Can someone be human without freedom of choice? I no Sartre never flat out says that but this is how I interpret parts of his theory's. If I've totally misinterpreted this sorry!
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Freedom
Sartre's theory on a being for themselves and a being in themselves is very intriguing; having freedom is a property of life. The ability to be free can transcend the facts if a given situation, and only beings for themselves can do this. Is what Sartre points out what it means to be human? At the start of the school year we discussed what it meant for a person to be human. The idea of emotions, intellect, the fear of death, etc, all came up, but Sartre is suggesting that you cannot be human without freedom. I tried to find a counter to this and came up with the example of a person he runs wild and is naiive in the ways of civilization; the counter back was it was that persons choice to live like that, they are still expressing freedom. Humans can flee freedom but this results in their freedom to choose what they want to do. A person always has a choice even if it is a poor result for given situation. If I were held up at a Mcdonalds and told to murder a person inside and bring a big-mac out, or be shot myself, I still have the choice of doing one or the other.
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I'm not sure if I have an answer for you, but I do want to raise some more questions. It really does seem weird and inconsistent that the existentialists -- the name itself implies this! -- see a humans essence as being created through experience (i.e., the "existence precedes essence" claim). Yet Sartre does think that all humans have freedom, as you point out and even go so far out as to say "that you cannot be human without freedom." When we speak in this way, we usually are talking about essences, which are, generally, the characteristic of a thing that without which the thing would not be as it is. So Sartre seems to say that freedom is an essential characteristic of humans while also saying that humans do not have essences until they are created through existing.
ReplyDeleteDr. Johnson had a response to this inconsistency in class, but I think it was worth noting again.