Willing one’s own freedom and willing others’ freedom are the same act

Evidence

Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours: one of the shocking things about charity — in the civic sense of the word — is that it is practised from the outside, according to the caprice of the one who distributes it and who is detached from the object. But the cause of freedom is not that of others more than it is mine: it is universally human. If I want the slave to become conscious of his servitude, it is both in order not to be a tyrant myself — for any abstention is complicity, and complicity in this case is tyranny — and in order that new possibilities might be opened to the liberated slave and through him to all men. To want existence, to want to disclose the world, and to want men to be free are one and the same will. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 88

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the keystone assertion the reader is tracking: that freedom is a universal, not personal, will. Worth sitting with the question of whether it is derived or merely asserted.
• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose: distinguishing the genuinely free person from the serious man — liberation is the free person’s own project, not charity. — connects to: Individual salvation attempts mystify freedom while only social action authenticates it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1916; Others constitute the situation that gives individual freedom its concrete content — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 453; Freedom is a social status conferring security and standing among others — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 30 (+1 more)