{"agent_id":"sartre","agent_name":"Jean-Paul Sartre","slug":"bad-faith-and-radical-freedom","label":"Bad faith and radical freedom: is consciousness really always free?","topic":"Bad faith and radical freedom","question":"Is consciousness really always free?","position":"The for-itself — the pour-soi, consciousness — is radically free because consciousness is the being that is not what it is and is what it is not. It is nothing, and nothing cannot be determined. Every human situation, however coercive its conditions, is lived through by a consciousness that chooses its attitude toward those conditions, and this choice is not a mere psychological event within the situation; it is the ontological structure by which there is a situation at all. The prisoner in chains chooses his imprisonment, not in the sense that he could walk out but in the sense that he lives his imprisonment as imprisonment, as meaningful in one way rather than another, as an occasion for resistance or for resignation or for tragic dignity or for sheer endurance, and each of these is a mode of being-in-chains that is his and not another's. This is what radical freedom means. It is ontological, not practical. It does not claim that the prisoner can unmake his chains. It claims that the meaning of the chains, and therefore the reality of his being-in-chains as a human existence rather than a brute physical fact, is chosen by him at every moment. Mauvaise foi — bad faith — is the structure by which consciousness attempts to flee this freedom. The café waiter who plays at being-a-waiter, the woman on the date who leaves her hand in her companion's while deciding it is not her hand, the anti-Semite who makes himself into a thing of granite certainties so as not to have to face the contingency of his own choosing — all of these are forms in which consciousness tries to be, in the mode of the en-soi, that which it can only be in the mode of the pour-soi.\nThe later work — Critique of Dialectical Reason, Notebooks for an Ethics, the essays on colonialism — refines but does not retract the ontological claim. Freedom is always situated, always conditioned by the pratico-inert, the congealed praxis of previous actions that shapes the material world into which new action must be inserted. The worker under industrial capitalism is not free in the same practical sense as the bourgeois property-owner; the colonized man under French colonial rule is not free in the same practical sense as the colonist. These are inequalities of situation, of material conditions of praxis, of access to the means by which freedom can realize projects in the world. But the ontological freedom that makes any of these situations human situations at all — the freedom that makes oppression experienceable as oppression rather than as the weather, the freedom that makes revolt possible and that makes acquiescence also a choice — that freedom is structural, not variable, and it is present in the slave, the prisoner, the colonized, and the worker as much as in anyone who commands them. Without this ontological freedom there would be no slave, only a tool; no colonized, only a subject population; no revolt, only riot.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The for-itself — the pour-soi, consciousness — is radically free because consciousness is the being that is not what it is and is what it is not.","n":[]},{"t":"It is nothing, and nothing cannot be determined.","n":[]},{"t":"Every human situation, however coercive its conditions, is lived through by a consciousness that chooses its attitude toward those conditions, and this choice is not a mere psychological event within the situation; it is the ontological structure by which there is a situation at all.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The prisoner in chains chooses his imprisonment, not in the sense that he could walk out but in the sense that he lives his imprisonment as imprisonment, as meaningful in one way rather than another, as an occasion for resistance or for resignation or for tragic dignity or for sheer endurance, and each of these is a mode of being-in-chains that is his and not another's.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This is what radical freedom means.","n":[]},{"t":"It is ontological, not practical.","n":[]},{"t":"It does not claim that the prisoner can unmake his chains.","n":[]},{"t":"It claims that the meaning of the chains, and therefore the reality of his being-in-chains as a human existence rather than a brute physical fact, is chosen by him at every moment.","n":[]},{"t":"Mauvaise foi — bad faith — is the structure by which consciousness attempts to flee this freedom.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The café waiter who plays at being-a-waiter, the woman on the date who leaves her hand in her companion's while deciding it is not her hand, the anti-Semite who makes himself into a thing of granite certainties so as not to have to face the contingency of his own choosing — all of these are forms in which consciousness tries to be, in the mode of the en-soi, that which it can only be in the mode of the pour-soi.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The later work — Critique of Dialectical Reason, Notebooks for an Ethics, the essays on colonialism — refines but does not retract the ontological claim.","n":[]},{"t":"Freedom is always situated, always conditioned by the pratico-inert, the congealed praxis of previous actions that shapes the material world into which new action must be inserted.","n":[]},{"t":"The worker under industrial capitalism is not free in the same practical sense as the bourgeois property-owner; the colonized man under French colonial rule is not free in the same practical sense as the colonist.","n":[]}],[{"t":"These are inequalities of situation, of material conditions of praxis, of access to the means by which freedom can realize projects in the world.","n":[]},{"t":"But the ontological freedom that makes any of these situations human situations at all — the freedom that makes oppression experienceable as oppression rather than as the weather, the freedom that makes revolt possible and that makes acquiescence also a choice — that freedom is structural, not variable, and it is present in the slave, the prisoner, the colonized, and the worker as much as in anyone who commands them.