JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

202Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsbuildings, which I am walking along, extends out of sight for me, it is my life, it is life.And my solitude at Bordeaux was solitude, the forlornness of man.Difficulty: there are two orders. The man in hell and the saved man. Once we allowthat freedom is built up on the ground of the passions, this difficulty no longer exists:there is natural man with his determinism, and freedom appears when he escapes theinfernal circle. But if you are not a Stoic, if you think that man is free even in hell, howthen can you explain that there is a hell?To put it another way, why does man almost always first choose hell, inauthenticity?Why is salvation the fruit of a new beginning neutralizing the first one? Let us considerthis. What we are here calling inauthenticity is in fact the initial project or originalchoice man makes of himself in choosing his Good. His project is inauthentic whenman’s project is to rejoin an In-itself-for-itself and to identify it with himself; in short,to be God and his own foundation, and when at the same time he posits the Good aspreestablished. This project is first in the sense that it is the very structure of myexistence. I exist as a choice. But as this choice is precisely the positing of a transcendent,it takes place on the unreflective plane. I cannot appear at first on the reflective planesince reflection presupposes the appearance of the reflected upon, that is, of anErlebnis that is given always as having been there before and on the unreflective plane.Thus I am free and responsible for my project with the reservation that it is preciselyas having been there first.In fact, it is not a question of a restriction on freedom since, in reality, it is just theform in which it is freedom that is the object of this reservation. Being unreflective,this freedom does not posit itself as freedom. It posits its object (the act, the end of theact) and it is haunted by its value. At this level it realizes itself therefore as a choice ofbeing. And it is in its very existence that it is such. Nor is it a question of a determinismor of an obligation, but rather that freedom realizes itself in the first place on theunreflective plane. And there is no sense in asking if it might first realize itself on thereflective plane since this by definition implies the unreflective. It would be equallyuseless to speak of a constraint on the mind of a mathematician because he, being ableto conceive of a circle or a square, cannot conceive of a square circle. It is not a questionof a limit which freedom trips over, but rather, in freely making itself, it does sounreflectively, and as it is a nihilating escape from being toward the In-itself-for-itselfand a perpetual nihilation, it cannot do anything unless it posits the In-itself-for-itselfas the Good existing as selbständig.Whence the real problem: “can one escape from hell?” cannot be posed on anyother level than the reflective level. But since reflection emanates from an alreadyconstituted freedom, there is already a question of salvation, depending on whether