What is in the volume

Sets the problem. Sartre's claim that the human being is condemned to be free asserts that freedom is not a property held in degrees but the mode of being of a conscious creature. The chapter shows why that formula divides its readers, locates the ambiguity that produces the division, and states the plan of the work.

1. The shape of the problem
2. What the first edition set out, and where it stopped
3. The critics who must be answered
4. The theoretical intervention: situated and distributive answerability
5. A note on method
6. The plan of the work

Freedom is the conclusion of an ontology, so the ontology is reconstructed before the conclusion is judged. Being divides into two irreducible regions, the in-itself and the for-itself, related through nihilation. The claim is that the doctrine of freedom is already implicit in the earliest description of the for-itself rather than added to it from outside.

1. The phenomenon and the being that appears
2. The transphenomenal being of the object
3. Being-in-itself: the plenitude of what merely is
4. Being-for-itself: the being whose being is in question
5. The pre-reflective cogito
6. Nihilation and the dependence of the for-itself on the in-itself
7. What the ontology already settles about freedom

The emptiness of consciousness carries much of the previous argument, and it is not self-evident. From Descartes through Husserl, philosophers placed an ego at the source of mental life. The chapter reconstructs Sartre's argument for expelling the ego, first made before Being and Nothingness, and shows why the move is indispensable.

1. Intentionality: that consciousness is always of something
2. Husserl’s transcendental ego
3. The ego as a transcendent object
4. The impersonality of the unreflected field
5. Reflection, the ego, and the limits of self-knowledge
6. The emptiness of consciousness and the seed of freedom

What is the nothingness by which consciousness is separated from itself, and how can it enter a world characterized as sheer positive plenitude? If nothingness belonged to the in-itself, the for-itself would perform no distinctive operation; if it were a shadow cast by negative judgment, the distance from causal determination would be illusory. Negation is argued to be the exercise of ontological freedom.

1. The question and the encounter with non-being
2. The absence of Pierre
3. Against Hegel and Heidegger
4. Nihilation, the rupture of the causal order, and anguish
5. The temporal dispersal of the for-itself
6. The for-itself as lack and the impossible synthesis
7. What negation settles, and what it does not

Sartre's most radical thesis: freedom is not something the for-itself possesses but what the for-itself is. A faculty belongs to a subject that could exist without it, and Sartre denies that any subject stands behind freedom in that way. The identification is reconstructed through the analyses of action, motive, will, emotion, and the fundamental project.

1. Freedom is not a faculty but the being of the for-itself
2. The structure of action and the priority of the end
3. Motive, cause, and end
4. The will is not the seat of freedom
5. Emotion as a mode of freedom
6. The fundamental project and existential psychoanalysis
7. Freedom as the source of value
8. The coefficient of adversity
9. Situated motivation and the field of reasons

The turning point of the book. Taken without qualification, the previous chapter invites the charge that the prisoner is as free as the warden. Sartre's doctrine of situation points toward a better account, and the chapter follows the five structures of situation before formalizing the distinction among ontological non-coincidence, situated choice, and practical efficacy.

1. Facticity: the given that freedom must be
2. My place and my past
3. My surroundings and the coefficient of adversity
4. The Other and the look
5. The dialectic of concrete relations with others
6. The body as the lived ground of situation
7. My death
8. Sartre’s reconciliation and its equivocation
9. The two registers formalized
10. Two registers and three analytical levels

A being that cannot escape freedom may still try to disguise it. Bad faith represents consciousness to itself as a thing with a fixed nature, or as a role leaving no alternative, or as a pure transcendence untouched by fact. The analysis tests the translucency attributed to consciousness, since if nothing is hidden from consciousness then ordinary self-deception looks impossible.

