JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Freedom181construction of what Sartre would call a free society: a society we wouldfreely choose rather than historically inherit. Our dispositional capacity tochoose continues to ontologically differentiate us from naturally occurringobjects and artefacts even though we are denied the power to create a freesociety in Sartre’s sense.Freedom is exercised in history. It is not an option for me to freely act inthe situation of a late-nineteenth-century German coal miner if I am amidtwentieth-century French intellectual. My historical location opens forme a range of actions I may perform but there is an infinity of actions whichare closed. There is a dialectical dependency between freedom and truth.There is no truth without freedom and no freedom without truth. A humanbeing is free but at the same time in bondage; a chooser whose power ispolitically and historically constrained. It is only at the moment of death thata human being is complete. Before death a brave person could become acoward or a coward could become brave. Only death brings an end tofreedom.BEING AND NOTHINGNESSBeing and doing: freedom[. . .] at the outset we can see what is lacking in those tedious discussions betweendeterminists and the proponents of free will. The latter are concerned to find cases ofdecision for which there exists no prior cause, or deliberations concerning two opposedacts which are equally possible and possess causes (and motives) of exactly the sameweight. To which the determinists may easily reply that there is no action without acause and that the most insignificant gesture (raising the right hand rather than the lefthand, etc.) refers to causes and motives which confer its meaning upon it. Indeed thecase could not be otherwise since every action must be intentional; each action must,in fact, have an end and the end in turn is referred to a cause. Such indeed is the unityof the three temporal ekstases; the end or temporalization of my future implies a cause(or motive); that is, it points toward my past, and the present is the upsurge of the act.To speak of an act without a cause is to speak of an act which would Jack theintentional structure of every act; and the proponents of free will by searching for it onthe level of the act which is in the process of being performed can only end up byrendering the act absurd. But the determinists in turn are weighting the scale bystopping their investigation with the mere designation of the cause and motive. The