An excerpt from the second edition

Preface to the Second Edition

When the first edition of this study appeared in 2012, it remained almost entirely within the horizon of Sartre’s early philosophy. Its argument was straightforward, though the route to it was not: the analyses of being, nothingness, negation, facticity, and appearance in Being and Nothingness converge on an account of consciousness, and Sartrean freedom becomes intelligible only once that account is understood. Consciousness is not a thing with properties; it is the activity of distancing itself from what is given. Nihilation names that activity, and freedom is its consequence. I still regard that thesis as sound. The intervening years have not weakened it, but they have made its incompleteness harder to ignore.

That incompleteness prompted the present revision. I returned to the book for three related reasons.

The first concerns the limits of the original inquiry. The first edition ended with the solitary for-itself of Being and Nothingness, as though Sartre’s analysis of freedom ended there as well. It did not. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, published in 1960, the earlier ontology is brought into contact with history, scarcity, worked matter, institutions, and the resistant presence of other people. Freedom is no longer considered chiefly as the structure of an individual consciousness; it is followed into a world already shaped by collective action and by the sediment of past projects. Any account that omits the Critique therefore omits a substantial part of Sartre’s position. This edition attempts to supply it.

The second reason is argumentative. The first edition made too little contact with the strongest objections to Sartrean freedom. An interpretation has not earned its conclusion merely because it can be made textually coherent; it must also survive the objections that reveal what the text may have overlooked. Merleau-Ponty’s charge that an absolute freedom is empty, and the determinist’s suspicion that a freedom unconditioned by the past explains nothing, cannot be treated as misunderstandings to be dismissed in passing. They identify genuine pressures within Sartre’s account. The revised edition therefore gives those pressures a central place and concedes what, in my judgment, must be conceded.

The third reason provides the organizing thesis of the book. Readers sympathetic and hostile to Sartre have often taken the later philosophy to repudiate the earlier one: the philosopher of absolute freedom appears to become the theorist of a freedom constrained by material and historical conditions. I argue that this familiar picture treats two questions as one. Sartre speaks, often without marking the change of level, of freedom as the ontological structure of consciousness and of freedom as practical efficacy. The first concerns the for-itself’s non-coincidence with every factual description of it, its irreducibility to the role, character, motive, or condition it must nevertheless live. The second concerns what an embodied and situated agent can bring about in a world of matter, scarcity, institutions, and competing projects. The first is not an unlimited power to manufacture motives or meanings; concrete possibilities are articulated through the body, history, language, and the sedimented activity of others. The second is conditioned throughout and distributed unequally. Once these claims are distinguished, the later work appears less as a recantation than as the social and material completion of a structure already present in Being and Nothingness.

I have retained the original main title because the subject remains Sartre’s conception of freedom. The subtitle has been revised to identify the full argument of this edition. The inquiry now follows the path from consciousness and nihilation to the practico-inert, then asks what that path contributes to the allocation of responsibility. The expanded material does not attach an unrelated moral theory to the interpretation. It tests whether the interpretation yields a defensible account of answerability in cases that do not depend upon Sartre’s examples.

The scope of the inquiry should also be clear. This is not a biography, and it does not appeal to episodes in Sartre’s life as explanations or excuses for his arguments. Nor is it a general introduction to existentialism, a label whose popular associations often obscure the specificity of Sartre’s philosophy. The book addresses a narrower question: what conception of freedom emerges from Sartre’s ontology and social theory, and how much of that conception remains defensible? Where the literature divides, I have tried to reconstruct the principal alternatives before stating my own view. The relevant standard is argumentative adequacy, not allegiance to Sartre or hostility toward him.

The note that follows explains the citation practice. I have used only authorities that can be identified and checked, and I have avoided page references where the available editions do not share a stable pagination. In those cases, internal divisions provide greater accuracy than a page number whose apparent precision would mislead. An uncited claim can be assessed on its merits; a false citation compromises both the claim and the inquiry that relies on it.

The result is offered as one intervention in a continuing dispute about a philosopher whose work continues to resist settled verdicts.

This second edition preserves the argument of the original study while revising its account of motive, meaning, responsibility, and causal conditioning. It positions the continuity thesis against the nearest scholarship available by November 19, 2023, and it tests the resulting responsibility framework against disputes concerning many hands, manipulation, culpable ignorance, structural injustice, and standing to blame. The revisions therefore extend the interpretation into a bounded theoretical intervention without converting the book into a general treatise on moral responsibility.

