Sartre, Freedom, and America

Sartre is one of the few major Philosophers to attain any kind of status in American popular culture, albeit one with little verisimilitude. The most common impression of him, based probably on some of his fiction, seems to be of someone despairing over the absurdity of existence, so that the title 'Being and Nothingness' probably connotes to most who have heard of it a Hamlet-like contemplation of suicide. Thus, there is likely little awareness in America that that work includes a theory of Freedom that is unfamiliar to most Americans. In contemporary American life, 'freedom' generally means a liberty from government interference in activites such as economic, speaking, gun-ownership, and the enjoyment of private pleasures. In stark contrast, in Sartre's theory, it is an ever-present existential radical freedom of choice, complemented by an absolute responsibility for one's actions. Given that he formulated and published this view during the Nazi occupation of France, it is not likely that he would take a poster of Obama with a Hitler moustache as a serious expression of Freedom. But, it is not merely that the American concept is superficial and underdeveloped from the perspective of Sartre's--on his theory it is illusory. For, on that theory, 'doing what one wants' is conditioned behavior insofar as one does not choose what one wants. And, indeed, on the Psychological theory that is the basis of the American system, namely Adam Smith's, derived from Hume's, action is ultimately a slave to passions. Hence, on the theory that predominates in American life, conduct is not Free, on Sartre's definition. Furthermore, Sartre's second major work, Critique of Dialectical Reason, demonstrates how the system that best enhances individual Freedom is, in fact, Socialism. As few Americans that there are who are familiar with that argument, there are probably less that care to hear such a critique of the American system, and even less with the capacity to respond to it with intellectual integrity. So, an abyss lies between the American popular impression of Sartre, and reality.