Radical Freedom, Choice, and Responsibility Theme Analysis

Based on Sartre’s argument that there is no fixed morality or human nature to determine human action, he believes that humans have radical freedom. This means that people have the absolute power to choose how they will act in any given situation and in their lives as a whole. Tomorrow morning, anyone could choose to become a vegan or take up snowboarding, quit school to become a farmer, or go on a crime spree. These choices are not individual in the sense that they don’t affect other people, but rather in the sense that nobody else can override one’s own conscience.

In fact, it is precisely because of this radical freedom that people are wholly responsible for the choices they make and for the people they become, even if their control over their choices does not imply control over every outcome. Since nothing outside a person forces them to act in any particular way, people are completely responsible for the outcomes of their actions (although not for the circumstances in which they act, unless those are circumstances are of their own making). This radical freedom has both positive and negative components. The positive component is that people get to decide how they want to live; the negative component is that people are always forced to make some decision—even if that’s the decision to do nothing—and take responsibility for it. This is why Sartre argues that people are “condemned to be free”; the one thing nobody can choose is to not have choices. Anguish, as Sartre defines it, is the feeling of moral responsibility that accompanies the necessity to choose and the recognition that one will never receive a final judgment about the correctness of one’s choice. Whereas Sartre’s critics argue that existentialism causes anguish, he replies that anguish is an inescapable fact of life. Turning away from anguish, according to Sartre, does not mean overcoming it, but rather hiding from it in bad faith: it means choosing to do nothing and pretending one is not morally responsible for oneself. In Sartre’s mind, people’s choices are all that matter: what a person chooses to do makes up the entirety of their life, character, and essence. Mere beliefs do not matter because all beliefs are either expressed in action or bad faith. Unfulfilled plans and fantasies, likewise, do not matter because they never come to fruition.

However, a person’s actions do not only express their own character; they also reflect that person’s view of what is good for humanity as a whole. Sartre argues that “there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.” Put another way, Sartre believes that people are responsible for their choices to all of humanity (this is part of how he answers the objection that, without objective morality, there is nobody to hold anyone else responsible). Sartre argues that nobody would choose an evil over a good, so choosing any particular end means taking that end to be good. Every action expresses a good that “concerns all mankind.” This makes every actor a moral “legislator” for humankind as a whole, and it means that everyone should always ask, “what if everyone acted that way?”

Although Sartre is not terribly clear on this point, there are a few interpretations of his reasoning here. One interpretation is his argument that “nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all”—the very concept of a moral good implies that it is universal. A second is that every actor responds to the common human condition through their actions, so those actions reflect a belief about how people should navigate that common condition. Sartre gives the example of choosing between Christian and Communist union membership; this choice would express one’s belief about the value of struggle in the real world versus resignation in this world for the sake of rewards in the afterlife. The sense in which an individual fashions humankind in their image through any particular action they take functions, in a way, as a substitute for the sense in which God is said to have fashioned humankind in his image. This does not mean that each action expresses a view of the human good, but rather that the totality of a person’s actions across their life—the totality of their human project—in turn reflects a total value system.

There is one overridingly important factor in determining which values to choose. That factor is simply the fact of radical freedom. Sartre argues that freedom is “the foundation of all values,” since nobody would be able to develop a value system through their actions unless they were free to begin with. This means that one important measure of a person is the extent to which their actions reflect and respect “the quest of freedom in itself.” Near the end of his lecture, Sartre offers two examples from literature: Maggie (from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss) and La Sanseverina (from Stendahl’s The Charterhouse of Parma). The two women espouse opposite moralities with regards to sex and relationships but Sartre says they are morally equivalent because they both act for the sake of their own freedom. He invents counterexamples, characters who act in the same way but only do so because they believe they have no power to consciously affect their situations, which he uses to demonstrate that living authentically is less about what one chooses than the consistency of those choices with the freedom of all people. In fact, he says that “one can choose anything, so long as it involves free commitment.” Conversely, choices that deny human freedom—whether they are forms of bad faith that deny one’s own freedom, forms of violence that hinder another’s freedom, or impulsive decisions made out of hasty judgment—are inconsistent with the absolute character of that freedom. And a crucial part of existentialism’s purpose (and especially this lecture’s purpose) is to offer people a way to understand and act with respect for their own freedom by dispelling forms of bad faith and confronting the anguish that is an inherent part of any moral decision, whether people choose to recognize it or not.