For Sartre freedom is defined as responsibility, not power or absence of obstacles.

Evidence

The first problem is related to the classic opposition of freedom and necessity; and since ideas are best located and defined with respect to their opposites, it is worth recalling that the opposite of freedom, in Being and Nothingness, was neither necessity nor constraint, but rather determinism. Freedom is therefore positively defined neither as supreme power nor as the absence of obstacles, but rather as responsibility; the paradoxical element of Sartre’s notion of freedom is of course precisely the manner in which we are responsible for everything that happens to us (even through necessity or constraint), in that we are not free not to react to the fate in question. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 565

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrarian definition of freedom as responsibility-by-necessity — we are not free not to react to fate.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Frankfurt-School lineage: this freedom-as-responsibility has echoes in Lukács’s and Adorno’s treatment of reified agency and complicity. — connects to: Freedom is the nihilation of a being it is, not something added later. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1159; Sartre’s freedom is not an attribute but the very existence of consciousness. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 410; Sartre’s situation concept holds that circumstances matter but never abolish freedom of choice — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 36

Broader Connections

• Freedom is the nihilation of a being it is, not something added later. #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1159
• Sartre’s freedom is not an attribute but the very existence of consciousness. #expands (0.78) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 410