

































7Issue XII  Spring 2025

To Live Free or To Make Excuses

TO LIVE FREE OR TO MAKE EXCUSES
IN DEFENSE OF SARTRE’S (REVISED)  

CONCEPT OF RADICAL FREEDOM

PALOMA FIGUEROA



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

 Is the slave as free as his master? The prisoner as free as his 
captor? Before even attempting to answer these questions, one cannot 
help but imagine how easy it would be to challenge anybody who dared 
affirm such propositions: not only given the semantic absurdity of trying 
to equate the freedom of the slave with that of his master when the 
master-slave relationship is defined by the negation of one individual’s 
freedom by another, but more importantly given the undeniable reality of 
the physical constraints imposed upon slaves by their masters by virtue 
of the latter’s dominant status and power. Still, Jean-Paul Sartre was one 
who affirmed that “the slave in chains is as free as his master,”1 a claim 
which, along with his overarching concept of freedom, has earned him 
quite a few objections and caricatures – including the comic above.2 
Here, the same Sartre who unshakably states to Simone de Beauvoir 
that freedom cannot be taken from us except by ourselves ends up in 
shackles against the wall of a dungeon, as Beauvoir guides him through 
a thought experiment to test through how many restrictions of freedom 
Sartre still considers himself “totalement libre.”3

1  Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. 
Paris: Gallimard, 1943.

2  Existential Comics: a philosophy comic about the inevitable anguish of 
living a brief life in an absurd world. Also jokes. “Sartrean Freedom.” (n.d.) 

3  Sartre, L’être et le néant, 741. Quoted in FØLLESDAL, Dagfinn, and 
Henri SARLET. “LA LIBERTÉ CHEZ SARTRE.” Revue Internationale de 
Philosophie 35, no. 135 (1981): 41–59.



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To Live Free or To Make Excuses

 Though this comic is caricatural, there is always some truth 
behind caricature––and indeed it is true that Sartre’s initial concept of 
freedom elaborated in Being and Nothingness (1943) was, even from 
an existentialist perspective, radical. Existentialism is a philosophy 
centered around human freedom and responsibility within a universe 
considered devoid of inherent meaning. According to existentialists like 
Sartre, we are ‘thrown’ into this universe at birth, left alone to construct 
our own existence through our choices and actions, without any higher 
being or predetermined essence to turn to––hence the fundamental 
existentialist idea that “existence precedes essence.”4 Beyond this 
shared idea, what makes Sartre stand out from other existentialists is 
his conception of freedom as limitless and unconditional. To him, every 
human agent, regardless of their personal circumstances, is always free 
to choose their course of life in accordance with their freely set projects. 
Obstacles to one’s freedom only arise in light of those projects, not as 
material constraints. It follows that, by reorienting one’s project, one 
can eliminate those obstacles. Therefore, there is no such thing, from 
Sartre’s perspective, as an in-itself limit to my freedom; in fact, to 
consider myself limited in that regard would be to act inauthentically, in 
“bad faith”, wherein I self-deceptively interpret my given circumstances 
as being outside of my control, and thus consider myself unable to freely 
choose otherwise. Hence why the caricatured Sartre in the comic above 
holds on for dear life to his interpretation of himself as free despite his 
circumstances––even as a prisoner in shackles. To consider his freedom 
lost would be to surrender to bad faith, thus becoming more of an object 
than a conscious human being. 

 As the comic suggests, Sartre’s radical freedom has been 
subject to many objections––some of which convinced Sartre to revise 
his thesis. Perhaps most notably, his fellow existentialist thinker and 
lifelong partner, Beauvoir, insisted against Sartre that people are not all 
equally free, due to social inequalities and sedimentation––a concept 
that we will explore in detail in section II for its centrality to Beauvoir’s 
existentialist theory and to her philosophical disagreement with Sartre. 
Though the latter revised his theory in light of Beauvoir’s insights, 
even this less hyperbolic concept of freedom has been directly and 
indirectly challenged since, namely by contemporary cognitive science. 
Indeed, countless recent findings reveal that the human brain appears 
to be determined by various internal processes and external influences, 

4  Gallagher, S., Fuchs, T., Zahavi, D., & Aho, K. Existentialism (Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

upending not just Sartrean freedom, but the very existentialist foundation 
of free will and lack of pre-given essence. These findings leave Sartreans 
with a rather angoissant existential problem: faced with such serious 
objections to human freedom, let alone to “radical” freedom, can the 
latter concept still hold any value, or should we discard it along with our 
very conception of ourselves as free agents? Further, what contributions, 
if any, can the canonical version of existentialism5 make to current 
thinking and how can it evolve going forward, faced with the scientific 
advances since these foundational existentialist works were published?  

 In this paper, I argue that there is a way to hold on to our 
felt freedom as human agents while acknowledging the neurological 
and social factors that may limit us psychologically and sometimes 
physically. I argue that, in fact, we should hold onto our belief in the 
possibility we have to transcend those limits imposed on us, rather than 
considering ourselves determined and powerless, lest we fall into the 
“bad faith” Sartre warned of. This, as we will see, is one of the valuable 
contributions that existentialism can still make today. With this in mind, I 
will start by explaining Sartre’s initial form of existentialism–the concept 
of “radical” freedom––based on passages from Being and Nothingness 
and Existentialism is a Humanism. I will then consider a variety of 
objections to Sartre’s thesis, first at the sociological level with excerpts 
from Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, then at the 
neurological level with excerpts from Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: 
A Science of Life Without Free Will and a recent paper by Neil Levy. To 
the sociological objections I will respond with Sartre’s revised theory of 
freedom inspired by Beauvoir’s philosophy and described by Jonathan 
Webber in Rethinking Existentialism. As for the objections from 
neuroscience, I will respond by arguing that it is of pragmatic importance 
that we see ourselves as free agents even if the cognitive sciences do not 
regard us as such. Finally, I will end with Webber’s argument in favor of 
conserving existentialist philosophy for the significant contributions that 
it can bring to various fields beyond individual existence in today’s world. 

5  As Jonathan Webber calls it in Rethinking Existentialism; more on this idea 
in section III.



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To Live Free or To Make Excuses

§ I: "NO MATTER THE CIRCUMSTANCE, WE ARE ALWAYS 
FREE": SARTRE'S INITIAL CONCEPT OF FREEDOM6

 Though Sartre did revise his version of existentialism later in his 
philosophical career, the main ideas for which he is remembered––and 
caricatured––stem from his initial concept of human freedom. In this 
section, I will attempt to summarize the key elements of this foundational 
radical theory which I aim to defend later in this paper.

