The brute facticity underlying freedom is ungraspable yet indispensable to it.

Evidence

Totalitarian rulers rely on the compulsion with which we can compel ourselves, for the limited mobilization of people which even they still need; this inner compulsion is the tyranny of logicality against which nothing stands but the great capacity of men to start something new. The tyranny of logicality begins with the mind’s submission to logic as a never-ending process, on which man relies in order to engender his thoughts. By this submission, he surrenders his inner freedom as he surrenders his freedom of movement when he bows down to an outward tyranny. Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men. Over the beginning, no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power, because its chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, the beginning. As terror is needed lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-coercive force of logicality is mobilized lest anybody ever start thinking—which as the freest and purest of all human activities is the very opposite of the compulsory process of deduction. Totalitarian government can be safe only to the extent that it can mobilize man’s own will power in order to force him into that gigantic movement of History or Nature which supposedly uses mankind as its material and knows neither birth nor death. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1072 (#expands, via linked claim)

These observations should show us that the situation, the common product of the contingency of the in-itself and of freedom, is an ambiguous phenomenon in which it is impossible for the for-itself to distinguish the contribution of freedom from that of the brute existent. In fact, just as freedom is the escape from a contingency which it has to be in order to escape it, so the situation is the free coordination and the free qualification of a brute given which does not allow itself to be qualified in any way at all. Here I am at the foot of this crag which appears to me as “not scalable.” This means that the rock appears to me in the light of a projected scaling—a secondary project which finds its meaning in terms of an initial project which is my being-in-the-world. Thus the rock is carved out on the ground of the world by the effect of the initial choice of my freedom. But on the other hand, what my freedom can not determine is whether the rock “to be scaled” will or will not lend itself to scaling. This is part of the brute being of the rock. Nevertheless the rock can show its resistance to the scaling only if the rock is integrated by freedom in a “situation” of which the general theme is scaling. For the simple traveler who passes over this road and whose free project is a pure aesthetic ordering of the landscape, the crag is not revealed either as scalable or as not-scalable; it is manifested only as beautiful or ugly. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1162 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Facticity makes the for-itself both wholly responsible and wholly unjustifiable. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 837; Freedom is the capacity to begin, which logic cannot compel. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1072; Obstacles are indispensable to freedom yet seem to condition it ontologically. (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Obstacles are indispensable to freedom yet seem to condition it ontologically. #complicates (0.85)
• Freedom is the capacity to begin, which logic cannot compel. #expands (0.82) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1072
• Freedom requires a resisting, brute world rather than being limited by it #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1153
• The situation fuses freedom’s projects with brute contingency indistinguishably #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1162
• Freedom is a factual necessity, not an essence we can know #corroborates (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1074
• Freedom is not self-founded but thrown, creating its own facticity #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1156
• Freedom cannot choose its own past but must exist through it. #corroborates (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1177
• Objective possibility constitutes freedom but requires knowing and wanting #qualifies (0.72) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1285