Sharam Kohan
November 19, 2023

Note on Texts, Translations, and Citations

The English editions of Hazel E. Barnes’s translation of Being and Nothingness do not share a common pagination, and the pagination of the French L’Être et le néant differs again. References to Being and Nothingness therefore identify its internal divisions, including part, chapter, and, where useful, titled section. The work is abbreviated BN in the notes. Other primary texts are cited by internal division where their structure permits and pagination varies among editions.

References to the Critique of Dialectical Reason follow Alan Sheridan-Smith’s translation, and references to Notebooks for an Ethics follow David Pellauer’s translation. Translations from the French supplied by the author are identified as such.

Introduction: The Problem of a Freedom Said to Be Absolute

Few doctrines in twentieth-century philosophy have been at once so famous and so widely judged untenable as Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that the human being is condemned to be free. The formula is arresting, and Sartre meant it to be. It asserts that freedom is not a property a person may possess in greater or lesser degree, nor a political achievement to be won and lost, nor a capacity that develops with maturity and decays with age, but the very mode of being of a conscious creature, something one cannot renounce, evade, or fail to exercise, since even the attempt to escape it is itself a free act. To be conscious, on this account, is already to be free, and to be free without remainder.

The formula has inspired two sharply different reactions. For some readers, it is emancipatory: a refusal of every attempt to treat a life as the execution of a script written by God, nature, inheritance, or social role. For others, it is extravagant and finally callous. Human beings are shaped by circumstances they did not choose, confined by bodies and histories they cannot exchange, and often prevented from doing what they have every reason to do. A prisoner cannot leave the cell; poverty closes possibilities that remain open to the affluent; illness may defeat the most resolute project. To call each of these persons absolutely free can sound less like a defense of agency than an indifference to suffering expressed as paradox.

That objection deserves to be taken literally rather than neutralized by sympathy for Sartre. Yet it also depends on an ambiguity that Sartre’s own formulations frequently encourage. When he calls consciousness absolutely free, the claim concerns the kind of being consciousness is: it introduces negation and possibility into the world and never coincides with the facts that describe it. 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; to a stone, the same walls are neither prison nor obstacle. An obstacle exists for a being already oriented toward an end. The argument of this book is that Sartre’s conception of freedom becomes coherent only when freedom as ontological structure is distinguished from freedom as practical efficacy, and that the latter depends on the former without being guaranteed by it.

I. The shape of the problem

The problem becomes acute when one places the early and the late Sartre side by side. Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, is the great document of the first register. Its long fourth part, devoted to “having, doing, and being,” contains an account of freedom so uncompromising that Sartre is driven to say there are no accidents in a life, that the one who is mobilized in a war deserves that war because he could always have escaped it by suicide or desertion, and that we are without excuse. The Critique of Dialectical Reason, published seventeen years later, reads at first as the work of a different philosopher. Here freedom appears hemmed in on every side by scarcity, by the inertia of worked matter, by the way our own past actions congeal into structures that turn against us, and by the serial impotence of human beings whom circumstance has reduced to interchangeable units. The man who reads Being and Nothingness and then reads the Critique may be forgiven for concluding that Sartre changed his mind.

The literature divides along two connected axes. On the historical question, Thomas Flynn, Joseph Catalano, and Gavin Rae read the Critique as developing the early commitment to individual praxis by showing how group forms and the practico-inert constrain or enlarge practical freedom. On the conceptual question, Peter Jones challenges the multiplication of Sartrean freedoms, David Detmer defends a distinction among ontological freedom, choice, and obtaining, Renxiang Liu offers a layered distinction between ontological and psychological-practical freedom, and Peter Poellner reconstructs early Sartre in terms of reasons-responsive autonomy. Kate Kirkpatrick’s 2023 analysis adds an important clarification by separating freedom as transcendence, practical power, and moral freedom in the dispute over Sartre and Beauvoir. The present argument enters both axes. It accepts that the taxonomy is not original to this book, but contends that its ordered use clarifies the relation between the early ontology and the later theory of conditioned praxis.

The development from the early to the late work is real, but it occurs chiefly in the account of situated realization. Sartre does not abandon the for-itself’s non-coincidence with its factual identity. What the Critique supplies is a far more adequate account of how concrete possibilities are historically articulated and how little ontological openness assures about successful action. The later work is therefore neither a simple restatement nor a repudiation of Being and Nothingness. It is a material and collective theory of the conditions under which a project acquires, or fails to acquire, purchase on the world. The task of the book is to state that continuity without treating the first register as a power of ex nihilo meaning-production or the second as a merely external limitation imposed upon an otherwise complete subject.

