Existentialism: Exploring Sartre's Radical Freedom

 Exploring Existentialism Part Three: To Be Free or Not to Be Free?

In my last post ‘Exploring Existentialism Part Two,’ we looked at Heidegger and the existentialists' demotion of logical positivism from its monopoly on the quest for truth and meaning.  In Heidegger’s view scientism and logical positivism have no final authority when it comes to apprehending the big questions about our lives, this is especially the case in the context of our direct intimate experiences of our day to day being in the world.  In Part Two we also looked at some of the common critiques of this approach to philosophy as well as its limitations.  We concluded so far that existential philosophy, particularly that of the continental tradition can get lost in a realm of subjective expression and may better be treated as poems about subjectivity.  

In this respect, they connect up as much with the literary tradition of the 20th century as with the philosophical tradition. The borderline between poetry and philosophy in existentialism is a very murky one, and that has to do with the logical structure of the system, but it also has to do with the fact that what they are doing transcends all boundaries, and in fact, is antagonistic to the idea of boundaries at all. 

Philosophy of Individualism

Heidegger’s influence cannot be understated, he was one of the most important German philosophers of the century, and many of his students went on to become existentialists.  Just as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are worlds apart, there are no identical existentialists. They change because they're all individuals, because this is a philosophy which celebrates individual expression, authentic responses to the great questions that we all face, that we all must answer ourselves. We must eschew concocting smug pseudo solutions to problems which no one can truly solve as there is no ultimate grounding for our judgments of right and wrong; nor for the thinking that we do, nor for the actions we undertake.

 

Radical Freedom of Choice

We must stop the smug project of producing one size fits all answers, answers which cleverly hide our uncertainty under the rug of convoluted logic, authority, and the unquestioned confidence in technology. Rather the existentialist wants to us to confront the fact that there are no ultimate rules: this is life, messy and ambiguous, here and now.  We must confront this reality which is delivered directly to our senses and our conscious experience, our intimate subjective experience of being in the world. 

The stage is now set for us to explore the existentialist ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre lived a little bit later than Heidegger, and his work is really a development based on Heidegger’s ideas. It's much more readable than Heidegger, though to be fair, Heidegger really takes the cake when it comes to unreadability. Sartre explores the implications of Heidegger's main ideas by asking similar questions, and many of the same questions asked in Sartre’s work, are answered in a way that's much more accessible. 

If you're going to be reading existentialism, I strongly recommend reading Sartre first, and I prefer his literary works as a starting point before diving into his main philosophical works.  I find it helpful to juxtapose the kinds of questions that somebody like Heidegger wants to ask with those of a scientific philosopher.  Instead of asking ‘what things exist?’ Heidegger implores us to ask: ‘What does it mean for things to be?’ Of course, when you phrase the question in this alternative manner about what it means for something to exist at all, you have stepped into the depths of philosophical questioning.

 

The Great Question of Being

Heidegger's argument essentially tells us that there is no foundation to this class of questions, but we must ask, ‘what is it for something to be?’ Heidegger doesn't want to know what things human beings know, but ‘what is it to know anything?’ He doesn't want to know what things we can think about instead, he penned a book, 'What is called Thinking’ which simply examines what it means to think about anything.

Heidegger changes the orientation of our though and hence it’s structure.  He turns the usual questioning process on its head. Instead of trying to describe with ever increasing precision the external world, we're going to try and describe with whatever precision is possible, the world of the human psyche: not what do we know, but ‘what is it to know anything?’ Not ‘what is it that exists?’, rather ‘what is it for anything to exist?’ ‘What are we talking about when we talk about existence?’ Heidegger’s answer to this is that if we pursue this line of questioning thoroughly and honestly, that we will eventually end up in silence. This is the starting point where Sartre really continues from Heidegger.

 

Sartre: Being and Nothingness

Sartre tries to answer questions that Heidegger has left in silence and those that the positivists refuse acknowledge. Sartre centres himself upon the question of what it means to be a human being in the 20th century.  He utilises phenomenology, a descriptive method, as his approach to this question. One could say that his best works are his novels and plays since they offer a poetic concretisation of his central concepts in a way which is both accessible and compelling.

For Sartre it is questions of anxiety, uncertainty, and the inherent lack of decisiveness in facing human problems which characterises his novels and his plays. Now, Sartre says essentially that what makes human beings human, and what makes them different from everything else in the world, is that they're free to make choices. 

For Sartre, we are all condemned to freedom, which means we are forced to make choices that have no logical grounding and that there is no way to avoid this excess of freedom without the self-deception of what he calls ‘bad faith’. In Sartre's parlance, ‘bad faith’ is a lack of authenticity: we are called to live authentically. We are called to deal with who and what we really are, we ought to bravely and squarely face all the ambiguity, anxiety and misery which the reality of what we are entails.

 

Being In Itself VS Being For Itself

For Sartre what makes us different from other beings is our freedom and he creates an ontological system to describe this difference. This is the central endeavour in his tome: Being and Nothingness which is itself the later extrapolation from Heidegger's Being and Time.  In this work, he tells us that there are two kinds of things, the things en soi and pour soi: things in themselves and things for themselves. All objects such as rocks, furniture, and utensils are things in themselves, they are not conscious: they are objects. These are contrasted with things that are for themselves, pour soi: conscious human subjects. 