 In his essay Existentialism is a Humanism published in 1946, 
based on a lecture he gave the previous year during a conference, 
Sartre states that there is one idea that unites all existentialists, whether 
Christian or atheist7–– namely, that “existence precedes essence.”8 From 
the perspective of atheist existentialism, which Sartre adheres to, this 
is the idea that there is no such thing as a shared human nature because 
“there is no God to conceive it.” As such, human beings exist “before 
they can be defined by any concept.” Objects, in contrast, are defined by 
the concept for which they were produced. The paper cutter, for example, 
is crafted in a specific way for a predetermined use: the “essence” of the 
paper cutter, or “the recipes and qualities which allow for its production 
and definition”, precedes its existence insofar as the role of the paper 
cutter is determined, and the paper cutter cannot be defined beyond 
that role.9 Contrary to the paper cutter, Sartre argues, human beings 
are essentially nothing: “man exists first, meets himself, arises in the 
world,”10 and defines himself only thereafter, during the course of his 
existence. In other words, man is a blank slate at birth, undefinable 
because there was no God to define and craft him, and through the years 

6 I will be quoting parts of the comic above in the heading of each of the 
three sections of this paper, but to be clear, these are not Sartre’s own 
words; the same precision applies to the following headings.

7  It must be noted that Sartre’s strict duality between Christians on the one 
hand and atheists on the other excludes religious atheists of other faiths 
than Christianity. Among 20th century existentialists of Jewish faith, for 
example, we can think of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, namely. In 
this passage, Sartre only mentions Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel – both 
Christian – as figures of the non-atheist existentialist school of thought 
that he opposes. Yet while considering the opposition between religious 
existentialism and atheist existentialism, Sartre omits the fact that Christians 
have not been the only ones to make contributions to the former.

8  Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Gallimard, 1996), 
26. 

9  Sartre, 27.
10 Sartre, 29.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

he defines himself through his actions. “Man is nothing more than what 
he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.”11

 How does man “make” himself? This is where Sartre’s concept 
of the project comes in. To him, man is first and foremost “a project 
which lives itself subjectively”, given that nothing precedes this project, 
and that the latter arises out of one’s subjectivity, the foundation of 
human existence. As such, we will firstly be what we will have projected 
ourselves to be through our freely chosen fundamental project.12 To have 
this freedom of choice is not just to have the ability to choose between 
the different possibilities that appear to me; it’s the ability to choose our 
basic orientation in the world, which itself creates the possibilities and 
obstacles to which we are confronted. 

 Therefore, for Sartre, obstacles are to a certain extent determined 
by ourselves. As he explains in Being and Nothingness, the mountain 
only appears as “not climbable” to the climber standing at its foot, in 
light of his projected climbing––a secondary project which finds its 
meaning in terms of his fundamental project, which might be to become 
a world-renowned alpinist. In contrast, the mountain appears simply as 
beautiful or impressive to the traveler passing by, “whose free project 
is a pure esthetic ordering of the landscape;”13 it does not appear to 
him as climbable or unclimbable, since he doesn’t have the project of 
climbing it. In this sense, our obstacles only appear as obstacles in light 
of our project, not as a material reality. We have the freedom to remove 
obstacles from our way by choosing to change our project: if the climber 
decided to change his fundamental project of becoming an alpinist to 
pursue another career, then the mountain would not appear to him as an 
obstacle anymore. 

 We may live our entire lives with a single fundamental project, 
but it is always subject to change. Indeed, to Sartre, we are always freely 
choosing our project or orientation, therefore we cannot use it as an 
excuse for any wrongdoing; in short, “we are alone, without excuses.” To 
be human is to be “condemned to be free”–– condemned to choose our 
own course of life without a guiding essence, God, or a set of objective 
values that could legitimize our conduct,14 and condemned to bear the 

11  Sartre, 30.
12  Sartre, 30.
13   Excerpt from Being and Nothingness in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul 

Sartre. Edited by Robert Denoon Cumming. (New York: Vintage Books, 
2003), 269.

14  Sartre, 39.



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To Live Free or To Make Excuses

responsibility for each of our decisions and actions. There is no form 
of determinism that could alleviate the weight of total responsibility 
constantly resting on our shoulders; “man is freedom,” whether we like 
it or not. 

 Any attempt to flee our total freedom and consequent 
responsibility, to treat perceived obstacles as material constraints that 
limit my freedom, is what Sartre calls “bad faith” (mauvaise foi)––a 
central element of his existentialism. To choose inaction rather than 
confronting the field of possibilities opened by my freedom, out of the 
anguish provoked by the thought that I am free to do anything at any 
moment, is a form of bad faith. To use events of my past as an excuse 
for my present wrongdoings15 is a form of bad faith insofar as those past 
events in themselves did not determine me to act in any certain way 
in the present. In other words, fleeing into psychological determinism 
to escape taking responsibility for my actions when the reality is that 
nothing is determined and that only I am responsible for my own actions 
is a form of bad faith. 

 The opposite of bad faith is authenticity, which Sartre presents 
as our moral imperative.16 As Neil Levy writes, to act authentically is to 
face the lack of external meaning and value in the world by embracing 
our “free choice of values,” knowing that “nothing justifies this choice 
except that we have made it.”17 When we face this choice, we live 
authentically. Conversely, when we flee this choice by accepting a 
seemingly constraining situation as our only option, or by adhering to an 
“overarching metaphysical system that we take to confer justification on 
our lives,”18 then we are living inauthentically, in bad faith. 

15  Like saying “I cheated on you because my parents cheated on each 
other when I was younger, so I see infidelity as a normal part of romantic 
relationships.” More on this in section III.

16  Sartre’s concept of authenticity was heavily influenced by Martin 
Heidegger, particularly his ideas about Dasein’s “being-in-the-world” 
and the importance of confronting one’s own existence and choices 
‘authentically’ within an inauthentic world. For more on Heidegger’s 
understanding of ‘authenticity,’ see Heidegger, Martin. (1927). Being and 
time. Translated by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. New York, NY: Harper & 
Row, 1962.

17   Levy, Neil. “Choices Without Choosers: Toward a Neuropsychologically 
Plausible Existentialism.” Essay. In Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, 
and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience, 111–25. (Oxford University Press, 
2018), 113.

18  Levy, 112-113.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

 No internal or external constraint can justify my denial of my 
freedom of choice––even the slave or prisoner is free to choose his own 
interpretation of his condition. As such, from a Sartrean perspective, 
even in situations of oppression our human capacity of meaning-
making remains, so that such oppressive processes that aim to turn 
individuals into freedomless things cannot do so as long as that person 
has a consciousness. This is why, even tied up against the wall of his 
dungeon, the comic’s Sartre insists that he remains “free to interpret” his 
condition.19

 In short, Sartre’s initial concept of human freedom can be 
described as “radical” insofar as it leaves absolutely no room for any 
form of determinism, or “excuse” in Sartrean terms. No matter our 
socio-economic background, our psychological baggage, our physical 
constraints, or any circumstance that we may take to determine or limit 
us, Sartre urges us to take back control over those perceived constraints 
which we may take to structure our existence. It is in that sense that 
Sartre calls his doctrine one of “optimism”, one that motivates action20 
by placing the human agent as the source and foundation of all values 
and meaning21––hence the idea that existentialism is a “humanism.”

