Freedom is the small capacity to not fully reproduce one’s conditioning.
Evidence
I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made of him. Th is is the limit I would today accord to freedom: the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 635
Categorization
- DEFINE: Sartre’s later, refined definition of freedom as the minimal movement of not rendering back precisely what conditioning gave — a bounded, realistic revision of his earlier absolute freedom.
- SEED: Angle: the aging Sartre retreating from absolute freedom to a ‘small movement’ — as a theory of what maturity does to philosophical positions.
- XREF: Connects to the Foucault-Habermas debate on the constrained subject, and to the ‘critical theory’ conception of freedom as limited by socialization. — connects to: Freedom’s real question is the price of acting otherwise, not whether one could — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1101; Freedom means autonomy of choice, not success in obtaining one’s ends. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1154; Empirical freedom is a negative concept defined by absence of constraint within a situation. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1158 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Freedom can break the circle of imposed inferiority
#expands(0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1979 - Freedom is the capacity to begin, which logic cannot compel.
#expands(0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1072