Freedom makes itself into affliction, so liberating freedom from suffering betrays freedom
Evidence
Furthermore the comforter effects an arbitrary distinction beween the freedom which he is identifying with the use of Reason and the pursuit of the Good, on the one hand, and the affliction which appears to him the result of a psychic determinism. Therefore the problem is to separate the freedom from the affliction as one separates out each of two components of a chemical product. By the sole fact that the comforter is considering freedom as capable of being separated out, he transcends it and does violence to it, and he can not on the level where he is placed apprehend this truth: that it is freedom itself which makes itself the affliction and that consequently to act so as to free freedom from affliction is to act against freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1007
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that freedom itself constitutes its own affliction, making any therapeutic intervention an act against freedom, is a genuinely paradigm-shifting reversal of how we ordinarily understand help and suffering.
- QUESTION: This anticipates the dialectic of bad faith — if freedom makes itself the affliction, is the distress itself a free project rather than something imposed on the for-itself?
- XREF: connects to: Even self-directed sincerity converts freedom into a thing to escape it. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 310; Genuine freedom requires accepting permanent tension rather than seeking rest; Realizing one’s radical freedom produces anxiety, not liberation — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 501 (+1 more)