1. The paradox of self-deception
2. Against the Freudian censor
3. The disjunction of facticity and transcendence
4. Sincerity is also bad faith
5. The faith of bad faith
6. Bad faith and the analytic problem of self-deception
7. Authenticity, and why bad faith belongs to the first register
8. Bad faith as a socially sustained achievement

Ontological freedom has an affective disclosure and an ethical consequence, but the consequence is narrower than Sartre often claims. The chapter separates causal responsibility, agential participation, moral answerability, and attribution to character, then builds situated answerability and the distribution principle from that separation.

1. Anguish before fear
2. The flight from anguish and the spirit of seriousness
3. From unlimited responsibility to situated answerability
4. The war, and the limits of the doctrine
5. Without excuse
6. Abandonment and despair
7. Beauvoir and the ethics of ambiguity
8. Toward an ethics, and toward the social
9. Situated answerability
10. The responsibility vocabulary and its provenance
11. Four forms of answerability
12. Standing to blame and the authority to demand
13. Institutional standing: forfeiture, transfer, and restoration
14. The distribution principle
15. Preliminary applications

The Critique of Dialectical Reason is often read as the break with the earlier philosophy. This chapter argues otherwise: the late work supplies the systematic theory of practical efficacy the early ontology lacked, while preserving ontological freedom. Praxis, scarcity, the practico-inert, seriality, and the group are read as a continuity test rather than a recantation.

1. A place for the individual in Marxism
2. From need to praxis
3. Scarcity and the genesis of antagonism
4. The practico-inert
5. Seriality
6. The group, the pledge, and the recovery of efficacy
7. Alienation presupposes freedom
8. Necessity in the milieu of freedom
9. Scarcity, violence, and the rationality of revolt
10. The progressive-regressive method and the totalization of history
11. Continuity or rupture: the scholarly division and the verdict
12. The practico-inert as a strict continuity test
13. Collective efficacy and institutional responsibility
14. Institutions as architectures of answerability
15. The division of remedial responsibility

Cases drawn from coercion, oppression, and institutional fragmentation establish coherence, not comparative superiority. A theory built from those phenomena can be expected to judge them well. The harder question is whether it improves judgment on problems formulated independently within responsibility theory, and the chapter runs the stress tests.

1. Comparative method and standards of success
2. Many hands and responsibility for fragmentation
3. Manipulation, ownership, and the constructor of the field
4. Culpable ignorance and the direction of tracing
5. Structural injustice and differentiated connection
6. Institutional standing after the stress tests

The three objections taken to be strongest: Merleau-Ponty's claim that total freedom is empty, the determinist's claim that an uncaused freedom is unintelligible, and Detmer's claim that Sartre cannot consistently make freedom both the source of value and a value. The two-register distinction answers part of each and all of none.

1. Merleau-Ponty and the emptiness of total freedom
2. Reply to Merleau-Ponty, and what must be conceded
3. The determinist objection
4. Reply to the determinist, and its limit
5. Detmer and the problem of freedom as a value
6. Reply: the two registers and the locus of the ethical
7. Causal conditioning and agential intelligibility

The distinction is not exempt from the criticism it has been used to direct elsewhere. Four sections defend the reading against objections from relabeling, selective interpretation, interpenetration, and trivialization. The last is more stringent: it states the conditions under which the contribution would be redundant, mistaken, or unnecessary.

1. The objection from mere relabeling
2. The objection from selective reading
3. The objection from interpenetration
4. The objection from trivialization
5. Reasons this contribution may be redundant, mistaken, or theoretically unnecessary
6. The nearest rival interpretations
7. Is situated answerability only a restatement of existing theory?
8. Objections to distributive answerability
9. Results of the comparative stress tests

Both opening charges are partly correct against Sartre's strongest rhetoric, and neither requires rejecting his central phenomenological insight. The for-itself is not a thing identical with its factual description, yet its concrete possibilities and effective power are bodily, historical, and social throughout. The limits of the result are stated plainly.

1. The limits of the result
2. Situated and distributive answerability
3. Comparative reach
4. Avenues for further inquiry