II. What the first edition set out, and where it stopped

The first edition of this study, published in 2012, was concerned exclusively with the first register, and within that register it advanced a thesis I continue to hold. The thesis was that Sartre’s various and seemingly disparate analyses, of being and its modes, of nothingness, of negation, of facticity, and of the phenomenon, are unified by a single underlying claim about consciousness, and that freedom is the upshot of that claim. Consciousness, for Sartre, is not a thing among things. It has no contents, no inner theater, no substantial ego lodged within it; it is, in the formula of his earliest philosophical essay, a sheer translucent activity directed always beyond itself toward its objects. Because consciousness is nothing in itself, it is able to take up a relation of negation toward what is, to hold the given at a distance, to envisage what is not and what is not yet, and thereby to project itself toward possibilities that the given does not contain. This power of standing back from the world, of introducing into the plenum of being a fissure across which possibility becomes visible, is what Sartre means by nihilation, and it is, on the reading defended here, the whole of what he means at bottom by freedom in the first register.

The first edition reached that conclusion but stopped just where the most difficult question begins. If consciousness is free in a radical and inalienable sense, how should we understand the equally evident fact that human beings are constrained? The earlier discussion acknowledged facticity and situation, Sartre’s names for the given through which freedom must act, but it did not follow constraint into the domains in which it becomes socially organized: scarcity, institutions, collective action, and the inertia of a world already worked by others. The present edition does so. It must therefore engage both the later social philosophy and the critical literature that treats the early doctrine as incoherent. The aim is not a more expansive summary of Sartre, but a conception of his freedom that is no longer confined to half of the evidence.

III. The critics who must be answered

Three objections shape the inquiry because each places pressure on a different part of the account: its relation to the world, its relation to causation, and its relation to value.

The first is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose chapter on freedom in the Phenomenology of Perception mounted the objection that has proved hardest to dislodge. Merleau-Ponty argued that a freedom that is total is indistinguishable from a freedom that is null, because a freedom present equally in every situation and absent from none can make no difference among situations and so cannot be a freedom to do anything in particular. If I am as free in chains as out of them, the freedom has been purchased at the cost of all contact with the world in which freedom is supposed to operate. This is the objection from emptiness, and I argue in Chapter Ten that the two-register distinction is precisely what answers it: Merleau-Ponty’s objection tells decisively against the conflation of the registers and not at all against the ontological claim taken on its own terms.

A second objection comes from determinism. Its force is not that Sartrean freedom is empty but that it is metaphysically impossible. If every event has sufficient antecedent causes, and action is an event, then action too is caused; a caused action cannot be free in the sense Sartre appears to require. Sartre replies that the for-itself is the being through which nothingness enters the world and causal determination is suspended. To a determinist, however, this may simply restate the disputed conclusion. Chapter Ten therefore develops a less vulnerable reading: freedom need not lie outside the causal order, but in the agent’s interpretive relation to what causally bears upon her. A motive moves an agent only as understood, adopted, resisted, or re-described within a project.

The third critic is the most sympathetic, and for that reason the most instructive. David Detmer, in a study that takes Sartre’s side against the charge of irrationalism, nonetheless presses the question whether Sartre is entitled to the theory of value his doctrine of freedom seems to require. If freedom is the source of all value, can freedom itself be a value, and if it can, does Sartre not smuggle into his ostensibly value-free ontology a normative commitment he has no right to? This question bears on the relation between the descriptive and the prescriptive in Sartre, and I return to it when the argument reaches the ethical implications of the two registers.

The nearest competing interpretations impose two tests. First, if Jones is correct that Sartre uses freedom in one governing sense, the distinctions employed here must be defended as an analytical reconstruction rather than attributed to Sartre as his explicit taxonomy. Second, if Detmer, Liu, Poellner, and Kirkpatrick already distinguish ontological freedom from power, obtaining, or moral freedom, the present book must identify what its cross-period argument adds. Its answer is that the Critique supplies not merely examples of limitation but a systematic account of how individual praxis is mediated by worked matter, seriality, institutions, and collective action, while the revised theory of answerability states what ontological freedom does not establish.

The resulting contribution has two levels. The first is interpretive: it joins a Detmer-style ordering of freedom, choice, and obtaining to the continuity dispute; narrows ontological freedom to non-coincidence rather than unrestricted constitution; and shows why ontological participation in a situation cannot by itself ground causal or moral responsibility for that situation. The second is theoretical: it develops an account of situated and distributive answerability from the claim that social structures organize the conditions under which reasons, alternatives, demands, and remedial powers become practically available. The first level is tested against Sartre scholarship. The second must be tested against the general literature on responsibility and structural injustice.