§ II: “REALLY, NO MATTER WHAT?”: OBJECTIONS TO 
SARTRE’S RADICAL FREEDOM

 The problem is that in practice, Sartre’s concept of freedom 
does not hold as strongly as it may appear convincing on paper. In fact, 
many would say that it does not hold at all. From the publication of 
Being and Nothingness up until today, Sartre’s initial existentialism has 
been subject to a number of objections so strong that some of them led 
him to revise his own theory a few years later, while other more recent 
objections have put into question whether existentialism as a philosophy, 
even away from an ideal of “radical” freedom, can still hold. In this 
second section we will explore those different objections, starting with 
those made to Sartre’s radical freedom, then moving on to those made to 
the broader concept of freedom. 

19  Though Camus reaches this conclusion in a different way, we could draw a 
parallel with his Sisyphus, who can and must choose to be happy rather than 
live in despair, as the only possible rebellion against his condition. 

20  Sartre, 77.
21  Levy, 113.



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To Live Free or To Make Excuses

§ 1: OBJECTIONS FROM A LESS “RADICAL” 
EXISTENTIALISM  

 Though Sartre is often regarded as a symbolic figure of 
existentialist philosophy, it is important to note that his version of 
existentialism was only one among several. Indeed, the enduring influence 
that Sartre has had on existentialism by virtue of his particularly radical 
ideas on freedom sometimes overshadows the fact that there were other 
existentialists at his time who contributed to the movement’s evolution, 
namely by putting forward objections to Sartre’s radicality, specifically 
to his overreliance on the concept of bad faith.22 One of them is Beauvoir, 
who had a significant influence both on Sartre’s philosophical career and 
personal life.

 As Sonia Kruks explains in “Simone de Beauvoir and the 
Limits to Freedom,” Beauvoir never challenged Sartre’s conception 
of freedom head-on. In fact, she based her own works on the central 
premises of Being and Nothingness––that it is wrong to abdicate one’s 
freedom to a higher principle or power, and that all values emerge from 
our fundamental project–– yet they led her to some “most un-Sartrean 
conclusions,”23 namely concerning the question of oppression. Indeed, 
the fundamental disagreement between the philosophies of Sartre and 
Beauvoir is summarized in a passage from the latter’s autobiography, La 
force de l’âge (1960), where she recalls the following discussion with 
Sartre back in 1940: while Beauvoir argued that “not every situation is 
equal: what transcendence is possible for a woman locked up in a harem?”, 

22  When I say other existentialists, I am mainly referring to Simone de 
Beauvoir and Franz Fanon, two other frontrunners of mid-20th century 
existentialism. In a more comprehensive paper, I would have included a 
discussion of both of their rich philosophies but given that the focus of 
this paper is on Sartre’s concept of freedom, I will only discuss Beauvoir’s 
ideas given that they directly influenced Sartre to revise his own. As for 
Fanon, he also interacted with Sartre in response to the latter’s essay about 
the Négritude movement, “Black Orpheus” (1948). Beyond that, Fanon 
made significant contributions to existentialism––namely by bringing in 
the perspective of a racialized person’s struggle with limitations imposed 
on their freedom–– and should not be placed in the shadow of Sartre and 
Beauvoir. By not including him in this paper, I do not wish to contribute 
to giving Fanon that secondary status, but for our present purposes, a 
discussion of his ideas would make this paper unnecessarily longer than it 
already is. 

23  Kruks, Sonia. “Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits to Freedom.” Social 
Text, no. 17 (1987), 111.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Sartre maintained that “even such a cloistered existence could be lived 
in several different ways.”24 In a way, this fundamental disagreement is 
summarized in the comic above: what united them philosophically was 
their commitment to human freedom, but what distinguished them was 
the added “no matter what.”

 Beauvoir argued that there are situations of oppression in 
which the radical freedom that Sartre describes is denied and ceases 
to be possible. This is because freedoms are “not autonomous but 
interdependent.”25 In other words, my freedom depends on the Other’s 
will: if the Other chooses to deny my freedom and objectify me, then 
I become the Other’s object if I submit. “It is this interdependence [of 
freedoms] which explains why oppression is possible” and additionally 
“why it is hateful,”26 as any attack on the value of human freedom is 
hateful from an existentialist perspective. In fact, as an existentialist, 
Beauvoir’s conclusion is not that oppression entirely negates the 
freedom of the oppressed. As she explains in The Second Sex, dominant 
social groups try to make the one they subjugate into the Other, denying 
them their transcendence as they reduce them to the status of object, 
yet to fully become an object one has to submit to this objectification: 
“if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be 
submissive enough to accept this alien point of view.”27 Thus, as long as 
the individual does not submit to this “othering,” they do not lose their 
fundamental freedom entirely. 

 Still, to acknowledge that freedom can be limited, Beauvoir 
draws a distinction between formal freedom and genuine freedom. On 
the one hand, human beings have an ontological freedom that allows us 
to set our projects and modify them. Yet a freedom that does not actually 
allow us to fulfill our goals is merely “formal”. As such, while a victim 
of oppression has the formal freedom to revolt against their condition, 
they have “genuine” or “moral” freedom only insofar as their project 
of revolt succeeds in emancipation, which, if achieved, would allow 
them to freely pursue their projects in the world. With this distinction, 
Beauvoir responds to the criticism made against existentialism that “the 
precept ‘to will freedom’ is only a hollow formula and offers no concrete 

24  Kruks, 111. Quoting from Beauvoir, La force de l’âge, Volume II, 
Gallimard (1947), p. 498.

25  Kruks, 112. Paraphrasing Beauvoir, Pyrrhus et Cinéas.
26  Kruks,112. Paraphrasing Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. 
27  Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated and Edited by H. M. 

Parshley. (London: Vintage Books, 1989), 9-10.



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To Live Free or To Make Excuses

content for action.”28 Beyond this “hollow” freedom––the one implied 
in Sartre’s claim that “the slave in chains is as free as his master”––the 
reality is that the power to make meaning in the world and freely choose 
between a range of options is not given to everyone equally: in some 
extreme cases of oppression, there may be only two options to choose 
from, one of them involving a high risk of death, which would be the 
ultimate negation of one’s freedom. Beauvoir may agree with Sartre that 
the slave is as free as his master on the formal level, but the slave’s 
genuine freedom is limited by a situation in which only submission or 
revolt is possible. 

