The Nothingness of Freedom
“Everything that I have tried to write or do in my life was meant to stress the importance of freedom.” Sartre, 1975
Following the tradition of 20th century Continental philosophy, Sartre characterizes human beings with a fundamental lack. As he indicates, “human reality… exists first as lack and in immediate, synthetic connection with what it lacks,” we come into existence recognizing ourselves as “incomplete” beings. Apprehending our possibilities to become, we strive to surpass our facticity to fill our inborn fissure. This endeavor to transcend ourselves defines our desire. However, such desire is our fantasized dream that is not realizable, for we are beings who can never become who are not. The inherent lack within human reality and the impossibility of satisfying our desire demonstrate an absolute freedom is purely an unattainable ideal. Nonetheless, Sartre tries to establish freedom as the highest value and devise a theory for radical freedom by emphasizing the power of our imagination. He regards imagination as a faculty through which we realize our infinite possibilities, attain our insatiable desires, and reach our ultimate freedom. Exaggerating imagination’s power and failing to recognize its limitation, Sartre fabricates a freedom that is merely a product of our imagination with which we console ourselves when confronting the difficult freedom we are given. As his famous slogan “man is condemned to be free”3 hints, a dialectical reversal of Sartre’s theory reveals that his freedom grounds upon man’s unfreedom; it is a beautiful illusion that mistakes the imaginary as the real.
Sartre’s early works, The Imaginary and The Psychology of Imagination, emphasize the importance of imagination in our creating of ourselves and defining of our essences. Imagination, a constitutive part of our consciousness, both negates and invents. As a negating consciousness, it pulls us away from the reality we are immersed in and creates a transcendent space in which we see our possibilities. As an active and intentional consciousness, it formulates a relation between our consciousness and its intending object, and enables us to perceive a world with meanings. Through imagining, we create a world that is mine and mine alone. Imagination is presented as the only faculty that allows us to surpass our facticity and define our own being. The imaginary, referring to the imaginary world, becomes the sole realm in which our desires can be possibly satisfied and our freedom can be possibly achieved, for it is only there we can fully possess our objects of desire, coincide our facticity with possibility, and become our own God.
However, as Sartre’s phenomenological description of the twofold relationships between desire and imagination reveals, imagination is only able to appease some of our desires but never completely satisfy them. The problem lies in the Nothingness our desires point to in the process of their coming to be through the work of imagination. On the one hand, desire draws its energy from imagination and is conditioned by imagination. Adopting Husserlian intentionality, Sartre argues that our desires are “outside” of our consciousness and our objects of desire exist in reality. Consciousness, defined as the awareness of being conscious of something, presupposes a perceptual object in the real to which we intend. Our imaginative consciousness interprets it and endows it with a meaning, which gives rise to our desire. Sartre then takes a departure from Husserl and claims that “the two worlds, real and imaginary, are composed of the same objects,”4 but they only differ in the ways of us being conscious of the objects. Our objects of desire in the imaginary has a one-to-one correspondence with those in the real, and consequently our desires always refer back to the abstract objects we cannot grasp.
The absolute and irreducible distance between the objects of desire in the imaginary and those in the real indicates a necessary exclusion between our perception and imagination, and it opens up a space where imagination is free to condition and modify our desires. In the imaginary, our objects of desire are images that “know a certain fullness together with a certain nothingness.” The uncertain nature of the images requires imagination to refurnish its concreteness in order for it to appear present and become “real.” However, as imagination conditions the images, our original desire fades and a new element of desire the “desirable” is added. The “desirable,” the pure act of desiring, the Desire with the capitalized D, translates desire into desiring desire. As Sartre states, “desire is moved by the desirable,” our fascination of the act of desiring substitutes our original purpose pursuing the object. We chase after “the empty absolute,” the ultimate ideal universal Desire characterized by its pure absence that we are never able to own. Although we can appease some of our desires by obtaining empirical objects along the way of pursuing the “desirable,” we can never fully satisfy our desires because we are desiring the Desire.
Imagination conditions our desires and leads us into a realm beyond the real and the imaginary in which we are forever ignorant of and lost. Under the irresistible force imposed by the “desirable,” we desire to desire. We consume our desires to reach the “desirable.” Guiding our actions and determining our creation of ourselves, the “desirable” endows the value of desiring to our existence. The order of existence and essence is thus reversed existence no longer precedes essence but satisfying the “desirable” comes before creating our own meanings. Human freedom is completely compromised in our futile battling against the thought of desire. Desire created through imagination mercilessly exposes our emptiness in the unbearable gaze of Nothingness, an ontological “desirable” as the telos governing our being. Sartre’s radical freedom dissolves in the realm of Nothingness in which we have no comprehension and control. Recognizing the challenge posed by this realism, Sartre turns to the imaginary for a solution.
In the imaginary, our desire directs our action and motivates imagination. Imagination becomes an active act of consciousness that creates our objects of desire so we can become the foundation of our own world. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre proposes an ontological dualism that defines human beings as being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Based on this model, he describes our fundamental desire as our pursuit of being-in-itself-for-itself. Being-in-itself, the is, is a self-complete being that has a nature and essence. It is “uncreated, without reason for being, without any connect with another being… de trop for eternity.” On the contrary, being-for-itself is a pure consciousness that contains nothing. It is the power to negate. As both being-in-itself and being-for-itself, humans look beyond our facticity by negating the reality we are immersed in. We pursue our possibilities to fulfill our lack of essence and strive to become a perfect being who unites with himself, “the in-itself [that]… knows no otherness.” However, the wish to reconcile and coincide being-in-itself and being-for-itself is an accomplishable task. By becoming being-in-itself, which is a fixed identity, we destroy our power to negate and the very nature of being-for-itself. Because freedom demands an absolute distance between oneself and one’s consciousness, such unified identity fundamentally cannot be formed.