The method of reconstruction requires an explicit criterion. A charitable interpretation is not one that makes every text consistent at any price. It is one that identifies the strongest position the textual evidence can support, marks the passages that resist it, and states where the resulting view belongs to the interpreter rather than to Sartre. Continuity is therefore a conclusion to be argued, not a presumption. The later work must illuminate tensions already present in the early work, and the early ontology must remain necessary to the later theory, if the reading is to amount to more than retrospective harmonization.

Three tests govern the reconstruction. The first is textual range: the account must explain the ontology of Being and Nothingness, the practical analyses of facticity and adversity, and the social forms of the Critique. The second is conceptual economy: it should not multiply senses of freedom beyond what is needed to block equivocation. The third is critical adequacy: it must survive the prisoner, the victim of war, the socially formed motive, and the causally conditioned act without redescribing those cases until their difficulty disappears.

The resulting thesis is best stated as a sequence. Consciousness is non-coincident with every complete factual description. Non-coincidence makes possible the disclosure of reasons, absences, and ends. Such disclosure occurs within a bodily and historical field that agents inherit rather than create. Choice stabilizes a project within that field. Practical efficacy depends upon resources, institutions, cooperation, and material conditions. Responsibility arises only where conduct is sufficiently attributable under those conditions. Each step is necessary to the next, but no step licenses the stronger conclusion that agents are sovereign authors of the whole sequence.

This formulation also identifies what would falsify the interpretation. It would fail if the early Sartre treated freedom only as an uncaused power of choice with no constitutive relation to facticity; if the Critique eliminated rather than presupposed individual praxis; or if the distinction among non-coincidence, situated articulation, and efficacy merely renamed the same phenomenon three times. The later chapters address each possibility directly. The reconstruction earns acceptance only if it explains otherwise conflicting claims without depriving the conflict of substance.

Iddo Landau’s objections to Sartre’s absolute freedom provide an important adversarial test. The answer cannot be that every apparent counterexample concerns only obtaining, since some counterexamples concern the formation of desire, the intelligibility of alternatives, and the capacity to govern conduct. The present revision therefore does not defend every statement Sartre makes. It defends a restricted ontological thesis and treats the excesses concerning motivation and responsibility as errors generated by extending that thesis beyond its proper scope.

IV. The theoretical intervention: situated and distributive answerability

The responsibility argument requires its own dialectical location. The language used in Chapter Seven does not arise in an intellectual vacuum. Hart distinguishes role, causal, liability, and capacity responsibility; Watson separates the attributability and accountability faces of responsibility; Scanlon understands responsibility through the appropriateness of asking agents to defend judgment-sensitive attitudes; Fischer and Ravizza ground responsibility in guidance control through an agent’s own reasons-responsive mechanism; Shoemaker argues for a tripartite distinction among attributability, answerability, and accountability; and Angela Smith develops answerability as a unified account of responsibility. The present book does not claim priority for that vocabulary. Its question is what a Sartrean account of situation adds to it.

The answer is that responsibility theories commonly identify capacities or relations that must obtain if an agent is to be responsible, but they often treat the practical availability of those capacities as a property to be assessed after the social field has already been formed. Sartre’s analyses of facticity, the look, seriality, and the practico-inert make the formation of that field philosophically visible. Institutions distribute information, authority, credibility, time, risk, and the cost of refusal. They thereby affect not only whether an agent succeeds, but which reasons can be recognized, which alternatives can be organized into projects, and which demands for justification can fairly be made.

The theoretical thesis of the revised book is therefore more exact than the earlier interpretive claim. Ontological non-coincidence is a threshold condition of answerability, but social situation distributes the epistemic, practical, relational, and institutional conditions that determine its object, degree, and fairness. This is the theory of situated and distributive answerability. It does not infer morality from ontology. It explains why the moral assessment of action must track how agency is organized within a field that no individual creates alone.

Four levels must be distinguished. Formal answerability concerns whether the being in question can be addressed as an agent rather than merely described as an event. Practical answerability concerns whether the agent could recognize and respond to the relevant reasons under the actual conditions of action. Relational answerability concerns who has standing to demand an account and what form that demand may legitimately take. Distributive answerability concerns how social arrangements allocate the knowledge, authority, alternatives, exposure to cost, and remedial power upon which the other forms depend. The fourth level is not another species of blame. It is an account of the architecture through which responsibility becomes concentrated, dispersed, concealed, or displaced.