 In this way, Beauvoir adds nuance to Sartre’s theory of freedom 
with her concrete discussion of oppression, largely based on her analysis 
of the historical oppression of women by men. As Kruks explains, 
Beauvoir’s thesis is that woman is locked into “immanence”29––
the negation of Sartre’s “transcendence”––by the situation that man 
imposes upon her, a situation which she is not necessarily responsible 
for. Indeed, although we could say that some women are acting in “bad 
faith” when they submit to their objectification, bad faith is not always 
the explanation: in Sartrean terms, women are always responsible for 
themselves no matter what, while in Beauvoirian terms, “for many there 
is no ‘moral fault’ because there is simply no possibility of choice.”30 
This disagreement over personal responsibility highlights another aspect 
of Sartre’s initial theory that Beauvoir disagreed with: emphasis on bad 
faith as the only valid explanation for people feeling constrained by 
circumstances which they experience. 

 In chapter 7 of Rethinking Existentialism, Sartre scholar 
Jonathan Webber argues that it is in their respective interpretations of the 
inferiority complex, a phenomenon identified in Freud’s psychoanalysis, 

28  Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard 
Frechtman. (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 2015), 84. 

29  Defined by Beauvoir as the falling back of the for-itself’s consciousness 
into the in-itself (Kruks, 121).

30  Kruks, “Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits to Freedom,” 114. Quoting 
from The Second Sex. 



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that we can clearly see how this disagreement plays out.31 As Webber 
explains, the idea of an inferiority complex is central to Beauvoir’s 
theory on the construction of gender through socialization: the idea 
that men are superior to women is instilled in young boys and girls 
by both male and female adults offering them different opportunities, 
encouraging them to do different activities, praising them for different 
actions, which results in so many women feeling a sense of inferiority 
to men. On the other hand, Sartre interprets the inferiority complex as a 
“project that some individuals freely choose,” an inferiority project.32 In 
his view, social values can structure one’s existence “only through being 
internalized into the projects one has freely chosen and can abandon”. In 
other words, as a woman I don’t need to accept being categorized as part 
of an “inferior group”, for I have “absolute freedom” to adopt projects 
that “attempt to disprove or [...] ignore” this categorization. However, 
to Sartre, most people are “committed to the project of bad faith”, 
identifying themselves with a fixed set of characteristics as if these 
formed part of an essence that determined their behavior.33 It follows, to 
him, that the only reason why we might feel inferior and limited is due 
to bad faith.

 Beauvoir, on the other hand, finds an alternative explanation for 
people feeling constrained by their life circumstances: sedimentation, 

31  In chapter 5, Webber gives a more extensive account of both Sartre’s and 
Beauvoir’s articulations and interpretations of the inferiority complex, 
among other concepts taken from psychoanalysis. In fact, Webber 
argues that “existentialism is not fundamentally antagonistic to Freudian 
psychoanalysis, as is often claimed, but rather aims to provide better 
articulations and explanations of the phenomena that Freud identified than 
Freud himself achieved” (76). Webber’s analysis reveals how, despite his 
hostility to Freud, Sartre actually preserved some Freudian insights, such 
as the inferiority complex, in his own existentialism, with the intention of 
better explaining them according to his own theory of mind. For more on 
the relationship between existentialism and psychoanalysis, see chapter 5 of 
Rethinking Existentialism. 

32  Webber, Rethinking Existentialism, 86.
33  Webber, 114-115.



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a concept derived from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.34 As Webber 
argues, Beauvoir’s reliance on sedimentation rather than bad faith makes 
her theory of existentialism “preferable” to Sartre’s “for a reason that 
seems to explain why Sartre went on to adopt Beauvoir’s conception 
of sedimentation and revise his existentialism accordingly.”35 Indeed, 
Sartre’s initial reliance on bad faith makes him unable to go beyond 
the individual to explain why members of certain social groups often 
have certain characteristics in common, such as an inferiority complex 
relative to another group. If he tried to use bad faith to explain the 
origins of those characteristics, he would have to explain why this bad 
faith is a common feature of people’s outlook within one social group––
but how?36 It cannot be the result of a fixed essence, since existence 
precedes essence; nor can it be the result of some prior project of bad 
faith, because again we would need to ask why it was freely adopted by 
each individual within the group. Thus not only is this centrality of bad 
faith unfounded, it also suggests a sociologically inaccurate account of 
the origins of shared cultural values.37

 A more accurate account, as Webber argues, could be built 
upon Beauvoir’s idea of sedimentation. The argument for sedimentation 
goes as follows: in childhood, each individual experiences specific 
“opportunities, encouragements and discouragements” based on the 
values of their surrounding culture, experiences that will direct the 
individual towards projects that incorporate those values.38 Those 

34  Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in his book 
Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), where he writes that “the 
sedimentation of our mental operations [...] allows us to count on our 
acquired concepts and judgments, just as we count upon the things that 
are there and that are given as a whole, without our having to repeat their 
synthesis at each moment.” According to him, “building up the layers of 
meaning through which subjects engage with the world and each other, 
rests on a ‘double moment of sedimentation and spontaneity.’” (Pepper, 
Ken. “The Phenomenology of Sensorimotor Understanding.” In Bishop, J., 
Martin, A. (eds) Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory. Studies in Applied 
Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 15. Springer, 2014. 
Quoting from Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by 
Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012, 131-132.) 

35  Webber, 116.
36  Webber, 116.
37  The insufficiency of bad faith when it comes to explaining the origins 

of shared values is explored in more detail by Webber in chapter 7 of 
Rethinking Existentialism, with a critical analysis of Sartre’s attempt to 
ground cultural characteristics common to Jewish people in his essay Anti-
Semite and Jew (1948). 

38  Meanwhile, “childhood plays no special role in the formation of the 
individual” in Sartre’s initial existentialism, according to Webber.



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projects and the values within them then become “sedimented,” or 
internalized within the individual’s psyche at an age where they adopt 
projects based on influence. Once they become mature enough to adopt 
projects on the basis of critical reflection, they will be influenced by 
those sedimented values. Thereafter, new projects that contradict these 
values can be adopted in theory, but only after considerable time and 
“pursuit of these projects” can they become sufficiently sedimented to 
counteract the older ones. Thus, it is with sedimentation that Beauvoir 
can explain how “woman” has been constructed as the Other––“the 
second sex”––through a long history of male domination, conditioning 
female individuals to be passive and dependent, and rigid gender roles 
that reinforce those values.39 Meanwhile, Sartre’s initial existentialism 
cannot account for the empirical social fact of women’s secondary 
status. To avoid this problem without abandoning existentialism 
altogether, Webber argues, Sartre needed to replace his overreliance on 
bad faith with Beauvoir’s idea of sedimentation––which, as we will see, 
he eventually did.

