Sartre and Theology by Kate Kirkpatrick

Author:Kate Kirkpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

This is the reason for the hope many have seen in Sartre’s philosophy: because no matter what the level of our unfreedom at the level of the individual situation we confront, at the level of consciousness we are ontologically free.

But Sartre’s message of freedom is also a message of responsibility. Freedom is ‘the stuff of my being’, and the first step Sartre makes towards making ‘this comprehension’ explicit is to revisit his discussion of bad faith, reminding his reader that since human reality is its own nothingness the human person is ‘condemned to exist forever beyond [his or her] essence’ (BN 461). For if the ‘being of man is to be reabsorbed in the succession of his acts’ (BN 453), then ‘no limit can be found to my freedom except for freedom itself ... we are not free to cease being free’ (BN 462).

He writes that this condemnation to freedom is what he defined earlier as facticity. ‘I can neither abstain totally in relation to what I am (for the Other) – for to refuse is not to abstain but still to assume – nor can I submit to it passively (which in a sense amounts to the same thing). Whether in fury, hate, pride, shame, disheartened refusal or joyous demand, it is necessary for me to choose to be what I am’ (BN 550).

But there are aspects of Sartre’s account of freedom that seem not to merit the label ‘optimistic’. As we shall see in the following chapters, precisely whether Sartre’s view constituted pessimism, optimism or realism (whole or partial) became a matter of theological debate. For in Being and Nothingness Sartre describes freedom as ‘really synonymous with lack’ (BN 586). To be conscious is to exist in a state of perpetual knowledge of nothingness, of falling short. And Sartre explicitly (and famously) refers to this state as one of condemnation: we are ‘condemned to be free’.39

Freedom coincides at its roots with the non-being which is at the heart of man. For a human being, to be is to choose himself; nothing comes to him either from without or from within himself that he can receive or accept. He is wholly and helplessly at the mercy of the unendurable necessity to make himself be, even in the smallest details of his existence. Thus freedom is not a being, it is the being of man, that is to say his non-being. If we begin by conceiving of man as a fullness it becomes absurd to look in him for psychic moments or regions of freedom; we might as well look for an empty space in a vessel which we have filled to the brim. Man cannot be at times free and at other times a slave: either he is always and entirely free or he is not free at all.40

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