This framework makes a claim beyond Sartre interpretation while remaining grounded in Sartre. Against theories centered upon an isolated mechanism, attitude, or choice, it argues that reasons-responsiveness is socially scaffolded and politically vulnerable. Against theories of structural responsibility that assign a common forward-looking obligation to all participants, it insists upon differentiation according to power, contribution, benefit, knowledge, and capacity to alter the structure. Against unlimited Sartrean responsibility, it denies that formal freedom equalizes responsibility among agents whose practical fields are radically unequal.

The theory would be redundant if the existing responsibility literature already explained these distributions without remainder. It would be mistaken if social conditions affected only success after a fully formed choice, or if differences in power had no bearing upon the fairness of demands for reasons and repair. It would be theoretically unnecessary if Hart’s taxonomy, Fischer and Ravizza’s control condition, Smith’s answerability, and Young’s social connection model jointly supplied the same explanatory structure. Chapters Seven and Eight formulate the theory, Chapter Nine tests it on rival terrain, and Chapter Eleven determines what survives those tests.

V. A note on method

The method requires brief clarification because the interpretation is reconstructive as well as historical. I begin from a principle of charity: a position should be stated in the strongest form the text can sustain before it is assessed. Where a passage admits of more than one plausible reading, I prefer the reading that gives Sartre the more coherent argument, not because contradiction is impossible, but because defeating the weakest available formulation establishes little. The same principle guides the treatment of apparent tensions across Sartre’s corpus. When a bold assertion stands beside conceptual resources that qualify it, I first ask whether those resources support a coherent revision before concluding that the philosophy simply contradicts itself. This procedure has an obvious danger. Charity can become anachronism, and an interpreter may discover in a text distinctions that belong chiefly to the interpreter. Chapter Eleven presses that objection directly. Throughout, I therefore distinguish between what Sartre expressly says and the reconstruction I believe his materials support.

The history of philosophy is treated here as philosophy, but the distinction between exegesis and reconstruction remains strict. Four matters must be kept apart: what Sartre expressly affirms, what his arguments support, what historical intentions are reasonably attributable to him, and what position this book defends after criticism. They diverge most clearly in the accounts of motive, the prisoner, and wartime responsibility. Sartre’s rhetoric sometimes treats a formal non-coincidence with the given as though it entailed sovereign authorship of the concrete field of reasons or control over worldly outcomes. The reconstruction rejects that inference. It seeks to preserve the irreducibility of the for-itself while conceding the bodily, social, and causal conditions that structure what an agent can perceive as possible and what an agent can accomplish.

VI. The plan of the work

The argument proceeds in three stages. Chapters One through Three establish the ontological and phenomenological foundations. Chapter One reconstructs the distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself and identifies nihilation as the structure from which freedom will emerge. Chapter Two traces Sartre’s account of consciousness through Husserl and the rejection of the transcendental ego. Chapter Three turns to nothingness and negation, showing how the for-itself introduces absence, possibility, and temporal distance into a world that, considered in itself, contains none of them.

Chapters Four through Seven examine freedom within the first register. Chapter Four argues that freedom is not a faculty possessed by consciousness but the mode of being of consciousness itself. Chapter Five introduces facticity and situation and develops the distinction between ontological freedom, choice, and efficacy. Chapter Six treats bad faith as the attempt of a free being to disguise its own structure. Chapter Seven follows freedom into anguish and responsibility, places situated answerability within the analytic responsibility tradition, and develops the distinction among formal, practical, relational, and distributive answerability.

The final stage places the account under social and critical pressure. Chapter Eight reads the Critique of Dialectical Reason as the theory of conditioned efficacy missing from the early ontology, develops institutions as architectures that distribute knowledge, authority, cost, and remedial power, and carries the practico-inert through as a strict test of continuity. Chapter Nine moves outside the Sartrean cases. It compares situated and distributive answerability with rival verdicts on the problem of many hands, manipulation, culpable ignorance, structural injustice, and institutional standing. Chapter Ten examines the objections associated with Merleau-Ponty, determinism, and Detmer’s critique of freedom as a value. Chapter Eleven turns the critical method upon both the interpretation and the responsibility theory, asking whether either merely renames familiar distinctions, depends on selective reading, or adds explanatory value beyond the nearest rivals.

A philosophy that places freedom in the structure of consciousness rather than in successful action asks us to separate two matters that ordinary moral and political language often joins: what an agent is and what an agent can do. The first may remain invariant while the second is radically unequal and vulnerable to fortune. Whether that separation clarifies Sartre’s view or merely protects it from counterexample is the question on which the book turns.