Freedom has concrete content only when engaged in the world
Evidence
One of the chief objections leveled against existentialism is that the precept “to will freedom” is only a hollow formula and offers no concrete content for action. But that is because one has begun by emptying the word freedom of its concrete meaning; we have already seen that freedom realizes itself only by engaging itself in the world: to such an extent that man’s project toward freedom is embodied for him in definite acts of behavior. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 83
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- XREF: Directly serves the reader’s goal — this is the definitional core grounding how the free person differs from bad-faith types: freedom is embodied in definite behavior, not a hollow formula.
Related
- Freedom aims to disclose being, not to capture or fix it. (similarity 0.86)
- Freedom that withdraws into self-interest denies its own nature (similarity 0.84)
- Willing one’s freedom and willing that being exist are one choice (similarity 0.83)
- Freedom is the being that makes itself a lack of being through desire (similarity 0.83)
- Freedom constitutes my being rather than attaching to it as a property (similarity 0.83)
- Freedom exists only by being conquered from original spontaneous existence (similarity 0.83)
- Freedom is the foundational condition of all action (similarity 0.82)
- Freedom is meaningful only as engaged by free choice of ends (similarity 0.82)
- Individual freedom is grounded in meanings others have already established. (similarity 0.82)
- A more profound freedom than will underlies all volitional acts (similarity 0.82)
- Freedom precedes essence and is indistinguishable from being human (similarity 0.82)
- Freedom means choosing oneself within one’s world, not choosing the world itself. (similarity 0.81)
- Freedom exists only as engaged, self-choosing action, never as undetermined potential (similarity 0.81)
- Freedom is the nihilation of a being it is, not something added later. (similarity 0.81)
- Beauvoir holds that ethical freedom is realized through constructive worldly action (similarity 0.81)