Sartre's Opinion about Freedom

Introduction

It is helpful to distinguish between existentialism, as a philosophy of existence that flourished intermittently across Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the existentialist movement, which rose to intellectual prominence in France after World War II. Although the former poses many provocative ethical questions, it remained rather diffuse and apolitical until it was seized on by a group of French intellectuals who identified themselves as members of a distinctive movement led by Jean-Paul Sartre. The latter's influence on radical political thought has been extensive, and despite the movement's demise by the 1960s, an existentialist style of philosophizing about everyday life and existentialist concerns about individual freedom continue to reverberate in contemporary political theory.

Discussion and Analysis

Sartre's massive “Essay in Phenomenological Ontology,” Being and Nothingness (1943; probably written in 1937), has been his most influential “existentialist” work. It opens as a phenomenological inquiry into Being (ontology), but chiefly for the sake of inquiring into your and my particular way of being as “existents.” A number of central features of our way of being are revealed by an analysis of the dynamic of human “consciousing”. It should be noted, however, that while human consciousness is always at once “consciousing-of-an-object” and 'consciousing-of-itself, ” our practical preoccupation with the object — the thing, other person, event, state of affairs, issue — ordinarily leaves awareness of its own activity only implicit (Lavine, pp. 12-134).

Sartre marked this implicit form of the reflexivity of consciousness by parentheses: “conscience (de) soi” (“consciousness (of) itself”). Ordinarily, when the subject matter is not threatening, we may well shift from the implicitly to the explicitly reflexive form; perhaps even to a further reflected level. (The counterpart claim within contemporary linguistic philosophy is that in principle one can always shift from propositional uses to propositional mentions.)

Because of this bipolar ...