Freedom means choosing oneself within one’s world, not choosing the world itself.

Evidence

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Freedom is the escape from an engagement in being; it is the nihilation of a being which it is. This does not mean that human-reality exists first, to be free subsequently. “Subsequently” and “first” are terms created by freedom itself. … We said that freedom is not free not to be free and that it is not free not to exist. This is because the fact of not being able not to be free is the facticity of freedom, and the fact of not being able not to exist is its contingency. Contingency and facticity are really one; there is a being which freedom has to be in the form of non-being (that is, of nihilation). To exist as the fact of freedom or to have to be a being in the midst of the world are one and the same thing, and this means that freedom is originally a relation to the given. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1159 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

But since desire, as we have established, is identical with lack of being, freedom can arise only as being which makes itself a desire of being; that is, as the project-for-itself of being in-itself-for-itself. Here we have arrived at an abstract structure which can by no means be considered as the nature or essence of freedom. Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence. The upsurge of freedom is immediate and concrete and is not to be distinguished from its choice; that is, from the person himself. But the structure under consideration can be called the truth of freedom; that is, it is the human meaning of freedom. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1331 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Freedom precedes essence and is indistinguishable from being human — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 226; Finitude is the condition of freedom, since freedom requires choice. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 871; Freedom requires choosing one’s own essence, not merely one’s acts — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1126 (+16 more)

Broader Connections

• Freedom is synonymous with the for-itself’s lack of being #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1328
• Freedom is the nihilation of a being it is, not something added later. #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1159
• Freedom is the being that makes itself a lack of being through desire #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1331