Freedom and Choice
A critical claim in existentialist thought is that individuals are always free to make choices and guide their lives towards their own chosen goal or "project". The claim holds that individuals cannot escape this freedom, even in overwhelming circumstances. For instance, even an empire's colonized victims possess choices: to submit to rule, to negotiate, to act in complicity, to commit suicide, to resist nonviolently, or to counter-attack.
Although external circumstances may limit individuals (this limitation from the outside is called facticity), they cannot force a person to follow one of the remaining courses over another. In this sense the individual still has some freedom of choice. For this reason, individuals choose in anguish: they know that they must make a choice, and that it will have consequences. For Sartre, to claim that one amongst many conscious possibilities takes undeniable precedence (for instance, "I cannot risk my life, because I must support my family") is to assume the role of an object in the world, not a free agent, but merely at the mercy of circumstance (a being-in-itself that is only its own facticity, i.e., it "is" inside itself, and acts there as a limitation).
Read more about this topic: Bad Faith (existentialism)
Famous quotes containing the words freedom and/or choice:
“To thee, fair Freedom! I retire
From flattery, cards, and dice, and din:
Nor art thou found in mansions higher
Than the low cot, or humble inn.
‘Tis here with boundless pow’r I reign;
And ev’ry health which I begin
Converts dull port to bright champagne;
Such Freedom crowns it, at an inn.”
—William Shenstone (1714–1763)
“... given a choice between hearing my daughter say “I’m pregnant” or “I used a condom,” most mothers would get up in the middle of the night and buy them herself.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)