Freedom (Routledge Companion to Phenomenology)

Freedom Penultimate draft. Please cite only final version in The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology. Human freedom was Jean-Paul Sartre's central philosophical preoccupation throughout his career. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the cornerstone of his moral and political thought, Being and Nothingness, contains an extensive and subtle account of the metaphysical freedom that he considered fundamental to the kind of existence that humans have. Although rooted in phenomenology, Sartre's account of freedom draws very little on analysis of the experience of freedom itself. It is rather based on a general phenomenological account of perceptual experience and the motivation of action. The result is one of the most sophisticated portrayals of freedom in Western philosophical literature. It is certainly the most detailed account of freedom given by any of those philosophers who made the description of experience their central philosophical method. This claim is more usually made for Maurice Merleau-Ponty's account of freedom, which he presents in critical dialogue with Sartre's, but as we will see his account stops short of a full phenomenology of agency and owes its plausibility and popularity in part to its author having asked one question too few. The preference for Merleau-Ponty's theory is also partly due, however, to Sartre's account often being presented as far simpler and much less credible than it really is. Sartre must take some of the blame for this. He develops it across the whole of Being and Nothingness. Although he does devote a sizeable part of the book to this topic (1943: pt 4 ch 1 § § 1-3), much of the groundwork he lays for this earlier in the text seems incautiously worded and can only be properly understood in the context of this later discussion. What is more, he does not seem to give a clearly indicated concise statement of the theory that whose fine details fill hundreds of pages. The result is that readers often formulate his theory on the basis of only part of his overall discussion. One common misreading finds him proclaiming a kind of staccato voluntarism, each atomic moment in time finding us having to decide afresh how to respond to the world that confronts us (e.g. Smith 1970). In its bare form, this overlooks Sartre's careful account of action as responding to the invitations, demands, and proscriptions that we find already there in the world as we experience it (see esp. 1943: pt …