Individual Freedom in Sartre's Existentialism

What is it that shapes the way the people live in groups, societies, countries, or regions of different places in the world? For example, a dating club or a sporty club in term of a group; a poetry society or an economic society in term of a society, or even Islamic religions or Western or Christian religions? It is obvious that each of these terms involve different set of rules or conceptions for each of the group of which the functioning term represents. A poetry society must have different activities and guidelines for its members to follow than an economic society has for its members. Speaking more generally, Western countries that are not Islamic or Muslim have been living most of their lives governed by biblical ethics that were called Christian values for thousands of years since the day God communicated with Moses to grant His commadments to the people who lived on earth who needed His counsels. Thus, people have been always living in according to some values that were either provided by a divine being or by rules of concepts set by their own groups or societies. Freedom generally speaking and individual freedom specifically speaking are also affected and controlled by political or ethic concepts or even by each person in his or her own rules; however, individual freedom is not totally independent from the societal freedom in a general meaning since a person always belongs to a certain group or a society, or a country, they must somehow adapt or conform themselves to what other people in their groups or societies are doing. Thus, the ways people live seem to have been set up by a priori rules that affected how they behaved. Hereby, I should remind or redefine what it means by the term, a priori. A priori means what is knowable "prior to" experience or beliefs and it is what belongs to concepts or set-up rules that we understand independently of our own experience; and experience means matter of fact or "the process or an instance of personal encountering or undergoing something" in a meaning given by a dictionary. So, a posteriori would mean "posterior to" or what comes after we begin to have experience with something or in an event or by encoutering some particular event. And this a priori term is used in Sartre's propaganda sentence in suporting for his existentialist theory for he says that "life has no meaning a priori" and that "existence precedes essence". In this essay, I will explain what it partly means by those quotes of Sartre's.

What does it really mean by being a man or a woman? Of course, the term a man gives us a big picture that is especially different from the term a woman in a biological meaning as well as in a functioning meaning. Similarly, the term a laborer and the term a physician describe quite different pictures of the two kinds. A man has different bodily functions and different mental thinking than those of a woman although sometimes, in our today's modern society, men and women seem to be more likely to be able to do many the same things. Despite all of the likely or the similarities in some conditions, men and women still have difficult problems in conciliating the physical difference or the degree of intelligence between the two sexes. Men can do a lot more than women in term of physical activities; for example, a typical woman, nor an extraordinary one, cannot lift more than one hundred pounds or cannot do a hard laboring job such as those of a construction worker and of a mechanic who build highways, and repair cars or big trucks by hands. Of course, a woman can do the same labor job that a man do provided that she has the assistance from technical devices or tools to help her with external forces that a machine can support that are not her own forces. In a secular meaning, men and women have different abilities due to the differences in their biological traits, but in a celestial meaning, God is to be claimed of having made men and women different for the purpose of marriage and of forming a family in a reproductive meaning. And this is considered a priori matter or a priori understanding which is beyond any human meaning or experience since in today's modern society, people tend to establish their own secular concepts to adapt themselves with the experience they have faced while living on this earth. Why do women and men have to be different? Is there any human being in other planets that are neither a man nor a woman? With the advancement of modern science and technology, specialists are exploring more deeply and profoundly into the unknown worlds in the universe outside the earth, and therefore, those questions take us to go further into wondering about matters that can be solved and matters that cannot be solved because if there are no other creatures in the universe that are different from those of our own planet then it is obvious that God must have had a purpose for creating men and women. Even if there is doubt that men and women would be the only beings in the whole universe, the concept of a creator such as God can never be extinguished in our thinking. Thus, the concepts of what a men and what a women is are not humanly conceptualized, and they exist before our existence on this earth if we accept the concept of a divine creator. Moreover, since all the creatures that exist on this earth must have an original beginning, a concept of a divine creation is a possible concept that any one who is pondering about how the first lives were made up would be more likely to come up without any difficulty in thinking about the necessity of an original creator. So, it is obvious that the creation of all of the earthly creatures is a priori concept that exists beyond any human experience and before a human existence on earth. Thus, if the concept of a divine creation is accepted then there would be more questions to follow thereafter including ones such as: Why men look like a man or a woman look like a woman? Or why human beings have hands that can function differently than the hands of the animals? Or why animals do not have a big brain and are not as smart as human beings? The answers for those questions were already provided to us by the biblical stories and were also explained by God, or Jesus and His disciples, or the Saints as they were recorded in the bible. Thus, we are informed with some a priori knowledge that we did not even create or set up; the knowledge that is now a priori meaning or knowledge of life. And this means that God creates human beings according to His own images and according to His own essences. The fact that human beings having minds or brains can be explained that human beings are possessing what God also possesses which is a brain or a mind.


