Jean-Paul Sartre — "The only true freedom is freedom from choice."
The only true freedom is freedom from choice.
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More from Jean-Paul Sartre
"We are our choices, and we are responsible for our choices."
"The greatest joy of all is to be free."
"The best way to get to know yourself is to risk yourself in the company of others."
"Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence."
"Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root]."
About Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
French existentialist philosopher (Being and Nothingness, 1943) and Nobel literature laureate (refused, 1964) who shaped postwar French intellectual culture. Closely associated with Simone de Beauvoir (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (phenomenologist contemporary and Les Temps Modernes co-editor). For an intellectual contrast, see Albert Camus, Algerian-French novelist and philosopher — Once Sartre's closest collaborator, Camus broke with him publicly in 1952 over Soviet communism; Camus's moral-resistance liberalism and Sartre's revolutionary commitment became the two postwar French Left poles. The Sartre-Camus break is the canonical postwar French intellectual rupture — they argued whether revolutionary violence is ever justified, and never reconciled.
The standard scholarly entry points to Jean-Paul Sartre's work: Annie Cohen-Solal (French biographer, NYU) — Sartre: A Life (1985); Ronald Aronson (Wayne State University, philosophy) — Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship (2004); Bernard-Henri Lévy (French public philosopher) — Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century (2003). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Jean-Paul Sartre.
Details
This is a misinterpretation or ironic twist on Sartre's ideas. He argued that we are condemned to choose, and thus condemned to freedom.
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