JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

180Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingssays in Being and Nothingness that in a sense I choose to be born. Clearly,any kind of Platonic pre-existence is out of the question here. Sartre thinks itis false that we pre-date (and post-date) our empirical existence. Drawing adistinction between existence and essence, Sartre means that what mybirth is, or is to me, largely depends on how I freely think of it. Its significanceis the significance I bestow upon it. Freedom does not pre-date existence.Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes the essence we freelychoose.In Being and Nothingness a person is their freedom. Sartre identifies theupsurge of freedom, choice, and the person himself, as one and the samebeing. One existent is subsumed under three descriptions. I do not have myfreedom. I am it. The will has no role in the exercise of Sartrean freedom.The moment the will operates, the decision is already taken. Sartre’slibertarianism entails that human actions are unpredictable. The only respectin which I am not free is that I am not free not to be free. I am not able not tochoose.We could refrain from action, or omit to act. Would this not be a way ofescaping one’s own freedom? Sartre’s position is that refraining from actionpre-supposes the choice not to act. This is what refraining is. There existsan infinity of actions I am not performing. I am only refraining from doingsome of them. In Iron in the Soul Sartre has Ivich and Boris agree about theFrench soldiers caught up the May 1940 invasion of France ‘they chose tohave this war’ (p. 69). They did nothing to prevent it.Sartre believes those who live in the developed countries are causallyresponsible for the death, by starvation and malnutrition, of those who live inthe Third World. To fail to save life is as causally efficacious and as morallyculpable, as to actively take life. This kind of reasoning leads Sartre to justifypolitical violence by, or on behalf of, oppressed groups, for example in thePreface he wrote for Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnésde la Terre, 1961) and to support the Baader Meinhof gang in the early1970s. Sartre denies that the distinction between our acts and our omissionsmarks a distinction between what we are and are not responsible for.How is Sartre’s libertarianism to be reconciled with his post-war Marxism?A human individual retains the capacity to choose whatever their situation,whatever the constraints on their power. Our power is constrained becausewe are alienated. He endorses the view of the early Marx that members ofcapitalist society are psychologically estranged from their work, the productsof their work, nature, and each other. This alienation is an obstacle to the