Sartre initially viewed freedom as man's ability to choose due to his consciousness. However, he later recognized criticism of this "ontological" view, namely that oppression involves being forced into bad choices rather than a lack of choice. Sartre thus developed a "material" view of freedom as requiring non-domination, freedom from coercion, basic security, and access to social and cultural resources to pursue one's goals. He saw oppression, like slavery, as a distortion of both the oppressed and oppressor's self-understanding through non-mutual recognition and domination.

1. MAN VIS-À-VIS
FREEDOM
Reporter: Aline G. Tipay
BSED 3F-1

2. Sartre first explores what freedom is and how man
comes to have it.
Freedom itself simply means the ability to choose:
man comes to have this ability thanks to his having
consciousness.
Freedom is synonymous with human
consciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS( Being-for-itself) – is marked by
its non-coincidence with itself.

3. “BEING AND NOTHINGNESS”
“An essay in phenomenological Ontology”, reveals
Sartre’s aim of describing the fundamental
structures of human existence and answering the
question “ What does it mean to be human?
“ Humans, unlike inert matter, are conscious
and therefore free”

4. THE NOTION OF ONTOLOGICAL FREEDOM
It implies that humans are free in all
situation.
In Being and Nothingness, he passionately
argued that even prisoners are free because
they have the power of consciousness.

5. Sartre’s ontological notion of freedom
has been widely criticized.
Important contemporary critic of
Sartre’s work was his colleague
Maurice Merleau- Ponty

6. Sartre later works, he became critical of
what he then called the “Stoical” and
“Cartesian” view that freedom consists in
the ability to change one’s attitude no
matter what the situation.

7. Sartre’s shift to a material conception of freedom was motivated
directly by the holocaust and World War II.
 Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946),
published just after the war, was the first of many works analyzing
moral responsibility for oppression.
 The fact that Sartre’s view in Being and Nothingness seemed to
leave little room for diagnosing oppression did not stop him from
articulating a forceful normative critique of Anti-Semitism. His
analysis of oppression would, in fact, use the same dialectical
tools as those in the section on “concrete relations with others”
in Being and Nothingness.

8. Sartre’s new appreciation of oppression as a concrete
loss of human freedom forced him to alter his view that
humans are free in any situation.
Take the case of the prisoner. The prisoner is
ontologically free because she controls whether to
attempt escape. On this view, freedom is synonymous
with choice. But there is no qualitative distinction between
types of choices.

9. In Anti-Semite and Jew and Notebooks Sartre
implicitly addresses the above criticism,
arguing that oppression consists not in the
absence of choice, but in being forced to
choose between bad, inhumane options
(Notebooks, pp. 334-5).

10. In the political period as a whole Sartre developed his
material view of freedom by contrasting the free person
with the slave.
Though his notion of slavery is derived from Hegel,
Sartre, unlike Hegel, diagnosed literal cases like
American chattel slavery.
Sartre follows Hegel in portraying slavery as a form of
“non-mutual recognition” where one person dominates
the other psychologically and physically. A slave, he
argues, is un-free because he is dominated by a master
(Notebooks pp. 325-411).

11. Material freedom requires, therefore, non-
domination, or freedom from coercion. He adds
that in master/slave relations, the self-conception
of the victim and perpetrator are intertwined and
distorted; both parties are in “bad faith”; both fail to
fully understand their own freedom. Though both
perpetrator and victim are in bad faith, only the
slave is coerced physically (Notebooks, p. 331).

12. •Sartre’s view of material freedom is independent of
any notion of human nature. He consistently rejects
the existence of a pre-social human essence or a
set of natural human desires (“Existentialism is a
Humanism”; Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 49; Search
for a Method, pp. 167-181).

13. we can say that a person is materially free in
Sartre’s sense if
(a) she enjoys basic material security;
(b) she is un-coerced; and
(c) she has access to cultural and social goods
necessary for pursuing her chosen projects.

14. QUESTIONS

15. 1. It implies that humans are free in all situations.
a. Consciousness
b. Notion of Ontological Freedom
c. Material view of Freedom
d. Ontological

16. 2. It is the concrete loss of freedom.
a.Oppression
b.Non-domination
c.Freedom from coercion
d.poverty

17. 3. It is marked by its non-coincidence itself.
a. Ontological
b. Consciousness
c. Material view of freedom
d. Notion of Ontological Freedom

18. 4. It simply means ability to choose?
a. Consciousness
b. Notion of Ontological Freedom
c. Material view of Freedom
d. Freedom

19. 5. Person is materially free in Sartre’s view, EXEPT
ONE:
a. She is coerced
b. She enjoys basic material security
c. She has access to cultural and social goods
necessary for pursuing her chosen projects.
d. She is un-coerced

20. END OF MY
REPORT!