Sartre holds freedom and facticity are ontologically distinct, so situation never limits freedom.

Evidence

While I may choose to modify my possibilities in the face of the facticity of the situation and the challenges it poses to my free projects, I might also persist in a futile course of action, my intentions thwarted by my situation— both options, for Sartre, are equally an exercise of my freedom even though the former course will be more practically effi cacious than the latter. Th e central claim he is making is that freedom cannot be limited by the facticity of one’s situation since the two are ontologically distinct experiences that human beings live simultaneously. To be free, on his account, is to experience oneself as able to transcend the givens of one’s situation even if this is only done through imagining the possibility of one’s situation being otherwise. Th is is why he believes that even the prisoner confi ned to a cell is as free as someone who has never been incarcerated. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 636

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core of Sartre’s early ontology: freedom and facticity as absolutely distinct phenomena of the for-itself, rooted respectively in nothingness and materiality.
• XREF: The ‘prisoner in a cell’ example echoes in Foucault’s carceral analyses and in the later Beauvoir critique of such a voluntarist conception. — connects to: Sartre argues existential freedom survives even imprisonment and death — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 509; Sartrean freedom requires facticity, not its absence — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 508; Freedom and facticity are mutually condition each other’s existence. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1176 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Freedom and situation are mutually constituting rather than opposites #contradicts (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1164
• Freedom and facticity are mutually condition each other’s existence. #contradicts (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1176
• Facticity and the past are identical in Sartre’s ontology #contradicts (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 433