A more profound freedom than will underlies all volitional acts

Evidence

In our attempt to reach to the heart of freedom we may be helped by the few observations which we have made on the subject in the course of this work and which we must summarize here. In the first chapter we established the fact that if negation comes into the world through human-reality, the latter must be a being who can realize a nihilating rupture with the world and with himself; and we established that the permanent possibility of this rupture is the same as freedom. But on the other hand, we stated that this permanent possibility of nihilating what I am in the form of “having-been” implies for man a particular type of existence. We were able then to determine by means of analyses like that of bad faith that human reality is its own nothingness. For the for-itself, to be is to nihilate the in-itself which it is. Under these conditions freedom can be nothing other than this nihilation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1075 (#expands, via linked claim)

This is what Hegel caught sight of when he wrote that “the mind is the negative,” although he seems not to have remembered this when he came to presenting his own theory of action and of freedom. In fact as soon as one attributes to consciousness this negative power with respect to the world and itself, as soon as the nihilation forms an integral part of the positing of an end, we must recognize that the indispensable and fundamental condition of all action is the freedom of the acting being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1069 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Freedom is the foundational condition of all action — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1069; Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1075; Freedom of will is the necessary foundation for civilization — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1041 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1075
• Freedom is the foundational condition of all action #complicates (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1069