The Emptiness Objection, and What It Costs to Answer It

The most penetrating critique of Sartrean freedom did not come from the determinists. It came from within phenomenology, in the chapter on freedom that closes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and it remains the objection that any defensible reading of Sartre has to survive. Chapter Ten of this book takes it as the first of three, and concedes to it more than is usually conceded.

The argument runs as follows. Sartre holds that freedom is total: present in every situation and absent from none, equal in the prisoner and the free citizen, undiminished by circumstance. But a freedom that is everywhere the same can make no difference among situations. And a freedom that makes no difference among situations cannot be a freedom to do anything in particular, because particular action requires a field already structured with significances that incline without compelling, in which some courses present themselves as weighty and others as negligible.

The circularity follows immediately. If I constitute the entire meaning of my situation by a free act, then nothing in the situation can resist or solicit me, and choice loses its object. Choice is choice among possibilities that already matter differentially. On the strong Sartrean account their mattering is itself my free positing, so the choice would have to constitute the very field within which it is a choice. A freedom that is total could nowhere gain a foothold.

Why the objection is the deepest

Most objections to Sartrean freedom press the confusion between practical efficacy and ontological structure. They observe that the prisoner cannot leave, that poverty closes what affluence keeps open, that illness defeats the most resolute project, and they conclude that talk of absolute freedom is indifference to suffering expressed as paradox. Those objections are answered by distinguishing the registers.

Merleau-Ponty’s objection is not answered that way, because it does not stop at efficacy. It presses the first register itself. It asks whether formal non-coincidence can be a coherent notion at all if the field of significance within which non-coincidence operates is supposed to be the free positing of the very consciousness that then chooses within it. That is a challenge to the ontology, not to its social application.

What must be conceded

Two things, and the book concedes both.

The first concerns the alleged equivalence of situations. Merleau-Ponty is right that a freedom making no difference to what an agent can do would not be freedom to perform a determinate action. The objection is decisive against equal or unlimited efficacy. It does not eliminate ontological freedom once that concept is restricted to non-coincidence. The prisoner and the citizen are alike in not being reducible to a factual identity; they are not alike in the possibilities they can perceive, sustain, or realize. Equality at the formal level entails neither equality of situated choice nor equality of power.

The second concession is heavier. What solicits, weighs, attracts, or repels is not constituted anew by an isolated freedom. Body, habit, language, and sedimented history organize the practical field before reflection reaches it. On this point Merleau-Ponty’s criticism succeeds against the strongest early Sartrean doctrine of meaning-constitution, and it should be recorded as a success rather than deflected. Peter Poellner’s reasons-responsive reconstruction of early Sartre points in the same direction: consciousness may be self-determining at the level of ultimate orientation while remaining affectively responsive to values and reasons disclosed in experience.

The consequence is stated in Chapter Ten, section II, and it governs the rest of the book. The first register must be formal rather than content-generating. Non-coincidence is a structure, not a power to manufacture meaning from nothing.

Where the mature Sartre goes

The interesting fact is that Sartre himself moves toward this position, through the practico-inert. Individual praxis in the Critique of Dialectical Reason encounters a world already structured by the deposited and inverted activity of others. It does not confer significance on a neutral field; it inherits a field that prior praxis has made significant, and it must work through what it inherits.

A difference nonetheless remains between the two philosophers, and it should not be papered over. Sartre tends to interpret sedimented significance as earlier praxis, all the way down. Merleau-Ponty assigns the body-subject a prepersonal intentionality not reducible to prior choice. The reconstruction offered in this book does not need to settle that dispute. It requires only two things: that inherited meaning be real, and that agential uptake not be reducible to passive reception.

What survives

The two-register distinction survives, but not intact and not for free. It survives after the first register has been narrowed to formal non-coincidence, and after the relation between the registers has been understood as interpenetrating rather than sequential. Situation does not begin its work after a sovereign choice has been made. It helps constitute the field from which a project can arise at all.

That is a real cost. An interpretation that pays it can no longer describe consciousness as conferring every meaning, and can no longer treat the prisoner and the citizen as differing only in what they happen to obtain. What it gains is an account that a serious phenomenologist cannot dismiss as empty.

Developed in Chapter Ten, sections I and II, and applied throughout Chapters Seven and Eight.