 As explained above, Beauvoir’s idea of sedimentation has the 
potential to save existentialism from objections made to Sartre’s radical 
freedom. Indeed, “social forces are extremely powerful”40 and cannot 
be overlooked by a strictly individualistic account of responsibility. 
At this point, it is important to insist that Beauvoir’s analysis does not 
conclude that sedimentation and oppression negate freedom: she offers a 
more nuanced, realistic account of freedom than Sartre, but with no less 
emphasis on the moral value of embracing one’s freedom––for example, 
through participation in collective revolt against a shared condition.41 

§ 2: OBJECTIONS FROM NEUROSCIENCE  

 So far, we have posited human freedom as a central inescapable 
necessity: without freedom, there can be no existentialism and 
both Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s entire philosophies would be rendered 
obsolete. Yet what if we had reason to posit determinism, specifically 
incompatibilist determinism, as a central, inescapable necessity? Then 

39  Prinz, Jesse. “Moral Sedimentation.” Essay. In Neuroexistentialism: 
Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience , 87–108 
(Oxford University Press, 2018), 91-92.

40  Prinz, “Moral Sedimentation,” 92.
41  Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 93.



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we would have to accept that all events, including human decisions and 
actions, are predetermined and causally inevitable, which is incompatible 
with the idea of free will, and that therefore free will is nothing but an 
illusion–– human beings do not really have the capacity to choose freely 
and independently. We would have to rule out existentialism premise by 
premise: asserting that essence precedes (even determines) existence, 
that there can be no such thing as “authenticity” since there is no genuine 
freedom of choice. We would have to rule out, paradoxically, that the 
only possible form of authenticity is living in what Sartre would call bad 
faith, which in this case would come down to recognizing the different 
forms of determinism that make me unfree rather than self-deceptively 
asserting the illusion that I am free. For Sartreans, this reversal of ideas 
seems inconceivable and yet, contemporary cognitive science forces us 
to seriously consider it. In this subsection, we will explore several such 
objections to human freedom based on findings in neuroscience.

 When it comes to “radical” freedom, scientific objections 
are overwhelmingly obvious: as Levy writes, “Sartre’s optimism 
about agency conflicts with contemporary science.”42 For Sartre, the 
mind and consciousness are one and the same, and consciousness is 
“essentially free”43 from anything that could constrain or even guide 
it. Yet contemporary findings in cognitive science have revealed that 
the mind is not “essentially free” or “essentially independent” from 
external influences. Furthermore, unconscious processes––which 
Sartre rejected44––suggest that a large part of our mind is “opaque to 
introspection”: we consider ourselves to be affirming values “that have 
no foundation beyond our choice,” when these values may actually 
reflect “deep-seated unconscious impulses”45––echoing Beauvoir’s 
idea of sedimented values, though with more scientific backing and 
different conclusions. Indeed, Beauvoir used sedimentation to explain 
why historically marginalized groups have limited freedom; here, the 
presence of unconscious processes in the mind suggest that human 
beings are not free at all by showing how little control we really have 
over our thoughts and actions. 

 Levy illustrates this with the idea of modularity of mind. 
Though a popular conception of the mind treats the conscious mind, 

42  Levy, “Choices Without Choosers: Toward a Neuropsychologically 
Plausible Existentialism,” 114.

43  Levy, 114.
44  Levy, 114.
45  Levy, 114.



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or self, as a kind of “control center”46–– a “CEO” that delegates tasks 
to other parts of the brain––while the unconscious is like a rogue force 
that doesn’t report to the “CEO” but doesn’t offset the latter’s control 
over the mind either, contemporary cognitive science tells us that there 
is no such control center: rather, “the mind consists of nothing but such 
unintelligent mechanisms” as those supposedly directed by a “CEO” 
that does not exist. In other words, there is no unified self in control, just 
a collection of automated mechanisms or modules. There is “extensive” 
evidence in favor of this modularity of mind,47 an idea that conflicts 
with our conception of ourselves as a unified self, or “chooser” from an 
existentialist perspective. 

 Do the ideas of authenticity and genuine choice still hold in the 
face of this dissolution of the self into a multiplicity of modules? As 
Levy explains, if our moment-to-moment decision making is indeed 
shaped by the multiplicity of modules which constitute us and that 
are “obscured from consciousness”, then under many conditions those 
modules will shape our choice while causing us to have false views about 
the reasons behind our choice––a form of unconscious self-deception or 
“confabulation.”48 Sartre maintained that man is radically free as long 
as he has a consciousness, but what if the very notion of consciousness 
becomes hardly accessible or controllable? The existentialist conception 
of human beings as “unified agents making choices for reasons” that we 
can justify is thus challenged by empirical findings which we can hardly 
deny. 

 If you, naive Sartrean, feel anguished when confronted with 
this kind of antithesis, wait until you hear what hard determinist Robert 
Sapolsky has to say about human freedom. The title of his recent 
book says it all: “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.” 
As one of the leading researchers in neuroendocrinology today, his 
thesis against free will is worryingly strong in that, contrary to Sartre’s 
phenomenological method, it relies on extensive empirical research on 
the human brain. As such, when he asserts that “there is no free will” or 
at least that “there is much less free will than generally assumed,” we are 
compelled to listen.49 

46  Levy, 114.
47  Levy, 116.
48  Levy, 119.
49  Sapolsky, Robert M.. Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. 

Penguin Press, 2023, 15.



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 Sapolsky’s thesis rests on the idea that “nothing comes from 
nothing”: when I behave in a particular way, it is due to “the determinism 
that came before, which was caused by the determinism just before that”, 
and so on. There is no causeless, undetermined behavior that I may want 
to attribute to my free will, because free will is an illusion: I am as I 
am as a result of “the biology over which [I] had no control, interacting 
with the environment over which [I] had no control.”50 Explaining why 
a certain behavior occurred requires looking at what factors the agent 
was influenced by during their adolescence, when a key region in their 
brain was still being shaped by “socialization and acculturation”; it 
may require looking further back to how childhood experiences shaped 
the construction of their brain, and even further back to the genes they 
inherited.51 Once again, this somewhat echoes Beauvoir’s emphasis 
on the role of early life experiences and circumstances outside of our 
control––such as an abusive parent––in shaping our adult self, but with 
more scientific backing and drastically different conclusions, as well 
as different premises, considering Sapolsky’s belief in an “inherited” 
essence. 

