JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Freedom179a choice, there is no situation which does not limit our power. Sartre spellsthis out clearly in the 1947 essay Cartesian Freedom (La Liberté Cartésiennein Situations I ) when he insists that the situation of a person and theirpowers can neither increase or limit their freedom. Although what I can do islimited by where as well as when I am, that I can do something rather thannothing is in no way affected. I retain the dispositional property of being achoosing agent even though which choices I may exercise varies fromsituation to situation. Clearly some choices may be unpleasant to me but,logically, an unpleasant choice is nevertheless a choice. The expression ‘Ihad no choice’ is misleading.The theme that freedom is unimpaired by constraints on power pervadesSartre’s literature. Sometimes his characters are horribly constrained: thetortured resistance fighters in Men Without Shadows, Mathieu and hiscomrades trapped in the clock tower in the 1949 volume of The Roads toFreedom; Iron in the Soul. As their power is reduced their awareness offreedom increases.In Sartre’s existentialism, the recognition of freedom is a lonely first personsingular phenomenon for which recourse to others provides no respite. Forexample, also in Iron in the Soul, Sartre has Odette shift swiftly from the firstperson plural thought ‘What ought we to want?’ to the first person singularthought ‘What ought I to want ?’ (p. 185) against the background ‘situation’of the May 1940 invasion of France. Odette is expressing the ethical tenet ofBeing and Nothingness that ‘It is I who sustain values in being’. Sartre didnot write ‘It is we who sustain values in being’. For all his repudiation ofDescartes in ‘Cartesian Freedom’ the primacy and inescapability of the firstperson singular exercise of, and confrontation with, freedom remainsthoroughly Cartesian.Sometimes, the existence of freedom is depicted as dependent upon itsacknowledgement or recognition by the agent. For example, in The FliesSartre has Zeus say of Orestes ‘Orestes knows that he is free’ and Aegistheusreplies ‘He knows he is free? Then to lay hands on him, to put him in irons,is not enough’. 1 Although, as we shall see, Sartre thinks there is a pervasivehuman tendency to deny one’s own freedom, it is the fact of a person’sfreedom not their knowledge of it that makes freedom unconstrained.Freedom is entailed by knowledge of freedom but not vice versa. An agentaware of their freedom can act authentically.Sartre endorses Heidegger’s view that we are ‘thrown’ into the world. Weare but we did not choose to be. Seemingly inconconsistently with this, he