Sartre’s freedom is structurally immune to genuine removal by the Other.
Evidence
Yet the Other can never truly threaten my freedom because my freedom is not something either I or the Other choose to have in the fi rst place, so it can’t be taken away by the Other nor can I relinquish it of my own accord. Just like the project of bad faith, then, the threat that the Other poses to my freedom can never be fully enacted. Just as I am incapable of successfully lying to myself, on Sartre’s account, so too am I incapable of having my freedom taken away from me by the Other. Ultimately, for Sartre, the important issue is not whether the Other can actually take my freedom from me but rather a matter of recognizing that the freedom of the Other generates a profound existential insecurity regarding my totalizing grasp on the world of my concern. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 641
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies Sartre’s ontological rather than empirical sense of freedom and the structural parallel to bad faith.
- XREF: Contrasts with Beauvoir’s insistence in The Ethics of Ambiguity that oppression can genuinely reduce freedom; the reader is tracking exactly this divergence. — connects to: Sartre grounds all value in an unjustified, self-legitimizing freedom — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 185; The inseparability of freedom and power undercuts Sartre’s claim that slaves are free — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 501; Sartre holds that even capitulating to the Other expresses free subjectivity. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 642 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Sartre holds that even capitulating to the Other expresses free subjectivity.
#expands(0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 642 - The Other’s freedom becomes a limit only through one’s own free choice.
#expands(0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1240