 As for Sartre, his main ideas can be reformulated in polar 
opposite form by Sapolsky: man is not “what he makes of himself”52 
rather “nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and 
environmental luck over which [he] has no control.”53 Existence does 
not precede essence, rather the other way around, given that we are not 
born as a blank slate but with a particular genome that, together with 
environmental influences, “determines” our behavior. The only point 
on which Sartre would agree with Sapolsky is that “there is nothing 
but an empty, indifferent universe” which we will eventually fade into, 
yet their conclusions from that premise are expectedly incompatible: 
Sartre would say that, for as long as it exists, the self is much more than 
a collection of atoms, rather the independent source of all meaning in 
the universe––“uncaused causes who are the foundation of all values” 
in Levy’s terms54––while Sapolsky considers the so-called self to be 
nothing but a temporary arrangement of atoms that we each call “Me”.55 
Sartre and Saposky may also agree that people’s brains and behaviors 

50  Sapolsky, 11.
51  Sapolsky, 12.
52  Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, 30.
53  Sapolsky, 13.
54  Levy, “Choices Without Choosers: Toward a Neuropsychologically 

Plausible Existentialism,” 113.
55  Sapolsky, 360.



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can change through life, but while the former would articulate that in 
terms of freely chosen projects subject to change, the latter maintains 
that the science of change “doesn’t counter this being a deterministic 
world without free will.”56 In short, the two may have a couple premises 
in common, but not a single conclusion.

 This essentially comes down to a debate between free will and 
determinism. For Sapolsky, to be human is not to be “condemned to 
be free” but to be condemned to be determined despite believing that 
we are free. As he observes, belief in free will is extremely prevalent: 
it is at the root of all social practices and institutions––including the 
justice system which punishes criminals based on the assumption that 
they are responsible for their crimes. For Sapolsky, this widespread 
assumption shows that, faced with harsh truths about existence, humans 
have developed “a robust capacity for self-deception”, which “includes 
a belief in free will.”57 From this perspective, adhering to existentialism 
is a ironically a form of self-deception since in Sartrean terms, to adhere 
not to existentialism but to a form of determinism that does not posit 
man as a free and responsible agent is a form of bad faith, or self-
deception. Conversely, to be “authentic” from Sapolsky’s perspective 
would be to “face our lack of free will,”58 or to at least begin to question 
our certitude of ourselves and others as free by attempting to make the 
“radical changes” in our thinking and feeling that a lack of freedom 
would imply.

 At this point, the case for human freedom, let alone radical 
freedom, seems like a mere delusion. How can we genuinely see ourselves 
as free agents considering the empirical facts of social, biological, 
and neuronal determinism? Faced with sedimentation, modularity of 
mind and the debunked idea of causeless behavior, should we follow 
Sapolsky’s recommendation to face our lack of free will by reorienting 
ourselves towards determinism, giving up our conception of ourselves 
as “choosers” and accepting ourselves as temporary arrangements of 
atoms determined by various forces over which we have no control?

 
§ III: “EVEN THEN! I WOULD BE FREE TO INTERPRET 
MY CONDITION”: SARTRE’S REVISED CONCEPT 

56  Sapolsky, 23-24
57  Sapolsky, 362.
58  Sapolsky, 365.



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OF FREEDOM BASED ON BEAUVOIR’S THEORY OF 
SEDIMENTATION, AND WHY THIS EXISTENTIALISM 
CAN AND SHOULD BE RETAINED TODAY
  
 Direct confrontation with texts like Sapolsky’s might trigger 
such a felt necessity of reorientation towards “a life without free will”, 
but it doesn’t need to trigger a fundamental reorientation of our self-
perception and behavior––nor do I think it should. In this final section, 
I will argue that without blindly rejecting what is widely accepted 
today about the human brain and the extent to which genes and past 
experiences shape it, it is possible and even morally desirable to hold on 
to a nuanced version of radical freedom, conserving the moral imperative 
against bad faith, only without the now outdated conception of ourselves 
as “totalement libres.”

§ 1: ON SARTRE’S DERADICALIZED FREEDOM

 Before we elaborate on this nuanced version of radical freedom, 
it is important to insist that Sartre himself came to recognize the limits of 
his initial concept of freedom. Thereafter, he revised and “deradicalized” 
it to include the sedimentation of values, which he took from Beauvoir, 
as a more coherent basis for projects than bad faith. According to 
Webber, this more “mature” Sartrean existentialism made its first notable 
appearance in Sartre’s biography of vagabond and thief turned writer 
and political activist Jean Genet, published in 1952. 

 In Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, Sartre analyzes Genet’s 
character, lifestyle and writings as “expressions of a single complex 
project rooted in childhood”––an explanation he would never have 
given a few years earlier when his theory implied that childhood plays 
no fundamental role in the formation of the individual. According to this 
analysis, Genet’s project was born from the social environment and moral 
values he was exposed to as a child: raised by a family of poor peasants 
after his mother abandoned him, with the value of property (among 
others) instilled into him, he finds a way to acquire some property by 
committing petty thefts early on, for which he is labeled a “thief.”59 Over 
the years, “he comes to accept that this judgment correctly identities his 

59  Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 17. Quoted in Webber, Rethinking 
Existentialism, 126.



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essential nature”60 (note here Sartre’s mention of essence and nature); by 
internalizing society’s moral judgment of him based on actions that his 
childhood led him towards, society had “penetrated to the very bottom 
of his heart.”61 

 This instance of sedimentation, Sartre argues, partly explains 
why Genet continued to violate society’s moral code throughout his life, 
accepting this socially attributed “essence” rather than resisting it––a 
form of submission which former Sartre might have qualified as bad 
faith. Yet here he treats it as a “conversion” based on a conscious decision 
to embrace society’s judgment of him, which becomes sedimented as 
Genet’s outlook is “gradually transformed by his repeatedly deciding to 
embrace his supposed evil nature”62 as a thief in the eyes of society. This 
is the “project” that Genet becomes committed to, and the sedimentation 
underlying that project makes Sartre qualify it as a “prison without 
bars”: Genet’s commitment to being a thief does not make him unable 
of adopting “new points of view entailing new commitments,” but those 
would not displace “the original attitude” towards himself, so deeply 
internalized that it “continues to influence thought and action.”63 As 
such, Sartre’s revised concept of freedom recognizes the power of social 
forces, as Beauvoir did before him, while remaining attached to the 
imperative of embracing our capacity to “make” ourselves, to a certain 
extent: “we are not lumps of clay,” he writes, “and what is important is 
not what people make of us but what we ourselves make of what they 
have made of us.”64

 With sedimentation, Sartre no longer relies on bad faith to 
explain why we are sometimes unaware of our motivations or why 
we sometimes feel constrained. He now agrees with Beauvoir that we 
experience this when our deeply sedimented values conflict with our 
more recently endorsed values. He also corrects the incoherence of 
grounding a theory of shared cultural values on bad faith by showing 
how the values of one’s social environment, such as Genet’s peasant 
origins, can become sedimented in one’s outlook early on, creating 
the “prison without bars.” For these ideas he credits Beauvoir’s The 
Second Sex. He does not, however, entirely abandon his own version 
of existentialism in favor of Beauvoir’s: his theory of bad faith and his 

60  Webber, 126.
61  Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 21. Quoted in Webber, 126.
62  Webber, 127.
63  Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 69. Quoted in Webber, 127.
64  Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 49. Quoted in Webber, 127.



