Maurice Merleau-Ponty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Freedom is never the absolute negativity of a for-itself that stands outside its situation and chooses its meanings ex nihilo. Freedom is always situated — conditioned by the body's grip, by the sedimented history of the perceiving subject, by the perceptual field that is already organized when the subject arrives at any decision. Sartre's radical freedom in Being and Nothingness, careful as the argument is, operates within a residual Cartesianism: the for-itself's absolute nihilating power is the cogito raised to ontological status, preserved from the perceptual conditioning that any honest phenomenology of the embodied subject discovers.1
PoP Part III Ch 3 makes the case directly. Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) extends it to the political plane: Sartre's ultra-bolshevism of the 1952 Communists and Peace essays liquidates the dialectic by treating class struggle as a one-way determination, just as the for-itself's radical freedom liquidates the perceptual conditions of any situated agency.234
For us, consciousness only attributes this power to itself if it passes over in silence the event that establishes its infrastructure and that is its birth. A consciousness for which the world is "self-evident," that finds the world "already constituted" and present even within consciousness itself, absolutely chooses neither its being nor its manner of being. [m. Conditioned freedom.] What then is freedom?Phenomenology of Perception, p. 480
Precisely because it agrees to commit itself to more than what it knows of a party and of history, it allows more to be learned, and its motto could be Clarum per obscurius. Choosing according to principles or incontestable details, but without ever seeing where his reticent action leads him, Sartre on the contrary practices Obscurius per clarum. Behind these two commitments there are two meanings of freedom.Adventures of the Dialectic, pp. 221–223
At least it was—to speak as Sartre does, but without smiling—the Marxist "something or other." 68. The Marxists had a word (which is no longer used except Titually) for designating the line which takes into account the objective situation as well as the spontaneous reactions.Adventures of the Dialectic, p. 157
If freedom is to have a field to work with, if it must be able to assert itself as freedom, then something must separate freedom from its ends, freedom must have a field; that is, it must have some privileged possibilities or realities that tend to be preserved in being. As J.-P.Phenomenology of Perception, p. 463
settled-as-articulated