Freedom that withdraws into self-interest denies its own nature
Evidence
For a freedom wills itself genuinely only by willing itself as an indefinite movement through the freedom of others; as soon as it withdraws into itself, it denies itself on behalf of some object which it prefers to itself: we know well enough what sort of freedom the P. R. L. demands: it is property, the feeling of possession, capital, comfort, moral security. We have to respect freedom only when it is intended for freedom, not when it strays, flees itself, and resigns itself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 91
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Distinguishes genuine freedom (willing itself as movement through others’ freedom) from freedom that resigns itself into property, comfort, and security.
Related
- Willing one’s freedom and willing that being exist are one choice (similarity 0.88)
- Freedom exists only by being conquered from original spontaneous existence (similarity 0.87)
- Freedom’s only limit is itself; we cannot choose not to be free (similarity 0.85)
- Willing freedom and willing moral selfhood are one and the same (similarity 0.84)
- Freedom aims to disclose being, not to capture or fix it. (similarity 0.84)
- Others’ freedom is the condition of, not a limit on, my own freedom (similarity 0.84)
- Freedom has concrete content only when engaged in the world (similarity 0.84)
- Freedom constitutes my being rather than attaching to it as a property (similarity 0.84)
- Freedom is the being that makes itself a lack of being through desire (similarity 0.83)
- Individual freedom is achieved only through the freedom of others (similarity 0.83)
- Freedom acts through self-influence over one’s own inner life, not just absence of constraints (similarity 0.82)
- Denying that one freely chooses ends makes one enslaved to those ends (similarity 0.82)
- Freedom means choosing oneself within one’s world, not choosing the world itself. (similarity 0.81)
- Moral judgments require presupposing human freedom in oneself and others. (similarity 0.81)
- Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being (similarity 0.81)