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claim that it is widespread remain, only now he is able to explain that 
widespread adoption of bad faith “in terms of its sedimentation” as a 
value.65 

§ 2: ON THE MORAL VALUE OF HOLDING ON TO OUR 
BELIEF IN FREE WILL AND APPLYING EXISTENTIALIST 
INSIGHTS TO TODAY’S WORLD

 Despite this “deradicalization”, Sartre is still not immune to 
caricaturesque comics: first, because he remains popularly associated 
with his earlier “radical” freedom; and second, because other objections 
can be brought even against his more socially conscious concept of 
freedom insofar as the very notion of human freedom has become 
seriously problematic considering contemporary cognitive science, as 
discussed above. 

 These objections and the evidence behind them push us towards 
a most un-existentialist conclusion: that us human beings, supposedly 
capable of transcendence, are actually nothing more than our facticity. 
As defined by Sartre and explained by Webber, facticity is “the set of 
one’s own physical features and the physical and social features of one’s 
situation” or “the facts that one has to deal with.”66 Hence to say that we 
are nothing more than our facticity is to say, joining Sapolsky’s thesis, 
that we are nothing more than the biological and environmental facts 
that shaped us and over which we have no control. While the influence 
of biological and environmental factors, as well as of sedimentation, 
on our brain cannot be reasonably denied, I would like to further the 
existentialist idea that we are more than our facticity: that no, we are 
not “determined” to remain stuck with the facts of our current situation 
unless we convince ourselves that we are, which is where I think Sartre’s 
concept of bad faith can still be of value.

 From a Sartrean perspective, human existence is structured by 
projects, which we choose in the context of our multi-layered facticity. 
Additionally, as Webber writes, the projects we choose to pursue “can 
either transform that facticity or simply maintain it.”67 As such, I can be 

65  Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 33-36. Paraphrased in Webber, 128. 
66  Webber, 191.
67  Webber, 191



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more than my facticity if I pursue a project that aims to transcend it.68 
My choice of that project may still be influenced by sedimented values,69 
but then again, all projects are, to a certain degree, sedimented. We may 
become conscious of the effects of that sedimentation––for example, 
I may become aware of an inferiority complex–– and thereafter it is 
possible to pursue a project that aims to overcome those sedimented 
values woven into my facticity. 

 Indeed, the “chooser” may be just a collection of automated 
modules as Levy argues, or determined by a range of factors according 
to Sapolsky, but the fact is that in practice, I am still the one who does 
the action of choosing a project based on what I perceive as my reasons, 
and then acting accordingly. From a consequentialist perspective, it 
doesn’t really matter whether my choice was determined by this or that 
underlying factor: as long as I believe that I have the power to construct 
my own existence, rather than perceiving myself as determined and 
powerless due to some negative childhood experience or membership to 
some social group, I am less likely to turn biological and social factors 
into obstacles in themselves and then partly impose those limits on 
myself. This is similar to how Beauvoir argued that one can only become 
fully objectified if one submits to that objectification. 

 As such, insofar as it is possible to choose a project that transcends 
my facticity, we must recognize that facticity can be transformed, 
and that I am the only one who can make that effort for myself. To a 
certain extent, I can transcend the different forces that some might say 
“determine” me. This is neither naive nor idealistic when you consider 
different examples of real individuals who have achieved emancipation 
from constraining situations. Take Malala Yousafzai: when the Taliban 
took over and prohibited girls like her from going to school, did she 
submit? On the contrary, she resisted by speaking out publicly in favor 
of girls’ right to learn – which made her a target. At the age of 15, 

68  Except  in certain situations of oppression where one’s options are 
significantly reduced due to physical constraints. I won’t go on here about 
the possibility of emancipation from situations of oppression as my present 
purpose is to make a more general argument supporting the possibility to 
transcend one’s facticity. For more on the possibility of liberation from 
oppression, I recommend Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity.

69  For example, in The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that only through paid 
employment can women regain the transcendence that male domination has 
historically denied them, but in her time and still in some places today most 
of the options available for paid employment became known as pink collar 
jobs for requiring more “female” skills.



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when the ban on girls’ education had just been lifted, she was shot by a 
masked gunman on her way back from a school exam. Yet despite this 
near-death experience which she survived, she still chose to continue 
her activism, eventually becoming the world-renowned advocate she is 
today. Young Malala could have accepted her facticity by submitting to 
the ban without pushback – with reason, given the danger of resisting – 
but instead she chose to pursue a project that transformed her facticity. 
In other words, Malala’s ontological transcendence remained within her, 
despite being “degraded into immanence”70 by those who tried to take 
away her fundamental freedom to choose her own course of life.71

 With this example in support of my argument against 
Sapolsky’s determinism and in favor of defending a nuanced form 
of radical freedom, my intention is not to reject the empirical fact of 
social inequalities, or the years of neurological research conducted by 
neuroscientists like Sapolsky. Rather, it is to warn against the concrete 
danger of confusing unlikelihood with impossibility. It was unlikely for 
Malala to rise against the Taliban considering the risks involved, yet she 
did. Therefore, transcending one’s facticity is not impossible. Similarly, 
it is not impossible to transcend sedimented values, but what is certain 
is that taking it to be impossible will remove that possibility altogether. 
Merleau-Ponty once argued that, although we can free ourselves from 
sediments, their deep “embodiment” in our practices and cultures 
renders such self-emancipation “unlikely.” Going back to the inferiority 
complex, he argued that after having built his life upon the latter, 
“continuously reinforced for twenty years, it is not likely that I would 
change,” given this “commitment” to inferiority.72 Of course, if I tell 
myself that I am “committed” to inferiority, then I will remain as such 
and act accordingly. Having never considered the possibility of working 
through that sedimented belief, I might live my whole life as a victim 
of my inferiority complex, with all the missed opportunities that entails: 
for example, not applying to top universities because I don’t believe I 
could ever be accepted, or never feeling secure in relationships because 
I don’t believe I deserve love. Following this thought pattern further 

70  Webber, Rethinking Existentialism, 191. Citing ideas from Beauvoir, The 
Second Sex.

71  Her father being an education activist and encouraging her to not limit 
herself certainly influenced her, but in no way did it determine her to 
become an activist herself. In a way, her father’s influence gave her 
(positive) sedimented values that contributed to her project of resistance, 
but that project was certainly not her only option. 

