Contingency

Contingency is the brute fact that the For-itself exists without having chosen its existence or supplied its own foundation. Sartre’s account makes this lack of ground inseparable from freedom: a person must choose, but cannot choose whether to exist or to be free. Contingency is not simply an obstacle to freedom; it is the condition freedom continually takes up, negates, and gives meaning to through projects in the world.

Definition and Scope

In the For-itself, contingency is facticity: the unchosen fact of being this conscious existent here in the world. It is the necessary connection between the For-itself and the In-itself, including the world and its own past. That connection makes it possible to say that the For-itself is or exists, but it does not furnish a reason why it exists. Its existence is given, not justified.

This distinction prevents freedom from being mistaken for self-creation. If freedom were its own foundation, it would have to choose whether to be free before making any other choice. But such a choice would already require freedom, which would in turn require an earlier choice; the attempted explanation would continue without end. Sartre’s conclusion is that people are a freedom that chooses, but do not choose to be free. They are condemned to freedom, and that condemnation is itself a facticity of freedom.

Absurdity and the Ground of Choice

Because the For-itself cannot avoid choosing itself, its choice is absurd—not because it is irrational or unconnected to reasons, but because choice is what first brings foundations and reasons into the world. A choice is not an isolated, reasonless occurrence in a rational universe. Rather, the very possibility of treating anything as a reason arises through the For-itself’s choosing and pursuing an end. The choice has no ultimate ground outside this activity.

That absence of a foundation does not make freedom mere passivity or random contingency. Freedom turns back toward its existence and illuminates it in the light of an end. In Sartre’s account, it is a perpetual escape from contingency: freedom interiorizes and negates the given, taking up what it did not choose as part of a project. The fact is not erased, but its significance is transformed by the purposes through which the For-itself lives it.

Freedom in a Given Situation

Freedom is never an undetermined power waiting outside the world for an occasion to act. It is always engaged, and a choice is a choice in the world. The For-itself must perpetually withdraw from what it is as a given: it leaves its past behind as a fact that it no longer simply is, while still having to be that past in the light of what it will become. It finds no support in what it was, yet its projects make a world appear by organizing what is given around an end.

The practical sense of freedom shows this dependence clearly. A pass that permits a person to walk at night matters only in relation to a curfew and the situation it creates; without a prohibition on street movement, the permission would have no comparable meaning. Yet the situation does not cause freedom, supply its reasons, or serve as material for a ready-made power. Freedom is not produced alongside being and then applied to it. It is the escape from an engagement in being, a nihilation of the being that the For-itself has to be. Facticity and contingency name the inseparability of that escape from the given existence it takes up.

Projects and Attempts at Justification

The fundamental project is not one particular ambition, passion, or psychological disposition. Those are to be understood through a more primary project concerning the For-itself’s total being-in-the-world: a chosen type of relation to being. Because an end gives the world its organization, this project makes the given intelligible in its light. It is not outside time, nor an instantaneous choice detached from circumstances; in its upsurge, it temporalizes itself, projecting a future that illuminates the present and gives the In-itself data the meaning of pastness.

One effort to escape contingency is to seek recognition from the Other as an existence justified by a function. A person may try to be only a presiding judge or a chief treasurer and paymaster, identifying existence with a role whose purpose appears to justify it. But the role’s end cannot create the existence of the person who performs it. Such an effort to make existence seem warranted by function therefore reinforces, rather than abolishes, the contingency it was meant to escape.

Significance

Contingency sets the limit that gives Sartre’s account of freedom its force: freedom determines itself through choice, but it does not determine that it exists. Suicide, too, remains a choice and an affirmation of being, not an exit from the necessity of choosing. No decision can reach a position outside existence from which the chooser might decline the burden altogether.

The result is a conception of freedom neither as mastery over every circumstance nor as a power that can choose its own starting point. The For-itself is free in relation to what is given because it can pursue ends in spite of a situation; it is contingent because it did not choose the fact that there is a situation, a world, and a self to take up. Freedom makes meaning possible, but cannot turn that meaning into an ultimate justification for being. Its projects continually reinterpret the given without abolishing the groundlessness from which they begin.