Motivated by this insatiable desire, we use imagination as a tool to achieve our being-in-itself-for-itself. Imagination draws its energy from our endless “useless passion,” the fervent desire that moves us in our interminable pilgrimage of becoming. We extravagantly exercise our power to negate, intend, and invent. Desire manifests itself through our imagination first as an obscure concept and a thrusting force propelling us to create our existence and a world of meaning. Our objects of desire become concrete and replace the absences of our lack in the real: “the object as an image is a definite want; it takes shape as a cavity.” They carry a part of our unbearable energy as empirical objects, counteracting our excessive “useless passion,” which culminates to our death. However, in gaining presence and essence in the imaginary, objects of desire dissociate from the real and become unreal. The “reality” of the object in the imaginary directly relates to the “unreality” of the object in the real. In the imaginary, therefore, imagination redefines reality and prioritizes the imaginary before the real. “The abyss that separates the imaginary from the real” disappears as imagination substitutes the real with the imaginary. We foolishly trap ourselves in the imaginary, in which we finally are able to possess our desire and achieve a temporal being-in-itself that is no more than an illusion. As the real dissolves in front of the imaginary, we become rootless beings who wander in our fantasy. The solipsistic nature of the imaginary restricts us within the boundary delineated by our imagination. We become objects of our imagination as we fascinate ourselves with the magic that imagination presents. Sartre describes such solipsistic minds as pathologies in the examples of narcissists and neurotics. He further concludes that “all who imagine are sick” because they are trapped by the ideology of transcendence that leads to nothing but the emptiness of the imaginary. In the imaginary, mental images become nothings because of their essential unreality and we become nothings because of our total negation of the real. Our nothingness is filled not by us but our desire for transcendence. Existence, therefore, is not our creation. Instead, Nothingness defines our essence. We are nothings chasing after Nothingness, driven by our “useless passion,” forever condemned to live in our imagination.
By indicating the fundamental tension between human lack and desire as well as illustrating the dynamic between desire and imagination, Sartre ruthlessly crushes our childish wish of fulfilling our lack and asserts that “this world is difficult.” Abandoning “this world,” he flees to the imaginary and the realm of the “desirable” to justify human freedom. However, both justifications point to a Nothingness that dictates human actions. On the course to fulfill our lack and be absolutely free, we are either enslaved by the ideology of Nothingness or imprisoned by imagination’s emptiness. Desire and freedom stand in absolute opposition to each other, and freedom is reduced to either realistic or solipsistic when it is compromised for desire. As he develops his theory, Sartre seems to recognize this fundamental dichotomy. However, he still aims to justify freedom as the highest value in the shadow casted by Nothingness. Therefore, Sartre is forced to abandon his attempt to establish an absolute freedom and seek a freedom in between the imaginary and the real, traversed by imagination as a negating consciousness.
Sartre famously claims that “existence precedes essence,” that the value of life lies in our act of choosing at each moment of our existence. As we choose, we create ourselves and define our essence. We embody our freedom. The process of we exercising our freedom, that is choosing, committing, and willing, consists freedom’s value. He takes this stance further and indicates that man is so free that “man is condemned to be free.” Although we cannot avoid the act of choosing, we determine the outcomes of the situation. However, this freedom comes with a cost of our happiness, “human reality is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.” The masochistic violence this freedom brings demonstrates the harsh reality we have to unconditionally accept. From this point of view, human existence can be equated as seeking joy in suffering.
The dualistic nature of Sartre’s philosophy and his pessimistic view of human reality as lack give rise to a freedom that is established upon unfreedom. Sartre digs deep into the darkness of despair and conceives hope with his blinded eyes. The hope which he delivers perhaps is a real light that we do not see, yet the possibility of it being invented should also be acknowledged. Jacques Lacan criticizes Sartre’s freedom as follows:
[Existentialism proposes] a freedom that is never so authentically affirmed as when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment that expresses the inability of pure consciousness to overcome any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization sexual relationships; a personality that achieves self-realization only in suicide; and a consciousness of the other that can only be satisfied by Hegelian murder. The freedom rooted in our insatiable desire, our ambiguous human situation, and the limitation of our imagination is a lie that we tell to console ourselves. The self-deceptive illusion of being free serves merely as a placebo we take to comfort ourselves. But perhaps “the walls of a prison” are products of our imagination, built to fill up the Nothingness in us so we can be something in this difficult world. To believe, or not to believe, that is the question.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith P. Subjects of Desire : Hegelian Reflections in TwentiethCentury France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Print.
Fink, Bruce, 1956, and Jacques Lacan 1901. Ecrits : The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
Kearney, Richard. Poetics of Imagining : Modern to PostModern. New York: Fordham University Press, 1998. Print.
. The Wake of Imagination : Toward a Postmodern Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905. Being and Nothingness; an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Print.
. Existentialism and Humanism. Brooklyn: Haskell House, 1977. Print.