From Socrates to Sartre EP27 ⟩ “Sartre III: ‘Condemned To Be Free’”
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These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.
Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.
Sartre III: Condemned To Be Free
Welcome to your life sentence, displayed before you by Thelema as she dons her Ghost of Christmas Past hat and carries us back to a Christmastime Sartre writing away at the height of his powers.
Paris, Winter 1942–43. Outside, the Left Bank shivers under crystal bitters; inside, the cafés thicken with smoke and din, wine-dark chatter, and the clink of glass (just as is heard here in this Hendrix song). Amid the murmur and the weight of occupation, in that Satanic forge of warmth and barbarism, Sartre’s interior intensity surges, and after some amphetamine-fueled hammering, Being and Nothingness is born.
In it you will find the most famous counterintuitive truth of the 20-cent —
Man is condemned to be free.
Thrill with joy as Dr. Lavine plunges her urethral sound into the spinal fluid of that claim’s notochordal canal, and recreates it all proper-like and from scratch.
She starts with Sartre’s phenomenological method, then [patented series of steps here], and then finally brings us to the existential vertigo that (studies show) reliably follows once the victim has lost every external anchor—God, essence, history, even her self’s own private interior biography. After this, what’s left?
Freedom as Power to Nihilate
One of Sartre’s great moves was to fork Husserlian phenomenology into its currently fashionable Buddhist core. Consciousness is not a thing, he shows us. It is neither a container of thoughts nor a Cartesian substance. It is instead a no-thing—a transparent clearing through which the world appears. Also, this transparency isn’t passive but active—an active universal solvent.
When Sartre looks for Pierre in the café and finds only Pierre’s absence, the solid café dissolves into a mere background for a non-being. Consciousness inserts a gap, a nothingness, between itself and things. It nihilates being.
This is Sartre’s still popular metaphysics of human freedom. Our freedom just is this capacity to separate, negate, suspend, and imagine alternatives. Freedom is not just one tool in our toolbox of capacities, wielded by a positive, perduring protagonist; it is the ontological structure of consciousness itself!
Freedom Cuts Both Ways
Hello Abyss. Goodbye psychological drives, social structures, Marxian base, Freudian past. Sartre’s bitter pill of NO EXCUSES means I cannot in good faith blame outer reasons for what I am or will be. Between me and any such fact there is always a gap—nothingness—in which choice takes place. We are free to choose a totally novel self-path, self-story, self-acting—right where we are sitting now.
A gambler’s past resolution, an addict’s promise, a writer’s aspiration: none determines the present act. In each new situation, freedom is ex nihilo, spontaneous, ungrounded. This is Sartre’s refusal of every deterministic account of the human condition. “Reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown. Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog!”
Fractal Responsibility
Everyone loves freedom these days. Freedom fries still exist, and Republicans love “freedom” so much that they inverted its meaning. Freedom is the great American distinction. We love it!™
But Sartre’s freedom is a nightmare. Freedom seeps into places it shouldn’t. Like into responsibility for meaning-making, and responsibility for world-making. No God, no Platonic form, no universal science can step in to tell us what our choices mean. We alone confer meaning on the brute facts of our existence.
Freedom is a life sentence to total responsibility and self-making.
Our Beloved Flight into Bad Faith
The good news is that the dread of such naked responsibility is so intense that it drives us into bad faith, Sartre’s improved version of the topic formerly known as self-deception. So it’s not really good news.
Sample situations:
- The woman on the date pretends her hand is “just a thing.”
- The waiter performs his role as though it were his essence.
- The anti-Semite hardens himself into a rocklike “French identity” to escape contingency.
Bad faith is the human temptation to become a thing—to pretend that freedom can be escaped. The trick rebuttal is that even this evasion is itself a free act, and thus reveals the very freedom it denies.
Is Sartre’s vision just a historical artifact of an abnormal, temporary, unhappy wartime consciousness? Maybe, but that doesn’t matter because the upshot is not only true but inescapable —
- We do not get to choose whether to be free.
- We only choose what we make of that freedom, or whether to disavow it.
METHOD
Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:
Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:
ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE
Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.
She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.
View all of our coming episodes here.