The situation fuses freedom’s projects with brute contingency indistinguishably

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘situation’ as the ambiguity of freedom and the brute in-itself, using the scalable crag as the master example.
• XREF: The scalable crag example is the canonical target Beauvoir and secondary Sartre commentary return to; core backdrop for the freedom/facticity distinction in Beauvoir’s ethics. — connects to: The brute facticity underlying freedom is ungraspable yet indispensable to it.; Freedom from contingency requires a deliberate common project of becoming. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2019; The term ‘project’ links freedom and contingency in historical determination. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 104 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The term ‘project’ links freedom and contingency in historical determination. #expands (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 104
• Obstacles are indispensable to freedom yet seem to condition it ontologically. #expands (0.80)
• Freedom is not self-founded but thrown, creating its own facticity #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1156
• Freedom from contingency requires a deliberate common project of becoming. #expands (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 2019
• The facticity of place only becomes an obstacle through freedom’s original project #expands (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1175
• Freedom requires temporal continuity, not isolated instants of choice. #expands (0.70) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 24