MAN VIS-À-VIS FREEDOM

Reporter: Aline G. Tipay

BSED 3F-1

Sartre first explores what freedom is and how man comes to have it.

Freedom itself simply means the ability to choose: man comes to have this ability thanks to his having consciousness.

Freedom is synonymous with human consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS( Being-for-itself) – is marked by its non-coincidence with itself.

“BEING AND NOTHINGNESS”

“An essay in phenomenological Ontology”, reveals Sartre’s aim of describing the fundamental structures of human existence and answering the question “ What does it mean to be human?

“ Humans, unlike inert matter, are conscious and therefore free”

THE NOTION OF ONTOLOGICAL FREEDOMIt implies that humans are free in all situation.

In Being and Nothingness, he passionately argued that even prisoners are free because they have the power of consciousness.

Sartre’s ontological notion of freedom has been widely criticized.

Important contemporary critic of Sartre’s work was his colleague Maurice Merleau- Ponty

Sartre later works, he became critical of what he then called the “Stoical” and “Cartesian” view that freedom consists in the ability to change one’s attitude no matter what the situation.

Sartre’s shift to a material conception of freedom was motivated directly by the holocaust and World War II.

 Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946), published just after the war, was the first of many works analyzing moral responsibility for oppression.

The fact that Sartre’s view in Being and Nothingness seemed to leave little room for diagnosing oppression did not stop him from articulating a forceful normative critique of Anti-Semitism. His analysis of oppression would, in fact, use the same dialectical tools as those in the section on “concrete relations with others” in Being and Nothingness. 

Sartre’s new appreciation of oppression as a concrete loss of human freedom forced him to alter his view that humans are free in any situation.

Take the case of the prisoner. The prisoner is ontologically free because she controls whether to attempt escape. On this view, freedom is synonymous with choice. But there is no qualitative distinction between types of choices.

In Anti-Semite and Jew and Notebooks Sartre implicitly addresses the above criticism, arguing that oppression consists not in the absence of choice, but in being forced to choose between bad, inhumane options (Notebooks, pp. 334-5).

In the political period as a whole Sartre developed his material view of freedom by contrasting the free person with the slave.

Though his notion of slavery is derived from Hegel, Sartre, unlike Hegel, diagnosed literal cases like American chattel slavery.

Sartre follows Hegel in portraying slavery as a form of “non-mutual recognition” where one person dominates the other psychologically and physically. A slave, he argues, is un-free because he is dominated by a master (Notebooks pp. 325-411).

Material freedom requires, therefore, non-domination, or freedom from coercion. He adds that in master/slave relations, the self-conception of the victim and perpetrator are intertwined and distorted; both parties are in “bad faith”; both fail to fully understand their own freedom. Though both perpetrator and victim are in bad faith, only the slave is coerced physically (Notebooks, p. 331).

•Sartre’s view of material freedom is independent of any notion of human nature. He consistently rejects the existence of a pre-social human essence or a set of natural human desires (“Existentialism is a Humanism”; Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 49; Search for a Method, pp. 167-181).

we can say that a person is materially free in Sartre’s sense if

(a) she enjoys basic material security; (b) she is un-coerced; and (c) she has access to cultural and social goods necessary for pursuing her chosen projects.

QUESTIONS

1. It implies that humans are free in all situations.

a. Consciousnessb. Notion of Ontological Freedomc. Material view of Freedomd. Ontological

2. It is the concrete loss of freedom.

a.Oppressionb.Non-dominationc.Freedom from coerciond.poverty

3. It is marked by its non-coincidence itself.

a.Ontologicalb.Consciousnessc.Material view of freedomd.Notion of Ontological Freedom

4. It simply means ability to choose?

a.Consciousnessb.Notion of Ontological Freedomc.Material view of Freedomd.Freedom

5. Person is materially free in Sartre’s view, EXEPT ONE:

a. She is coerced b. She enjoys basic material securityc. She has access to cultural and social goods

necessary for pursuing her chosen projects.d. She is un-coerced

END OF MY REPORT!