Sartre’s Freedom and Duty

In Sartre’s existentialism and ambiguity, he thought that we were sentenced to be free, and thrown to freedom, and there was no any other origin of us except freedom itself. In other words, in Sartre’s perspective, human beings were born to have freedom, people could not to choose a situation lacking freedom, and we even had no idea to escape from this kind of freedom. Freedom is existence; there was no any difference between them. The pursuit of freedom could be derived from Sartre’s childhood, and it was developed with his growth.

l  Freedom in his childhood

Ever since his childhood, he had been feeling free, there was no any ambiguity, contradictory or abstraction in my understanding of freedom. From born to death, he felt freedom clearer and clearer, because Sartre had an unfettered childhood, when he was loved as a little prince by his families. When he realized that all the people were born to be free, this kind of superiority by freedom was lost gradually.

l  The Freedom for Choosing

Human beings were born to be free, so we could not obtain assistance from outside or ourselves, and people were full of annoyance and fear. Human beings needed to choose all the time of lives, we chose to be an ideal person by actions, thoughts, and feelings, and we all had the freedom for choosing at any circumstances. However, there was conflict in his choosing freedom in the whole society even in a specific group: society or world had its specific systems, but our choosing freedom was complete and absolute. Therefore Sartre came up with people’s duty: in his perspective, willingness of a person was absolutely free, there was no any limitations when he made a choice, although a society had its own moral or legal standard, they could not impact this choosing freedom, but human beings must take responsibility for what they did. If a person disobeyed social morality or law, the criticism or punishment were what he needed to take, but these were not the evidence for not being free.

l  Freedom and Others

Sartre summarized the relationship among people: Others are hell. Because the existence of others set up barriers to our freedom, and the ego existence made barriers to others’ freedom. This seemed to be social ridiculous and irony of existence. We could not leave alone in the world without others, but the existence of others was block to our freedom. However, Sartre thought that we had the freedom for choosing, we could obtain freedom by our choice and actions, the existence of others had double meanings, it was either restriction or condition. There was shortcoming or contradictory in the development of Sartre’s theory, which made him continuously amend his thought of freedom, as a philosopher with justice, responsibility and independence, he advocated human beings’ personality and freedom, but did not lose duty to society due to excessive emphasis on freedom. But this was just Sartre’s trap which was difficult to get rid of in his academic life.

l  Freedom and the Practical Value of Duty

Although some scholars thought that Sartre’s theory had contradictory and extreme, it had very positive and practical value on humanism, transforming themselves by people’s willingness and shaping characters by people themselves. Other theory concerning destiny, god, certainty and fate were negative in his perspective, because they were restrictions towards human beings’ choosing freedom. He made us know that people could hold their own destiny; there was no natural things except existence and freedom, hopes were derived from actions. Now that we could decide what to do by ourselves, we should be brave to take responsibility of our decision. If we could reflect ourselves whenever there was conflict, others would not be our hell, but the conditions for our existence.

    After Sartre came up with the conception of choosing freedom, he found moral uncertainty brought by it, which troubled him for a long time, so he did not achieve “absolute freedom” just like what he said. Rather than a serious and deep philosophy, the freedom for choosing was more like a painful, real but difficult pursuit of philosophy.