Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy of Freedom

Abstract

It is now a commonplace in discussions of existentialism to distinguish between existentialism the fad, the darling of the Left Bank and of the sensation seekers, and existentialism the serious philosophical endeavor to explicate the categories and structure of man’s existence in its unique and immediate being. Nevertheless,. any discussion of the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre seems, like a tropistic reaction of a plant, to bend toward a confused admixture of ontology, ethics, psychology, literature, and publicity. It is beyond the scope of my present intentions to determine the reasons for the unclarified status of Sartre’s thought, but that lack of clarification may be taken as a starting point for an examination into the meaning of Sartre’s conception of existential freedom.

“I desire to speak somewhere without bounds… for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.”

Thoreau