Not only the difference in familial roles of a man an a woman, but also the differences in soietal roles and in professional roles that can be easily recognized or understood in term of differences. For example, female workers do not choose jobs that belong the the male realm and neither do male workers. Beside the differences between a man and a woman, individual differences also make another important role in a society. We cannot force everyone to do what he or she does not like to do or do not have the abilities to do, nor do we want all people to do the same functions in a society because a society needs different functions to work well together to provide the different needs for the whole society. Of course, we need factories that can make household necessities and utilities and farmers who can provide grains and fruits for our daily meals. A society has to encourage people to have different professions or jobs to support every one who lives in it, but Sartre seems to oppose the individual choices to praise up what he calls human responsibility. However, Sartre seems to misuse the term human since in his language, it means more than just one person's responsibility, but involves the entire human world, and I will come back to explain about this point later on.


So, what does Sartre means when he says that "life has no meaning a priori"? Of course, this statement will certainly causes us to understand that life does not have any meaning that is bounded in any concept or any belief that is out of our own experience but only in our own experience or our own creation for it. Furthermore, in Sartre's book, Existentialism and Human Emotions, he declares what he means by that statement with his further explanations in a paragraph that follows immediately after that statment: "Before you come alive, life is nothing; it's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose. In that way, you see, there is a possibility of creating a human community." (Sartre, 49) It means that before we are born, we did not exist; that is correct but the next statement is really a problem because it means our lives do not have any meaning except that which we are going to cling to or take as a meaning for our lives. So, it means that no one can tell you what to do or what you should be except yourself. You are the only one who has to tell yourself what you want your life to be and what you want to be, not to include your mother, your father, or any society or any book or any value that you have been taught with. Here, I can see that Sartre's existentialism is a very subjective idea that I have never seen before presented by any other philosopher. That could also mean that any value that you learn from your family, your school, or from your parents does not and cannot intervene with the meaning of your life. "Before you come alive, life is nothing" tell us all what Sartre wants to say even we could have misunderstood him; at this point I think Sartre was not very careful with his language. The statement "life is nothing" is very vague and too general even he already explained what he meant in his book; I think he did not explicate to the readers enough ideas except that the subjectivity of a person is the primary cause for the establishing of the meaning of that subject's life or that individual life.


As I already explained above that life can not be nothing even before we are born to have a life because each of us will be either a man or a woman who by the purpose of creation should do what a man or a woman can do as his or her role in a familial or reproductive meaning. Man is to be the provider and the support of a woman's life while the primary role of a woman is to be able to bear and have children. Furthermore, each of us has different traits from our private parents and ancestors, and nobody are wholly alike. Besides, there are different regions in the whole wide world, the Western, the Eastern, the Uropean, the Chinese, the African, etc. of which different ethics can show that we are different from not just personalities but also from appearances, facial traits, height, speeches, skin colors, etc. So, if Sartre says that life is nothing before we are born is not correct because even before we are born, we should have already known what kind of race we would become since if our parents were Chinese, or African, we would be a Chinese or an African although we haven't yet know if we would be boy or girl, and in fact, we would know our sex about five months before we were to be born; thus, our ancestors, our parents are the sources that can determine what kind of person we will become to a certain couple of parents under certain ancestors.


"It is up to us to give our life a meaning" does not mean that we alone can determine what we ought to be but it can determine what we should be. We can only decide what our lives should be not what our lives ought to be since we already carried out in our bodies our parents' genes and our ancestors' genes and what we would like to be is sometimes also what our parents liked to be in their lives or what our ancestors liked to be in their past lives. What we want us to be is sometimes hidden in the subconcious brain which have been affected unknowingly by our parents' genes or our ancestors' or our relatives' genes that we never knew existed if we did not know bibliographical facts obout them. Thus, the values that our parents, our relatives have for themselves can also affect our values that we sometimes are not aware of. Moreover, life has a priori meanings which were given to us by God, the creator as I already explained above.