Those of you reading this who have studied the History of philosophy, or at least a diverse sample of previous thinkers will see this distinction between the world of nature, the world of senses, the world of objects, and the world of subjects, as a revival of the old metaphysical distinction between things that have souls and things that don't. Notice that in a world purely made up of physical things, there will be no freedom. It is the fact that we are conscious beings that leads Sartre to insist that we are free.  Now if we keep in mind that Sartre is using the phenomenological method inherited from Heidegger and Husserl, his argument makes sense.  His method is to describe the human experience and brackets any reductionistic or metaphysical assumptions we may have.  Since we all experience being conscious and making choices, then his argument for human choice and freedom is coherent, at least within this framework. 

I would also add that from a pragmatic point of view, we all experience the world as if we were making choices. If we ever develop our physical science to the point where we believe or we are willing to make the argument that we don't really make any choices, that we don't have any freedom, Sartre says that that science is really a way of escaping the burden of making agonising choices that have no fundamental ground. Sartre says, like iIt or not, we are free, this is an inescapable fact of our existence and is part of the human condition. For Sartre this is what it means to be a subject as opposed to an object. 

 

The Great Divide

The distinction between subjects and objects is a driving element within Sartre’s philosophical enquiries and ultimately his ontology. He behoves us to ask, ‘What's it like to be a subject in the 20th century?’ It is through this questioning lens by which he splits the world we experience into subjects and objects; into minds and things.  This splitting of the world is reminiscent of Kant’s concern with moral freedom which was further refined into an overarching concern that the human being, the psyche: our subjective experiences are being completely subsumed under the rubric of Newtonian mechanics. So there is an echoing of Heideggers’s shunning of logical positivism.

Kant addressed this concern by dividing the world into physics and metaphysics: phenomena and noumena.   Sartre, however, dispenses with the metaphysics altogether, and his phenomenological method in some sense dictates this; yet, some may hold this as a dubious and bold venture at best. This is especially dubious considering that Sartre's own intellectual move of splitting the world into subjects and objects at the very least implies a metaphysical direction; however, we should note that metaphysics has gone out of fashion.  

It’s become sort of an intellectual faux pas to discuss these topics within a metaphysical framework during both Sartre’s time and even today in 2024, so instead he tries to reformulate these questions in ways that will make sense to the contemporary world. While Kant had to reconcile moral theory with Newtonian mechanics, Sartre wants to reconcile his moral theory; he has his own moral theory of authenticity, a heroic response to the meaninglessness, the unpleasantness and horrific uncertainties that have characterised the 20th century.

 

Freedom And Bad Faith

So what does Sartre do in the face of this conundrum? How can he find a way to morality and agency in the mechanistic and sociopathic reality of the post WWII 20th century?  Well we works in a manner similar to Kan’t in that he makes certain assumptions, yet unlike Kant he takes one of these assumptions and stands it on it’s head.  Instead of assuming the way Kant does that God exists, Sartre assumes that God doesn't exist, and his argument will be something along these lines. 

People invent religious myths and religious illusions in order to relieve themselves of the burden of making decisions that have no ground.  If you can latch on to something that is apparently certain, such as a set or religious rules or even a political viewpoint, you can avoid the necessity of seeing the arbitrary uncertainty and the responsibility of making groundless decisions.  The religious or political creed that you subscribe too masks these issues, and allows you to avoid the responsibility and the freedom that is really at the bottom of all of our actions. So for Sartre, the reason why people invented religious systems and why they still gravitate towards them is that they are too inauthentic, and they are too timid to face this uncertainty and groundlessness that is characteristic of our freedom.  They need to externalise this freedom and responsibility into an outside authority figure which they can follow, but even in this they are exercising their freedom, but they are doing so in bad faith. Ultimately such individuals for Sartre are unwilling to grasp the fact that these religious beliefs and their rules are just made up to alleviate our anxiety. 

 

Overcoming Bad Faith

As soon as you realise this is what religious and cultural conventions are made up to do, they no longer alleviate your anxiety and Sartre transforms this into a virtue. The agonising qualities, the fact that there's no way out, that there's no exit, that there's no way to avoid our freedom, is what Sartre is forcing us to consider. Not only does he leave out the idea of God, but he also says that there are other ways of shielding ourselves from the burden of freedom and the anxiety and uncertainty that accompany it. Yet, Sartre maintains that in order to be honest and authentic, in order to be at least what human beings could be, we have to confront our freedom and the uncertainties that it entails, we need to confront the fact the world is absurd, there is no fundamental reason or justification for anything: the world simply is, and we make choices every moment.  We take a gamble with each choice as we are essentially making up the rules as we go along, and this is too much to take in for most people.

Now, let’s look at how Sartre regards psychoanalysis: he says that psychoanalysis serves largely the same function that religious belief does. It allows us to attribute our behaviour and our feelings and your connection to the world in a deterministic way that hauls back to your childhood and early experiences.  This whole process facilitates the evasion of responsibility for the choices that we have made. In this regard, Sartre says that psychoanalysis is in fact an example of bad faith, there is no subconscious rather there is our bad faith and the fracturing of our self that results from this. It's you deceiving yourself so that you can give yourself a respite from the difficulties of freedom and responsibility of being a human being. 

Sartre thinks that Freud, in that respect, has been one of the chief contributors to our undeception because the psychoanalytic methods of Freud give us the opportunity to confront the fact that there are no rules, that there is no structure to the world, and that your behaviour is not determined by our childhood experiences, your mothers weaning practices etc, It's determined by you. It's determined by the world and your confrontation with the world. Responsibility rests with you, and it can never go away from you except at the cost of being less than what you could be.  While Sartre disagreed with Fread’s theory of mind, principally the unconscious, he did recognize the value of the psychoanalytic process in so far as the individual can take conscious control of his or her life, which for Sartre is a process of owning one’s freedom.