Freedom is the human capacity to put beings out of circuit behind a nothingness
Evidence
Being can generate only being and if man is inclosed in this process of generation, only being will come out of him. If we are to assume that man is able to question this process—i.e., to make it the object of interrogation—he must be able to hold it up to view as a totality. He must be able to put himself outside of being and by the same stroke weaken the structure of the being of being. Yet it is not given to “human reality” to annihilate even provisionally the mass of being which it posits before itself. Man’s relation with being is that he can modify it. For man to put a particular existent out of circuit is to put himself out of circuit in relation to that existent. In this case he is not subject to it; he is out of reach; it can not act on him, for he has retired beyond a nothingness. Descartes following the Stoics has given a name to this possibility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it—it is freedom. But freedom here is only a name. If we wish to penetrate further into the question, we must not be content with this reply and we ought to ask now, What is human freedom if through it nothingness comes into the world? — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 225
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines freedom negatively as the human capacity to secrete a nothingness isolating oneself from beings, which Descartes named drawing on the Stoics.
- XREF: Sets up the Beauvoir backdrop — her ethics of ambiguity turns on this freedom-before-essence structure. — connects to: Freedom is the being that makes itself a lack of being through desire — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1331; Freedom is synonymous with the for-itself’s lack of being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1328; Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1075 (+7 more)
- QUESTION: The question ‘What is human freedom if through it nothingness comes into the world?’ is the pivot the whole book answers downstream — worth tracking how Sartre resolves it.
Broader Connections
- Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being
#corroborates(0.88) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1075 - Freedom is the being that makes itself a lack of being through desire
#corroborates(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1331 - Freedom is synonymous with the for-itself’s lack of being
#corroborates(0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1328 - The given never conditions freedom because freedom is its internal negation
#expands(0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1160 - Empirical freedom is a secondary nihilation that presupposes an original nothingness
#expands(0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 262 - Freedom operates through, not against, the psychological structure that constitutes us
#contradicts(0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 724