Man is condemned to be free because he creates neither himself nor his values.
Evidence
Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 13
Categorization
- DEFINE: The precise sense of the famous ‘condemned to be free’ formula — the twin absence of self-creation and external values.
- XREF: connects to: A single free person cannot generate genuinely moral values. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 218; The serious man submits his freedom to supposedly unconditioned absolute ends — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 43; Nothing justifies the values a free being adopts since freedom grounds all values — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 250
Related
- A single free person cannot generate genuinely moral values. (similarity 0.89)
- Sartre grounds all value in an unjustified, self-legitimizing freedom (similarity 0.83)
- Nothing justifies the values a free being adopts since freedom grounds all values (similarity 0.83)
- For Beauvoir, freedom, value-creation, and denying Being are one and the same act (similarity 0.83)
- The ineffectiveness of motives itself constitutes the condition of freedom. (similarity 0.82)
- Freedom precedes essence and is indistinguishable from being human (similarity 0.81)
- Values are invented by people since there is no a priori meaning (similarity 0.80)
- Freedom requires choosing one’s own essence, not merely one’s acts (similarity 0.80)
- Humans lack any predefined nature and create themselves through choices (similarity 0.80)
- Freedom is the human capacity to put beings out of circuit behind a nothingness (similarity 0.80)
- The serious man submits his freedom to supposedly unconditioned absolute ends (similarity 0.80)
- Freedom has no essence and therefore cannot be described like other things (similarity 0.79)
- Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being (similarity 0.79)
- Freedom constitutes my being rather than attaching to it as a property (similarity 0.79)
- Freedom is the being that makes itself a lack of being through desire (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Nothing justifies the values a free being adopts since freedom grounds all values
#expands(0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 250 - A single free person cannot generate genuinely moral values.
#corroborates(0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 218 - The serious man submits his freedom to supposedly unconditioned absolute ends
#exemplifies(0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 43