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Step 4 of 7~8 min read~30 min left
The Condemned to Freedom Passage
Examine Sartre's core claim about freedom, responsibility, and anguish.
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. [...] The anguish of freedom is not the fear of a specific thing but the recognition that nothing, not God, not nature, not society, compels the choice. [...] Bad faith arises from the attempt to deny this freedom: to treat oneself as a thing whose behavior is determined, as a role whose identity is fixed, as a past whose decisions are irrevocable. [...] The waiter who plays at being a waiter is trying to be what he is not, an in-itself, and in doing so flees from the nothingness that is his being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943, trans. Hazel Barnes); 'Existentialism Is a Humanism' (1945); reconstructed from IEP 'Sartre: Existentialism' and Wikipedia 'Being and Nothingness'”