The Gift and Curse of Freedom
In the early phase of his career, Sartre focused mainly
on his belief in the sanctity of every individual consciousness,
a consciousness that results from each person’s subjective and individual
experience of the world. He was particularly attuned to the ways
that people are objectified by the gaze of others. As Sartre became
more intimately involved in the concrete political questions of
his day, he came to focus more on the various larger social structures
that systematically objectify people and fail to recognize or affirm
their individual consciousness and innate freedom. These structures
include capitalist exploitation, colonialism, racism, and sexism.
Sartre’s focus on individual freedom shaped his view of
Marxism. Politically, Sartre was for many years closely allied to
the French Communist Party. However, he never actually joined the party,
largely because of his ever-present suspicion of authoritarian states
and institutions of all kinds, especially after the Soviet invasion
of Hungary in 1956. Sartre always harbored a healthy libertarian
or anarchist streak. He wanted the working class to collectively overthrow
the capitalist system and believed that any political struggle should
affirm and allow for the individual freedom of all human beings.
In accordance with this view, Sartre never accepted Marx’s view
that economic and social realities define consciousness. Rather,
Sartre affirmed that people are always essentially
free. No matter how objectified they may be, the gifts of freedom
and consciousness mean that they always have the possibility of
making something out of their circumstance of objectification. In
Sartre’s view, individual freedom of consciousness is humanity’s
gift—as well as its curse, since with it comes the responsibility
to shape our own lives.
The Burden of Responsibility
Sartre believed in the essential freedom of individuals,
and he also believed that as free beings, people are responsible
for all elements of themselves, their consciousness, and their actions.
That is, with total freedom comes total responsibility. He believed
that even those people who wish not to be responsible, who declare
themselves not responsible for themselves or their actions, are
still making a conscious choice and are thus responsible for anything
that happens as a consequence of their inaction. Sartre’s moral
philosophy maintains that ethics are essentially a matter of individual
conscience. Sartre reveals much about his own ethics in his writings
about oppressive societal structures and the ways in which individuals might
ideally interact with each other to affirm their respective humanities,
but he is dismissive of any version of universal ethics. He is clear
in his belief that morals are always first and foremost a matter
of subjective, individual conscience.
The Difficulty of Knowing the Self
For Sartre, for any individual to claim “that’s just the
way I am” would be a statement of self-deception. Likewise, whenever
people internalize the objectified identity granted to them by other
people or by society, such as servile woman or dutiful worker, they
are guilty of self-deception. Every individual person is a “being-for-itself”
possessed of self-consciousness, but he or she does not possess
an essential nature and has only a consciousness and a self-consciousness,
which are eternally changeable. Whenever people tell themselves
that their nature or views are unchangeable, or that their social
position entirely determines their sense of self, they are deceiving
themselves. Sartre believed it is always possible
to make something out of what one has been made into. This task
of self-actualization, however, involves a complex process of recognizing the
factual realities outside of one’s self that are acting on the self (what
Sartre calls facticity) and exactly how those realities
are working, as well as knowing fully that one possesses a consciousness
independent of those factors.
For Sartre, the only truly authentic outlook recognizes
one’s true state as a being possessed of self-consciousness whose
future conscious state of being is always a matter
of choice, even as that conscious state will itself always be in
flux. That is, even though we are ultimately responsible for our
own consciousness, consciousness of self is never quite identical
to consciousness itself. This difficult paradox—that one is responsible
for one’s own consciousness, even though that consciousness is never
quite graspable, since it is based on nothingness—goes to the heart
of Sartre’s existentialism and is crucial to his conceptions of
human freedom and moral responsibility.
En-Soi (being-in-itself) vs. Pour-Soi (being-for-itself)
Sartre defines two types, or ways, of being: en-soi,
or being-in-itself, and pour-soi, or being-for-itself.
He uses the first of these, en-soi, to describe
things that have a definable and complete essence yet are not conscious
of themselves or their essential completeness. Trees, rocks, and
birds, for example, fall into this category. Sartre uses pour-soi to
describe human beings, who are defined by their possession of consciousness
and, more specifically, by their consciousness of their own existence—and,
as Sartre writes, by their consciousness of lacking the complete,
definable essence of the en-soi. This state of being-for-itself
is not just defined by self-consciousness—it would not exist without
that consciousness. In Sartre’s philosophical system, the interplay
and difference between these two manners of being is a constant
and indispensable point of discussion.
The Importance and Danger of the Other
Following Hegel, Sartre writes that an individual person,
or being-for-itself, can become cognizant of his own existence only
when he sees himself being perceived by another being-for-itself.
That is, we can formulate a conscious state of being and an identity
only when we are confronted by others who are also possessed of
that consciousness and we apprehend ourselves in relation to them.
As Sartre explains, however, the encounter with the Other is tricky,
at least initially, because we may first believe that in being perceived
by another conscious being we are being objectified or essentialized
by that being, who may appear to be regarding us only as type, appearance,
or imagined essence. In turn, we may seek to regard others as definable,
simple objects not possessed of individual consciousness.
The notion of the Other plays a central role in Sartre’s
thinking and writing about large-scale systems of social objectification,
such as colonialism, racism, and sexism. Such systems enable the
Other to be falsely seen as an object, a definable being-in-itself,
and not as a free individual, a being-for-itself, possessed of his
or her own undefinable, conscious state of being.
