such an
extent that other people are also a block to our freedom. This has been noted a long
time in political theory. You know, I mean, it’s easy to imagine a completely free
anarchistic singularity, but you get two or three people together and they are bound to
start getting in each other’s way. You know, already you begin to see there are
problems limiting your freedom. I think Sartre engages in a bit of existentialist overkill
in this period in his life. In one of his plays. I am sure you have heard about it – it is
called “No Exit”, Sartre goes so far as to say “Hell is other people”; you know, if there
was a heaven, I would be there by myself so you folks wouldn’t be around to piss me
off.

And he has a wonderful section in “Being and Nothingness” and I think women should
be able to relate to this more than men about the gaze of the other. It’s especially true
if you are like a stranger in a Texas town and you are… you know, in town for just one
day to buy some things, and everybody is looking at you; you are the stranger, you
know, and they fix you with their gaze. Sartre has a brilliant and beautiful passage in
Being and Nothingness about the alienation and distancing effect of the gaze. This of
course has become, you know, like, so hip and popularised in feminism that men at
least politically aware men don’t look at women anymore, or other men, or objects, or
at their notes. no, I am sorry, you can’t see, again, there is a tendency to excess in
Sartre.
In any case, he has this discussion of the world as both a field in which we are
condemned to be free, but one in which our actions are limited not only by objects;
you know, the facticity of the world the way it is. facticity is a fancy word for the way
the damn thing is set up and by other people.

This is where Sartre’s thought undergoes, as he gets older, a profound change, and I
mark that and I do mark that with his autobiography: “The Words“. This is where he
looks back on his young existentialist period, when he painted the hell the world was
in No Exit, and the Nausea he felt at other people and at himself, and his, you know,
fear before nothingness and death, and he looks back on that period and he says “I
was, as it were, doubled. On the one hand, I was ‘I’; Jean Paul Sartre, you know, the
just… person, on the other hand I was the chronicler of hell, the privileged young
writer allowed to observe all the torments of the modern personality. I was extremely
happy, fake and hoodwinked to my very soul” So this is something, when you have
your lecture in here, and I know we’ll have a lecture series on existentialism, be sure to
remind whoever is lecturing here that Sartre came to view existentialism in a different
light later. In other words, if you are too happy about things like death, despair, dread
and anxiety then it’s time to wonder, you know, if this thrills you too much. Just follow
your heart wherever you happy, because you cannot attain true freedom if you are not
happy to your everyday doings.

Name: Dieter F. Suico Teacher: Mr. Jose David Sim

Section: SM11A1 Subject: SOCSCI 4