The freedom of facticity

Abstract

“Here I am—Jew, or Aryan, handsome or ugly, one-armed, etc. I am all of this for the Other with no hope of changing it.” Thus wrote Sartre in his Being and Nothingness. But was not Sartre the major advocate of existential freedom, with the tenet that “we are condemned to be free”—no matter what our situation might be? The question hence arises: How free are we from the facticity of situations, particularly ones in which we are subject to collective identification? How free are we to change the situations—places, environments, histories, others—that we inevitably belong to and which subject us to collective identities? How free are we from identification in terms of others? How free are we to transform such identification? These questions are of particular relevance given the harmful effects of collective ascriptions and the currently pressing demand to transform them. In an attempt to address these questions, I offer as alternative to Sartre’s concept of the “facticity of freedom” what I would like to call the “freedom of facticity”.