Sartre: Leading an Authentic Life

An introduction to the philosophy and existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, looking at his phenomenology, his ideas about consciousness as free, as being for-itself.

Are you free? What does freedom really mean? The broadest definition of freedom is to be able to choose, to make decisions that aren’t forced or determined by someone or something else. But aren’t we all born with, into, and are constrained by personalities, skills, character traits, our specific bodies, emotional make-ups, an IQ, an environment, an upbringing?

Don’t all of these things make a me, an I, that constrains my possibilities?

Even if we’re free in the world – free to go where we want and do the things we want to do – surely we’re not free from these personal things. Surely we’re determined by them, they impose themselves upon us. Aren’t we imprisoned by ourselves?

Sartre’s answer is a resounding NO. We’re always free, unconditionally, transcendentally, universally, and more than that, we can choose to create ourselves, to fashion our experience of the world into a beautiful, meaningful, purposeful pattern; a melody.

Through his novel Nausea and his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s ideas about freedom, anxiety, and the transcendence of the ego are all explored.

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Sources:

Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism

Mark Carroll, 'It Is': Reflections on the Role of Music in Sartre's 'La Nausée, Music and Letters

Jonathan Webber, Sartre’s Theory of Character

Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Sartre, Nausea

David Detmer, Sartre Explained: From Bad Faith to Authenticity

Credits:

JeanPaul Sartre Photo

Unknown author, CC BYSA 3.0 NL via Wikimedia Commons