Life has a priori meanings says that a Chinese artist is different from a French artist even both of them are modernists or impressionists because their artistic pieces may present their different views, a Chinese point of view and a Western point of view. All Muslim artists will have the same religious point of view although each of them creates his or her own artistic style. All Buddhist monks think in the same Buddhist religous principles that are not the same as Christian principles that all Christian priests think. Life has a priori meanings shows that there are some common points that some people in the same group can have despite their different personalities; for example, republican politicians and democratic politicians in the United States may have different points of view although they all serve one country. Another example of "life has a priori meanings" is that a ballet dancer whose parents are also ballet dancers could be a better dancer than a ballet dancer whose parents are not ballet dancers; besides, a person may never become a ballet dancer if his or her mother or father does not know how to dance or has a different job than that of dancing or may have a diferent job as a physician to cure sick people and does not have any idea about aesthetic values. Thus, when Sartre says "life has no meaning a priori", he seems to reject many values including familial values, conceptual values, biblical values and just want to rely on the values that a person wants to create for his or her own life after he or she is born. Sartre says:

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It meant that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on scene, and only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be... Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principles of existentialism." (Sartre, 15)

And,

Man is the start of a plan which is aware of itself... nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven, man will be what he will have planned to be. Not what he will want to be... But if existence really precedes essence, man is responsible for what he is... Subjectivity means, on the other hand, that an individual chooses and makes himself; and, on the other that it is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity. (Sartre, 16)

Thus, we see that subjectivity is what an existentialist takes to be his or her guiding point to act forward. An existentialist always has to be a chooser who must follow what he has planned for what he wanted to be, and also is responsible for his or her own choice. Sartre says:

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses... Man is the future of man. That's
exactly it. But if it is taken to mean that this future is recorded in heaven, that God sees it, then it is false, because it would really no longer be a future. If it is taken to mean that, whatever a man may be, there is a future to be forged, a virgin future before him, then this remark is sound. But then we are forlorn." (Sartre, 23-24)

Sartre then even gives us a story as an example of what he means by forlornness and choice, and the story is:

To give you an example which will enable you to understand forlornness better, I shall cite the case of one of my students who came to see me under the following circumstances: his father was on bad terms with his mother, and, moreover, was inclinced to be a collaborationist; his older brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940, and the young man, with somewhat immature but generous feelings, wanted to avenge him. His mother lived alone with him, very much upset by the half-treason of her husband and the death of her older son; the boy was her only consolation. The boy was faced with the choice of leaving for England and joining the Free French Forces--that is, leaving his mother behind-- or remaining with his mother and helping her to carry on. He was fully aware that the woman lived only for him and that his going off-- and perhaps his death-- would plunge her into despair. He was also aware that every act that he did for his mother's sake was a sure thing, whereas every effort he made toward going off and fighting was uncertain move which might run around and prove completely useless; for example, on his way to England he might, while passing through Spain, be detained indefinitely in a Spanish camp; he might reach England or Algiers and be stuck in an office at a desk job. As a result, he was faced with two very different kinds of action: one, concrete, immediate, but concerning only one individual; the other concerned an incomparably vaster group, a nationally collectivity, but for that very reason and dubious, and might be interrupted en route. And at the same time, he was wavering between two kinds of ethics. On the one hand, an ethics of sympathy, of personal devotion; on the other, a broader ethics, but one whose efficacy was more dubious. He had to choose between the two. Who could help him choose? Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says, 'be charitable, love your neighbor, take the more rugged path, etc.' But which is the more rugged path? Whom should he love as a brother? The fighting man or his mother? Which does the greater good, the vague act of fighting in a group, or the concrete one of helping a particular human being to go on living? Who can decide a priori? Nobody. No book of ethics can tell him. The Kantian ethics says, 'Never treat any person as a means, but an end.' Very well, if I stay with my mother, I'm running the risk of treating the people around me who are fighting, I'll be treating them as an end, and, by doing that, I run the risk of treating my mother as a means... But if you seek advice from a priest; you already knew, more or less, just about what advice he was going to give you. In other words, choosing your adviser is involving yourself. The proof of this is that if you are a Christian, you will say, 'consult a priest.' But some priests are collaborating, some are just marking time, some are resisting. Which to choose? If the young man chooses a priest who is resisting or collaborating, he has already decided on the kind of advice he's going to get. Therefore, in coming to see me, he knew the answer I was going to give him, and I had only one answer to give: 'You're free, choose, that is, invent. (Sartre, 27-28)

