Freedom is the original upsurge that posits one’s ultimate ends.

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The project of being or desire of being or drive toward being does not originate in a physiological differentiation or in an empirical contingency; in fact it is not distinguished from the being of the for-itself. The for-itself is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in the form of a project of being. To the for-itself being means to make known to oneself what one is by means of a possibility appearing as a value. Possibility and value belong to the being of the for-itself. The for-itself is defined ontologically as a lack of being, and possibility belongs to the for-itself as that which it lacks, in the same way that value haunts the for-itself as the totality of being which is lacking. What we have expressed in Part Two in terms of lack can be just as well expressed in terms of freedom. The for-itself chooses because it is lack; freedom is really synonymous with lack. Freedom is the concrete mode of being of the lack of being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1328 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1075; Freedom is synonymous with the for-itself’s lack of being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1328; Freedom is meaningful only as engaged by free choice of ends (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being #corroborates (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1075
• Freedom is meaningful only as engaged by free choice of ends #corroborates (0.85)
• Freedom is synonymous with the for-itself’s lack of being #corroborates (0.82) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1328
• The obstacles that limit freedom are constituted only by freedom’s own posited ends #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1152
• The upsurge of freedom and the revelation of the given are simultaneous and inseparable #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1203
• Freedom is the nihilation of a being it is, not something added later. #corroborates (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1159
• Freedom exists only by being conquered from original spontaneous existence #qualifies (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 22