The inward freedom to create meaning remains the ultimate sanctuary.

Evidence

No matter how much is taken from me, this inward freedom to create meaning remains my ultimate sanctuary. Jean-Paul Sartre writes that “freedom is nothing but the existence of our will,” and he elaborates: “Actually it is not enough to will; it is necessary to will to will.” This rising up of the will to will is the inner act that secures us as autonomous beings who project choice into the world and exercise the qualities of self-determining moral judgment that are civilization’s necessary and final bulwark. This is the sense behind another of Sartre’s insights: “Without bearings, stirred by a nameless anguish, the words labor.… The voice is born of a risk: either to lose oneself or win the right to speak in the first person.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 905

Categorization

• DEFINE: Grounds ‘will to will’ and the first-person voice as the basis of autonomous moral judgment.
• XREF: connects to: Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1075; Divine self-presence is opened up by an internal distance rather than merely broken — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 858

Broader Connections

• Divine self-presence is opened up by an internal distance rather than merely broken #expands (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 858
• Freedom is the for-itself’s permanent ability to nihilate its own being #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1075