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¶ … free will as expressed by existentialism. Address Sartre's ideas that "existence precedes essence," bad faith and "we are condemned to be free."
The basis of the Sartrean, existentialist concept of freedom, is that all human beings are free because human beings are not essenial 'selves.' Rather, human beings merely have what is often defined in existentialist terms as "a presence-to-self." This is merely a false sense of conciousness that human beings often mistake for an essential self. In other words, human, lived 'being' or existence really precedes the coming to awareness of what we call, in our illustion, the essential self. There is no essential self for Sartre, there is only a state of being. Human beings do not really have such a core, unalterable self or soul. Rather all human being simply are in the world, swimming in a state of being and lived existence. All human beings are merely in a state of existing in the present moment, and what we do with that existance is up to the free will of every living organism. In other words, humans are always beings in a situation, never a human being outside of a particular context.
Hence, "transcendence" a denial of the self at the core of Sartre's philosophy. Human beings are condemend to be free in that no religious or political doctrine is inherently or intrinisically correct in every situation. No schema can accord for every possible situation fo being or existance. All schemas that attempt to make a claim for their totality of their state of correctness at all times are thus acts of "bad faith," as they attempt to put artificial constraints on human freedom. Rather, for Sartre, life is simply what we make of it, diferent human existences bump up against one another in a random fashion. However, it should also be remembered that for Sartre, a state of human freedom also corresponded to responsibility to the world. Even free existances, not essences (i.e., human beings) are still responsible for the world, the horizon of meaning in which all free beings operate.
Works Cited
Flynn, Thomas. "Jean-Paul Sartre." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 Edition). Edward N. Zalta, Editor. URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/sartre/.
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