By Williams, Fidelis Yakunat
The question of freedom and action has been controversial down through the ages. It concerns the power or ability of the person to choose a course of action and take responsibility for it without being subject to restraints imposed by antecedent causes or necessity. This is the question Jean Paul Sartre, one of the twentieth century French existentialist philosophers, deals with in his philosophy. His position is that man is free; and to prove this, he identifies human reality with being for-itself or consciousness in his famous work: Being and Nothingness. According to Sartre, in the for-itself, existence precedes and commands essence. This means that the human being is first of all a being with no definite nature or essence. It is only in existing that man determines his essence; and this is what constitutes freedom. The human person is characterized by action and that is the expression of freedom. Sartre went further to state that though man is free, his freedom is a factical one, that is, in a situation, a freedom that goes with responsibility. The purpose of this work was to expose Sartre’s notion of freedom and action; investigate the tenability of Sartre’s position; examine the ethical implications of his notion of freedom and action; and highlight its strengths and weaknesses. The historical, expository and evaluative methods were used for this research. The study finds out that Sartre tied his idea of freedom to that of choice and insisted that freedom is not like a property to be added to the being of a person, but it is part of the being of a person to be free. This freedom is expressed in action. It is a freedom in a situation and a freedom with responsibility. This notion of freedom as choice is very tenable as it agrees with the experience of our everyday life. However, Sartre failed in his notion of freedom in his attempt to remove the idea of God and creation from his philosophy. The idea of God is never at variance with human freedom. The strength of Sartre’s theory is in its idea of responsibility which can be a spring board for ethical standards. On the other hand, its major weakness is that his idea of freedom can encourage an ethics of subjectivism.