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Early Sartre on Freedom and Ethics
Author(s) -
Poellner Peter
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
european journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.42
H-Index - 36
eISSN - 1468-0378
pISSN - 0966-8373
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00532.x
Subject(s) - consciousness , epistemology , self consciousness , autonomy , interpretation (philosophy) , philosophy , argument (complex analysis) , situated , electromagnetic theories of consciousness , object (grammar) , phenomenology (philosophy) , law , political science , computer science , linguistics , biochemistry , chemistry , artificial intelligence
This paper offers a revisionary interpretation of S artre's early views on human freedom. S artre articulates a subtle account of a fundamental sense of human freedom as autonomy, in terms of human consciousness being both reasons‐responsive and in a distinctive sense self‐determining . The aspects of S artre's theory of human freedom that underpin his early ethics are shown to be based on his phenomenological analysis of consciousness as, in its fundamental mode of self‐presence, not an object in the world (Section 1). Sartre has a multi‐level theory of the reasons‐sensitivity of consciousness. At one level, consciousness's being alive to reasons is a matter of the affective perception of values and disvalues as features of phenomenal objects (Section 2). This part of his theory, a development of S cheler's, is, however, situated within a broader phenomenological analysis resulting in the claim that the ultimate reasons acknowledged by consciousness neither are nor justifiably could be values adequately presentable as intentional objects. Consciousness's ultimate reasons are, in this sense, not given by the world but by itself (Section 3). Section 4 reconstructs and assesses S artre's argument that consciousness cannot rationally have an ultimate end other than self‐transparent (‘authentic’) freedom itself.