Freedom has no essence and therefore cannot be described like other things
Evidence
But at the start we encounter a great difficulty. Ordinarily, to describe something is a process of making explicit by aiming at the structures of a particular essence. Now freedom has no essence. It is not subject to any logical necessity; we must say of it what Heidegger said of the Dasein in general: “In it existence precedes and commands essence.” Freedom makes itself an act, and we ordinarily attain it across the act which it organizes with the causes, motives, and ends which the act implies. But precisely because this act has an essence, it appears to us as constituted; if we wish to reach the constitutive power, we must abandon any hope of finding it an essence. That would in fact demand a new constitutive power and so on to infinity. How then are we to describe an existence which perpetually makes itself and which refuses to be confined in a definition? — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1073
Categorization
- DEFINE: Key definitional move: freedom is indefinable precisely because existence precedes essence — the anti-essentialist foundation of Sartre’s freedom.
- XREF: Heidegger’s Dasein doctrine is invoked directly; this is the bridge for a reader doing systematic continental background. — connects to: Freedom precedes essence and is indistinguishable from being human — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 226; Nothing justifies the values a free being adopts since freedom grounds all values — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 250; Freedom cannot choose itself and thus creates things and situation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1205 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Freedom is a factual necessity, not an essence we can know
#corroborates(0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1074 - Freedom cannot choose itself and thus creates things and situation.
#expands(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1205