originate with him? He must be free in his very being. In a revision of
Heidegger’s phrase, an expression that will define “existentialism”
from then on, Sartre remarks: “Human freedom precedes essence
in man and makes it possible; the essence of the human being is
suspended in his freedom. What we call freedom is impossible to
be distinguished from the being of ‘human reality’” (BN 25 ). This
“ontological freedom,” what Sartre will later call “freedom as the
definition of ‘man’” inEH, will constitute both the highest value
of existentialist thought as it exemplifies the Greek (and Nietzschean)
maxim to “become what you are.”^40 But this narrow concept of free-
dom will constitute a major limitation as the movement develops
a social conscience in the 1940 sandseekstheontologytosupportit
in the 1950 s.
This focus on Nothingness opens the door to a phenomenology of
all the “negativities” (ne ́gativite ́s) that populate our experience, from
the fragility of a glass or a friendship to such phenomena as distance,
distraction or regret. In fact, Sartre will echo Heidegger in saying that
human reality (Dasein) is “a being of distances” (BN 17 ). One senses
the ontological dimension of the many psychological descriptions that
punctuate Sartre’s imaginative literature. No wonder the influential
Marxist structuralist and arch foe of Sartre, Louis Althusser, could sniff
(^40) In other words, “Actualize your creative freedom.” Though he devotes more space to the
question of values later in the book, already in this first chapter he relates nothingness and
freedom to the anguish of creating moral values: “What I call everyday morality [later, “the
spirit of seriousness”] is exclusive of ethical anguish. There is ethical anguish when
I consider myself in my original relation to values...My freedom is the unique foundation
of values...As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable” (BN 38 ). This leads to a
clutch of existentialist themes that will broadcast Sartre’s nascent philosophy to a wide
public:
I emerge alone and in anguish confronting the unique and original project which
constitutes my being; all the barriers, all the guard rails collapse, nihilated by the
consciousness of my freedom. I do not have nor can I have recourse to any value against
the fact that it is I who sustain values in being. Nothing can insure me against myself, cut
off from the world and from my essence by this nothingness which Iam. I have to realize
the meaning of the world and of my essence; I make my decision concerning them –
without justification and without excuse.
BN 39 )
We should keep this relation of anguish and moral creativity in mind throughout our
reflections on Sartre’s three approaches to ethics. It will remain the recurrent theme, the
cantus firmus, of Sartre’s “ethical variations” from now on.
Being and Nothingness 183