Second Edition · Revised and Expanded

Sartre's Conception of Freedom

Consciousness, the Practico-Inert, and Distributive Answerability

Freedom is not worldly omnipotence. The decisive question is how a conscious agent takes up a situation whose possibilities, costs, and powers are unevenly distributed.

Read an Excerpt Buy the Book

Sharam Kohan · Doxprint LLC · Hardcover

Front panel of the dust jacket: the title Sartre's Conception of Freedom set in white on a near-black ground above a vermillion rule, with the subtitle and the author's name
The Argument

One claim, two registers

Few doctrines in twentieth-century philosophy are as famous, or as contested, as Sartre's claim that human beings are condemned to be free. The claim has been read as emancipatory and as callous, and the second reading is not unreasonable. Human beings are shaped by circumstances they did not choose and are often prevented from doing what they have every reason to do.

This book argues that the objection depends on an ambiguity that Sartre's own formulations encourage. When he calls consciousness absolutely free, the claim concerns the kind of being consciousness is. When critics reply that human beings are not absolutely free, they ordinarily mean that agents cannot accomplish whatever they choose. The two claims concern different objects. The prisoner is not free to leave, but the cell appears to him as confinement only because he projects a life beyond it.

Once the registers are distinguished, the later social philosophy appears less as a recantation than as the material completion of a structure already present in the early ontology. The book then develops a theory of situated and distributive answerability, asking how institutions allocate knowledge, authority, alternatives, costs, and remedial power, and how those distributions should shape judgments of responsibility.

The distinction in full

The first register supplies formal openness; situation articulates the possibilities through which that openness can be exercised; worldly and collective conditions determine whether the exercise becomes effective.
Chapter Five, section IX, "The two registers formalized"
The Organizing Distinction

Ontological freedom and practical efficacy

Two questions have been asked under one word. Separating them is what allows the early ontology and the later social theory to be read as one argument rather than two.

A condensed form of the comparison developed in Chapter Five.
Question First register: ontological freedom Second register: practical efficacy
What it names The formal non-coincidence of the for-itself with every factual description of it. The situated power to form, sustain, and realize projects within a resistant world.
Whether it admits of degree No. It is structural and universal, neither increased by privilege nor abolished by confinement. Yes. It is enlarged by knowledge, health, resources, rights, and solidarity, and diminished by their absence.
How it is distributed Equally. Every for-itself possesses it and none can surrender it. Radically unequally, through bodies, institutions, and the sedimented activity of others.
Where the book develops it Chapters One through Four, and Chapter Five, sections IX and X. Chapter Five onward, and above all Chapters Seven and Eight.

The full comparison

Front panel of the dust jacket
The Volume

Bibliographic data

Title
Sartre's Conception of Freedom
Subtitle
Consciousness, the Practico-Inert, and Distributive Answerability
Edition
Second edition, revised and expanded
Author
Sharam Kohan
Publisher
Doxprint LLC
ISBN
979-8-234-17877-0
Format
Hardcover, $39.99
First edition
2012
Second edition
2023
Purchase For Instructors
Consciousness / Situation / Answerability. From ontology to the social field of practical freedom.
Spine and back panel, dust jacket, second edition
Architecture

Eleven chapters, from the two regions of being to the division of remedial responsibility

The volume opens with a preface to the second edition and a note on texts, translations, and citations, and closes with a conclusion and a table of references.

Division Title Sections
Introduction The Problem of a Freedom Said to Be Absolute 6
Chapter One The Two Regions of Being 7
Chapter Two Consciousness and the Expulsion of the Ego 6
Chapter Three Nothingness and the Work of Negation 7
Chapter Four Freedom as the Being of the For-Itself 9
Chapter Five Facticity, Situation, and the Two Registers of Freedom 10
Chapter Six Bad Faith and the Flight from Freedom 8
Chapter Seven Anguish, Situated Answerability, and the Approach to an Ethics 15
Chapter Eight The Social Turn: Conditioned Freedom and Distributive Answerability 15
Chapter Nine Comparative Stress Tests in Responsibility Theory 6
Chapter Ten Three Objections and the Limits of the Reply 7
Chapter Eleven The Interpretation and Theory Under Pressure 9
Conclusion Untitled in the volume 4

Browse every section

Sharam Kohan
The Author

Sharam Kohan

Sharam Kohan is the author of Sartre's Conception of Freedom. In this revised and expanded second edition, he extends the original study beyond Being and Nothingness to Sartre's later social philosophy and develops the book's account of situated and distributive answerability.

He is also the author of Judgment, a Priori Itself (1997) and The Honest Organization (2019).

Biography and speaking