The previous article ended on Sartre's formula: existence precedes essence. For a human being there is no pre-existing design to realize, so what you are is settled after the fact, by what you do. That formula is easy to nod at and hard to actually believe, because almost everything in ordinary life assumes the opposite. This article takes Sartre's most quoted phrase — "man is condemned to be free" — and works out what it asserts, why choice and responsibility are for him the same fact described from different angles, and where the feeling of anguish comes from.
The phrase appears in two places, on two levels. Being and Nothingness (1943) works it out as an analysis of consciousness, written in occupied Paris, much of it drafted while Sartre was a prisoner of war. The public lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (delivered 29 October 1945, published 1946) restates it for a general audience and adds an ethical argument on top 4. Keeping the two apart prevents a lot of confusion later.
Freedom is not a power you have
Start with what Sartre does not mean. Ordinary freedom is the absence of obstacles: you are free to the extent that you can do what you want. Sartre explicitly rejects this as the technical sense of the word.
"to be free" does not mean "to obtain what one wishes" but rather "by oneself to determine oneself to wish" … it means only the autonomy of choice. 2
The reason is structural, and it follows directly from existence precedes essence. If there is no human nature, then no fact about you — temperament, upbringing, class, desire — is by itself sufficient to determine what you do. Freedom in Sartre's sense is not one more capacity bolted onto a determined creature. It is the name for the absence of that determining relation. To be conscious at all is to be the kind of thing not exhausted by its causes.
Two consequences follow, and both sound strange until you accept the premise.
First, this freedom cannot be lost, because it isn't a possession. Sartre writes that "no limits to my freedom can be found except freedom itself," and that "we are not free to cease being free." Hence the claim that startles readers: "the slave in chains is as free as his master." The prisoner passage shows the distinction he has in mind, and the care he takes with it:
we shall not say that a prisoner is always free to go out of prison, which would be absurd, nor that he is always free to long for release, which would be an irrelevant truism, but that he is always free to try to escape (or get himself liberated). 2
So: chains can entirely remove your freedom to obtain; they cannot remove the freedom to choose, because choice is not a matter of what the world permits. The slave is not free to live like the master — but he is free to take up his condition as natural, as intolerable, as something to rebel against, or as something to escape from.
Second, this freedom meets real resistance in the world. Sartre calls it the coefficient of adversity: "there is no obstacle in the absolute sense," because an obstacle is only an obstacle relative to a project. A particular crag "may manifest a profound resistance if I wish to displace it" and be "a valuable aid if I want to climb upon it." 2 This is where Sartre's own formulations strain. He says freedom is absolute, and also that "freedom can exist only as restricted since freedom is choice." Both sentences are his. The honest reading is that he means absolute in the choosing sense and limited in the obtaining sense — and that this distinction does a lot of quiet work in his system.
The mechanism: why your motives cannot push you
The abstract claim needs a mechanism, and Sartre gives one through the example of the gambler.
A gambler has resolved, sincerely, never to play again. He now thinks of himself as reformed and relies on that identity to carry him past temptation. Then he approaches the table:
What he apprehends then in anguish is precisely the total inefficacy of the past resolution. It is there, doubtless, but fixed, ineffectual, surpassed by the very fact that I am conscious of it. 3
Why does knowing his resolution destroy its force? Because being conscious of a motive turns it into an object for consciousness — something I stand over against, not something I simply am. And an object is by definition not me and therefore need not move me. Sartre's formulation:
In vain shall I seek to catch hold of them; I escape them by my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of my act. I am condemned to be free. 2
This is not a claim about weak willpower. It is a claim about the structure of consciousness: there is a gap — Sartre calls it a nothingness — between motive and act, and only an act can fill it. The same gap shows up in the climber on a narrow path without a guard rail. He is not afraid the rock will give way (it looks solid) or that wind will push him off (the air is calm). He is afraid he might jump:
If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from throwing myself into the abyss. 3
Nothing in his past, his character, or his will to live guarantees the next step. That is freedom, and notice it is not a pleasant discovery.
Not choosing is still choosing
Because the gap is always there and only an act closes it, declining to act is itself an act. Staying in bed, letting someone else decide, treating a matter as "not my problem" — all of these have to be done, and you are the one doing them. "I had no choice" is, for Sartre, not a description of a fact but a description of a choice (and a dishonest one). This isn't moralism; it's the same structural point: a refusal is sustained by nothing but you.