So, we see that according to Sartre, since existence precedes essence, man is first forlorn and does not have any essence until he determines what he wants to be. Consequently, man has to choose for himself of what he wants him to be and of what his life has to be and in the story about what the boy should have chosen, i.e., to stay with his mother or to leave for the army? In this case, If I had been consulted by the boy, I would have advised him something different then Sartre's answer for Sartre gave the boy the freedom to choose. I would tell the boy that he should have chosen to stay with his mother since I had a different point of view than Sartre's point of view regarding ethic principles. Since Sartre believes that existence precedes essence, and that a man does not possess any essence before he is born, and that only after he has acquired experience or he has learned how to choose to be what he wanted to be then he would become somebody with some kind of essences; thus based on that view point, Sartre believes in individual freedom regarding one's life or future, he suggested that the boy was to be responsible for his own choice and his own life because he had a life to live and nobody would live for himself or be responsible for his life and his family, he should be free of his own choice and learn how to care for his own life. But I think if we need to give someone some guideline because he or she does not know what to do, then I would say staying with his mother is a better thing to do because before one can learn how to love many other people, one should know how to love one person first. The first principle is easy and also important since if one person cannot love even another person then how can he or she love more than one person or even love a whole group of people. It is obvious that if the boy choose to leave his mother, he may think about his own benefit for enlisting into the army as a career with a purpose to earn a salary or to get other things for himself and not to truly love his mother. I think there are still some basic understanding for every ethic principle that if we carefully think about it, we should know what to do in certain situation.

For Sartre, subjectivity is the main characteristic of an existentialist, and it is this subjectivity that gives him choices because no one can make him an object or tell him what to do: "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." Thus, because "life has no meaning a priori", an existentialist is forced by this guidline to choose for himself the meaning of his or her life, and Sartre even goes further than the principle of choice for he says:

In one sense, choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I ought to know that if i do not choose, I am still choosing." (Sartre, 41)

That means that even when we do not choose, we already decide for ourselves by staying in whatever we are doing and do not wish to change it. For example, If I am living in one state and do not want to move to any other state even if I can do that for any reason, small or big, I still show that I do like and want to stay in the state I am in now. There are many reasons in one's life that could make one change to a new situation, but if one does not want to change, then it is obviously that he or she likes what he or she has or the situation he or she is in. To Sartre, choice and responsibility go side by side since when one chooses, one must understand why one is making that choice, and therefore, one will be responsible for that choice. But what then this freedom of choice will lead an existentialist to what point?

Now I think I should come back to the topic about Sartre's freedom and responsibility in his book by considering some of his other famous statements:

Besides, I can bring moral judgment to bear. When I declare that freedom in every concret circumstance can have no other aim than to want itself, if man has once become aware that in his forlornness he imposes values, he can no longer want but one thing, and that is freedom, as the basis of all values. (Sartre, 45)

And,

And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depend on ours. Of course, freedom as the definition of man does not depend on others, but as soon as there is involvement, I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom. I can take freedom as my goal only if I take that of others as a goal as well. Consequently, when in all honesty, I've recognized that man is a being whom existence precedes essence, that he is a free being who, in various circumtances, can want only his freedom, I have at the same time recognized that I can want only the freedom of others. (Sartre, 46)

According to Sartre since there are no a priori values to guide a man, his is supposed to choose for himself the values which he will live in accord with; thus, there is real freedom and this freedom that Sartre calls "the basis of all values." If a man does not have any freedom at all, how can it happen that he can choose? If someone is restricting you or tells you what you can or cannot do then it is obvious that you cannot do certain things, and if the things that you want to do fall into the things that you are told not to do, then you cannot do those things; therefore, you do not have freedom to do what you are told not to do. Here we can see that being able to choose our own values is obviously freedom and it is even freer if there is no previous values to guide before one can choose; and for that, I wonder what kind of freedom I should call under Sartre's ideas, complete freedom? or absolute freedom? Let's read more Sartre's ideas about freedom:

