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, freedom and/or choice:
“We must introduce a new balance in the relationship between the individual and the government—a balance that favors greater individual freedom and self-reliance.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Then did they strive with emulation who should repeat most wise maxims importing the necessity of suspicion in the choice of our friends—such as “mistrust is the mother of security,” with many more to the same effect.... But notwithstanding the esteem which they professed for suspicion, yet did they think proper to veil it under the name of caution.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)