Descartes

Descartes is a recurring philosophical interlocutor in Sartre’s analysis of freedom, associated both with the cogito’s search for essential truth and with the claim that the will is free while the passions are subject to determination. Sartre uses this position to sharpen his own argument: freedom is not a faculty set apart from psychic life, but the condition of human existence and choice.

The Cogito and Particular Freedom

Sartre contrasts Descartes and Husserl as thinkers who ask the cogito to disclose a truth of essence. In his account, Descartes reaches a connection between two simple natures, while Husserl grasps the eidetic structure of consciousness. Sartre objects that if consciousness exists before its essence, neither account captures what the cogito can establish: not an essential definition of freedom, but its factual necessity. The cogito instead discloses freedom as the freedom that a particular existent cannot avoid experiencing.

This contrast also marks a limit on what Descartes can contribute to Sartre’s inquiry. Freedom cannot be treated as a universal nature shared identically by every subject; it must be approached as the particular freedom disclosed in existence and acts. Sartre’s argument therefore shifts the question from what freedom is as an essence to how the individual encounters it as an unavoidable condition.

Will and the Passions

Sartre places Descartes within a familiar division: the Cartesian will is free, whereas the passions of the soul can receive a physiological explanation. Later psychological accounts, including intellectualist explanations of jealousy and snobbery, preserve a related picture of psychic life as a set of determined processes besieging a free power. On this view, the will might master, use, or accommodate the passions, much as human beings deal with nature by obeying it in order to control it.

Sartre refuses that synthesis. A spontaneity that is free by definition cannot reach into an already constituted determined process and alter it as an object; nor can a determined process act upon spontaneity. The two kinds of existence would remain heterogeneous and isolated. The alternatives, Sartre argues, are that human beings are wholly determined or wholly free. Because a consciousness externally determined would become mere exteriority and cease to be consciousness, he rejects the first alternative. Descartes’s distinction thus serves as a foil for Sartre’s insistence that freedom cannot be restricted to one psychic faculty while the rest of the person remains determined.

Choice, Action, and Freedom

Sartre also credits Descartes, following Stoicism, with recognizing a distinction between freedom of choice and freedom to obtain what is chosen. Freedom does not guarantee success or the achievement of a desired end; it concerns the subject’s autonomy in choosing. But choice is not merely an unacted wish or dream: it involves a beginning of realization. Sartre accordingly refuses to separate intention from act. Actions disclose intentions, making them available for reflection rather than leaving them only as lived, non-thetic consciousness.

This account makes the example of the prisoner precise. It would be absurd to claim that a prisoner is always free to leave, and trivial to say that the prisoner can always long for release. The relevant freedom is the freedom to attempt escape or seek liberation: to project an end and discover the value of that project by undertaking action. Descartes’s insight, as Sartre presents it, helps dissolve arguments that treat willing and being able as separate measures of freedom. It also clarifies why freedom is not identical with getting what one wants: its evidence lies in choosing through action, even when circumstances obstruct success.