Therefore in the name of this will for freedom, which freedom itself implies, I may pass judgment on those who seeek to hide from themselves the complete arbitrariness and the complete freedom of their existence. Those who hide their complete freedom from themselves out of a spirit of seriousness or by means of deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards; those who try to show that their existence was necessary, when it is the very contingency of man's appearance of earth, I shall call stinkers. But cowards or stinkers can be judged only from a strictly unbiased point of view. Therefore though the content of ethics is variable, a certain form of it is universal. Kant says that freedom desires both itself and the freedom of others. Granted. But he believes that the formal and the universal are enough to constitute an ethics. We, on the other hand, think that principles which are too abstract run aground in trying to decide action. Once again, take the case of the student. In the name of what great moral maxim do you think he could have decided, in perfect peace of mind, to abandon his mother or to stay with her? There is no way of judging. The content is always concrete and thereby unforseeable; there is always the element of invention. The one thing that counts is knowing whether the inventing
that has been done, has been done is the name of freedom. (Sartre, 47)

By the above paragraph, we see that Sartre is against Kant's universal ethics because in the story of the boy who did not know what he wanted to choose, staying with his mother or leaving her for the sake of the country faced with the problems of uncertainties in vague values such as Christian values which told him to love only his neighbor and to choose more general values than to love his poor mother who was in need of him, or Kant's universal ethics of duties, but what kind of duties in this case should the boy follow when both duties, a duty toward his mother and a duty toward the whole country seem to conflict to each other?

For Kant, it was clear that a moral action was one performed out of a sense of duty, rather than simply out of inclination or feeling or the possibility of some kind of gain for the person
performing it. So, for example, if I give money to charity because I have deep feelings of compassion for the needy, I am, in Kant's view, not necessarily acting morally: if I act purely from my feelings of compassion rather than from a sense of duty, then my action is not a moral one. (Warburton, 43)


Thus if the duty is important according to Kant, and quantity is more important than quality then the duty of the boy toward many people or the whole country is what the boy should choose, but what does duty really mean? Is it a demand of what people must do regardless of how people feel or think about what they should do? As I pointed out above that if one person does not even have love for one person then how can that person have love for many others? Duty without love or feelings is faking duty, or people do their duties because they are demanded to do so but not because they think they love to do that duty or like to do that duty for themselves. Thus, duty without feelings for duty is robotic duty, and this kind of duty will turn everyone into a robot that is controlled by some kind of mechanism, and it is therefore a mechanical duty. So, then the horse will return to their old path because it is used to that path if no one tells it what path to go. People will do things they like to do if no one forces them what to do, and so is duty an empty term without any meaning? Since people just do their duties out of an oblige but does not do it based on their true feelings and their true favor for it? Sartre recognizes this problem of duty in Kant's ethics is a remarkable recognition that not every philosopher could have recognized. Here, Sartre came up with a solution for the boy; i.e., to give him the freedom to choose for himself based on his own feelings in his jeopadized situation. Actually, because Sartre believes in his maxim that 'existence precedes essence', so one can freely choose essences that one wants to have. Not only individual freedom is important to an existentialist, Sartre also recognizes the freedom of others beside one's own freedom for he says, "I am oblige to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom." This means that if I like to do something that I choose to do then others can have the same freedom to do something else they choose to do. At this point, I would wonder about the possible conflict that can happen among different things that people want to do including the thing I want to do and the things others want to do. But it seems obvious that Sartre allows for these conflicts to happen because the freedom of others is not less important than my own freedom.

Finally, freedom of choosing is the end of Sartre's existential ethics although throughout his book, he aslo mentions about responsibility that goes side by side with choice. But will responsibility conflict with the choice that one makes? I have not seen the answers for these problems of conflict among individual freedom and between choice and responsibility in Sartre's book. In conclusion, there are vague definitions as well as vague explanations on important terms such as a priori values, subjectivity, freedom, choice and responsibility in Sartre's book although he did present well his points on some of these terms. And I think the most important idea that Sartre wants to bring out under existentialism is that no a priori value can determine what an existentialist want to take as his or her own values to guide his or her life with. An existentialist is first forlone or born without any essence and not until he or she has to decide what he or she has planned to do with his or her life.

References

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions, New Jersey: Carol Publishing Group Edition, 1999.

Warburton, Nigel. Philosophy: the Basics. 3rd Edition. New York: Routledge, 2003.