Sartre and the Dialectic of Freedom †

In Being and Nothingness , Sartre claims that consciousness is absolutely and inevitably free. This article defends his ontological conception of freedom against the charge that it cannot account for our experience of limitation, coercion, and external causal determination. I argue that Sartre's claim should not be understood as asserting the imperviousness of consciousness to external limitations or causes but rather its irreducibility to them. Because its activity cannot be exhaustively explained by appealing to them alone, consciousness always contributes to the constitution of its own experience as a free act of self‐determination. After examining Sartre's critiques of determinism and indeterminism, I argue that ontological freedom can be understood in terms of a dialectic between external determination and self‐determination, such that consciousness realizes its freedom in and through conditions limiting its free activity.