72  Mearleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) The Phenomenology of Perception, 
Routledge, 2012,  466-467. bQuoted in Prinz, “Moral Sedimentation,” 89.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

sediments those beliefs and convinces me that I am forever stuck with 
my facticity, when in fact it is possible to overcome a deeply ingrained 
inferiority complex; it would certainly be a psychological challenge and 
it may require years of therapy , but it is not impossible.  

 My fundamental issue with arguments like Sapolsky’s and 
even Merleau-Ponty’s is that, by pushing us to reduce ourselves to our 
facticity and deny ourselves our own possibility of transcendence, they 
encourage us to invoke past experiences as excuses for acting a certain 
way and refusing to change, as if we were incapable of change. For 
example, although it has been shown that children who grow up with 
unfaithful parents are statistically more likely to cheat on their own 
partners,73 there is no direct causal link between having unfaithful parents 
and committing infidelity ourselves. Yet it’s an easy form of excuse that 
allows a cheater to paint themselves as the victim of circumstances 
outside of their control, thus avoiding responsibility and justifying any 
future infidelity on the same basis. In Sartrean terms, this is a form of 
‘bad faith’ – convincing oneself that one had no choice but to act in 
a certain way, that there is a necessary causal link between past and 
present at play, when really, past events in themselves do not determine 
me to commit a wrongdoing in the present. Suppose you learn that your 
partner had an affair (within an otherwise healthy relationship), and they 
justify themselves by saying they had no other choice, that they were 
‘determined’ to cheat for whatever reason. I doubt anyone (except for 
hard determinists like Sapolsky, and even then) would accept this as a 
valid excuse from their own partner. Yet it is not uncommon for us to 
use these kinds of excuses for actions that could have been avoided, 
including but not limited to cheating. In that sense, I join Sartre in arguing 
that the denial of one’s own freedom in ‘bad faith’ is an unfortunately 
widespread social phenomenon. 

 Now there is a way to transcend this phenomenon of which we 
have all been guilty at times, and this is where I join Webber in arguing 
that existentialism can still have an important value today, despite 
scientific and sociological objections made to it. Webber’s argument 
is that the “canonical” version of existentialism, based on The Second 
Sex, Saint Genet, as well as Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, has “the 
potential to make significant contributions to moral thought, philosophy 

73  Weiser, D. A., Weigel, D. J., Lalasz, C. B., & Evans, W. P. (2015). Family 
Background and Propensity to Engage in Infidelity. Journal of Family 
Issues, 38(15), 2083-2101. 



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of mind, social psychology and psychotherapy.”74 This “canonical” 
existentialism does not treat the individual as “totalement libre”, nor 
as the “mere product of social forces,” but “combines the freedom to 
revise the values that shape one’s outlook with the sedimentation of 
one’s projects over time.”75 According to Webber, empirical psychology 
supports this core claim, and indeed existentialist perspectives have the 
potential to contribute to both the philosophy of mind and procedures 
of psychotherapy.76 On a more individual level, I would add that 
such existentialist perspectives as Beauvoir’s argument for the moral 
imperative of acting authentically can help us confront the values and 
experiences that make up our facticity and work to transcend those 
that keep us down (or at least know that it is possible). In this way, we 
may enlarge our horizon of possibilities, allowing ourselves to dream 
big and aim high in our projects, and catching ourselves whenever we 
are tempted to fall into bad faith. As Levy eloquently writes, while “we 
are all tempted to confuse convention with nature” and “social facts for 
fixed regularities”, the existentialist call to “face up to our freedom” and 
“recognize that we have options” is “salutary” in that it “can lead us to 
live more reflectively and more responsibly.”77

 So, is the slave as free as his master? The prisoner as free as his 
captor? Early Sartre would have argued that, although the slave may not 
have the same freedom to obtain due to physical constraints, he would 
have the same freedom to choose at the very least his interpretation of 
his situation. In less extreme situations, however, there is no “excuse” 
for considering oneself unfree: we always have the moral imperative to 
act authentically. While Beauvoir also believed in this moral imperative, 
she objected that not every individual is equally capable of turning their 
formal freedom into genuine freedom, namely due to sedimentation. We 
saw how Sartre then revised his radicality considering this objection. 
Yet he continued to face objections given his existentialist commitment 
to human freedom, a concept which contemporary cognitive science 
seriously challenges. Faced with this challenge, this paper has argued 
in favor of holding on to our conception of ourselves as free agents to 

74  Webber, Rethinking Existentialism, 188.
75  Webber, Rethinking Existentialism, 192.
76  For more on this argument that I find quite original and interesting but 

won’t explore in too much detail here, I recommend Chapter 11 of Webber’s 
Rethinking Existentialism.

77  Levy, “Choices Without Choosers: Toward a Neuropsychologically 
Plausible Existentialism,” 119.



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give ourselves the possibility of transcending the facticity which the 
objections above reduce us to. This paper has also made the case for 
conserving Sartre’s “bad faith” within a more nuanced version of radical 
freedom. 

 At this point, one might find it contradictory for me to still speak 
of “radical” freedom after so many have objected to it, and Sartre himself 
later “deradicalized” his concept of human freedom. My response would 
be that, in an era where more and more scientific findings on the human 
brain give strong support for the thesis of determinism, any degree of 
belief in free will may be considered “radical.” Yet if being a radical 
in this context means believing in our individual power to rise above 
our circumstances like Malala did and give ourselves a chance at living 
a better life, rather than constantly making excuses that limit our own 
potential, then we should all be radical existentialists. 



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REFERENCES
Aho, Kevin. “Existentialism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 6, 

2023. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/.

 Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. 
New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 2015. 

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated and Edited by H. M. Parshley. 
London: Vintage Books, 1989. 

FØLLESDAL, Dagfinn, and Henri SARLET. “LA LIBERTÉ CHEZ 
SARTRE.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 35, no. 135 (1981): 41–59. 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23945373.

Kruks, Sonia. “Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits to Freedom.” Social Text, no. 
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Levy, Neil. “Choices Without Choosers: Toward a Neuropsychologically Plausible 
Existentialism.” Essay. In Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose 
in the Age of Neuroscience, 111–25. Oxford University Press, 2018. 

Macomber, Melissa. “If My Parents Cheated, Will I? Myths, Realities and 
Solutions — Melissa

Macomber | What to do When a Parent is Cheating?” (2021, May 21).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945). Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by 
Donald A. Landes.

London: Routledge, 2012. 

Pepper, Ken.  The Phenomenology of Sensorimotor Understanding. In Bishop, J., 
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