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Freedom and the Origins of Reasons

This chapter clarifies the core descriptive claim of existentialism that the reasons for action encountered in experience depend on the values at the heart of the agent’s projects. It argues that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre’s initial form of existentialism fails because it mistakes this for a claim about the meanings encountered in experience. Sartre’s initial form of existentialism agrees with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology that experienced meanings are determined by the agent’s physical capabilities and social situation. Sartre adds that the world is experienced as a field of reasons that encourage and discourage specific courses of action and that these reasons reflect the agent’s projects. Sartre’s theory of radical freedom is that projects have no inertia of their own, so one can revise or replace a project without needing any reason to do so or meeting any resistance from that project.