Responsibility: the same fact, seen from the other side
If nothing else determined your act, then nobody else is its author. Sartre defines responsibility as "consciousness of being the incontestable author of an event or of an object," and its reach is enormous: "he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being," because "nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are." 2
Note the word is author, not cause. Sartre isn't saying you caused your circumstances. He is saying that circumstances only have the meaning they have through a project that is yours. This is why he says you are responsible even for your passions: calling a grand passion an irresistible torrent would turn it back into a cause, and so back into an excuse.
The 1945 lecture then adds a second layer. There, choosing is also legislation: since you always choose what seems better, and a claim that something is better claims it for everyone, "in choosing for himself he chooses for all men." You act, Sartre says, as though "the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing." 1
This is Kantian in flavour and considerably less secure than the 1943 analysis. It is not obvious that deciding to marry commits humanity to monogamy, as Sartre's own example claims 5. Treat the two layers separately: the claim that you must choose and are its author is structural, and the claim that your choice legislates for everyone is a moral argument grafted onto it, and it is the part critics attack. Sartre later expressed reservations about the lecture — his remarks focus on how widely a simplified talk came to stand in for his philosophy rather than on disowning its content.
Where anguish comes from
Angoisse is the pivot of the whole account. Sartre borrows the word from Kierkegaard and Heidegger but gives it a precise structure: anguish is not a mood that accompanies freedom, it is the way freedom becomes conscious of itself. "It is in anguish that man gets the consciousness of his freedom." 2
Its distinguishing mark is direction. Fear has an object in the world; anguish is about me.
anguish is distinguished from fear in that fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself. Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over. 2
Sartre's examples make the contrast concrete. A soldier under bombardment fears the shells; but the recruit who is "afraid of being afraid" — who asks whether he will hold up — is in anguish before himself. Someone who has just lost his fortune fears poverty; a moment later, wringing his hands and asking "what am I going to do?", he is in anguish, because the question has no answer written anywhere. Fear comes from a future that could be imposed on me; anguish comes from a future that I must produce.
So the vertigo on the cliff is not anxiety about the probability of falling. It is the recognition that nothing is holding the person who wants to live in place — that his wanting to live is not a guarantee but something he keeps choosing at every step.
From this, two sources of anguish follow. One is internal to the 1943 analysis: "anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being." Your essence — everything you have been — is separated from you by a nothingness, and must be remade rather than merely relied on. The other is the lecture's added burden: total responsibility, and the sense of acting as a legislator for all humanity.
One thing anguish is not: paralysis. Sartre's example is the military commander who must interpret a general order and thereby decides which of twenty men live. He feels anguish, and it does not stop him from acting — "it is the very condition of their action." 1
Why "condemned"
The word is deliberate and it carries three things. Condemned, because you did not create yourself: you find yourself at liberty whether or not you asked for it, and freedom is not something you can decline. Condemned, because there is no exit — you are "not free to cease being free." And condemned, because there is no excuse. As the lecture puts it, in the passage about God's absence: with no creator there is no human nature to appeal to, and no values written "in an intelligible heaven," so every excuse — temperament, passion, orders, a sign from above — collapses. "We are left alone, without excuse." 1
Sartre's version of Abraham makes the point well. A voice commands the sacrifice, but "if a voice speaks to me, it is still I myself who must decide whether the voice is or is not that of an angel." For Kierkegaard this is the anguish of a religious trial. For Sartre it is proof that no authority can take the decision off your hands.
That leaves an escape route, and Sartre names it bad faith: the attempt to become a thing, to "apprehend ourselves from without as an Other or as a thing." 2 But the flight is itself a choice, so it cannot succeed: "the flight from anguish is only a mode of becoming conscious of anguish." The person pretending to be a fixed type has to keep up the pretence, which means the freedom is still there, doing the pretending.
What this does and doesn't establish
Two neighbours are worth separating off. For Camus, the absurd is the collision between the human demand for meaning and a universe that answers nothing — a different question from "what determines my action." Camus's response is revolt rather than commitment, and in The Rebel he attacks the idea of total freedom as empty rhetoric. Heidegger's Angst is the apprehension of nothingness, not of responsibility; Sartre says the two descriptions imply each other.
The main objections are well known. Merleau-Ponty argued that a freedom present in every action and impossible to lose explains nothing about any particular action, or about why some people can do more with their lives than others. And Sartre's own text oscillates: an absolutely free consciousness that nonetheless "can exist only as restricted" is not obviously one coherent doctrine. His later Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) tries to place freedom inside material scarcity and social structures, which is a different project.
What survives, and what the phrase is doing, is this. Freedom, choice, and responsibility are one thing for Sartre because they are three descriptions of a single structure: no essence means nothing determines you; nothing determining you means an act must come from you; an act coming from you means you are its only author; and becoming aware of being that author is exactly what anguish is. "Condemned" marks the fact that none of it was optional.