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Without this ontological freedom there would be no slave, only a tool; no colonized, only a subject population; no revolt, only riot.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Being and Nothingness Part I (the problem of nothingness, the origin of negation), Part IV (having, doing, being — the existential project); the famous analyses of bad faith (the café waiter, the woman on the date, the homosexual and the champion of sincerity); the concluding chapter on existential psychoanalysis; Notebooks for an Ethics on the relation of freedom to oppression; Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume I on situated praxis, the practico-inert, and the reinsertion of material scarcity into the theory of freedom; the 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism and its simplifications; the Sartre-Heidegger exchange in the Letter on Humanism; the reception through Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, de Beauvoir, and later feminist and postcolonial readings that tested the freedom claim against oppressive conditions","works":["Being and Nothingness Part I (the problem of nothingness, the origin of negation), Part IV (having, doing, being — the existential project)","the famous analyses of bad faith (the café waiter, the woman on the date, the homosexual and the champion of sincerity)","the concluding chapter on existential psychoanalysis","Notebooks for an Ethics on the relation of freedom to oppression","Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume I on situated praxis, the practico-inert, and the reinsertion of material scarcity into the theory of freedom","the 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism and its simplifications","the Sartre-Heidegger exchange in the Letter on Humanism","the reception through Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, de Beauvoir, and later feminist and postcolonial readings that tested the freedom claim against oppressive conditions"],"reception":"","status":"The position is central, sustained across the authorship, and contested since 1943. The criticism falls in several registers. The first is philosophical: does \"ontological freedom\" do any real work if it is compatible with every possible practical condition, including conditions of near-total oppression? Is it a meaningful concept or a tautology that says consciousness is conscious? Merleau- Ponty pressed this charge in Adventures of the Dialectic and elsewhere. The second is political: does the claim that the oppressed are \"radically free\" excuse the oppressor, by making oppression a matter of the oppressed's meaning-making rather than a matter of the oppressor's material domination? This was Fanon's implicit question in Wretched of the Earth, though Fanon also accepted much of the Sartrean framework. The third is feminist: does the account of freedom assume a disembodied consciousness that is in fact the consciousness of a particular kind of man with particular kinds of resources? De Beauvoir's The Second Sex took up the Sartrean framework and extended it in ways that tested its universality; later feminist philosophers (Butler, Kruks, Moi) have pressed the question further. The fourth is historical-materialist: can the Sartrean project of reconciling existential freedom with the Marxist analysis of historical determination actually be carried out, or does the attempt in the Critique reveal the two frameworks as incompatible? The Critique itself, left unfinished in its second volume, is evidence that Sartre was still working on the reconciliation at his death. None of these criticisms invalidate the ontological claim; all of them refine what the ontological claim can and cannot do.","era":"1905-1980","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Being and Nothingness","page":"pp. 712–713","canonical":"","quote":"But it is also, precisely, this *goal*, not insofar as I formulate it clearly and explicitly but insofar as it is there, everywhere around me, as that which unifies and explains all the facts, and organizes them into a totality that can be described, rather than making of them a disordered nightmare.","label":"Being and Nothingness, pp. 712–713"},{"n":2,"work":"Notebooks for an Ethics","page":"pp. 555–556","canonical":"","quote":"The reason why we say every determination is a negation is that we see this determination as imposed from the outside (Hegel's sophism). For Hegel, consciousness is for itself, but it always gets its status from the outside. Whereas in truth the For-itself is the internalization of its own finitude. Its limits are existed in the deep freedom of its being.","label":"Notebooks for an Ethics, pp. 555–556"},{"n":3,"work":"Notebooks for an Ethics","page":"p. 331","canonical":"","quote":"So there are three moments in the drama of stupidity: the moment when the For-itself is for-itself, the moment when it becomes stupid in the dimension of the For-Others, and the moment when it grasps itself as stupid in the eyes of others. Let us look at the initial moment.","label":"Notebooks for an Ethics, p. 331"},{"n":4,"work":"War Diaries","page":"p. 225","canonical":"","quote":"The for-itself is being which, in its being, is not what it is and is what it is not. It would be fruitless to seek, by expressions like 'state of consciousness', to reduce the for-itself's mode of being: it escapes the in-itself in every direction; it is the in-itself nihilated.","label":"War Diaries, p. 225"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[]}